City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everyone. We will now call to order the special meeting with the county of Sacramento and the city of Sacramento. Would the clerk please call the roll?

For the county of Sacramento, Supervisor Kennedy? Here. Supervisor Desmond? I think absent at the moment. Vice Chair Hume? Here. Supervisor Serna?

Here.

And Chair Rodriguez? Here. County of Sacramento has a quorum.

For the City of Sacramento, Councilmember Kaplan? Here. Councilmember Dickinson?

Here.

Vice Mayor Talamantes?

Here. Against my will.

Councilmember Pluckybaum? Absent. Councilmember Maple? I am here. Mayor Pro Tem Guerra?

Here.

Councilmember Jennings? Absent. Councilmember Vang?

Here.

Mayor McCarty? I will note for the record supervisor Desmond has

This joint special meeting of the County of Sacramento and City of Sacramento is live and recorded with closed captioning. It is cablecast on Metro Cable Channel 14, the local government affairs channel on the Comcast and DirecTV U-verse cable systems. It is also live streamed at metro14lime.saccounty.gov. Today's meeting replays Sunday, May 24th at 6 p.m. on Metro Cable Channel 14. Once posted, the recording of this meeting can be viewed on demand at youtube.com forward slash Metro Cable 14. The Board of Supervisors fosters public engagement during the meeting and encourages public participation, civility, and use of courteous language. The Board does not condone the use of profanity, vulgar language, gestures, or other inappropriate behavior, including personal attacks or threats directed towards any meeting participant. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Each speaker will be given two minutes to make a public comment per agenda item. Please be mindful of the public comment procedures to avoid being interrupted while making your comment. Comments made by the public during a board of supervisors meeting may include information that could be inaccurate or misleading, particularly concerning topics related to public health, voter registration and elections. The County of Sacramento does not endorse or validate the accuracy of public statements made during these open public forums. The recordings are shared to provide transparency and access to the proceedings of public meetings. To make a comment in person, please fill out a request form and hand it to clerk staff. The chairperson will open public comments for each agenda item and direct the clerk to call the name of each speaker. When the clerk calls your name, please come to the lectern and make your comment. If a speaker is unavailable to make a comment prior to the closing of public comments, the speaker waives their request to speak and the clerk will file the speaker request form in the record. The clerk will manage the timer and allow the speaker two minutes to make a comment. The remainder of the agenda comments will take place at the conclusion of the timed matters. As a reminder, rule of procedure 10b allows the chair to establish uniform time limits for people addressing the board in relation to a particular matter. Such limits may be announced at the beginning of each matter posted on the agenda and can include setting a specific amount of time devoted to public comment, for a particular item, announcing cutoff times for receipt of request to speak forms, reducing the amount of time per speaker or other reasonable and content neutral measures. You may send written comments by email to boardclerk at saccounty.gov. Your comments will be routed to the board and filed in the record. If you need accommodation pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act or medical or other reasons, please see clerk staff for assistance or contact the clerk's office at 916-874-5451 or by email at boardclerk at saccounty.gov. Thank you in advance for your courtesy and understanding of the meeting procedures.

All right. If we can have everybody please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

The first item on our agenda is status update on the independent assessment of Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency by CVR Associates, Inc.

good afternoon chair and board members vice mayor and members of the council I'm here to introduce the item that's before you today as you recall in August of 2025 the County Board of Supervisors requested that staff pursue an independent assessment of Sacramento housing and redevelopment agency with the goal of strengthening governance operations and collaboration across our jurisdiction and community partners. Following a competitive procurement process and in partnership with our colleagues from the city of Sacramento CVR associates was selected. CVR rose to the top because of their extensive experience nationwide in assessing public housing authorities and their strong track record conducting organizational assessments that lead to implementable outcomes. today cvr is here to provide an overview of their assessment process they have just launched their first phase which is stakeholder input and the city council and board of supervisors are among those key stakeholders amongst others that they'll talk about Their work will evaluate SHRA's key program areas, examine governance roles and responsibilities, and identify opportunities to enhance coordination, transparency, and impact. This is an informational item, and we look forward to hearing from CVR as they walk us through their approach. So with that, I will invite Melanie Campbell up to and Zach Elliott Mercado. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Melanie.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you, Siobhan. We do have a presentation that briefly describes what our process is. We'd like to share that with you, a little bit of our expectations with regard to our team and our timeline. And then we just want to continue our listening phase, which is what we're in the midst of right now. So CVR, Siobhan had a chance to share a little bit about what our history and experience is. But we've been doing this for over 30 years. In fact, we've just had our 31st anniversary of the organization. And we do specialize in the work that housing authorities do across the country. We do agency plans. We do agency assessments. We certainly are very, very informed on the Housing Choice Voucher Program, a public housing basic core programs that housing authorities operate, but also the ancillary programs that a lot of housing providers and housing agencies administer for communities. We additionally do a lot of consulting in the area of affordable housing development. So we are very knowledgeable about that. And we also have proprietary technology solutions because we know streamlining and efficiencies is essential when we're providing affordable housing services. So we have a line of business along the technology solutions as well. So I'm Melanie Campbell, I'm co-president of CVR Associates. I'm joined here by Zach Elliott-Maccato, as Siobhan said, but also here present with us at the moment as well as Candace Horton, and Mike Andrews is also with us here today. We have additional team members that will be helping out on these assessments, but they'll be joining as we progress into the coming weeks and months of our scope of work. So just again, we've done some of this work really across the country. We just put a few examples of housing agencies that we have done this kind of work for. But we also do work, frankly, for hundreds of communities across the country and even into the Caribbean. And we, again, are also a HUD TA provider. HUD calls on us to provide technical assistance to housing authorities and grantees across the country. So we have three strategies, and Siobhan touched on them a bit, but these are words directly out of the RFP that we responded to and that our proposal spoke to. I won't necessarily read all this to you, but basically is we're gonna look at their public housing and voucher programs, their development programs, some of you call them, excuse me, the entitlement programs, and certainly governance. I'll turn it over to you.

I hate when that happens.

All right. With that, so we just wanted to give you a flavor for the team that we have for each of the strategies. So we have this label as task one team, but really strategy one team. That'll be led by Candice, who's in the audience. We have members that are here with us today and the members that are not here with us. And so one of those members not here with us is David Vargas and Milan Osinek. They are with a company that they've formed since being former HUD executives. So they were at the... higher echelons of HUD, and now have formed their own company and specialize in public housing programs. Steve Nolan is also a subcontractor to us. He specializes in PHA finance, and we have a CVR team member, Vincent Bruton and Jason Bohr, who have expertise in public housing and the voucher program. I will be leading the strategy two team, which is around development programs. We're joined here by a subcontractor, Mike Andrews, who's with Structure Development. We have Rebecca Rothenberg with Atria Planning. She specializes in entitlement programs. We have Steve Nolan again on that task team, and then Jason Bohr as well. And then finally, for the governance team, we have Melanie Campbell. We again have Dave Vargas and Milan Ostenek, Mike Andrews, Steve Nolan, and Jason Bohr. So our overall process, this is also taken from our response to the RFP. Right now we're in that step one, which is really our listening session. And so we've started that this week. That'll continue over the coming weeks. And then steps, phases two and three are kind of gonna be meshed together. And that's really when we dig into the meat of the assessment. So doing due diligence, requesting documents, the things that are rising out of these conversations we're having this week, we wanna dig in further. Ask questions, make requests, meet with the right people to answer questions that we have. And then in phase four, we'll start drafting our observations, making recommendations to you all, and that will lead to a final deliverable. And so some of the formatting here is a little wonky on the screen, so sorry about that. But we got kicked off and we signed our contracts and everything in March. We're here with you all now in May. We're planning, we're in the midst of planning a site visit in July to dig into the assessment phase and meeting with staff and really digging into questions that we have that are rising out of these listening sessions. We're in talks to come back in September or do a September virtual touch point with you all. So to be determined, but we're in the process of scheduling that. That would just kind of give you a preview of kind of where we're heading. And then we would plan to come back and present our planned observations and deliverable in November and then finalize that deliverable and submit it before the end of the calendar year. All that said, this is our plan. And at this moment, we don't quite know what we're going to get into when we get into the assessment phase. And there might be some threats we need to pull on a little bit longer, or we know we're in a dynamic environment and things change. And so there could be things that alter this timeline, but we will make sure that you are kept informed throughout that process.

And I think the only other thing I would add in full transparency is Chris Warren, who is the current executive director for SHRA, is a senior vice president with our firm, CVR Associates. And that completes our presentation.

So this was an opportunity for us to bring both the city and the county together. I think we haven't done this for about almost 10 years, I think was the last time the two governing bodies got together. I think one of the things was to really kick off the project and to share where the project was going and then also any feedback or anything that either of the governing bodies would like to share with CVR, now would be a good time to share that information.

One moment, I do have a supervisor in the queue. Supervisor Hume?

Thank you, Chair. I just want to say what a momentous occasion this is, that it's the first time we've sat as a JPA body on this dais or any other dais to talk about SHRA. So hooray for that. And then I would just like to reiterate, I can't speak today for some reason. I don't know why. I would like to say again that what I mentioned in our briefing the other day, that this is a grand opportunity to reimagine a housing authority of how you might dream about one being. And so I hope you take that opportunity seriously and not just nibble around the edges or polish off the rough pieces, but really reimagine and know that we are all committed, I think, up here of trying to do something a little differently.

Thank you. Supervisor Kennedy.

Thank you, Chair. I had a lot to say this morning, so I won't reiterate everything I said then, but just for the public to know that this is a long time in coming. This is an agency that's 40 years old, and I think it's healthy for introspection every 40 years. You know, the world of housing has changed. The world of homelessness has changed. Certainly, redevelopment hasn't only changed, it's gone away. There's a number of reasons that we need to do what we're doing here today. I thank you. I've read over your materials. I applaud your approach. I think it's a good one. Certainly, your credentials are valuable. amazing and the right seems to be the right people to do the job I think having you know in the process we don't have have our what's your title interim interim executive director having an interim executive director and then eventually a permanent executive director this is the exact perfect time to do that so I really appreciate my colleagues on both the board and the council for recognizing that and for being here today. So, you know, my door is open to you throughout this process at any time you want to chat.

Supervisor Desmond.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I just want to pile on. I'm sure everybody will be piling on here. I appreciate the chance to visit with you yesterday. And I think for members of the public watching this, I think this is really an inflection point in how we collectively address homelessness in the county. And I think all of us up here are committed to continuing to have public forums like this where we all gather and give the public a chance to weigh in on what we're doing and for us to hear their frustrations and for that level of transparency to guide the policy decisions that we collectively make in addressing this crisis. So thank you.

Vice Mayor Telemontes.

Thank you, Chair. I do want to note that this is the second time in the history of this SHRA body where the city and the county meet together on the dais to be able to discuss SHRA and the future of it. And so for me, I'm just super thankful for our county partners on agreeing to meet together collectively today. Having everyone in the same room to provide direction, to ask hard questions, and to improve coordination is important for us to be efficient, transparent, and just have better communication so we can better serve all the Sacramentans with our housing crisis here. So thank you and look forward to the reports. Thank you. Council Member Garrett.

Thank you again. And, you know, one, I just wanted to thank for the briefing that you guys were able to provide. One thing I forgot to mention, and I'm assuming it is in the stakeholder identification, but not only in the conversations that you have as individual rank and file members on the work that they do. But I want to make sure that we're also having a conversation with our bargaining units so that they also are communicating with their employees about, you know, the concerns that they may have and the fears of where this agency may be going. And so I want to make sure that that's a deliberate part of the conversation. And excited to be here with my colleagues. Thanks.

Thank you for your input.

Council Member Kaplan.

Hi, good to see you in person. Welcome to, I guess it'll be interesting, and I look forward to the final report with 14 bosses, because we're totally going to agree on everything. But most importantly, I really want to look forward as what does SHRA look like? As we look for an interim director, how do we have a cohesive approach to what are their job duties? What are the goals that we as a body want them to accomplish so that there's a true transparent and open line of communication? And then I just want to encourage, and I know you're doing this, but when we talk about listening to the stakeholders, it's the people who are actually on the ground building the affordable housing, working in this area. What is their experience? Because they may have experiences in other jurisdictions and other states that have best practices that we could look at implementing here. But appreciate you and look forward to the final report. Thank you.

Council Member Mabel.

Thank you, Chair. Well, we had a great meeting yesterday. Thank you for taking the time. And I know we talked in depth, so I won't go into all of that. But I just want to say, I want to agree with some of my colleagues here that it's time. You know, it's been many years. I heard 40 years, but I thought SHRA was founded in 1973? 80. What? Yes or no? ChatGBT system.

ChatGBT system.

No, I'm more inclined to trust Supervisor Kennedy than ChatGBT. Regardless of the timing, I think it's been plenty of time. And as was mentioned, our part of SHRA, the redevelopment piece, is no longer here. And it's probably not something that will ever come back, at least not in the same form that we once had it. And so it's high time for us to really take a look at what does this agency look like and what does it do, what should it do moving forward. And I think that's really important that we do it in partnership with one another. I will say publicly that one of the things that I hope comes out of this is, you know, I think one of the challenges that I've heard from not just staff at the agency, but even from sometimes the public and others is that it's really hard when you have two different places where key decisions are being made. So, for example, getting the same presentations at both the city council chambers and the Maybe two different performance evaluations for the executive director. Maybe, you know, all of these things, policies that are coming forward. And not to say that it can't happen that way. It has happened for many years. But perhaps it would be better if we did things together that made sense. So I look forward to seeing your recommendations on the governance piece, how we can work together better and be more efficient with the time and the space that we have. And also, I think probably most importantly, for the employees to make sure that it's really clear for the staff, the executive director, the staff in the agency that they know exactly what's expected of them. And we are giving one clear message from all of us about what we'd like to see everything from. you know, how much should it cost to build a housing project, you know, what that expectation looks like, because I know there's different opinions on that on this dais, to, you know, what the staffing should look like. One of the things that we talked about yesterday was I'm really keen on customer service. That's something that I take into account in my job all the time. I view myself in that way for the constituents that I represent, and I think that all of our agencies and departments should do that. And so finding ways that we can be more efficient and effective using technology, perhaps, to be better in our communication with the constituents and the folks who use SHRA and are in our housing. And so those are some of the things that I mentioned that we talked about a lot more. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Also, as was mentioned by Lisa Kaplan, from other agencies, there's a lot to learn. They're all structured in different ways. There's maybe some things we can take and others that don't make sense. But I think that we have a lot to learn. And I'm looking forward to the conversation. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Council Member Dickinson.

Thank you, Chair. I'm sorry I wasn't able to meet with you this morning, so this is my first introduction to you and you to me, and I appreciate the presentation. I do agree with my colleagues with respect to the time for review. I think it is timely. Certainly what the agency does has changed most significantly with the with the demise of redevelopment, but contrary to some who believe I was around at the time the agency was created, that is not quite true, but I've been around this environment for a long time. And it seems to me there's often in these exercises, these undertakings, a presumption that something is broken. And I don't think necessarily that's a presumption that applies in this case. Are there... changes that may be beneficial? Are there modifications that may be helpful? Absolutely. And that's to me the point of doing these kinds of reviews. But I do hope as one member of this combined body that you don't go into this work with the assumption that the agency doesn't work. There may be ways to improve it, certainly. There may be ways to help us be more efficient and more effective. But I would suggest to you that this agency and this rather odd structure has actually worked quite well over the duration of time that the agency has existed. So my expectation is not that the agency needs to be torn down and rebuilt necessarily, but that it is one that can hopefully work better for all of us with some sensible kinds of improvements and with the recognition that the mission of the agency has changed some because of what's happened externally in particular. Ultimately, we want to focus, in my view, on the outcomes that we want to achieve through the agency. And identifying those outcomes and then measuring how well the agency is meeting those outcomes now and whether there are changes that can be made that will better help us reach those outcomes, I would tell you that's what I'm looking for out of this work. Thanks.

Thank you.

Vice Mayor Telemontes?

Thank you. I just want to touch on what Councilmember Dickinson just said. There's a lot of members of the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency here in the audience, and I just want to thank you for the work that you have done to produce all the reports that have come before us now under the direction of Chris Warren. Incredible work that you're doing, and like Councilmember Dickinson said, there's always areas of improvement in every single organization, every single department, because we here in local government are tasked with, like Mayor McCarty says, doing more with less. all the time and so less federal dollars are coming down for you and the programs that you currently operate the vouchers that you operate and the need and the demand continues to grow in the Sacramento community so keep up the good keep up the good work hang in there and looking forward to working with you and the consultants and Chris Warren to be able to move Sacramento forward thank you all right I will save my comments to the end are there any requests to speak

Yes, we do have one member of the public signed up to speak. Public comment. Would Lambert please approach the lectern? You have two minutes to address the body.

good afternoon lambert i was invited here by someone because i'm a native and i i think this is a good good thing if you work in the direction that you should uh... i think uh... senator ashby should get some sort of uh... kudos to because from what i've read she was trying to do this type of thing and there was a lot of pushback but here you are this is the powers to be in sacramento and being a native you should be able to sit down and figure it out Otherwise, you should, to me, be replaced because there's enough power in here to figure this out. It's only one section of the city, which is SHRA. Now, it covers a lot. I was a big fan of, I can't think of her name, Rochelle, Rochelle. And also a lady was here before her called Cassandra Jennings. They were outstanding with SHRA. But like you said, the redevelopment is gone. And so, you know, I wish you well because people have been talking about you should come together. So here you are. Now you're front and center. You're going to be under the microscope of scrutiny. And so hopefully you get it done.

Thank you, Lambert. There are no other speakers. Okay. Mayor McCarty.

Well, thank you. What time is it, by the way? 2.28. This was scheduled for an hour. I know. We didn't know if we could make it happen in an hour. And I guess that's what I wanted to address, is that we're all here together, and we wanted to do this, and now what? And so I would venture to say, like you started out, Supervisor Hulme, that this is the beginning, and we're here at the first meeting, and maybe we're not gonna dig into as much today, but I would very much like, as some of our council members have talked about, and our Vice Mayor has, and Supervisor, If we could have a structured opportunity for us to engage on SHRA matters. I'm not sure if it's every item. Certainly some things are certainly specific to our geographic area, but on big issues like the budget, what's happening with our housing choice voucher program, reforms at the federal level. what's happening with our public housing stock throughout the city and county. Because one, the people who call these numbers, they don't know the boundaries. And number two, the questions that Supervisor Desmond may ask, like, oh, we didn't realize that, and we're not always watching. your Channel 14 hearings after that, thank God. And so this just allows us to, you know, whether it's the Golden One slogan or the Golden State Warriors slogan, stronger together. And I think that's what we are when we work on these issues. I WILL SAY, TOO, THAT I THINK IT'S TIME TO MODERNIZE IT. I DON'T KNOW IF WE WANT TO THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER, BUT A LOT HAS CHANGED. IT WAS CREATED IN 73, IT WAS MODERNIZED IN 80. I KNOW COUNCILMEMBER, FORMER SUPERVISOR, DICKINSON, AND I BOTH SERVED ON THE SHRA COMMISSION WHEN IT WAS VERY DIFFERENT. WHEN MOST OF THE STUFF WE TALKED ABOUT WAS REDEVELOPMENT, AND THAT'S BEEN GONE SINCE 2012. AND MOST OF THE ISSUES NOW, 75% OF THE BUDGET. And our team is related to public housing and administering housing choice vouchers. So certainly that's the focus and having an opportunity to zero in on that and focus on effectiveness. I also think that we need to focus on, can you bring up that chart again you had, Chris or somebody? There's one, two, three, the kind of elements. Okay.

Are you talking about the strategies?

No, there was this one. Area focus.

There we go. Area focus. So governance, we're here, you know, clearly we're all interested in that. As I said, roughly I think 75% of our people and our resources we get from the federal government, which I know we're on the chopping block right now, hopefully it doesn't happen, are for strategy one. And so that's appropriate to look at that and how those are working, what we can do to maximize. But two, I don't know if 2026 going forward, if they're in the right place. I know some of the programs that SHRA does, the county does on their own. And does it make sense for the jurisdictions to zero in on that or with SHRA? And so as you look at the effectiveness of those programs and how we're optimizing it, I think that's a key question as well, is what does that look like? going forward. But I guess the big picture is I'm appreciative that we're all here. And I know people were nervous. There would be a big food fight here. And obviously, we're very cordial. But I think we're all on the same page. And when people call SHRA to get help for housing. They don't know boundaries and so forth. They know that we are elected to help and try to make things better. So again, this is hopefully the beginning. And thank you, Chairwoman Rodriguez, and look forward to the next endeavor.

You know, I agree. I think this is very exciting time for the city and the county because there is so much that crosses over between our jurisdictions. And to have the opportunity to come together and problem solve, because ultimately the end user, which are our constituents, are the ones that are in need. And when we get the phone calls that, you know, I waited an hour and a half to get through. I didn't get through. Can you try calling? And they call to us. Our ultimate goal is to be able to help an agency that could do some improvements and also maybe reconsider whether now is the time to even change the name, Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. We don't have the redevelopment part anymore. So to me, it's very exciting to do the collaboration I also want to thank you and your team for the effort that you are going to take in this endeavor and working with us to make those improvements. And that is it. All right. Any other comments? All right. So there are no other comments. Any other comments from the execs? All right. Then we will call adjourn this meeting at 2.34. Thank you. Thank you. Wow.