City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, we're going to go ahead and call this meeting to order. And it's a special meeting. I'm asked for roll call.

Here. And can we go ahead and ask for the video and playback schedule?

At a special meeting, citizens wishing to address the council for any matter on the agenda may do so at this time. The matter is discussed under provision of California government code. The city council is prohibited from discussing or taking immediate action on any item not on the agenda. To make public comment, submit a speaker card to city clerk, raise your hand in Zoom, that's the button in the corner, or press star nine to raise your hand, participating by telephone. Now y'all understand, please wait to be called upon uh by the city clerk when speaking listen i can't leave these horses ho

Yeah. This letter, courtesy notice of violation,

So there's a code citation and nothing explains what it is. How would the person who got the letter know what the problem was?

Okay, I just wanted to make sure that this is not the only thing they received.

I saw that in the slide as well. Hopefully that's not what a constituent would see even just on the front side. Because it doesn't even say really what that, I don't even think it says that this is a code section. It just has a series of four numbers.

Yeah, there's this little bitty line in the middle. It says...

So it's just missing the, you've got a car parked on your lawn. Correct. Correct. Whatever the, whatever the thing is. Yeah.

So it didn't have an example of what the more explanatory, the better. Correct.

So the chain link fence item or any of these that we have up there, is this sort of a standard thing we have, or do we flip that up for different arguments? Like, do the people who have chain link fences in their yard get that? And then four months later, they get a, if you want your neighborhood to be safer. And then three months after that, if you want your housing value to be higher, you know, is it like a multi-point sell or is it just sort of that thing hangs out when we do a mass mailing?

You can have all the reasons on all of them. Just highlight a different one on each one. Try to grab their attention. Keep tapping it. Whatever the normal sales strategy is for something.

Yeah. So David has a really good point because originally we heard of the program in, I think it was Tacoma, Washington. And it was a series of three letters. And the first letter said, Dear neighbor, we've seen this, this, and this, and we would like you to clean it up. And the second letter said, you know, a mother still goes by and nothing happens. And the second letter said, Dear neighbor, we sent you this letter, and we really are hoping you'll take some action. And the third letter says, dear neighbor, you ignored us, so we're going to do this, this, and this. So it's kind of a staged ap

There's a business I could mention that's close to my heart, sort of. They have landscape violations at least annually. Like every year they forget, oh, I got to mow the weeds, you know, or I don't have any landscaping out there and I don't water it. Maybe that's a problem. And for, I don't know, 15 years, this has been a problem, 10 years, like. If I mentioned the name, you'd immediately say, oh yeah, 40 times we've gone and talked to them. The amount of time we've spent talking to them about the same problem over nearly a generation is nuts. It should just be, guess what? You're on year 15,

It's just crazy. If you walk in the neighborhood, we all walk by some yard that is never kept. And even in the environment where there is an HOA, the HOA never seems to notice. So, you know, nobody, so X yard is never mowed.

Sometimes it's a choice. It's not a matter of I can't afford it or I can't do it or something else is in the way. It's just, yeah, that's a low priority for me. Well, it isn't to living in a suburb. It isn't. I think eventually on the sales part, it was enforcement on the left and sales on the right on the sales side. Eventually it's, you know, Diane's going to be hired to go out there and make the pitch and the sale for somebody. Right. Doesn't have to be internal. We might have an exterior partner. Yeah.

I'm glad this all comes with horseback riding. Keep going.

That's a lovely idea, but I don't think I've never seen any relationship between the HOA management company and the city.

I mean, even when there are, you know, management companies sitting up in Roseville and you've got a group of people walking around the neighborhood supposedly serving what's going on, they may send out a letter, but nothing ever happens, and that's the end of it.

I understand. I understand the list of coordinated investments, but how do you create these things when you have an area that is fully built out.

So it would have to be. OK, I can see West Loma.

You're being very creative. We appreciate that. Isn't the project that we have approved affordable at Mills Crossing?

It's sort of ironic. Because we're always talking about infill, but in reality, infill in a completely developed urban area is extremely difficult when you don't have space. And that's why everybody goes to greenfields.

Yeah, I mean, things like that always go to the to the property owners registered address, not to the site is addressed.

Are there cases where you could make it collectible in the current tax year?

Here's the fine you keep ignoring, and if you get a standard lien and they don't have to do it until they sell the property, they may not care. Never going to sell it. Right. Just hang out there with the mechanics lien or whatever that's called.

while ago when we were doing a serious battle with bad landlords particularly apartment owners who were just bad actors slumlords basically one of the strategies was you call their bank figure out where the mortgage is you call the bank tell the bank what's going on figure out who their insurance company is call them it's like you start lighting fires underneath the bad landlord in a variety of ways so they can't dodge it i mean is that still a common thing we do

How often do you think we exercise that tool?

We do letters as a step before the meeting?

That's just two or three times a year. Yeah. When you started that sentence, I thought you were going to say two or three times a month.

i think i'm okay with increasing the fees as suggested um the way we talked about that in committee i think the the temporary use permit and these public events uh temporary use permit is something particularly on the special events side i wouldn't want to really increase a fee for them but that's not what we're talking about with the previous item right that fee is not proposed for increase for temporary use permit

Right. There is, I have some personal experience with this. When people try to sort out in Rancho Cordova how to get a temporary use permit for a special event, they immediately run into challenges. On our website, the forms they're presented with, how they talk to people at the counter, it's very confusing. To them, because it's the same thing as, I don't know, Garrett wants to put up file cabinets behind his office, you know, and store 25 years of paperwork out in the back parking lot. Or someone wants to have a drone show on Tuesday. It's like, these are really different things. One's going

So personally, I would like to add item four, that if the business, the violating business has a use permit, that the use permit be pulled.

Do they endanger their underlying use permit if they do an illegal use?

And I think we all know what I'm talking about. I just think something's got to happen to shut them down. And that's just, and so far, We haven't done anything significant. We've wasted a lot of police time. We've wasted a lot of neighborhood angst. And they continue to do it. Now, I know we had this same sort of issue to a different degree, not the kind of widespread impact that this current problem is having, but over in Lincoln Village. And ultimately that one sort of went away. But these guys are not going away.

Well, that's what cities have police powers for. I mean, this is perennial. This is not a one-off thing. And you can't stop it because of social media. So something has to be done.

council meeting and propose the amendments to the ordinance at a later date but we're happy to to answer any questions and discuss further so just a couple of background questions um originally when we incorporated you know our big issue was the the disintegrated um condition of many of the original apartments And there was an awful lot of work done between economic development and code enforcement to, you know, either make sure that those owners, especially the out-of-town owners, either cleaned up or, in some cases, we'll find you a new owner. You know, those kinds of things. So is there any

So applying that to the potentially dangerous animals, do you find them... in all situations or is it mostly on the street or?

All right, let's go ahead and see is. I've got some discussion stuff. You want to hear from public first? You can do that. Let's go ahead and hear from public comment, please.

Yeah, I think this is an issue that is really core to the existence of Rancho Cordova. It's probably why we became a city, is to clean things up and sort of save the community from what might happen otherwise. If people weren't paying attention to the details and sweating the small things that make life unpleasant for some or make us feel dangerous or unattractive to others. So... I think up front, when we took this on, we recognized that we can't fix the macroeconomics. We can't fix broken families. There are certain things cities can do, but there are things we can do. We can do things like

And I don't know, I hear from the team kind of what some different options are.

You said finding efficiencies and do innovation, automation, et cetera. So I really appreciate that. I assume that's, we're always doing that. That should be in our DNA. Yeah. That should be just a normal reflex. And then measuring how effective officers are, how many cases are we doing, what's bogging us down, what's the bottleneck, all that kind of analysis. I assume that's always done. But I think we can talk about and have to talk about resources at some point with this. Another level of campaign I would suggest, this is one I had a dream of for about 25 years now, I think, is a mow your l

So David has some really good ideas. I like the beautification ideas. The other thing that the city is doing that I have noticed, and I think it's kind of in the gardens area, there are solar-powered streetlights being installed at intersections. And I have to say that for those of us who live in a neighborhood where streetlights are common, and they were not common in the majority of Rancho Cordova. Sacramento County did not... require streetlights until 1970 or something. But it's very nice to see all of those news streetlights at intersections. And it's a great place to put them. If we go b

Micah, can I interrupt with one important thing? We used to do facade rebates. Do we? Okay, that's good. Those were, I know you all, David will remember, the county told us we couldn't apply for any more facade rebates at the chamber because we'd used all their money.

That was Linda's program, by the way, that she started back then.

She broke the bank with our success in that.

It's nice to know that's why. But we see things on Folsom Boulevard where it's an approved plan. We did it. They had grass. They had trees. They had shrubs. So they turn the irrigation off during the drought. Everything's dead. It's a dust bowl. Plants are out there. Oh, they poured some rock on it to make it look better. And it's like they're so far off from where they started. You know, the community is damaged by it. It's now a blight.

But that was why we had to keep changing the county code. Because first of all, we had to say, oh, well, you need to have landscaping. And then we had to say, guess what? It had to be live. And guess what? You had to irrigate it. et cetera, et cetera. And it was just an evolution to get people to clean up the fronts of their storefronts. I mean, Folsom Boulevard was never a handsome place. And we did not have the kinds of really nice buildings with bones that you see on Del Paso Boulevard or City of Elk Grove, Old Town Elk Grove, something like that. We just had basic concrete structures. And

Well, it was designed as Highway 50, right? Highway 50 supported uses tiny little parcels.

And a gas station on every corner and a motel on every other corner.

Which is why I think if we came back with a grant program and on one hand we're enforcing the rules, on the other hand saying we'll help. That might be the magic to trying to turn that street around. And others. Others could benefit from this too. You can call beautification if you want. But basically, it's just trying to uplift those old commercial corridor communities. Grab stuff again.

I actually have a framework for that. But it was all based on signage. Not just Folsom Boulevard, but Bradshaw and Sunrise. You needed use permits for freestanding signage.

All right. Do you guys got what you need?