City Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome everyone, the time is four o'clock and we'll call this meeting to order. Madam City Clerk.

Thank you very much. And I believe we have one of our members, Ms. McDonald, participating remotely. Do we need to make any kind of announcement pertaining to that?

Wonderful. Welcome remotely, Ms. McDonald. Glad to have you here. We will move on then. We have a very succinct agenda this evening. We'll go right to the fun part here, our proclamations. We have two of them this evening. Proclamation 7.1 pertaining to National Transit Month. And I will hand it over to Ms. Fleming.

Thank you. Whereas public transportation plays a vital role in connecting communities, supporting economic vitality, and enhancing quality of life, and whereas Santa Rosa City Bus and Santa Rosa Paratransit provide safe, reliable, and accessible climate-friendly transportation that which connects residents to essential destinations, including employment, education, healthcare, and recreation, whereas Santa Rosa City Bus and Santa Rosa Paratransit provide essential transportation services, supporting mobility throughout the community, including 1.5 million passenger trips annually and more than

And it's great. We have so many members of our transit team out tonight. And you've got a number of dedicated bus riders up here on the dais, including, I believe, Ms. Banuelos. Did the bus not get you here this evening?

It was wonderful and very efficient. And I really appreciate the work that you all do. I had to take the bus. I can't drive right now. So you're there when people need you and also for everyone else that needs you on a daily basis. So thank you.

Thank you, indeed. All right, we're gonna do a photo eventually, but is it, but Jamie Smetis or Rachel Eade, which of you, Rachel, are you gonna accept the proclamation? By all means, say a few words.

Thank you very much, Director Eade. And Luis, did you want to say a few words? out tonight all right let's go to public comment first and then we'll do it then we'll do a photo are there any members of the public that would like to celebrate our public transit in Santa Rosa oh please sir the floor is yours can you hear me we can we can hear you speak close to the mic the mic doesn't pick things up very well

Thank you so much. Are there any other members of the public who'd like to say a few words? Mr. Alvarez.

You know, I just asked for the floor, but yet I don't know where to start. It's amazing to me the amount of level, or actually the level of service that is provided to the community, even in a downed economy. I represent District 1, and to my knowledge, it's the most heaviest use of the ridership, and it also has the most amount of buses traveling up and down Sebastopol Road, whether it's 2 or 2B. And so it's to be a great thing that is happening, right? And for those of you who've never ridden the bus before, the amount of technology that's been implemented into the system is jaw dropping. Fr

Thank you, Mr. Alvarez. And I should have asked earlier, do we have anyone online making public comment? I'll ask our Madam Zoom host whether anybody online is either clicking star nine or raising their hand.

Thank you very much. And thank you, Stephen, for those kind comments, as well as highlighting that Santa Rosa is ahead of Rohnert Park in terms of our connections. With that, we're going to close public comment and we'll ask anybody who's affiliated with the transit teams to come down front. Let's do it. Let's do a photo. Thank you again to everyone who's making public transit work in Santa Rosa. Thank you for coming out today. We'll move on to our second proclamation, item 7.2, our proclamation for Creek Week 2026. All right, another big one. And let's see, we're going to Miss Rogers, of cour

Thank you, Mayor. Whereas throughout much of California, cities, counties, and stewardship organizations recognize Creek Week as an annual celebration of our creeks, watersheds, and the ocean, and whereas the 238 creeks and approximately 360,000 residents of the Russian River watershed are connected and mutually support each other, making the Russian River and its tributaries important resources to the people of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, And whereas pollution in the form of trash and debris, chemicals, nutrients, and sediment degrade the quality of life and the quality of resources within

All right, we can't celebrate our water team often enough. So thank you for coming out tonight. And Michael, are you gonna be accepting the proclamation? Please say a few words.

Michael, thank you for all that news, all those great events. We'll open it up to the public. Are there any members of the public that would like to make a comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Oh, and we won't yet, because we have to go online. Madam online Zoom host, is there anybody online wishing to make public comment?

Thank you very much. All right, we'll close public comment, and we'll ask anybody who's here from the Santa Rosa Water Team to come on up. Let's take a photo. Thanks again to our Santa Rosa Water Team. We'll move on to item 8.1, our Community Empowerment Plan update. When Ana Huerta isn't being called upon for her photographer skills, she's also running our community engagement for the City of Santa Rosa. Ana, thank you for all that you do. Tell us what's new with community engagement.

An impressive lineup as always. Anna, have we done Pumpkins in the Park annually? Or are we building up the Leprechaun and Pot of Gold team?

All right. It slipped my attention in past years. That's exciting. All right. Questions from council? No questions from council. Any questions from members of the public? Any public comment in chambers? Seeing none, we'll go online. Is anyone online wishing to make public comment on this item?

All right, thank you very much. We'll close public comment and I'll just say thank you. That's a lot of work on behalf of the city. All right, we'll move on to item nine, our city manager and city attorney's reports. City Manager Nutt, any items to report this evening?

Thank you, City Manager Nutt. City Attorney Crocker?

All right, thank you both. We'll go to public comment. Would any members of the public in council chambers wish to comment on either of those reports? If you wish to comment on either report, make your way to the podium. We'll take your comments there. And if there are others who wish to comment, if you could begin making your way to the podium now just to be efficient. All right, the floor is yours.

So Cynthia, we can't get into a back and forth in a public comment session, but at Thursday's meeting, we're gonna have lots of information about how the system works and be ready to answer any questions there.

So I will defer to our city manager if he wants to address that.

Thank you. All right, at the other podium, please go ahead.

Thank you for coming out tonight. And again, on the 17th, on Thursday, we're going to have a lot of our city staff and much more information presented. So thank you for making comment tonight. Do any other members of the public wish to speak who are in council chambers? Seeing none, I'll go to our Zoom host. Is there anybody online who has raised their hands or dialed star nine?

Thank you. All right, we'll close public comment on this item, and we'll go on to item 10, our statements of abstention or recusal by council members. Do we have any statements of abstention or recusal this evening? Seeing none, we will go on to, let's see, our approval of minutes. We have two sets of minutes. Item 12.1, our August 18th, 2026 special meeting minutes, and then items 12.2, our August 18th, 2026 regular meeting minutes. Are there any amendments to the minutes or edits? Seeing none, we'll go to public comment. Do any members of the public in council chambers wish to make comment o

No one's raising their hand. Wonderful. We'll close public comment, and we can adopt the minutes as submitted. Which brings us to, oh, whoops, I skipped over one. We have to do our mayor and council member reports. Oh, sorry, did you have a comment? Oh yes, no, as I just mentioned, I skipped over our mayor and council members' reports. I went right to the approval of minutes. Let's go back to item 11, my apologies. And again, we've got 25 minutes, folks. This is our time to shine. So Ms. Rogers, why don't you kick us off and just take as long as you'd like.

I would love to, Mayor. So I have a few things to report. One, SCTCA met yesterday awarding a number of funding cycle two grant awards to a city road bicycle pedestrian and transit projects totaling $25 million. These include five projects that council had approved for staff submittal last year, including improvements to Stony Point Road, the Joe Redota Trail, Cleveland Avenue, a shared use path on Farmer's Lane Extension right of way, and further study for improvements on Petaluma Hill Road and Santa Rosa Avenue. So we are very happy about that. And yesterday I had the opportunity to go on a

Thanks for signing a spotlight on our staff. I hope that there are a number of unexpected twists and turns in that story. We hope everyone's okay. So thank you for presenting that. Let's go to Mr. Alvarez. Can you speak for longer than that?

I'm almost done. Now, I want to report that I visited RUP High School in District 1, and the purpose was really for me to find out how the integration of the RUP and the RCP students is going. Not too long ago, RCP was closed. Their campus is located in Larkspur, near Cardinal Newman. And the reality is that the children of RUP have been ever so welcoming. to the students of rcp and this coming from rcp students there's been no type of physical altercations of any type. And in fact, when I was visiting the classrooms and I asked them to raise their hands, whether they were RUP or RCP, the clas

Thank you for that. I'm gonna look to our online colleague, Ms. McDonald. Did you wish to make a report this evening? It's hard to see when you have your hand raised. All right, Ms. McDonald, join the fun.

Hi, thank you. And I appreciate the opportunity. I just wanted to thank my representative on the Parks and Recreation Board, Keating Vogel, for coming to the Park Month event with me, not this month, but the month before. And her eagerness to share with me that the pickleball courts she had heard were opening in Howard Park. And so I recently drove by there and saw that in fact, everyone was playing on the pickleball courts in Howard Park and just thank the staff and our contractor for getting those open earlier than anticipated. I know this has been a long time coming uh over in district thre

Thank you, Mayor. I just had a really quick announcement. Just thought I should announce it. Tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock, the Violence Prevention Policy Team is going to be meeting over at Steel Lane Community Center, and that's for our community partners, but also for the public. We don't normally meet there. We normally meet over at Findlay, but we're having a joint meeting with the Operation Team, so it's going to go a little longer than usual. But I just wanted to let the public know, because we don't get much public involvement or feedback, and I would love to see you all come out if yo

So, thank you. Thank you for that. And Ms. Fleming, did you have anything? Nothing from Ms. Fleming? All right, I can use up a little bit of time. So in no particular order here, I wanted to celebrate the fact that the City of Santa Rosa was helpful statewide in getting a correction to a law that affected how goat herders were paid. Many of you have noticed that we have goat herds and sheep herds in the city that do vegetation management in our parks and their open spaces. There was a loophole in the state law that was threatening the viability of that. Some of the wage issues with respect to

I don't have 10 minutes though. I guess I can talk.

Okay. So I did forget to say that on the second, District 1 and District 7 had our community meeting. It was very well organized. I do wanna thank Ana Horta for her time and commitment to make sure that we have these community meetings and also thank all the staff that were present because you could have been home um eating dinner or doing something fabulous but you were not you were there with us eating popcorn nuts and having water so thank you so much for for your time for your commitment to to santa rosa and i wish you the best for the one that you guys have um coming up which is yours Yes

We'll take all we can get. Thank you, Ms. Rogers. Anything from any of the rest of my colleagues? All right, let's throw it open to public comment. Mr. Hilber, are you wishing to make comment on this item? Yes, briefly, yes. Please, don't be brief, Mr. Hilber. Take your full two minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Hilber. And what I will say is the city is well aware of that particular area, and it's been a topic of much discussion over the last few months. So thank you for highlighting it. Are there any other members of the public in council chambers who wish to make comment? Seeing none, we'll go online. Madam Zoom host, has anyone pressed star nine or raised their hand?

Thank you very much. All right, we'll close public comment on that item. And we will very slowly go to item 13, having done the minutes out of order. We will go through consent. Madam City Clerk, do we want to go old school and read all the titles for items 13.1 through 13.10? Is that something that we have an interest in?

Then I will simply note that we have items 13.1 through 13.10. Does anybody wanna ask any questions about any of these items, looking at my colleagues? Now would be the time to do it. Okay, well then let's go to public comment. Mr. Hilber, back to you.

Thank you, Mr. Hilber. Are there any other members of the public in Council Chambers who wish to comment? Seeing none, we will go online then. Madam Zoom host, anybody online? Has anybody raised their hand or pressed star nine?

All right. Well, seeing that it is four minutes before five o'clock, what we're gonna do is we're gonna recess for exactly four minutes and start again on the dotted five. Thank you, everyone.

Oh, I was already jumping ahead. Yes, I forgot the most important part. Yes, I would like a motion. Mr. Alvarez, is there a motion?

Indeed there is, Mayor, and I will see if I can take four minutes to present this motion. Please, please. No, no. I'd like to make a motion to adopt the 13.1 through 13.10 and wait for the reading of the text.

All right, we have a motion, and we have a second by Ms. Rogers. I guess we can go ahead and call the vote.

Thank you very much. All right, I guess we are gonna recess for two minutes and come back in two minutes. Thank you for your patience, everyone. All right, welcome back, everyone. The time is now precisely five o'clock, so we'll get ourselves going. Thanks to everyone for their patience. Madam City Clerk, let's reconvene. Would you please call the roll?

All right, thank you very much. And again, we couldn't start our public comment on non-agenda matters before five o'clock. That's why we had that short break. But now here we are. We are having one public comment on non-agenda matters tonight because we have nothing else on the agenda. So this is the public's only chance to comment this evening. If you wish to make public comment on any item not listed on the agenda, please make your way to the podium. And if you could be waiting, use both podiums and be waiting as the speaker in front of you concludes. Let's keep this efficient as we go back

All right, we're gonna go Matthew, Jenny, and then Cynthia. Matthew, Jenny, and Cynthia. Is Matthew here? Jenny? Cynthia? Cynthia, you have the floor, thank you.

Cynthia, thank you very much. Jenny, Dana, and Ronnie. Is Jenny here? Dana? Ronnie? There we go, and if you have put your card in and wish to speak, if you could be waiting by the podium. All right, welcome, the floor is yours.

Ronnie, thank you very much. Jason, June, and Bruce. Is it Jason? Yep. Perfect. Jason, you're up. Thanks for coming out tonight.

no permanent file no tracking everybody every road and every mile no trust us when the infrastructure is built because rights don't require proof that you ain't got the guilt the young yay coming out if we if we gave out awards for public comment that would have to be in the running very very very memorable all right thank you thank you for coming out tonight thank you for that we're gonna move on to june bruce and stephanie do we have june here june you're up thank you for coming out is this went on okay If you can lean closer to the mic, it doesn't pick up very well.

June, thank you very much. All right, we got, and if we could, let's hold our applause till the end. You can do jazz fingers. We wanna keep the noise under control here. All right, so we got Bruce and Stephanie. Is it Bruce?

Thank you, Stephanie. I'll ask again, are Jenny or Dana here? Is anyone else in, or does anyone else in Council Chambers wish to make public comment? Seeing none, we'll go online. Madam Zoom host, do we have anybody online who has raised their hands or dialed star nine?

All right. Sir, are you looking to make, are you wishing to make public comment? All right. All right. Make your way to a podium.

Seeing none, we'll close public comment. And that was our only public comment on agenda items this evening. We'll note that item 17, under item 17, we have two different items. We have a couple of legislative updates and then a notice of a final map for Meadowwood Ranch. And beyond that, we are adjourned. Thank you, everyone.