City Council - Regular Meeting

All right. David. A few things going on. There was a great pancake breakfast for Cordova High football kickoff on Saturday morning. I was there. That evening, Linda and I were at the Sun River Neighborhood Association 25th anniversary. And that was a pretty cool event because there were people who had been active in the incorporation of the city 25 years ago and people who were key to the founding of that organization celebrating 25 years of it. And all of them were incredibly positive about what the city has accomplished in the interim. And they all wanted to tell Linda and I about how great

In response to that. And I sort of think if that would not do us damage in some way by missing out on some national night out stuff, that might make sense. I do think it is an interesting and positive measure of how we're doing in terms of connecting citizens with the city and with each other. And that the bigger those events are, the more it reflects on the health of the community, so. I don't think that's a fake thing. I don't think it's a niche thing. I think it's one of the general measures that we can rely on. I want to congratulate transportation staff. I'm not sure. Albert's not in the

We have had some great funding outcomes at SACOG. I'm not gonna brag about it specifically here. I just want council members and anybody listening to know we have had some great success with grant writing. It might make some of our peers a little jealous.

There he is. Come on, we're talking about you.

But we're having great success with our grant writing and transportation, and so I just wanna give plaudits to the staff here at the city who are getting that done. Very, very good work.

You're not going to tell us what it was? I've got to vote on Thursday. Oh, that's such a tease.

There's a series of them. The latest one is coming.

I know. Did you hear that? He's like, yeah, we've got a lot of money. I'm previewing it. I'm not going to tell you about it, though. Previewing it.

Yeah, you've got to come in the next meeting to hear about it, I guess. All right. I also met with some youth mentorship providers and some potential providers and some special needs programs for kids providers. including Coach Ross, who some of you may remember from years ago, the program he was doing at Cordova Meadows, which involved an after-school reading program, and if you really did all your work in the after-school reading program, then you got to go play football. So it was a football program masquerading as a reading program, which was actually a reading program that kind of looked

Thank you, Mayor. This is Siri Pulipati, Council Member. So I attended National Night Out and I agree with Council Member Sander. It was a pretty hot night. In fact, we did have the discussion at one of those neighborhoods in front of the homes that actually had a really big tree and it was cool out there, but we couldn't step out of that tree, so all of us were huddled under that shade of that one tree. We should also maybe follow suit like our State Fair and move it to a month where it's cooler and more neighbors would come out. But we had more neighbors do it in different places and some th

All right, moving on to Garrett. All right, so I get wrapped into lots and lots and lots of meetings. So I met with Dr. Cana. He builds housing and he's looking at Rancho Cordova because there's lots of places that you're building. What a lot of people want to know is what type of housing we're looking for. And I said, Rancho Cordova doesn't have a type. We want everything in our city. That way everyone has an opportunity to live in our city. I met the coolest company. called butcher power. Butcher power is, so unique and they based themselves in Rancho Cordova and they were like a brother sis

Did you say the motherboard was pretty? Yeah. They made it look attractive. Is this supposed to be one of these transparent computer cases so you can have your motherboard lighting up? No, it's on the side of the wall.

It doesn't look like someone barfed on it. transducers onto a green pad. It looks like it's well put together, and I'm like, yeah, you're right. It is prettier than the other ones.

An IT guy's view of pretty. I'm just narrowing this down here.

Listen, I think all colors are pretty, especially black and white, because ones and zeros are the best colors out there.

Right. Damn it. This is crazy. KYA Services, they're another group that's moved into Rancho Cordova. Amazing construction company that wants to do business in the city, with the city, and around the city. Awesome. It was interesting because the CEO, they're a bunch of lawyers, and they just found a market they really felt they could come into, and they have landed in Rancho Cordova and just exploding all over the place, growing.

The lawyers decided to get out of law and open a construction company.

Everything. And so they worked their way around certain, they found ways to do certain businesses with cities and counties and stuff like that. And it's great. And it's interesting because the guy actually, the owner is South African. And so every time, and so when he's talking the whole time, all I heard was the guy from Die Hard That accent, I was like, that's fabulous. And it was cool. So very interesting people. And what's fun is due to the AI ecosphere or ecosystem we're building, more and more of these businesses are coming to Rancho Cordova, finding a place to land, and then building ou

Nice to see lawyers doing something productive.

Damn. Listen, I'm trying to keep him in the city. Why are you chasing him out of the city? We still appreciate you, Joe.

Listen, Joe also is going into construction now.

We're about to be the most represented profession on this dial.

That's true. The county opened new veteran services in Rancho Cordova. And it's just furthering the culture of Rancho Cordova. We take care of our vets. We always have. It's one of those things that is in our DNA. And so now we have a great place. If you're a vet and you need help, there's no shame in asking for it. And this is for all my city council members and all my constituents. If you need help, we have places for you. Mentally, physically. If you just need someone to talk to, I have family members that have gone through this their whole life. Being a Tuskegee Airman with parents of that

Well, and we have two of the bigger churches that are in Rancho Cordova and a school. So I just love it because it's also drawing the big, you know, Nvidia, Solidine, Korean-based firms that are all coming to Rancho Cordova and they're like, we feel so blessed that we're here and we're not afraid, whereas some of the states aren't showing the best. you know, resting people and resting poor guys. But it's been great to come into Rancho Cordova. So they said they love it here. They can't wait to help. The group now wants to shift to more of a community-based thing. So they want to help people wi

Huh? Super good. Super good. I'm going to learn something.

So I can see how not to say words? Perfect.

The best part was he did backup. He just cut off like two-thirds of the way in. I know you're watching in the other room, David. I literally hear people laughing from here. But you were fired. Don't let anyone say that. Me and you on tour.

All right, we're gonna go ahead and move on to consent calendar items. Consent calendar items are deemed routine and non-conventional by staff unless a member of the council wishes to pull an item. For an individual consideration, all items may be approved with one motion. Guys, is there any items you wish to pull? Seeing none, I ask the clerk if there's any public comment related to consent calendar item.

All right. Let's see what's next. Oh, no consent public hearing. There's no public hearing. Oh, regular calendar items. We're going to have an update from our police chief. Stacey, can you go ahead and read the subject?

Sean, get on up here. Wow us with your statistics and stats.

How many did you get to on National Night Out? Oh, he was with him. He was with seven. Seven.

Quick question, moving forward, can we just, is there a way you can have the age for these DUI?

THAT WOULD BE GREAT. IT WOULD BE GOOD TO KNOW.

I thought the images you showed of the secured e-bikes, which I think were all the dirt bikes. Yeah, that are basically not legal on road or on sidewalk, right? So you can take them to the OHV and that's about it? Is how that lines up? Yes. But you do see those guys riding around town, so... We do see them occasionally.

Yeah, I think a lot of parents or grandparents or whoever just purchase those thinking, boy, that looks cool. It does. But unfortunately, not legal on the road. So yeah, that's a huge learning curve here. So I appreciate that. And you guys did some enforcement at schools, I know, as well, like issuing tickets, I think, last fall, maybe. It's been a while. We did.

Cool. School resource officers, you mentioned we have two. We used to have three. Any interest at the school district in returning to three? Because that would allow us to have sort of one at the high school and then two others that floated.

I think it was budget on the school district side. And a worry about law enforcement over presence or something in schools.

And I've witnessed the rapport that they can build with students, particularly at Cordova High is where I've witnessed this. It's amazingly... positive and productive and in the off chance when something challenging happens there those relationships not only sort of long term in the life of the kid but in that moment are really important you know because we have had situations where there's been a police response to corova high particularly when they reduced this from three to two and there was no school resource officer available that day one was in training and one had a day off kind of situ

Such a valuable thing. The accountability and safety angle I really like in terms of talking to kids about not just issue them a citation for what they do. It's kind of like what we do in code enforcement, right? You've got this problem. Let's figure out a way to solve it for you so you don't have this problem anymore because we don't want you breaking the rules, right? That's a very positive way to handle it. It's sort of like in society we talk a lot about freedoms, but we don't like to talk so much about our responsibilities. But you can't have one without the other. So the accountability i

But it seems like there's, and then community volunteers or civilian employees as part of PAL and a real effort to go out and find grants. And I'm always, back then I was always concerned that we took the badge and we had the badge go to Walmart and buy the food for the snacks, right? And it was just like, no, let's not do that. Let's get the badge in front of the kids. interacting with the kids where it's to the greatest benefit, and have somebody else go and buy the snacks.

So I think it's great, everything we do. I'm very impressed with it. I'm a growth guy, so I'm always thinking, well, how could we get twice this big? What would it take to be twice this big, touch twice as many kids in a positive way? For example, we had a boxing idea once upon a time. I don't know if we still own that equipment or not. But there's other opportunities of things. You know, it doesn't have to be boxing. I'm just using that as an example. It's very effective in some other jurisdictions, I know. But it seems like there's a lot of opportunity there, and I'd love to see like a growth plan of how we're going to go out, capture some more money from grants out there, leverage what we've got more efficiently, effectively, and get more kids engaged.

Yeah, we're an innovation city, and we've had a great history of innovating on that front. It's just there's more potential.

Just on the, I'm sorry. Just on the traffic front, most of your categories showed increases. More citations, for example. Someone could characterize that, I suppose, as a negative. I would characterize that as a positive. because I think, I'll just make numbers up, but in our city we probably have a thousand, let's say, serious traffic violations a day. That's like running a stop sign or something like that. Some number, 500, whatever it is. And we probably give out 25 citations or something a day, right? So it's like there's a very big market and we're nipping at it, right? And the question i

I've noticed some drivers that sort of have a pattern of traffic violation that's really extreme. You can imagine a red light, and they're coming up to the red light, and there's cars in the two lanes, like on Folsom Boulevard. They'll swing into the left turn lane, slow down a little bit, see is anybody coming, and just run the red light, like from the left turn lane, and go straight. And they'll do that time after time after time. You can see them do it all the way down the boulevard. Or in a neighborhood. Just through stoplight after stop sign after stop sign after stop sign.

Oh, wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah. I'm almost wondering if it isn't some kind of a thing that they see. Is there something trendy in social media where they show people driving like that? Because when I've seen that, it all kind of looks the same. I mean, the pattern of how they drive it. I don't know. Neither. I wish I did. No, I wish we could crack that.

generate revenue but it really is about behavior and increasing the safety in our streets and in our community so there's a several hundred dollars speeding ticket and that's us about a buck 25 i'm not exaggerating right it's just a couple of dollars you're not you're not exaggerating yeah if anything at all joe

Two things. Yes, doing a great job. We have that flock dashboard that we had made, and I know it still exists somewhere, but it's not Google search searchable. I was looking for it. A constituent wanted to see more flock info, and I Googled Rancho Cordova transparency page, and it doesn't show up in the first result, so that could be good to get that there. And my second piece is a prayer, if they're listening up there. Josh Hoover and Roger Niello we need Legislative approval for speed cameras. There's five cities on the list in California.

Yeah, Donald Terry a long time ago said that he wanted to make sure that the thing we spent the most amount of money on, we actually have quarterly updates on it, and you're doing a great job. All right, moving on. Next thing. Who do we got? Stacey, go ahead and read the announcements.

He doesn't want to be appointed. It's messed up Did a bunch of work he wants to go on the ballot and be clicked off on by let everyone in the community see his name I

When we had Dr. Sander run, were you the only one?

It's because there wasn't a meeting in time to keep it off the ballot. We have to act quickly under state law. That's what I was explaining because I had the same question.

Yeah, I think we missed a timeline. That's probably the right people.

I mean, we have precedence and, you know, with Dr. Sanders, sorry, Dr. Sander. And either we follow that or we start a new one.

Yeah, I'd rather let the community vote, but I think it is a little awkward. As a candidate, I mean, you're sort of of two minds. Yeah, I'd love to have people check the box and ask for my name, but at the same time, as a city, it makes us look slightly odd. Why'd you put this on the ballot when there's no election?

Well, I mean, you go around and look at it. The thing is the community wants to see the person. I want to give that district, that's their person that ran. He's the only person that stood up and did the ballot statement, all that stuff. He wants to have his name shown that the community has someone from his area. That's the whole reason we do this. And next time he's going to have competition and they'll get to see his name and someone else's name. So I think it's only right, since he took the time to raise the money, get ready, get all the stuff in place, that he should get his name on the ba

The candidate would like to be on the ballot.

Right, and it does seem like we're using taxpayer candidate to promote a specific, even though he's unchallenged, it does seem like we're using $14 we could spend on something else for the benefit of a political name recognition.

I think we have 75 days to decide. Do you want to do this?

No person has been appointed? Isn't that what it says on here?

What does this mean, though, if by the 75th day?

Yeah August 20th, so doesn't that mean we have 75 days 75 days before is that is today's So this Thursday would be the 75th day, okay Well, it looks like from one point Councilmember Budge mentioned that if what the candidate would like to do and looks like the mayor has spoken to the candidate and his preference is to be on the ballot and he's the one that's losing that $600 and he's okay with it.

But he's incurring $14,000 from the taxpayer.

Fair point. But what if somebody wants to write in their name? We're denying those folks the opportunity of doing so.

Right, that's good. That's actually the point. I mean, has there ever been a successful write-in candidate in a municipal race?

It is, but you always give folks the option of being able to write in.

Good point. Except for the senator from Alaska once, I think. There was three people. In that situation, I think, Borkoski. That's the first one. Not many write-in successes, yeah.

But I think that's right. I think we should give everyone the opportunity. And that under-ballot always be taking a lot of votes. All right, call the question. Call the question.

Yeah, if he did, he wouldn't get to put down that he was elected. I don't think that there's a point. I don't think there's a difference.

I would like to move a motion that we go ahead and put him on the ballot.

Option number two. Second. Roll call, please.

All right, now we're moving on to future agenda items. Anyone got anything they wanna talk about? No. Then lastly, I'm gonna adjourn the meeting in the name of, and I lost this. Steve Nelson. Steve Nelson. May he rest in peace. Meeting adjourned.