Area Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

Okay, we are calling to order Thursday, July 16th, 2026. The time is 637, the Cobb Area Council July meeting. We will start with a roll call.

Jake Strickler.

Absent.

Kathy McCarthy. Just talking. Oh, okay.

Here.

Myself, present. Chris Nettles. I'm here.

Present.

Magdalena Valderrama.

Not here. Absent. Absent.

Joe Schneider. Out of the country. Okay, that's good.

Okay, we'll stand for pledge. 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.

While you're all still standing, if you just stand back up, I just want to take a moment here to recognize someone very important to us. Thomas lost his son, and I just want to say our condolences, and let's just have a moment of silence for him. Thank you.

Thank you, Paul. With Jake not being here, I get to be vice chair and run the meeting. Move us along. So we will start with an approval of the agenda.

I'll make a motion to approve the agenda.

Second. Any other discussion? Okay, all in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Thank you. We have an agenda. Hopefully you've had a few minutes to look at the minutes expertly drafted by Chief Paul Duncan.

Thank you.

I'll move to accept the minutes from June 8, 2026.

second any other discussion okay all in favor of accepting these minutes aye raise your hand are there any opposed all right we have minutes it is now time for short announcements

Thank you.

I have a switch. Hi, Robert Stark, president of the Mountain Lions. Thank you for coming. Thank you to the CAC for taking part in this community. Just a quick bit. The berries have been ordered. This year we're getting 500 pounds, not 600 pounds. There will be more cobblers for sale, less individual servings because we could not sell enough of the cobbler pies last year, so we're going to make more of them this year. They will be 22.5% larger than last year. And we hope everyone and everything goes smoothly for the Cobbler Festival. I'd like to remind folks that we have bingo here every Saturday night. We open at 6.30. Bingo begins at 7.30. And you're welcome to come here. We have food. We have drinks. And we have bingo. Thank you. Thank you, Rob.

Thank you.

Hello, Cobbites, Margo Kambara, Lake County General Plan Advisory Committee representative speaking for myself. It's back, the general plan. Final draft and your local area plan. Final draft, it's posted at this website, lakecounty2050.org. Look under documents, then look under general plan. That's where you're gonna find the latest draft of the general plan plus Cobb Mountain area plan. so you want to take a look at cob area plan make sure that your suggestions are in there there is a separate document that has a log of the suggestions that were made and if your suggestion isn't in there you might be able to find your suggestion and then find the reason why it wasn't included something else to keep in mind is that the planning commission will be looking at the general plan the local area plans at its meeting on Thursday August 13th it's going to be held as a workshop style meeting public is invited then at the next the following Planning Commission meeting on Thursday August 27th the focus will be on the environmental impact report for the general plan the board of supervisors will be considering the general plan the specific date hasn't been set but it's expected to be sometime in september and that too will be open to the public thank you thank you margo okay now we would take public and board comment on any non-agenda item you're limited to three minutes

Good evening, I'm Tom Slade and I thought I should explain myself because I speak fairly often here and When I come here, maybe you understand, it's always FYI. I'm never here to convince anybody. It's never a sales job. And I look into some things very closely, like when I lived in Vallejo in the late 70s, there was going to be a lot of growth. I bought books on land use planning. So I would speak at the meetings. I had a pretty good idea of what I was talking about. And that is what I do. So when I bring things here, it's things I've looked into in depth. you can take a look or not, like COVID, remember the days you could not question COVID, and well, we can now. And so I had some, I questioned it all the way along. Oh, and what I want to say is, and Professor Nettles will confirm, there are people whose minds are closed, and no matter what you show them, they will just argue with you. And other people have open minds, and they will listen. And those are the kind of people I'm just asking you just to take a look. So that's usually why I'm here, just FYI. So thank you.

Thank you, Tom.

Thanks, Tom.

Hi, Cobbites. Margo Kambara back. General Plan Advisory Committee representative speaking for myself. Two days ago, the Board of Supervisors authorized the addition of an energy element to the General Plan. This is a positive step. Ideally, the team drafting the energy element will include many suggestions and points already made by the public concerning energy and the locations for energy projects. Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Paizka recently said that the county should set the table to prepare for energy development projects. Part of the table setting or developing an energy policy should include the following. defining revenue participation, defining local labor participation, defining safety standards, and defining infrastructure protections regardless of permitting pathway, state or county. A properly set energy policy table can promote informed and productive discussions between county representatives and energy developers. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors set its expectations that the ad hoc energy policy development committee produced the first draft of the energy policy for the county. The draft is due 60 days from July 14th. Ideally, the ad hoc committee will have meaningful engagement with the public, including residents who are subject matter experts with decades of executive level experience in the energy and finance industries. Thank you.

Thank you, Margo. any anyone else okay uh supervisor jessica paiska is not here so we will strike that from our agenda of course i keep moving my face so supervisor paiska is not here so we can strike that from the agenda and we can go on to the fire storm season update with paul duncan

Thank you. I do have a new program that we're putting in place for Cobb residents. We've been asked about notification for the copter when they're doing just kind of night flying stuff that's really not a fire and it's not during training season. So we have established a group me. So this is a notification system. I'll set the QR code over here. You can just sign up for it. It's one way notification and it's coming right out of the hell attack base. So if they need to make a night flight, they will be posting to this group and it'll be notification just for us. I'm not advertising this to the rest of the county because they're not as impacted as the folks who live on the mountain so the intent is just to add a little confidence to the folks that live up here when you hear the copter running at night that there's not a fire we don't know about or something going on so you'll have that sign up i'll set it over on the table and you can sign up for that we did just put a brand new water tender in service it's pretty exciting the old ones from 1984 just replaced that with a brand new unit very exciting there we have two brand new engines that are also going to be put in service they have been delivered working on just some final repairs for them but we will be putting one at the Cobb station that's station six two and the Hidden Valley station that's station six three we will advertise out to the communities about a push-in ceremony and that's where we invite the public up to push the engines into the apparatus Bay for them to exist there and then the last item I have is some grant funding work that the South Lake County Fire Protection District is doing in the Middletown area so that is grant funded and is with the South Lake County Fire Protection crew out there so if you see them out there that's what they're doing and that is it for me Tom go ahead hold on

When I hear fire incidents, sometimes I say, do you want to reset the timer? And what's that about?

Oh, when you hear on the radio that they're on a fire and they say reset the timer?

Yeah, what's that about?

On a structure fire, we set a 20-minute timer. because the newer structures are really are built with a lot of components that fail early in a fire. So we set that 20 minutes timer basically from the time the fire starts to the time it ends and every 20 minutes we're notified to check for structure stability and then also that the firefighters have an evolution when you have an air pack on You shouldn't be on that for more than 45 minutes. So that gives us two evolutions of air packs and it's check for structural stability every 20 minutes. So when they say we're checking for your 20 minute timers up, that's a cue to the incident commander to check for structural stability, to do an accountability check. So there's checking to make sure everybody's here and we're not missing anybody. And the other is the air pack usage because it's a lot to it. So that's what the timer is. But thanks for asking. That's a great, great question.

Did you have a date for that push-in ceremony?

It should be within the next week here. The final repairs are just about done with that new engine, so it'll be at the Cobb Fire Station within a week, and we'll put it out on social media.

Okay, great.

I can put it out to the mail list if we want.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Don't you think everyone would want to know?

Perfect.

Thank you.

Sure.

Okay, treasurer's report. Chris?

I'll go fast. We only had two transactions last month from our general fund, one for $172. It's the storage unit. And then, of course, our $300 that we lovingly pay the Lions Club every month to have this meeting here. And you can see the current account balances for the various accounts under current account balances as of yesterday. And the operating budget balance is about $39,832 and some change. We also have the $48,000 small business loan fund sitting there. So we've got close to $88,000 in net assets. And there you go. If you have any specific questions, I'll entertain them now. Right now we have no standard set up for that. When we got the grant originally from the San Francisco Home Loan Bank, we set up a revolving loan fund. And it turned out to be the person that we were paying to administer the loans and get the payments and everything was charging us more than we were making an interest. And we decided to put a hold on it until we can get a better system in place. We also didn't have the loan committee that would look at these applications and decide who to give the loan to and so therefore we have no real standards for giving loans anymore so a couple of things need to happen before we can start that loan fund back up again that's right we have no criteria to apply that's part of it that's part of the issue the whole system needs to be

Revised, reinvented, and then administrated by someone before we can get those funds out.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And people do inquire about it occasionally and from time to time. And the unfortunate reality is it's a fairly big job for us to do something with.

Yeah. So if you know someone who loves to do that sort of thing, please send them our way.

We need a committee of at least four or five people to do it. And pulling that committee together, every time I ask somebody, they're like, I can't.

Yeah.

So as soon as we can pull together a committee of committed people, committed committee. So he would be on it. Yes. Yeah. probably one of the other limit to to be on committee to sitting board people but you're on my radar now be careful okay I've got I've got one other person that has has expressed an interest as well so we may be able to fire up something fairly quickly Absolutely. It would be nice. I mean, I think we could take it up to $50,000 with some of the money that we get from the Cobbler Festival. I like round numbers. And some of the things that we've been entertaining is changing it from a loan program to a small grant program and just handing people the money. We have to be careful with that because we don't want, yeah, we can't look like we're just handing our friends money, right? So there have to be criteria in place. It has to be really clear. It has to be well communicated and fair. And who can ask for money? Can somebody just come in and say, I've got a business idea? Or do they have to be incorporated with a board? I mean, that's all the things that we'd have to figure out.

Yeah. Yeah, the caterer.

And that would be consistent with what we originally envisioned this fund for. It was intended to be small loans that help people get stuff that they needed to just keep doing business. But I'm not sure that I mean, there was a there was a period of time during the pandemic when they were just giving out money. And so nobody was interested in this money. And now a few thousand dollars doesn't seem like it's enough to help anybody. So we have to give this some deep thought, what's gonna be useful and what's not going to be, open us up to criticism about favoritism. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for the question.

Yeah, I had something from Meg Delaina that said Loch Lomond Community Firewise Fiscal Project of the Seaguar Springs Redevelopment Association is continuing its weeknight fundraising dinners until Labor Day to contact Susanna Morandon for details and have a number for her. And then also from Elliot with a statement he's not going to make it to the Cabaret Council meeting but would like to advise on their CWPP project. Although we have to postpone the second annual Cobb Forest and Fire Summit, we are going to work to reschedule it for October. Cal Pine has agreed to be the official sponsor of the event. Stay tuned. We have scheduled two training sessions for our community citizens science team that will do the on the ground verification and refinement of government data about our Cobb Mountain area. Teams will be trained to use field recorders to evaluate 40 plus key sites that are in the area for fire vulnerability and fuel model characteristics. The four hour training sessions will be held at the Glock Lomond Firehouse and given on July 23rd and July 29th. If folks are interested in participating and learning about the Cobb ecosystem, please contact Jessica Lytle at Jessica, J-E-S-S-Y-C-A dot S-S-C-R-A dot org. And that is from Elliot.

Thank you. Yep. So that was a Fireways Community Report and a Forest Health Committee Report doubled up. communications committee I would just say that weekly check-ins continue please have your radios on and monitoring and if you don't want to hear all the traffic you want to just be listening for an emergency you want to turn to channel 9 so that's the communications committee economic development committee we've had no meeting so there's no report blackberry cobbler fest We had a big week. The golf course has been reacquired by Hank. I guess there's an offside chance that in the next 43 days it could change if someone came and really, really wanted it. They could pay the county a lot more money and get it. But we're happy to be working with Hank again. He's very much interested in continuing the work of the Black Braid Cobbler Festival and his first priorities are water and mowing and I don't know if we're going to need a team of volunteers for that or not, but he seemed pretty confident that they can get that taken care of. And once that was all in place, we stopped treading water, and we have two platinum sponsors, returning sponsor of Calpine at the Geysers. Yay, thank you. Thank you, Calpine. Which they had previously already said they would do it. And then... Sutter. Sutter, thank you. Don't want to say the wrong one. Sutter Health is back as a platinum sponsor as well. And... We have music and sound lined up, five different acts with expanded hours. We're going to open at 10 and stay till 6. So you can come earlier in the morning when it's cooler and come later in the afternoon when it's cooler and be in the shade.

We're going to have cooling stations.

Cooling stations with springs, water, misting. It's called misters. What can I tell you, music, oh, there will be the refrigerated beer vending truck again, yay. There will be porta-potties again, so between the music and the beer and the porta-potties and the festival place location will be all right, not to mention the almost 100 vendors. So we are all set to go. fewer fewer food vendors yeah again we kind of were treading water that's what I keep saying for a couple weeks while we figured out what was happening with the golf course so a lot more communication will be coming forth to the vendors but yes overall fewer vendors and we'll be meeting monthly monthly weekly we're meeting weekly at the pizza place on mondays at 6 p.m right that's that's where the monthly came from it came from the mon and monday so yeah every monday from now on um any other questions oh question sorry mr stark If you shout it loud enough, I'll repeat it for you, and then you don't have to get up.

I would just, Robert Stark, I would just say that last year when we mowed, it was being watered.

Yeah.

It's not being watered now. I know. yeah his first priority is to get the leaks fixed he's got work to do but I would say if it doesn't if it's not damp I would ask the South Lake County Fire Protection District to have a unit ready if we have to mow it bone-dry

and and I think also we could bring in some water tender people to come and hose it down before I just want to make it official that's all okay we're right across the street yeah call anytime right on thank you right there gonna go all the way around to get to it okay any other questions or thoughts comments concerns otherwise oh

Next meeting. Next meeting.

There was some casual discussion about the August meeting before this meeting started. I think I'll just say that we're going to play August by ear because most of us will be putting all of our efforts into the festival, which is a week and a half following. So unless there's somebody special who wants to come and talk to us, like a representative from the county that has important information to share, we may be going ahead and canceling the August meeting.

What do you think we'll know by? So, I mean, I think Peg TV will want to know well in advance of canceling.

Well, how about two weeks from today? I'll reach out to Jessica, ask her if she knows of anything going on, and if there's anybody in the pike that wants to come talk to us, because she usually knows. And then we'll send something out on July 30.

How about that?

Okay. So moved.

All right. I think that's it. Let's adjourn. 704.