City Council - Regular Meeting

And have him give us our pledge, and then we'll move on to invocation.

Alright. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me to pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America And to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for

all. Awesome. Alright. And at this, can I call on Siri?

Mahima Patel and Parag Nathisai.

Excellent. Come on up, guys.

From BAPS Charities.

Good evening, mayor, council members, city staff, and community members. My name is, and I'm a president of this beautiful city, Rancho Cordova. On behalf of all the volunteers of BFB's Samaritan Hindu temple, I would like to lead in a peace prayer. My name is Moema Patel, and I am a resident of this beautiful city of Rancho Cordova, which me and my family call home. I will now translate the prayer that was recited.

May there be peace in heaven, peace in the sky, peace on earth, peace in the water, peace in the plants and herbs, peace in the trees and forests, peace among all the divine beings. May there be peace in the universe, peace in the supreme beings, peace everywhere. True peace and let that peace come to us. May all beings experience tranquility, and may there be no fear from any direction. May all creatures live in a peace and harm harm harmony without fear.

Oh god, may you remove all obstacles and difficulties, and may all that is good and auspicious come to us. Peace. Peace. May there be supreme peace, and may peace be everywhere from free free from all the troubles and dangers. We thank you again for allowing us into this wonderful opportunity to recite the prayers.

Nice job, guys. Alright. Members of the this is a public comment. Members of the public wishing to address the council for any matter not on the agenda may do so at this time by completing and submitting a speaker card to the city clerk. For items not on the agenda. Speakers will be called by the mayor at this point on the agenda when the item will be heard. Speakers are encouraged to keep their comments to three minutes or less and state the name of community residents under the provision of California government code. City council is prohibited from discussing or taking immediate action on any item not on the agenda unless items demonstrated to be of emergency nature. Immediate action arose after the posting of the agenda. Stacy, do we have any public comment?

Yes. We'll start with doctor Marlena Urich.

Hey. Coming up, guys.

You'll have up to three minutes.

Yes. Thank you. Good evening, mayor, city council members, city clerk, and staff. My name is doctor Marlena Urich. I'm a resident of Mather, and I'm also the CEO of Always Learning and the originator of Ways of Kindness as a community initiative.

I'm here tonight to sincerely thank you for your investment in the children and families of Rancho Cordova through the Community Enhancement and Investment Fund. Your support allowed us to bring the Ways of Kindness program to seven local schools during Kindness Week, which is February. More than 2,500 students, parents, and school staff participated in this school wide effort focused on social emotional learning, including empathy, inclusion, and positive action. Students didn't simply learn about kindness, they practiced it daily. Each student wrote on a personal act of kindness on a pennant, and to and together, those individual actions created a visual wave across the campuses reminding children that they matter and their choices affect each other.

And here's an example of what you'll see at our seven schools in Rancho Cordova.

So

just as an example of some of the things that the children wrote, smile at someone today. In the joy of others, donate things to poor people, help a homeless person, and help feed the hungry. What mattered most was not the decorations, but it was a it was a change in behavior and connection. Counselors and staff reported students reaching out to peers who were usually alone, including others at recess and lunchtime, and expressing appreciation to teachers and parents. One of the parents I saw said, I love this place.

But children began recognizing that they do have the power to improve their school community in a time when children are experiencing increased anxiety and isolation. This project gave them something very important, a sense of belonging, empowerment, and hope. They learned that they are not helpless and that they can make a difference. I would like to personally invite you and the city council members of the community to join on March 6 at Rancho Cordova Elementary School at 05:30 p. M, where they'll be creating another live waves of kindness activity with students and families.

Because of the success of this program, I will also be applying for future grants to bring in the waves of kindness to the city's international festival on May 9 and the kids day in the park in April. Your continued support allows us to strengthen not only our schools, but the culture of our entire city. Thank you for believing in our children and for helping Rancho Cordova become not only a growing city but a caring one. Thank you.

Additional public comment that I have was submitted via email for general public comment, but in reviewing the comments, it more relates to the RCPD update. So I am not gonna share those at this time under general public comment, but I will wait to share those names and report that out during the RCPD update. So with that being said, there's no additional public comment at this time.

Alright. Let's go ahead and move on to no presentations. Always good. And so let's go on the council reports, and let's go ahead. Joe, what you got?

Just broke my phone in the parking lot. So

Oh, no.

There goes my alarm tomorrow morning. If someone can knock on my door and wake me up, that'd be really appreciated. I am a late riser. Ben had two different opportunities arrived recently with commercial property renters in our city who happen to have an infamous bad landlord, one of the common ones, and been helping them with these really straightforward legal issues and getting some results for them. And it's just kinda crazy how you get bullied if you don't have a lawyer by some of our commercial property owners.

Let's see. I was at an endorsement interview process Friday night for they've got the primaries coming up, and a local city had a a count a council member candidate up asking as incumbent to be endorsed, and it made me chuckle that, you know, everything she was rattling off is her accomplishment. She did it, and it was that was staff. That was like, you had amazing employees who went and did all that stuff for you. The way you describe it is mine, mine.

I built this Park. I did this. And I would like to think we give our staff a lot more credit than maybe some of our other electeds do. Last but not least, George Washington Carver, that whole situation. Hoping that we can help however we can, realizing that there appears to be a morale issue there, maybe even unrelated to financial issues.

Had a lot of outreach. Some teacher at the school called me the other night for about thirty minutes, and she was on the verge of tears. And, you know, people really wanna see it succeed, but they have issues with how it's being run. And so however we can help facilitate, I would encourage us to do

so. Are

they on the on the positive side of moving into the full support of district? I

wouldn't doubt it. I mean, I think I think the goal would probably be to not have a time period where nothing's happening there, where people currently there can graduate, things of that nature. Yeah. Agreed. And and and the fact that it's a charter maybe makes it a bit more flexible in that regard, I would imagine. But

David.

Few things going on. I am Linda will recall this. I am once again tiering first tier suburbs for the National League of Cities. This isn't a committee that looks we're gonna rename ourselves the suburban council. So the first tier suburbs council because I don't think people know what First Year Suburbs is.

It just means an aging suburb, basically. So I think suburban council will cover it. But it's allowing me to sort of step back ten or fifteen years ago when I was doing this for NLC the first time and look at the state of the art in thinking about how suburb how suburbs age. So I expect in this year and probably next year, I'll be coming back to you guys with some ideas from that little that little adventure I get to take again. But if you have ideas about things that could be programmed into the the curriculum this year for first year suburbs, I'd appreciate hearing about those.

I've got plenty, of course, from things that we've done, but I'm interested in new stuff you may have gathered from from elsewhere too. I am coaching the academia team, academic decathlon team, again at SJV, and this Saturday is our big competition. So when we beat a bunch of the neighboring jurisdictions, and if you hear tears and wailing, that'll that you will know why we did that. Wasn't soccer this time. It wasn't track. It was academic decathlon that beat them, and that's fun. And last Friday no. Last Saturday night, I was honored with an award actually from SJV. Linda, you were there. Mike, you were there.

Some staff members were there. I appreciate it very much. The mayor was there, made an appearance. People were were very happy to see him in the room. And it was a fun a fun little award to get, and it's hard for me to believe I've been doing that stuff there for a decade. Doesn't seem does more than a decade. Doesn't seem possible, but it's been incredibly rewarding. The Clark Massey relays were last weekend. I don't know how many people remember who Clark Massey was. I did not know him.

Linda may have. I don't know. He was a track coach here between, like, 1960 and 1980 at Cordova High, and he had the incredible distinction of leading a track team through, like, fourteen years of never losing a meet, which that's just unheard of. So he is a very famous track coach in the state, and they had this track meet in his honor for probably twenty years following his death. And then during the pandemic, it stopped, and the track coaches over there did not restart it until just recently, Basically, with our support of facilities and and for athletics, they restarted it.

And we hosted this is the the bang we get as a city for this. We hosted 27 different teams, thousands of athletes last Saturday from high schools all over the Sacramento region who walked in there and thought, wow. This is a great place. This is really well built. This is really well run. So that's our positive image again, right, to the region. So that was a big success. I'm happy that we were we were part of that. Other than that, I'm filling my time with meetings at Saxour Air Quality District, SACOG, and then that American River Conservancy one I can never quite get the acronym right for, which I think, Garrett, you might have to cover for me as I'm at NLC when they have their next meeting.

I can't wait.

It's low it's low pressure. They already said they're done giving us money anyways.

It's kinda showing that. Right?

Already gave you enough money. Twice a year.

Twice a year. Yeah. Not not too onerous.

Alright. Excellent. Seardog.

I was kinda out sick the last two weeks, so my report is pretty light. Congratulations, council member. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend your event, but I heard it was pretty good.

Since you were sick, I'm glad you didn't. But I'm glad you're better in here today.

Yeah. So, but, I did do a radio interview with CAP Radio to talk about AI and, robotics ecosystems. So Rancho Cordova is in the news, and it's staying in the news. So every opportunity that we can get to promote Rancho Cordova, especially from an AI perspective, I'll be there. So that's what that's one thing that I did in the last two weeks. Thanks.

Linda.

Okay. Well, I must be the one who got overloaded with meetings. So, yes, I know the event for David Saturday night was really nice. And Garrett, you can talk about it since I wasn't able to stay the whole time. But, you know, congratulations and well deserved.

It's budget season. The library is talking about its budget. The library's budget is oddly divided into two different entities. One is the city Of Sacramento, and the other is the unincorporated county, including all the cities. So the portion of the library budget that comes from Sacramento County and the unincorporated and the incorporated cities is nice and healthy, and there's no problems with it.

But the budget at from the City Of Sacramento is not sustainable, as they said. And I know our finance director alerted me to that fact. Regional transit met. We had a growing strong neighborhoods meeting. And the great thing about the growing strong neighborhoods meeting is that the police department talked about some special enforcement projects they have going on.

So we'll probably hear about that a little bit later from them. We had a really good meeting with Folsom Cordova two by two. And probably the highlight of the last two weeks was having our sheriff come to the Rancho Cordova luncheon a couple of Fridays ago, and he made a great speech. And he talked about everything that's important to Rancho Cordova, which is really our children. And he's just he and Adam House and the police chief in Sacramento are wonderful examples of the kind of children that have grown up here in Rancho Cordova, and we're extremely proud of all of them.

Thank you.

Alright. Move on to me. So here's a slow rundown. JPA met with, on the connector. So we have to decide what we wanna do about the connector. They're switching out some stuff. It's slowing down, and, we have to find a way to match a $25,000,000 grant. And so every dollar we can find that we can put toward this, we can have a match. And if we can't find money, then the grant would go away. So we need to fight to keep that money and find out who can give us more money.

Met with Insight, Herman Kaiser, which is actually interesting because we have so many machine, plants, and they're the ones that work on, the the the, ultrasounds and stuff for cancer. And so they build that here in Rancho Cordova. Amazing partner. What a great business to have in Rancho Cordova. They're looking to add and grow their business. And so I'm trying to meet with all the CEOs to see how business is, to make sure we have a key pulse on it, and they're doing great. I missed it, and I apologize in advance, my friend, but they opened up pan bagels. And she's right next to my house, so that makes it even worse. But great bagel shop. I eat there almost, weekly.

Wife and I walk there, and it's a great partnership. The person was there, has been in the city for years doing everything from trucking to real estate, and now they're, open a bagel shop. And and so it's delicious. And they literally

Is that because truck drivers like to eat bagels?

They do. They love bagels. And one of the best apple fritters in the region. I don't know why, but you know when the edge is crispy and the sugar

coordinates and

it gets and you

can eat that. Tell Lee.

It's stupid. And they never have a happens to be

particularly fond of apple fritters.

If you don't get there early enough, it's gone. And it's that crispy, delicious breakaway problem. Sugar. You never have to eat the whole apple fritter because that's just ridiculous, and that's a real depression day. But most of the time, you can get, like, a couple bites in. I had coffee with the mayor. Thank you for everyone that shows up for that. It's interesting, the different community members that show up to the coffee with the mayor so I can talk to them and find out how things are going. It was funny because I was there, and I just found out that the CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters just moved into Rancho Cordova. So it's funny because I'll be sitting at a coffee shop, and all of sudden, they're like, I'm not even here for that, but just so that.

And then we had the people that are doing the warehouses over out towards on 50. Their guy came out and talked about how he's really excited. He didn't wanna share with me who was moving into those warehouses, but I was like, well, you should just tell me quietly. That way no one knows. The secret's just between me and you. So then he's like, I'm not gonna tell you, but he told

me anyways.

Don't But it's very exciting. I'm not gonna say it on the thing. I won't ruin it for him. But yeah. But they're they're good partners, and they now have another 100,000 square feet. And I met with some of the CEOs and are looking at bringing manufacturing back to our city, which is gonna be anywhere from 25 to 3,500 jobs on development, and that is super exciting. It's the so we rolled out Black History Month. But before I did that, I accepted an award for Rancho Cordova for the thirty eighth Black Expo and Black Excellence. And so that was fun talking to them. They actually bought the new Micah for the city of Sacramento.

And so I got to talk to her about what she saw and how her plans are and how the city of Sacramento is and and how she's gonna overcome $60,000,000 of debt. So I I hugged her, we cried together. And we said it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. Met the CEO of Log Off Brewing. He's awesome. He's actually worker bee there for, like, I think, six years. And then when they sold off, he went and bought it. They're doing well. They're looking at a little bit of expansion.

But for the most part, they're more looking for who the best partner is to have the brewery where the brewery at. They they like what they have, but they're always looking for a new home. So we're gonna help them out to make sure that they stay locked in the city. Met with the CEO of the Sac Marriott. He just spent, I think, 22 or $23,000,000 redoing. Had literally the nicest spread I've ever seen at a hotel. Like, steak upstairs, oysters downstairs. Like, it was crazy. Like, you're like I'm like, what is this? Is this a hotel? And he's like, yeah. No. So I'm showing off. And I'm like, that's great. And then he was like, hey. He's like, I'm really excited about that stadium. And I was like, yeah. He's like, but you didn't ask me to put my name on it. And I was like, well, technically, it's not my stadium, but I would love for you to be on our stadium. So

We just wanna know where your flapper dress was.

Flapper dress. Listen. I had on I was ready. I had my gangster hat on and my machine gun in the background, my little Tommy gun. I was ready. I know how to do a zoot suit. Right? You better watch out.

Twenties theme for anybody listening

to this. It was all over the gray. That's

just 20.

That's just how I walk around Rancho Cordova. I don't know what you're talking about. Sabrina, the songstress. I think my and my staff already knows they do an amazing job. But the fact that they put together with the Cordova Community Council all these cool events for Black History Month and the fact that you could go and hear jazz in the city kinda lit my whole life up. I was just super excited. So Sabrina and Songsters came in, took over the MAC, and we had them her singing a bunch of really cool old jazz songs. So my family has history in jazz. My grandma was a jazz pianist a long time ago back in the when it was really hard to find jobs. And so she'd work at bars at night playing jazz musician.

And my her sister was a famous concert pianist, and they both would war on pianos against each other during Christmas with one thinking that she could just like, you could to my grandma, and she would pick up the song and play how it would sound, whereas my other grandma would complain about how lazy her finger work was and would show her how to play professional. And when those two were together, it was an amazing sight because they would try to one up each other. Met with GSEc and figured out how we're gonna work together to really grow the city's AI ecosphere. What can we do to make sure that the stadium is successful and how they're going to sell Rancho Cordova as a leader of AI and robotics and really make us a statement for the region. Had a vice mayor meeting with my favorite person, Linda.

Had another Merrill minute, which is fun to do because then I get to talk. Today was exciting. I met with senator Padilla and talked about how he says he's pretty confident about getting us money for the rail on on Horn Road, that there's money for that. And then we've had a long talk about how we really want to change the narrative of that California can just do it itself Yeah. Instead of trying to go to the feds to ask money, we'll just make it ourselves and earn it ourselves.

And so he's he likes to see a city that basically is doing housing and economic growth because he says that's the two things. He's concerned about the flight. Like, we're having massive flight out of California to the tune of where it was affecting electoral races or electoral votes. And so what we wanna do is make it attractive to come back because we still have the best climate. It's just making it the best business climate and enough housing.

And so they like the model of Rancho Cordova, how we're doing it the way we've done it. And I think that's also because you guys, you and David set up a contract city. And I think those are that's the model that everyone needs to move into nowadays because that's that's allowed us to stay that and very conscious of where we spend our money. And so they're excited to to show off Rancho when we go to cap to cap. He would like to sit down with us and say, how can we make this a model that really goes?

And I said, you should start. The growth that we're seeing in the city is a reflection of you as well. So don't pretend like you're just in this field, like, you don't get to accept some of this. Was like, start coming to our meetings and start accepting, like, this growth and saying that what you're doing is affecting us in a good way. And I said, it'd even be cooler as if you came and met with the CEOs and told them that you were so they're actually thinking about instead of you know how people in the olden days would be like, you're just lucky to come to California. They're thinking more of the the congressmen and senators will show up to big businesses and be like, just we're really happy. Thank you so much for being here. And is there a way that we can may help you to grow in California?

So You know, regardless of your party perspective, Badia is a good guy. He quite some time ago and, David, you might have been there before he got elected to the Senate when he was Secretary of State. He came to Cordova High and did a discussion with all the students about registering to vote and pre registering to vote. He was it was really very nice. He talked about his family and and his background, and and it was really well received.

Yeah. I met him several times in the past two years and spoke with him. And the other interesting fact about him is he's a former president of the League of California City.

He brought that up.

So he definitely gets, like, the city perspective on things.

He was funny. He was like he's like, I'm from the inland city of inland of California. He's like, I understand how hard it is to get noticed when you're not one of the big cities, and I just really would love you know, he likes that. He wants he says he understand. He also guess he was something in LA, and he helped build a stadium. So he's like, if you need to commiserate, he's like, I know what you guys are going through. So I'm like, cool. Can you help? And then last, we met with downtown Doba. The progress, it is a grind, but we are moving forward.

And so I always say every step forward is a good step. A lot of reports are coming back. They had a lot of reports for the staff while we were there, which was excellent. So that means everyone's kinda keeping each other honest. And I think we're looking at an excellent timeline to have it before planning commission in the next three to four months, and then and then to us, for us to give us an attaboy and then hopefully breaking ground. And they're they I mean, they have such an aggressive timeline, but it's everyone's seeming to treat it more like it's for Rancho by Rancho, and so everyone wants to see it successful. So that's awesome. Micah.

Thank you, mayor. The timing was great with senator Padilla's office because it gave us the community project funding dollars are out now for both the senate and the congressional district offices. So we are working on ideas and projects for those. So we'll definitely be submitting a list of ideas from our team to them as far as for grant opportunities. So it was good to hear directly from them what they care about so we can align things that we care about as far as for the federal priority.

So that was good timing. I did speak at the pro youth event last Monday, which was great in the evening. And so those are always very fun events to go and talk about what it is we do here and what the role is and lots of good questions from from the from the youth in in that sense of kind of what what they have to look forward to and I always tell them they will be future council members and city managers someday. So, I look forward to seeing them be successful in that way. We did have a general plan community meeting last week as well, so we had about 50 residents show up.

So thank you for the planning team who put that together. And not only the planning team, but all the other staff that go and attend. The general plan has a lot of different fingers and touches many different departments, and so the team put that together. And so a lot of good folks, a lot of folks we hadn't seen before, so that was good to see a different turnout for for that event on Wednesday. We also, as kind of an internal conversation, we had Black History Month lunch and learn, we had Bishop Parnell Loveless come to the event, which was great for a, you know, community like ours to have the bishop come in a city of our size come and talk about the history of it was actually on the Gulaguchi kind of people.

And so he gave a great connection and actually made a great connection to the the those individuals and kind of what it means to be like the city of Rancho Cordova and made a good reference and a connection there, which he does, if you've ever heard the bishop speak. And so I suggested to Shelley that he come and do that same thing at a future Cordova luncheon. So so that was great for the team. We had about forty, fifty of our team members there to come and hear about Black History Month and have had had him come. So those are just some of the highlights for me from last week. So thank you, mayor.

Thank you. Alright. Alright. Consent calendar items matter deemed routine and noncontroversial by staff unless a member of the council wishes to pull an item for individual consideration. All items may approved in one motion. Staff or council, is there anyone who wishes to pull a consent calendar item? Casey, Stacy, is there any public comment?

There is no public comment.

Can I have a motion?

Then I will move approval of consent calendar items 9.1 through 9.9. Second.

Roll call, please.

The second was council member Little.

It was. Thank you.

Council member Sander? Aye. Council member Little?

Yes.

Council member Polipotti?

Yes.

Vice mayor Budge? Yes. Mayor Gatewood? Yes. The motion passes.

Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and we're doing public public hearing items. No. No. No. Me just see. Yeah. No. Consent public hearing items consist of matters deemed routine and nonconjurative by staff unless a member of the council wishes to pull an item. Why is it the memo? I'm gonna go ahead and open the public hearing and ask and ask Stady, is there any public comment?

There is no public comment.

Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and close this.

And I will move approval of item 10.1. Second.

Roll call, please.

Council member Pulapati?

Yes.

Council member Sander? Aye. Council member Little?

Yes.

Vice mayor Budge? Yes. Mayor Gatewood?

Yes. Alright. Move on to regular calendar items. This is gonna be good. Darcy, come on up here, and we are gonna talk about the historical building and site inventory within the city of Rancho Cordova. And Darcy, go ahead and staff report. Sorry, Stacy. Darcy, go ahead. Hit it.

Do you need to call the item?

Right. Read it? I'll read it real quick.

Really? I just read it. Okay. This is mean.

Good evening, mayor Gatewood, members of the council, with the community development department. Before you this evening will be a discussion regarding historical buildings and sites within the city and receive some direction on potential next steps. The existing general plan has an entire element that talks about cultural and historical resources, and it plays upon various aspects of the historic resources of the city. So history dating back to Native Americans, gold mining, historic railroad operations, the Pony Express, Mather Field, and Aerojet. There's various policies and actions within the general plan to help with the preservation of cultural resources as well as historical.

This discussion is gonna focus on the historical element of the general plan. Before you on the screen are eight different locations within the city that are identified in the general plan as having either some sort of local community significance or like number four, which is actually already listed on the California Historic Landmark, and that's the American River Grange Hall. So these were specific identified locations or sites that were done way back when we first did the general plan. But the general plan also has language in there that says, if there are other local identified sites or structures that we want to preserve and protect, we can modify this list at any time and add those to that. Before you on the screen are the five different specific action items in the general plan that relate to the preservation of historic buildings within the city.

These could be federal, state, or just local significance. The first action item that's up there is something that's an ongoing thing that we do throughout the city. We're always gonna be compiling and collecting information on the history of our city. So that one is ongoing. The next four items are things that we have not done to date.

And, specifically, there's a few on here that would be triggered and geared just towards looking at the local significance of sites within the city. So staff's suggested work plan to look at identifying local significant sites as well as how do we preserve those sites would be to focus on that list that I previously showed you, those eight structures. And then by the suggestion of counsel and or the community is also identify additional sites. Associated tasks could include identifications of those sites, which is gonna require some surveying. It's possible that some locations may now have federal or state significance, and that's part of the process.

Looking at potential community outreach component to get feedback from the community on locations. At the end of the process, you're gonna wanna do something that actually protects the buildings. So you're looking at some sort of ordinance, standards, regulations to protect the buildings. There will be a fine line between wanting to preserve a building but also not wanting to punish a homeowner if they happen to have significance because their building's 50 years or older. So through the process, those are things that we will take a look at because we certainly don't want somebody to have to go through a cumbersome process to switch out windows or change their roof.

So just in closing kind of direction and next steps that we're looking at from council, have three different options. You could direct staff to devise a work plan that implements all of the general plan action items. So that would be all of those action items that were listed on that previous screen. The one action item that wouldn't be included in staff's recommendation would be to take a very detailed look at Kilgore Cemetery, who's buried there, take an inventory of everything. That's a pretty cumbersome process that could be done as a separate action item at a later date.

Staff's recommendation is to now just focus on sites and structures identified in the general plan and any additional ones that you would identify. Additionally, you could take no action at this time and direct us to come back at a later date. So with that, that concludes my presentation. Again, what if you do choose option one or two, we would be looking for you to suggest any additional sites that you want us to look at as part of the process.

Alright. Stacy, have any public comment.

Yes. We have one speaker, Helen Wellem Bishaw.

Hi. My name is Helen William Beshaw, and everybody knows I'm all about preservation for future generations. I do have some concerns. You know, the city paid $1,000,000 to refurbish Kilgore Cemetery, and that was in, was it 2007? I think it was.

Then, in 2023, we celebrated our twenty year anniversary. And out the gate, we talked about the Nisman and the Maidu. They were the original owners of the land, but yet we have nothing dedicated to them. There is one site available within the city's boundaries that does have significant sites on it that date back 3,500 years old. I wanna know when we're going to recognize and save land that affected the original owners of the land.

We mentioned them in our twenty year anniversary right out the gate, but yet we've done nothing to, recognize them. That same location has what we call heritage trees. We are the city of trees, but yet we have allowed TrueMark to come in and deep disc along the root lines, to kill off many of the trees. There's a gorgeous oak tree that is a historical tree sitting right in the front of that site. You then have the Routier Station, which was built in 1866, later became a post office in 1871.

Cities bought it. They need a location for it. What better place than to move it across the street right on that piece of property? Because it would have ties with things. It would have ties with the fact that there are documented areas that aren't disclosed in the area of the Native Americans dating back thirty five hundred and twenty five hundred years.

So I wanna know when we're going to come into the ages and recognize the original owners of the land. There's nothing in the city that recognizes them. And I've been pushing for that for a long time. And you want to move the, Routier Station. Once you move it, it loses its historical relevancy, becomes a historical building, and it is movable.

Then you have the Caprice House, the yellow house on Caprice, that is like 1913 or 1920. That's an old house. That's privately owned. You might want to look at connecting, getting that because that was close to where the Mills Station, building used to be before it was moved again. So we have one mile of Rancho Cordova that has a lot of historical relevancy, and I do hope we don't build that light rail station that's gonna block the, what used to be the old winery area. Thank you.

In addition, we had one additional public comment from Brenda Guston and Michelle C. St. Clair for this item of 12.1. It's been distributed to the council, placed on the city's website, and printed for the public in the back of the council chambers.

Excellent. Thank you. Council, anything?

So I can comment.

All right, Linda. Hit it.

At this point in time, our general plan the information in our general plan is really out of date and not particularly accurate. So I came up with a list of 11 different well, actually, 10 different structures in two sites. Any list of Rancho Cordova historic properties needs to include Mill Station and the Sheepherder, the old Edwards Motel, what we consider Brookside Winery, which was the Silver Brothers Winery. There is a preschool at Cordova Baptist Church, and I think the original builder was a gentleman named George Hanlon. I have to check that.

It was Chris Williamson's uncle. They are basically just east of the intersection of Georgetown and Coloma. We do still have the Menke House, which is off of West La Loma, and it doesn't look like anything it used to, but it was the Menke House. They grew hops in that area. The house on Caprice is the Dowenhauer house.

Now you just clarified it

Dowenhauer's for owned a lot of property in that area, including a lot of what we've been using as Mills Crossing. They ultimately sold it to the Fongs, or Mr. Fong, young Mr. Fong, who died. There's a house on Mulaga at Ellenwood, sort of, behind Raley's, that I've always thought looked like it was kind of out of place, like maybe it was an original house in that area.

It's kind of brick. We do need to include Rutier Station. Joseph Rutier built it. Well, no, actually, that's not accurate. Joseph Rutier took over all of the agricultural properties for Joseph Folsom and stayed on the property.

And ultimately, the railroad built him that area, that building, to house all this produce so it didn't get rained on in the wintertime. And they would take it up to Truckee and put ice on it and carry it across country to the markets back east. There is the Johnny Horn House on Horn Road at the top of the hill. People think of that as the Utterback Sod House, but it's really Johnny Horn's house. There is the Grange.

And then we have to include Kilgore Cemetery, and you don't have to worry about it. I have all of the original books and the maps and everything, and we know it goes beyond what the Girl Scout did back in the actually, the Girl Scout became a police officer. So our police department would remember her. But she researched the original graves, and then you can match them to the original map and the original cemetery record books. And then, while I'm not a fan of just declaring a site, on the other hand, the property that the Park District has on the East Side of Studerus, that they're going to make a park ultimately to match the one on the left side, that actually was the Williamson's house.

I mean, that's where the Williamson's house was. And there's a brick monument out there. And if you want to consider brick monuments, then obviously I think it says something about the Yeah. 15 Mile House. And and I did say the Grange. Yeah. So those would be my additions. I can't think of anything else around here. We really don't have to work on the Kilgore Cemetery. Like I said, I I've got all of that information.

But from my perspective, the most important thing we do is direct staff to come back with a some sort of a preservation process.

Alright.

David, do you have anything about the preservation process?

Yeah. Linda, I agree with your list. Where is the Minky House? Where where is that located?

Okay. West Aloma, first turn to the right. It's now like a boys' home. It's at the end of the street. It's a dead end road.

Yeah. Okay. So

just sort of hooks

right into it. It's been heavily remodeled.

Think of the I can't think of the name of the street.

Okay.

And then the Downhauer House on Caprice is the other one in that neighborhood that's old.

Turn on Caprice off of Paseo Drive. Yep. Make the curve. It's the it's the northern boundary of Mills Crossing.

Okay.

What we think of as Mills Crossing are the farm property.

So you mentioned a couple of brick monuments. Isn't there another marker on Folsom Boulevard?

Well, there is. You're right. In front of the the gas station. Yep. But that was I think that's a Pony Express monument.

That's why I

think that And that's why people used to think that Mill Station was a Pony Express stop.

Right.

It wasn't. The first Pony Express stop was down at 5 Mile House in Brighton, where Brighton Station is located, and the freeway goes over the the over Folsom Boulevard. But the second stop was out at 15 Mile House before they went to out to Moreno Island.

So just thoughts to add to Linda's list. Certainly, Pony Express, Lincoln Highway, First Railroad in the in the Far West. Gotta be careful about that because St. Louis is in the West, technically. They did pretty much everything before anything happened in Sacramento.

The Lincoln Highway is good.

Lincoln Highway is Yeah. Yeah. Lincoln Highway, Pony Express, Mather, and Mather base headquarters is now gone, but the site is still there. Some of us would hope we could restore that or do something with that at some point. The whole Cold War thing that we're sort of investigating with the National Park Service, There probably is something we ought to worry about there. Yeah. You know, space race, Cold War. Significant things happen here, but I think that that kinda encompasses nicely. And, of course, we've got under under this some Native American resources that probably none of us fully understand.

Yeah.

What's there, where it might be, or how it might best be utilized.

If you read Margaret Bolton's little book from nineteen sixty something or other, she does have she does start off with a chapter about the Native Americans who were here.

Because I know I've seen that there are surveys done by the state, but some of them seem to be not particularly well done. Other work is probably well done. I just have never sorted that out, but that might be something we wanna look at.

Alright. I know you wanna say something.

Are we good?

No. He's got something.

I was just gonna say, I went back on Google Maps historical, and my neighbor's properties looked so bad for so many years. I think he might qualify.

Oh, ouch.

Dang a joke.

See what you and

at that note, Darcy, did you hear everything you're going to need? We do

we do have to be careful about that 50 year old house statement, though, because we've got how many 100 would be 50 years old? Hundreds and hundreds.

Really? When you consider modern day Rancho began to build in 1955, all of a sudden, makes the rest of us look very old.

Stop. Now those are over 70 years old, so

they're in control. Alright. Do you want do we have a motion, or do we wanna send the staff back to go come up with the policy? Is that what you wanted, Linda?

What do you think, Darcy?

Well, I I heard clear direction from two council members. I think we just need one more to

give the direction to Do it.

Okay. That's all we need is direction. I don't need a motion.

I think that that ag history, you know, whether it's wine or hops, mining history.

Can we do the rocket history? Can we please, Graham

Rocket history. The the Air Force history. The backside.

Yeah. Actually, the interesting thing is we grew we we think of specific things out here, like like the walnuts that the Williamson's planted and and pears and peaches. But Joseph Rootier was a Frenchman who came who got hired by Folsom to come out and manage his properties, which he had ultimately gotten from Leedsdorf through action of Abraham Lincoln. And he grew a much wider variety of things, you know, some I'll call them French plums or some other stuff like that. It was really the what's their names that brought the grapes in the early, very early nineteen hundreds.

I like that you're putting your hand up, David, like you said, remember? The nineteen hundreds when you were there. Remember, you've you showed up and you had the grapes?

Nineteen hundreds. Yes. That's true.

Not the majority of them.

So I wanna kinda just kinda frame a little bit. Kinda some of this conversation is around a little bit of it sounds like just kind of telling our historical story and some of the fine but some of this is related to and what this effort would be focused on is really looking at particular buildings and things to make sure if there's policy changes we need to make, that we go and make those changes to protect those buildings. The other part of this conversation we can we can talk about, think about, which is more about the kind of history and historical significance of some of these other places that may not relate to preservation or some of these other pieces.

The other thing we need Darcy's staff to research is establishing our own historic list. Sacramento County has one. Helen is almost correct. If you've moved a building, there has to be a reason for it to move in order for it to remain historic. So I never went through the process to put it on the National Register, but the county was perfectly willing to add it to their historic list of properties.

So for us the next step would be, once we have the list identified from you today, is to actually do the cultural significance research and studies to bring back for that further conversation. Because you're not picking the list right now, what kind of which how you want to kind of initiate it. This is really just making sure we have enough or have the list that's on your mind that we can when we bring back the information for these different properties, we didn't miss anything in that conversation.

So Cool. Thank you.

Thank you.

Alright. Next. Rancho Cordova Police Department update. Stacy, wanna announce it?

Nope. You've done a great job.

You're doing a great job today. Chief Matayo, get out here. Matayo, last last meeting? Last one. No. This is his last meeting.

Oh. This They come in. It's

terrifying.

So all the hard questions will be directed towards the retiring chief Tamayo, and all the easy ones will get towards the new chief, chief Hampton. That's the goal for you How

do you think you'd make them look better? Do you think red is whole uniform? No.

Alright. Go ahead. Alright. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, council members, city staff, and members of the public. Thank you for having me here. Matt Tamayo, Rancho Cordova Police Department. And, like we said, joining us is new chief or soon to be chief, Sean Hampton. I wanna go through the numbers for this last year as far as the crime stats and, pick out some, things that we've been working on and and share with you. So we'll start off with total calls for service. We have done a comparison in the last five years and it's, the first graph there is the total citizen initiated and officer initiated calls.

So, we've come down a little bit. I know the graphs look, highly different, but it's it's about 1,800 calls, for service. But this is anything from someone calling to report a suspicious vehicle in their neighborhood or an officer identifying a suspicious vehicle. And so in our dispatches tracking, this is how many calls and sort of what the calls for service over the last several years look like. Online reports, again, not too much difference over the last five years.

Little peaks and valleys, but, it seems we've been doing quite a bit of education in our neighborhood watch meetings, our Citizens Academy, and other engagements that we've been part of and letting people know that, hey, if you want, there is a online reporting option. And so it seems that some of that messaging has been getting out there and people are using it, more frequently. Moving into our crime stats for the year, these are all NIBRS, so that's your national incident based reporting system numbers. These are the numbers that we share with the federal government for overall tracking. And looking at the crime stats, some categories have gone up and some have gone down.

I can promise you that overall crime is down in the city, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. And then going through the categories, homicide, we have one listed there, and that has an asterisk next to it. And the reason for that is, if you recall back in June, there was an incident on the light rail, over at Mills Station in Mather Field, and the DA's office declined to prosecute citing a, self defense case. And so when that incident initially happened, it was cataloged in NIBRS as a murder. However, there are other, subcategories, one being justifiable homicide.

It hasn't moved yet, but I, believe it will be at some point. So for the time being, in order of transparency, we wanted to make sure that we listed it. So, your next category is rape. Pretty standard, throughout the last five years. Robbery.

Looking at the robbery stat, I thought it was a little high this year, and so we had our analysts sort of dig down deeper into it and look. And, what we found was 38% of those robberies were petty thefts that turned into robberies. And so as an example, that would be somebody ran into a liquor store or a gas station, grabbed a case of beer, and then ran out. The clerk chased them out, either detained them or tried to detain them. They turned around, pushed the clerk, hit the clerk, or said, hey.

I've got a knife or a gun, and the clerk let them go. And so I think that's part of the reason for the spike. I also looked back to 2024 to see if the numbers were comparable. And in 2024, it was about 30% of those 66 were similar circumstances. So it's come up a little bit, but not as high as those numbers suggest.

Aggravated assault, interestingly enough, it was the same as last year. Aggravated assaults include threats with a firearm, threats with a knife, domestic violence, any sort of assault where there's more of a significant injury. It could be two people got into a fight on the street and then went their separate ways, someone later reported it. And then when you look at person crimes total, we have 410 for the year. Moving into property

Sorry, chief. Could you repeat what is the previous what's aggravated assault?

So aggravated assault can be anything with serious bodily injury, could be threats with a gun, threats with a knife. It could be assault with either of those two weapons. It could be a shooting. It could be two people got into a fight and somebody got their, lip, split open or lacerated, anything with with serious injury.

Okay.

Moving into our property crimes, this is where we saw the biggest decreases. Burglaries went down, our larcenies, so these are the petty thefts, people stealing from, let's say, one of our big box stores or any other business, or residents. You know, maybe someone took a plant off of someone's patio. If it's reported to us, we catalog it. Motor vehicle theft is down significantly.

Arsons, this category was up. Looking at the arsons, we found that, a high percentage and I have a note. Let me find it. I'll have to find it later, but a high percentage was had a homelessness component. So these are warming fires.

These are things that people in that community set on fire, not necessarily to cause property destruction, but mostly to keep warm during the winter months. And then looking at property crimes total, we had a significant decrease. And so when we look at sort of crime over the last several years from 2023 to 2024, we had an 11 about an 11% decrease. And then this last year, '24 or in yeah. '24 to '25, we had a 15% decrease. Excuse me. Oh, yeah. And then overall, between those two years, we saw about a 25% decrease in overall crime in the city.

So just a just a a detailed question on larceny. When you describe taking a plant off a porch, does that include porch pirates?

It does. Yep. Yep. It includes

Oh, that's good.

Yeah. Looking at mail theft, this has been significant. We've talked about this a lot. We saw the DA's office today came out and dedicated a mail theft district attorney to the mail theft task force, which is I think is great movement. As you may know, sort of this mail theft task force idea started here, homegrown in Rancho Cordova.

We have a partnership with the United States Postal Inspector Service, and we've significantly, I think, not only made an arrest but some headway in curbing mail theft in this area. Of course, looking at these numbers, can see that it comes and goes. You'll see the peaks and valleys specifically starting in April '5, and those coincide with arrests we've made. So we'll see mail theft go up. We make an arrest, it drops off.

Then mail theft starts to go back up. We make an arrest and it drops off, and you can sort of see that cycle. And so, you know, these I do want to say and share and reiterate that these are the numbers provided to us by the United States Postal Inspector Service. We have a different set of numbers and they don't they're not equal. Obviously, the Postal Inspector Service numbers are better than ours as far as reporting.

And what we found is people are just reporting at one place or another. And what we want to reiterate is report it to both. Let us both know. Now that we have this formal partnership, we're going to get that information anyway. But it's always good for us to capture that data because we can go back and search it, use it to look at crime trends or likely neighborhoods that this is gonna occur and adjust our response accordingly.

We also find that people report it in social media and that may be, you know, helpful for them to vent, but we don't know, right? You have to report it to us. We do monitor social media and so sometimes we're able to pick that out. Community members will also send it to us and say, hey, I think, you know, this person said their mail was stolen and they put this picture on social media. So we do get some of that info, but I would ask the community to let us know for sure so we can capture that information.

Would it be okay when they post it on social media to tag you guys?

They could do that.

So that way it'd be something at a minimum. Right? Right. They don't

have to

do that maybe when you post these kind of things, say at least tag us so we're aware of such stuff is happening.

Yeah. I I mean, that helps. I would just say they'll call us also because tagging us on social media, it's not always monitored and we might get it twenty four hours later. We've had cases where people have called us and said, Hey, somebody just stole my mail, and we were able to track them down, you know, ten minutes, fifteen minutes later because of a great, you know, vehicle description or last known location of travel and things like that. And so we're not gonna get that right away on social media.

That is another way to report though, and and I would appreciate that. But my message is please, please call us and tell us right away when it happens. These are this is a listing of our sort of our successes with our mail theft team. And looking we started a relationship with our postal inspector back at the 2024, but really formalized that relationship in 2025. And so you can sort of see, if you go back, you look at these numbers of these arrests, they coincide with these peaks and valleys here.

And so what I do want to highlight is these four day, five day, one day operations. These are cops in cars at night watching mailboxes, along with our postal inspector partners, probation, and other regional partners that we have. Some of these were Rancho specific, and some of these were region wide specific. So the four day operation, that one was the entire Valley area was part of a of a directed operation to locate male thieves. So I think we've been fairly successful.

It certainly can get better. We're looking at expanding our partnership. We're looking at bringing in other agencies in the area. We're welcome to and we want to make it bigger because it is effective. And the partnership with the Postal Service lets us look at not only our state charges but federal charges which are much more severe and in, you know, when we arrest somebody on state charges, they may spend three months, six months, a year in jail depending on the nature of the charges. If it's federal, that might be five years to thirty years. So it's a significant difference.

Sorry. So those those arrests, are they in Rancho Cordova or with respect to a connection with the Rancho Cordova male theft?

They're all arrests that we've made in Rancho Cordova.

In Rancho Cordova.

Right. Well, we may have arrested somebody in Citrus Heights or a neighboring city but it's because of a crime they committed in Rancho Cordova.

Thanks. It's like whack a mole. You arrest one and another pops up.

Unfortunately, yes. Yes. Our DUI update or sorry, our traffic update with our motor team and DUI five is a dedicated vehicle. We have an officer that works a modified shift, so 6PM to 4AM. And his specific mission is traffic safety, but part of that includes DUI enforcement. And so this is just a summary of the activity they did over the year. We issued 3,200 citations. That's not all DUI citations, just to be clear. That's any traffic violation. Office of Traffic Safety provides us money every year, and so we do vehicle safety operations.

We do DUI operations. We do education and enforcement operations. An example of a education operation would be around Christmas time and other times throughout the year. We contact juveniles riding bicycles or scooters without helmets, and we give them a helmet. We give them an information sheet that they can share with their legal guardian or parent and, you know, with a goal to, hey, please be safe, wear your helmet.

DUI arrest, this is cumulative between our motor team and our dedicated traffic car at night. That's 68 over the year. And then DUI checkpoints, had two in twenty twenty five. And then citywide DUI arrests, this is the trend. We had more last year, but I attribute that increase, the 143 in 2025, to having that dedicated traffic safety unit at night.

Enforcement five, so this is one of the programs that we started this past year and we used data to determine the highest crime areas in the city and then just thought, hey, what can we do to address this crime? And so what we did is we had a staged approach. We created a map. We actually created two maps, two of the high crime areas in the city. And the high crime area was based on these crimes listed here, from aggravated assault to weapons violations, vandalism, theft, drugs, narcotics, robbery.

And so what we did is we created these maps. We initially put an officer in a vehicle, a marked vehicle, and said, Hey, this is your area. This is only your area. Drive around this area. Be visible. Say hi to people. Sit in parking lots. Go up and down every street. And the reason for that was studies have shown that an increased presence of an officer in an area has a cooling effect on crime. And even if an officer drives down a street, that cooling effect can last up to eight hours. And so we wanted to test it. Hey, is that true? And sure enough, it was. We saw just during that first phase a decrease in these type of crimes. We then went to the next phase, which was directed enforcement.

So start if a car needs to be pulled over, pull it over. If there's a warrant that needs to be served, let's serve that warrant. And we started that officer started conducting enforcement operations. The next phase was incorporating our special teams, so problem oriented policing, homeless outreach, crime suppression unit, motors, and they went in there and they conducted their missions in there. And then we went to the next phase, which is our partnership with Neighborhood Services, And we conducted a crime prevention through environmental design survey of the entire area.

And we didn't focus on private residences necessarily or specific businesses, but what we focused on is areas in which the city could enhance, fix, or upgrade to make that area safer. And through that partnership, we conducted a many page report. We shared it with Public Works and Micah, the city manager. And we found that some of that work was already being done, and some of that work is now being done to enhance those areas and hopefully continue the decrease in crime in those areas. We focus primarily on our first location throughout 2025.

And then sort of at the end '5, we transitioned to our secondary location. And we've already seen a decrease in crime there, not as high as the first area, but still a decrease. And so we're hoping that trend continues. And so looking at the graphs, just picked out a couple of the major decreases was burglaries. You can see in 2023, we were pretty high, but going into 2025, we've been able to lower it.

Weapons and drug arrests. Now, this stat went up, and we attributed that to the work that the officers are doing in the area. They're addressing specific type of crime. And so these were proactive. 18 of these 33 were proactive stops, meaning a search warrant was served, a vehicle stop, a person on probation was contacted or we did a probation search at their house.

And so these are on viewed activities which I think led to a majority of the increase. And then our service center. So if you don't know, our service center is open to the public for reports, for consultations, and for quite a few services that many people in our community don't know, I want to take time to highlight it. Of course, you can walk in, you can get information, we can point you in the right direction or handle what your issue may be there or get an officer there if it's something more higher level. They also answer the phone quite a bit and conduct consultations.

I guarantee the phone rang more than 6,509 times. This is just when we provided information that was relevant. A lot of times people call and wanna know about a community event or something like that and we transfer them or we share that info, that wouldn't qualify as a consultation. Walk in telephone reports, these are people that wanna report crimes, maybe don't have access to a computer or don't want to. They wanna come in and so one of our volunteers will take that crime report.

Ranch Cordova Cares, This is a program that many people don't know exists, but this is where our volunteers call people in the community just to check on them. I think it's a great service. Not many people know. We want to get the word out. If you have, you know, a mother, a father, an aunt or uncle who's elderly, who's alone, or you know of somebody who's alone, refer them to us and our volunteers will call them and check on them from time to time.

Online reports, we have a computer actually in our lobby where people can come in, use the computer if they don't have access, and file an online report, and we can walk them through the process. Vacation checks, this is something else we offer that people don't realize. But if you're going on vacation, you can call the service center and let us know what times you'll be gone and we'll drive by your house and check on you. We don't have a wake up phone service yet, Council Member Little, but we could start that if you would like.

You got to drive by his house.

Yeah. We can chirp volunteer a hours. So almost everybody that works at our front counter is a volunteer. And this is amazing. So just this year, these people from our community, their Rancho Cordova residents, donated five thousand five hundred and thirty seven point five volunteer hours, and that's just this year. If you look at those people individually, some of them have been volunteering for ten, fifteen years in our service center. And so several people by themselves are in the tens of thousands of volunteer hours. So I think that's pretty amazing and the support that we get from them. VIPS Patrol, so this is volunteers and policing. We have a truck that they drive around, and we log the hours that they're out.

And so we had eight sixty hours of people driving around at patrol. They may be doing vacation checks. They might be picking up a bicycle for us to rehab to give to a child or other things as assigned. And for vacation check requests, I just want to put out there ranchcordovapd.com and that's how you navigate to it. And that's it.

Alright. Thank you. Sounds great. Any public comment?

Yes. Caitlin Sheehan. And following Caitlin will be Autumn.

Alright.

You'll have up to three minutes.

Awesome. I'm Caitlin. I'm in the Cordova Meadows, part of town. I come to you today to talk about concerns about the flock ALPR system. While I understand our police department is a contract with the sheriff, it is our name on the flock contract and our money paying for it.

Currently, there are multiple other cities and counties in California that have found flock to be in violation of state law. Five of those cities have modified, suspended, or canceled their contract due to this violation. San Francisco and San Jose have been facing lawsuits related to their usage. Most locally joining the conversation is Woodland, where fewer than 1% of the nearly 300,000 plates read have been tied to any legal concerns. Woodland community members suspect that their data has been accessed by other organizations on behalf of federal agencies.

Current California law prohibits sharing that information with agencies outside of the state. Today, I'm asking that we suspend the system until we confirm no unintended illegal use has occurred and the public have more consideration in the implementation. I want to put some emphasis on the public consideration point here. The first time I could find ALPRs mentioned in council meeting minutes was from June 2023, where both the presenter and two residents voiced concerns about privacy and urged counsel to factor that into the conversation. After that presentation, ALPRs do not show up in meeting agendas until the approval of the over $1,000,000 contract in December 2024.

In the nineteen minutes of that presentation, and questions from counsel, crime and criminals were the subject of at least 12 different points, while residents were not mentioned once. At that time, we already had a traffic camera system in place, where ten minutes prior, the police department had spoken about how that system had helped solve mail theft problems. But mail theft was the reason for implementation sold to the public in articles and press releases of August or in August 2025. Beyond the lack of consideration for residents, there are severe privacy issues found from the flock system that the public is becoming increasingly more aware of. U.

S. Senator Wyden from Oregon wrote the FTC requesting investigation due to cybersecurity practices. Some concerns were raised due to the potential for hacking of the system, as had already happened to multiple accounts. The information that was stolen was then found for sale on the dark web. There's another researcher who exposed over 60 cameras just live streaming with no password required.

While I can go on for days about the privacy concerns I've learned about, I'll leave you with this one. There's a severe lack of transparency from FLAC as they, refuse an outside audit and fight to silence any concerns raised about their system. We as consumers need to require better from any vendor that our city works with, especially when it comes to privacy. So, again, I urge counsel to make a decision to suspend while investigation and conversation can happen. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next speaker is Autumn. Is your last name Grishop? Okay.

Close. Grishop.

Thank you. Yes. Hello.

My name is Autumn. I've been in here four years, and this is my first week council meeting. I've learned a lot, so thank you. I'm here today. I'm concerned about the use and possible expansion of the flock ALPR cameras in Rancho Cordova.

While marketed as public safety tools, these systems collect real time vehicle data and create significant private security and financial risks. Currently, Rancho Cordova has 52 or more of these cameras within city limits, and I feel that having these cameras or adding more is a huge concern. First, the California state auditor found that the license plate images were shared widely without considering whether recipients had a right or need for data and that 99.9% of stored images belonged to people that were not suspected of any crime. This February 2026, Mountain View, California canceled the flocked contract after they discovered that over 250 unauthorized agencies performed over 600,000 searches of local data. This lack of oversight raises serious concerns about compliance with California, s b three four privacy law.

Second, technical investigations have shown serious vulnerabilities in the system. Flat cameras have been exposed on the open Internet without password protection. Sensitive API keys were discovered in the firmware code, and multifactor authentication was not usually required until 2024. Everyone in this room has to use MFA to sign into their emails, so why wasn't this required for the sensitive data of every person that drives through the city? Reporting noted that even after outreach efforts, approximately 3% MFA?

Multifactor authentication. Thanks. Reporting noted that even after outreach efforts, approximately 3% of agencies had not enabled MFA, potentially leaving billions of records exposed to this day. Third, mail theft is a crime of opportunity that these cameras cannot physically prevent. The cameras only record vehicle data after an incident occurs and can be bypassed by using stolen plates or masked vehicles.

Meanwhile, the city is paying approximately $3,000 per camera per year for a subscription system that independent reporting has shown does not reliably reduce crime. In San Marino, California, burglaries actually increase after installation despite marketing claims of up to 60% crime reduction. Finally, there have been documented cases of misuse. In one case, Texas deputies abused 83,000 flock cameras to track a woman seeking an abortion. In another case, a Wisconsin officer was criminally charged for using the system to track his ex girlfriend, demonstrating that abuse is often discovered only after the harm occurs.

Before expanding the surveillance infrastructure, I think the city should demonstrate that the existing systems are secure, necessary, and proportionate to the risks that they are intended to address. I asked the council to prioritize less invasive public safety investments, protect the sensitive data of the residents and city, and to consider removing flock cameras altogether. I emailed a longer list with included references and data that I would encourage you to read. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

In addition to the two public speakers that we've heard from, we also received five public comments via email. Those individuals who submitted those public comments are Julia Shaw, Kristen Gast, Autumn Grishup, Sarah Moore, and Amanda Bartell. Those have been distributed to the council, placed on the city's website, and printed for the public in the back of the council chambers.

Alright. Thank you very much. Council. Anyone got anything? Siri? Linda? No? Jojo.

I think at the very least, to our constituents, we can respond to their points in writing. Maybe staff can about some of their concerns, which one we which ones we think are founded, which ones we think are unfounded, room for improvement, just because this caught the community's concern.

I think I think it's fine. You guys can tell them all the security that we do because not every city is as technology advanced as ours, and we wouldn't leave an open AI or MFA left off of computers or anything of those levels. So it's good to kinda work it through

and show them. And I agree with Joe. It's okay.

Answer them. Tell them how secured our system is because we don't allow the things that other cities do that would allow MFA not to be put on a camera or that you could act openly access a camera by scanning IP addresses or that someone would reasonably hack through our our encryption walls because we're different like that. But And and the conversation will continue. Yeah. Of course.

Maybe the city manager can address some of these concerns. Is there anything that you could add of how we're using our surveillance for LPRs?

Sure. So I'll probably defer to the to the one of the two chiefs over, but I think generally I think we do have a plan to kind of produce some different documentation as far as what it is and what it isn't and be able to produce, you know, some of this information for the public to continue to see what is happening. But I think if there are items that I think Chief Tamayo or you want to address of just kind of what it is, what it isn't real quick and then kind of be able to address any of those right now.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the commenters are not incorrect in the information that they're sharing. Those are valid concerns. That did happen. I think, you know, some of those things that happen in other states, whether it's a camera or a privileged database, you know, we have files on people that we've arrested before.

Anything can be abused. Anything has the opportunity to be abused. Our goal and our mission is to make sure that it isn't. And so to talk about some of the agencies in California that have gotten away from FLoC, what they found was in the FLoC user agreement at the time this has since been corrected by FLoC, but at the time, you had to physically go in as an agency and select who you were going to share with and who you were not going to share with. I don't know who's in charge of those other FLAC systems, but I can speak on behalf of our system.

Ours was always we didn't share with anybody out of state. We didn't share it with any federal agencies. I understand immigration enforcement is a huge concern and we were not sharing that information. And so I think our program, our IT department that manages our FLoC contract was well aware of those and has taken steps to make sure that our data is secure. And FLoC does take pictures.

It takes pictures of vehicles and license plates in given locations wherever there's a FLAC camera. It doesn't follow your car anywhere. It only takes pictures of that intersection. Now, reasonably, if there's a network of FLAC cameras, you might be able to tell where someone drove during a given time. What you're not gonna be able to see is where they ended up, what they did in between, and where they started.

And so we don't just use it for mail theft. It's obviously a tool for mail theft. I will say since our flock network went live, we had 19 mail theft arrests and 13 of them were as a result of FLAC. I'm not gonna tell you it was directly because of FLAC because it wasn't, but FLAC was used. It was one piece of information that we used in a broader investigation to locate that particular vehicle.

We also use flock for many other things. We use it for theft from a store and we get a license plate number right away when someone calls in. We use it for parental kidnapping cases. We use it for regular kidnapping cases. We use it from any crime from theft all the way up to shootings and worse. And so it is a valuable tool for us. We don't use it singularly as the only piece of information to make a case. It's also been used to exonerate people or vehicles from, you know, hey, saw a white car. Well, we know it's not this white car because they weren't involved and we're able to tell by that license plate data. So it is a tool that we use.

It has been valuable. One of the other comments was the camera doesn't show any reduction in crime in an area. And I can see I don't necessarily disagree with that. It is just a camera. But what it does allow us to do is arrest the people committing those crimes.

And the downstream effect is if that person is not committing crimes anymore, then maybe that area is safer. And so, it's not a cure all. I don't think there is any law enforcement technology that's going to 100% stop crime, but it is a valuable tool for investigative follow-up and, efficiency, and immediate, resolution of some of these cases where historically all we would know is there was a white car involved. And now it provides us a lead to resolve that case.

Alright. So good. Thank you. Alright. Next. Stacy, you go ahead and read the next subject, please? See, I got it on the last one.

Fiscal year twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six midyear financial report.

Alright. Good evening. Kim Dre and Carra Giorgio, chief financial officer. So we just heard some numbers from the police department, and now we're gonna continue that trend. And here's some numbers, with our midyear financial report. So this is the first year, fiscal year 2526. As you all know, we adopt two year budgets here, and so we are currently in year one of the budget that was adopted in June 2025. And as you'll recall, during those budget discussions, we were anticipating an economic slowdown. We were already seeing indicators, of some of our key revenues kinda starting to slow. And so overall, our revenues for this year were budgeted 2% below actuals for last fiscal year.

At the midyear mark, so we look basically at the first six months of the fiscal year, but we also kind of take it a couple months into the seventh and eighth month to just start looking at trends. And overall, revenues and expenditures in the general fund are really kind of performing as expected and in line with sort of our initial budget estimates. And so even though we're talking tonight about some signs of slowdown, those were anticipated. These are normal economic times. And so we do think that overall, the city budget remains strong, and we will remain balanced.

So just wanted to kind of show some numbers here on our revenue side. This is a lot of information. The last column is really just how the numbers this is what the revenues look like in the general fund as of the six month mark. And as you can see, you know, we don't really get a lot in the first six months of the year. So we have to use a lot of kind of other sources of data to start doing some predictions on how the revenues overall are going to perform.

But I think one thing is clear is, I talked a lot about in the last five years, we saw basically a 35% growth in our general fund revenues, which was extraordinary. However, this year, we are not going to see that continuation of that growth. That is the reality of where we are. I think, overall, we expect things to remain pretty stagnant, from the prior year. So I'm gonna go into a couple of these key revenues, in the next slide just to provide some context overall of how we're doing.

So property tax, this is our largest source of revenue in the general fund, and this is really the revenue source right now that is kind of helping us kind of move forward and maintain a pretty balanced general fund budget, and it's helping absorb some of the decreases we're seeing in some of our other revenue sources. So property tax revenues as a whole this year are up 9%, So that's a pretty extraordinary jump, and I'm going to give a little bit more detail in the next slide about that. And we are expected to just kind of slightly exceed our budget projections for the current year. And, you know, in the prior slide, when I had property tax up, you see kind of there's no number in there right now, that first line. We get the first installment of property tax in January, and, this year, this the county assessor's office has actually implemented a new system, and they have not yet been able to tell us.

We got the money, but we don't know how to how to allocate it yet. We don't have that information from the assessor's office. So we're still working with them and hope they get that in the next couple months. So I wanted I thought these were some interesting kind of numbers just to share with you guys on property tax and kind of what's going on with our assessed value. So this first chart at the top kinda just shows, all the cities in Sacramento County and the assessed value change, from last fiscal year to this fiscal year.

And so in green, you'll see Rancho Cordova highlighted at 9.5%, and it's a solid three percentage points higher than the next closest city, which was Galt, with Folsom close behind. And then you can see sort of everyone else in the three, four, and 5% range. So 9.5% is an extraordinary jump one year over the next. And then the slide or the chart below, the value change by cause, I put this in here because, again, this provides some context of why are our revenues, or why is our assessed value growing by 9.5%. And as you look at that sort of on the far right, you can see kind of the percentage that is attributable to that change in value.

And so kind of if you go three down, you see prior year transfer of ownership, and all the way over to right, you see 48%. And so what that's saying is that almost half, almost 50% of that growth that we're seeing is a result of basically properties that were kind of assessed at a much lower value that were sold and then now are being assessed at a much higher market value. And so 50% of our overall growth is is a result of that turnover, that property turnover. The other one that I think is kind of a lot of people will think, oh, we're a growing city, new construction. That does, in fact, add quite a bit to our assessed value.

And so you go down a couple more to the new construction residential, and you'll see 14%. So those are just some of the, driving factors that are contributing to Rancho Cordova doing extremely well in property tax.

And then I Yeah. Just in terms of the whole growing strong neighborhoods effort, you could you could come to the conclusion that this transfer of ownership would be properties in the older part of Rancho that were actually, some could even be still be pre prop 13 assessments, and that maybe people are moving into original Rancho Cordova as much as they are moving out East Of Sunrise. Absolutely. And interestingly enough,

you just gave me perfect segue to the next slide, so thank you for that. And that's exactly what this graph depicts. As you'll see, so it talks about kind of the last time a home had a assessed value change by decade. And so kinda starting on the left hand side, the large navy blue means that 35% of the city's single family housing stock has sold since 2020. Wow.

And then as you go down to the green section, an additional 32% of the city's housing stock has sold since 2010. And so kind of along to kind of explain some of what's going on as we look through, I mean a big percentage already has sold within the last basically two decades. And then as we see some of those homes that are probably assessed at a very low value, those are starting to the numbers are starting to really diminish. And so I do think that these kind of dramatic increases that we're seeing this year probably will not continue at this rate. I think we had a quite an extraordinary year, but just gonna give some context of what's happening here.

Yeah. Mortgage rates are not so great now, so I would assume there's gonna be less property sales going on, although I don't I don't have numbers on that. But the old rule of thumb was every property in California would change hands once every ten years. So seven?

Seven. Wow.

That's wild. Seven years.

So that's just, you know, I thought this was some interesting different data. I'm trying to mix it up a little bit and keep this stuff interesting. Moving into sales tax. And so for years, sales tax was kind of leading the charge and was the revenue source that the city was seeing some pretty significant year over year increases. That has definitely slowed, and that is not just specific to Rancho Cordova.

That is a really a state of California and really a nationwide trend that we're seeing. So overall, the statewide outlook for sales tax, very flat, both this year and looking into next year. The performance for this year, what we're seeing in our, end of year prediction puts us, down 3,600,000.0 from our high in 2324, and this is the lowest our sales tax. This Bradley 1% Bradley Burns has been since pre COVID. So, you know, really seeing a level set here, with sales tax this year and even doing, performing slightly below where we expected it to, when we adopted the budget last spring.

And there's a few reasons for that. One, we had a significant business called Teachers Curriculum, that has relocated its operations to Mountain View, so that is a change that was not anticipated in the budget. We also have a couple other large businesses where, and this happens they're remitting sales tax to the city, and suddenly that sales tax starts going to the county instead. And so we have to have an audit done and get that fixed. Sales tax is a very messy industry. And so those are sort of being investigated. Eventually, they get corrected, but sometimes it takes two or three years to get corrected, so they won't be corrected likely this year.

And then the county doesn't give the money back.

They eventually gets all sorted out.

But

How do we handle that? I mean, because most people probably don't realize, but you can have a business with a number of employees in Rancho Cordova reporting sales tax on sales here. Could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales tax to us. And then for no apparent reason, no change in, like, internal strategy or employees or anything, they decide to book it somewhere else versus here. Yep. So the sales tax follows wherever they file the papers.

Point of sale.

Or whatever they put on the form Mhmm. Seems very arbitrary.

Well, we so we do have a consultant firm that we work with that

basically when that happens.

That this is what they do for a living, and they will we go we have quarterly meetings, and we'll review those sales tax numbers. They dive into it. And when they see a delta, they start to investigate. Okay. Does this make sense? Was this supposed to happen, or is this an error? And that sometimes that research that, like I said, can take years to kinda get settled out.

And and sometimes it's an error not in our favor from a sense of, like, sometimes these are just legitimately not being reported correctly, and we bear the benefit of that, and we have to be the ones that pay the other direction of of those errors. So

we don't like it when that happens,

We don't, and it's painful. But I think partly that's because of our business mix here is a little bit different, but because of our strong business base and business to business transaction, that actually is a little more complicated than, you know, I know I really bought something here in Rancho Cordova. It's the business to business where you see some of this interplay a little bit more. And so we sometimes have a harder time, like, kind of being consistent because of the of our business mix that we have.

And then the last item that I'm just gonna mention, there has been a change in how sales tax for used vehicle sales is being remitted. And so kind of historically, those would just get remitted by each individual used auto dealership to CDTFA, and then they would distribute us that sales tax accordingly. And several years ago, there was actually an assembly bill that changed that, where now that sales tax from used car sales is going to the DMV. Then the DMV sends it to CDTFA, who then gives it to the cities. This just And everybody takes a cut.

Well, and so what ended up happening, rather than how we've historically gotten sales tax remitted by each dealership and we would know how that dealership was kind of performing, we just are now getting a lump sum payment for used vehicle sales. And the amount that we received last quarter was significantly below what we would have expected to see. Again, kind of working through some of those differences, but that is probably not something that we're gonna see get fixed this fiscal year. But at some point, it will get corrected. Another one that we talked, extensively about during the budget was building permits, and we knew that, you know, overall, we're seeing signs of slowdown, and that has, in fact, been the case.

So for the first six months of this fiscal year, we issued two thirty seven production home permits, which was basically 50% of what we had done a year prior. So overall, performing basically in line with what we had expected. This is a slowdown that we had accounted for when we put the budget together. And so we still anticipate we're going to be within the budget on that. And then on the commercial side, actually, we saw revenues in the first half of the year actually already exceed the budget, which is great news.

And so that's, helping us in some of those areas where we might be not be doing as well, and, that was attributable to some of our large valuation projects, such as the Trader Joe's cold storage and Amazon, which have contributed to that. So as a whole, permits are expected to meet or maybe even slightly exceed budget, but just kind of noteworthy that that slowdown that we anticipated is in fact being seen. And then a few other revenues to mention, transient occupancy tax, which is our hotel tax. That has, you know, we've seen some fluctuations in that in recent years, and we're starting to see some slight trend upward, some positive momentum there. So overall, we do expect that that will end the year above budget.

Interest rate cuts kind of started to happen a little bit more quickly than maybe we'd initially anticipated in the budget, so interest earnings may miss the mark slightly. But as a whole, a lot of this was anticipated. We did expect to see the slowdown. And overall, the budget is performing as as we expected, and we do expect to end the year still balanced. General fund expenditures, overall are at 38%, as of the midyear point.

And while it may seem like it should be closer to 50%, oftentimes because a lot of our services are contractual, it might be just because we haven't received all those invoices and paid them. So we have kind of done some analysis. And overall, expenditures are basically trending within budget. A couple things that are just kind of different here. So staff salaries and benefits, where we have seen in recent years those salaries and benefits coming in quite a bit under budget.

That was largely attributable to a lot of salaries and benefits being charged to reimbursable development activity. So as we see that development activity slow down and we see probably more staff time being charged to projects that are not reimbursable, we're starting to see those numbers kinda tick up, which, again, was expected. So overall, we expect the budget to end the year within or the numbers to end within budget at the end of the year. And finally, our community enhancement and investment fund. These the local add on sales tax, as I've mentioned before, the method the methodology for how those sales tax revenues are collected differs from the 1% Bradley Burns that I talked about a couple slides ago.

So because that is different, this is actually performing better. And overall, we had budgeted revenues at $11,900,000 and we actually expect them to exceed the budget, closer to $12,400,000 So hopefully, that continues. And so if those do continue and we come in over budget at the end of the year, we'll return and kind of talk with counsel about the best way to utilize those dollars, but we wanna make sure that those actually come to fruition before we make plans for them. So that concludes my presentation, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Great. Nothing.

You got anything? Oh, wait. Any public comment?

We do. Helen Whalen Bashaw.

Come on, Helen. She's from Tara Grande,

if you

didn't know that.

I've got a question regarding, your the methodology used prior for the car sales. You mentioned dealers. What percentage were you getting prior to going to DMV with the private car sales between citizen to citizen?

So the used car sales, the 1%, would be based on where registered. So if a car was purchased here Rancho Cordova at a used car dealership, the one there's a difference between

the one I I what I wanna know is, owner to owner, no Oh. No middle person as a dealership?

That I don't know offhand.

Because that was something you might wanna look at. Because you're a lot of sales don't even go through dealers now. Haven't been for a while. My 22 registrations didn't go through anybody but me and the person buying them. Thank you, Ellen. Alright.

Thank you very much. Good job on projections. The federal government will be calling you shortly. Alright. Any future agenda items? Puppy? Nothing. Alright. Meeting adjourned.