City Council - Regular Meeting

Claire, would you call the roll, please?

Council Member Andriotta is currently absent. Council Member Reedy.

Here.

Council Member Brown.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Eklund is currently absent. And Mayor Pearl.

Here. Okay, very good. We have three items on the agenda. Closed session will be a conference with real property negotiators, threat to public services or facilities, a conference with legal counsel, existing litigation. Is there anyone in the room who would like to speak on the subject? Okay. Do we have anyone, Blair, anyone on Zoom?

I have no one on Zoom.

Okay. In that case, we are going to close public comment and we're going to adjourn to our closed session. Thank you.

Thank you.

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 channel cable channel 18 YouTube and zoom those wishing to address city 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 Use the raise your hand feature or press star nine 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 Pastor Mark Andriotta. Once the invocation has concluded, Mayor Pearl will call the meeting to order.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we come today asking your guidance, wisdom, and support as we begin this meeting. Help us to engage in meaningful discussion. Allow us to grow closer as a group and nurture the bonds of community. Fill us with your grace, Lord God, as we make decisions that might affect our citizens, city staff, first responders, and the friends of our community of Lincoln. and continue to remind us that all we do here today, all that we accomplish, is for the pursuit of truth and the greater glory of you and for the service of humanity. We ask these things in your name. Amen.

Thank you, Mark. OK, welcome to the meeting today, May 26, 2026. Roll call, please.

Council Member Andreatta. Present. Council Member Reedy.

Here.

Councilmember Brown.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Eklund.

Here.

Mayor Pearl.

Here. Thank you very much. Okay, report from closed session. Mr. Attorney.

Direction was given to staff. No reportable action was taken.

Thank you very much. Okay, Pledge of Allegiance. Jeff Short, would you lead us in the pledge, please? Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.

Thank you, Jeff.

OK, agenda modifications. Anyone, any of my colleagues have anything to modify at this point? OK, good. There will be a staff, Mr. Manager.

Yes. Thank you. Oh, there we go. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. One small item. I'm going to give a brief report, but we will be requesting continuance of item 15B.

And 15B is the wall of recognition concept discussion. Yes, sir. Very good. Thank you very much. Okay. Uh, information items and disclosures. Do any council members have any conflicts to report any, any of the items for discussion tonight? Okay. Very good. Thank you. Uh, are there any informational items to, to share at this point? Okay.

Information item I have is the proclamation.

Okay. Well, perfect. Well, we're getting there right now. A great segue. Thank you very much. Okay, the next one is an American Legion proclamation to Rebecca Nielsen. Would you step forward, please? Okay, so what we're going to do, we do have a formal proclamation for you. What we're going to be doing is three of us who are here on time, three sections of it, we will want to read it and want to thank you very much for the service and everything that you do. So, what? I'm sorry. Okay. Did I step on you? Okay. Okay. So today we are recognizing the American Legion, James E. Fowler post number 264 for 105 years of service to the Lincoln community. Since receiving its charter in 1921, the post has supported veterans, local youth, patriotism, and community service throughout Lincoln and the surrounding area. The Post has consistently upheld the core values of the American Legion, which are patriotism, citizenship, national security, and helping fellow veterans and neighbors.

On May 12, 2026, the organization celebrated its 105th anniversary, marking more than a century of dedicated service. Earlier this year, the Post elected new officers and selected Rebecca Nielsen, a U.S. Army veteran, to serve as Post's commander. Commander Nielsen's election is especially significant because she is the first female veteran elected commander in the history of the James E. Fowler post number 264.

Her leadership reflects the important and growing role women veterans continue to play in both military service and veteran organizations. On behalf of the city of Lincoln, we congratulate James E. Fowler post number 264 on this milestone anniversary. Thank them for their longstanding service to the community and recognize Commander Rebecca Nielsen for this historic event.

And Rebecca, if my colleagues join me up here. Okay, Holly.

Yes, can I just say really quickly, so I was just saying aww because I didn't get to help read that, but that's okay. I was late to a closed session. But no, I wanted to say thank you to the mayor and council and for staff for putting this proclamation together. I asked for it because Rebecca told me a couple weeks ago that she was elected the first female commander, and that just blew me away, and I just felt we needed to recognize that. So thank you very much for doing that, and congratulations to you.

Rebecca, if you would join us up over here, my colleagues will join us over here. Yes, please. Okay, next presentation is Friends of the Lincoln Public Library, the 2025 Annual Report and 2026 Annual Donation Presentation. Gloria?

and city officials. Can you hear me okay? There we go. My name is Gloria Pallotti-Irie. I'm the president of the Friends of the Lincoln Public Library. I appreciate this opportunity to present our 2025 annual report to you and to talk to you about our mission, which is solely to support and promote the Lincoln Public Library. This year, 2026, marks 40 years since the Friends became a nonprofit organization registered with the state of California. So it's our anniversary. Since its inception, we have worked diligently to raise funds and bring awareness to library offerings and the importance of libraries to our community. Over the past decade, 10 years, we have contributed over a half a million dollars for library programs, resources, and services. In the last two years alone, the Friends provided $115,000 and $72,000. This is particularly noteworthy given that the City of Lincoln current annual budget for the library stands at a little bit over $1 million. And the per capita spending is significantly less than the statewide median for public libraries. In Lincoln, the budget is about $18 per kappa when the statewide medium is $41. Statistics for 2025 show how much our community engages with the Lincoln Public Library. There were 278,000 visits to the library. There were over 18,900 attended library programs and events, and that was a 28% increase over the previous year. Our patrons checked out books and other items, totaling 371,000. And we had patrons access digital resources, totaling 81,000. These numbers are expected to increase each year as our community grows. The city of Lincoln will be challenged not only to maintain but increase future funding for the library. Our 2025 report, which we produce in-house, demonstrates how the library encourages kids' interest in reading by giving books to teens and children. The Friends purchased over 1800 books for this purpose. The annual report also shows how our funds were used to expand library resources. In total, 420 books and magazine subscriptions were purchased by the Friends. And we also paid for Canopy, which is a video streaming platform, and supplemented Hoopla, which is another digital library service. We also helped, oops. make the library a favorite destination of our community by supporting the library's monthly programs, family art night, the teen advisory board activities, and the library's many special events. I hope all will take a few minutes to read our report, The full report was included in tonight's agenda and is available on our website. And I also brought a few printed copies. And for those of you who might not want to read the full report, we actually even have a one-page highlights. For this year in 2026, the Friends Board has at present authorized $128,000 for the library to continue programs and events highlighted in our annual report, further expand its physical collection, refresh the furnishings in the children's library, and initiate new programs such as the one that just ended recently, the Your Next Chapter, which was a reading challenge for Western Placer Unified School District elementary schools. And they also are piloting, and hopefully will be expanding later this year, a young explorers program for toddlers and babies where their caregivers or parents can come and the children can explore in a structured but still free-form kind of environment. This amount will also include funds for the Libby app, which lots of people do to get their e-books. And we'll be expanding the digital offerings and reduce waiting times for Lincoln Library card holders. The diverse range of services provided by the Lincoln Public Library is made possible through our community's financial support of the Friends, the countless hours contributed by volunteers, and the unwavering dedication of our library staff. Our community can be proud of the Lincoln Public Library. We ask that the City Council continue to give priority to funding the library at its current level, and when feasible, increase its funding to better serve our growing community. Thank you, and I don't know if anyone has questions for me here. That's it.

Thank you, Gloria. Let me just say at the outset that I was thinking, as you were going through your presentation, that the flame of learning is kept alive through libraries. And those of us of a certain age remember what it was like, and that's where you went to get all your information. The wonderful staff, they had to help guide you to do it. When you mentioned the difference between hour per capita expenditures versus the statewide average, part of it has to be the difference that Friends of the Lincoln Library are contributing, both in terms of actual dollars, but probably even more importantly, the time being spent there. And that's the critical part about it. And to me, that's what Lincoln is. I mean, we are a community of volunteers. We step up, we believe in the community. and helping our friends and neighbors. And the library is a central part of it. What I find really rewarding is how the library is adapting to the challenges, because going forward, it's going to continue to be a hard slug to how do you maintain the services of the library in such a complex and evolving universe, including AI. But you guys are doing it. I mean, and that's the key. So kudos to the to the friends, kudos to the staff. I'm going to start down over here because I know Holly's going to talk.

Oh, no, I just thank you so much for that. Really appreciate it. And what the mayor said is absolutely true that we're so grateful for your group and all you've done over the last 40 years. When you said 40, I was like, wow, that's a great accomplishment. So thank you. And we know we're very fully aware of all the hours and hours and hours that you spend and the money that you raise, and it doesn't go unnoticed, and we're very grateful. So thank you so much for everything that you guys do. Appreciate it.

So I'll leave some printed reports. That would be great. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Anyone else?

Ben?

Yeah. You said it really well when you talked about how Organizations such as this are a direct reflection of who we are as a community, as a city, and that really isn't who we are and sitting in these seats, it really is friends of the Lincoln Library and the passion that they have and the service that they give. And I think in a conversation earlier today, someone had mentioned that it was a little bit difficult to try to get funding in our city for nonprofits. And I think it's probably mostly because we have so many great organizations that are backing our city and putting forth that effort that it seems like it's hard to get those funds. We are such a giving community and thank you enough for the many years of service that you have in the organization because, again, backbone of who we are.

Thank you all for having us.

Gloria, how many members are in the Friends? What's your population count, order of magnitude?

Well, I think we're like 350. Every year we have to kind of like build it up toward the end of the year. So right now I think we're at 350 or members, but we have more donors than that. We have people that, for whatever reason, prefer not to be a member, but they do donate. And we just had our big campaign, the Big Day of Giving, and we brought in $22,000. So that was great. We also get our funding through book sales, which have been fantastic over the last year. We kept thinking people are going to stop reading hardbound books, but they show up. So we resell those, and that's a big moneymaker for us. We also have some local nonprofits who provide us with grants for specific purposes. And I think, is that about it, Neil, for revenue? I think so. So anyway, so we have several sources that we use, and it's all been, we've been successful the last few years very much, so.

Any other colleagues before we go to the audience? Okay, thank you. Hold on one, okay. Any other questions from anyone in the audience or comments?

Okay, and anyone on Zoom? Okay.

Thank you again on behalf of the entire city and the community. Gloria. Thank you. Okay. Moving on to public comments on non agenda items. Um, all speakers time will be limited to three minutes unless extended by the mayor or comments or questions should be addressed to the mayor. And in most cases, the city council is prohibited from discussing or taking actions on any item, not appearing on the posted agenda, but may engage in brief discussions, provided direction, provide directions to city staff or schedule items for future meetings. Okay. Madam clerk, do we have any speaker cards?

We do have four speaker cards. First up is Christopher Lane followed by Stan Nader.

Hello, city council members. I'm Christopher Lane. I brought to you on April 28th at the city council meeting an urgent public safety concern that could cause serious injury, impalement, or death to any persons traveling along the public space above an abandoned construction project which has left exposed rebar. There are no barriers or safety signs protecting the public from falling into the 20 foot ditch. If there were to be an accident along the stretch of roadway, the vehicle could go off the cliff causing an elevated amount of serious injury. The population in this area has exploded with most of the residents being families and kids riding e-bikes to get to and from school. There are four schools within a quarter mile of this extremely dangerous abandoned construction site. I have pictures of groups of kids right at this intersection, and I've provided a copy of those pictures to you, Mr. Mayor. We the public are requesting immediate action be taken by the city to block off the city's property to keep any pedestrian or e-bike traffic from traveling along this section of walkway by putting temporary concrete traffic barriers that prevent pedestrians or cars from going over the extremely dangerous cliff. This type of barrier prevents anyone from removing it. It is obvious that because of the amount of time this danger has existed 10 years or more, The city's failure to address this issue years earlier in the process of getting the owner and those responsible for putting this public in danger will take a considerable amount of time to get this construction site cleaned up and made safe again. The city must not hide behind its supposed immunity clauses and rules any longer and must act immediately because of the extreme danger and threat to public safety this site possesses. The city must act immediately because it has known about this project since 2013 when it issued permits for MCC Construction Woodcrest Development LLC to begin construction. When this project was abandoned, the city failed to follow up with its inspections to ensure the construction does not pose a public safety threat. I've been in contact with Sean Scully regarding this matter and he has started the processes that will help to get this site cleaned up. but it will take some time. Please do not throw the weight of this on Sean Scully, but come alongside him as I've tried to do to find a solution to prevent the public from being hurt. Please, I urge you to approve and expedite the necessary and urgent projects he will be bringing to you very specifically like walkway barriers and signs to be put in place while waiting for the cleanup of the rebar and the restoration of the hillside to prevent any further erosion possibly affecting the roadway above. the sidewalks, and then the second one would be the sidewalks completed along Colonnade, Bella Breeze, and Joyner Parkway so that the school kids don't have to walk in the street near a high volume of traffic. So they don't have to walk in the rocks, dirt, and mud. Due to the amount of time this project has been abandoned, the rains and traffic have further eroded the hillside and returning the ground to its original state would be a major project and would impede the further growth of business in that specific location. The city must expedite and approve the projects that Sean Scully, the city manager, is about to put forth. And the city must move and shift funds to pay for these projects and expedite this process. There are a great deal of unanswered questions as to how this project got abandoned without oversight from the city on such an important and dangerous construction site. The city must hold themselves accountable for the failures and do whatever is necessary to get this urgent public safety concern completed in a safe and effective manner that does not cause more concerns to the public safety. This city must issue a public statement explaining what happened and why it was ignored for 10 years and what you are doing to prevent this from happening again and to address who is responsible for this gross negligence.

Sir? Yes. I think we got the gist of it. Sean, do you want to comment? Yeah, sure.

This is weird. So hopefully everyone can hear me. I've been communicating with Mr. Lane about this. There is a bit of an update that I don't want to go into super detail about, but our city engineer was able to determine that one of the various iterations of a project at that location at some point a couple of years ago left, for lack of a better term, a security bond. on file. And so we may have some limited resources to do a permanent kind of safety improvement there. There's a couple, we can go on and on about this, but there's a few things we have to determine first. First question is, is that, is what is the rebar holding up as it relates to the bank that it is designed under? What is the appropriate treatment to eliminate it and have it removed? There's no question that it should have been done. Because that can take a couple different forms. It can take a form of fill. It can take a form of bend and remove. And do we have enough resources in the retained amount that was kept to be able to pull that off versus leaning the property for the cost? Do you want to add something, Ben, to that?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. When this was brought to the city's attention, this is something, yes, thank you, Mr. Lane, for bringing up the safety concern. We're going to do everything within our power to get this, you know, make the site as safe as possible. While keeping in mind that, you know, we generally, as a city, try to respect private property rights, right? So this is all on private property. We don't typically just, you know, encroach on private property and start demoing or demolishing or, you know, taking down things. But Mr. Lane is correct. This is a safety hazard, even though it's on private property. And as our city attorney can probably, you know, state that the liability for the most part will rest with the private property. But as public servants, it's our goal and our job to make, you know, the city as safe as possible in general. So this is a high priority for us. And And we have determined that there is some grading security and we're gonna coordinate with city attorney and finance director, see if we can tap into that funding and try to get something resolved as quickly as possible, possibly utilizing our public works forces.

John, do we have any timeline for any fixes to mitigate the potential danger?

So there's some process that is required of notice prior to doing it, but we should have some sort of clarity about total solution within the next month or so. In the meantime, I don't know if Mr. Lane mentioned, but Matt's, our public works director's crew was nice enough to go out and cap all of those exposed rebar for the time being, which is not a total solution. It just, makes it somewhat more safe for the time being. And then we'll do the heavy lift thereafter.

I'm sorry if I missed it. Did you say that? Cause I know you reached out to the property owner the last time. Did they ever respond?

Property is owned by a foreign company, uh, that we've spoken to their, there's an intermediary, um, company that I suppose represents them on some level from a real estate perspective. And we were, our code enforcement department was told that we shouldn't expect any response back.

And by foreign, I assume you mean overseas. Correct.

Okay. I'd like to respond to those comments. So right now, as it exists, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Thank you. Yeah, if I could have Sean Scully kind of meet with me at a later time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you.

Dan.

Following Stan, we have Jason Daggett.

Mr. Mayor and Council, my name is Stan Nader. I live in 12 Ridges area. I know the city manager was intending to have an item on this agenda relating to quote e-bikes, but they wanted to continue to ask the city council to consider stricter enforcement and greater penalties for e-bike riders and their parents for those riders violating basic traffic laws. Your current ordinance calls for education and minor penalties for rider violations. The city of golf tried that approach and found that was not working and have gone to $500 fines and 40 portrait forfeiting of their riders vehicles. I certainly understand the constraints the city police department has by enforcing stricter enforcement because of the lack of staffing. But I believe if you do not have an enhanced level of constraints, the city is putting yourselves at legal exposure. When you compare the population of Roseville uh, to the number and the number of officers, uh, and, and related to the city of Lincoln. Lincoln had, which should have 55 officers, not 28 that the department currently has. That leads me to my next subject and that is economic development. I reviewed the city's website for the page on economic development. In the 2024-2029 economic development action, and I put that in capital plan, it states the number one priority is business support and job creation. In 2010, Placer County sponsored the Placer County Economic Forum. The featured speaker was Dr. J. Robert Fount, who was Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. His qualifications include PhD in urban land economics, finance, and urban planning. His focused comments regarding economic development is jobs, jobs, jobs, and everything else will follow. I believe more attention needs to be paid to attracting businesses that provide jobs for our citizens. When the people of Lincoln leave the city for employment, they have the opportunity to shop and spend money outside our city. Even if the county gives the city everything they're asking for in the property tax sharing agreement and can persuade the citizens to support an increase in sales tax, the city still will need more resources to balance the city's budget. It's time for all hands on deck to approach including the city council advocating for enhanced business system, Stan, can you summarize, please?

Thank you.

Thank you, Stan. I might add on the e-bikes, this is an evolving situation. I just had a coffee with the mayor up in Sun City, and almost all of the questions involve the e-bikes and what's being done. So, you know, this is not a static situation, but we continue to move forward, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve until we find the optimum solution for the community. Jason.

After Jason is Jeff Short.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, staff, regarding e-bikes. Increasing the penalties for e-bike violations. I agree we could do that and probably should. Education programs, that might help a bit too. I'm not saying we don't do these things, but in my opinion, I think our biggest issue with e-bikes, along with several other issues in the city, are not going to be fixed by laws because we have an enforcement problem. We passed an ordinance a few months back for e-bikes that mostly mirrored laws already on the books at the state level, so we just made it illegal even harder. And here we are still talking about e-bikes with no measurable change. I had a conversation a while back with an officer of our PD, and I asked, hey, are helmet laws still a thing? To which they replied, well, they're supposed to be, so it's clearly not a big priority for the PD to enforce. I've seen more times than I can count, just around the GEMS area alone, officers driving by students that are clearly underage, not wearing a helmet or riding an e-scooter, And not once have they stopped. That's anecdotal, I know. But from what I've seen, it's an enforcement problem. The same can be said for the traffic issues in our city. I half-jokingly told our city manager a while back that if we position officers at Lincoln Boulevard in first and third and gave tickets for failing to yield the right-of-way to people turning left, we could not only afford to pave our streets, but we could probably pave them in gold. this council last year after the 4th of July all agreed that we needed to do something about illegal fireworks, which as the name suggests are already illegal. As of yet, I'm not aware of any real action that's been in front of the council to combat them because you cannot legislate enforcement. And I know our police department is understaffed. I get it. I think we can all agree on that. My big question next would be, why has it been minimal action or motions or council-initiated business to propose ways to increase our general funds? We've had a lot of motions to increase new housing developments, which more people strain our PD more. But no sales tax increase, ballot measure discussions, or maybe cannabis dispensaries. And I'm sure some people may have clutched their pearls, as I mentioned, the devil's lettuce. But the first, the first city with general funds to even consider a, to not consider a legal business that generates more than $220 million per quarter for the state and upwards of $85,000 a month for a small town like Marysville is foolish. And if you think there's not a market for it, the next tree lighting 4th of July parade or rods and relics you're at, I encourage you to close your eyes, breathe deeply through your nose and take in the smells of the event. In case you were wondering, Marysville population is 12,000 people. They have 17 sworn officers. Our population is 56,000 and growing. We have 28 sworn officers. So a city that's a quarter of the size has more than half the officers. Obviously, I'm not saying it's a golden ticket, but combined with coming business centers can make a huge difference in keeping us the third safest city and not getting a busy signal when you try to call our PD, which is something I've personally experienced twice.

Thank you, Jason, very much. Okay. Jeff?

I must have filled my card out wrong. I'm here for 14B. And that's going to be a tough act to follow, by the way. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm here for 14B, but get those Z bikes, man.

Do we have anyone else?

Is there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment?

Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, council members, city staff, those here, as well as at home. Two quick items. First of all, oftentimes we come to the meetings, we're here, next thing you know, it's a month, it's a year of going down the road. I saw a couple of articles last couple of weeks on what doesn't happen in places like here. So I'm just throwing this out there as a nice reminder that It's great to have a city that still has an invocation. We still pledge allegiance to the flag. We do have a dialogue going back between citizens and the board and the city. So I'm just throwing it out there. Let's make sure that we're still remembered and we're going in the right direction, even though sometimes it feels we're not. And on a brighter note, anyone that's out there, and it may have already been put out there, I haven't seen it yet. If anyone has been to the Lincoln Community Center in the gymnasium area, and if you've had mobility issues such as a walker, wheelchair, whatever, A lot of people, if you have been there before and you're like, I can't go back because I'm too close to the line where the game is played and it's right in your lap, that does discourage people in wheelchairs and for lots of reasons. Bottom line is you don't have to worry about that now. Through the city manager, certainly the chief engineer, Will Foote, Scott and his group, people can come in there in wheelchairs and walkers and sit up there and feel comfortable and safe and watch the players, friends, family, and enjoy themselves. So with that, thank you very much.

Thank you, Byron.

Dollar. Dollar.

Hello, everyone. I just wanted to thank Matt and his crew for spraying the cockroaches. It got done that same week. And I'm hoping that it gets done at least three times a year.

I'm hoping it's more effective than that.

Hopefully, we don't because you know, they come back, or they go somewhere else. And then you're gonna have a bigger problem.

Thank you. Thank you, Darla. Okay. Anyone else in the audience on public comment before we go out to Zoom? Okay. Anyone on Zoom?

Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide a public comment? I see no hands raised.

Thank you very much. In that case, we'll close public comment and move to consent calendar. This time we only have one Item on the consent approval of the meeting of the meeting minutes of May, May 12th. Does anyone want to pull this one item? Good decision.

Okay. I'll accept a motion then. I'll move. Okay. Second.

Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries 5-0. Thank you very much. Okay. And we'll move on to public hearings over here. 14A, receive a presentation and hold public hearings on the annual military equipment report and renew ordinance number 1045. Bravo to comply with AB 481, presented by Police Captain Eaton.

I feel like we just did this one. Has it been a year already? Yeah. Wow, lucky you.

Lucky us. Well, thank you, Mr. Mayor and council members. My name is Zach Eaton. I'm your rookie captain here in Lincoln. Tonight, we are here to present first our, of course, my computer goes off of my notes on it right as I come up here.

So just give me one second.

So we're here actually to present our military equipment use annual report. I'm happy to report that we really don't use a lot of our military equipment a lot, but nevertheless, we need every piece of equipment that we have. You guys see that? Is that on the screen?

There we go. There we go.

So this is posted to our website. We're required to post this 30 days before a public hearing on this. So this has actually been on our PD website since the 20th of April. So the public is welcome to take a look at how we use our military equipment, summary of complaints that we have, internal audits that we do, and the annual costs that we have moving forward with our military equipment. But just as a little background really quick. The city is required to approve our use before purchasing this type of equipment and also us using, helping other agencies, neighboring agencies to use this equipment. So we're required to come to you every year. You guys have approved this since January 1 of 2022 is when it actually came into effect in California. So this is the fourth or fifth year that we've used this. I'm just going to roll through a couple quick highlights for us. So we did not use any military munitions this year. That would be, as I click through this really quick, that would be some of the pictures that you see. Our beanbag shotguns, our 40 millimeter launchers, our pepper ball guns, and then some of our CS and CN grenades that you can see here. We didn't have any complaints that we're aware of regarding our military equipment, so that's been fantastic. We completed an inventory shortly to present this to you, and we have all of our military munitions accounted for. Our funding this year is $25,000 and most of that centers around training and drone replacement. Drones are very expensive. There's been some shift in culture and drones related to drones coming from China. And so we're not gonna be buying drones from overseas anymore and buying US made drones. So we're happy to report that as well. And we plan to purchase three more 40 millimeter launchers to have them in more of our patrol vehicles. They're more readily available out in the field. We had 151 drone flights last year, and each flight is actually listed in this military equipment report. So we've detailed pretty much everything we do related to military equipment use is in the report. So I'm trying to be cognizant of your time here tonight, but The fact of the matter is we really consider this equipment to be life-saving equipment. And without this equipment, it really handcuffs our officers' options in the field when they're dealing with some pretty precarious situations. And so our request to you tonight is to adopt the ordinance again so we can continue to purchase and use military equipment in the city of Lincoln. If council does not approve this, again, those are pieces of equipment that we just can't use anymore. And with that, I will take any questions that you may have.

Thank you. Any questions for my colleagues? Whitney.

Just out of curiosity, what do the new drones do?

They pretty much have the same capabilities. The drones that are made in the US, obviously technology gets better and better and better every couple months, it seems. There's some concerns with the information and where that information goes from foreign-made drones. There's a lot of different companies that are coming online in the United States right now. Skydio and Brink are two big ones. And they're becoming integrated with some of the other systems. So Axon, which provides us with our body-worn cameras, and a lot of other equipment is now coming on board with some of these drone makers. And so the capabilities are just getting better, but it's really about information sharing and the manufacturers and who actually has access to that information.

Okay. So there isn't any new, like, interesting, exciting features that they have other than they're just safer for us to use and more...

There are some in testing phase, but they have not publicly been announced yet for new capabilities that are coming out. But when those come out, we'll always look to see how we can improve our services as well. I just don't want to discuss them yet because they're not publicly available information.

You tell us, then you have to. No, I'm always a supporter of responsible technology. And I think that anything that's going to help you guys do your job and also keep you safer is a win for everybody. So yeah.

Thank you. Council Member Brown. Yeah. Do you have anything to combat enemy drones?

Good question. So not right now. We do not. That is one of the most pressing issues in law enforcement as well as on the military side of everything. Unfortunately, we don't have any technology right now, but I know that's where the world is going and That's more of a state issue. I know Council Member Andrada spoke a little bit about ordinances that will help us coming forth. But technology right now, we don't have any technology that I'm aware of that we can get our hands on to stop that. And it's something that we are very concerned about. Thank you.

Are you allowed to just shoot them down?

I think that would depend on the situation. Obviously, if it was causing somebody life and death, I think that there would be our policy would allow us to improvise. But unfortunately, that's just an area that we haven't waded into in law enforcement yet. It's very new.

I was reading about That is, it's like an energy weapon that is supposed to be really small and portable for law enforcement departments to be able to aim it at a drone.

Yeah.

If it's a threat to just shut it down.

Yeah, I do know that there is, I'm sorry, Council Member, I do know that there is technology out there that allows us to do some counter drone intelligence to where we can actually find for people who are operating drones in restricted areas. And so I know that's one way to combat it, but as a technology that exists to just make the drone fall out of the sky, so to speak, that's not available yet to us.

No questions, I'm always supportive of making sure they have what they need as well.

Okay, good. Do we have any anyone, any speaker cards on this? The public hearing, right? So we have to open the public hearing. Yes, there we go. Thank you.

Is there anyone in the audience that would like to provide a public comment?

Byron, yes.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, council members, city staff. I was going through that list and I looked at all the incidents that, the drones were called in from people who were lost to juveniles who were lost, and that seemed to ready that. As we were talking about the capabilities of the drones, unlike helicopters and that sort of thing, do the drones have any capability in the way of body temperature, that sort of thing, that you can be able to use that in it? Not just for somebody being lost, but let's say if you're trying to find how many people are out where they shouldn't be and that sort of thing. And my last comment is, even though we've kind of worked our way from this, but California, we were involved. And I don't want to make this political, but we were involved for the first time where outside of California, we were having people come in for the first time. literally doing things to u.s citizens other states as well any of that equipment any thought about when that would have to be and i know this is a broad question but if that were to be deployed would it have been in any of the circumstances that have hit the news over the last you know year or so in the way of who's being used for and against. I always think that it's always against the bad guys, but that line somehow is being skewed. So I'm not quite sure how that would work. So I appreciate it.

Mike may respond to that.

Yeah, so our drones actually possess FLIR technology, so they can see heat at night when it's dark, and it's actually very, very cool. So yeah, we can count people. And to the second question, I'm not quite sure I understand what incidents you were talking about and referring to drone, I'm sorry, regarding what type of Yeah, so state law and our policy does not allow us to assist ICE in any way, shape, or form. The only time that we would be able to assist ICE is if somebody's life, it was a life or death situation and anything outside of that, we don't have any involvement with ICE and we don't allow them to use any of our drone technology.

Very good.

Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Mr. Murray.

Was there anyone else in the audience? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I see no hands raised.

Okay, in that case, we'll close the public hearing over here. Additional comments? No, I move approval. Okay, I have a motion for approval. Do I have a second?

Second.

Moved and seconded. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nope. Okay, 5-0. Thank you very much. Thank you, Captain Neaton. Okay. 14, Bravo. Adopt a resolution approving the proposed user and regulatory fee schedule effective July 1st. Presented by Assistant City Manager, Nita Racker. You're on.

good evening thank you mayor pearl and i'll just take a brief moment to do a quick introduction and then i'm going to hand this off to our consultant so this is our update of the annual user and regulatory fee we do bring you a annual update but once every five years we do a complete redo and re-evaluation of all the fees within the study This year, we reached out to more departments than we ever have before. I think every single department in the city, including IT, recreation, trying to think, maybe human resources didn't ask for an additional fee, but there were fee requests from every department that needed to be evaluated and considered for inclusion. And the only other comment I want to make before I bring up our consultant is that the title of this item, there is a typo that it says the fees are going to be adopted and in effect July 1st, 2026. However, The staff report, that title is in error. It should be August 1st, 2026, which is the information that is in the body of the staff report, as well as the presentation and the resolution before you. So with that, I want to turn this over to our consultant, Terry Madsen, with ClearSource, and he's going to be presenting this slideshow to you.

Well, good evening, mayor and members of the city council. Thank you for allowing me to speak with you this evening. I know you have a full agenda, so I will do my best to be brief. I'm going to walk you through about a 20 slide presentation. Um, and, but I'll move quickly through it and leave it to the city council to direct me in terms of questions or feedback areas. You'd like to dive in any further. Um, So just by way of orientation, the first half of this presentation will just be a background about user and regulatory fees, the use of them in Lincoln and throughout California. So everything you're hearing in the first half of this presentation is common. to California, it applies to Lincoln, Roseville, Folsom, equally Southern California and so forth. The second half of the presentation will dive specifically into recommendations for consideration linked to Lincoln, and then we'll conclude with staff recommendation for city council. So just by way of background, when we think of this idea of use of city revenues, most commonly we think of as the broad pool of revenues available to a city are typically sales tax dollars, property tax dollars, and so forth. And we use those revenues as much as possible to provide services of broad community-wide benefit. So most commonly we would think of this as like public safety services, public works type services, park maintenance services, where every resident and business in Lincoln has access to those roads for pothole repair and so forth. When we see a direct receiver of service, we frequently use what we call user and regulatory fees. To recover the cost of providing that service so direct receiver of service direct method of cost recovery most commonly we think of permit processing plan reviews required inspections and so forth, as direct receipts of service. In terms of the study that is being presented to the city council and the fees you're being asked to adopt, they are limited to what we would call service-based fees. And service-based fees fall into two primary worlds, development-related service-based fees and non-development-related fees. In the development world, we would think of like building, planning, land development, engineering, and so forth. In the non-development world, we think about parks and recreation fees, administrative fees, and so forth. I want to highlight that we are dealing with service based fees exclusively, there is no proposed adjustment and no review of what we would call development impact fees. So fees when new development comes and we say, hey, we need an infrastructure to accommodate this new development that is not within the scope of this study or this evening's item. And additionally, there is no review or proposed adjustment to any taxes, any utility rates, any assessments. So the things... That as residents and businesses in Lincoln we encounter sort of on a day to day basis, they are not proposed for any sort of review or adjustment as part of this item. These are more discrete periodic activities that we're we're examining As the assistant city manager mentioned, this item is reviewed, or the fee schedule is reviewed and adjusted annually as part of your normal city operations. The last time you performed a study like this, though, was in 2020. That's common among municipalities. You undertake this type of endeavor every three or five years. It's an intense activity. It relies a lot on staff resource. And so what you're doing is... performing this study, understanding information available as of this moment, and then in the interim years, you make reasonable, rational adjustments, and then you come back and do this type of study again every several years. So why does Lincoln perform this type of study every several years? Why your neighbors do the same activity and effort every several years? The number one reason is because you're trying to comply with legal requirements. Because we're dealing with fees and not taxes, we have governance outlined in the California Constitution and the California Government Code that directs the collection of fees and the administration of fees. Another reason we do these types of studies is because by definition, When you have lemon like you know sort of limited general fund resources and a number of things that you would like to accomplish. When you recover a greater share of the costs of these direct services, you are by definition freeing up general fund resources to be used for another. city purpose, some broad community-wide benefit purpose, if you so choose. And then I think the final bullet point is really critical, which is when we recover our costs of service, we position Lincoln to continue to meet the service level expectation of the community. So we're positioning ourselves to be able to maintain staffing levels and to respond promptly to our residents and development community and so forth. So I mentioned this idea of legal guidance in the constitution, the California government code, and there's two primary drivers that we consider. Number one is we are not in the profit making business. The idea of fees is cost recovery, but it's not in excess of cost recovery. And then secondarily, there should be proportionality assigned. So something that's more intensive in nature would have a higher cost of service than something that's less intensive in nature, so we want to think about proportionality and we want to make sure that we're not asking for more than it actually costs us to provide the service. So everything you just heard is common throughout California and it just sort of informs you philosophically in terms of the boundaries. and parameters that this study was conducted under. Now we'll focus specifically on Lincoln. So as policymakers, we say to you, well, okay, you have 350 fees in your city fee schedule. And the reason you have 350 fees is because you're trying to accommodate the various scenarios that could come through the door. Some of them come through relatively infrequently, and some of them may come through sort of day after day. Again, California cities typically have hundreds and hundreds of fees in their schedule because they're trying to accommodate these different scenarios. But we say, okay, if we want to give the city council sort of broad picture of what is being proposed amongst these 350 fees, we would say to you, that more than 70% of the city's fees are proposed to either remain unchanged, have some minor decrease, or an increase that's considered relatively close to inflation, like a 5% type increase. So we would say that about 70% of your fees are proposed for very minor change, if any. For the remainder of this presentation, we'll focus on the other 30% of those fees because we would say those might be of particular interest to you as decision makers. So there are 22 fees that would vary based on, the change would vary based on project criteria. So within a fee you might have A minor category and a major category in the minor may remain relatively unchanged the major may have a 6% increase, we would say that. That change depends it doesn't meet the criteria of 5% or less so we we just called those out that say you know it could be a decrease or an increase, depending on the scenario. But there are 59 fees that are proposed to increase by more than 5%, and there are 14 new fees proposed. The next couple slides will focus on those. For the fees that are proposed to increase by more than 5% of the 59, the majority of them live in the planning world. And we use the word fees here in this presentation. But in the planning world, you collect what we call fixed fees, where somebody says, hey, you are going to pay $600 for a particular service, or you're going to pay $700 for a particular service. And then we have what we call time and materials deposits. In this world, we're using those interchangeably for the sake of this presentation. So about half of these 30 changes are simply just recalibrating an initial deposit from let's say a ten thousand dollar initial deposit for a large um like general plan type review or something like a specific plan amendment something like that where we're saying you know that deposit has remained relatively unchanged for the last five years let's re readjust that number just to give the public a better idea of what they're likely to pay so If they didn't need all of that, if the deposit wasn't expended, they would receive a refund of unused amounts. So half of it is just recalibrating the deposits, and the other half of them are linked to fixed fees, but their staff has sort of reviewed the time estimates and said, hey, you know, In the five years ago we thought this was seven hours of work today, it seems like it's closer to eight hours of work with the multiple rounds of review and so forth, and so we need to adjust these fees if we're going to target full cost recovery. same concept in the the remaining areas they're just fewer so a few fire fees, a few police fees public works fees and so forth, and again, these are periodic requests with sort of a specialized. response needed or a specialized nature like vehicle impound release, no one needs to pay that if they don't drive with a suspended license or have their vehicle towed for parking illegally or something like that. But when these do occur, if we want to recover the cost of providing that specific service, we would have to adjust these fees by more than 5%. In terms of the new fees proposed, there are 14 new fees proposed. Six of them live in what we would call the public works world. And staff just went through and wanted to clearly identify when there are specific requests for service or specific need to provide service that isn't contemplated in a base rate. So if we have this idea that you're a commercial refuse user and you have agreed to limit your refuse to a certain level, to a certain size per week or per month and so forth. If you are overflowing that, the city would have a mechanism to say, hey, you need to honor the terms of the amount of waste you can put in these particular bins and so forth. Over the last several months, I think the airport committee has considered several recommendations. They are included in this fee schedule. So there's nothing in this schedule that deviates from what the airport commission has already considered and approved. And then finally in the recreation world, just clarifying that a new park space is available for reserved use. And anything in the recreation world is linked to reserved use. So all of us in Lincoln can attend our parks, and use available facilities whenever we desire within the normal operating hours. But if we want to reserve space, we have dedicated fees for that. Finally, I just want to draw attention to an interesting item in Lincoln. And again, this is common to municipalities, but it's an area that has, you know, community development staff, development services staff wanted to make sure we addressed it in terms of this study as a cleanup item. And so in Lincoln, you make use of internal city staff and you make significant use of third party service providers like contract plan reviewers, contract inspectors and so forth. When you make use of those third party services, you currently apply a 40% administrative rate. So let's say I get a bill for $100 from a third party there would be a 40% add-on that was applied as part of the last fee study. The reason that happens is because Lincoln staff typically only bill for very few hours. So there is not a commensurate time and materials billing by Lincoln internal staff. Instead, the Lincoln internal staff costs are recovered via this administrative fee. But I think the development community has asked that that administrative fee be more in line with what they typically see in other communities, like a 10 to 15% admin rate. And we are comfortable proposing that as part of this study, as long as the city staff begins, you know, actively billing for their own internal time. So before you were recovering your staff costs via this administrative rate. Now you'll be recovering your staff costs via time and materials billing. And we've communicated with the development services team and they're ready to implement that assuming this fee schedule goes into effect. We assume that this would be a revenue neutral transaction. So what you used to collect via an admin fee, you will now collect via time and materials billing. Staff can monitor that time and materials billing to ensure that. what we would anticipate is actually happening under normal development cycles. Because most of your fees come from development services fees and we are proposing to be, you know, essentially remain neutral here. We're just modifying a billing methodology to another billing methodology in your fixed fee world. There's not a lot of significant changes. So we're not recommending any fiscal impact as part of this current activity, nothing that would sort of impact your 26, 27 budget. Instead, what we said to staff is to monitor Um, activity and to adjust accordingly via mid year, if necessary, or in an upcoming budget cycle. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Um, at this time, if the city council has any questions or feedback, I'm available to receive them.

I'll start off for probably about three decades. I was on your side of the podium over there. And so I know that the, and you stated it very well, the user fee schedule is a living document. You know, you want to adjust it periodically, but every once in a while you want to do a touchstone and look at it from the ground up again. And your team has done a very good job in doing that. what I found in the field is that this protects our citizens because before, even before like the mid eighties, when this rigorous application of methodology started to become apparent, cities and counties were charging whatever they want and everyone rolled on it. It wasn't right. There was some lawsuits that went on about it. It was corrected. I think the whole industry, has become a better partner with our development, with anyone who uses the services, and that really is the key. A government can charge up to the full cost of providing the service. It doesn't have to charge that if it wants to subsidize, but it can charge more, right? And you can charge more to subsidize one area as opposed to the other. So I went through your You know, the report, kudos and congratulations, great methodology. I think that it's going to serve our team for the next couple of years. We'll keep on making adjustments as we go along.

Thank you.

Any other questions for my colleagues?

I'll wait until after.

Okay, public, okay. Okay, very good. Okay, we'll open up a public hearing over here. Do we have anyone?

We do have a speaker card from Jeff Short.

Good evening, Mayor Pearl and Council Members. Jeff Short, North State Building Industry Association. I am not here to attack the fact that half of the 5% or more increases is on the Planning Department. I am here to support the change that's being made on the administrative fee. It's something that we have been asking for, and as more and more of your staff has come in-house, we appreciate the staff that Sean has put together, and working with NIDA has been fantastic on this and many other issues, and so realigning your fee structure to look more at how most of our builders see them in other jurisdictions and are used to them will be very helpful as consultant explained. You know, we don't think that this puts any sort of undue financial pressure on the city, but it does help builders in the community be able to better compare what they plan on doing from a financial perspective. So we support the change. I also support that last note on there about, you know, reviewing this as we get started and making sure that the balance is right, both for the city and for the development community. The last thing I'll note is I think I did hear him say 10% to 15% was supportable. Just leave that right where it is.

Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, the key in this is transparency, and that's really what we want to do. All the numbers are out there. You can take a look at it, see what the numbers are, where they are. It's not an exact science, but it's a darn good representation of the services that are being provided for our citizens who are using a particular service as opposed to the general population. Okay, I'll come back to my colleagues now. I'm sorry, do we have anyone else? Okay, Stan. Stan.

Mr. Mayor and Council, now that the proposal is for the staff to be billing for, I would encourage you as a council to monitor this process closely. And the reason I say that is when I was on the council, developers were supposed to bank money towards their efforts that the city was putting forth. And we had numerous accounts that were in the red. In fact, we had one that owed the city $106,000. And their item was on the agenda for their approval of their specific plan. And I was mayor at the time. And I could have been a mean old mayor and said, I'm pulling this specific plan off the agenda. But I assumed I would have been overridden by my colleagues. So again, I would ask you to watch this closely.

Thank you Stan.

Would you like me to respond to that?

Yes, please.

So when I stepped into the role of Community Development Director about a year ago, they did have a process in place in order to minimize the amount of developer accounts that might be in the negative. But I did tweak that process just a little bit with staff, and I'm happy to say that we have gotten the amount of negative accounts down to a very manageable number. A very small dollar amount, considering where we were in the past, and that that is my job to manage that for you. That if that becomes an issue, that we would bring that forward, but that you're relying on my expertise to keep that under control. And as I said, we've kind of tweaked the process, and it is working very well.

Thank you. Yeah, the bad old days were the bad old days, and they are the old days. I mean, you know, we have a new team, and we have new processes, you know, that are making sure that things like that don't happen. And we're, again, at the end of the day, we're very transparent, but we're also looking out for all of our citizens. It's their dollars. It's their general fund. Okay, do we have anyone else?

Was there anyone else in the audience that would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. I do have a hand raised on Zoom.

If you're on Zoom, please unmute.

Fran, you are now unmuted. Please provide your public comment.

Hi, everybody. I have been trying since... six o'clock to get on this Zoom. I never got an e-bulletin. I never got to register. When I looked for a registration, it registered me for June 9th. So I couldn't find a phone number. So I emailed Sean and he sent me a link. Thank you, Sean. And he said Oak Tree Lane was on the agenda, but I don't see it anywhere. And that's why I'm raising my hand because I wanted to say something about it.

Okay, but Fran, we have to talk about this subject.

But since I have your attention, is Oak Tree Lane on the agenda? Because I don't see it. And like I say, I've been trying to get on here since... No, it's not on the agenda. Well, Sean, why did you say it was? I don't recall saying it was.

You can run, but you can't hide tonight, Sean.

Anyway, it's very frustrating to, you know, want to say something to you and not be able to say anything to you. I was on YouTube. I can't say anything to you on YouTube. And I didn't say anything at the last meeting. And somebody said to me, hey, you didn't say anything at the meeting. I don't think you want to hear from me every time. But since I have your attention and I don't see it, I am just going to tell you that the stop signs are working really well. Thank you very much. And they finally painted the strips on the road, which really helps. They're doing the landscaping. And if any of you haven't been out there.

Branson, we're off topic here. We'll have Sean give an update on Oak Tree during the city manager presentation.

Okay. It could be recovered by then. I'm finally happy that I finally got to be on here. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Fran. And stay tuned. Sean will be responding.

And, Mayor, just for PSA, if you don't get the link through the e-ball, you can just click the agenda on the website, and there's a link on the very first page, and it'll take you right into the Zoom.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. Do we have anyone else on Zoom? Claire, is there anyone else on Zoom? Oh, you're checking.

Oh, my. I'm so sorry. Thank you.

Thank you, Fran.

I guess it's me.

Okay, Tony. Sorry, you have now been unmuted.

Thank you. Yeah, I just want to add my voice to Jeff tonight. We really appreciate Sean and the rest of the staff taking this forward and Anita. And it's about time. We've been, you know, struggling with some numbers to make sure it's aligned with the development community. And I think we're happy finally. to see it taken forward and then having some number to be able to drive forward and compare and hopefully see the end result better to be everybody. And as far as a comment that came up about taking stuff forward, I don't think... Staff have been really very, very conscious about that. I remember one time we had a hearing and staff said, wait a second, we have to clear this account to make sure that we go to hearing. So council doesn't like to take anything as a negative. So I think that's been working really good lately and that's thanks for Nita and the rest of the staff. So I appreciate your hard work and looking forward to what's next after this, you know, finalizing the data.

Thank you, Joni. Claire, anyone else?

I see no other hands raised.

Thank you. In that case, we'll close the public hearing. Comments from my colleagues?

So I don't have any questions about the the increase of the fees i'm supportive and thank you for all the work on this, I know, is a big undertaking but Sean if I if I could or need to either one of you. Could I just take a little bird walk and just ask a question on fees in general, not necessarily development fees, because that that's perfectly understandable. When we charge or any city, not just us, but when any city. charges a permit fee for a homeowner who wants to change out their water heater or fix their slider or whatever, that sort of thing. Is that state law that they have to do that? Or is that just a city ordinances that everybody just does it?

So depending on the improvement to the home, there is a very, very black and white line of what requires a building permit and what doesn't.

There's some deviation city to city, but generally it's,

You know, to your example, water heaters, for example, pretty standard. That's a safety improvement that we want to make sure we install correctly. So,

It doesn't blow up their house.

Ideally.

Yeah. So what about, like, just a sliding glass door? Like, your handle breaks, you've got to put a new slide door. Like, I'm just asking, like, from a resident's side, is, like, why would a resident, and I'm not arguing against, I'm just curious, like, why would a resident need a permit just to replace a slider door? Is that just because it's a state law? Yes. Or is it because we just want government oversight? No, we...

I think if our building official is here, he would tell you is that we prefer to not to, to limit the kinds of things that we need to inspect to only things that are safety related in nature. And so the standard and building and building permits is typically, uh, improvements that could have some safety implications. So a slider, for example, no, I don't think that replacing the handle to a slider probably applies, but, um, For example, window framing. It's important we get a look at that. If it's installed incorrectly, it can lead to mold and some other problems. So usually that's the test in general.

Okay. I appreciate that. Did you want to weigh in on that?

Yeah. I think there's very minor stuff like your slider door handle breaks and all you're doing is just swapping out. I do not think that would qualify for a permit. It's like a true retrofit. You're modifying.

Okay. That makes sense. Thank you. appreciate that.

John. I just my compliments for the work and when this is mayor looks at this kind of stuff with a critical eyes, so his compliments yeah means a lot carries a lot of weight, so I appreciate all the work done here it looks great Thank you.

Well, and I really quickly, I also really appreciate the work that goes into talking with the BIA, you know, and making sure that they're on board. And I appreciate that. And I appreciate Jeff being here. That makes our lives a lot easier when staff works with that. Thank you for that.

And one of the things that Terry didn't mention, but is like pretty important is that the goal here is to charge the least amount possible to provide the service so that We are recovering that cost, but keeping it affordable for folks to come in and do what they want to do, but also not charging so little that every other taxpayer is paying for that thing that you're trying to accomplish.

Well, I was just going to say exactly what Sean just said, is that that was really clear in your presentation, and I appreciate that, because now it's just good to have a kind of a compass to know what, you know, our goal, as Sean just said, to have our homeostasis is all based on the, like you're saying, the proportionality and cost recovery, and we're not trying to make a profit. We're just trying to make sure that we're not you know, having to charge other places so that we can stay whole. So I appreciate all the work and Nita and everybody else that behind the scenes put in with us and thank you.

Thank you. Ben? Yeah, I'll just go ahead and chime in with that same thing. Everyone's already said the exact same thing that I was going to, but it's from the public's perspective that, you know, why do you need so much money for this and that and the other? I'm already, I can't do this and that and the other. Anyway, and so I just want a third or fourth of that one or whatever that is. Thanks.

Okay, good. In that case, we're going to get a motion on the approval on it. Oops, hold on a second. We'll close the public hearing. Very good. I'll move adoption.

Okay. I'll second. Second, okay.

First and second, very good. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed, say no. Five, zero. Thank you very much. Thank you, Terry. Thank you, Jeff. Okay, 14, Charlie. Conduct a public hearing and adopt a resolution determining Starbucks Circle K project as exempt from CEQA and adopt a resolution proving the tentative map by Associate Planner Thomas Cruikshank. Thomas, thank you.

All right, good evening city council i'm Thomas kirk shank associate planner with Community development department, the project for you tonight is the starbucks and circle K commercial project, the tentative parcel map. I will discuss the location entitlements and findings environmental determination staff recommendations. This project is or this presentation is a summary of the project more detailed information is in the staff report provided. so the two acre parcel is located at the southeast corner of first street and joiner parkway it is a vacant commercial lot and it is within the joiner ranch general development plan and this project would include a circle k gas station and a starbucks with a drive-through on april 15 2026 the planning commission approved conditional use permits a design review and a tentative parcel map the As you can see here in the plan here, the Circle K would be this portion here with five pumps and the Starbucks is located here on the south with a double driveway to help accommodate traffic and the drive through at the back here. So the map proposes divide the two acre parcel into two separate one acre parcels. One is 1.04 acres, the other is 0.94 acres. The tentative parcel map has been found to be consistent with the City of Lincoln general plan to join a ranch general development plan. The City of Lincoln municipal code title 17 subdivision and title 18 zoning. analysis has determined the project is exempt from secret or California environmental quality act pursuant to section one, five, three, three, two infill development. And the project is also consistent with the development intensity and land use assumptions evaluated under the joint ranch general development plan will not result in any new or more severe environmental impacts than those previously considered. staff recommends the city council conduct public hearing consider the information contained in the staff report testimony of the public and take the following actions adopt a resolution determining the project is exempt under sequel and adopt a resolution approving the tentative parcel map. That concludes my presentation I am available for answering questions if you have any.

Thank you, Tom questions from the Council for my colleagues. Okay, very good. Okay, in that case, open the public hearing.

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide a public comment?

Darla?

Do I ask them? Does it have to be a gas station? Does it have to be a gas station?

There are many types that are allowed by zoning into that particular parcel. However, the application that is before you is for a gas station.

Okay, what happens when you build a gas station and then it goes belly up? What happens with the property? Like what happened on 193 and Old Highway? You know, where the automobile service is? Across the street, there's an empty lot. There used to be a gas station there. Now it can't be used, my understanding, because it used to be a gas station.

I'm not sure, but the reality is that the businesses make the decisions of where to go, how much money to put in, what facilities they want. And as long as they are within the confines of the approved specific plans, then it's fine. It's their money that they're putting into the project. They want it to succeed. We want it to succeed. If they didn't think that there was a market for, and I'm not speaking for that, I'm just talking as a bystander. If they didn't think that there was going to be an opportunity for them to succeed, they wouldn't do it without a doubt. So does it create competition? Yes. What the end result is, who knows? That's just part of the American process over here. Certainly, if any business that goes belly up and it becomes an eyesore and we have the ability to go in and to... and to change that. But right now, this is American business and just acting the way businesses operate in this country.

Because there was opportunity to put a gas station at Joner and Ferrari where there's no gas stations at all.

Darla, I hear you, but this is a decision that the business community makes, and it's their decision. It's their money. I'm not saying that you're incorrect in what it is, but no one has seen the foresight of what you're proposing over here at this point.

But to her question, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Just theoretically, if a gas station does close and they remove the underground tanks, that property can be used for something else, correct? It doesn't deem it uninhabitable, correct?

Yeah, so a lot has changed over the last... 30 or 40 years in terms of the requirements for putting underground petroleum tanks in the ground. There's websites that you can go on to on the state and you can see them throughout the state where a gas station went out of business. It wasn't ever used again and those tanks stayed in the ground and those tanks eventually started to leak and they created environmental issues. There's literally thousands of properties like that throughout the state. Many of them at this point have been reused. And there are a variety of agencies, including Lincoln, but not just Lincoln, that monitor and have all kinds of very stringent requirements to make sure that that type of possible environmental contamination is lessened to the greatest extent you can. And actually the property, I think that you're referring to on McBean and Lincoln Boulevard, could be developed if the property owner so chose, even with contamination.

Ben? Yeah, I was going to... I think the... Coming down to your question really has to do more with, as a council, what do we have the... What can we do about it? And it comes down to, as a council, we can only say in this property that whoever owns, we zone it to accept A, B, C, and D, and E that can be built there. So the only thing we can do is just rezone it if we don't want a gas station to be there to say, well, you can do A, B, C, but not D, because D is the gas station option. So that's the only control that we really have over this with this person that owns the property. Other than that, when somebody owns a property and says, oh, look, you as a city has authorized that a gas station could be put there. I decide that I want to put it there. So here's my application. And they follow all the steps of what it has been approved for that could be put there. Outside of that, that's the only thing we could do is just go back and say, well, you know, we think we have enough gas stations or subways or whatever the case may be. And in So we're going to change the zoning on this, and we're not going to allow it to happen because we think there's enough. That's the only thing that we could do. But the fact that it's already zoned for it to be built, and the applicant's already being put it in saying, hey, this is what we would like to build. That's all that we have that we can do. OK.

Thank you, Ben. Well said. Thank you. OK.

Was there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment on this item? I see no hands raised.

Okay. Very good. In that case, we'll close the public hearing over here. Comments back from my colleagues.

I have a question. I'm not opposed to the project. I support it, but correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I am. Did we not say no more drive-thrus, or was that just in the downtown quarter? Because I feel like there was another one that was approved that was close to downtown. Maybe I'm misremembering.

The only one was Dutch Bros, which predated that decision.

Okay, because we grandfathered that one in.

But anything in the downtown plan, no drive-thrus allowed.

Okay, but that's far enough out that it's okay. All right.

Thank you. Any other comments from my colleagues? Okay. In that case, I'll accept a motion.

I'll move. I was going to say one more thing. Sorry, really quick that to Darla's point, right? Like, and this is not a criticism of the applicant, but I mean, I'm not really thrilled about another Starbucks, right? But that's up to them. And if it doesn't last, it doesn't last. It could be something else, right? I mean, I would prefer something else. I would prefer like a grocery store or something there, but. So I hear you, Darla. But I'm going to vote yes for it. I support them, what they want to do. But I wish it was not a Starbucks because we already have, what, four or five of them. But that's okay. I support it. So I move approval. And did I say yes? Do you second?

Yes. But we still have a couple more intersections where Starbucks can go in. Yeah, right.

Okay. Let's not. Okay.

I'll second. Okay.

Second. Thank you.

Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Okay. Very good. Passes 5-0. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you, Tom. Okay. Item 14, Delta. Conduct a public hearing and adopt a resolution approving changes to the public facilities element fee schedule presented by Vin Kaye.

Okay. Hey, good evening mayor and council members. Um, item before you is a routine item that, um, the city updates annually. Um, And the item is actually a change to the city's PFE or public facilities element or impact fee program. Just for context, these annual routine updates may seem minor because of construction cost index. I look back at the last five years, It varies. This year, it only went up 0.4%. Previous year, it actually went down in 25 minus 1.5%. And 24 was 1.1%. 23 was 1.4%. Interestingly, 2022 went up 14.4% after the pandemic. So that's just for context. And then the reason these updates are so important is because Our PFE program is valued at over $2.1 billion for all the infrastructure that's needed to facilitate future development. With that being said, just a little background. In June of 2022, Council adopted a resolution that approved a comprehensive update to the nexus study for the city's PFE program. And then naturally in the fall, October of 2022, the development community had concerns about the increase in development impact fees. And then subsequent to that, Council approved a resolution to phase in, in three parts, the increases in 2023, 2024, and last year in 2025. So, you know, tonight, the item before you is just an adjustment to the Engineering News Record Construction Cost Index. It's a relatively minor increase this year, but it is an important increase. um so with that um that concludes my presentation our our consultant francisco associates online to help answer answer any questions you may have thank you vin okay any questions from the council at this point okay that gates will open up public hearing is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment on this item

Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I see no hands raised.

Thank you very much. In that case, we'll close the public hearing and bring it back to my colleagues. Okay. We're all good? Okay. Motion, please.

Move adoption of the item.

Moved and second. Very good. Thank you very much. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed, no. Okay, very good carries five zero. Thank you very much, man. Okay. 14 echo, uh, conduct public hearings and adopt resolutions, approving the 2025 urban water management plan and 2025 water shortage contingency plan and authorizing submission to the California department of water resources, the California state library and applicable cities and counties. are presented by Chris Nelson, and you're going to summarize 402 pages for us in just a few minutes, is that correct? Absolutely, yes.

You'll be excited at the pace I go here. Yes, actually, it is quite a document, just an interesting fact. This is, well, Since 2005, every five years, I've been involved in the updates to the Irrmoire Management Plan, and they went from about that thick to about that thick, so yes. Sorry, let me get this going here. But yes, tonight we're here to speak of the 2025 update to the Irrmoire Management Plan. And thank you, Mayor and Council, for allowing us, along with our consultant, Wes Yost, to present this here during the public hearing. We're presenting both the water shortage contingency plan along with the urban water management plan. We will be asking for adoption of the documents separately, although they are intertwined. Just want to introduce our staff here tonight. That's from West Yost. Online, on Zoom, we do have Angie Yan from West Yost. And in the room, we have Radora Biatin from West Yost. So thank you for being here. So burning question of the night, the title of the slide, what is an urban water management plan? It's a long range planning document that evaluates projected water demands, available water supplies, reliability under drought conditions, conservation planning, and response to, sorry, and shortage responses throughout the year 2050. So five year increments until 2050. It's both a compliance document and a practical tool for the city to use. It's used for planning for future infrastructure planning, water supply assessments, and long-term water supply reliability. So why is the Urban Water Management Plan required? Well, the Urban Water Management Plan is required by the Urban Water Management Planning Act. And that is for water suppliers serving more than 3,000 customers or serving more than 3,000 acre feet of water per year. Of course, the city does meet both those thresholds. Therefore, you are listening to me this evening. Having adopted a water management plan is also important for maintaining eligibility for grants and loans for states. So that's basically the penalty. If an agency was to choose not to go through the process, they would be ineligible for any kind of state So, sorry if I jumped ahead here. Yeah, so key components of the city's urban water management plan, it covers system descriptions, water demand projections, water supply availability and reliability, supply and demand comparisons, of course, the water storage contingency plan, which I'll get into a little bit later. And along the lines, there's also demand management measures, which kind of tell us how to reach the goals that we want to reach. So the city of Lincoln's water service area generally corresponds to the city limits. The system includes service water supplies, groundwater wells, storage pumping, and extensive distribution network. Continued growth will require ongoing system improvements and expansion as we continue to expand as a city. So this slide, it's kind of a favorite, kind of describes the units that we use when we're talking about water in the water management plan. The two units that we usually speak of are acre feet per year and gallons per capita per day. So think of an acre feet per year as basically it's a football field that's full of one foot of water. That's an acre foot. And then gallons per capita per day. Milk jug is a gallon of water. Think about that in terms of you typical average home or a person, excuse me, would use about 100 of those gallons per day for their sanitary needs, drinking water, things along those lines. So those are the measures that we use. It's universal. So we can all be speaking the same language. Water use projections. So the urban water management plan projects water use through the year 2050 in five-year increments. As Lincoln continues to grow, water demands also are continuing to increase. This analysis is important because it allows the city to evaluate whether our supply portfolio and infrastructure planning remains sufficient through our community and throughout the timeframe. So this slide summarizes our historical and projected potable water demands. The demand forecast reflects land use assumptions, population projections, and recent water use patterns. These are planning projections used to assess long-term reliability, infrastructure needs, and the city's ability to meet demands under both normal and dry year conditions. Since 2020, the demand remains kind of fairly leveled out there, if you take a look. And despite continued growth, it still remains somewhat level looking from 2020 through 2025. And some of the things that we look at that contribute to that are, of course, an emphasis on conservation, expanded use of recycled water, and improvements to infrastructure, basically taking care of those leaks that are out there in the system that recreate the non-revenue water. In this slide, we talk about our potable water supplies. So Lincoln's water supply portfolio is based on treated surface water from Placer County Water Agency, supplemented by city groundwater. We also use recycled water in place of potable water for some landscapes and some parks that we have. This diversity is important because it improves operational flexibility and strengthens the city's long-term water reliability. Just a note about NID. NID is not included within the plan, that supply that we do have available to us. It's for... Conservatively, we did not plan for that throughout this document, basically due to the temporary agreement that does not specify an amount of an ID that the city is entitled to, and the fact that we are actually ongoing with the negotiations on that supply and that agreement. If the city does continue to use an ID supply, however, that would just add to our portfolio and the diversity that we have. Recycled water is an important part of the city's broader water resource strategy. It is for non-potable purposes, like I said before, such as landscape irrigation, certain industrial uses, such as Sierra Pacific. Of course, expanding appropriate recycled water helps preserve potable water supplies that would normally go to that use, and we are always looking for ways and opportunities to expand that out. Water shortage contingency plan. So our water shortage contingency plan, it is the city's tool during water shortage conditions. Describe the city's plan for preparing for responding to water shortages. aligns with the state standards. The state has set standards on the stages that they want the city to implement, about six stages that are required by the state for us to include in our water shortage contingency plan. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, they are being, it's being presented as a separate document so that we can go back and amend that document separately from the urban water management plan if needed. One thing of note is, although we do note that our water supplies are sufficient for dry year conditions, multiple dry year conditions, this plan is important when we go through drought conditions as a state and the Water Board plans an emergency proclamation that says, hey, every agency must reduce water by 20%. Well, that's where this water shortage contingency plan would help the city meet that goal. So although we may not have a supply-driven drought, you might have a regulatory mandated response. And these are the shortage levels that I spoke of. Stage zero is the city's normal water supply and that normal normal stage and that includes our normal restrictions, such as not watering with an open hose not letting water run off of the. onto the pavement and these progressively increase you know by about 10 percentage till it gets greater than 50% and that would be for responding to catastrophic failures and things like that so. So key takeaway, we have sufficient future-ready water supplies. 2025 Irma Water Management Plan demonstrates the city has sufficient supplies to meet projected demand through 2050 under normal single dry year and five consecutive dry year conditions. And again, those supplies that we do have available to us are through PCWA, the city's groundwater, and our recycled water. Staff recommends that the city council receive public testimony, adopt the resolution approving the 2025 urban water management plan and the resolution approving the 2025 water shortage contingency plan and direct staff to submit the adopted documents to the California Department of Water Resources and other required recipients. And that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to take questions.

Thank you, Chris. A very good summary, actually. Very good. Thank you. Thank you very much. There's a lot of information there and well covered for the public and for us also. I had one question to open it up. In Section 3 of the report, it talked about population growth, and it had us pegged at 55,000. And then using the Department of Finance's data, they ran it out to 2050 of 67,000 population, leaving about 40,000 people in limbo. So the question is, does the plan accommodate that you talked about, the fact that these basic numbers here were not correct? Or I should say not correct. They don't align with what we see our city.

Exactly, yeah, and you're correct. It did use Department of Finance, which is the accepted, normal recommended, excuse me, by the Department of Water Resources tool. Yes. The water supply planning portion is based off of land use and development, so it falls more of an average 3% per year, rather than the 1.2, I believe, that the Department of Finance uses.

OK. So despite the population numbers, we're still good? Yes. As far as everything goes? Yes.

At the end of the day, we're still good? Yes. The water demand projections are based off that 3% increase. And Rudar, you can correct me. I got the thumbs up.

I have a couple comments later on, but any other questions for my comments?

Yeah, I have a couple questions. Thank you for that. That was really good. I asked Sean this question, and this is maybe you know, and maybe you found out. Sean, I don't know, but the customers in Lincoln who do get water from NID right now, I know we're in negotiations, do they pay NID directly, or do they pay the city, and we pay one bill to NID?

So if you're talking about the potable water supply that we do get from an ID, that is actually wheeled through Placer County Water Agency. They do the treatment. So Placer County Water Agency purchases the water from an ID. They treat it, and it's sent to us with their supply. So it's the same. It's kind of mixed together, same water, and they are paid off of their water bill, same cost.

Okay. Do we have people in Lincoln who get water from NID for ag purposes that's not potable, and do they pay separately each person to NID, or does Lincoln pay one bill?

No. So Lincoln does not pay for the NID raw water supplies, and those, I believe, are around Sun City, or Turkey Creek, excuse me.

And they pay individually? Residents pay individually?

Yeah, that's, I believe it's the HOA that actually has that contract.

I think, depending on the area of town, some parcels that would be more ranchette in nature do have direct payment, customer payment to NID directly, and then you have associations like Sun City Lincoln Hills pays directly. I think Lincoln Crossings has a deal that they pay directly for their gray water.

Okay.

there's probably some other ones I'm forgetting, but those are the big ones. Okay.

Thank you. Um, and then, um, I know that we, to your recycled water, uh, point here, are we using that for all of our parks now or just some of them?

No, we have two parks, uh, Foskett and, uh, Joyner, I believe that are, uh, um, recycled ready. Um, It depends on proximity, these parks' proximity to the infrastructure we have for recycled water. We are looking at new development as it comes along and asking that that does include recycled water for common areas and new parks.

Okay, thank you. Appreciate that.

Okay, thank you. Anyone else at this point before we, John? Yep. Can you pull your slide deck back up on slide eight? would be what was very interesting to me is the the amount of water between 2010 and 2025 is plus or minus some very small percentage what was the population growth between 2010 and 2025 i would have to go back and take a look at that don't want to guess um current population is right around

53,000. Let me help you out, Chris. Thank you.

Between 2010 and probably roughly 2019, our building levels and growth were a trickle. We really started to pick up growth, significant growth at about 2019, just before COVID. And then between then and now, we've seen roughly a 7% clip yearly growth. in growth patterns. So we can get you the exact data, but I know this because I was looking at it from another project we're working on. And during and post Great Recession, we really didn't pick up true building activity until about the last portion of that decade, 2018, 19-ish. And then the other interesting little detail on the chart is Chris, you'd know this better than me, but the state drought occurs in like 2013 or 14.

Does that sound right? Yeah. 2014, 2015.

And that's right around the time that low impact development and all the different kinds of like water saving measures that go into, you know, the, the production of, of toilets and, and,

Washing machines and all of those kinds of things that's when things really ramped up in the conservation world in California that first. Of the most recent routes that we had yeah and that's when we had the blanket 30% from the state mandate to reduce by 3% so yeah. A lot more attention was paid to conservation, a lot more public outreach, and a lot more investment in incentives.

And today, the interesting thing is, and PCWA just adjusted their calculation, is a home, for example, I live in a home that was probably built 25 or 35 years ago. The amount of water that my The property I live on uses compared to a home that was built last year, for example, is about 33% less. Because such a large portion of water usage on a residential lot is, is irrigation of, of sod or turf. I remember you told me once what you guys estimate that app of total usage per parcel. It's.

Total usage of what now?

Like for gallons used on each parcel, what rough percentages goes towards irrigation? Oh, yeah.

You're thinking about like 70% of your usage is going to the lawns when you irrigate that way. That's one of the arguments about the treatment and the chemicals that we use to treat. You're treating lawn.

Were you saying that yours is using 30% more than the one today? Or 30% less than the one today?

More.

Okay, that's what I thought. I mean, I don't water very much, so not very much, but you know what I mean. So I assume some of those conservation things are requirements now, and so they'll continue on to the future in terms of being able to sort of bend the curve, as it were, like the example Sean gave. And then some of them are sort of optional and educational where people make choices, right? How does the plan play between those optional ones in terms of these projections going out to 2050?

As far as what our tools in our toolbox are?

Right, like how much of that, obviously you use all the ones that are required, right? And then there are the more subtle ones and or the drought tells you to stop doing your lawn and those sorts of things. But how much of the subjective ones are built into the plan or none at all? And it's just the required ones.

They're both hand in hand. So subjective, like your public outreach, going out to schools, talking to students from the young, getting that conservation mindset. Not a requirement, but it's something that we choose to do.

So the plan takes into account that some of that will be effective?

Absolutely. Okay.

Yeah.

I know the NID thing is kind of an open question.

What, in terms of the total supply, for the city, what does that opportunity represent compared to PCWA and the wells? Like what role does that play in there?

So again, we don't have a volumetric supply for them and Matt, you can feel free to jump in on this when you want to, but what we do over 2025, for example, we use 1500 acre feet of our total 10,500 acre feet was from NID. There's potential for more, I believe, but Matt,

It represents about 11% now, is that what I heard?

No, no, no. It's much less than 11%. It's more like a 1%.

OK. And it could be? To be determined.

We Chris Sam and I did visit an ID, I think, within the last 30 days they got us our G their GIS mapping information. One of the potentially low hanging fruit opportunities to leverage that water is using that raw water for potentially irrigation purposes like like that's done in some city and Lincoln crossing. As far as treated water, yeah, that's wheeled through PCWA. I believe, and Chris and I need to look more into this. I believe maybe 20 years ago, there was an effort to look at, you know, city of Lincoln building a water treatment plant using that water. But I believe the number back then was 240 million, which sounds really high. You know, we're not ruling out potentially a smaller package plant to serve that area. to compliment our, our, you know, distribution system here in the city of Lincoln, but that's, you know, something that we need to look into more, you know, partnering with PCWA on the next three phases of OPR seem to be really beneficial to the city of Lincoln. I mean, that's, you know, our, our charted path right now, but we do need to look at all opportunities. Groundwater's kind of our fail safe backup, you know, supply, but really we'd like to leverage surface water to the extent possible and whether that's through PCW air and ID that's that's the preferable pathway and not leveraging groundwater and when we do we're going to be. You know as Chris is a very active participant in the development of the water bank that's something we're going to have to be conscientious of is when we do use groundwater that we're using it in a sustainable method.

And they were recharging as much as we were pulling out.

You had to make a deposit to make the withdrawal. One of my last questions, and this is maybe outside the scope of the plan, but the water shortage contingency plan, I assume that's mostly about droughts. But we also, I feel like, have a pretty big Achilles heel in that some massive percent of our water supply comes in essentially one pipe. Yep. How to the, I mean, again, it's probably a lot outside the scope of this. Maybe you can address a little bit just for my own edification and general public. How are we thinking about reducing the impact of that? Should there be a catastrophic failure to the one big pipe?

Yes. So, and this kind of goes to what Matt was just saying. We have to look at those opportunities for groundwater recharge, increased groundwater, wells available to us, again, that do recharge. We look towards diversifying the recycled water supply as well and lean on that. And yeah, looking to have discussions with PCWA about a secondary pipeline that is planned out in the future. There's also other opportunities that we need to realistically look at with neighboring agencies as well. NID, Roseville, others that we would look at for enterprise.

So where would that be sort of on the short versus medium versus long term? hearing more about some of those things. Because it sounds like a really long, very expensive undertaking for a second pipe going that whole distance. That feels like a decades thing versus a few months or years thing.

Yeah, that's definitely a decades thing.

I believe, was it 2040?

Past 2040? The current pipeline has capacity through about... Through O for phase one, not quite the full capacity for O for phase two. So sometime between phase one and two, there's likely, there's a couple of different pipeline segments and opportunities that PCWA has. But it looks like that's the likely timeframe that that would be constructed or a portion thereof through Bickford Ranch.

That's a second pipe or expanding certain portions of the one?

They're just the one.

I think it's a combination. I think it's some new pipeline and it might be upsizing or utilizing a portion of the Bickford. I believe they said 18 inch. There's some additional capacity in there. We actually had a meeting with PCWA on this very topic today. So again, these are, you know, Lincoln continues to grow. Placer County continues to grow. We're working closely with them to make sure that we have the infrastructure needed to provide that water supply and It's a good thing. It's going to take a lot of work. So Chris and I have, you know, good employment and job security here because there's a lot of work that needs to be done. But we are working on that. And they know that that's important to the city of Lincoln. But they also want to be conscientious of how much the rate payers pay and how much the water connection charges are for future development. So it's really, you know, a balancing act in all of that. But they are very aware that we're very interested in inner ties with other agencies or other water systems to provide that redundancy in the meantime. So there's a lot of opportunities to address these challenges. But, you know, every five years we're going to do another urban water management plan as well as water master plan, but we collaborate with them. And I know we have a link in PCWA two by two, I think in the next couple of weeks where they'll be covering this again and some more of our collaboration efforts.

I appreciate it. Maybe we can make a note. I don't want to wait five years to circle around on this. So maybe we can hear some little update in six months or a year, just kind of how these various paths are converging and how close we are to some kind of redundancy. It just makes me a little nervous.

Yeah, I think we could probably even ask, and they've done this before in the past, we could ask Tony or Andy from PCWA to come and give a presentation here at City Council about You know, because they're not, PCWA is not blind to it. They're aware that when you have a single transmission point, you put yourself at risk. And we have had problems, you know, fortunately not long problems, but we've had problems with that transmission line in the past where we've had to have emergency fixes. So they could probably share a little bit about, and they actually have a little more done on this than we think. There are map segments that they've put together about where they think you upsize line versus create redundant lines and connection points. It's also important to note, as Matt mentioned, that PCWA retails water to Rockland. And they also are going to be providing water to Placer One. And so there's sort of all around our borders, there's opportunities for inner ties that might make sense versus running an entire new, very, very expensive line all the way down from Auburn.

And there's also the River Arc project too. Oh, River Arc, I forgot too.

So this is actually leading me to believe we probably just need to have PCWA come down. Thank you.

I agree because the last thing that I would want to have happen is you know, the same thing that we had to do with the rates and stuff for the water, you know, having an issue where nothing is done or I think gets pushed off, pushed off, and then all of a sudden it's a real hard ask of the whole community. So making sure we put in the conversations and the harder things now to get that taken care of so that, yeah, so that the contingency is not a, and problem or an issue down the line.

And I'd like to add one more thing. We have been having meetings with the Village Five development team, and we are emphasizing the importance of constructing a well with that development with the first thousand homes so that we don't further strain our four operational five wells that we have backing up our system. So that's one thing that staff is continuing to... advocate for is constructing that well, as well as we have some funding in our budget to look at constructing another well for the city of Lincoln. So our goal is two new wells in the next five years.

Okay. Well, thank you. We seem to be flushing out a lot of good information here. I know right now, just between us. Okay. So are my colleagues good?

Yeah, I was just gonna say, well, I think we kind of covered it, but it will be good to get a little bit of an update and we can definitely get, we have a couple of meetings with PCWA and then we also have the, annual trip to hear all the updates with all it's a water world pcwa it's it's a lot to take in the entire operation not just in placer county but the whole region is um you know and you know and and so i just want to say that i'm really i'm comfortable with how you and the team and everybody is looking into the future because they have a great foundation, but there are little gaps that you know and you found. that I'm really glad and appreciative that you're looking forward to filling them before it's something that we're reacting to and it's very, very expensive. So I love the idea that there's these new opportunities and with Placer One to maybe tap into those, looking into our partner communities for those opportunities and then the groundwater. So I was curious to hear about if there was any new progress with the redundancies with the ground wells, but we can get all that sorted out next time.

Yeah, and as Matt mentioned, we are in discussions about that already with the Village 5 and we are conducting a groundwater recharge study right now that's gonna kind of map out Lincoln's future along with Placer County. Our future as far as where we can take the best opportunities for either in lieu recharge, direct recharge through ASR wells or groundwater percolation through spreading projects.

I'm gonna go out to Any comments for the, we can bring it back to the council. So we're going to open up the public hearing. Very good. Okay.

I do have a speaker card from Stan Nader.

Mr. Mayor and council in the 2026 water master plan figure ES1 shows that When you exclude groundwater supplies, the city's max day demand exceeds PCW is ability to provide city surface water supply by 2030 when you add in groundwater supplies, the city's max day demand will exceed available water supplies by 2037 The future water supply portion of the chart is the largest part of the chart without either the water master plan or urban water master plan defining where that water will come from. This should be a warning sign that the city needs to do extensive work to identify reliable and dependable surface water supplies, whether partnering with NID and revisiting water treatment plant located on Raccoon Creek and becoming a partner in the RiverArk project with PCWA and Sacramento County. As I have shared in the past, groundwater supplies can be unpredictable because of falling water tables, groundwater subside, ground subsidence, saltwater intrusion and potential state regulations that restrict their use. I had the opportunity to speak with PCW staff and they had the opportunity to review and comment on the urban water master plan and said they had several suggested corrections. They also voiced a concern that the city was placing a much greater reliance on groundwater to increase the city's water supply. Another area of concern I have is the issue of the city only having one main water line coming into the city. The document often speaks about the importance of redundancy in the system. As the city continues to grow, you cannot keep pushing a square peg through a round hole. When I was on the city council, the city engineer at the time, Ray Leftwich, would tell the city council that when he would go out to where the main line was located, he was hearing the pipe vibrating, and he would have difficulty sleeping at night. This vibrating causes a condition called scuffing, which reduces the useful life of the pipe. I know the city's current focus is on water line improvements within the older part of this Lincoln, but I believe this issue does need your immediate attention. Thank you, Stan.

Chris, do you want to talk about that? I had a question like that also on the, and I think it deals with the word maximum.

Absolutely. So, well, just to, I know Mr. Nader had actually asked some of those same questions to me earlier this week as well. And the answer is yes, this plan does address some of those concerns with future water supply and the plans, just what we were discussing. We're not talking about groundwater alone as the answer for when we do hit those peak demand years. We also are talking about different phases of OFR as part of our supply, along again with recycled water and et cetera. But the pipeline condition, I haven't experienced that myself. I understand the concern there and I agree. One pipeline to the city is a concern. As a water manager, it keeps you awake at night. That's why we have these plans also, water source contingency plan to help us in case of a catastrophe, we do have a plan in place to at least respond and get our customers on board until those corrections can be made. So yes, summarize the plan, both water master plan and urban water management plan do address those supply concerns. And you had a comment, you said?

Well, maybe America has added two little additional pieces of context here. First is that, keep in mind that what we're trying to accomplish when we talk about additional well siting is to try to diversify our portfolio so that it's not so dependent on surface water, wherever that may come from. The second thing is, I think it would be incorrect to assume that we haven't made significant investments in making sure that we have a safe and reliable water supply. Placer County Water Agency has some of the oldest water rights that exist in the state of California. The quality is generally excellent and their service delivery has been really consistent, at least from my view. The city council, a couple years ago invested $40 million into the offer treatment plant to ensure that we had reliable water for current users and for future users for a good long period of time. And that's only phase one of that project. The singular connection point, you know, to be fair, has been a problem for decades. Um, and will not be solved in a couple of years. It takes planning, uh, and resources. So the question is, you can spend all of your money on connection issues, or you can spend all of your money on water surface, uh, making sure you have a sufficient, um, supply. But what we've kind of chosen to do is diversify our spent, right? Spend, uh, with regard to our well systems, spend with regard to replacing old lines and spend what we can to, to set aside additional capacity. Um, And balancing all of that while we're not open to make it so expensive for the ratepayers and or development folks that come in to build here.

It sounds like also our partners in water are also stepping up things that weren't known years ago, like RiverArk and working with Rockland and Roosevelt.

Sure. I mean, look, all of those projects, whether it be NID projects or River Arc, you're talking about significantly expensive improvements to pull water off of, for example, the Sacramento River, and not next year, like many years down the road.

Okay. Thank you, Chris.

Was there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none.

Byron.

Once again, Byron Chapman, 12 Bridges area. Mr. Mayor, council members, city staff. I too was around, back around 2014, 15. A couple of things were happening at that point. One, there was really a lot of aggressive movement in building homes. The drought came into play. State of California said we hit the 20%. You got to cut back on that. And the public was really, really upset. And at that point in time, there were one, if not several meetings where it literally got down to the point where the the public was so fearful of what are we going to do? Do we have enough water? And then it got so bold to where the mayor and the council at that time literally said, look, let me put you at ease here. We could absolutely, with the aquifer that the city of Lincoln is sitting on, we could pull water from nothing else but that aquifer for five years and we would still have water. Well, a lot of us kept saying, okay, if you stop building houses, maybe that's true. So my questions are, one, if we do have an aquifer, how large is it? How deep is it? How do you measure that? uh and and then some of my concerns were addressed tonight like it isn't just lincoln that we're talking about we're looking at our neighbors look at colfax whether they're in auburn we're looking at uh all of that comes on the roof it just doesn't stop at the county line um so one Do we have the aquifer? Is that something we want to bet our money on? Two, that already had been addressed, but it concerned me too, which is the backup for the pump station. I mean, if that goes down, just turn the pipes off for a while because it's just not going to happen. So that's something that's being addressed. And The whole point being, with all the growth that we're doing, there's a lot of good stuff about that, but go to Bigford, go out to Turkey Creek. No matter where you turn in this city and go out in any direction, we have a lot of growth, and there's still a lot of growth coming in. So that's not getting less. And you build pretty much a two-story home, it's probably more than two people. That's just the way it works. So I'm just concerned that to make sure that we do have that plan, because back then they were literally, the city was literally telling us, oh yeah, we've got more than enough water. We were not even worried about that. And I'm like, yeah, we are. So what I've heard is very, very positive, but it is something that if we don't get on it now, we're going to get behind on it. And digging in the ground and putting into pipes and all that stuff. And here comes another rate increase. Man, that's a lot to take in. So anyway, thank you.

Thank you, Byron. And I think you've heard that. Yeah, Chris, I think you've heard, Byron, that we are on it. You know, we're looking at from a whole range of applications, a lot that weren't known, you know, even 15 years ago. So Chris, do you want to?

Yes. Yeah, we are an aquifer, and I would never say that we can pull 100% of our supply from that aquifer. We do have partners, and you did address that. We have neighboring agencies. We have ag users. We have private well owners that we can do no harm to. If we decided to put all our eggs in the groundwater basket, we would be doing harm, open up for litigation, Everything bad, catastrophic that could happen could happen. So no, that's why we do have diverse supplies and why we look at diverse supplies. Even when we talk about the groundwater portion in the urban water management plan, we reference SGMA and the fact that we have to maintain our commitments under SGMA and maintain a good partnership with the other agencies that are part of our GSA, our Groundwater Sustainability Agency. So no, we're not gonna be pulling all our water from that aquifer, but yes, there is an aquifer there available to us currently for supplemental supply, peak demand and future, Supply should we need past 2035 when we do hit those peak demand issues. I think I hit on most everything on that one.

Thank you, Chris.

Was there anyone else in the audience who would like to provide public comment? Seeing none, I will move to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to provide public comment? I see no hands.

Thank you very much. In that case, we'll close public hearing, bring it back to my colleagues. Comments?

No, just that this is something we could talk about for hours.

So I feel very much that we're cutting it off short, but we could literally be here all night and I'd still probably have more questions and still have things that I want to look up. And just really quickly to go into what Mr. Chapman was inquiring about is something that I didn't know until a couple years ago when I was first pointed on to the PCWA two by two is, I mean, one of the many things that I've learned is I was thinking that you just, you know, if it's down there, you just tap in and just get it. It's just, you know, free for the taking and it's under us. So it's our land. So, you know, yay, that would be great. And then there's Sigma and then there's regulations and we have to share it with everybody. And then there's all the things that you were just, So it's really interesting and fascinating to research our whole water world, as I keep saying, if you want to go down that whole rabbit hole, water nerd hole, which is fun. So anyway, I appreciate you putting this together and all the work, and to be continued.

Ben or John, anything? Okay, good. In that case, it sounds like we have to do two different resolutions. So I'll accept the resolution approving the City of Lincoln's 2025 Urban Water Management Plan. Do I hear a motion? Motion. So moved. Do I hear a second? Second. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries 5-0. Thank you very much. Next, adopt a resolution approving the City of Lincoln's 2025 Water Storage Contingency Plan. So moved. OK. Second?

Second.

OK. All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? 5-0. Thank you very much. And then we'll direct the adopted water management plan and the shortage and contingency plan be submitted to the California Department of Water Resources, the California State Library, and applicable cities and counties. OK. We're very good. Thank you very much.

We need a motion. We need a third motion.

OK. Very good. Second? Second. OK. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Okay, 5-0, thank you very much. All right, general business, Ms. Brown.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. Today, we are going to be presenting to you a brief overview of the 130-page Fiber Master Plan, because I'm sure that you guys didn't fall asleep while reading. But just as a reminder, this was funding that you guys put aside from ARPA to put together this broadband plan, and it's been... a labor of love, I guess. We have put a lot of effort into it, and so I have a consultant online, Michelle, and she's from Entrust, and she'll be giving you the presentation today.

Thank you, Jennifer. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you. I'm going to attempt to share my screen here, if that's okay. Okay.

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay.

Good evening, mayor and members of city council. My name is Michelle Williams and I am a senior broadband consultant with the interest solutions group. And first of all, thank you so much for having me here on your agenda this evening. Real quick, in terms of my professional background, I have been with Entrust for about a year and a half, but immediately prior to that, I was employed with the city of Culver City, which is located down in Southern California near Los Angeles. and i was employed there for 27 years and the last 12 years i was the chief information officer and one of my primary projects was to initiate and to place into operation their municipal broadband program So with that, fast forwarding, I have been working with Jennifer and her team for just about a year now. And I'm excited to present to you at a very high level and very quickly the broadband strategic plan that has been delivered through Lincoln's Engagement with Interest Solutions Group. The high level topics that I will cover as it relates to the strategic broadband plan for the city of Lincoln are listed here on this slide. It is important to note that the broadband plan is a result of collecting and analyzing numerous data sets. And in the end, our goal is to provide and design a plan that aligns with the city's long-term operational goals, as well as your economic and community service goals as it relates to the broadband space. One of our first exercises when working on a strategic broadband plan is we review the city's asset inventory. And we noted that the city of Lincoln has approximately 11,160 vertical pole assets. And this includes utility poles, streetlights, over half of which the city owns as well as traffic signal poles. And so why is this important? Vertical pole assets are very important to broadband strategy as they facilitate opportunities to install aerial fiber infrastructure, to also install small cells deployment as well as Wi-Fi deployment opportunities. We also work with staff to identify critical city locations and 15 locations were identified, including city hall, fire stations, public yard, as well as wastewater treatment plants. And understanding where these critical municipal locations are allows us to understand what locations may require enhanced broadband service and again with the objective of enhancing municipal communications. We also listed the schools in the city of Lincoln and completely understanding that the school district operates under a completely different umbrella, not under the city, but it was noted here and the schools are noted in the plan, mainly because connectivity to schools through education certainly provides a community benefit. And lastly, we identified existing fiber and conduit assets that are city-owned. And while this was limited in nature, there certainly are assets that can be leveraged in the plan. We also analyzed the broadband marketplace, if you will, in the city of Lincoln. And I would like to highlight that this analysis was performed about a year ago, but at the time of the study, it was acknowledged that Lincoln did have one of the higher fiber coverage rates in the Placer Valley region. But while that was noted, What you can detail here is on the map depicted in red is that 50% of the city is in a cable monopoly. where they do not have access to fiber. And so dating back to one of the overarching goals of this study and the strategic plan being put into place was to really address equity, digital equity. And so we see that highlighted here on the map. We also conducted a community survey inviting responses from residents as well as the business community. We received 309 responses and it's interesting because some of these responses actually, excuse me, reflect and to some degree also validate the marketplace landscape that we just discussed previously on the previous slide. where we see that 46% of the respondents have cable, while 28% of those respondents have fiber connectivity. It was interesting that many of the respondents are somewhat pleased or satisfied with their current internet service. However, it appeared that pricing seemed to be one of the largest sources of dissatisfaction where dissatisfaction was noted. Okay, so with all of that data, we worked on developing a conceptual network design, which consisted of a redundant fiber backbone throughout the city. And what helped us to also design this is we identify 80 public and community sites that were important to the community as well as to your municipal operations. And so what this slide is demonstrating is that if the city of Lincoln were to undertake constructing the backbone, we're looking at about 46 miles of new construction throughout the city. And we estimate with construction rates being at about $130 per linear foot, that the price estimate there would be about 30 to $35 million. as a capital investment. Now, let me state quickly, I understand city budget constraints and limited resources. We are not proposing this recommendation. The next slide. Well, let me back up. Let me explain what the slide is. And going through this exercise, what we know and what we have analyzed is that there is existing private fiber in the community. And so it would not be a wise investment to overbill. And when I say overbill, I mean install fiber on top of or in close proximity to where there are existing assets. but rather the recommendation would be to leverage those private assets. And so this slide is depicting for us those 80 locations that I spoke to earlier, as well as what I'll call the gaps in fiber. So the lines are just showing those areas where we did not identify any private fiber in the community, in that location. And so if the city were to undertake just building out that gap build of about 15 miles, so we've reduced it from 46 miles down to 15 miles, that estimated construction would be at about 10.3 million. And of course, again, understanding budget constraints. In about two slides, I'm going to get to recommendations that can help us even lower, potentially even lower that initial capital investment. We also took a stab at phasing in the construction for those, again, those 15 miles that I was referring to in terms of that gap build. The first phase requiring a much smaller capital outlay as well as understanding that future phases may not require city construction. It may be cooperative bills and things that I'll get to, as I said, in a moment when I get to the recommendations. Switching gears just a little bit, I did want to speak to another deliverable, which is included in the strategic plan, which is the retail broadband analysis plan. And this is a standard deliverable with most of our broadband reports that are delivered. We are often asked the question, if a city were to decide to take on building out infrastructure throughout the city, or for some cities who may already have infrastructure in place, what would a retail model look like? What would a retail model consist of for the city? And is it sustainable? And so we typically will provide this quick model, which speaks to sustainability of a retail model. And when I say retail, let me just explain what I mean there. If a city has the infrastructure, and as I'm presenting here, if the city of Lincoln were to build out 15 miles of fiber infrastructure in those locations that were previously displayed, is there an opportunity for the city to then provide direct internet service to the community? And so that's what I mean when I say the retail model. And typically, and in this scenario, the quick answer is no. And primarily because there's staffing that's required. This would be an entire enterprise that is not currently in place in the city. So you're looking at... staffing costs, you're looking at back office accounting and customer support and all of those labor intensive expenditures that would be required to stand up this type of organization within the city. And so that's really the primary reason why it is not sustainable and it's not recommended. This model also, which is presented in the report does not include recovering the 10.3 construction, excuse me, 10.3 million in construction costs, nor does it include about another 1.6 million, which would be required for networking equipment. And typically we get the question as well, well, when does a model, a retail model work for a city? And usually it's when a city is already operating a utility. Okay, so this is the slide that I had been alluding to and building up to. So what are the recommendations? As I mentioned, certainly we don't recommend overbuilding, which would be constructing in areas where there are already private assets. The recommendation is certainly to leverage those private assets. We recommend the city pursuing a private partnership with an existing ISP who already has a presence in the Lincoln community. And by doing that, you could establish a partnership where there are options for collaborative bills, for joint bills with the partner, which would greatly reduce the construction costs that are estimated and that I spoke to in the previous slides. Certainly having a partnership would be, it's intended that it would be a win-win for both sides, but particularly for the city, it allows you to share costs and reduce even financial barriers as well as expedite broadband deployment. And lastly, as I wrap up here, there were additional recommendations in the plan which spoke to streamlining city standards and specifications in regards to things like implementing micro trenching standards as well as small cell ordinances and basically what you're doing is setting up pathways so that you are ready for broadband expansion and also in working with a private partner, dealing with other what we call carrots and sticks or incentives and deterrents. Utility coordination establishing dig once ordinances and development agreements, all of those things can assist you with ensuring that the city is well primed for broadband expansion. And that concludes the presentation, thank you again for the opportunity to support the city of Lincoln in this effort. And I'll pass it back over to you. Yes. Thank you.

Thank you, Michelle. So do you have any questions?

This point?

Okay.

No, I just, I, I really like that. I believe this is the ARPA dollars going into effect.

Is it not? The plan. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

I have one question.

So when she talked about that there's a part of town that already has private ownership of fiber, would that be like the HOAs, like Lincoln Crossing and places like that?

Private would be any provider of internet. So we have Astound in town. We have Fidium. We have the HOA one. So it's all of those that are able to provide.

Anyone else before we open it up?

Got my question. I had a couple questions, but I'll wait.

OK, very good. John?

So one of the, maybe the plan kind of covers it because it's a little bit more structural, like,

the actual physical structure.

Did you look at models, not where the city is providing retail, but essentially where the city owns the infrastructure and multiple providers can ride on top of it, competing with each other to the same households? There are a number of examples in the US where the municipality isn't actually competing. They have a partner who actually runs and maintains their network, and then multiple providers can come on top of it and compete with their services over the top. Is that something that you guys looked at at all?

Yeah, so if the city is installing, say, you know, conduit, then they can lease the space to other providers to be able to put their fiber within our conduit. So one of the big things that we'll be going for is like with new development to be having city conduit in the new development, which then can go all the way up to the house because it's one thing just to be in the street but another thing to be able to deliver all the way to the house and then it would just make more room for more providers to be able to get in there without huge costs which would then help the homeowner for lowering having more competition.

So it's a slightly different model where there's a single fiber to the house. And through software-defined architecture, the provider over here can route the traffic over a single set of infrastructure to that ISP and compete for that customer without all the ISPs having to pull their own fiber through the same conduit. Did you look at that model?

Michelle, is he talking about like different strands in the same dedicated to, no?

Yeah, no, what I think you're referring to is kind of an open source model, if you will. And so in that scenario, it would have to be, let me just denote that it would have to be city-owned fiber at that point. And then you could identify a one or two or even three providers, which would then ride that single fiber into a complex or a home where they have options for, say, one, two, or three different providers. I will say that we did not specifically look at that model for Lincoln. And I think mainly because understanding that there are providers that are already in play, which have fiber assets made available. And with the city at this point having limited fiber assets, we did not look at that specific model, but certainly, you know, that is a viable option if the city were to have those assets that could be made available to the ISP.

The plan doesn't foreclose that as an option.

No, but in that plan, John, does the city maintain the fiber, or is it a – It depends on – there's multiple models around the world and in the United States.

Sometimes the city does it with its own people. Usually they have a provider that they contract with to do the maintenance, but they're provider agnostic in terms of who's actually selling the in-service products. And the only reason I kind of bring it up is that it kind of goes back to some of our development and other conversations. Based on our general plan, we will build more than we've built. So the fact that the, you know, the 35 or 40% that's already been built is kind of this mishmash doesn't mean the next 60 can't be this way. So, but the plan provides flexibility to do that, which is great. Yes. Have those additional discussions.

So that is, I just wanted to make sure that I was clear that that is going to happen in the new development is planned to have that.

Any other questions before we open it up? Whitney? That was my question. Okay, good.

And let's see, we'll go to public comment then.

Is there anyone in the audience who would like to provide public comment?

Jason.

So I'll start with, I read exactly zero pages of this report ahead of time, so forgive my ignorance ahead of time. Thank you, Jason. I don't understand the benefit to the city owning fiber. I mean, obviously there's a large initial cost. Even if it's contracted out through a provider for the maintenance piece, there's still a cost associated with maintenance. It just seems like a very big financial risk. for a benefit that I don't necessarily see, especially when we could partner with providers, especially in areas of building new things, having worked for a provider for quite some time. The not so well kept secret is that they want people on their fiber network because it's more profits for them, it's cheaper for them to maintain, and then they can charge more for it because it's fiber, so there's more profits for them, so they want people on that network. I don't see why that wouldn't be a better financial option.

So we have fiber connections all over the city, and we have a monthly fee. Part of what the goal here is to lower our ongoing monthly fees. And by doing that, we would be partnering with a private company we would be working with them on expanding the fiber, and in return, they would be giving us discounted or no cost fiber to our facilities, as well as being able to allow us to further expand our fiber footprint, which we can then use our streetlights for power and put small cells to give better cell and wireless connectivity within neighborhoods that don't have it without building giant towers. We would be able to put our traffic lights in with fiber connectivity and the cameras that read the the cars coming and how they talk to each other. It just kind of interconnects our city into a better way that provides benefits that you can save money.

If I understand that correctly, aren't we paying like $20,000, $25,000 a month or something like that?

I couldn't remember the exact amount, but we pay a lot of money for that.

Yeah, right now it's about $12,000 a month that we pay to... for just the facilities that we have, but that doesn't include, I'm not including what we paid just for cell connections. So we have at all of our tank sites and our water site, all our pump stations and everything, we have cell that we pay for monthly, and getting fiber to those locations would then allow us to get rid of that bill as well.

it really could amount to quite a lot for us to be able to save on our taxpayers.

Yeah, and not just that, but it is kind of, you can have redundancy, and it'll just be, a cell can come and go with the wind sometimes, and so having fiber, it's inherently just more expensive.

Mayor, if I could also, I think the other side of this too, Jason, is why we're having this conversation. And Sean, you can correct me if I'm remembering wrong. We set this money aside to do this study because coming out of COVID, there was a lot of discussion about everybody was, you know, doing school at home, people went remote. And there were parts of town where there wasn't great service. And so the school district was having to do hotspots in different places so kids can be on their Chromebooks and that sort of thing. And so it came to us. It was like, well, what can we do better to service the residents? So not only... You know if if we implement this plan on some level, will it save the city money, but the whole point of it also was. We have residents who don't have very good service and we wanted to see what we already had and what we could do to make it better, so I think that's where it started. doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to spend millions of dollars doing it, I mean we may end up finding a partner, but we set the money aside for the plan, because there was real needs. coming through COVID and out of COVID. And so we wanted to see where we were and where we could improve. So I think that's how it got started. Am I correct? Yes.

Just so Zoom can hear. What I'd add to that is things have changed a little bit between when we started this and today. But an infrastructure bill or two ago, fiber was a key component in sort of the federal spend. The feds sort of acknowledged that the way for the United States to remain super competitive was to have the fastest internet services we could provide as far across the country as we could provide them. And there was a lot of grants available at that time for actual construction projects. And some of that has dried up in the last couple of years. But Jen and I were talking about this the other day that it's such an important need, especially with what's happening with AI and other kinds of technology. We don't see that long term going away. This plan gives us the ability to access technology. other people's money to get some of that done. But I think the key point that Council Member Reedy made, and I think Mr. Daggett said, is we certainly wouldn't want to get into any kind of business that we thought would be better suited in the private sector, because that's just really not ours. But there are opportunities for us to partner with private sector folks where they get a little something out of this plan, and so in exchange we get something out of it too.

Right. And I think we actually said that back then that we don't want to be in the internet business. Like we don't want to be the provider business. So we just want to, I don't want any more.

Yes.

We're good on services.

Okay. Good. Anyone else in the audience would like to make a comment?

Seeing none. I'll move over to zoom. Is there anybody on zoom who would like to provide public comment on this item? I see no hands raised.

Okay, very good. Can we get a motion on this?

So I share your concern. I'm not interested in getting into a boondoggle. And some of these ones, some of these miscible Wi-Fis and internets are absolutely that.

But this is just the architecture about how it goes together.

And then you figure out the financing and the actual partnerships along the way, which I think is a smart step-by-step process as we go.

Yeah, okay. I think it's important that I'm glad that I remember when we did this, and it wasn't on council, but I, I remember being in this meeting, and I was excited that that was what you guys decided our former council decided to use these ARPA dollars. Because I do, especially, and that was before AI. Now here we are, and we're going to need to stay competitive and keep up with, as we were talking earlier about, what would you classify our presentation earlier? Anti-hacking and technology and strengthening our tech and IT. We also discovered when we did a deep dive in cell phone tower and 12 bridges that there's a lot of concern that we. We didn't a lot of residents didn't want to have a cell phone tower understandably it's a huge. huge. I saw I saw I'm just gonna say I saw it is it is it's not for it no one said that it said no one ever that they're beautiful um so and that was something that I was looking into is our possibilities of having like those little uh what are they called the little small cells yeah and the only reason we couldn't do it is because we don't have fiber in that area but If we did, we could. We could have or we could. And then those areas that will have it, we're not going to potentially have to have a city littered in gigantic 5G, 6G, whatever towers where you just see them everywhere. We could be... more aesthetically pleasing nature, you know, suburban area. So I'm supportive of this and figuring out how we can bring this to fruition.

Well, I'll move to adopt the resolution of the master.

Thank you. Do I have a second?

Second.

Second, okay. Moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries 5-0. Thank you very much. Okay. Sean, 15 bravo.

Thank you. Super brief, because I'm going to ask you to continue this item to not this next meeting, but the second meeting in June. but potentially next meeting. Our city clerk, Hope, is out and unexpectedly, and she was sort of the partner I was working with on this project. And just real quickly, so everybody understands what we're moving. One of the items that was on our strategic plan that was brought up by Mayor Pearl was a concept of some type of recognition monument for community members, that have dedicated themselves to making Lincoln what it is. Rockland established something very similar a number of years ago called the Wall of Recognition in Rockland. And Hope, our city clerk, ironically was working there at the time and actually stood up and designed the program over in Rockland, which it's a little bit more detailed than simply just picking a name out of a hat and putting it on a on a wall somewhere. And so I'd like to ask the council move that to a meeting in June because I think it's important that she's here so she can explain some of the pitfalls that you might fall into unless you set this up in a thoughtful way, which we've done.

So that's the pitch. Okay, very good. Second? Second. Okay, very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. Second, open it up.

Yeah, he seconded it.

Opened it up for comment. Oh, he did not, you're right. Okay. All for comment.

Is there anyone in the audience that would like to comment on this item? Seeing none, I will move over to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom that would like to comment on this item? I see no hands raised.

Thank you. And even though I'd love to take credit for it, Ron Dolencek, who was on the fiscal sustainability, I'm sorry, with the fiscal investment oversight committee with me, his wife was very much involved with it in Rockland. He was the one who brought it to us. And so we're just the, we're just moving it forward and it's going to be really good. Thank you very much. Okay. So that was a move to. Now we can move it. Move it.

Okay. John was the second.

Okay. Very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? 5-0. Thank you very much. City Manager reports.

Thank you, Mayor. I only have about one hour of reports, so if you'll just bear with me here. I'll be there. Yeah. Actually, you know, it's really funny is the longer you do this, the more you start to acknowledge when you've lost a little bit of your audience, which is the five of you start to see people's responses get a little more amusing. I'm just kidding. So, yeah. Real quick update because Fred asked for it. So, yes, Oak Tree Lane is moving. If you'd like to pray for anything, a respite from any rain for a while would be really wonderful so that we don't have to pause construction on any of our many projects going on at this moment. But Tigard's out there.

In fact, they were working over the weekend.

And so what you're going to see at some point soonish is you're going to see those barricades move from the – north side of the roadway to the south side of the roadway as they start to flip the work onto the other side. But as far as we can tell, and huge thanks to Vin and the PD team and the fire team and the public works team, we weren't sure that the stop signs were going to operate. They could have either been a little bit more risky than we thought, or they could have made people really angry in terms of how long they're kind of backing up traffic. But just anecdotally, I drive that way a lot, and it does slow you down a bit, but it's not prohibitive. And it seems as though most people are now used to the 500 signs we have down Highway 193 alerting you of a stop sign coming up. So huge thanks to VIN for finding a solution, at least while we get this project wrapped up. Uh, the only other update I will give is because it's been mentioned tonight and a couple of times in June, we've got a number of pretty important business items. Um, the most important of which, and we may spread this over to meetings. I'm still working on that idea is, uh, the concept that council will have to consider in terms of whether or not you place a revenue measure on the 2026 ballot related to sales tax. Um, if you haven't caught any of myself, chief Mejia, chief valves, need a couple others giving, um, updates on this to various civic groups. It's all available online. Or if you'd like to hear something this week, I'll be giving a quick chat to the chamber tomorrow morning during their breakfast meeting. And then I'll be doing the same exact thing the next day at Rotary and probably a few more times after that. If you want a more recent one, I did one to the lab. Was it lab that I did that to, Kevin? a couple weeks ago, and that's recorded. Someone could pull it up and watch it if you'd like. But that'll be kind of the keystone item at probably both meetings in June. And that's all I have tonight. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Okay. Council initiated business?

Holly? Well, it's something we already talked about, but I just wanted to make a couple comments and ask Captain a question about the e-bike thing. So this is... I know every community is having this conversation. It's not just us. Everybody everywhere is having this conversation. And there's a couple different sides to this. And I'll get to my question here real quick. There's a lot of people who say, let kids be kids. And I totally agree with that. except for these e-bikes are not the 1980s, 1970s, 1990s bikes. And there are a lot of good kids who are riding safely, but there are a lot of kids who, they're not the not good kids, but they're taking a lot of risks and people are getting hurt. In fact, I have seen these kids, like myself with my own eyes, ride in the street like they were riding an adult motorcycle. And they're like, know 12 13 14 years old in the traffic uh and my husband and i were terrified i was like oh my gosh someone's really going to get hurt and and and we do have some of them that are terrorizing older citizens and stuff which because they can get away faster i guess you know which which is really sad so my question is and i think this is one of the things that we talked about early on in this discussion um are you guys uh working on the education piece and parent outreach. And where is that? Because I know like you can go into the schools and you could like pull kids over. And the thing is, is I agree with the enforcement piece that Jason was talking about, but you guys can't be everywhere all the time, you know, and these kids riding around disappear pretty quickly. What does it look like enforcement right now? And maybe we can work on a parent education piece. I don't want parents to get in trouble, but they need to understand that their children are in grave danger and they don't even realize it.

Yeah, a couple of different things to unpack there. I would say, first of all, for enforcement. So we recently obtained some dual sport motorcycles that we've actually started using during spring break was the first time that we used these. And we actually ended up issuing a double digit citation in terms of e-bike enforcement. So we have three of those dual sport motorcycles and our officers get on and actually go ride the trails. They ride around the city and actually make enforcement stops on them. So We did that during spring break. We had some positive with that. Our SROs are also doing that when they don't have to be in school. So they're doing enforcement on that. And obviously patrol officers are doing that in between calls, but they don't do it as much. And then our motor officers also doing it as well. So. For the enforcement piece, yes, we are conducting enforcement. We're still working on our ordinance on our side to develop structure on the backside of how do we collect fees and those different things now that the ordinance was passed. But there is existing vehicle code law that we use to be able to site for electronic motorcycle type things riding without a license because depending on the class of e-bike that they're riding, certain laws apply to them and then certain laws don't apply to them. So it just, it's dependent upon the bike that they're riding. Obviously a lot of bicycle laws that are on the books also come into play. In terms of the education piece, so we believe firmly that we should start education in the school and we need to loop the parents in on this too because The reality is parents are buying some of these bikes just anecdotally from what we've been told, and they're letting their kids ride these bikes, and they have no idea the capabilities of them. And like you said, you come wrong way on an e-bike that goes almost 40 miles an hour. It's a disaster waiting to happen. And so we're working with our SROs to get those messages out in school assemblies and other avenues to where we can really – um contact those kids uh when they have to be at a certain place which is school and so um we probably need to do a little bit more of it but it's something that we're already getting in front of and like you said council member this is a this isn't just a lincoln problem this is kind of a nationwide problem at this point so yeah everybody's really dealing with this issue and i know that it's one of the things we get most complaints on i know um it's come up tonight so I would say that we just don't have dedicated positions in the police department on a more widespread scale to do this every day because it's more so ancillary other than our motor officer.

Well, I want to real quick and want a second what you're talking about. And we did an SRT for the creek and for the unhoused situation. I can't see why we couldn't do the exact same thing and if we needed to get some e-bikes or just redo that same team for this.

So a couple things. One of the reasons it wasn't on this meeting is I was hoping, and I think I'm going to get it, and I did check with Chief Alps about this, the chief in Rockland has been on the lead. He's been the lead on this issue regionally, way ahead of everyone. And he gave a presentation to a small group of city managers a couple of weeks ago. And we learned some really interesting things. And I'm just going to paraphrase a few. I've asked him, I've asked their city manager. It sounds like she's going to agree to load us him for the evening presentation. one of his counsel to have him give a presentation on what Rockland has done. Because what I think you're going to hear from him is really interesting. And this is somebody that has been spending a lot of time on this issue. The opportunities that you have with regard to the ordinances you can pass locally and the enforcement you can do is somewhat useful. What he will tell you is they found that ticketed enforcement is ineffective. And there's a few reasons for that. The first is that what it is intended to do is simply anger parents to say things like, well, hey, look, we're just trying to have our kids get out and be outside and not being on a screen all day long and Now we're ticketing for this. So that was one issue. The second issue is that even where it's effective, I think I mentioned this last time, you have a whole other generation of young folks that are going to be turning 10 or whatever next year. And guess what? They're going to want e-bikes. So it's not the same as ticketing someone at 17 for speeding. That's going to remember that ticket at 24, et cetera, et cetera, right? You stop using an e-bike at some point or don't use one as much. So he's found that partnerships with the schools and better education and really doing they've done all kinds of creative things like, for example, they've given out little gift cards for like a donut at the donut shop. If you, you know, a police officer stops and you have your helmet and you're not. riding an e-bike that's illegal. We've already done this with our school district, but they basically got the school district to agree not to allow any class two or above e-bikes to be driven to school. And when they do, they'll go and take care of it. So there's a bunch of things that they've tested that some work and some don't work, and they dispel some rumors. And so I think it'd be useful, since this just happens to be an issue that they're pretty far ahead on,

regionally maybe to have him come and give a little presentation on what has worked and not worked in rockland that'd be great and just to clarify i'm not interested in ticketing like i mean if that's effective great but i just want to say too i know we're not the school district but whatever we can do to help educate parents and the community please let us know because yeah you're this is a nationwide issue and this Everywhere I go, every meeting, everyone's talking about it. And I just am terrified that we're going to lose a child or that a resident is going to hit a child and then they have to live with that. And so I get e-bikes are fun, but they're a problem. We need to get a handle on it. Thank you for that. Thank you for allowing me to. Thanks, Holly. Very good. Anything else from my colleagues? Not for business, no. Okay.

Hi. Yeah, I agree with everything that you said. I feel the exact same way. And I don't understand why this is the perception is any different than letting your child hop on a motorcycle. So I don't I just don't I don't understand the the perception gap and the parents not why are they even buying them for their kids in the first place? But if there's anything that we can do, let us know. And then it will be great to hear. Is it Rustin Banks? Is that who it is? Okay, I remember he was speaking about this last year. It would be great to hear from him. And then this is definitely something that I think we could bring in the school district to that meeting as well and see what they could do. I know that there was some concerns on their end with, with mitigating and them feeling like they have the resources to do anything.

Yeah, well, we can add them into, I think what I'd just add, and then maybe we can leave it at this, is there are certain types of, for lack of a better term, violations that are very, very difficult to police because they become cultural in nature. So for example, fireworks, legal fireworks were mentioned. I have so much experience, unfortunately, trying to blunt illegal firework usage through fines, through aggressive police activity, through firefighters getting involved. I can tell you that I've worked in communities where we were fining people two to four to six to $8,000 per violation, and it had zero impact on how many we saw the following year. So we found that education about the potential of someone dying or you know embers falling onto someone's roof was a more effective tool than that than policing it it just didn't work um and some other times she could probably share with you a bunch about that thank you john or ben okay good in that case committee reports

but with Ben, yeah, I've got, um, uh, PCTPA inspired tomorrow and we'll be talking about the Sierra college one 93 light. So I'll give you some good news next time around.

Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. John.

Uh, we had our EDC had a great strategic planning session. Got some good stuff out of that. Looking forward to seeing the next steps of that. Um, what my met and adopted its budget and there'll be, um, No tip increase for next fiscal year.

We've had the airport committee meeting. Things are going along very well. We've got a number of initiatives that are working through, including noise abatement, including hanger fees, including a number of other initiatives out there. So that's good work in progress and moving along. I've got the air pollution control district next week. and we just had a meeting with the pioneer community energy going over finalizing the final budgets and moving some other stuff whitney well the two of you just did all the work for me so thank you

Yeah, I had a SACOG last week. And the big topic was we had a presentation from an expert on transportation that studied large cities. And the topic was the transit fiscal cliff. And so they talked about how during COVID, the federal government gave the transit companies, lots of money during that time. And now that money is pretty much expended. And so SACRT is always struggling to make ends meet. And so the presentation was really interesting. And then what SACOG is wanting to do is, so there's this bucket of federal money from the Federal Transportation Administration. And right now, so I forget if it's 80-20 or 70-30, I forget, but like a large portion of it is prescriptive. It's like formula and it goes to places just automatically. And then the rest of it is competitive money. What they want to do right now, SACRT gets all that. They are the designated recipient, and then they send out all the money. What SACOG wants to do that they're looking into is to help SACRT and to be the second designated recipient, and then they can help funnel funding to our region for competitive grant funding. It's really only a few million dollars, so it's not going to go very far anyway. But anyway, my question was, is that even possible? Are there a lot of bureaucracy and legalities to separate that? And so that's something that they're working on. So nothing earth shattering right now. It's just interesting listening to, you know, it's the constant thing about transportation. It's like... There, there is a fiscal cliff they are they're not bringing up money and one of the suggestions was there's about. 45% I think it was and maybe you guys might know better 45% of these transit companies where people aren't paying the fare. And so they always say, we need more money, we need more money. Well, let's go back and make sure that everyone's paying the fare first and then see where you are. So that was one topic of discussion. Anyway, just wanted to share that, that they're working on this federal funding thing and we'll see where SACRT goes in the future and how it affects us.

Okay, well, very good. In that case, it looks like we're adjourned.

Thank you, staff. Appreciate you.