City Council - Regular Meeting

There we go. All righty. I would Oh, good evening, everyone. I would like to call the September 8 2026 closed session City Council meeting to order. City Clerk, can we have a roll call?

Present. Councilmember Lodge? Here. Councilmember Peterson? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Mayles? Here. Mayor Krupa?

Here. Okay, we are not going to have an invocation at this point, but we will go into public comment. Our city clerk, are there any registered speakers for public comment? No registered speakers, ma'am. Is there anyone in the audience that has anything to say about the items that are on the agenda? All right, seeing none, we will now proceed to closed session. Thank you for joining us and we will be back at six o'clock or thereabouts. Sit down, Connie. I've always wanted to say that. Okay, so the first item on the agenda, threat to public services or facilities, and I can only assume that

Mayor, if I can interrupt before we go into the first item, because it's closed session, we need to clear the room. Clear the room. Yes.

Of those people who are not presenting in this item. Thank you very much. That is correct. And then we will turn off the recording and microphones. one, I would like to call the September 8th, 2026 regular City Council meeting to order. City Clerk, may we have a roll call?

Councilmember Howard-Clark? Present. Councilmember Lodge? Councilmember Peterson?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Mayles? Here. Mayor Krupa?

Here. We show that Councilmember Lodge will be coming in. I believe Please show that Councilmember Lodge has now joined us. And tonight, the invocation will be by Christian Tikus, after which Councilmember Peterson will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Please stand.

Good evening, City Council. Please bow your heads. Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight with grateful hearts, recognizing that the freedoms we enjoy were not given to us without sacrifice. We remember those who have served, those who have suffered, and those who have laid down their lives so that we might live, worship, speak, and gather freely. May we never take for granted what others have paid such a great price to preserve. Lord, with that freedom comes responsibility. We have trusted you and each of us with an opportunity to serve our community and one another. Your word reminds us in Ephesians 4 to walk with humility, gentleness, patience, and love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. So tonight, help us to pursue that kind of unity, not a unity that requires us to agree on everything, but one that allows us to work together for the good of the people we serve. Where there are differences, give us understanding. Where there is disagreement, give us peace and grace. Where difficult decisions must be made, give us wisdom, discernment and courage. Remind us that leadership is not merely a position, but a responsibility. That service is not about ourselves, but about those you have entrusted to our care. So this night, bless this council, our city staff, our first responders, our residents and all those who serve this community. May the work done here tonight honor the sacrifices of those who came before us and help build a stronger, more united community for those who will come after us. We ask for your guidance, your wisdom and your peace over this meeting. In Jesus mighty name we pray. Amen.

We move your cover. And place your right hand over your heart, please. 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.

We will move on to the city attorney's report from closed session.

Thank you, Mayor. For items 6C, 6D, 6E, and 6F, the City Council gave litigation or settlement direction. Thank you.

Very good. Thank you very much. We will now move to presentations. The proclamation for Patriot Day, a national day of remembrance, will be presented by Mayor Pro Tem Mayles to our information technology manager, Scott Underwood. Come on up, Scott.

Testing, testing. Okay.

Patriot Day, a national day of remembrance. Whereas on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the United States of America experienced an unprecedented act of terror that claimed the lives of 2,976 innocent people. forever altering the course of our nation's history. And whereas the country watched as Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, Flight 175 struck the South Tower Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and Flight 93, due to the heroic efforts of passengers and crew, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, preventing further destruction at a major U.S. site in Washington, D.C. And whereas though more than two decades have passed, Many individuals and families continue to feel the lasting effects of that tragic day, and we as a community extend our deepest support, compassion, and solidarity to all those still grieving or impacted And whereas each year on this solemn day, Americans unite to honor the lives lost, including innocent civilians, courageous first responders, and dedicated military personnel whose memory lives on in the hearts of a grateful nation. And whereas in the days following the attacks, the American people stood together with profound resilience, compassion, and a renewed sense of national unity. and whereas we continue to pay tribute to the bravery, selflessness, and sacrifice of the firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and citizens who risked and gave their lives in acts of unimaginable courage to save others. Now, therefore, Linda Krupa, Mayor of the City of Hemet, along with the Hemet City Council, do hereby proclaim September 11, 2026, as Patriot Day, a national day of remembrance and service, and calls upon all residents to mark this day with ceremonies, of remembrance, acts of service, and moments of reflection to honor the victims, pay tribute to the heroes, support those still affected, and reaffirm our shared commitment to unity, resilience, and hope. May we never forget. Scott Underwood was out there in New York City after the terror attacks, and he'll explain what he did there.

Thank you. I didn't do anything but my job, so I just was there when I was needed, and it was a little bit of a different situation. Our team was South Tower, so that's where we responded to. and spent a few days down there. I know that it wasn't just myself. There were firefighters, paramedics, police officers from just about every agency that you can imagine. There were also structural engineers. There were... Gosh, people from public works departments, utility departments. We had the 452nd Air Wing and Mobility Wing that actually flew us out there. And we had even all the way on up to people that you probably would never think of at Norco Camp. Their conservation crews came out and helped us load up all the pallets that we had to take to march to be able to get into the plane. It was a lot of people. So it's not just police and public safety that can do good things in the time of need. It's the average person that just steps up. And, you know, that's all that it took.

Thank you, sir. You bet. Who's taking a picture? Anybody? No one's taking a picture?

We don't have anybody? Oh.

Councilmember Jackie Peterson will present the proclamation for the United States Air Force 79th birthday presented to Colonel Michael A. Kristoff, retired, senior aerospace science instructor, Hemet High School, and to the Air Force JROTC at Hemet High School. So please, all of you come up.

Proclamation for United States Air Force 79th birthday. Whereas on September 18th, 1947, the United States Air Force was established as an independent military service under the National Security Act of 1947 after decades of evolving aerial warfare roles within the U.S. Army beginning as early as August 1st, 1907. And whereas the Air Force traces its lineage through a series of predecessors, which include the Aeronautical Division, Signal Corps, Aviation Section, Signal Corps, United States Army Air Service, United States Army Air Corps, and United States Army Air Forces, which collectively laid the groundwork for modern air power. And through both world wars and beyond, airmen have exemplified valor and innovation, from aerial reconnaissance in World War I to pivotable pivotal contributions in World War II to the dawn of the jet age in the Korean War, the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947, the development of long-range strategic bombers like the B-52 in the 1950s, the introduction of versatile fighter aircraft such as the F-15 and F-16, and the close air support A-10 in the 1970s, and later advancements in stealth technology, unmanned aerial systems, and space-based capabilities. And the Air Force's mission to fly, fight, and win air power anytime, anywhere reflects its enduring commitment to national security, technological excellence, and global readiness. And whereas the Air Force has grown into a modern service incorporating active duty, reserve, National Guard, and civilian personnel operating across air, space, and cyberspace domains. And each year, on September 18th, communities across the nation celebrate the Air Force's birthday, honoring the courage, integrity, service, and excellence of airmen past and present. Therefore, Linda Krupa, Mayor of the City of Hemet, along with the Hemet City Council, do hereby proclaim September 18th, 2026, as United States Air Force birthday, and urge all residents to join in recognizing and celebrating the invaluable contributions of the US Air Force and its dedicated airmen throughout our nation's history, presented September 8th, And thank you for your service, sir.

You never give a pilot a microphone. You're doomed. No, thank you very much. This is a great honor, Madam Mayor, for recognition of Air Force birthday, and we'll do our best to continue to uphold the standards.

And I'd just like to say that Hemet has some awesome ROTC programs in our city. I've worked with several of them, and every one of them is outstanding. So thank you for your leadership in mentoring these young folks, and go Air Force. Thank you.

Thank you.

I would just like to say I've had the honor of attending two events at Hemet High School featuring these young people. And they not only are impressive in what they do, but their standing in the community is amazing and outstanding. So Colonel, thank you for what you do for our students. And thank you, students, for being here. And you look really good in your blues.

And you don't have to stay for the whole meeting.

No, you don't. So, okay. Moving on to communications from the public. First, we will have public comment on items not listed on the agenda, but within jurisdictional matter of this body. Do we have any speakers?

Yes, we do, Mayor.

All righty.

Our speaker this evening is Charles Vinyard, followed by Ray Michael and Rick Lindsey. You all have three minutes.

Is your red light on or green light?

Green light, yeah, there we go. As we know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there was a lot of people asking to defund the police because they weren't being transparent. A lot of them were hiding things on bad cops, even though there are good cops. The reason why I'm here today is because I got a ticket in January, which I went to my court date, but the ticket was never sent over for me to get my court date. They revised it after all me handling it, and I asked Sergeant Gomez for the dash cam and video cam so I can go over it before court so I can pick it apart to show my innocence. They're refusing it. He says I have to go and get a court order. I don't know how that's being transparent. I notice you want new body cams and special face cams or whatever. If the public's not going to be able to get available what goes on in Hemet, then we don't need them for the police officers. It's wrong that we're not having transparency in Hemet. Enough on that part. My next part is for Noah. For the last four years, every time we have serious rains, which are coming up, we get flooded out because of all the homelessness that puts all the stuff in the sewer traps, okay? Noah, please, get people out there today, the workers, and get that cleaned out before we have flooding again. We don't need our streets to be flooded. We don't need to wait until the last minute to help them get overtime to have a good Christmas. We need to protect our citizenship, our citizens, and our roads, and please get that all cleaned out before we have serious rains and we flood our streets again. That's about it. I'm just really confused with the non-transparency of the Hammett Police Department. And I just like to see the sewer system be cleaned out. I mean, I'm just a citizen and I see that. And I don't know why it's not being cleaned out ahead of time. Anyways, everybody have a blessed day and take care.

Thank you, Mr. Vineyard. Thank you. Moving on to Mr. Michaels.

I haven't seen you in a while. My name is Roy Michael. Let's talk Hemet Logistics West warehouse project next to the lakes at Hemet West. With all the trouble with Ontario Airport Authority in the news, it makes me ponder about the Riverside Airport Authority getting approval for the open pit to take in the rainwater 1,087 feet from the Hemet Ryan Airport, where I have already showed you their numbers are woefully inadequate for the amount of rainfall they expect to capture in Hemet. One of those two to three day hurricane storms like the one that flooded this entire valley many years ago, the rainfall we saw the last couple of days was hurricane driven and that one was down near the bottom of Baja Peninsula. I think about one hitting Long Beach. I guess that's why their specs, they show spillways for the open pit that is already in a flood zone that will more than likely flood my community. Can you imagine that lawsuit? the meeting where i explained the shortfall in their thinking was ask the they asked the developers rep eps why they said the thousand eighty seven feet was okay instead of the faa and riverside airport authorities own guidelines with requirements of ten thousand feet up to five miles due to the possibility of wildlife interfering with flight operations I've watched very large flocks of Canadian geese rest there for a few days at a time in that field. It only took three geese to take down Sully's plane into the Hudson. Luckily, no one was killed. I don't want a Learjet coming through my roof. That's a lot of difference. A little over three football fields to five miles? The EPS rep said they were comfortable with the number or something like that, and the commissioner dropped the subject. EPS is the same developer's rep that tried to persuade us that Newland Simpson warehouse project was a great project for Hemet. We all know how that went. Let's talk about traffic. The project shows about 2,900 vehicles every day with a large number of heavy trucks and semi-tractor trailers. Sanderson, Florida intersection is just about five foot balls away. It's already listed as a D intersection using the A to F scale. It's already a D and now they want to F it up. However, the 2,900 does not include the vehicles from the additional approximately 900 square feet of rental warehouses that will also be sharing the property. Let's be conservative and say an adjusted number of 5,000 vehicles. If there was a G at the end of that scale, that's what that intersection would be. We have no idea what those warehouses will be storing since we have no way of knowing who the runners will be. Thank you for my time.

We've got 15 seconds left.

Oh, that was my warning. All right.

Keep going.

You confused me. We have no idea what those warehouses are.

Thank you very much, Mr. Michaels. Next speaker.

Rick Lindsay, followed by Michael Kennedy.

Go ahead.

Hi, it's Rick Lindsey. I'm doing my monthly follow-up on the request to pave.

Could you speak into the microphone a little closer, please? And is the green light on? Yes. Okay.

I'm trying not to flap my arms like I usually do and knock it away. Not a problem. It's Rick Lindsey. And doing my follow-up on wanting Wentworth to be paved. Did you guys happen to discuss that this past month? Because you didn't the month before last. Did you all do any of that discussing about that? And so my next question would be, are you, who is it that's in charge of deciding what streets will be paved, what streets will be slurred? Is that you? Who, am I talking to the wrong people? That's my question.

It would be the city engineer chief of public works, our interim city manager, and you may get his contact information and talk with him after the meeting or tomorrow.

And the name is?

Noah Rao, R-A-U, Mr. Rao.

That'd be he. Okay, because I tried, is his office over on Industrial?

No, it's actually at City Hall.

Okay, because not last year, but all the years before, I would call over there about Wentworth, and once or twice a year, and they're always nice, no matter what I call about and stuff, but nothing was ever done, so that's my fear. Today, I better see if you guys are actually the persons I talk to, AND SO I DO HAVE A POSITIVE. I HAVE MORE ON THAT, BUT I GET A LITTLE TALKING TOO FAST AND EVERYTHING. I CALLED LAST WEEK BECAUSE IN OUR COMPLEX THEY WERE TRIMMING TREES LAST MONTH. WELL, ONE OF THE BIG TREES THAT I ALWAYS WALK BY, THANK YOU, on my way to the mailbox is huge, and it didn't get trimmed, and there's big branches that are broken. So I called last week and talked to them over on industrial, super nice, and told them about it. They were out today and trimmed that tree. So that's the quickest yet, because I used to call every year and say, hey, time to trim the trees. So I figured I'd throw some positive in for you. So thank you. And also, I had called this Sorry. I called, because last time I had talked about signals and stuff, so I had called and talked to the clerk. She gave me the number to the person to call and left a message, haven't heard back, but about the two stoplights at Wentworth and Sanderson, Acacia and Kirby. So yeah, I have more, but I'll just save it for next month. Thank you very much, sir. I'll talk to you next week, sir. Thank you. Appreciate you guys.

Good evening, City Council, Mike Kennedy. I wasn't going to speak tonight, but had a few things that came up. As I've mentioned before, I'm totally against any taxes, but Measure Q is very important for this city. The new folks have put a lot of stuff out on blogs, and I don't think they've really researched it very well. They conveniently have left out that there's no tax on food, medical, health supplies, which I think is very misleading since there is no additional tax on that. Additionally, if it's not passed, they really can't complain about the roads, the library, police, and fire. So I really encourage them to look at it very carefully. I'm very invested in Q because living in McSweeney Farms, we're due for a firehouse at the corner of Gibble and Domenicone, and this will go a long way in promoting that since we do not have a firehouse in the south part of Hemet. The misinformation as far as what the police and the fire department executives make is just absolutely bizarre. I'm not going to go into the detail, but it's totally erroneous information. Also, a lot of people don't realize that the sworn positions within the police department or the fire department, basically, for every 12 employees you have, you have to have another employee due to the state requirements for vacations and so forth like that, and also for sick leave. uh... it is very deceiving when you look at that uh... because they have to contribute the cowpers which is six billion dollars in the whole so it's only going to get worse and they're really there issue is with the state and not with the city The state requirements for clawbacks have really devastated a lot of the metropolitan areas. As a matter of fact, some of the cities and towns, municipalities, they are, instead of being able to grind and pave, they're gonna just put into gravel because it cost about $1 million in order to pave one mile of thing, and we have 300 paved miles in Hemet. Finally, misinformation that this is going to be so the city council can get a raise. My major was accounting. I did a great forensic audit of what the city council makes, and you all are making $10.97 an hour. So for Mayor Krupa, who's termed out, I have you a job starting at Dunkin' Donuts where you're going to double your income when you retire. I'm kidding. For Council Member Peterson, good thing is with your night differential at Walmart, you'll be able to triple your income. So on that part, I will just say thank you very much. And Mr. Lodge, I saw you doing a doobie, brothers, and you're dancing. I've gone ahead and gotten you, I paid for you to get Arthur Murray's dance studio. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. Are there any other speakers?

That was our final speaker, Mayor.

Thank you very much. Moving on to public hearing, would you please read the instructions or procedures for the public hearing?

The City Council's procedures for public hearing will be as follows. Staff will provide a report and clarification of items presented. The public hearing will be open for comments for those in favor of or in opposition to the item, followed by rebuttal to any comments made. The public hearing will be closed and the City Manager may respond to any questions raised by the public. The public will not have an opportunity to respond. Discussion will be brought back to the City Council for direction or action.

Okay, can we get a staff report on item 16A?

All right, good evening, Mayor, Council. I am Jolene Farris, Interim Public Works Director, City Engineer, and I'm here for the public hearing for the Steffens Kangaroo Rat Fee. This is amending Chapter 58, Article 4 of the Hemet Municipal Code. Okay, so a little introduction. So what is the Steffens Kangaroo Rat fee? So the Steffens Kangaroo Rat Habitat Conservation Plan, or SKRHCP, is a regional conservation plan that is administered by Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency, or RCHCA. It provides the framework for mitigating any impacts associated with development to the Steffens Kangaroo Rat, and the RCHCA has a permit granted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for the Steffens Kangaroo Rat. The permit allows for take of the SKR as part of development activity, and that's defined as any attempt to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, all those other things, or attempt to engage in any such conduct related to the Steffens kangaroo rat. And any public and private developer that proposes individual projects within the Steffens kangaroo rat plan must pay mitigation fees for the land that removes Steffens kangaroo rat habitat. And so the fees paid supply funding necessary to implement the plan, and then the fee is a pass-through fee that we collect on behalf of the RCHCA. So some of the fee changes, just to summarize this. Our current fee schedule, it has individual single family home construction is $250 per dwelling unit. Agriculture is $100 per gross acre. However, it's either $100 per gross acre or 1% of the valuation of the building, whichever is greater and not to exceed $500 per gross acre. And then all other development is $500 per gross acre. So the proposed fee, most of it is staying the same, but the agriculture is going up to 500, but they are classifying that as not a change because they, I'll go to the next slide, they're considering it as not a change because most of, or all of the developments that were considered agriculture were defaulting to $500 anyways. So to them, they didn't classify that as a change, but I wanted to clarify that it, TECHNICALLY IS A CHANGE. THE ONE THAT IS GOING UP IS THE ALL OTHER DEVELOPMENT AND THAT IS GOING FROM $500 TO $900 PER ACRE. THE SINGLE FAMILY HOME CONSTRUCTION IS STAYING THE So other changes in the municipal code. So this municipal code was adopted in 1996, so it's quite old. The current revisions reflect updates to definitions, the mitigation fee, and additional information for payment of fees. A fee adjustment section has also been added for future adjustments based upon the consumer price index for all urban customers, or CPIU. And so staff recommendations are that we open the public hearing and receive public testimony, introduce by title and waive the full reading for ordinance number 2081, amending chapter 28, article four of the Hemet Municipal Code, and authorize the city manager to return the ordinance for second reading and adoption at the September 22nd, 2026 city council meeting. And I would like to clarify that in the staff report it does say for a second reading and adoption on September 23rd, that should be September 22nd, so.

apologies for that very good thank you for the presentation i will now open the public hearing city clerk are there any registered speakers no registered speakers for this item all righty i will now close the public hearing bring i bring back for discussion of city council um any questions or comments on this item Okay, hearing none, did we have any, well, we already did public comment, nevermind. Then can I have a motion to approve the item?

I will do a motion to approve the item and ask that Jalene come back on September 22nd and give us our second reading.

Okay, and do we have a second?

I'll second it.

We have a motion and a second. Please vote.

Before we do the roll call, Mayor, let me go ahead and read the title into the record, please. Ordinance number 2081, an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Hemet, amending Chapter 58, Article 4 of the Hemet Municipal Code, establishing the Riverside County's Stephens Kangaroo Rat Habitat Conservation Plan Fee Assessment Area and Setting Mitigation Fees.

Okay.

We're going to do a vote on our machines.

Oh, there we go. It wasn't working at first.

And everybody push whatever color you want. Okay. Okay. Oops, I didn't confirm, never mind. Two-step, push a button and then confirm.

There we go.

Okay, that is 4-1, Mayor Pro Tem Joe Mayles saying no. All righty, moving on to receive and file. Are there any comments or questions from council or staff on the warrant registers, periodic payroll payments, or the quarterly local sales tax update items? You got questions? Okie doke. Turn your microphone on, please. And Tiffany, come on up.

Good evening, council.

Hi, Tiffany. I got a question on the IDS group. One was on 7-2 and the other one was on 7-9. Do you need the invoice numbers?

What was the vendor name?

IDS.

IDS. Do you have the page number of the staff group?

Yeah, page six. and it was 7-2-26.

Councilmember Lodge, what's the question on IDS group?

I'm just wondering because we got those two checks that were written and were they both for design?

I think they're only working on one project for Fire Station 2 right now, which is design work. So it would be my understanding that they would be for that project.

I was just wondering because $46,000 for design is a little bit high, I think.

I think the total for the design was $80-something thousand all in for that project.

Okay. All right. That answers that question. And we've talked about the others, so.

Okay. Any other questions or comments on anything on the receiving file? Go ahead, Connie.

Okay. Here's the local. This time I went ahead and did just strictly Hemet before I was identifying some of the locals in Winchester and San Jacinto. The suggestion is If you speak with a company in another city or another community altogether up in Northern California, sometimes I feel like I want to ask, have you ever thought of moving to Hemet? Now, that might be a very simplistic view, but even if we get one that answers it, or moves or thinks about it, we have a lot of open spaces, a lot of open buildings. Just throwing it out there. We did B&W Pipe, AutoZone, Al's Kubota, Cozen Fox, F&M Lock Lowe's, O'Reilly Pins and Needles does embroidery. Staples, Tim Moran, Allen Auto Glass. He does a lot for us. Hemet True Value, Heron Rumsnoff, Rumsnoff. ICE Auto Repair, Les Schwab, Five Star Plumbing, Night Shield, Curry Copy, Anna Dee's Trophy, BJ Sportings, Tim Moran, Robert Duffin, Bee Service, Smart and Final, and Elite Customs Construction. When you can, buy local.

it i have a comment okay okay i just want to thank tiffany barnett um over the weekend i was looking at the agenda and um i had about a half dozen questions and on labor day yesterday she answered every one of them completely and concise and thank you for your prompt attention to matters that matter to the city thank you no other questions or comments on receiving file okay

Items 17A and 17B are received and filed. Moving on to the consent calendar, all consent calendar items will be acted upon simultaneously unless requested by an individual council member for separate consideration. Are there any council members that would like to pull consent items for separate consideration? 18A. 18A, 18C.

Okay.

We are pulling, are there any people from the audience that pulled any of these?

No.

Thank you very much. So with the exception of 18A, 18C, and 18F, we'd entertain a motion to approve the rest of them.

I will make a motion to approve the other items.

I'll second.

We have a motion and a second. When it comes up on your screen, please vote. and confirm. Okay, that passes unanimously. Item 18A.

Let me pull it up here. Yeah, my concern is just the amount of minutes that we're approving here. I mean, they go back to a year, and I can't even remember yesterday sometimes, but I can't see approving all these minutes without going back to them. I don't know if everyone else did, because nobody seemed to have a problem with it. But I'm willing to approve July 29th, August 31st, but anything before that, I'm just, you know, I don't think I can approve them. I didn't go back to all of them to kind of distinguish between them. And I know you weren't here, or Rosalia.

If I may, Mayor Pro Temp. Yes, that's correct. I was not here. However, I did go through the video.

Okay.

And spent the time and reviewed all video for those particular minutes. There were a couple of them that were, an agenda was done for them. There were special meetings. But, you know, when there's an agenda, there has to be some type of record of that agenda. So, unfortunately, there were not, there weren't minutes for those particular special meetings, but they were, I believe they were closed session. They were very easy to do.

So you went back to each one of them then? Yes, I did. You made sure, and so everything that's here is correct? Yes, yes. I didn't realize you went through all of them. I did.

Okay. Been very busy.

Okay, perfect. Well, if that's the case, then I'll go ahead and approve it.

Okay.

Make a motion? I'll second.

I'll make a motion to approve.

I thought you did.

I'll second it.

We have a motion and a second to approve item 18A. Everybody vote and confirm. That passes unanimously. Moving on to item 18C. Mr. Mills, you're back on.

Okay. My only question is I see that we had some expenditures on changing the new fire truck, the ladder truck that we got. And I was just concerned about one of the items in number 15 that was a cost of $33,000. And I just wanted to find out what that was concerning.

I did get that earlier. We've also got Battalion Chief Skip Ireland here. Mr.

I mean, when you buy something new like that and we're retrofitting it with different things and we have a high cost like that, it's just something I'd like to know what had to be replaced or.

Mr. Sure. Not a problem. Good evening. Mr. Good evening. Mr. So, regarding the change orders, any piece of apparatus that you do purchase or even specify to build, there's change orders along the route. This apparatus was a build from L.A. County, so that's why we got it faster. Instead of waiting five years, we got it within 18 months. So, with that, it didn't come with shelving, pullout trays. It was a compartment. You open the door, and it's like an empty closet. There's no clothes in there. So, with the change orders, we had to put those shelves in there to mount equipment, pullout trays. accessories for going up there to actually do the inspections of the vehicle to finalize it before we accept the vehicle so these fees added up we did ask for um 125 000 initially for these this rig um we are a lot of 75 000 and so we fell short on that portion of it um and that's what it came up to for the 37 075 dollars and 54 cents um With that, there's always change orders. It could be safety inspections. Things go on and on.

Right. I know there's changes that need to be made in additions, but I was just concerned about number 15. That's $33,185.

Yeah, Mayor Pro Tem, that item was the pipe for the ladder and the nozzle. So it's a pipe for the water pipe that goes all the way up the ladder so that it produces water at the top of the ladder.

Oh, so they don't come with pipes already? I guess this one didn't.

Just to understand that, Noah, so for the ladder, we actually took the pipe off of it because it's a maintenance issue and it's a high dollar cost item. So what the cost was for was for the nozzle, we put hose up there now, we lay hose up the ladder, three inch hose, and then we have a nozzle that we take off the top of the ladder truck, we lock it into the top of the rungs, and we hook up the hose. By doing that, it reduces maintenance issues and any type of damages to the rig and replacing that piping. So, we went to this new route of doing three-inch. We're not the only person in the fire service that thought of this, trust me. This was traditional back in the early 1900s. We didn't have pre-plumbed apparatus, used hose. So, we've gone back to that to reduce maintenance issues, damaging pipes, and all of that. The 37,000 was for the change orders for the upfitting of the apparatus. I'll keep it as simple as that.

Okay. Well, I'm fine. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay.

Any more questions? Yeah. I got one. Sure. When did we take possession of this truck?

We received it, what is this? This is August. Two months ago. Right now, it's actually at the manufacturer, who is Rosenbauer, and they're doing some warranty work on it for us, and then it'll be back in two weeks.

Is this the same ladder truck that Noah climbed? That you climbed.

The new one? I wasn't there, I don't know. Is it the new one, Noah?

The opening at Station 4.

Okay, so that was, yes, correct.

Vice Mayor Pro Tem, Mr. Mayles went to the top of the ladder and our city manager climbed to the top of the ladder and our library director. went up the top of the ladder. So, yes. And none of them fell, thank God.

Well, I didn't hear anything, so I guess that's good. All right.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I was just concerned about that line item. No problem, sir. Okay, thank you.

So, we've had it two months, and it's in for warranty work?

Yes. As soon as it gets back, all the gear is laying on the floor. We'll put it on the rig, and it's going in service. Yep. Any more questions? Okay. Thank you.

Well asked.

You have another question? No. Nope. Okay. All righty.

I'll go ahead and approve 18C. I think it's 18C, right?

18C. Is there a second? I'll second it. All right. There is a motion and a second. Please vote and confirm. And that passes 5-0. Moving on to 18F. Hey, you get a twofer.

Oh, yeah, okay.

I just had one question. I was watching TV one day, I think in March or May, I'm not sure when it was, and there was an executive order being signed for if you buy vehicles that are American-made, you get a tax right off of some type. And I was looking at the purchases of the vehicles, and we have Ford, Ford, Ford, and then BMW. And I was just wondering or curious if... Are we taking advantage of that executive order and getting the American-made vehicles, a tax write-off on these vehicles? And if we are on these BMWs, is there any way we can go with the Harley-Davidson police motorcycles since they're American-made?

As far as going to the or using the BMW platform versus the Harley, industry standard moved a long time ago to the BMWs for a lot of different reasons. Their reliability, their comfort, basically what their riding dynamics or what they're used for. They're much more specifically designed for law enforcement use. There's very few agencies in California that still even use Harleys for motorcycle enforcement. That's what our current fleet is. That's what our officers have trained on and are used to. So there's a lot of different reasons why BMW specifically is what we're looking to replace our current BMW models with in the fleet.

I was just looking out for the rebate or whatever, the tax write-off.

No, I completely understand that. Unfortunately, just the retraining alone would offset any costs that we potentially would look at in any kind of a rebate for the officers who already know how to ride.

I was just imagining ape hangers on the Harley, you know. I'd love to get pulled over by a Harley instead of a BMW if I ever got pulled over.

So you're saying you want to be pulled over?

No. Okay. All right. I was just curious about that.

Yeah, I just wanted to add that as a government agency, we're tax exempt, so we don't actually file taxes like traditional people do, so we don't get any kind of rebates like that.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, any other questions or comments on 18F?

Okay, seeing none, what was your pleasure?

I'll go ahead and approve 18F. Thank you.

He has a question. We already went through that. You should have pulled it and sent a paper up here. Okay, next time you will. Okay, is there a second?

Second.

Okay, there's a motion and a second.

Okay, vote. All right.

Mr. Vineyard, you're more than welcome to talk to the Lieutenant, Lieutenant Paez. Sir, talk to Lieutenant Paez, please. Thank you very much. And that is passes 5-0. Moving on to discussion action items. Can we have a report from staff on our first discussion item 19A? WHO IS DOING 19A? OH, OKAY.

GOOD EVENING, COUNCIL. JOLENE FERRIS AGAIN. I'M JUST GOING TO INTRODUCE OUR CONSULTANT WHO HELPED PREPARE OUR CITYWIDE SAFETY ACTION PLAN, MONIQUE CHEN.

THANK YOU SO MUCH.

WELL, GOOD EVENING, VICE MAYOR AND COUNCIL MEMBERS.

My name is Monique Chen. I'm a principal at a consultant firm, CR Associates, and I'm a registered traffic engineer with about 30 years of experience. And I serve as the consultant project manager for the project. Let me get this. So this we're talking about the comprehensive safety action plan for the city and really quick on the overview I'm going to quickly touch on the project background where we got the funding from and then talk about outreach and engagement summary and provide a high-level collision analysis summary and and then talk about some of the safety project recommendations, and then discuss our project prioritization criteria and results, and then share a couple examples of the high priority projects. And on a different note, separate from the comprehensive safety action plan, we also prepared 16 school mobility assessment and made safety recommendations, and I want to share one example with you all tonight. First, back in 2011, our government passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which actually provided $5 billion over 2022 through 2026, that's five years, to improve roadway safety. And that program's called Safe Streets and Roads for All, short for SS4A. You may hear me use that term later on this evening. And city staff did a fantastic job and got a planning grant which allowed us to perform this analysis, this study. And it is a required element in order for any agency to apply for any design and construction funding, so the planning effort. And so we already later on will talk about the grant application we submitted under the same program this year. And working with the task force, we've identified a vision statement for the project. And that vision statement is a helmet where everyone can travel safely, walking, biking, driving, or taking transit without risk of fear of serious injury or loss of life. And some of the project goals we established, and the first one obviously is to reduce fatal and serious injury crashes. We want to build a safe and connected infrastructure for all roadway users. We want to manage traffic speed and improve traffic operations. And we want to advance ready to implement projects and allocate funding. And lastly, we want to promote education, partnership, and accountability. So there were eight components required for the comprehensive safety action plan. We call it CSAP. And first and foremost is the leadership commitment and goal setting. And we got city council to commit to the vision zero. So thank you all for supporting the effort. And then we established a planning structure and that is partially working with established task force group, and the task force were represented by multiple departments from the city, police and fire, city, county of Riverside, RTA, WRCOG, Caltrans, the school district, as well as a couple of community-based organizations. and we provided very extensive in-depth safety analysis. Also had a very extensive, expensive engagement and collaboration with community members. I'll touch base on that. Equity considerations were a part of the plan development, both from analysis as well as recommendations perspective. And then finally in chapter seven of the report you will see some policy and process recommendations we've made in order to help achieve the goals in addition to the physical infrastructure improvement recommendations. Then we identify the strategies and project selection that is the prioritization criteria that I will talk about. And finally is the progress and transparency which is in chapter eight of the CSAP. And quick overview on the project schedule, we kicked off I believe was last July, so it's been 14 months. Last summer we did data collection analysis. We had our first task force meeting followed with a public workshop at the city library. And then we also had four pop-up events. The report has very detailed documentation of those events, lots of fun activities that we had. And then come to the second phase in the winter and spring of 2026, we spent a lot of time on developing recommendations, creating safety projects, looking at project prioritization. And then during that phase, we had our second TASK FORCE MEETING AS WELL AS A WORKSHOP WHICH WE LEVERAGED A PLANNING COMMISSION HEARING BACK IN APRIL THIS YEAR. IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER, THAT'S WHERE WE'RE AT RIGHT NOW, IN THIS PHASE WE BASICALLY DRAFTED THE the comprehensive safety action plan created the monitoring framework and we had our third and final task force meeting and a workshop and that was in the pop-up style because we determined that we got much much more better attendance and support from community members when we go meet them in where they're at and then we also were able to submit a grant application for one of the projects and it was in the amount of just a little bit short of ten million dollars. So fingers crossed and that we'll get that and today I'm here to talk about the project and get through the project adoption process. So as I mentioned earlier, we hosted four pop-up events in summer and fall of 2025, and then we had those three workshops, one in November, one in April, one in August, and then we had three task force meetings before each of the workshops to get task force members input on the materials we were gonna present. There's also a project website, as right now, the only thing on there are the draft documents, basically the draft plan along with the draft 16 school mobility assessment. And by the way, all of the events, public events were promoted through city social media. And I'm going through very, very high level because if you look at the report, the technical report, it was probably 80, 90 pages on the safety analysis. But this is just high level. I want to really share on some of the high level takeaways. And one of which is the data we collected, we used was from January 2020 to December 2024. During that time, we had almost 2,000 injury collisions, and that includes 85% of vehicle to vehicle, 10% pedestrian involved, and 5% bicyclists involved, and out of which about 64% of those collisions occurred in intersections where multiple movements and conflicts occur, and then about 36% occurred in the mid-block. But I really want to bring your attention to the vulnerability of the users. While we talked about pedestrians, 10% of collisions, bicyclists, 5%. But then if you look at the fatal and severe injuries, pedestrians, fatal and severe, during the same period, it was almost 26%. And while bicyclists, it was just under 15%. So it's anywhere over two to four times of the chances of pedestrian cyclists getting severely hurt or killed comparing to vehicles. And from there we developed a high injury network and as you can see here the blue lines covers the projects and the red dots were the isolated intersection where the collisions happened the intersection or mid block What I really want to point out here is the high injury network covered 13 miles of city roadways, but about 80% of the severe and fatal collisions. So the goal here is how do we do the minimum improvements have the maximum impact? And from there we leveraged all of the federal and state resources in terms of countermeasures and looking at crash reduction factors. And then we developed, we used over 60 countermeasures that's from intersection traffic signal segments traffic calming, rural and other miscellaneous. And slightly see here are some of the examples of potential intersection countermeasures. And here you see is a sample of different treatments, whether it's intersection striping improvements, whether it's separated bikeways, whether it's improved lighting, we heard lighting was a challenge throughout the city, so there were a lot of lighting improvements, and then also traffic calming in terms of how do we slow down vehicular speed on local or slower streets. So from there we start developing safety projects and what we want to do was using these few principles. We want a full coverage of the high injury network. We want to be consistent to the general plan roadway as well as bicycle networks. We want to incorporate previously planned but unfunded safety projects, and we want to identify systemic project that, you know, for all of the city control, the signalized intersections, systemic meaning same treatments for multiple locations. And then we want to find recommendations that are feasible countermeasures at locations that have fatal and severe collisions. So there might be individual project sites. And then lastly, we want to have sizable projects. So when we go apply for grant applications, you're not just looking at a single intersection. Again, coverage of the safety network. And at the end of the safety assessment, we identified 47 total projects with 42 corridors and five systemic improvements. And then we took those 47 projects through a prioritization process, and there were both objective and subjective. On the top what you see here are really data-driven scoring-based. We look at five criterias that look at the high injury scoring, which you got zero to four point, and is it in the systemic environment or the injury collision history? Do you have multiple collisions occur at those locations? And is it adjacent to schools? We understand how important children are in Hammett or any other community. And then we want to consider equity needs. And lastly, most vulnerable users with those collisions. We talk about the vulnerability of cyclists and pedestrians. So a total of 14 points were given for these data-driven analytics results. And then after that, we... took these projects to both the public the task force as well city staff to get their input as well each one of those inputs worth two points so a total of 18 points we're putting through the prioritization process i apologize for the small table but this is really to depict the top sorry, all 47 scoring and then I want to kind of lead to the top 20 that we talked about. But what I really want to point out here, understand that there were some state routes that have quite a few collisions and definitely, you know, worth a lot of attention. However, since Florida is out of the control of the city, so we didn't really put them in the rankings because that is something city staff can coordinate with Caltrans on at a later time. So I'll quickly talk about some of the examples of the high priority projects here. As you can see here, there's two roads, one on Causton, one on Mustang, and Sanderson have some highlight, and those are the two projects I'm gonna focus on. But before that, I was gonna talk about some of the citywide systemic improvements, and these are mainly focused on intersections or signal treatments. And so the first one you see here is high visibility crosswalks and advanced stop bars. And as you see on the picture, so what the stop bar does is it really creates a little bit additional space between stopped vehicles and pedestrians. And the high visibility crosswalk is, again, bringing pedestrians to more of the attention of the drivers. And this treatment is applied to all 52 city owned and operated signalized intersections. And the second one is to upgrade signal hardware. In this case, it's really a bike plate, as well as changing into LED lighting. And these treatments are proven to be very effective, especially in the evening time. As you can see below the map, this recommendation is applied to 10 different locations at the city. And the reason being is, CITY STAFF HAS ALREADY DONE A GREAT JOB IN PUTTING, INSTALLING THE INTERSECTIONS IN THE CITY ALREADY. The next one is a protected left turn phase if the left turn pocket does exist. And what you see here on the picture, what we call the protected left turn is a green arrow. Instead of green ball, you look at the green arrow, which means the left turn movements will have no conflicting movements from the posing through traffic, which really can decrease any kind of head-on or broadside collisions. And this applies to eight seven or eight of the city's locations. And the next one is protected permissive flashing yellow left turn signals. We have a few of those protected permissive signals. You probably have experienced it on Sanderson, whether it's on Johnston Mustang or Page Plaza. And what you see there is that you have a left turn arrow as you're making left turn all of a sudden the left turn arrow disappears and you got a green ball. And so some left turn drivers continue making the left turn not aware that opposing traffic going through. So that's where it can cause confusion and the sense of false security. So what we're recommending here is instead of just having the green ball and have it paired with yellow flashing arrow. So to really bring attention to the left turn drivers that you gotta yield while you're making the movement because there's gonna be vehicles coming opposite direction. So those were the four different systemic recommendations. Another one that did not make to the top 15 is really the neighborhood traffic calming program. That's talked about in the report itself. And then I'm gonna focus on two project-specific locations, and this is Mustang and Sanderson, as you can see here on the blue lines on the map. So this is right next to the West Valley High School, as well as Sanderson. Some of the recommendations we're proposing, including the raised medians, speed feedback signs, infield sidewalks, and probably the bigger recommendations here is separated and physically protected and protected bicycle facilities on Sanderson and then as well as on Morgan Hills Road and Mustang Way we are recommending a pedestrian hybrid beacon that is going to be activated when students are crossing. Let me go to the next slide, and this is really a physical depiction of these recommendations. You can see here sidewalk infill, class four bikeways, speed big feedback signs, reach median, another one of those that can really control left turn movements. high visibility crosswalk with a then stop bars and that I talked about earlier and leading pedestrian interval and this is going to be applied at Mustang and Sanderson and this is really because there's going to be a lot of pedestrian crossing there during arrival and dismissal we want to give the pedestrians the leeway about seven seconds or so to enter into the intersection before vehicles can make right turns or left turns etc. And then lastly is the pedestrian hybrid beacon at Morgan Hills and Mustang. And this is the project I talked about. We submitted an SS4A implementation grant back in May. And because it was a grant application, we actually went ahead, did a striping and basically conceptual engineering design for the entire corridor, both on the section of Mustang as well as Sanderson. So this is only just a quick sample. These kind of drawings really helps to increase the chances of winning the grants. Hopefully, again, it helps for us to get the application awarded. And so here, the next project is Colston Avenue, and that's near Colston Elementary School. And this right here, what you see is a class two bike lane, sidewalk infill. Let's see what else. Anywhere when there's an intersection, we're recommending same pattern continental crosswalks and event stop bars. And I believe city staff already submitted an active transportation program grant for the bike lane portion of this project. So two different funding programs. And here, again, a quick map on how these recommendations are depicted throughout the corridor. The light-shaded yellow box you see here are the ones we actually did a conceptual engineering design of the striping plans. Okay, so we're almost there. Thank you for your patience. And so I'm going to quickly go through the mobility assessment. And this is not meant for you to read any of the documents here during this meeting. I'm going to go through very quickly. So there were 16 schools we conducted school mobility assessments for. We went out there and during school arrival or dismissal time to observe patterns, talk to some parents and also school staff. So today I was gonna walk through the Colston Elementary School. And so this is what the, I call it pamphlet looks like, and it's one of the 16. So it starts with a cover and then you see the acronyms list, a table of contents, and then it talk about the school profile, geographic location. and observations that we made, whether it's parents drop off, whether it's missing certain infrastructure, whether it's lack of curb ramps for ADA, whether it's student crossing now at crosswalks. So these goes on and on, and sidewalk obstructions. So we basically walked and biked about a quarter mile, about 10 minutes walk, from each school with a crow fly. So we documented all of the existing physical challenges and issues and then identified opportunities for walking, biking, rolling, pickup, vehicle movements. I'll go to the next one and collision summary within the crow fly of the 0.25 mile of buffer. and then have some demographics data along with some infrastructure recommendations. And then finally, each school will have a table that describe the recommendations and also the geographic location. With that, I am done with my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much for the presentation. Do we have any public comment on this item?

We do. One speaker. Charles Vineyard.

First of all, I'd like to say thank you to her for her presentation, which is excellent, very informal. You always have been seeing throughout the last two years about handicap lanes, bicycle lanes, et cetera, et cetera, and she talked about kids or people being hurt on bicycle about six to seven percent. One of the biggest problems is, because she says that she works with the Hemet Police Department, But every day and every night at Arby's, which is all red, it's all fire lane on the streets on Florida right there, there's cars parked there for up to a minute to two minutes trying to get into In-N-Out Burger. In front of Pi Pi's, the cars are blocking a fire hydrant, which is also red there. okay, that police or fire department is not gonna be able to get to because of it being blocked by all these people that just wanna get into In-N-Out Burger. Then on top of that, we spent $3 million for the bicycle lane. No kid, no adult can use that bicycle lane anytime basically after three o'clock p.m. because the cars are lined up all the way back by the bus stop. I'm trying to figure out what is wrong or why Hemet Police looks at this area as leprosy or why they're not pulling people over for being part, because as we all know, if you pulled up to Stater Brothers in the fire lane, jumped out, but if you left your car running and hazard lights on or even, your sister jumped out and went shopping for a minute and came back out, your car's towable because you're not allowed to do that. Why is it not being enforced? Is In-N-Out special? Do we give In-N-Out leeway to block our fire lanes, block our fire hydrants, block the $3 million, the bicycle lane we put in for the children to ride in? I mean, do we build this stuff, but then we don't care about pushing the law? I'm confused. Anyways, thank you for listening.

Thank you. Okay. Bring it back to council. Questions, comments on this presentation?

First of all, this is a great, you did a great job, really. And it's interesting to me. What I was the most interested, the collision on 3.3, collision by time of day and the severe and fatal collisions by time of day to me is very important to notice that it's, you know, in the overnight it's less because there are less people out there, obviously, from 1 o'clock to 6. But the evening, which part of it has your traffic for commuters, also just getting to and from when you have kids you're getting them to a baseball field or, you know, whatever. That's when we have the severe and fatal collisions, but not vehicle only. That's during a different time of the day. So it's just really interesting to kind of think about when I drive through Hemet and be real interesting to see what intersections correspond to the most severe number of fatality. I'm sure the police could use that information too, but it was just fascinating. Great observation.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'd just like to say this is a great plan, especially for future projects and grants. So I was very impressed with this report. There was a lot of work put into this by the community, the staff, your agency. It was good. And I like that Koston Avenue was highlighted. That's in my district, and I do get complaints about the safety around the school there. And that's good that that was pointed out. I wish the survey would have gone just a little more west. to Four Seasons Boulevard and Highway 74. There are a lot of accidents there. There's a lot of speeding, there's a lot of red light running, and it's a highly dangerous intersection there. And the police department has been helping us with a little more, surveillance lately and I know in the past they did something with CHP because it's right on the border and it's on a downslope. So people just go speeding through there like crazy. I drove through there. And there was an accident a few weeks ago and one of our residents going out to make a left turn while the accident was active he saw three cars run the red light right in the intersection so i wish this would have gone a little further west to see that intersection but thank you it's a great report thank you any other questions or comments i have one question on

Do we have the stats on signalized intersections versus always stop intersections on any turning data or on broadsiding accidents?

We have, are you talking about traffic volumes of turning data? We have all collision information everywhere within the city, but in terms of traffic volumes, we have very limited data, is whatever city may have done surveys for, and we've researched city's website on development projects to see, but the traffic volume certainly is missing. So we don't know the true exposure of these turning movements and collisions. But in terms of broadside, where the broadsides are, how often they happen, we have all of that data both at signalized intersections or always stop or side street stop control.

And I know some of these things have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented. So that's really good. But I agree with you when you have the protected left turn and then all of a sudden it just goes green, that is confusing to a lot of drivers. And it's just like, well, I can still go and not realizing somebody else is coming through the intersection at you. GOOD INFORMATION AND THIS REALLY SETS A PLAN GOING FORWARD THAT WE CAN RELY ON TO MAKE THE ZERO ACCIDENT OF POSSIBILITY IN THE CITY OF HEMET, WHICH WE'LL NEVER ELIMINATE ALL OF IT, BUT AT LEAST WE CAN ELIMINATE SOME.

ABSOLUTELY.

OKAY. WHAT IS YOUR PLEASURE, COUNCIL?

I'LL MAKE A MOTION TO ADOPT Let's get that closer to the eyes, first of all. Resolution number 2026-144, adopting the City of Hemet's Comprehensive Safety Action Plan. Good job.

Okay, is there a second? I'll second it. There's a motion and a second. We need to read anything further that we just have it as resolution? No. Okay. All righty. Make your choices and confirm your selection. That passes unanimously. Thank you very much and thank you for the presentation. I know a lot of work went into this and there was a lot of public input and it was really gratifying to see the number of suggestions and the areas that we probably would not have thought about that are hazardous to bicycles, pedestrians and or cars.

I have a sidebar with the attorney real quick.

Sure. Moving on to item 19B. approval of a downtown kitchen grant program agreement with the dugout Froyo at Nuke Nation. And who is giving the staff report on this one?

I'll be giving a brief verbal presentation here as soon as Mayor Pro Tem's done. So the downtown kitchen grant program originated as an initiative in the Hemet Rises economic strategy that was adopted back in August of 2024. The city council then adopted guidelines for a downtown kitchen grant program on April 22nd, 2025. The City Council has allocated a total of a million dollars toward the program over two fiscal years to help attract new businesses and support improvements to existing restaurants. To date, 900,000 has been awarded, leaving 100,000 available for the grant program. So a new round of applications were opened up in early August for a period of three weeks and received five applications. On August 31st, 2026, the business council ad hoc committee gave the recommendation that the remaining 100,000 in kitchen grant funds be awarded to the dugout Froyo at Nuke Nation. The recommended award is a new business that will go in downtown along the original desires of the program, and it will offer something new and exciting with frozen yogurt and batting cages downtown. um that concludes my uh report and i'll turn it over to the mayor for any ad hoc comments as well okay i'm not on the ad hoc but these two are yes okay

I believe that this project would be good for the city because it's downtown, and that's what we're trying to highlight is our downtown. We don't have batting cages, plus a yogurt shop being involved with this, and I just think it's going to bring more tax revenue to the city.

That's it?

That's why. Plus I have a granddaughter and a grandson that are in softball. No, I'm just kidding.

Joe, I just want to say this one's a long time coming. We've needed this for a long time. Batting cages, where's the nearest ones around? None. So I think it's a good idea.

My granddaughter has to go to Marietta or Menifee, one of them, to go bat for batting cages. I think that's going to be ideal.

I think it's going to be great. They're going to do a good business. I really think so.

And nobody has touched on the fact that it's frozen yogurt.

Secondary.

That's where I'll be while they're getting it.

Exactly. I do have a couple questions on this, however. The timeframe to use this, I believe, is 18 months?

Mr. That's correct.

Ms. Okay. And I'm looking at those that have been awarded, and I believe Rendezvous Coffee is the only one that is up and operational. And what is the, probably, if we can have it maybe at the next meeting, a status update on all of these? And then what happens if they don't use this within 18 months?

Well, they wouldn't get the reimbursement and the city would still have the funds. So it would be up to the council what you would want to do from there. But if they've had any partial reimbursements, the agreement's pretty solid that we have clawback rights to get the money back or have a lien on the property.

So is it up and operational in the 18 months or is it just beginning the project in 18 months?

No, it's 18 months to finish the project.

Finish the project. Okay, just wanted to clarify that.

Are we permitting properly, or are we causing any delays for these businesses to come in and open?

Not that I'm aware of. We do waive the permitting and building fees, but anything that's coming in is getting processed.

Okay, thank you.

Okay. Are there any registered speakers on this item?

There are none.

All righty. Thank you very much. Council, what's your pleasure?

Go ahead. I make a motion to approve this resolution and awarding the $100,000 to the Dugout Froyo at Nuke Nation. I'll second that.

I'll second. Let's fight over it. You take it to the batting cages.

There you go.

Show win. Show win, yes. All righty, motion and a second. Please cast your votes and confirm your selection. That passes unanimously. And I want to thank the all of the staff and the public and the company for all of this. I'm going to go back to the one before because I forgot to thank everybody for the presentation on the zero pedestrians. But this is also good. So ad hoc committee, good job. Moving on to 19C, discussion and direction regarding potential dedication and future reestablishment of Devonshire Avenue between Santa Fe and Thompson. Welcome.

Good evening again, Mayor and City Council. Yes, this is a presentation, a very short presentation, more discussion based just to provide the city with direction on proceeding. So here is a map of what I'm gonna be discussing. So first let me talk about a little bit of the history for this. This goes back all the way to 1954. City Council passed a resolution with the intent to vacate and abandon Devonshire Avenue there, the blue area. between Thompson Street and Santa Fe. And then we get to August 8th, 1972, and city council passed a resolution that requested the Hemet Unified School District Board of Trustees to consider the vacation of Devonshire. So gave it, and I guess we wanted it back about 20 years later, so. And then we continued those resolutions stating their intent to reopen Devonshire Avenue by the 93-94 school year which is approximately when West Valley moved into the new facility that it's at right now because that was the old location for West Valley. And then in 1993 City Council passed resolution 3026 that ordered City Council and Hemi Unified District staff to meet with elected officials to formulate a plan for the reinstallation of Devonshire Avenue and Santa Fe. So basically what you see here, the yellow area is area owned by Hemet Unified School District. It also currently owns Devonshire Avenue, the area in blue there that has been vacated. And the area in red is currently existing right of way that crosses buildings and stuff. The city would ultimately, if the city proceeded with construction of Devonshire Avenue, the responsibility to design and that would be on us, but the parcel map would be needed first to separate these parcels, create a right of way for Devonshire between Santa Fe and Thompson, and then the parcel map would also combine the three parcels at the top IN THE YELLOW, AND THEN THE TWO PARCELS AT THE BOTTOM, AND WE WOULD ALSO VACATE THE RED AREA THERE. SO IT WOULD BE RIGHT NOW THERE'S ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE PARCELS WITH SOME RIGHT-OF-WAY, AND IT WOULD BECOME TWO PARCELS WITH AN ACTUAL RIGHT-OF-WAY OF DEVENSHIRE THERE. SO I HOPE I EXPLAINED THAT CORRECTLY. SO ANYWAYS, THE CONSTRUCTION WOULD BE SEPARATE FROM THIS, AND SO THE CITY IS REQUESTING DIRECTION ON PROCEEDING WITH THE TENTATIVE PARCEL MAP FOR THIS, AND WE'RE HERE TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS.

that you may have okay thank you for the presentation do we have any registered speakers on this item no registered speakers there all righty council questions and comments go ahead approved tonight would it have to come back for a second um for a second time here at council or would it start right away

It depends on the direction given by council, but if the direction was given to proceed with the parcel map, we could get a proposal for that and start with that right away if that's council's direction.

Thank you. Has any thought or conversation been had with the school district to open Santa Fe at the same time? That was...

that has been mentioned but the way that they have their facility planned they intend to leave that closed and used on both sides of santa fe and so they don't intend to vacate that but but the conversation was had

I think we should I should put to move for that the junior high is no longer there and neither is the football stadium So and I realize Emmett Unified owns all of it But it would be really nice on their part if we could open Santa Fe at the same time and have through traffic on there But I also have a question. So if we go forward on this Tonight it is only the parcel maps that are being approved. It is not any street improvements. It is not any street creation.

It's not even designed for the streets. It would just be the parcel map to create the right-of-way.

Okay, so that would be at least 10 years down the road. No, we're all going to be here, sitting out there. All righty, if no further questions, what's your pleasure?

I recommend that we provide direction, which we have done, and go ahead and go with the parcel map and approve it.

Okay. I'll second. There is a motion and a second to go forward with the recording of parcel maps to get this started. Please vote and confirm your selection. And that passes 5-0. Thank you very much. Moving on to 19D, commercial cannabis business permit term extension and renewal amendments. Could we please have a staff report?

Yes, Mayor. Steve Graham-Pacifico, your city attorney. You have before you Urgency Ordinance No. 2082 and Ordinance No. 2083. Why we're here. Several storefront cannabis permittees are still in construction. When the City Council originally approved commercial cannabis operations back in 2022, 2 storefront retail was not an authorized use in 2025 the City Council approved amendments to the regulatory ordinance that would allow storefront cannabis to begin operating in the city, but one of the express directions of the Council was that the Council did not want. folks engaging in the licensing process and then essentially squatting on the license and trying to flip it or sell it or use it without actually opening the stores and generating the promised tax revenue to the city. So the original ordinance and regulations adopted by the city manager had very aggressive timelines that essentially required upon issuance of the permit that the operator get up and running In about eight months, because the initial unlike every other cannabis use where the permit is issued at the same time as certificate of occupancy. For storefront retail it's issued as soon as you are awarded the right to to engage in the business for all the operators. They didn't actually constructed any of the TIs or gotten the businesses up and running. So they received their permits, and they had to hit the ground and get going. Some of them have opened. There are three that have not yet opened. They have not received the final CFO, I should say. There's one that is operating under a temporary CFO. So, additionally, they're required under the general terms of the ordinance to submit an application for renewal two months before the expiration of that initial one-year term. And because we have the general language for all businesses as the standard which they are held to, they're also required at that one-year mark to have demonstrated being actively in business for four months. So I wouldn't call that a bug. I would call that a feature. The intent was really, when speaking with the council, speaking with the city manager, was if we're going to issue permits, we want the stores open so that they can begin generating that tax revenue. That being said, we have three that have engaged in good faith efforts to get these things up and going, and they remain in construction. They have an expiration date of October 23rd, 2026, is when their permits would expire. There was also some confusion with the applicants as to whether they had to file a renewal. They emailed city staff looking for clarification on that, and they missed the 60 day deadline as a result of that back and forth. So the bind that we have here is that it's going to automatically expire on the 23rd. They've missed the application to renew deadline. They have invested significant amounts of money in the application process and in the construction process. And again, direction to staff, the overriding goal is get these things open and start generating revenue. I had a good conversation with the city manager as well as the deputy director of community development. I tried to use my creative city attorney powers to figure out a way to make this work and achieve the council's direction with the language that we have. The Council has kept a tight leash on this particular business use, and the language is mandatory on how things need to occur. I believe that if we do not make the changes that we're proposing to the ordinance, that they will not be lawfully able to operate as of October 23rd, 2026. And if that's the case, and if they have no pathway to renew we're looking at a few buildings that essentially are going to end up vacant partially constructed so. Based on my knowledge of the desires of the Council and past actions you've taken, including an ordinance specifically directed at preventing vacant and boarded up. We put our minds together right before agenda posting time and said, these are the changes that need to be made. I ran them through the deputy director of community development. He had a few excellent additions just to make sure that as he's actually doing what the ordinance asks that he sees a pathway through for these folks. Because of the deadline, where you have first reading second reading and then it goes into effect 30 days after if we adopted this on regular notice with first reading today second reading two weeks from now and it goes into effect in 30 days it would go into effect on October 22nd 2026 which is one day before the permits expire I don't think that staff would have sufficient time to receive process and award renewals based on the requirements of the renewal process in less than 24 hours, notwithstanding the excellent staff that we have in that department. So my recommendation is that you adopt it both on urgency as well as on regular notice. The urgency ordinance and the regular are the same language. The urgency ordinance simply gets superseded when the regular ordinance takes effect, and that prevents any challenge to the amendment on the basis that the urgency findings were somehow defective. don't believe they are i think that there are very good reasons why we would want to correct this uh immediately but that's my presentation happy to answer any questions that you have you have a question the other two that are already open are they generating any tax revenue now and if so is it positive for the city it's a great question and one which staff was prepared to answer Ladies and gentlemen, Deputy Director of Community Development.

Thank you, Mr. City Attorney, Madam Mayor, Council Members. I do have some statistics for you regarding sales tax revenues from the dispensaries that are presently open. Budology opened in February of this year. In the first quarter of this fiscal year, they contributed $65,849 in cannabis sales tax revenue. And this last quarter, they contributed $103,677. Off the charts, the one on Industrial Way has been open for quite some time. Over the last year, they've contributed a total of $283,370 in sales tax revenues. The other two dispensaries that most recently opened would be off the charts on Stetson and State Street near the Stater Brothers and Star Buds. They have contributed $25,313 and $15,849, respectively, this last quarter. For the last year, that totals $494,058. And for this fiscal year alone, a grand total of $373,000 and $84. In addition to that, each through their community benefit agreement is required to pay $12,500 a year for an additional $75,000 a year. Unfortunately, from the migration to our former track it system to our present Tyler system, we have not implemented a measure by which to collect that fee as of yet.

Awesome. Thank you.

And I did just want to say my recollection was our projected best case scenario was $1 million in revenue per fiscal year. And it looks like we may have a chance of actually meeting that or exceeding that this fiscal year.

And that's with all five open?

Yeah, especially if we keep the pressure on. So one of the things you'll see in the ordinance is that it does allow for a short extension, but it is not an indefinite extension. Because again, the goal is to get these businesses up and operating.

And they all seem to have that intent. And all three of them are in the process and they're working hard.

They're all in the process of permitting. Yes. One of them is under a temporary CFO that may have expired.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments on this item? Do we have any public comment on this?

Yes, we do have one public speaker. Andrew Allen.

Mayor, staff, good evening. Just kind of curious as to if there's any kind of oversight on this. And the reason I ask is if you do a Google search on cannabis industry in other counties, none of them are paying their taxes. So yeah, we might get some sales tax from that part of it, but what about the taxes owed to the state itself? Last check, LA was owed over $400 million in back sales tax, and they're not paying it. So is there any kind of oversight as to if they're going to contribute to that? If they're not going to pay it, they are going to pay it. Are we going to hold them accountable for it? I know with my shot behind the one, they stated that they would have two security guards, and they do not. They have one. So, I mean, get knuckleheads racing through the alleyway to go back there. and they said that they would be patrolling the parking lot and the store, which they do not. So I don't know if that was one of their stipulations to have two security guards as part of their opening or not. But that was just my question and concern is if there's some kind of oversight to see if they're doing their due diligence to keep in business rather than just us collecting the sales tax and then the city being liable for the money owed. So that's all, thank you.

Thank you, very good question. Can we do some research on that?

I can. I can also just give some general thoughts on it. It's highly regulated industry at both the state and the local level. The renewal process requires the payment of an annual regulatory fee in addition to all those taxes, which the city uses to fund both a financial and an operational audit. by, I think we use HDL, which is sort of the statewide standard for local agencies. Can absolutely follow up on the specific business that the speaker just spoke about and make sure that when was last operational and financial audit done, and if it hasn't been done or it's been a while, we can get them scheduled for a new one.

Okay, any further questions or comments? What is your pleasure?

I move to approve ordinance number 2082, the urgency ordinance of the City Council of the City of Hemet adopted for the renewal of permits and authorizing city manager to impose conditions and execute compliance agreements and declaring the urgency thereof. And also, I move to pass ordinance number 2083, a regular ordinance of the city, and adding sections relating to the term extension and renewal of commercial cannabis business permits.

I'll second.

And we did have number three, which was a minute order. Oh, there's a third one. That was a question that we'd received, which was the desire of the council to get a report in the future on who's open, what taxes are they paying, et cetera. So you had some question and answer now, but our recommendation was that you adopt that minute order and get a more formal report in the future.

I think that's an excellent idea, and I would request that.

I do have one question in between. So, what are the obstacles that they were encountering?

I don't know the specific obstacles to any particular business, but staff probably does.

I think Mr. Papp has some answers.

And what I would tell you, generally the issues that they have are ventilation, HVAC, and security. These are usually the two issues that we have the biggest issues or problems with. But the Deputy Director can speak to it.

Yes, thank you for the question. One of the issues that prevented one of the dispensaries from opening was a backflow valve, a check valve at the rear of the building. It had been damaged or it was ineffective, it wasn't working properly and they needed to have that replaced before they could actually get a permit issued to start doing their TIs. So that delayed them quite a bit. Another one had a question about whether or not they needed to construct a block wall surrounding the perimeter of the property to separate it from residential and quasi-residential uses around the property. We did take a look at that and determined that no, they needed to complete that per the conditions of approval. So they are working on completing their TIs.

Were there similar obstacles for the three that made it?

Not so much, no. The ones that opened were fairly easy to open. They had the interior of the building was already completed. They made some minor modifications to the interior for non-permit related items, what we refer to typically as carpet and paint, painting the walls, putting new flooring down, maybe putting in some disposable or I'm sorry, removable shelving that don't, those types of things don't require permits. So the two that opened more quickly faced far fewer obstacles.

But the one that had the liquor store, how long did that take?

I believe they opened in June of this year.

Yeah, so it's been because they had to get ABC to come in and approve it and because it was right adjacent. I just question on why it's taking. I get the wall. That's my view. I really think if you're playing and planning and you want to be open, then you know about the backflow and you get it done as soon as possible. I get it. We need the money. But so thank you for the

Okay. I do have one additional question. How often or who does the inspection on filters and that type of thing? Because they've cleaned up their act in San Jacinto, so when you drive past State Street and 7th, you don't gag, at least I don't gag on the smell. So it's been cleaner over there. But who does that regulatory thing? Because I don't want that smell in Hemet.

Everything for these dispensaries is prepackaged, and it's a storefront retail type of operation, so there are no, I've been into dispensaries in the past for previous jurisdictions I've worked for where they had sort of sample containers that had holes drilled so you can smell the aroma, of the material you're purchasing. This is all prepackaged materials. There's no aromas. The HVAC system is required to be checked every year when they go through their typical business license review inspections to make sure that none of the equipment has been altered in any way.

Okay. And none of these are having active grows?

No. They are strictly storefront dispensaries, and everything's prepackaged.

Okay. Yeah. It does smell. I've toured them, came back to City Hall, and everybody wondered what I'd been doing. ultimately had to sell my car because it would stunk so bad on the inside. That's my personal opinion for smell. So, okay, any other questions or comments from council?

Well, I know Bedology. We went through and did the inspection before they opened, and they're very conscientious. I have got to give them that. And the way they run it, it's a tight ship, and I was thoroughly impressed. I HAVEN'T BEEN SO IMPRESSED BY THE ONE THAT'S IN ANOTHER LOCATION IN MY DISTRICT. AND I KIND OF AGREE. I THINK WE NEED TO KIND OF LOOK AT THAT ONE A LITTLE CLOSER BECAUSE I THINK THEY GET AWAY WITH, ESPECIALLY WITH THE LIQUOR RIGHT THERE. BUT, AGAIN, I KNOW WE NEED THE MONEY.

So back to that, the requirements that we have in our ordinance for security. Is there a stipulated number of security personnel or can they just have one as Mr. Allen has commented?

Well, as part of their permit approval, there is a security plan that was submitted and reviewed by city staff and agreed upon by the city and the applicant. I don't know specifically in this case how many they said they were going to have. We can certainly look into that for you. But I do believe that for their nighttime operations, they have one guard that circles the perimeter of the property. And during their daytime operations, I believe they do have two, one in store and one in the exterior.

Okay. Let's keep an eye on that, okay? Absolutely. Okie doke. What's your pleasure? Oh, there was a motion. There was a motion and a second. I just threw a question. I'm sorry. Okie doke. There is a motion and a second to do all of the things that are listed in 1, 2, and 3. Please vote.

Mayor, before we do the roll call. Yes, you need to read things. I'm sorry. No problem. No problem. Okay. Urgency Ordinance Number 2082, an urgency ordinance of the City Council of the City of Hemet, California, adopted pursuant to Government Code Section 36937B, amending Sections 18, 27, 511 and 18512 of and adding sections 18511.5 and 18512.5 to Article 16 of Chapter 18 of the Hemet Municipal Code relating to the term extensions and renewal of commercial cannabis business permits and authorizing the city manager to impose conditions and execute compliance agreements and declaring the urgency thereof. And then Ordinance Number 2083. In ordinance of the City Council, the City of Hemet, California, amending sections 18-511 and 18-512 of and adding sections 18-511.5 and 18-512.5 to Article 16 of Chapter 18 of the Hemet Municipal Code relating to the term extension and renewal of commercial cannabis business permits. You may vote.

All right. Thank you very much. Please vote and confirm your choices. And that passes unanimously. Thank you very much for that report. Moving on to 19E. Designation of voting delegate and alternate to the 2026 Cal Cities General Assembly and direction regarding resolution number one. Can we have a staff report?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I'll be introducing this item. This item is regarding the upcoming League of California Cities Annual Conference and General Assembly later this month. Each member city is entitled to designate a voting delegate to represent the city at the General Assembly. Tonight we are asking council to appoint a voting delegate and alternate to provide direction regarding or and to provide direction regarding the one resolution that is being considered this year. That resolution was submitted by the city of Murrieta and asks Cal cities to support the development of strategies to restore and strengthen the local authority over housing and land use decisions. Those strategies could ultimately include legislation, policy changes, a ballot measure, or a state constitutional amendment. Importantly, supporting the resolution tonight would not commit Hemet in any specific future proposal. It would support Cal City's further evaluating and advancing the issue. Staff believes that the resolution is generally consistent with the City Council's adopted legislative platform, but particularly our emphasis on protecting local control and preserving the ability of cities to make land use decisions that reflect local conditions. So with that, staff recommends that the city council designate its voting delegate and alternate and provide direction on the city's position on resolution number one. I will note that the general assembly will take place on Friday morning from 8.30 to 10.30 a.m.

Okay, thank you very much. So the first order of business is to appoint two council members to serve as voting delegate and alternate. And I would like to make a motion that that be Tom and Connie.

Wow, awesome. You don't want to be primary? Pardon? You don't want to be at the primary?

No. This is good experience for you guys that have been primary before. Okay. Okay. Yes. And you will be there at that time?

8.30 to 10.30 on Friday morning.

For sure. I'll second that motion.

I promise you I will.

Would you think we're going to go get ice cream and go, Jack, you'll never know.

Okay. So we've got Tom and Connie.

Thank you.

Who wants to be primary? Well, he's senior. Tom?

I'll be primary.

Tom can be primary. Connie can be alternate. It's a good experience. It's absolutely a good experience. Okay, so then we need to discuss the proposed resolution and determine our position and how we want our voting delegates to vote.

I would, I was, after reading through that, I wholeheartedly agree with them that, you know, we need more local control than we do state control completely and fully, and that's.

Yeah, I agree with that. It is not something that binds anybody. It is a suggestion, a very loud suggestion if it passes to Cal Cities to pursue this in Sacramento. Yeah, we've allowed legislature to take too many of our local rights away. So entertain a motion. Oh, I'm sorry. Are there any public speakers?

No public speakers on this item.

Okey dokey. So much pleasure. Go ahead, Jackie.

I make a motion to approve Tom Lodge as the primary and Connie Clark as the alternate and to approve this item before the General Assembly of Cal Cities.

They should vote in favor of this one. Okie dokie. Do we have a second? I'll second.

I'll second.

All righty. We have a motion and a second. Please vote and confirm your selection. Congratulations, it passes unanimously. Delegate and alternate.

There you go.

19F, calls for review of land use and development decisions under Chapter 90 of the Hemet Municipal Code. Staff report, please.

uh thank you mayor your city attorney again chapter 90 is the city's development code and it gives most land use decisions most land use decisions the city have been delegated to either the planning commission or to the community development director there is one route currently within the code that allows for a review of that decision by a higher body so for the director that would be the planning commission for the planning commission decisions that would be the city council and that's an appeal So an interested party, although that term is not defined in our code, can pay a fee, fill out a form explaining what the decision is, what the reason for their appeal is, file that within the 10-day period following the decision. And if they do, the decision is stayed and then an appeal hearing is held for the director again before the planning commission or for a planning commission decision before the city council. There is an alternative path for review of decisions that many cities have implemented, and it's called a call up. And essentially what that allows is for the planning commission, they would have the ability during that same 10 day period to essentially self-appeal, I guess is how we might put it, where the planning commission can say, we want to review that decision of the community development director. Or, an alternative, the city council, there was a planning commission decision that was made, the city council could essentially appeal that decision to itself, hold a hearing, and make a decision on it. It has to be codified. So you can thank the City of Newport Beach for that. The City of Newport Beach had a situation where their planning commission approved something that the council didn't like. They had a historical practice of allowing the council to pull or to call up items for review, but it wasn't codified within their development code. And the Superior Court said, Historical practice is insufficient when it comes to the due process rights of property owners. If you don't have an interested party that has filed an appeal consistent with the statute or the ordinances of the city, then the decision is final. And so they overturned the city council's decision in that case. What it is and what it isn't, right? So the... The body is bringing a delegated decision up to a higher level of review. It is not an adversarial appeal. So if you look at the language that I drafted, there's no reason that has to be given for the call up. And that is very important because we don't want to create an issue of due process rights where applicant would say well council member so and so called it up therefore they're biased against me and cannot participate so we are following the path that other cities have followed which is that there is no reason that has to be given by a member or members or of the entire council to review a decision and the fact that you have participated in the call-up does is not evidence of bias If the City Council wants to proceed forward with an ordinance of this type, I do recommend that you have a mirrored system that essentially follows the same timelines and steps as the current appeal process. Two reasons. The appeal process works pretty good, and I don't want to have to keep track of two different systems. So the timelines for 10 days would be the same. forms would be virtually identical and the effect where it has stayed, the decision has stayed pending that call up or appeal would remain in effect. Differences from the appeal, like I said, it would not require a reason and there would be no fee that has to be paid because this is essentially the city calling it up to itself, not an outside third party. The biggest question I've seen in conversations about whether to have this is who gets to do the call-up. So most agencies avoid a single member of the planning commission or a single member of the city council having the unilateral authority to call something up for review without the concurrence of the body. And the reason for that is pretty straightforward. A lot of different opinions on a city council, healthy diversity of thought. But one person can have really strong opinions that can clutter the docket for the council. As evidenced by tonight, the council has a lot of business to attend to that does not involve reviewing planning commission decisions. And so you could have an individual who essentially floods the zone. and is constantly bringing things up to the council, and if that's what the ordinance says they can do, then that's what the ordinance says they can do. We'd have to have noticed public hearings for every single one of them. On the flip side, at the other extreme end of the spectrum, is you require an actual action by the entire body in order to call up the decision. That is possible, and you frankly see that in cities where they meet every week because they're guaranteed to have a meeting within the 10-day time frame. However, since we meet every other week, oftentimes on the alternate week from the planning commission, granted, there will be times when there is not a regular city council meeting scheduled within 10 days of a planning commission meeting. So the happy middle ground that some cities have found is any member of the Council can recommend the call-up, and that stays the decision until the Council either has it on their agenda and can say, yes, we're going to do this, and schedules it, or no, we're not going to do this, and then it's done. The alternative is you can say two council members are required for any call-up. You're allowed to talk to one other council person without violating the Brown Act. If two council members are interested in doing something, that usually means it's probably something worth talking about most of the time. So those are two sort of procedural safeguards. And you could have the same ones for the Planning Commission and the council. You could have different ones. It's really up to the council. On the issue of The timeline, the 10 days, I just want to go back to that for a second. There are some cities that say no decision of the planning commission is final until the next regular city council meeting when a report could come and you can make that decision. That is possible. It's a little unwieldy, in my opinion. I work for an agency that has it. And the only reason for that is that we talked about certainty in the application process. And so an applicant doesn't actually know when their project approvals are final, because it depends on when the City Council meets next. So it could be next week, could be three weeks, maybe we're in the middle of summer, and it's a month and a half, right? So that's why I recommend you stick with the 10 days and go with one of the council member options if this is something that you want to do. I didn't add an attached draft ordinance to the agenda tonight. This would be an amendment to the development code. So a draft ordinance would need to go to the Planning Commission for their consideration and recommendation before it came to the Council. This is a legislative act. And I felt it was better to give the Council the opportunity to craft whatever it is you want to bring to the Planning Commission for their review and input rather than bringing them something that staff came up with out of thin air. Additionally, if the Council doesn't want to pursue this for whatever reason, then I haven't spent the time drafting the ordinance. So that's the end of my report. Happy to receive direction. I put 10 policy questions there that might help guide you, but like I said, usually the real crux of this is who gets to make the appeal. Thank you.

Questions or comments?

I like the two because it keeps it within the Brown Act. We have to... There has to be a system where feedback, good, bad, or ugly, the decision, it's ultimately our problem, the city's problem. If something is approved that maybe places the city in jeopardy, maybe too many of one thing in a concentrated area, and To me, this is a good just oversight kind of thing where, you know, we collectively can discuss whether it is it has merits or not. If two people come, I think there was maybe one in the past that I know two people had come. That's my view.

Yeah. You know, I would agree with that. I know just in the many years I've been here, there haven't been that many issues that have been approved or developments that have been approved that I think council probably would have turned down if it had gotten to us, and there was no appeal process. There was one recently where I personally thought it was just a bad idea and thank goodness the applicant appealed. And because of council action on that, it didn't go forward at all. And then there was another one that quite recently that you couldn't do anything about. I'm in favor of having that ability for both planning commission and city council to do a review. My concerns are the length of time if a project is approved by either community development or planning commission. Are those decisions made immediately? Or is there a delay in that process? Because delay, it's not good if we are hindering something that ultimately maybe decided that it's a good project.

So after any decision of the director or of the planning commission that are subject to appeal, the decision does not go into effect for 10 days, which is the current appeal period. If no appeal is filed within 10 days, then it becomes final. If an appeal is filed, then that decision is stayed pending the hearing on the appeal. Uh, we could put language, um, in the ordinance if that was part of the direction the council gave that the appeal shall be heard within 30 days or some other reasonable timeframe. You know, assuming that this has been before the planning commission, the packet's already ready to go. You're essentially just looking at changing planning commission to city council. We'll probably want to put a narrative about what happened, but my recommendation is that the hearing at the council, I'm going to use some Latin city attorney speak, it's called de novo. And what that means is you're not reviewing the decision of the planning commission. you are taking the evidence, hearing the testimony, and making the decision completely anew. And so for that reason, it's not going to be necessary for us to generate transcripts, put together a binder of all the evidence, essentially just bring the project as it was presented to the planning commission, to the council, or in the case of the planning commission, what the director had.

The other question, you made the comment, those that are appealable, are there some decisions that Community Development or Planning Commission make that would not be appealable?

So there are certain ministerial decisions that are made by the director especially. And there are some, generally in the MAP Act area, that are made by the Planning Commission. I would recommend that the ordinance carve out those decisions from this process. Only because, okay, you brought it up, you have no more discretion than they had, so.

Yeah.

There would also likely need to be some accounting for state law on certain housing projects. There are five hearing maximums in certain types of applications, and I believe a de novo call-up would count as an additional hearing, so. If they've already, you know, if the Planning Commission has already burned all five hearings, that may be the end of it. So we're going to have to deal with a couple of strange things like that, but that's what you pay me for.

Any other questions or comments?

I'm just looking at delays on certain things and overseeing somebody else's work. It's a fair concern.

So the council does hear appeals, right? But as a general rule, those appeals are relatively limited in quantity because you have to pay the fee, you have to state what the basis of your appeal is. So there's a little bit of a threshold issue there. We are injecting some potential additional uncertainty into the development process by having the call up procedure available. It would be something that, you know, we'd want to make sure that applicants are aware of that. You could go to planning commission and you get a 50 thumbs up. and on day nine you get a little email from the community development director that says the council wants to talk to you um and you know so that's not an email any applicant's going to want to get yeah so that that is certainly a consideration um that the council would would want to consider so the um i believe the board of supervisors

as the minutes of their planning commission meetings on their agenda on consent calendar. So they approve everything? I mean, they...

I think they receive the minutes and they use that as the basis for making a similar call. Okay. I can tell you other jurisdictions I work with that have a similar process to this also receive. And it's usually the draft minutes because usually it hasn't been had time to be approved yet. But it's in the form of a simple report as to what came forward and what did the Planning Commission do with it. It's action minutes. It's not long narratives. It's kind of hard to get it wrong.

So we would not have that. We would just have.

You want that? You could have that. Oh, god. I'm volunteering the city clerk's office for some fun additional work.

As long as I don't have to do it. She's good.

I think what would probably be best, I do think that there's, you probably do need some sort of information that decisions were made. Yeah. You know, the agendas are posted. I don't think it would be.

It would be nice to have the action item.

I think it's just the agenda and approved votes. I think that's something.

Sometimes the last ones to know.

Yes. As you're watching the polling.

Hey, Joe.

Yeah.

Remember? You didn't know we were going to get a Freddy's.

Yeah.

There you go.

There you go. I don't want to add another layer of bureaucracy, so to speak. I mean, we're all the same body. And yet, there haven't, like I said, maybe, I'm sure, under five in the entire time I've been on council that even people in the public said, why? Why did Planning Commission approve that? Why did the community development person approve that? Isn't there any discretion? Isn't there anything you could have done in council? And it's like, no.

Not unless you appeal it.

Yeah, and quite frankly, council can't appeal in this current form.

No one can appeal anything that they-

So any interested party can, and I'm going to leave that term undefined because it's not in the code, but any third party essentially is what I'm going to say can appeal it. But if a member of the council, let's just give an example. let's say there was one it sounded like council member clark had some concerns off we don't have to say what application that was we'll just say that there was one that she had concerns about if she had gone and filed an appeal she could she can file an appeal but then she has to get off the dais yeah exactly because that's i was told because now she's the appellant right and she she can't participate in the decision um and so this process would allow the council to look at those decisions or the planning commission to look at those decisions without having to go through that appeal process.

And I think the two is the safety net. I was just going to say. Yeah.

I like two. Yeah, just one person. No, one person. No, it's crazy. Oh, they're going to drive you crazy.

Yeah, and potentially that could be, I mean, they have dissension in other cities all over, Southern California where one council member makes it difficult for everybody. That's not what we're talking about here. We're just talking about having a common sense ability for two people to come up with it at the same time. And those odds are then we should look.

Okay.

Oh, I was just gonna say I'm in favor of like streamlining systems, you know, and with this concept, the City Council has the opportunity to shape the concept before the draft is prepared, rather than to react to a completed draft at the end of the process. So I don't like to see things go back and forth. You know, I want to, as somebody said, I'm boom, boom, boom. You know, so I like this idea.

Oh, good. Well, because you're going to be getting more of it, because you've got one on the next agenda item, too. There we go.

Do we have any registered speakers on this item?

No registered speakers.

Okay. So to approve this item is just giving direction to staff to come back to do what?

I think I got the direction I needed. Mostly it was how do you want the appeals to be handled? Like, how do they get initiated? So you're going to direct the city manager or designate to prep the ordinance.

That's me.

and we'll put it on the next available planning commission hearing and let them know that this is council's discussion this is what they you know generally they didn't look at the language but this is generally what they wanted we will take their recommendations and bring it back to the council for approval uh the next few months okay i'm looking at emory

Did you just add more billing hours to your time?

I did not. I added extra uncompensated work, unfortunately.

Okay, so what's your pleasure? I guess make a motion.

I will make a motion to direct either city manager or attorney to come up with an ordinance that speaks to the applicable time period for the method of call that will allow for a review to be 10 days and two council members.

Or planning commissioners. Yes, correct.

I'll second it.

Okay. We have a motion and a second. Please vote. And confirm your selection. Okay. That passes unanimously. You guys know what you need to do.

Mayor Mrakas, Right and then just in the sort of previews of coming attractions file. Mayor Mrakas, There is another amendment that i'll be bringing forward in the future same process where I bring you the general concept, I asked for your input and I take it to planning Commission, if you like it. And that going to the streamlining concept is going to be the ability of the director or the planning Commission to streamline the ability to do minor modifications. We have a lot of projects in him it that have that have been extended because sitting around. They were maybe designed 10, 15 years ago. A lot of substantial design work was done then. And maybe that design doesn't really meet the current market. With a little bit of discretionary authority, your director or your planning commission might have the ability to breathe new life into these economic opportunities for the city. But before we gave them that really fantastic discretionary tool, I thought it was a good idea to also give you a way to provide feedback on its use.

so that's why this one came first uh look forward to discussion on that in the future okay very good 19g 19g sidewalk curb gutter and parkway maintenance responsibility and liability policy discussion are you back on back on okay

So this one is a big ask. I just want to start there. You can make a motion to shut me down whenever you want, council member. That's OK. As we've moved from Cal JPIA to the city's current risk program, one of the things that we did as we were going through the budget process and the insurance premium negotiations where city staff was able to get pretty significant concessions and reductions from the initial planned insurance premium, although it is still a significant expense for the city. One of the things that we talked about were different mechanisms to over the near to mid term to reduce liability. As the Council has taken on this new role of overseeing risk with the city, one of the things that you will have noticed is that for a public agency, especially a city, A significant amount of liability arises from what's called dangerous condition on public property or which is sometimes referred to as trip and fall cases. The city owns and operates hundreds of miles of sidewalk. I don't think that's an exaggeration to say hundreds of miles of sidewalk, and we cannot be everywhere at once. We don't know every single lift crack or hole that is created in the sidewalks unless somebody reports it, which reminds me you can report any such thing on the city's website. And so one of the conversations that we've had is, how do we encourage adjacent property owners who under state law share responsibility in the maintenance of that sidewalk area? To report those, how do we properly apportion liability when a trip and fall happens? And how do we deal with some of the ongoing maintenance issues citywide? So we took what I would call the sort of draconian ultimate ordinance, which goes to the maximum extent of creating maintenance obligations, shifting liability to the extent it can, and put it together in the form, again, of a discussion here for the council. I think that there are some pretty, unlike the call-up, which I think, you know, I think it was a policy discussion, but I don't think that there was a significant amount of research necessarily that needed to go into it. I think there's a lot here that I don't necessarily have completed for you. So, you know, for example, when The Council was asked to look at what are the conditions of our roads. So he did a study. You got a map with color codes on it. You have PCI index and numbers like that. We don't have that information at the sidewalk level, and I think to get it would be an undertaking and a significant expense. It would also put us on notice for all those faults that we need to address. I don't think that we've done lately a significant dive into all the available funding sources for a program like that that looks at it and funds repairs. And so I think that we owe it to look further into those things. I don't want to speak for the interim city manager, but what I can tell you is that one of the struggles for the general fund in this area is the city's own municipal code, where the city has voluntarily taken responsibility for trees, street trees. That's not always the case in every jurisdiction. And so these are some pretty big conversations. I can tell you that there are some interesting additional ways of dealing with this that we've talked about internally. One of them is exempting residential properties from the program initially. We looked back through our liability claims. We don't get a lot of trip and falls in front of people's houses, even when there is sidewalk. probably because the traffic count is just relatively low for that compared to the commercial thoroughfares where you get a lot more people walking back and forth. Additionally, I think that the people who are walking on the sidewalk in their own neighborhood know the sidewalk and are very familiar with it, whereas folks who maybe are walking down one of the commercial areas are maybe less familiar with that particular area. But just, you know, again, not scientific tests, but just kind of looking at the claims, the commercial areas seem to be the places where we have the biggest issue. Additionally, one of the conversations that we had, again, just brainstorming this was, we could also exempt any property that has opted into the city's maintenance CFD or LLMD. CFD for sidewalks and streets, street trees and irrigation. So if you voluntarily join the CFD, which raises money and is responsible for maintaining these assets, then the city would agree that you are exempt, like we're not gonna come after you for any liability that arises. We will use that programmatic money to maintain the infrastructure. So like I said, those are some pretty, even for me, and I've been working on this for a while, those seem like some pretty big ideas. I don't necessarily think it's up to the council. If you want to give us direction, go draft this and bring it back. We'll do that. But what I was expecting tonight, frankly, after looking at it, talking with no uh it's probably you know we need some more information um there's some additional discussions we have we would like to have or as council member lodge said i did expect there's a potential for just a flat out no thank you um see see you next year for something like this So there's no pride in the authorship. This was a conversation that we had with our insurance team, and I said I'd bring it up to the council to see how we'd like to move. If the council did want us to go in this direction, one of my recommendations would that it be paired up and added to a sidewalk sort of inspection and maintenance program be added to your goals and be incorporated in next fiscal year's budget. as something that you want to look at how do we fund it? So that's that's the staff report on this one. Happy to answer any questions you have.

Do we have any public comment on this?

One public comment Charles vineyard

Hello, everyone. I'd like to start off with a warning, Will Robinson, a warning to anybody who wants to buy in Hemet, run away, because we just heard from the attorney trying to push, I own a house here in Hemet, and now you're telling me I gotta pay more money to the city to take care of the sidewalk that you put in, that you said is the city's property? That's crazy, all right? We just got done with 19A where you want to install new lights, new bicycle lanes, new striping. We're talking over $100 million for all that stuff. But you can't fix our residential streets. Let's work, you're putting lipstick on a pig, okay? And if you can't take care of the sidewalks, you can't take care of residential street, yes, you might be able to work at Walmart and double your pay, okay? But I guarantee you, you have very good pensions, all right? Maybe we need to stop paying these flock cameras that are only helping us very little as about a month ago, you were wondering who's gonna pay for destroying the motor home from the homeless. And where are we going to get the money back from that? Where are we getting the money back from the flock cameras? We're not getting it back. You're investing three, four meetings ago, somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 million, I think it was, or whatever, for all new cameras to protect the police. The police can't protect themselves. The cameras put a brick wall around the parking of the police. But you can't fix residential streets. And this wonderful lady right here says, we need the money. Keep the marijuana going. We need the money. That's true. I mean, every time I come here, I keep hearing you say, we don't have the money, we don't have the money, we've got to figure out. Well, why don't we just open... what we call chicken farms from Las Vegas, which is just hooker. We'll just make hooker prostitute legal here, and we'll get a percentage of that too. Another way that if you want to get money back, let's start hitting Facebook and YouTube video people that are doing that here in Hemet, and why are they not paying their taxes for all the hundreds and thousands of dollars each of these young adults are making? Where's the money coming for that? And with the marijuana money, how much of that is going to the street? We don't see a pie chart on what it's being used for. Please be more open. And again, yeah, we need more money, but let's not fix up Florida before we fix up what the community has already been paying for us to take care of our streets. Let's start using money correctly. I mean, you wouldn't want to use your pension city attorney to take care of all the sidewalks. Don't ask those people who own houses to cover your problem.

Thank you very much for your comments. Okay, I'll bring it back to council for questions or comments. I have several.

How about it? Okay.

Several questions. I LIKE THE NOTICE AREA. IT'S THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PROPERTY OWNERS TO REPORT TO THE CITY IF THERE'S A HAZARD OUT IN FRONT OF THEIR HOUSE. I AGREE WITH THAT. I'VE GOT CITY TREES. IT'S MY DUTY TO NOTIFY THE CITY. What isn't spelled out in here and would probably be the additional work that has to be done is exactly what type of hazard would have to be fixed by the property owner. I have curb that goes into my driveway that's been broken for years. It's probably 70 years old. I mean, would that be my responsibility to fix that if somebody tripped on it or tripped over one of the rocks that I had to prevent my neighbors from turning around in my driveway? There's just all sorts of questions, but I like the fact that it's going to be part of our risk management on sidewalk management, especially that for businesses and for anybody else. Caltrans on Florida Avenue, because we talked to them all the time about fixing their sidewalks. But just, you know, where would it go? What would it cover? And I'm sure this takes additional discussion.

Yeah, so I think that, you know, one of the areas the Council could give some, you know, thoughts on is the definition of the sidewalk area. I think in every similar ordinance I've seen, it includes the sidewalk and the parkway or the park strip, which is the grass or planted area between the sidewalk and the street. Right. Where sometimes you see divergence on is does it include the curb and the gutter? Is that part of the street? Is it part of the city's stormwater system? Is that part of the property owner's sidewalk area? Land use law is not something that everyone is intimately familiar with, so I don't want to assume that we're all speaking the same language. Property owners generally, not in every case, but generally, they actually own the land all the way to the center of the street. When their property was developed, originally built, the individual who subdivided it and built it dedicated a portion of that property to the city for the public right-of-way, for the roads. The entity that dedicated it was also generally required to construct the street, the curb, the gutter, the sidewalk. And so a lot of folks believe that this is all the city's problem. But actually under the Streets and Highways Code, the adjacent property owner has a duty to maintain that area in addition to the city. So this is not a concept that I'm coming up with. This is something that exists under state law now. Mostly, the idea was to look at a way to, like you said, use this in a way that actually helps advance our risk management program. One of the biggest issues for cities is simply notice. The commercial areas that get more traffic, we're generally going to receive notice faster. But we don't have personnel walking up and down every residential street of the city looking for inch or half inch lifts and sidewalks in fact some of our neighbors nearer the coast who seem to have a lot more discretionary funds for little projects have recently been adopting robots that travel i think uh city uh one of the cities in orange county did it it was on the news i saw And they've got one of these like delivery kind of robots traveling down the sidewalk using lasers to measure the sidewalk.

Yeah.

Because it's important. They know that it's important and it's not because they want their sidewalk to look pretty. It's because you, it, it, You're saving money in the long term by preventing liability for the city. So the notice idea where we're saying to property owners, hey, look, you know whether there's a problem with your sidewalk long before we ever will. make sure you tell us so that we can get it fixed. Seems like one of the things that, you know, even if we don't go into the liability side or the obligation to fix, I think making sure that people are informing the city would be a useful thing for all of us.

i know in sierra don south there's probably like every fifth house has a sidewalk in front of it that's part of the property owner's responsibility right there to the cities because the next four houses don't have it so that your property line goes all the way up to the edge of that sidewalk once the curb comes down into the street that's city's problem

So, I mean, like I said, I think you could be conservative with this. Curbs don't generally generate a lot of liability for the city. It's not the thing that keeps your city attorney up at night. It's the sidewalk and the parkway and in particular holes in the parkway or routes that people are tripping on. The curb is not the thing. If the curb was a deal breaker, drop it.

Because they're all sloped. They're not straight edge. Yeah.

You said that also that the number of claims of commercial property versus residential trip and fall. Can you elaborate on, I mean, what's the percentage?

Yeah, so this is admittedly an unscientific vibe check by your city attorney. But what I can tell you is, having looked at the trip and fall claims and cases that have been coming in just over the last year, They are almost all exclusively on the north-south arterials approaching Florida or on a few of the east-west arterials like Stetson.

Any other questions from Council? You've got one minute.

What the attorney was saying that when you buy a house that supposedly we owned all the way to the middle of the street, okay? If we own all the way to the middle of the street, well, that means I can cut into the sidewalk and widen my driveway more. Oh wait, no, I can't do that. Okay, because the city won't allow me to do that because they say that's our property and we don't allow it. I can't go out to the street past the curb and start digging it up and put a mosaic art piece on the asphalt because they're like, no, that's the city street. So don't say it's our property when we can't do nothing with it.

That's false.

Thank you very much. And that is not necessarily what the city attorney said.

So, again, land development is pretty complicated. There's a lot of rules. I think the best equivalent for most people who are watching is a lot of people are familiar with utility easements, like Southern California Edison or the gas company. They may have a utility easement across your property, and it's still your property, still pay taxes on it, but you can't construct in it or in any way interfere with their utility easement. In the same way, under state law, In order to ensure that every property has access, the Subdivision Map Act requires dedication of land that's developed for right-of-way purposes. But anyway, happy to answer any other questions the council has or get directions.

Do you have cities that do this, that have done this? And what are they and how did they come about? I like the idea of having residents help us fix, but

can't be punitive.

Yeah.

Especially if it's out of their control. I mean, some things aren't. Running a water hose and then putting mud or whatever, that's in your, as a property owner, that's your responsibility to clean it up.

Right. So I would say that the, um, Patrick Baur, Pathway i've seen that works both practically because this has to work actually actually work outside this building, not just in you know the the ordinance itself. Patrick Baur, But also is fair, I think, and perceived as fair. Patrick Baur, Is the notice requirement so again your house your sidewalk. you know if there's something wrong with it. And so informing people that they need to be communicating that to the city so that we can get a repair out there. One of the other things that I think is understood as fair is instead of just saying in every case you're going to be liable with us, is a concept that we call comparative fault. And so that is essentially if you did something as the property owner that caused the condition Then you're on the hook. But if all you did was own property and through time these things developed, then the city is not going to be looking for your assistance on the defense. So you gave the example of a hose. You could have somebody who plants their own trees in their yard and those roots cause a problem. should the public bear the cost of that lawsuit because you chose to put plants that cause lift to the sidewalks, I think most people would agree, okay, that's fair. But when it comes to just over time, even though the city usually isn't the entity that constructed the sidewalks, it's usually the property owner during development, I think most people see this as a government program as we heard tonight.

Okay, but back up here because... We have a lot of homes owned by slumlords. And I said it because it's true. And we have a hard enough time going and getting them to fix basic things for basic living. So are we really, what are we doing? Are we chasing? How are we going to make certain people? And we know that it's a handful.

So there are different ways that we could approach it. State law authorizes the assessment process, similar to weed abatement, right? So again, the sidewalks were typically required as a condition of constructing the buildings. And what the Streets and Highways Code allows is if that public amenity that you were required to construct in order to build your property becomes in a condition where it's not safe for the traveling public, you as the adjacent property owner have the responsibility to correct it. And if you don't, the city will come and correct it, like we do with weeds. We give them notice, hey, you got to take care of these weeds. It's a danger to everyone around you. When someone doesn't do it, what do we do? We go and we cut the weeds down and we put a bill, we put an assessment on the tax bill. You could do a similar process. But again, I think that you'd want to make sure that any, you don't have to apportion fault. You can just say this is your responsibility. You're doing it. I think that... like I said, a lot of members of the public, like we heard tonight, that is not their feeling or understanding of how this whole thing functions. And so I think you're going to get a lot of pushback. And so you may want to approach it more from the comparative fault perspective, which is if the property owner did something that damaged our sidewalk, Then they're paying for it that seems fair, but if they didn't then we're going to have a we're going to find a source of funds to have an ongoing maintenance system throughout the city.

Other comments? I have one comment.

You mentioned that if there's a problem with the property or if they have a sidewalk issue, make a call and get a hold of the city. You know, I'm a big supporter of C-Click Fix. I love it. It works for me. You know the biggest complaint I get? When I tell people to use it, nobody ever calls me. Nobody ever fixes it. It's been a month. I get C-Click fixed, you know, every day for three weeks.

You get the C and the click, but not the fix.

Yeah, and they don't get the fix. So, you know, us telling homeowners that, well, if there's a problem there, you know, you have to call and you if you want to get it fixed properly or you're going to be responsible for it. I just don't see it because until we start being a city that responds to our citizens better, I just can't see that happening.

I think this would have the opposite effect. I mean, to me, it would relieve liability on the property owner. If you've already noticed the city that this is a problem with the sidewalk, it needs to be fixed. I didn't do it, but it's yours, and somebody trips. It's not the property owner's fault anymore. They've done their responsibility in notification.

And the issue with dangerous conditions on public property is that in order for the city to be liable, it has to have notice. And so once we get the cyclic fix that comes in and says, hey, my sidewalk is broken. Someone's going to trip. If someone does trip on that sidewalk, we're gonna have a much harder time defending the case. And so there's a really strong incentive on us to go out there and repair it. And that's why my recommendation for this one is not just an ordinance, but you'd wanna make sure that you are actually funding a program that backs this up. Instead of just relying on general appropriations for public works generally, you could look at having a sidewalk repair program with dedicated funds to handling this. I know that there's not we're in the hole but I'm telling you one bad sidewalk trip and fall case that's your whole budget you could have repaired dozens if not hundreds of sidewalk issues and so one of the things I always look at is best practices or how some of these cities do these things and the ones that don't have liability, they save all that money on liability by trying to get it out on the front end. I know we're kind of behind the ball. We're doing the best we can. you're gonna have to make policy decisions how much to allocate what's the funding source what are we giving up to do this but you know we do have people tripping and falling throughout the city on a regular basis and we have to pay the insurance premiums we have to pay the attorneys to defend it we have to pay medical bills or settlements and so you know if we can avoid one of those by being more proactive, that may be something the council wants to consider.

Very good. Jackie, you look like you have wanted something. Right.

He beat me to the punch because I was going to mention C-Click Fix, too. You know, in talking to people, there's so many people that have never heard of C-Click Fix yet. And we've had it around for several years, and I think we really should publicize it more. And one of the aspects of this program would be public outreach before the introduction. So, we just really need to publicize the CCLIC-Fix-More in the interim, I think, and then, you know, just really give a lot of information on this if we would go active with something like this. So.

Female Speaker 1 So, we've had discussion. What's your pleasure?

Male Speaker 1 Bring it back.

Female Speaker 1 We can direct staff to bring something back.

I would recommend we bring it back. We do some more research into it.

Take into consideration all the comments that were made on this tonight?

Yes. So we can get a better idea of what we're going to draft.

One of the aspects was number eight was hearing and appeal. And I definitely think that, you know, we should let the residents show further facts, you know, if they dispute something. So, I would want that in there, that there would be some kind of an appeal process.

Okay. Yes. Is it appropriate to have public comment or a public hearing?

We absolutely can. And like I said, you see number 12 is about public outreach. The reaction tonight is not going to be unusual when folks hear about something, especially if it's really shifting liability. So I do think it's the kind of thing that we want to have facts on. I think we want to be able to explain how many trip and fall claims do we get a year? What is that costing the city? What is that costing the taxpayers? What would a program of being more proactive from both the property owners and from the city cost us? And what what does that look like long term? And I think if you have that conversation with some facts, I don't have the facts for you tonight. And I acknowledge that. I think then the council could probably make some more informed policy decisions on where it wants to go with with something like this.

Okay, so Tom, what's your motion?

i propose a motion that we bring this item back for further discussion and clarification on the january i was going to say i was actually going to say like full disclosure full disclosure we do have a lot going on right now so i think that january this is going to be a lift it will give me something to do over the holiday break oh yeah that's right you've got nothing else to do city council So Joe doesn't want responsibility. In any case, we can bring back a lot more data and we can see how many cyclic fixes we get for sidewalk repairs. It's the average time to get them fixed. Those are the kind of things that I think would really help inform where we want to go with something like that.

And that's really why I was saying public hearing, because It's like we're saddling people to something that we don't even know the public wants or understands or can afford.

An outreach, an educational outreach, exactly what it is, what it could be, and yeah, either having a work study or the public, well, you have to have the public hearing when it's going for an ordinance.

So this isn't a zoning ordinance, so it would be on the agenda. It would have public comment. It wouldn't necessarily be the kind where we have testimony for and against. But we can talk about I mean, I think that again for something like this. I think what we're looking for is probably something as part of the next budget cycle. And the question is really going to be for the Council. all right we're going to get notice out there we're going to get people educated we're going to allocate and create some sort of program but how far do we want to go with liability shifting and i think that that'll probably be a really good conversation once we know what the numbers are exactly and since we brought up cyclic fix can we get a data analysis on how many cyclic fixes that went through the city this year and and how how the response was on each one

Yeah, I can try to get a report together, bring it as a receiving file for the council. Okay, thank you.

Good idea.

You know, actually, the Planning Commission had recently a code presentation, and I thought it was pretty informative, and it might be something we might want to bring Sarah in and do. Yep, just saying.

Okay. Actually, sorry. You know, you're wrapping it up. Order. No. That's actually a pretty decent point. You're dangerous. It had completely escaped my head that our planning commission is also our infrastructure commission. That's what I was gonna say. Because that commission still exists. We just assigned all the duties to the planning commission. So maybe when we do the research, before we come back, do you want us to go talk to them, or do you want us to come back to the council first?

I think it needs to go to the planning commission and let them do it.

As the infrastructure commission?

Yeah.

That's why they got them.

We'll see them in January, come back in time for Valentine's Day.

Okay. We'll see you at Valentine's.

Okay, we have a motion. Do we have a second? I'll second. Okie dokie. We have a motion and a second with direction to staff on... Go to work on this item. It's something everybody can help with. Vote. Confirm your vote. Okay, that passes unanimously. Thank you very much. And now we'll move on to council and staff reports. So, Connie, you want to start us out?

Yes. Monday, August 24th, I did Water Master. Yes. That is the first time I ever did that, and it was just phenomenal. It's a good thing we met and we were able to do our little talk it out, what the agenda was going to be, and it was fun with our public works. And what the question really was at the end was, if you go ahead and you sell a piece of property to a public entity, do you get to keep your water rights when you go? and so that was a new complete there was a discussion we had an attorney and that was just basically we have to wait the water master has to wait until something comes up just because somebody said he wanted to maybe possibly do it doesn't mean it will happen so that was a Water rights are really important.

Water rights are for fighting.

Yes. Oh, yeah. August 26th, I went in and watched the swearing in of Officer Marcos Bocanegra. Bocanegra, Jr. He has a wife that has a cute little pouch and she's going to have a baby. And so we have a new added family member to the city of Hemet. August 27th, I was with WR COG and the PACE and commercial property assessed clean energy. We actually have one shopping center that is currently exploring this, and my own shopping center at True Value I referred also to, because what they do in the energy assistance, efficiency, water conservation, fire hardening, all of those things, there are loan payments that can be done via property tax, so you're not making the monthly, you're making your payment as a month, as a property tax for things like air conditioning, whoop, whoop, that we're going to have hopefully by next summer. So, that was very informational. I'm on the committee for that. August 29th, Linda Kicked the goal in the middle of Valleywide's American Youth Soccer Organization 50th year anniversary. Doesn't feel like I'm that old, but yep. And Jackie and I watched. We couldn't have done it better. But it was brutally hot. Then we went to the kids' fishing tournament. FUNDRAISER. THERE WERE A LOT OF DESSERTS. AND IT WAS NOT A GOOD PLACE TO BE IF YOU WERE ON A DIET. AGAIN, IT WAS BRUTALLY HOT. AND THE BAND, I DIDN'T CATCH THE BAND'S NAME, BUT THEY DID A PHENOMENAL JOB. CLEAR WATER EAGLES, JOHNNY CASH, THEY WERE GOOD. AND THEN SEPTEMBER 3rd, I DID THE LIBRARY TRUSTEE INTERVIEW. very very very fun to do that I found out today that my great-grandfather was a Hemet Library trustee because I am doing a presentation at the, I call it the historic, well, Hysterical Society, historical, on my great-great-grandfather that I never met and didn't know. But I was in there in the genealogy and Lord and behold, there's his name. He did it for about, I don't know, maybe 10 years. Girls Empowerment Camp is coming for Hemet Fire Department. Slots are almost completely filled. So anybody wants to do it, I would like to have our youth council also know that when we do our meeting next. And then this is a very somber 25th anniversary of September 11th. And I met a gentleman in the library trustee interviews that was affected pretty personally and he was down there for days helping. And he's a regular Joe, just like you and I, and he stepped up, and he's got some memories that it's just a tragedy. So please say a little prayer for all those that were there and worked. And I do worry about this gentleman on September 11th because I think You know, 25 years is terrible. And that's it. Thank you.

Well, I'm going to keep mine a little bit more lighthearted. Let me see. I was also at the fishing derby dinner, but I had to leave early because I had a prior engagement. And all those desserts, you didn't save me any, by the way.

I didn't win any.

They were looking good, though. Due to the diligence of our wonderful city clerk, our youth council meeting went off fabulously. And I'm looking forward to the next one because Rosalia does a great job organizing that for me, or for us. But yeah, I mean, couldn't do it without her, really. high hopes for the Christmas parade with the Youth Council. We're trying to get all the high school clubs and junior high clubs, whether it be Metal Shop Woodwork, Glee Club, whatever, to all be at Weston Park and sell their wares or performance pieces have been suggested. So we're going to really start on that one next week.

Is that right, Rosalia, next week? Next Monday?

Yeah, next Monday. So I'm really looking forward. I got high hopes for these kids, and I hope you are here when we have them here, because they're a smart bunch of kids. I'm very proud of them. Jackie, it's all you.

Okay, like Connie, I went to a lot of events, but I choose to stick to my council's staff and committee reports. As business outreach, there were several new businesses that opened since we last met. There were a couple of new barbershops. And I love that there's two young couples that opened these barbershops. And I just really hope they have a lot of success. And a lot of you know that the new Korean barbecue place opened this last week. So we wish them well, too. and there might be one or two I'm missing, but I know that those were like three prominent ribbon cuttings that we had. The Hemet Stock Farm, we're still in talks with developers on this. We're going back and forth, so we haven't reached an agreement yet, but we hope to. The Homeless Outreach, unfortunately, it got stalled earlier this year for an arroyo toad study. This Toad study is completed and CityNet is awaiting county approval of the study. CityNet is actually the people that bought the property where our navigation center is supposed to go. So we are anxiously awaiting progress on that. There's no official groundbreaking date as of yet. And this information came out on an August 18th meeting that was with the county and other agencies that several of us attended on Zoom. The Veterans Ad Hoc this evening we approved on the consent calendar. We're going to add two members to our Memorial at Gibble Field for our Veterans Day celebration this year. So Mayor Pro Tem and I on the ad hoc for that approved those two, and the council approved them by consent tonight. And Ramona Bowl, big event coming up. September 19th and 20, the first-ever Southern California Paletta Festival. It's a two-day culinary, cultural, and entertainment celebration for the whole family. So it's like an ice cream and other delectables. There's going to be live music, a lot of good stuff going on for two days. Tickets vary in prices depending on what you want because the extra concerts in the afternoon and evening are more. But the tickets start at $17.27. This is a big deal for our city because it's a big deal for Southern California. So we want everybody to come out and support that. You can check the website for... that concert and event. And there's other concerts that are upcoming that you can check. Ramona Market is coming up, and we're already advertising Boo at the Bowl. So come support the Ramona Bowl and the City of Hemet sphere of influence. That's all I have. My turn.

Hello, my name is Joe Mills. I'm city council of District 4. You're Mayor Potem.

Anyways, a couple things.

Did anybody bring up the interviews for the city manager? No. Nobody did. Okay, we had two days of interviews for a city manager. I still believe that we should wait. in hiring a city manager. We have an interim city manager here that says he'll take the job as long as he has to be there. He's good with it. It'll save us money in the long term if we wait. There, that's it. And then also, I had the pleasure of participating in the RTA meeting, and I really enjoyed it. I went prepared, I did a lot of research on it, and one of the topics was the alignment, the realignment for 79. They were going to bring it from Newport Road to Simpson Road, and the design should be completed in 2028, and the beginning of construction should be in 2029. The only problem I've seen with it was that they – WEREN'T GOING TO DO ANYTHING WITH SIMPSON ROAD. THEY WERE GOING TO LEAVE IT AS IS, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE IT LABELED AS LOSD. NOW, STREETS ARE LABELED WITH RTA FROM A TO E. SO A BEING NOT CONGESTED, NO TRAFFIC ON THE ROAD, BARELY A CAR HERE AND THERE. B IS A LITTLE HEAVIER. C IS A LOT HEAVIER. IS A LOT OF TRAFFIC. SO I ASKED THEM, WELL, WHY AREN'T YOU GOING TO DO ANYTHING WITH SIMPSON ROAD, MAYBE, YOU KNOW, PUT TWO HIGHWAYS ON EACH SIDE OR TWO ROADWAYS ON EACH SIDE? AND THEY THOUGHT THAT THERE WASN'T THAT MUCH TRAFFIC ON IT. BUT I SAID, WELL, THAT REALIGNMENT ENDING ON SIMPSON WE'RE GOING TO GET A LOT OF TRAFFIC THERE. YOU BETTER RECALCULATE WHAT YOU NEED TO DO WITH SIMPSON ROAD. SO THEY TOOK IT, AND WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS WITH IT. BUT THE REALIGNMENT THOUGH SHOULD BE STARTING IN 2028, OR ACTUALLY THE DESIGN FINISHED IN 2028, AND THEN THE START OF THE REALIGNMENT FROM NEWPORT TO SIMPSON IN 2029. Also, today's interviews, we did a couple ribbon cuttings for the new businesses. I'm also in the business outreach. We had Apostle Barber, yeah, Apostle Barber, a bar, hair cutting place, and then K-Town Barbecue. And then I also attended the kids' fishing dinner, which was really a nice dinner. I don't think I got to eat, though, because I had to go and pick up my wife at the airport. What else? Interviews, a couple of ribbon cutting. I guess that's it. I left my paper at home and didn't bring it, so I had to write everything.

Okay. Going through this. RCTC, which is Riverside County Transportation Commission meets tomorrow. And two of the things on the agenda have to do with this valley. And one of them is the official renaming of the SR 79 realignment. And unfortunately, My choice didn't win, but it came in a good second. So, officially, if the commission passes it tomorrow, the new realignment will be called the San Jacinto Valley Expressway. I wanted Mastodon Valley Expressway because they were here before us, but that's okay. RTA, Riverside Transit, we had a ribbon cutting for their first hydrogen cell bus. and the hydrogen cell refueling station that are at the Riverside office. And that's about it on that. But I did want to announce, oh, we did do a business walk, and I think the last one was at the mall, which was very, very informative. And it was just good to go through the mall and hear the needs and the good stories about some of the businesses out there. And since one of you brought up Christmas parade, the theme for this year's Christmas parade was decided today, and it is going to be O Christmas Tree. Oh, Christmas tree. So get ready for do that to get ready for that one. And that's all I have. So city manager, you should have some announcements to make. We didn't step on your toes tonight.

I certainly do. Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple items. First, I'm pleased to announce that Ryan Derrick will join the city of Hemet as our new fire chief beginning Monday, September 14th. Chief Derrick brings nearly two decades of fire service experience and most recently served as fire chief for the city of Montclair. We are very excited to welcome him to Hemet and look forward to introducing him to our community. The next item I have is the city is putting on two concerts at Mary Henley Park this month. The first one is this Friday, September 11th, featuring Queen of Hearts and the Honky Tonk Highway. This is a country band. So the second one will then be on Friday, September 25th, and that one features Hit City Party Band. Both of these concerts are from 6 to 9 p.m., and those events, as well as many, many others, can be found on Hemet365.com. And that concludes my report.

Thank you.

Okie doke. And future agenda items, we have the draft AI policy and many, many, many other things coming up on September 22nd. So there being no further business, this meeting is adjourned for the next city council meeting on September 22, 2026. Thank you for joining us today. We are adjourned.