Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

All right, good morning everyone and welcome to the Tuesday, September 8th, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting. We're happy to have you all here with us today. We are going to start our meeting with a flag salute led by Placer County's own District Attorney Morgan Geyer.

Thank you, Mr. Geyer. We will now move to our consent agenda. Is there anything that any board members would like to pull from consent? And is there anyone here in the chambers who has anything they'd like to pull off of consent? And anyone online? No, Chair. All right. I'll bring it back to the board.

I'll move approval of the consent agenda. I'll second.

Moved by Gore, seconded by Jones. This is a roll call vote.

Yes. We will now move to public comment. This is now the time for you to comment on any items that are not on our agenda for today. I would just remind folks at the three minute mark, there will be a timer and then you'll have 15 seconds to wrap up your comments before the mics are turned off. Is there anyone here who'd like to make a public comment today? Please come forward.

Thank you very much. Anyone else here in the chambers?

Thank you. Anyone else here in the chambers? And is there anyone online?

All right, I'll close public comment and bring it back to the board for a board member and county executive reports.

Supervisor Gore. Good morning. I might have mentioned this previously, but I want to bring it up again because this Friday is September 11th, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And so I know there are a number of comments commemoration events taking place, but in Roseville, at the Roseville Town Square, we are going to have 3,000 flags that we're putting out so that the members of the public can come by, stop, reflect, walk through the town squares and just remember. So I want to encourage people, whether you come to Roseville or attend another event, take some time to remember and share it with ou

Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Jones? Yes.

Thank you. Just wanted to report a couple of things that me and my team did since the last board meeting. This past week, we did a trash tour. We toured the facility, the . Yeah, this last week. And I just wanted to tell people how amazing their new equipment is. It's amazing, if you ever have a chance, they do give tours there. But they have, all of this is fairly new anyway, a couple years old. But all of the belts, everything, the machinery sorts everything. They sort very little by hand anymore. And the way that the equipment is designed, it really does cut down on the smell. It was amazin

um very interested and have all become firewise communities because of their concerns for the for fulton lake anyway thank you thanks supervisor augustuson uh thank you i wanted to also announce an event in auburn uh for this friday um honoring the 25th anniversary of 9 11. it'll be held 8 30 at our placer county fire station on atwood 8.30 to probably just after 9, and we will have a piece of the World Trade Center beam at that event. So hopefully the public, if you're interested, could come to that event. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to thank the gentleman from DPW who had to, while the rest of us had yesterday off, was out at Sierra College. 12 bridges repairing the stop sign because apparently somebody can't read and drove right through it so again just my continuous support to put something like an overpass there so thanks that's all i want to do is thank him for because i saw him at like 4 30 yesterday afternoon fixing it i'm like what happened he's like somebody ran it over and i'm like shocker okay anyways that was it supervisor jones oh i'm sorry okay mr chadney

Thank you. Okay, with that, Twyla, it's your lucky day. We are gonna move to our department item, item 5A, agreement with Wayfinder Family Services.

Great, thank you. Any questions or comments? Supervisor Gore.

Thank you, Twilight. This is actually a question more in regards to families that aren't, have issues with Child Protective Services, like families that do kinship care just because a parent died or is out of the picture. What local services do we have for grandparents who are raising their grandkids that are not part of the system?

Thank you. Great question. Is there anyone here who would like to comment on this item? And is there anyone online? All right. I'll bring it back to the board.

Move by Jones, seconded by Gore. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you.

We have about two minutes until our 9.30 timed item, so just make yourselves at home. Talk to your neighbor. Meet someone you don't know yet. I'll just stand up for a second, I guess. All right. It is 930. We can now move to our 930 timed item recognition of the district attorney's office for an award.

Do you mind just putting the mic down? Just a teen's question. Thank you.

Do you want to say a few words first? Sure.

Thanks, Lisa. Yeah. I don't know. Let them maybe.

and before you all leave just want to say thank you so much for the work that you do i know that we've all stated how much we just love and support your work and um it's so important and lisa i think especially for you as you kind of mentioned the prosecutor side of things i it's so rare to find a prosecutor who has that heart and compassion and also is going out and doing something big like this and i'm sure a lot of that has to do just with time because i know that the prosecutors have that heart and compassion but being able to translate that into something that the community can actually u

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Well, we have a problem that we don't very often have, and that is that our next item is at 10 o'clock, and we have to wait until 10 o'clock to hear it. So we will go ahead and just take a brief recess and come back at 10 o'clock for our 10 o'clock timed item. are we good to go now all right it is now 10 o'clock and we can move to our 10 a.m. timed item 2526 older adult advisory commission annual reports with Colby Good morning.

Great. Thank you so much. Any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor Jones?

Yes, I'd like to comment. Thank you for that and thank you for the invitation for another year and I will be there, of course. It's always exciting to see. I remember the first year you did it, you didn't quite hit your goal and then last year you had so many stuffed animals. I think you were trying to find offices to stuff them and hide them in because people were taking home bags and pillowcases and stuff and they still had so many left over so you're going to bring them out i don't know if you gave them all away or not you eventually oh good good okay well i'm hoping you hit your goal again

Oh, OK. Great. Yeah. If we could get that in or maybe that's in the info you gave us. I got this one. But if we can if there is info that we can give out like in our newsletters of different locations, that would be fabulous. OK, perfect. Is there anyone here in the public who would like to comment on this item? And yes.

All right. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for the work that you do and for serving our community in this way. It's really hard to find folks who are willing to give up their personal time for the community, especially nowadays. And so just really appreciate your long tenure on the commission and thankful for the work that you guys do because it's so important. And so with that, I don't see any additional questions and there's no, oh, it is an action item. Second. Moved by John, seconded by Gustafson. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming.

All right, we have about 30 seconds, so very slowly Mr. Morehead can walk up for our 1010 timed item sunset traffic fee district and capital improvement program update. Oh, I guess it's like 20 more seconds. Sorry.

I feel like we should have a countdown or something. OK, you're good.

All right. Thank you. Any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor Gore.

Can I just clarify, Rich? Thank you very much. So the plan was done in 2019 and the fee, it's been eight years since we've updated it, correct? I mean, we probably did the CIP.

right so this is the first real complete update for all the roadways out there based on the traffic impacts and what we anticipate yes that is true all right thank you okay i will open up the public hearing is there anyone here who would like to comment on this item okay anyone online no chair okay i'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the board I will move approval of the item.

I'll second move by Gore, seconded by D. Matei. All those in favor. I. Any opposed and no abstentions. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. Once again, we have about five minutes until our next item, so we will just take a break until 1020 and we'll be back at 1020. We are back for our 1020 timed item and Crystal is ready to go.

Does the deposit mean it's part of the overall cost, or is it just, to me, a deposit, you get it back? So can you clarify?

If I could follow up on that, Madam Chair.

Sure. Thanks. Oh, I'm sorry. So the minimum $4,000. Oh, I'm going the wrong way. I'm sorry.

I was just giving you a sneak peek there. Okay, there we go. So you said that the deposit is based on the value of the project, but this says minimum of $4,000 for an improvement plan review.

I just wanted to be clear, because the town of Truckee I'm more familiar with, and there's a percentage of value that they typically look at, but I

OK. Thank you. Questions, comments? Supervisor DeMattei?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, guys. On slide number 8, it was the payroll slide. You only used 20. If you can go back to that, please.

It looks like you only used 20% or 25% for our overhead and administration costs. I think that it should be closer to 40%. So would that affect other things? Because it's pretty expensive.

Okay. It just seems cheap. I wish I could do that.

Any other questions right now, Supervisor Gustafson?

Yeah, I had a couple. Thank you very much. And great amount of work, I know, goes into studies like this. And just from my limited professional experience in them, it's very complex. So thank you for all the effort, because I think it's important. A couple questions I have on the general plan maintenance fee. That one is maybe I need to understand a bit better why just new building permits versus all taxpayers. I mean, there should be a general fund commitment to that in my mind. But that's a point for a policy discussion of the board. And I know it's relatively small, but all of these add up.

Trustee Laura Smith‑ Yeah, why don't you go ahead and answer those first.

Yeah, I think that's a policy discussion for the board. Yeah, thank you for explaining why.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that because I think a lot of homeowners are interested. And we obviously want to encourage that. And it would be great to call that out if we move forward with these to make sure homeowners are aware. because often it's the existing homeowners who aren't trying to get a project through and don't have an applicant, don't have consultants that are going, I needed a permit. In fact, my own staff, I'm not going to point out names, didn't know about hot water heaters needing a permit. And so we're sending out inspectors this afternoon, I think. Because often homeowners don

It's often higher. I think the question was that I asked specifically was town of Truckee is doing 5%. Is that right? Is that how I read that? That project's less than $50,000, they would do a 5% deposit fee?

OK. Thank you. Can I clarify on that, Cindy? These fees are billable hourly, correct? Other ones are flat fees. But this one, because there's so much work, those are billable. Is that correct? I just want to clarify.

And then I think because I had the same question that I sent on the multiple reviews and if it's something on our end, so maybe you can speak to whether someone gets charged if it's a mistake that we missed or something on a third submittal.

So if an applicant says, well, hold on, why am I getting charged for that? Because it was on your end, then that gives discretion to the planning director to determine that. Correct. Yep.

Thanks. Supervisor Gore? I think on that note, and I appreciate that, I think we should make that sort of like a regular practice. Like, if we mess up, we own it. I mean, we're all going to mess up, we're all going to make mistakes, and that's okay. But when people are working on projects, spending a lot of money, um and then it takes longer because we made a mistake all happens let's own it i think that's just good business practice right let's own our mistakes we made a mistake we're not going to charge you extra fee and we're going to move forward so i i just i think that that's needs to be

that's helpful thank you and I think the monitoring will be helpful right to see actually what you anticipated based on all of these studies plays out and that what changes do we make as a result so I appreciate that very much thank you one question on slide number 24, which is the targeted fee offsets for economic development and the small-scale projects. I like that. I think that's important, especially as you're trying to get small businesses and help them be successful. Do we have comparisons from other jurisdictions as far as what they charge for like a restaurant tenant improvement? or a

Um, I might look at Gabe for that, for like a small scale commercial.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Supervisor Gustafson?

Thank you. I forgot a couple other points. We did receive some public comment on appeals. Two of those were on the cost of appealing to the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission. I want to make sure. Those fees just cover CDRA's time, not county council, not board of supervisors, not all the county clerk, all those other fees. Because I think for the public, those are huge increases. But I can assure the public that most of those appeals, when they come here, take countless hours of additional time that isn't reflected in those costs. Am I correct?

Okay. Thank you. Because just looking at the most recent ones we've had, we've also gone back to MAC meetings. Correct. We've had IT staff alone with fees that are this much to hold a joint MAC meeting in one situation. Those are being billed to the applicant, those costs. On that one, if I'm speaking of palisades and the appeal process.

So those are added on and above this. Correct. Okay.

And then the final appeal that was- Cindy, before you jump onto that, so Chris, what's the current cost of an appeal to the Planning Commission or an appeal to the board?

So it's about double the cost or the fee is about double.

And that was the question that came up from the public, but that was just the administrative fee portion. The costs are much more, yeah.

Thank you. And then the STR appeal was also questioned and I think the commenter thought it was an appeal from the general public about this. This is really somebody who's trying to get out of paying their citation. That's correct. That's that appeal process. I just want to make sure. Then finally, one of the writers, I think we've had four or five letters this morning, asked about PRAs. I don't know if Clayton, if you want to address that, but I think a PRA is entirely separate and not included in this.

At all. And they could still be requesting on a project, a PRA on a project that's underway, but they wouldn't be charged for that.

Absolutely. And I think that's true for the sheriff, for the DA. I mean, there's, you know, every department, every office, board of supervisors, those PRAs are very time consuming. But we cannot charge for those beyond the

Well, I think the questions were good and I just wanted to make sure we clarified them on the public record. Thank you.

All right. I think at this point most of my questions have been answered. So thanks to everyone else for asking the questions. I think I still had a couple that I had sent to you guys ahead of time. Along the lines of the monitoring, one thing I would love to see is after this first year if staff could come back and just give us an update on the permit volumes, the turnaround times. maybe any progress that you have made toward streamlining things if by a year from now there are some ai implementations that we've put in place just kind of updating us on those things i would love to see that bef

Got it. Okay. Thanks. And then on the pre-development fee and I just wanted to check on the credit option to get it back. Do they is the option that they would receive back that whole fee as a credit toward whatever their application fee is?

Got it. Thank you. I really appreciate that change, especially knowing some folks who have wanted to do something on their properties and some type of events and have been discouraged from coming to the county because of the cost of that pre-development meeting and just decided they'd ask for forgiveness later.

So appreciate that. And then to Supervisor Gustafson's comments on the general plan maintenance fee, I'm I definitely would like to have that discussion with the board after we have public comment and just to kind of determine how we do want to move forward with that, just as we have the conversations around the burdens on affordable housing and what that is going to mean for them. So, Supervisor DeMattei.

oh no thank you chair um just one other thing we talked about over cost and when i was at bigford to go take a tour i just happened to get there and there was a solar company that had drove up from vallejo to wait for an inspector their time frame was eight to ten it was three minutes after ten when i got there they had been calling and when i was there i heard the phone call and he just got a recording So, it's costing some of our people to kind of do business here because the inspector showed up sick, right? He didn't show up, he was sick. And there was no way that nobody got back to him, to

Well, credit to Blake for getting out there in time. I mean, they had 18 minutes still on the clock. But I don't think anybody was going to show up if he was sick. But the fact that they were calling and I heard that he was on. speakerphone and, you know, welcome to Placer County. And I'm like, wait, who are you trying to get ahold of? Because I've been, so that was the story. So.

Yeah, no, the two-hour window is fine. I mean, I've had to wait for inspections. It's no big deal. And sometimes you're not ready in that window. But this time they just, somebody showed up sick, but nobody got out to the contractors saying, hey, our guys aren't showing up all day today. So...

we should if we're expecting them to pay i would expect us to give them some kind of credit for not showing up that's a good idea appreciate that thank you thank you for that uh just one sorry one more question before we go to public comment on that general plan maintenance fee um so on a typical let's just say there's like a large subdivision development they would have to pay 50 cents per thousand dollars evaluation per house right right now at the proposed as proposed for the building up to up to that 20 000 cap right okay and um So for like a $400,000 house, is that the 20,000? There would

So sorry, I must have added a couple of zeros on there or taken off a couple of zeros. I was like, that's insane.

OK. Thank you. OK. It looks like we're good with questions for now. So I will open up the public hearing. And is there anyone here in chambers who would like to speak to this item?

Thank you. Anyone else here in the chambers who'd like to speak to this item? Anyone online?

All right. I will go ahead and close the public hearing. And would you like to speak to some of the questions that came up?

That fee we're going to review later this year, correct? Yes, just to clarify.

I just was looking ‑‑ relooking at that schedule. For residential pools, what if it's larger? Is that a just max fee or if it ‑‑ say somebody puts in a thousand square foot pool, which is a pretty big size pool. Where it says residential pool.

thanks gabe all right and i just want um you shared at the beginning of the presentation you did a lot of community outreach on this or stakeholder outreach right so there Folks in the building industry are aware of this. You've been interacting with them, et cetera. And then for the homeowners that it affects, at the end of the day, we're basically charging them the cost of us to do the inspections, et cetera, correct? I just want to make sure, because somebody said, hey, we shouldn't be taking this now, but we've done a lot of outreach. We have. the folks that it really affects are very awar

Yeah, Gabe, you mentioned that there's a higher fee for a higher end house. Isn't it just based on square footage? Or because it's what is considered higher end than your neighbor's house? We'll just keep you at the mic. Thanks, Gabe.

So what is considered luxury? Is there a definition for that?

Supervisor Gustafson, did you want to speak on that or something else?

Not specifically on that, but I think in context in relative to one of the callers being concerned about, and I share this concern of our average property owner and what we can do. And I feel that what we, that staff have proposed fees that recognize that we are trying to take care of our local residents and the structures that you've proposed and make sure that others are paying their full cost. We can't charge more than the full cost of providing the service, but we certainly need to get these folks because otherwise right now we are funding that. The locals are helping fund some of these la

And do you, to that point, do you have an estimate of how much, just on an average development year, how much would you anticipate would come in because of that fee?

What was the cost of the current general plan that we're working on? It's taking us three plus years. How much does it cost, Chris?

Can you clarify, then, how often does the state mandate a general fund update? Because what, you know, Paul said, right, if I'm Sierra County, things are pretty much business as usual. You know, they add some businesses, they add some homes, they don't have huge development. Does everyone have to do one within a certain amount of time for the state?

Thank you. So can you clarify, Crystal, what other local jurisdictions, because you said there are other jurisdictions that have this type of fee. Can you share who else that you are aware of have them?

And right now the proposal is $0.50 per 1,000 square foot of building valuation on. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000 on building valuation.

So what about a home improvement project?

Okay. So I'm adding one of my patio cover to my house, right? I have to pull a permit for that. And so there would be based on that evaluation for the just for that cover, just not for the cover, just the work that would be a little bit of a fee. So it's not just I mean, it's everybody paying a small portion for the future planning of Placer County. That's what you're looking at.

And if we were to do that, those funds would sit in a specific account pot that we would just utilize only for updating housing element projects like this. I think that that's important because if you're going to have a fee for a specific project, projects, you need to set those dollars aside. You can't be using them for something else.

I mean, you're going to add on. You're probably going to demo something and put something back. So I'd imagine that we would not have a fee on a demolition permit.

Well, if somebody had an old house and wanted to tear it down and demo it, you have to get a demo permit. Right. So make sure there wasn't extra fees to get a demo permit to go rebuild the house.

You get a credit for taking down old stuff. Thanks, Gabe.

You know, and I think my issue isn't so much that we need the money. We obviously have... We are subsidizing general plans. The question is, who should that be billed to? And the people that are doing the work to improve our communities are paying many other mitigation fees and many other CFD fees and other things. It's really our older legacy development that probably, well, we know isn't paying fair share toward these efforts. And so I'm just trying to look at that equity. And the other fees, I... I can agree with. This is one that's an

just a reach for me and and that's just my view and if we can help save some money to new development and encourage people to do these projects to me we should yeah i think it's fair maybe this is one that we could kick to when we do a one-year update and if this were to come back at that time and we evaluated maybe at that time there are things that have happened that are streamlining that are saving us money somewhere that maybe we can reevaluate at that time. But I agree. I mean, it's a small amount. $250 for a $500,000 home is not very much. It's a lot better than $20,000 for a $400,000 ho

I guess I go back to why does that property pay it and their next door neighbor who's not doing it? I agree.

I think, you know, as a board, we've obviously discussed

how do we help relieve the burden on affordable housing and this is just another one of those death by a thousand cuts i guess of just another little thing that maybe we actually could so make some difference into that point right so we don't want to add more fees on new homes and even new businesses right that it gets expensive and it's challenging already doesn't make sense to look at just building permits right if i'm doing an addition onto my home or I'm making an improvement to my home, 10 bucks is not that much in comparison. It allows us to add up some dollars, but to your point, The fo

Well, I just look at it as general fund. That's what general fund is. That's true. It's everybody's collective discretionary funds for those. This was just a small area that I couldn't quite see how people doing what we want them to do should charge a fee to our general plan update where often but I like the approach of what let's wait a year on that one and see where we come back and we'll also then hopefully have a general plan we're getting close to adopting so we can see the benefit of it I don't know no and it's one of those things if we know we're going to do it then we start setting asi

I was only going to chime in on some of the callers. I think they were mistaken as far as the fees were concerned that we haven't had an update on this for, what was it, 20 years or longer?

Yeah, but we're woefully far behind by the numbers after the study's been done, and so We need to start thinking about the future. I mean, we've talked about planning for growth as it is. And as more people move here, we're going to need more houses. More houses are going to be developed as more houses are built and developed. And we need more staff to process all of those things. I mean, it ultimately falls back to the same thing. And so it's going to cost us more to take care of more. And so if we don't do it now, then we'll be even probably could

Maybe that's why we're the fastest growing, we have less fees. I would, I'm not gonna make a motion yet, but I would agree with Clayton that we would, to take this out just to postpone it, I think it would be easier, cleaner cut deal. I'm not in favor of having that. fee policy in there for the general plan i think that we have enough fees and we're pretty stable at plaster county we're very fortunate and probably better than any of those counties and cities that were mentioned so i'm not i think we have enough fees and there's enough money that we're making right now that we don't need to put

Quick question on just the protocol. So if it's continued and they bring it back the next time around, do they have to present everything like they did today? Or is it like, how does that work?

Okay. Well, so we have a motion on the table. Was that motion? No.

I will make a motion. Sorry, I thought you made a motion. No, I was making a suggestion.

I think the question is, are we in agreement to keep or get rid of the fee? I mean, that's really the question for all of us, the five of us right now. We need to decide where we're at on that.

I mean, it sounded like everyone was in agreement. I would be fine having it come back in a year. That would be when we have the update on what the status is.

Yeah, but then you'd have to refer to Clayton. Would you have to have another public hearing to remove an amendment? No, no.

I mean, I'm fine continuing and then directing staff to bring it back as part of the one-year update so we can reconsider it.

But it has to be brought back before the end of the year, end of this year.

No, I just mean just take away everything I just said. Oh, gotcha. I'm fine with what you said.

I'm fine with removing that fee and moving to move.

If everybody's in favor of it, I would make a motion to continue this item.

If we're just removing one item, wouldn't it just be pretty simple to bring it back?

So I'll make a move. We postpone this till September 22nd at 9 AM. With the strike. With the strike of the general plan maintenance fee.

All right. Moved by DeMattei, seconded by Gustafson. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you all. We really appreciate all the work that you have done. Sorry that you have to come back again. All right. With that, we are going to adjourn our meeting until our next regular meeting on September 22nd.