California Identification Remote Access Network - Regular Meeting

It. I'd rather be honest.

Can I get everybody's attention? Hey,

Perry. How are you? All right.

Thank you. I appreciate the crowd in the room. We're going to get this meeting going. This is the meeting for the Strategic Economic Enhancement Development Committee starting at 03:02. Roll call.

Jerry Botto?

Here.

Member Spar?

Here.

Member Heintzon? Here.

Member McClain? Here.

And member Newnan? Here. Everybody's here? Hey.

I appreciate it, and I appreciate all the guests we have today. So thank you all for coming. We have a consent account calendar, 26DashO7 58EconomicDevelopmentDivision recommending the committee approve the speed meeting minutes from 04/16/2026. I'll take a motion to approve.

I'll recommend that we approve that. I get a second. Second.

Am I through here? Second. Any discussion? All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Okay. We have open forum. Do you read that, or do I read that?

Open forum? Can read it.

Now taking public comments in open forum. Participants will have three minutes to address the committee. Please state your name for the record.

K. And do we have anyone online just so I know?

We have one attendee online.

Okay. And they have not requested any comment time?

No. I don't think they will.

Okay. Before we jump into the agenda items, I want to call your attention to the fact that we lost one of our big supporters, Uncle Fuzzy. Yeah. Passed away. What? Yes.

Yeah. Oh my god.

I know. He was just here the last

It's devastating. Yeah. So

I wanted to, you know, just toast to uncle Fuzzy.

Uh-uh. Yeah.

Was all See you. He was great to be in here. Yeah. Uncle Fuzzy. He was great. He'd always corner me after the meeting and give me his little 2¢. So he was a very sweet man. So I appreciate the fact that he was here, and I just want our community to recognize that he was an important part of our crew. RIP Okaluazi. Part we missed.

Yeah. Okay. We're going to move on to the agenda item number 26,756. And as you recall in the development of our economic development community centric plans, developing it through the business improvement district was a key item on that agenda. Just to give just to set the stage, and I'm gonna turn over to Maya here.

As you recall, you know, we have some tourism promotion through the county with the Eldorado County Visitors Authority. I'm not sure that was always the optimum setup, but that's what we did have. The budget was eliminated. And so right now, we currently don't have any tourism promotion or anything to support Apple Hill or you know wine or whatnot like other counties up and down. 49 do, so one of the suggestions was to develop a TBIT or a I don't know what we'll call it, but a bid.

Let's just leave it at that for the moment. And the goal is to in and I'm going let Maya go through this. She's got a great presentation, But at some point, you know, I think we have to really seriously consider this. This county and its groups have to consider this because otherwise I think it puts us in a competitive disadvantage. I think you saw the document that Alexei's group put out here.

Thank you for doing that. It really shows us that it's considered a disadvantage. So I want everyone to go into this with an open mind. It is not perfect, it may not be your exact cup of tea, but I am hoping or demanding you have an open mind to it so we can have a good discussion with regard to that. Maya is from Civitas. Karen, I don't know if you want to jump in on any of this. No, you're on

a roll.

I'm on a roll, all right. Maya is from Civitas. Just a little bit of background, I have worked with Civitas since they came up with the concept thirty something years ago in John's little office in Sacramento, and I've worked with Civitas probably in 30 different destinations on the development of TBIDS, and I've worked in destinations. I've done it with wine. North Lake Tahoe now has one.

Mammoth has a comprehensive one. So there's all kinds. I'm gonna let her give her introduction, but she we we had some meetings with her, Karen and I, and that's why we wanted to invite you. This is the next step is to invite you to get some education out there, get some information out there, handle any questions. So I'm gonna just turn it over to you, We'll go ahead and knock it out.

Amy? Yeah. Thank you for the warm welcome model. Yeah. As you mentioned, Civitas Advisors is a legal and consulting firm. We've actually been in business. Is our thirtieth year, so we're celebrating thirty years of Ciptas. We have worked with 26 states across the country, both forming districts of this kind and also working at the state level to draft legislations in order to enable districts like these in their jurisdictions. We've worked with over 200 clients now worldwide, and we are all the districts that we've helped create are now generating over $3,600,000,000 for the industry.

And so as you can

see, we're very passionate about creating financial solutions for communities like yours that want to come together on very common brand and promote something that's going to attract the visitors to their destination. And then just a little bit about me, I've been with Civitas for four years now. My background is with the legal team, first and foremost with them, and then I've actually since taken on a more client development facing role. I travel across the country to deliver presentations much like this and speak at conferences.

So I'm very excited to speak with you

all today. So first, what is a Business Improvement district? There are two different types, property Business Improvement District or excuse me, property improvement district and a business improvement district. Both operate very similarly, but really what they are is a group of property or business owners are coming together wanting to promote their common business industry, and so they'll come together working to improve their specific either jurisdiction or when it's a property based district, it's mostly on like a very localized kind of downtown area. But really what the goal of them coming together is to create a self assessment and raise funds that then are used to promote either services such as tourism, marketing, sales, incentives, things of that nature on the business side, and on the property side, there are more often funding services such as maintenance, clean and safe, beautification, things of that nature.

In fact, the top 15 cities in The United States benefit from $600,000,000 a year in their own assessments. So they can be used in a variety of different ways, which we'll get into in a little bit, to go over kind of the differences with you as well. So the items of discussion today, we'll go over what a traditional business improvement district is, then we'll kind of jump into a hotel improvement district. You heard Carl mention it as a tourism business improvement district. And then finally, we'll kind of go over the property based district to give you guys an idea generally what each mechanism is used for so we can start trying to understand which one might be the best fit for Eldorado County as you guys move forward in the process of your economic development.

Here's a pretty good district comparison graphic where you kind of understand the differences of each mechanisms and the typical services that they implore. You can see the bid implores services that are specific for businesses such as marketing, special events, decoration and beautification, whereas a hotel improvement district that is assessed on lodging might look for more traditional sales and marketing. They might fund the visitor center services or look for more destination development types of services. On the property side, you're looking at your traditional kind of maintenance, beautification, and safety within that very localized property district looking to and also if you would like to make some capital improvements, the law authorizes those services as well. The assessment base basis varies in each of these mechanisms.

Under a traditional bid, you might be looking at different types of businesses that are collecting sales tax revenue. They're typically raising less money than a property side because these businesses are often if you're looking at a certain business type, they're often focused on something very specific to their type of business, so they might raise a little bit less money. In a hotel improvement district, that you're gonna be looking at an assessment on lodging, so purely lodging businesses. You might have a flat fee per occupied room per night. You might have a percentage of your assessment revenue on your hotel.

And then on the property size, you might be looking at assessments that vary based on lot size, parcel square footage, building square footage, uses, codes, and zoning. So really the idea here is to present different types of mechanisms that you might want to choose between in order to fund the services that you desire. In terms of collection, a lot of times these collection efforts are under the bid. They're collected with your renewal or issuance of business licenses. Under the HID, they're collected in tandem with your transient occupancy taxes.

And then on the property side, they're usually collected with property taxes as well. And again, this is all the collection under each of these mechanisms is normally handled by the local government and is then remitted to an organization that would then manage the funds, which we'll get into in a little bit. Average formation time between these, the shorter side is gonna be the business or the hotel improvement district. They'll have a little bit shorter of a formation, usually six to ten months. The property business improvement district side is often a little bit longer.

We just find that the petition process and the validating process under the property district takes quite a little bit longer, but we'll get into that in just a minute. So what is an improvement district and how does it work? You heard me mention about the collection with the local government and the assessment of the property or business owner. So essentially, what they do is a group of businesses or property owners will come together and opt to self assess themselves, either on a percentage of their revenue or, like, on the property side based on the size of their particular parcel. Those groups of businesses that come together to self assess themselves will usually come under consensus of what that assessment methodology is going to look like.

They would then vote amongst themselves to pass this assessment. And then when that assessment is approved on both the private side and the local government side, the local government then steps in to handle the collection process. They'll usually carve out a one to 2% administration fee to handle those collections, and then the funds themselves are remitted back to a managed or remitted to a private nonprofit, and the funds are then managed by that private nonprofit. And the big thing here, and the reason why the local government is required to permit them to a private nonprofit is because the assessments themselves are required under statute to benefit those businesses that are paying in. So unlike your regular taxes, there's no requirement of benefit.

The local government can collect and spend in their general fund as they see fit. But under these types of improvement district mechanisms, they're essentially financially stable because of that benefit requirement. Those services must benefit back to the payers that are paying the assessment. So really what this says is it creates a level playing field or eliminates the free rider situation because once it is voted upon upon the private side, all of those businesses that are choosing to assess themselves are then required to remit this assessment on an annual basis. There's a lot of transparency and reliability with these districts as well.

The statute requires levels of transparency in what's called a management district plan. The statute requires a plan that's outlining all the parameters of your district. It also requires an annual report approval process where each year the managing organization would submit an annual report to the local government to project both what they spent their money on and what they're proposing to spend their money on moving forward. And again, just a high level of reliability because once these mechanisms are in place, the statute allows for a term of up to five years on the formation, and then up to ten years upon renewal. So you've got a certified term to spend your district funds.

A lot of times with these improvement districts, there are those different conceptions. The biggest one is that they're often lumped into what a tax is defined as, but we work our very hardest here at the pause to make that distinction, that they are not a tax. So we'll go over a couple of those distinctions here with you. Unlike taxes that have no defined term, you heard me say that these assessments do have a specific term and plan that management district plan would outline, again, what your district is supposed to be spending its money on on those first five years, and then ten years, you're up to ten years upon renewal. Unlike taxes that are government managed and government opposed, these assessments are payer managed and payer approved, so it's initiated by the private sector side.

There's even a a petition process and a balloting process associated with the with the mechanisms being formed, which we'll get into in just a little bit. Unlike taxes there, you heard me say there's no requirement that the taxes must benefit those paying businesses. With assessment, that's the entire nexus of the statute. Any business that is going to be assessed must see benefit from the services that the funds are being used towards. So that is the requirement of statute, and which is why it's most important that at the onset, we're getting a collaborative effort to discuss what do businesses want to see their money being spent towards, because that's really the most important way to be able to sell these districts to those payers.

They're the ones who are gonna be benefiting. So it's really most important that they have a say in what the funds go to at the onset. Here we mentioned before, like taxes, because there's no benefit requirement, they can be just put into general fund and spend as they see fit. Local government obviously has very many priorities, so sometimes tourism promotion takes the back burner. With assessments, there is those legal accountability to how they are being spent.

And again, it's that district plan that's going to be kinda governing your districts through the bible of the district. And for that very reason, the funds themselves cannot be diverted. So during the length of the term of the district, government might try and say, hey. We need money for this we money for that. Well, you guys have an opportunity to make those discretionary decisions on the private sector based on is this authorized in the managed district plan, and if it is, do we want to see our money being put towards x, y, and z?

Go to next slide. So how does one go about forming these districts? So you've heard me mention that outreach and consensus building at Beyonce is going to be step number one. It's most often the most important. This is where we conduct open houses, surveys, one on one meetings, educational sessions, much like today's, really to educate the business and the property owners that are interested in the mechanism on how the mechanism works and what how we can start creating one that's going to fit your particular destination.

Once we get a pretty good consensus and outreach kind of infrastructure formed, and normally this takes the place of or what's created in this step is what's called a steering committee. It's often three to five business or property owners, depending on the mechanism that we choose, who is going to essentially be kind of the face of the district. We would work with them one on one to get them to kind of go and survey out to their peers and find that peer to peer is often most helpful in these types of situations. So once that steering committee is established, we would then roll into drafting that management district plan, which again is informed based on the outreach that we receive from the business or property community, and it outlines all the key parameters such as the boundary of the district, are we looking at a localized downtown? Are we looking at, in this case, would be El Dorado unincorporated county?

We might look to Placerville as well. What kind of services the business or what kind of services the district is going to fund, whether it's on the property side. Is that gonna be your typical maintenance? Is that gonna be clean and safe, beautification? On the business or tourism business side, are we looking at pure traditional marketing sales?

Are we looking at other destination or economic development type of activities? And then from all that of those services, we formulate a budget, and usually that is created based off of the assessment methodology that is decided upon during this outreach process, whether it's a 1% on all lodging stays, whether it's $1 in lodging stays, whether it's $1 in lodging, whether it's a percentage on other types of tourism, recreational experiences, or on the property side, whether that might be size of parcel or building size, what have you, we then create a budget that would need to be executed on an annual basis for that initial five term. And then, of course, we detail out in the plan that's required the governance of how this is gonna be managed. So you heard me talk about the private nonprofit corporation that would be formed. We would then also be creating its own separate board within this section.

And so that's also gonna be most important during the outreach process. What do the businesses wanna see in terms of how this is going to be governed so that you guys also have a say in what the board makeup is in that composition. Once we feel really good about the management district plan and it's been circulated around the community to be approved, we would then roll into the petition drive, which has a threshold, and that is going to be the 50%, more than 50% based on assessment. So it's not 50% by number. You might have 10 businesses, but you might only need three of the 10 businesses to get this thing approved because it is weighted by how much each business or property owner is paying into the assessment.

So you can think of it as kind of $1, one vote. Once that petition threshold is met, we would then submit those signed petitions in the remainder of the district and so local government, where we would have three stops. We would have a resolution of intention to state the intention that you're reforming the district. We would then have a public meeting, and this is only if the property district is what we're what we're going for because in a property district, there's both a petition and a ballot. So it's a two step voting process.

If we were to just do traditional business or traditional lodging, we don't need this valuing step. But in either case, the third step would be the resolution of formation to form the district. Then the district would then be in existence for five years. Going over a couple case studies for you, just wanna touch on a few rural destinations and destinations that are kind of neighboring to you. Amador County was established last May.

They are assessing their lodging rentals on 2%. They are raising about $200,000 Their county, because they don't have many lodging businesses, they chose to also assess short term rentals, which has been kind of hot topic for a lot of our clients. And if you'd like to cross that bridge, we absolutely can. We're just giving you an idea of kind of what all is possible here. You can see the types of programs that they are supporting with their $200,000 budget, and again, they'll be in existence for the next five years.

Another one I wanted to touch on that we're seeing in Amador County actually just passed their Wine Heritage District. So the first district you saw was more traditional lodging businesses, of your hotels, short term rentals. They also took it upon themselves to create a separate district that assesses only winery businesses. And so this is going to be a 1% on their gross direct to consumer sales revenue. It includes approximately 85 wineries. You can see they're bringing in an even larger budget than their than their tourism district, which is coming at 342,000 funds that are being used for it. Is marketing, bringing awareness, signage, things of that nature?

Maya, how if that wasn't put into one district, why did

they decide to do two separate districts? Is it

gonna be two separate marketing plans?

So Yeah. No. That's a great question. So there are two separate marketing plans, and the reason why they did them separately is because it really was just it's it was a timing factor, which one could they have gotten done sooner than than later. And so as you can imagine, the more business types that you include in your petition pool

Yeah.

The more votes you're gonna need to get, the more consensus building. And so they decided to kind of cut their losses, for lack of a better word, and say, okay. Let's just focus on wineries because, you know, we can get them first and foremost, and then the lodging will come will come separately. I think they were also interested in creating you could see, mean, we have 85 different wineries, so it would have been a lot of businesses at the table. I think there was also some disagreements on how the board governance was going to be created. So they decided to and, you know, the

name No.

There wouldn't be any differences.

You're right. Right. Right. Nothing. But, yes, exactly. Exactly. So that was the reason for that there. Lake County, another rural type of destination, was established back in 2019. They're assessing their hotels at a two and a half percent. They're raising almost over half $1,000,000, supporting your services such as digital marketing, your efforts, SMS branding, and visitors map and additional collateral.

Another one, Mammoth Lakes, and the reason I wanna bring this one into frame is because they are an example of one destination that is assessing different business types. So this was an example of a client that was able to kind of unify the very the Right. Varied business interests on both lodging, ski resorts. They've got some retail and restaurant. I mean, I don't think they're they're pretty highly localized, and they've got businesses, and tourism really is their bread and butter.

So for them, it made sense, and it took a while. It did take a long time, but they found it more worthwhile to wait the time in order to unify the interest because of how that benefit was really gonna spill over to all the different businesses there at Gannigan. They've even tiered their assessment revenue very detailed, and even it's broken down by business type, it's broken down by revenue. And so you can see there that there's just a lot of opportunity to get really creative with whatever district we decide moving forward, whether it's just lodging, whether it's lodging wineries or other tourism attractions, or if we wanted to do just purely property based. It really the world is at worst when it comes to these types of mechanisms and how we can get kind of really granular on what the assessment revenue and assessment methodology is.

Palisade saw, this is another case that I wanted to bring in to show you that you can also get very local on the services that you are implementing. So this was actually kind of a first of its kind district. Olympic Valley lodging businesses came together to assess themselves to support transportation. So they were in need of there was no Ubers, no cars. They really needed some type of shuttle system to get people to and from their different tourism attractions.

And so they created this district, and the sole purpose of it is to fund the micro managed transit service between assess lodging businesses and ski resorts. So this is just an example of something that they had a very, very specific issue that they wanted to solve, and this is an example of how they were able to solve that. So kinda here's a few more designations that were not included in the specific case studies, but I wanted to give you an example more examples, I guess, of other rural destinations that were able to do that. We have Amador over top, Feather River also assessing a two percent rate. Lake County, we have Marni Fosa County at one and a half.

Mammoth Lake has that multi rate system, and then the Valley, one and a half for transportation. So really just wanting to provide this data to show that rural counties are forming districts right now, and we were adjusted last year. And even really nominal budgets of $200,000 or upwards, you know, 400,000 when we have it, 6,000,000 can fund a myriad of services. It really just depends on what the business owners and or property owners want to see their funds going towards. What are the commonalities in terms of issues that you're seeing in your district that you think deserve to be funded with a district like this?

And so you can either go kind of a single district route if that's what's desired. I think in your case for El Dorado, you're a specialized type of county in which you don't really have too many lodging businesses, but you also have some tourism attractions that I think if there was a concentrated marketing effort for the entire county, that you guys would be able to kind of drive that visitor demand to your county. So that concludes the end of my presentation. I did have another slide that didn't make it in here, but it was showing the different destinations such as Folsom, Sacramento, Rancho Cordova, and the rates at which they are assessing their lodging businesses on top of their transient occupancy taxes. And I would say I think the lowest that we have was a 13%, and the highest is a 17%.

Folsom just approved a 6% for their tourism assessment. And you guys right now don't have any assessment. And really, the the transient occupancy tax is at a 10%. So you guys are pretty bottom of of the of the track in terms of opportunity for growth. We just did a study where we looked at the 100 destinations across The United States and took a look into what they're charging their guests on, you know, lodging and other types of charges that a guest incurs on lodging, and we found that the national average now is 15.7%.

So knowing that average, knowing that you guys are at 10, I think it's a pretty opportunity pretty big opportunity for you guys to kinda become on par with others. You've got a ton of room to grow. Even a 1% assessment would keep you well below what what we're seeing on average. So I'm just kinda giving you guys an idea to be able to share that with you. I can share it with her, and she can distribute with you all. But I'd love to answer any questions that really oh, we've got two more slides. Excuse me. Touching on the benefits to the county. Tourism promotion resumes. I know Carl mentioned that it was happening at some point in time, but those funds have since been taken back by the county.

That sounds odd to me to So imagine creating this fund would be dedicated funding without any more general fund expenditures. This mechanism also is really regenerative in a way that if it's driving an increased demand for overnight visitation, not only are you generating a sense of revenue off the district, but you're also increasing the training ox occupancy tax revenue that goes back to the county. So it's not only the businesses that are benefiting, it's the county as well kind of increasing the tax revenue generated there. There's a lot less county overhead. It's private sector led by that private nonprofit that would then administer the district.

So the county still retains kind of an oversight role in terms of the collection process and then improving your annual report. But other than that, it's really managed by the businesses paying the assessment in terms of governance there. And then the infrastructure framework, it's structured for funding traffic management, shuttle services, or visitor infrastructure. Really, what you want it to fund can go a long way. And then last slide, of course, benefits the industry.

You've got something that's predictable, stable, you know it's gonna be there for five years, and then upon renewal, it can go up to ten years, giving you an opportunity to modify the district after that five years have gone. And five years, it might seem like a long time, but it really isn't once these districts get up and going. You've got an organized structure. It creates a capacity where none exists across both wine, agriculture, and other recreation sectors. It's a very collaborative type of framework.

You've heard me mention that outreach and consensus building process can be really important to bring the groups together. And then, of course, direct investment. You've got you can do grant programs, sector specific funding going right back to the industry in terms of their needs. It really just is a win win for both sides here. And that concludes my presentation, but I'd love to hear thoughts, discussions, questions, anything you

can add. Maya, thank you so much, and I want to have an open and robust discussion. Let me just start with our committee first and then I'll open it up to our guests. Anybody from the committee have questions? Would you like to address? I have some questions.

Weighted if we do a business district, the weighted pass, so is that based on sales tax? Correct. So if if we're doing just lodging, that would be just based on transient occupancy tax. Okay. If we're doing lodging and businesses or just businesses that pay sales tax, you're exactly right. And you can base on the sales.

So when you say it's weighted if their sales tax is higher, they have more of a sway in the boat?

Exactly. Okay. And then I assume this is a yes, but local it's not based on,

like, ZIP code of like, local residents pay this as well even though it's a tourism pack. So that's

a great question. So the assessment is authorized to be passed off to the guests or the customer. It's most often when it's on lodging, it's easier to hypothesize that, okay, it's probably gonna be visitors coming in to pay that. Yeah. When you do restaurants and retails and those types of things, that's when you kind of get into that gray area of, okay, it might be visitors, but it might also be Local. Local. And that's something that it was something that was widely accepted, like in the case of, okay, we might be assessing our locals here, and is that something that it's worthwhile to us to to continue to pursue. So Okay. That makes sense. And then, yeah, those are the two main ones I have questions.

Can expand on the weighted? I think I understand, but so when it comes to a vote, for example, the the the what the vote is weighted based upon the potential revenue that that business based on sales, let's just say 1% flat sales. Then they get more weight up, more weight on their boat.

Exactly. Exactly. And

How's that? So that's based on sales records?

Correct. Sales records or or transient tax records if we're doing if we're doing lodging. And it it's dependent on the methodology that's decided upon for the assessment. So if we decide, first, we do 11% assessment flat on restaurant, lodging, whatever whatever types of businesses you include, then great. If there's a tier structure like you saw on Mammoth, then their weight would be associated with what tier they fell into. Okay.

Go ahead. So it's like an operating agreement that you start with. Is that correct? And and whatever the criteria you lay out in that operating agreement, you approve it for the first five. Yeah. And do are the ten renewable year ten year renewable periods, are they cumulative? I mean, they they just continue every ten years?

Yes. In

order question, yes. The the management district plan is much like that operating agreement. It's drafted We draft it, but it's informed by all of you. What do you want to see be put in here? And when as we're drafting it, it gets circulated for review to make sure that we're capturing accurately what it is you want to see for those first five years, and then we do it again for the the the ten years. And it is cumulative. So at the end of the ten years, you can go for another ten years. We like to say, try and start your renewal at least two years ahead of time to get everything in order. And oftentimes, at the end of five years or at the end of ten years, you realize, oh, this might be working well, or this is now kind of archaic. Let's let's change some things up. So you get an opportunity to modify the district decision. So you just

you modify those terms, you modify the operating agreement. What if you wanted to do it in midterms, any restrictions there?

No. You can also you can also modify during the term. The way that you would do that would be a written request by the owner's association. So by that private nonprofit that is consisting of the board that you've created and then you have an that can come together and decide, yes, you wanna modify these certain things. So long as it's not an increase in if it's an increase in assessment, there's a couple of different noticing requirements because you You need to

do yeah.

You have to do

a repo Yeah. Because it's considered an increase. But what we've been able to do and what a lot of clients have been interested in including in their plans is either an automatic or a discretionary increase or decrease. So that and mostly, it's for clients who are looking at a ten year term because they see that that's that's a long time. So if

they wanna either keep up

with inflation or if there's another pandemic and they wanna decrease the rate, having that language in the plan then circumvents the trigger and the modification that would consider an increase. Right.

Right. Dave, any questions? Yeah.

You mentioned that you took a look at El Dorado County and kind of an assessment of the different sources Yeah. And uses. So if you had a recommendation for us, what is your recommendation, and does it include a mix? Restaurants, what would that look like?

That's a

great word for it.

Yes, hiring.

Because I think it was a very small group. If we took a look at what the lodging demographics were, was pretty small and nominal. And so we could take a look into what the budget would be if we just included lodging. But I think in your particular case, because you've got lodging, you've got Apple Hill, you've got Whitewater rafting, you've got wineries that are all that are far far from each other, but would all benefit from an increase in overnight visitation demand, I think that a hybrid type situation would be best case scenario in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck. The only caveat with that approach is you kinda have to start from scratch and think about, okay, then what is Eldorado County's brand?

What is the story that we're selling in terms of, you know, we don't wanna just sell an experience. We don't wanna just sell whitewater rafting. We don't want just wanna sell the wineries. We don't just wanna sell the hotels. We need to think about how are we gonna sell the county as a whole so that someone comes and stays and then says, oh, here are all the things that I can do in the county. So that, I think, is going to be you don't need to decide it now, but I think it's going to be important to start to think about that in order to unify the hybrid type of situation and get people thinking about what they want their funds to be used for. Okay, thank you.

Just a comment and I'll open it up to the guests. Just FYI, we've had one of these in South Shore for about a decade, and it has worked incredibly well in the city of South Lake Tahoe incredibly well. So I think that's important to note that we already have a functioning one within the county. Secondly, I think, you know, when look at this in a collective approach, it really brings together all the elements of Eldorado County to promote and support the different sectors, whether it's Apple Hill or wine or lodging or you know, the outdoor recreation, and I think that is a key piece of everyone's working together. I mean, that's one of the real benefits is the working together part of this thing because you know, often have I see this in a lot I do a lot of tourism industry consulting and I see this in a lot of places.

So that is I think a key benefit of creating synergy and ideas and what are you doing and what are you doing and how do we, you know, leverage all of that together. And the third thing, a comment I'll make, and this, I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way. The days of other people money are gone. Okay? That that doesn't exist anymore.

Other people's money doesn't exist. We crossed that bridge in South Shore and I don't, you know, want to hold South Shore up as anything magnificent because we have our own issues, believe me. But those days are gone and we have to, you know, every owner and industry sector is going to have to look and say, look, you know, we have to look at how do we fund our industry. And so I think there's there's sort of a reckoning we're at now that we have to begin to deal with that.

Yes. South Lake Tahoe, is that a hotel

or business or a combo? Hotel only. Hotel only. Yeah. And there were political reasons. I can get into that in another another time on that. But with that, let me open it up to our guests, comments, Dave over there. Carl, you were involved in Temecula, DID. Well, I have recommended a lot of these. I've done the strategy work for Temecula, I recommended it. I did the strategy work for Amador Wineries, I recommended it. And so I've had the opportunity to recommend a lot of these in different jurisdictions from a tourism perspective. Yes, and Temecula's been a great success. Yeah, they

just renewed and had a five year renewal. So obviously it was a success. Is that

a hybrid model or Wineries only. Winery. Yeah, and they raise a pile of money, you know, a big pile of money, you know, There's little more upside. And their market position was, we'll work with tourism, but you know, we have a little bit of a different direction than tourism does, but they co mingle, you know, opportunities all the time, and they've had a tremendous success. But others, yeah, Lexi. I have a

question, Maya. So I think one of our biggest constraints here in the county is we're having a contraction in our industries, wine industry severely contracting, Regulatory changes at the county level has reduced our lodging infrastructure, things like that. There's a lot of pressures there. So we can I don't think our problem is necessarily a marketing problem as much as we need expansion? And if we do this and then are driving this overnight visitation demand, we don't have the lodging infrastructure to even serve that.

And I think that this comes down to a relationship with the county in terms of what types of businesses and industries are allowed to dovetail with this. So has there ever been a structure wherein the industry makes a contract with the county so that a percent of any of that gets earmarked for a co share in some way in exchange for expanded industry regulations. Or for example, we've got wedding. Wedding industry doesn't exist here because it's not an allowed use except for in special situations. So however, an assessment on that industry could be substantial revenue.

Has it ever been done where industries who currently don't exist, this seems based on existing businesses. We've got many industries that are not in existence yet that want to be hip camp, low impact camping, wedding industry, stuff like that. So is that an option to say, Hey, we want to partner and do a profit share, a percent of that back to this marketing or whatever they want to do, but a percent to the county to earmark for road hardening or fire mitigation or whatever those offsets that might get the county invested in helping those industries go, and then co invest it in ensuring that those regulatory schemes stay in an environment where those industry sectors can grow? Yeah, that's a great question.

And the way I'll answer that is we can get creative in to address the, you know, the industries that are not yet here yet. We can get creative in the way that we craft the language in the plan. The example that I'll use is for some jurisdictions that don't yet authorize short term rentals, I'll Susan's example, what we've done, but they are anticipating that they will at some point, at some time. What we do is we craft the definition in the language of what is considered a lounging business, and that definition would include something to the effect of short term rentals in anticipation of, and we do something, any and or future businesses will be included. And so that's and that's the way that's the way we're able to capture them knowing that they're incoming at some point in time.

So if we wanted to do something like that, we could absolutely do that. The way then your second part of could we do something then then of the budget earmarks it for, you know, future services that would mitigate those types of industries coming in, plainly, yes, with the caveat of we would wanna make sure that that benefit justified and made very clear to the businesses that are then voting it in. So we would need to convince them and craft the language and get the numbers, get the data to really say, yes, this is going to make an impact. Yes, this is gonna bring benefit, and these are the reasons why. It's a little bit harder sometimes justify your traditional type of maintenance services on the business side because it's more of a property owner benefit.

But with that being said, it's not impossible, and we've seen it done before. We have a district in Santa Monica that uses their tourism district monies to support cleaning up the beaches. Yeah. And so something like that, I can I can envision for for here, not necessarily cleaning the beaches, but to mitigate those incoming industries? And then another example, I'll say, in in terms of expanding both industries and also expanding assets, Sacramento has their they've got two districts, one for their traditional marketing, and they've also got one that is used for bonding against their convention center expansion.

They put a ballroom on top of their convention center, and it was something that it was funded both by the city and by a portion of this district revenue in order to know that, hey. If we expand this asset, it's going to build the infrastructure needed to accommodate that increased visitation demand.

So then is there a way to build in a safeguard into that type of contract that says, okay, so say you make this contract and it's a mutual benefit to the county for their things or whatever. Is there a way then that should the county then cease to support the industries with those regulatory schemes in some ways, reducing rights or whatever, can it renegotiate them getting that revenue? TOT, for example. So TOT is paid, and I understand it's a different type of tax, but there's nothing in there to put skin in the game both ways between the recipient of the TOT, the county, and those lodgings, except to know that it's a mutual benefit. But if those revenues could be lost by not supporting those industry regulatory schemes?

Can anything like that be built into a contract? Yeah, absolutely. It would go both in the managed district plan and in the operating agreement between the county and the private nonprofit to administer the district. And that, of course,

is going to be a negotiation. So that will just be another point of if we can formulate something that the business owners are saying, yes, this is our group with a stamp on it, then it's on us to then approach the county with here are the things that that we want in that contract, here are the reasons we just find behind them, and then we're kind of left, let's see what the county says

at And that then has a review, like you were saying, every five years or every ten years Exactly. Or

But let me add a little context on that. TOT is a very wanted tax source by all jurisdictions because it's unrestricted. It's one of the few that are completely unrestricted. So it's in the interest of the county to want to support TOT increase or TOT revenues. And right now none of our hotels run at maximum occupancy. Okay, so there's two strategies that can occur. One is you have to increase the usage of what you have. Yeah. Okay? And the second is you have to be open to the potential of more collections.

Yeah. Now I live out in South Lake Tahoe and I watch every year as millions of dollars slip through the county's fingers because there's no hotel in Myers to capture the revenue. There's not much up in Fair Play, there's not much in these other places. And I think we've talked about, Karen, one of the things we need to do is a supply and demand analysis for lodging potential in El Dorado County that has never been done. Because the county needs guidance to, hey, we do have a need, it could go here, it could go here, it could go here. So that's a piece that is down the road. But if we could simply increase the use of what we

have Yes.

In a short term and then sequentially or simultaneously begin to look at what are our future needs in terms of supply and demand Yeah. We would be able to deliver strategic response over time that I think puts El Dorado County in a good spot.

And attract more builders and things like money brings money. If you get more money into these businesses that are attracting all these tourists, then they can grow the tourism associations. They can do all that. And then it starts attracting, like, contractors and all of that. It can also just kinda skyrocket. Mean, I

wanna be clear. The goal is not just massive tourism. No. No. We've seen that. We've had that problem in South Shore.

Yeah, and Oklahoma.

And we've gotten very smart about who are these visitors that we want. We want people that will take care of the place, respect the place, pick up trash in the place, but spend money in the place. But that goes to the organization, the visitor authority organization that could be created and targeted. So there's a lot of pieces that need to fit the puzzle, but the elements are there to bring the puzzle together. So I just want to clarify that you put these things in motion.

Thanks, Chris.

You bet. Thanks. You put these things in motion, and you adjust as you go. And so sort of where we're at. But anyway, other comments from the audience?

Okay. Yes? You mentioned short term rentals. To add to what you were saying about using what we have is to examine how many of the potential short term rentals might be available in this county that, you know, I've seen other events staged where people move out of the houses for three or four days so that that short term rental can support a particular event. In our case, something like the Highway fifty wagon train Yeah.

That could be an event that could be grown into something quite similar to what it is right now, but beyond what it currently exists as. So if we impact what we have by using short term rentals prior to deciding to build a hotel in Myers or someplace else, what events will support building that and examine what those are, and if we wanna use existing things for short term rentals, let's look at the existing events that already

are present. And you bring up a good point. Hang on, Maya. The way you could envision this is we need what every other county has or jurisdiction has, is one promotional organization. And we are at a competitive disadvantage because we do not have that, and we need that.

That is what I would sort of lay out there as the potential should everyone agree to it, and that organization could be funded by TBIT or bid dollars from wine, bid dollars from Apple Hill, bid dollars from lodging, bid dollars from outdoor recreation. Those monies would flow into this tourism promotion organization. Now each of these groups may decide that hey, we want to hold a portion back to support our organization and some of the things that we want to do with the guidelines set up by with Cimitas, but now you have a, and that organization would be managed by board seats from each of the groups so that everybody has an equal say into it. Okay? And those that are paying have a seat at the board.

You may want to add a few more seats for community insight and all the rest of that or culture, what have you, just to get a balance of ideas. You know, I think the best boards have a little bit broader perspective. Okay, now you've got a really focused organization at a budget much bigger than what we had with visitor authority being operated through the chamber, which was a political challenging political dynamic. This organization stays clean. It stays focused on promotion.

It's got feedback. It has community working groups underneath it, a a marketing committee, a special event committee, a recreation committee, whatever the group decides. Now we've got this totally focused effort coming out of El Dorado County that puts us on par and maybe even above some of the competitive dynamics. And that group has the money to not only advertise, but to educate visitors. Yes. To say, when you come here, you know, come midweek or pick up trash or whatever it is. That's sort of where I think this could go. And I'm just maybe I'm ahead of the game too far, but I wanted to give just sort of the benefit of, you know, a thought of where it could happen.

Can ask Maya to maybe chime in on the navigating what we already have, the short term rentals, whether that is something that you would suggest in in in in incorporating what we do find out that we do have into something like a Vrmo or an Airbnb or something that the district names itself and is a completely separate

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Carl,

for elaborating on that. I think that, like with any business type, there's need to and we love this saying in our in our firm, we always say, is the juice worth the squeeze? So we wanna, first and foremost, take a look at how much are short term rentals even contributing in TOT. Let's take a look at that first. Is the county even tracking of what short term rentals contribute to TOT? I know there's a lot of What we don't know. A lot of what we don't know, and there's a lot of hurdles we need to jump over in order to identify what that DOT is. Because sometimes either a local jurisdiction doesn't even authorize short term rentals, but they're still in existence. They may be paying DOT. They may not be paying DOT.

So there's all these different kind of boxes we need to check first in order to identify, okay, what do they actually bring in? And then if they bring in a decent amount and then we think, this is actually worth the squeeze, and we we all agree, let's let's invite them to the table then. And then that would be the next step of inviting them to the table. Then at that point, then they open up another type of Pandora's box. Okay. Are they going to be super poor? Will they is it are they gonna understand it? That's also our job to educate them on, you know, what we're doing. If we've if and the way that we would want to do this is let's get unification on our internal groups first. Those that we know are gonna be supportive right now at this point in time, let's unify them first.

Then once we have kind of an understanding of what our messaging is and we we think and know that the short term rentals are gonna be impacting the budget in a way that makes it worthwhile to go after them, then we approach them and bring them to the table, and we deliver that kind of unified messaging point, and then try and get them supported on there. And it might be the case that even if they're bringing in some of the budget and we include them, again, the way the petition works, if you meet a certain threshold, then it's mandated on everyone that is falling into the definitions of the businesses that we outlined. So we might invite them to the table. They might be really upset with us, but at the end of the day, we might not even really need their vote to get this pushed. And some jurisdictions and communities have gone that route.

It hasn't soured or benefited the relationship fifty fifty. Sometimes it helps them because they actually do see the benefit, and then sometimes it just kinda sours it in. That will kind of might ruin your renewal efforts on that when you're up for renewal.

It was. Maya, is there any data from the successful bids or hotel bids that is collected from the businesses that this is impacting them. So from a perspective of the business, not the perspective of revenue to accounting or a board or anything like that, but to the business. And how is that being measured? How are we tracking it?

Because that will be very crucial if we decide to do something like this to get buy in. Yeah. To say, this is just another another fee tax that just goes up on ether, or it's truly impacting? You know, of course, business plan is there.

Yeah.

But business plan doesn't necessarily mean there's results. I wanna see results. So is that data there so we can see the results that it's impacting the businesses that are collecting the fees or paying

the fees? Let me give a personal example to you. Great question, Les. And and that measurement has to be built into the plan. So here's how we're going to measure, here's what we're going to measure.

My firm just was hired by Laguna Beach, We completed an analysis. Laguna allocates a lot of money into arts and culture, and the lodging properties wanted to be sure that, hey, is this driving business? Is this investment in positioning in arts and culture driving business to our lodging properties? Our firm did a pretty thorough economic analysis on this and could clearly show that there was a result of going back to the lodging properties. But you asked a great question because we have to build confidence in this, And not only for wine, for lodging, for outdoor rec, but that can be and correct me, Maya, we can put that in the maybe not the management plan, or does it go in the management plan, or the marketing plan that the organization develops, or but that can be I I think we can get to that pretty pretty easy.

The tools are there to Yeah. Do

So to answer your last question, we would we would want that to be in your marketing plan that is funded through the use of the district funds. It would be hard to put something like that in the management plan because things fluctuate, and you wouldn't wanna be not in compliance and according with some numbers that you put in there before you're actually seeing the results. But what I can say is that on average for these districts, the return on investment is 7 and a half dollars to one. So for every $1 of district revenue generated and spent, it returns on average 7 and a half dollars to the businesses that are paying into it. I have some more ROI metrics I could share.

So that's in in the increased revenues? Exactly.

And we see all of those. Can you share? Sure.

In Monterey County, we measured it by taxes collected, so revenue collected by business and by hotel. Yep. Our tax treasurer collect collects the information. The CAO and myself had access to it, so I knew the specific businesses and hotels. And we hire HDL, and we have HDL run a report. Has hotel revenue gone up? Has restaurant revenue gone up? So we had a hotel improvement district in Monterey, and we had a business improvement district for downtown's. And the city paid into it with linear foot of their buildings, and we paid we owned a lot of properties, so we paid the most, but by linear foot. And then each year, we would true up.

So we would have HDL run a report for us on sales tax in that improvement district and sales tax in that home improve that hotel improvement and then TOT tax. And we could go to business, see who's making more money if somebody lost money, And they were all making money, particularly Pebble Beach.

Yeah. And and to Les's point, the measurement is critical. The tools are there. I've been able to

get the data.

And and the marketing

I know it would be. I guess, I was looking for some empirical data from existing ones.

Oh, yeah. But legally,

you have to combine it as to one total TOT, one total sales tax, all that. You can't do the individual businesses and get that out to the members of the public.

That's a no no. No. You can't No.

Add, like, a t I t. Show.

How many are now in California? It's a 100 and

success to failure rate is probably ninety percent success, ten percent failure. And the reason for the failure, it's usually, you know, we're not able to get the vote at the petition threshold. Yeah. And the reason for that is really that, you heard me say the outreach and consensus building process is really important. And to get in front of those types of business owners or property owners who you think already, okay, they're gonna have some questions, they're gonna need to be educated a little bit more. Because sometimes, you know, the smallest property or business owner in the room might have the loudest voice, and that could sounder the whole process, and that's probably the biggest reason why we see.

So that's a 90% success ratio when an effort is tried and succeeds in establishing. Exactly. Is there any failures after it's established? And it just I suppose it wouldn't because the revenue's there, but the business plan was bad, and the marketing didn't work, and then it I had to

think we actually had one, I wanna say it was

Rural towns that had 29 Palm. Yeah.

They tried to form, but theirs was also a unique case in that they were operating under, there's two different laws that were used to create these. There's the 1989 parking business improvement area law, and there's the 1994 property business improvement district law. And the older one is pretty archaic and outdated, and they were trying to convert from the old to the new, And they we had we just had a couple business owners who just could not wrap their minds around modernizing their district. And so we all the way to the petition, I think, we're, like, literally, like, 49%, and we think we just we couldn't get there. And so and so they didn't even renew their their district at that point either. Michael?

I might intentionally wanted to wait a little while for during the comments and the discussions because this has been very forward looking. But, you know, our county has had a difficult time with continuity and constancy of purpose. I have provided Brianna three pages to include as part of the public record for this item that goes back to pre 2019 where our county adopted strategic plan, had this very kind of analysis on a strategic plan. We lost focus on that. We lost time, 10 roughly.

You know, I I don't wanna remain in the rearview mirror, but we knew then that a stable and a dedicated self funded mechanism was needed and that relying solely on a government funded visitor's authority had vulnerabilities. Sure enough, that played out. And so I wanna remind us that and I and and the reason I wanna include that in part of the public record is because we cannot lose focus on this. This is the most significant opportunity for revenues in this county. I think I've mentioned before, we had a lot of high hopes for our business park.

Our business park was was created with the intention of being the single biggest employment center for El Dorado Town. We do not realize this. And there's there's legitimate reasons why that's occurred, understandable reasons. But agriculture and tourism is still here. And while our neighboring counties during this time period where we lost our focus on this, for reasons that I'm still bothered by.

Those counties, Amador, they moved forward, and they're enjoying the success. And I guess my remarks here are intended to hold our feet to the fire, to follow through on this process, to do the necessary public engagement this process is going to need to encourage the engagement of the businesses so that decisions can be made. There will be really hard ones and controversial ones. Right now, it's it's like Groundhog Day, the movie Groundhog Day. I keep hearing I wake up every morning.

I keep hearing, you know, Sonny and Cher and you know?

That's an old one, man.

The Fresno races? Yeah. Right.

You know, I don't wanna be, you know, scolding that, man, we gotta get together. Yeah. And we've gotta maintain our focus on this. And I'm I'm really pleased that you're here providing a really solid review of this. I'm pleased that you brought this item forward. I'm glad that we have participation in the room that might actually help our continuity and consistency, but we gotta strike while this is understood because businesses are not doing very well in this segment. And I think that's interesting. Well, let

me hang on one second. I'm gonna make a comment, and then here, and then here, and then we're gonna wrap up on this. I appreciate the historical perspective, Michael, and I want to be crystal clear to anyone who sees this video, this is not a county mandate thing.

Yeah.

This is coming from the community. SEED is organizing the opportunity to educate and bring these groups together. But this is not a top down county mandate. This is for these different business segments. And you can choose to do it or choose not to do it. If you choose not to do it,

we are where we are.

But it'll take a resolution from our board. But that's doable. Okay? But if this community coalesces and brings it to the board, the board would be pretty They're not gonna anything. I would hope.

But the point is, I want to be very clear that this is not a county board of supervisors cram down. Okay? This is for Apple Hill, this is for outdoor rec, this is for wine, this is for lodging to come together and say, Yeah, we need this. We agree to it, we support it, and we will do it. And that should, I hope, energize everybody that, hey, you're taking steps to fix or help or support your industry segment.

And is the time tough? Yeah, but you know what? This is when you got to make the move, guys. Anyway,

We of good knew that ten years ago.

Well, are today, here we are today, we got another shot and your point of we gotta take advantage of it is is good wisdom. I totally agree. Let me go here and then over to Lexi and then for Perry.

My experience is similar to, I think, Carl's and what Mike's outlining. I did four PBITs for the city of Sacramento. The last one was Midtown. Did PBIT in Salinas. Use the different consultants. Sorry. And it was it was a bumpy road. I wish we would you civitas, but it was their choice. They voted on it. And rocky start, very difficult.

The governments came in, Salinas and Amari, reluctantly, because it was private sector put together for downtown. Midtown is fascinating. Midtown is put together by Gary Perry, Gary, and the private businesses because it's not a redevelopment area for the city. We didn't give them any redevelopment monies. And they said, you know, we want our own tourism, our own marketing.

You put 20,000,000 into contracting convention and visitor stuff, and that happens once a week. We want something that goes midweek and funds our restaurants and keeps our downtown lively. So you can come and take notes for us. When it's time for a city resolution, you can draft that, but we wanna put it together. You're welcome to attend the meetings, but it's our program.

And it brought the business together with a voice. What they wanted from the city, they wanted police and safety protection to clean up the downtown. I'm gonna work with the fire department on the alleyways and the roadways, and they wanted to work on planning and redevelopment so the infrastructure was there. They don't wanna run into a problem and say, the infrastructure's like the water and the sewer's not there to handle this. Now can you upgrade it?

They want to upgrade it before it happens, so we could handle more restaurants and more hotels. And it was the easiest PBIT in the world to work on because it was all done by the businesses. The businesses drive it, the governments don't drive it. And when other cities and sister cities would come to Sacramento, they would look at our redevelopment city, did a wonderful job, we wanna talk about Midtown. Oh, we didn't do Midtown, We we didn't put redevelopment money in that. That's all private sector run. Oh, they did such a good job.

Yeah. We watch. City collects the money.

The city collects the money and they distribute the money. The county collects the money and the county distributes

the the money.

Let me go to Lexi and Perry, and then we're wrapping I'll this

totally tee off what you just said, that the businesses do drive it, and I just want to give a little perspective to everybody. Who's not in the room right now is the industry and these businesses that we're talking about. And I've been Background for you, my family has been fifty years in the wine They started the wine industry post prohibition here in Apple Hill. We have seen the booms of the industry, the wine industry's great climb, the histories of Apple Hill. Eldorado County has a history of this sector, this sector being amazing and just growing and vibrant, and we are right now in the worst time we have ever been probably since the parablite, but that was environmental.

This Well,

not apple. White goods, yeah.

Wine.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the wine industry, but these other sectors, I mean, this small lodging, small retail, a lot of theirs. And we're having attrition from these organizations are aging, they are falling apart. There's a lot of these institutional legacy organizations that you would need to do this that are at this point not fielding boards. There's this turnover generationally in these things.

It's kind of a no man's land out there organizationally to get the type of cohesive buy in needed to make this happen. Mean, maybe it's an opportunity. I just want to be very clear that there is so much unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and business is such a struggle that it's going to be a very hard sell to say to give any more dollars. Know we have to educate on this, but people are just feeling very pinched and there's a lot of, it's not just market factors, there's the economy, there's the county's regulatory squeezes and business. El Dorado County in this era right now is an extremely difficult time for these businesses to even be in business.

So to get hopeful about something like this to grow and draw more customers is going be a very hard sell for these businesses until they start to feel that there is going to be a future. It's going to be hard. So all I'm encouraging us to do is as we go there is if this can be packaged, not just with, This is something you guys should do for yourselves. We need to be able to tell them the rest of the community and the county and the future is going to look bright too. We will all be here with you to help you get there. But right now, I cannot underscore enough how much pain and suffering is out there. Wineries are going out of business every day, right? They're up for sale constantly and it's, we know, it's We

definitely will need a message strategy. There's no question And about that'll come as this, if this process is encouraged to go forward. And I totally get where you're at and it's going to be a challenge. But you know what? I don't see a better opportunity.

Yeah. Well, the time is now. I mean, that's the thing. Like, it's hard sell, but this is exactly when it's needed.

But the communication by private business forming and working on this, not government, the communication that happens from that is incredible, and the networks that start happening is incredible. And they reach consensus, then they tell us what they need, what they don't need, and that benefit is gold. It's worth more than the revenue you're going to collect or the marketing that you're going to do. Because once they start working together and they're all pulling in the same direction, everything changes.

Last comment goes to Mary, and then we're going to move on. We don't want more. Okay. Then that's it.

That's okay.

Thank you, Mary. Well,

we have time. Stop it.

I'm following up with Michael's comments, basically. Seems like there's just a couple of things. The challenge is not to lose track of this thing. The challenge is to get to where the appropriate parties are crafting the operating agreement to move it forward. And in so doing, I'm wondering this committee, what this committee's capabilities are and people we're associated with.

If we shouldn't come up with a list of milestones and try to develop a strategic plan to get from point a to point b that we can follow and, you know, say this this milestone we've gotta push on so and so to get them to move over here. Because we're just some guys sitting around the table here, but we could follow-up on a plan to move it.

Alright. Let's, you know

will need a roles and responsibilities meeting.

Well, that's fine. Well, if you get the milestones out Agree. And you just and you make the strategic plan of when you need to target, at what times you wanna accomplish these things, and you pick up who's gonna pick I any

think it's a great suggestion, and we will definitely It's see

it's so small house that we have here. Yeah. You gotta apply efforts to move something to get to that spot.

I think Maya's team can definitely help us with those milestones. They've been through it, we can manage it, comment on this

And part

that's one way to not lose track of it Otherwise, it falls off the table.

It's not gonna fall off the table. Hey, that was gonna be my point.

Question to the VAD veterans and Maya, what are the next steps, or

what is the timeframe of it?

Who pays for it? So next steps, I see we kind of have one or two different options that we usually the services that we provide for our clients. One is if we're in, like, the really early stages and we wanna see what is even possible, we might start something that's called a feasibility study. That's gonna be a four month engagement. Really ranges from 6,500 to $7,500 a month for those four months.

And in that and what it really does, it actually takes the place of the first kind of tranche of what the formation would actually consist of, but it's a little bit easier to chew in the sense of you're only committing to a formal process. We're doing all that strategic kind of planning with that steering committee, those that we are identifying, who's gonna be really stepping up to the forefront to kind of be the face of the formation process. We would then sit with them, designate those types of roles and responsibilities, put together a timeline, put together a list of those kind of key milestones and deliverables of where we want to be at. And really, at the end of that feasibility process, what we do is, in that outreach and consensus building, we're kind of temperature checking all the different types of businesses that we think would wanna be included in this. And then at the end of it, we draft what's called the feasibility report.

So it includes, you know, where do we have support, where don't we have support, where would we need more effort to garner that support needed. It might be at the very end we say, yes, we've got the support here. We would advise to continue through formation, and we would draft in addition to that feasibility report that acts as kind of like a educational tool of all has been done in the past four months. It also starts to craft the bones. It's called a service plan, which is exactly the bones of what that management district plan would look like.

So we take all of what we've learned in the feasibility process, and we start piecing together, okay, What does this thing gonna start to look like? And that is really what takes up kind of the the first part of a formation anyway. So we would do a lot of that same work in the formation process if we wanna just kinda roll in a formation, but that's gonna be a much longer process. For my presentation. That's anywhere from more of a six to ten month process.

I think the fact that we've got kind of a hybrid type of nature, we're probably looking at a longer process on the ten month side. But, again, which kind of the difference between the two is maybe we just focus on temperature checking the room first feasibility side. Or if we think, no. Let's just kinda head into the same and just go for it, we can take that work that we would do with the feasibility process, put it into the formation process so that in addition to consensus building, we're kind of crafting the bones of the district, and then we would roll kind of right into that petition process to get the votes needed.

So Maya, what do you think? What's the balance of the fees to get to that spot?

So we're looking for the ten month process, we would likely be looking at a $75,000 cost. The cost itself of members fronting the cost, that is a completely reimbursable cost with the assessment revenues that are generated from the district, and that can be paid back either in the first year or throughout the lifetime of the district, so that essentially that balances out. But that would be $7,500 for full formation. If you just wanted to do

the feasibility, it would just be

the first four months of that.

First So what's the overall? You

said like $7,075,005 thousand Yeah. That would come, what we would do is work with the county to fund it, and they would get repaid It's been a collection.

Oh, that's

awful. They can get paid through

Yeah, they get paid through the collection of the dollars. And if we started the feasibility study and just make it $20 Yeah. And if you guys all say no, county's out $20, but we do feasibility studies in this county every time.

Yeah, I

agree, I agree. I'm just saying, we have to talk to, gotta talk with Karen, we gotta talk with the chief administrative officer. There's opportunity, and we also gotta There's talk to a lot of talking that has to go on, but this is doable every month in this state.

Absolutely. Think if I there could be one more. Yeah. This is to me, it's real important. The chance of success is right the way we start it. Yeah. If we start it too big, talking hybrid and all this, that could be the downfall. We need to determine we're seed. Right? So we're multi industry. Mhmm. Take that hat off for a second. I'm in the wine business. I go to my fellow wineries and Exactly. They don't care.

They wanna know what is it gonna do for a winery. Now I know that you build that but that ain't happening up front. That's gonna happen in the process. Yeah. So I think we have to be careful.

Do we, as a seed, try to direct this in the beginning to say, we need to do two, or we need to do one, but we need to know what the pitfalls of one over the other is. Just I think it's I'm a proponent of the concept, but I also know the devil's in the details. And my instinct tells me that, keep it simple. Look at Amador, success, and I'd like to look at their success in the first year. Who started that? It probably wasn't the county or county committee like this. It was probably the association itself.

Yeah. It was the white. So, Leif, we agreed, but you can start with this operating agreement and which from what I hear from Maya, you can go into the simplest way and you could get in there six or ten months and say, we've gotta we've gotta amend this agreement, you know, and move it change it or we have to add something

to it.

Here's what I I hear what you're saying. Here's what I think we ought to do.

Let's meet with everybody.

Yeah. Let's let's see what the wine guys say. Let's see what the Apple Hill guys say. Let's see what the lodging guys say. Let's see what the outdoor people say. Let's have those meetings. These guys need proof. These guys need this. These guys need this. Let's get that on the table, and then we can work with Civitas and and and and and the county to fashion the package. Yeah. And then we got something to sell, but or talk about. Then we can take another step forward. But let's get all everybody in the

room, let's get all these meetings

and see what everybody needs. And I'm very clear with what you're looking for, and I that's happened in many other TBIDs that I work for. What's it gonna do for me? That's a fundamental question for everybody.

Yeah.

And we've got to figure out the answer.

In the different sectors of business, there's gonna be different benefits, right? Yes. So, I mean, can almost take each section of business and design what the benefits are gonna be there, pro sect

group of people. And I

will tell it's all based on relationship. Yeah, so Like that's for sure what's gonna sell it to them.

All right, this has been a very good discussion. Erin, what's our next steps?

I

think you I think you've been we we don't have it as a voting thing just on the agenda, so we're not voting on the

presentation. Right.

The presentation. So what's our

next step? You know, based on what you said, if if we wanna start outreaching to various groups Let me go back to so Yeah. You mentioned there was, like, sort of a, hey. For I can dollar fee, you can

I think I can put together two outlines of the the two different approaches, one being the feasibility and the one being the full formation? I I agree to the point that you made in terms of just kind of like how I would order. You know, they had to keep it simple because that that was the quickest way that they were gonna get something done for sure. And I think that if we know that going in and we invite others to the table in some in some type of feasibility type of process, maybe maybe it's exactly what you think. There are people that come and say, absolutely no way, so then we just focus on the wineries. But maybe we bring everyone in. There's some other maybe there's lodging or other attractions that say, no. We wanna partner in on this with you. And then from that, it's okay. Then we got

It's definitely bigger then. Yeah. But

But then that that feasibility process

would kinda

reveal that and having us in the room to deliver a lot of this type of information, deliver more kind of empirical data behind each of these districts to then explain what are the implications of starting small, and what are the implications of going bigger, and what is this gonna mean for each type of business sector? That's gonna be a lot of that feasibility work. So I'd be happy to put together the cost and So

why don't you get a proposal, and then you move it forward through our process? Does that work, Karen?

Yep. That works.

Okay.

Do we wanna use the next meeting to Yeah. Invite people from all the different Well,

hang on. It it is it premature to

have David come to the eye commission meeting in June to make an informational? Presentation. Yeah, think we should do that. Not yet, or Yeah, don't know.

I think we should do that. I think we should

get a word out. You

gotta get the vibe out there and start talking about it. Hang on one second, Michael. So the next step on this will be Maya's going to get Karen a piece of bill. Two different proposals. Full blown out and then feasibility only, and then Karen can move those through our process.

We'll start the next meeting inviting a bigger circle of folks, bring your friends. June 18. Yeah, bring your friends, you know, and we'll start slowly getting the circle together. Let's see what that feasibility proposal looks like so we know what the steps are, and we can sort of keep that on track and we'll go from there. But I think I would like to say as you guys leave this room, this idea is now in play.

Okay? It's in play. Haven't figured it all the way out. Right. Know, got a lot of conversations to happen, but the idea of a TBID, whether it's hybrid or individual, whatever it is, this is now in play in this county, and I would urge you to tell everybody, invite everybody, we'll figure out how to communicate better, let's move in

that direction. When does that commission meet again?

June 10, second Wednesday. Oh, yeah. June 10.

Do you need to earmark the budget for that 75,000 this year, or is this a next year that you went out?

Okay. Know that the verdict Karen on that.

Yeah. There's still opportunity in this year's budget.

Yep. And Coming the one

that starts on July or September. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It it starts July 1, but it's finalized in Yeah.

And I I think he you know, we we've now he's expressed interest in this. So need

to do it in this this

next We're

just getting it on the

list of things. We got a bump in.

And keeping.

Yeah. There's a spin

on the list before. That was my point earlier. We You know? You know? I I think we're in a climate now where the businesses will

want to have this discussion. Yeah. Yeah. And Carl's never been part of it. So That's

that's true. We have have I could screw the whole thing up. Sense.

Indeed. But that continuity of purpose within our government is really important here. It's ephemeral, and we have to be able to have them participate as part of this process. We get the community and the businesses in here, and we can't get past I think it's continuity Asian?

Michael, it's continuity by everybody. Yeah. K? It has to be continuity by the government and It's support the

the president, a shortfall in confidence in one particular area. I agree, we we are need the county support.

We need them to, you know, agree to help refund this thing. That's going to be an indicator, a marker of support. We need people to show up for meetings. Do you want this or not? We need everybody's support.

We need everybody's consistency. And to get this thing over the end zone line, it takes it's going to take some elbow grease, guys, But you I will tell you, we can do this in this county, and it will make a difference. K? I guarantee you, it'll make a difference in a lot of different ways, not just funding, but it will make a difference in how well everybody networks and works together, how everybody envisions the future together. It can be done, And and and and I'm banking that this county's got got got the got the goods to get it done, and we'll figure it out as we go. We'll hit some stumbling blocks, but we will get it done.

I'm backing up, like, one of his comments where he stands here. I think in this house, we should find ways, develop ways to hold these guys' feet to the fire to keep moving, so they just don't listen to what we're saying and then go

home and forget You know what, I'm not worried about the county.

Think the businesses are gonna carry it, and it is about the businesses. The government just collects the taxes.

Honestly, I think the businesses will be happy that the government is really happy with doing it. I mean, I feel like that will pass it further. And they they're in support. Yeah. They could shut it down and be like, we're not paying the 75,000, but they're in support of it. That's all we need. Like, the businesses have to show up. That's gonna be the thing.

Yeah. We need to show up to the businesses. Would like to instead of inviting them to a random meeting at two I mean, this has to be stakeholder outreach meetings. You guys have to go to those board meetings and those member meetings and talk to them because they won't they're here. They're not we're gonna get a small sampling versus really stakeholder engagement.

My team has done this in many, many places, and they got

They go in there.

They've got they know the methodology, they've got the tools. We obviously have to come together with our tools, our databases, our whatever, and that's a meeting to happen yet. But let's be clear, it's going to take work. We're going to have to meet these people where they are. Okay? We're going to have a coordinated message, you know, what this could be, the upside of this for everybody. And, you know, we're making sausage, and I don't want to make any forth sausage in this meeting. You

made a good point. We're leaving here, it's out there. Yeah. This is moving forward. Absolutely. That means actions have to take place. Can you share with us a tactic, some tactics that we as we're not we're all stakeholders, but there's stakeholders out there, but we're the leaders of that. Again, I have a SIC community that this is just an interested person in the community. I'm going to a meeting. Do you have something? I can I understand the concept? I've done this in previous businesses, different same self taxing type of a concept. But for this, it's a little bit different, diverse. It's just some tactics. Think we just give us give us all some tactics and

I'll just we'll just start. Everybody will have talking points.

Yes. We've got even outs, talking points. We put together, you know, collateral materials in terms of, like, case studies that you saw. We would kinda go in with We'd

give it The ROI.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

We'll get all that out soon. Yeah. We'll get all that

Talk to you guys. So what

I might ask of everybody in this room is if you've got an organization contact, they've got a regular meeting date or whatever, send that to me so I

can start compiling that list of everybody Everybody's who needs outreach a missionary here or a Sherpa.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's a Sherpa. Alright. Well, listen. This has been a great conversation. Are there anybody online that would like to chime in? First, we left them. No? Okay. I want to thank everybody. Last thank you for You

guys mentioned, like, the tenth of the eighteenth. I wanted to make sure that I have that on the

The tenth is an Ag meeting.

Oh, Ag meeting's our next Seeds meeting. Okay. Yeah. And maybe we'll try to get, like, like, the head of the association. Okay. You don't want, like

try it out.

I'll

try it. You don't want all the

I'm like, you just want the head of the association. It's like I think that's

the start. Yeah. You don't want

all the businesses.

No. No. No. That's the start. Yeah. Need to be bed top down for sure.

I'm happy to make myself available for both the the tenth and the

It's fun. It's a big commission.

Yeah. Oh, the deal. That's our next meeting just got me on the seventeenth.

These are your feet. You'll always know.

The '8.

Let's well, listen. I wanna thank everybody for the good discussion. This is a pivotal moment in Eldorado County. We have to make this work, so let's just make it work.

We talked about this entire time. This is be

awesome. Here we go. Yes. All right. We're good. Keeping on in the agenda.

We've been talking about this forever. It's funny. Yeah. Know. Between the two organizations. Alright.

We got it

done. Oh, we

have another pick? Couple of Two

quick agenda items. Thank you, Maya. Thank you.

Health. Yeah. That'll be great. Between now and. I look

forward to meeting everyone again on board week.

I'm

excited. That'll be great.

K. Item number 260918, discussion and recommendation on the GSEC membership. Sacramento Economic Council membership.

Who does? The district attorney.

Thanks, Kathy.

Noorize the party.

Well, we already got support. I don't know if you guys saw in the packet, the Greater Sacramento Economic Council looking support or membership fees. Asked to put this on the agenda at the request of the chief administrative officer who's looking for guidance from this committee in terms of, you know, recommendation or not, or just giving our 2¢ on it. Karen, do you want to give any more background? You've got a little more feel on this than I do.

Yeah. I think probably most of you around this world know that with the cuts that were made to economic development a couple years ago that included G SEC membership, which had been it's 60 or 55,000 annually, and it's been that for a while. So they still helped us with a couple of things and stayed in touch, and we're really kind of at that decision point of do we consider membership or not? And the timing is interesting, Carl and I have talked about this, I've talked about it with the CAO as well, as we're talking about bid and contract with Civitas and all that, Where do we wanna put you know, if we know we've got a limited amount of money, we're not gonna be able to do all things that we wanna do on the list right away. We gotta really balance.

Yeah.

You know, do we wanna really focus on the bid that's our for now, then maybe we come back to G SEC in another year or two, or do we think

there's I think good value in this year,

You know, working with the Business Park and trying to make things happen there and losing horribly to residential. We don't have the sites that GPAC needs to attract the type of business they attract. They attract large office scientific research and development, semiconductor, and some warehouse distribution. If we could defer for a year or two and use the funds for something like Civitas or TOT that can be reimbursed or something, but just do a hiatus. We don't really have the sites yet.

We can reassess the sites in the business park after the planning commission gets done denying or approving some more projects. And we can move forward on this. I think this is bigger, more important. It's now. It's necessary. Yeah. Greater Sacramento's not going anywhere. I know we have a supervisor that serves on us, a board member that's very prestigious. There's still some events they can attend and still be connected, but you're not gonna get any benefit out of it this year or next year. Yeah.

Any other comment on this? Think our energy is limited. It is. Yeah. So, you know, to to have to ensure some kind of success, you gotta stay pretty focused. Yep. Alright.

I'm gonna take I'll I'll entertain a motion from this committee on a recommendation on this. Anybody wanna tackle that, Dave?

I make a motion that we do not fund Greater Sacramento Economic Council this year, and that we look at a focus of funding and resources towards our PBIT and TID efforts.

Can I get a second on that?

I second the motion.

Any other discussion on that among the committee members? All in favor? Aye. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Last item on the agenda, discussion and update on the pending presentation to the Board of Supervisors. Karen?

Yeah. This is just a standing item. We don't have any details, but think this is September. But then we are scheduled to go to the board. There is two months out of the year where all the committees and commissions are appointed by the board do a presentation. So and I wish I I apologize. Have those.

I think I thought we And we had Bryce come back from Utah.

Yeah. Not that he knew. Helpful. I know. I think we had a couple of people that maybe were appointed that were gonna be kind of an ad hoc to to work on this, and I don't see anybody here remember being appointed to that.

Right.

He replaced Bryte. There you go.

I'll buy him a ticket. Like, I'm coming back every weekend or something. He still?

He said if we needed help, just reach out. So I

can help him.

His wife has been commuting or remote working to Utah from home, and now he's in Utah, so they're planning on

He's in he's not he's

not going to Utah.

He's in Arizona. I thought he was going to Arizona. Utah. Okay, why don't

we put this on the next month's agenda

and tighten it up? What is it

the board needs from us? If we do that, we can put together

Yeah, I put it in that last time we talked about this. They had

the status of our

plan, the status of the committee, we still have no budget, what do we want to accomplish next What

you did accomplish, what you're proposing for the next year, that's the big piece.

Pretty simple. Yeah. Take that on the next one.

Yep. Okay.

No. I'm a I don't do it. Let's yeah.

Any final comments from the board or the committee? Is there some presentation or something being planned to for the supervisors kind of addressing the work that Lexi did and the document that she put on

the meeting

about just giving some relief to the VRBO and, you know, short term stay.

I don't know. What we what

we could do is kind

of Ordinances out there that are really, really hurting.

Don't know, I'm actually gonna be honest, I don't know what ordinances are really hurting anybody that at this point in time, anybody can apply to have a VHR. We're working on ag lodging, which is gonna be a little bit different, and it will open up so that, you know, like a winery or Apple Hill

Mhmm. Yeah.

Not limited to one like any, you know, VHR is. You could potentially have more.

I had, I don't know

if you stopped the presentation to the board on ad lodging, and that's a big effort, and that's gonna take a lot of outreach as well, but we need to kind of decide what are the parameters of that because

What we can do is outline what we looked into as far as ordinances and issues in the short term, and who we partnered with in the counties, and who we want to continue to partner with and move forward on these items or this agenda or this project, like ag, because I think that's important for the Board of Supervisors to hear, is we are partnering, we have looked at these issues, we are gonna work with the ag commission. Those are the types of things I think we wanna know that we're engaged or we're

not engaged. And Alexia just reached out and said she's willing to share data, what exactly do I need, so it's good timing because I'm thinking about that with that lodging, and I'll Just to know what data. Helps. Yeah. It would help.

I'd like to recognize the report she did send in too.

That's boring. Yeah. Don't worry about that.

I think what you were asking about, though, is what's the status of the because it's two different tracks right now, the ag lodging and the VHRs has Turnboo and Forever working on their ad hoc, and they just put a survey out. Is that what you're yeah. What's happening with that VHR ordinance review? Is there a timeline, or is that gonna dovetail with,

like, The the changes that have

been made that have caused all the, actually, in

there Exactly. See, that's the part where there's this misconception about the changes to the ordinance cause for What happened was we started enforcement, and I have a list of everybody who has said, Hey, we're affected by these new regulations, and I can tell you that the majority of them know what the problem is, has always been a problem, maybe before we made changes

to the ordinance. If you go back

and look at the last changes we made to the EHR ordinance, they were things like hosted VHRs now need to have a permit they didn't before. That's not causing any issues So other than a big slight

thing was the set hunt structure. It's attached.

The detached service.

Yeah. So structure. So they're trying to clean up, and and as much as we can expand, one of the the changes that's gonna be proposed for EHRs is looking at the guest house. ADUs, that's a great example. It's always been against our regulations to use an ADU for short term rental. That didn't change recently. That's been

I I'm aware of of either you. Yeah. But I'm aware of the ones that are guesthouses that are no longer allowed. And that that's and and I need to get up to speed on the details of it, but it's not it's pretty

But they might have been built

under an ADU. Yeah. So I

think we deal with this a lot in Apple Hill too is, like and, you know, there's a lot of things going on, but, like, actually reading the ranch marketing ordinance. And so for so long, El Dorado County has been We've been a rural county. There's a lot of things that the Delfinos have done that should not have been happening. But once you want to move to the next level and you want to bring tourists here year round and you want to be a legitimate South Lake Tahoe, you got to start getting with the program. And I think I don't know.

I I I'm on both sides of the fence because it's like you can't expect to have no ordinances and run a legitimate business that's bringing in, like, tons of money. But and you can't expect to have an ADU that you built for your grandma that you now wanna have people in all the time and not have any regulation. So it's gotta like we gotta all work together like we've been talking about because Well, something changed. And Yeah. It's it's the enforcement. And So they were getting away with it. Enforcement. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe support.

Yeah. Maybe there should have been a grandfathering in or, like, a whatever, you know, needs to happen so people don't get shut down. But I do think at this on the other side of the spectrum, people wanna just do what they wanna do on their 20 acres and not have anyone really say anything. And it's like, I want that too.

Yeah.

I know. I can't That's not the

point I'm making. Yeah. Yeah.

But it it's been a it's been an aggressive conversation in a lot of meetings.

I told them they weren't gonna they helped. You know, I I chase sound like a grand jury response. I partially I agree in part and disagree in part.

Yeah.

Well, I don't agree that the enforcement has been more broadly enforced. But the rules put in place for clustering, for buffering, and proximity to another vacation on a rental were considered for the problems in the Tahoe area and not at all in West Slope. That was that was wrong. And that made lawful People downstairs now on the wrong side of law.

That's what I'm talking about.

That I have a problem.

And you had to And

that's an interpretation in part that just the fact that it wasn't considered. And now, you know, we have a spiraling industry. We have no hotels. We're not gonna have any anytime soon. It's those vacation home rentals that are keeping properties viable Mhmm. That are keeping folks to spend another night so that they might visit a farm.

Are they contacting the planning commission, though, and, like, having conversations, or are they just letting out the planning?

Yeah. That's my that's my question.

The board the board made the board created an ad hoc committee of two board members. Okay. They had a public meeting, a fairly good public meeting. It was quite civil. There were a lot of people that came forward, communicated their harm.

Yeah. You know what? It's a great topic, but it's out of our hands.

Yeah. I think the question was just, is there a date that the ad hoc for VHRs was gonna come back with their findings? Is that is that is there any idea when that's happening?

Yeah. If it's going to be believe it's the the next survey. I don't know if that's closed yet or not. It'll be out there. But everything after that's kind of all, that's the last piece, really, and then it'll be prepared by staff to go. So it'll be this summer. Yeah. Yeah. That's true.

All right. I want to thank everybody for coming. This was a good meeting today. We're moving forward on what I think could be a very pivotal thing for this county. It's good to see coming from the eastern side of the county, looking at the western side of the county. Looking down on it. I wanna cheer you all on. I wanna cheer you all on and support the effort whatever way I can and take a motion. Take a motion to adjourn.

Thank you, mister.

All in favor. Alright. Thank you all. Have a great weekend, everybody.