City Council - Special Meeting

time hopefully in the relatively near future we're going to have a shelter over there on reed avenue so that we won't hopefully will that will be able to house um the majority of these individuals for some point in time so we transition then hopefully into permanent housing um the limitation in wichita kansas is the temporary temporary camp means for a period not exceeding 72 consecutive hours so Although they do allow camping on private property in Wichita, it is limited in terms of the time. We also looked at a provision in Seattle, Washington, a little bit different in terms of what it allows. It actually allows transitional encampment on private property owned by a religious organization. And a traditional encampment is allowed on any site in any zone, property zoned or controlled by a religious organization. So do two provisions of section 23.4 to .052 . If the site includes property developed with legally established parking that is accessory to a religious facility or other use established on the property, then any parking displaced by the encampment does not need to be replaced. It goes on and has a subsection , which requires that the encampment operator or applicant comply with the following provisions. Those provisions include things like sanitation, and having rules and regulations that control how that particular transitional encampment is operated. One of the things I found interesting about what Seattle does is their legislature actually enacted a statutory provision that places limits on the power of municipalities to restrict transitional camping. One of the ones that I remember specifically is it prohibited municipalities from placing time restrictions on traditional transitional encampments for less than four months. So the municipality can't come in and say, you can have this transitional camp, but it can only be for a month. The state statute in Washington says that municipalities don't have the ability to restrict those on transitional encampment provision. So it seems like, at least at the state level, they're kind of supporting what is attempting to be done at the local level in terms of trying to provide some transitional housing for people that are experiencing homelessness and trying to move on with regard to hopefully getting into permanent housing. So with that in mind and sort of talking about the issue of, and it really came up in the context of if we were to do this, what would it look like? And we did provide you guys with a copy of the ordinance. It's broken down into 13 sections with number one being the purpose of the ordinance, Number two has definitions. What's significant about the definitional part of that is it's limited to owner-occupant of that particular residential structure. Because I suspect that if it were a, if it's a leased property, there are probably some limitations in the lease with regard to how many people can stay there. And we wouldn't want to put people in the position of potentially violating their lease and getting sort of evicted because of allowing some Somebody to camp in the front yard when their lease didn't permit that there's a temporary residential camping permit authorized Essentially the permit would be free. You have to come to the city clerk's office You get issued a permit for your particular location And then that would give us the information that we would need to go forth to make sure that whatever you're camping Wherever you're providing those camping sort of opportunities are being conducted in accordance with the ordinance Eligibility, again, we talked about the issue. It has to be owner-occupied. The occupancy limitations, as written, were two people per residential lot. And understand, all of this is subject to change based on what council's direction. But right now, as written, the occupancy limit is two people per limitations. The local requirement, if you think about it, we don't, number one, we talked about the issue of probably wouldn't want to be something that leased. We also wouldn't want to have, we have a lot of circumstances now where the actual owner lives out of state, and sometimes we have difficulty with regard to enforcement for certain rental issues because we can't get a hold of the owner. There would be a local requirement. There's sanitation and health requirements, as you guys can imagine, things like trash. You actually have to give them access to potable water. You also have to give them access to restroom facilities, however you choose to do that, whether it's in your main residence or or however you would work that out. There's conduct requirements with regard to noise and things along those lines. The permit term right now is 90 days with the ability of the city manager to extend that for an additional 90 days. It would have to be inspected. You would have to give the municipality the right to do inspections. And, of course, my code department, the first thing they read in their hand, he goes, okay, who's going to be doing that? And how is this going to work out? So there would have to be some things we'd have to work out with regard to some of those responsibilities and who would be responsible for that. For revocation purposes, the permit would be revocable. If the city was getting information that shows that that particular location was not being maintained in compliance with the proposed temporary camping ordinance, the permit could be revoked. One of the issues that I've had difficulty that came to mind is the issue about What type of a relationship would you be creating? Would you be creating a landlord-tenant relationship such that if you were, you wouldn't be able to just tell the person to leave whenever you decided you wanted them to leave? That issue comes up a lot when we have boyfriend-girlfriends. You have an apartment. You let your girlfriend move in. You want to break up. Now you want to get rid of her. She didn't have a place to go. So you call the police and say, she's trespassing. I want her out. What the police are going to tell you is if it looks like she's living here, that's a civil issue between you and her that you're going to have to go over to district court and have her evicted. We thought about that in terms of, and this issue has, we've been talking about this issue on some level for about the last four or five years. And one of the things that came to my mind on the front end of it is, okay, we have to understand what type of a relationship are you creating? Because if you're creating a landlord-tenant relationship, that's a different animal than if you're creating some other type of relationship like a licensee or an invitee. If you're just creating a license, most licenses are revocable whenever you choose to revoke it. When I go to the football game at OU, I have a license to be there to watch the football game. If I start cutting up, they can go, you out. I can't say, oh, I get to stay here because I've got some sort of interest in my particular seat. No. But when I looked at it a little bit harder, The Landlord-Tenant Act applies to dwelling units, and that's generally a building, some sort of building that you're leasing out. There is a provision that talks about mobile homes, that if you think about it, if I live in a mobile home park, I rent the space, that would be something that would be subject to the Landlord-Tenant Act if you were leasing out spaces for people to put their mobile homes. But there's nothing in there that, in my opinion, would prohibit or that creates a landlord-tenant relationship if you were simply allowing somebody to camp there. So it would be something, and this ordinance would specifically say you're not creating a landlord-tenant relationship, which again goes back to the issue of if the property owner at some point in time for whatever reason wanted to say the person can't live there anymore or can't stay there anymore, they would have the ability. to revoke that license and have them move along. And then we talked a little bit about the issue of enforcement, who would be responsible for that. Primarily the police department in terms of if there were problems, they would be the ones probably going out and trying to enforce that going forward. So that's sort of what the proposal is. And like I said before, that's just a question that came up that we were asked, what would this look like if you were to put something together like this? And that's what it would look like. I did sort of put together what I think are some of my concerns as to how this either would or wouldn't work. And the first thing that came to, one of the first things that came to mind was the issue of restrictive covenants. Because most of us live in neighborhoods, when we purchased our properties, you sign the restrictive covenants that apply to that particular development. Those are private agreements between the property owners. The city does not have the ability to waive your restrictive covenants. So if you believe that, you know, let's say your covenants say that all houses have to be painted white and I decide I want to paint my house green, your neighbors can then go to court to sue you for violation of their restrictive covenants because, again, that's a private agreement between those property owners. The city wouldn't be involved in that. We don't have anything to say about that. So what went through my mind is if this were enacted and you were really considering doing something or allowing somebody to camp in your yard, I probably would be recommending you need to contact your private attorney and have them go through your restrictive covenants and see if that's permissible. I think our planning department, our public works department does get covenants on occasion. I mean, most of them are filed with the county clerk. There have been some litigation cases where we actually have copies of people's restrictive covenants. The ones I'm thinking of, the litigation I was involved in is Ashton Grove. And Ashton Grove's restrictive covenants specifically prohibit erecting a structure that has not been authorized by their design review committee. And then we go back to the issue of, well, is a tent considered a structure? And there are some interpretations of that term that would say, yes, it is. So in Ashton Grove, unless you've gotten the approval of their design review committee, you wouldn't be able to construct, you wouldn't be able to allow somebody to erect a tent in your front yard. Most of the covenants, I didn't really look at that many. I've only got a couple of them, examples on the network. The ones that I looked at probably would prohibit you from allowing somebody to camp in your front yard. And again, even if you were to enact an ordinance in that provision, that would be one of my concerns. I wouldn't want to put somebody in the position of being sued by your neighbors because you did something in violation of the covenants. I think on the front end, we need to be telling people, you probably need to have somebody look at that for you before you make a decision about that. The other issue is your homeowner's insurance. I don't know how your homeowners, I don't know how insurance companies are going to look at you adding this particular additional use to your property. What little research I could find on the Internet seemed to suggest that there may be a set of circumstances where you're not covered for some of those issues. Kind of thinking of it in terms of like car insurance, you know, I use my vehicle to get back and forth to work. What if I started using it for Uber? My insurance company is probably going to want to know that because that's an additional use of that vehicle. that goes over and above just my private use, that they're probably going to want to adjust my insurance rate for that. And if you're doing something like that, there's a possibility that your insurance company is going to want to know about that because they may not cover you. There may be certain things that occur on your property that they wouldn't cover. So again, that would be another one of the issues. I would say if you're thinking about doing this, you might also want to contact your insurance company and talk this through with them to find out whether they're okay with that or whether you need to make some alternative action. The other issue that came to mind was the issue of premises liability. And this really goes back to the question of what is your status on the property? Because your status on the property governs the duty that the property owner has to you. Oklahoma recognizes the three traditional categories, which are invitee, licensee, and trespasser. As a general rule to a trespasser, you don't really owe a whole lot of duties. As to invitees and licensees, you do owe a little bit of a higher obligation with regard to hazards that may be on your property. That second, the final bullet point, that's the Oklahoma jury instruction for premises liability that apply to a licensee. And most of the research I was able to sort of do came to the conclusion that under these circumstances, the person probably would be a licensee. Usually an invitee is somebody you're inviting onto your property for some commercial purpose, so you're benefiting it, like a store or a restaurant. You're an invitee. You have a little bit of a higher duty. But for licensees, the owner of the premises has a duty when that person whose presence on the premises is known or reasonably should be known. And obviously, if you invited them to camp, you should know that they're there. You can't injure them by a willful or wanton act. by nearly exposing him to danger by the failure to warn of any hidden dangers on the premises that is known to the occupant and that the licensee is not likely to discover by himself. This duty is limited to any hidden danger that the owner-occupant actually knows about and the owner-occupant has no duty to inspect the premises and dangers. But again, that just puts you at risk with regard to what the particular danger is. Should you have known about it, should you have not known about it, it's just another risk that I would want you to go talk to your civil attorney to ask them to give you an idea as to what your exposure is with regard to engaging in that type of activity. So those are some of the sort of thought processes I had with regard to an ordinance like that. Again, is it possible? Sure. Like I said before, we know that there are other municipalities that have done it. It really depends on how it's set up, and obviously that's a decision that you guys have to sort of think about and make a determination as to whether you want to move forward. So that's really all I have on that issue, and I'll be happy to answer any questions if you guys have any.

On the occupancy part, if a person owns 30 houses in Norman, could they use all 30 of them to allow two people each under this proposed, or only the one that they live

The way that if all right This is kind of going back we did some litigation a long time ago, and it was when we did our wastewater master plan because the way that we did the $5 fee Was if it was an apartment complex we did on every apartment complex even if it only has one water meter and The court said yeah, you could do it that way So arguably, you could do it either way. If it were separate structures, separate premises, I probably would say you probably could do it for 30. If it were just like one apartment complex, it depends upon how it's zoned. I think that would be something council would have to decide how they wanted to move forward on initially.

I'll just say that I am not supportive. I've heard from many Ward 4 residents and also entities that work in the COC that the message loud and clear is do an expansion and do a managed encampment, but not like this. And I'll just say in my past experience of dealing with encampments and neighborhoods, I think the person who lives next door also matters, and one of the scenarios that we've dealt with in the past, there was a trans man with a history in our previous relationship when they were married of domestic abuse, and so living next to an encampment while it was met well by their neighbor quickly spiraled out of control, which is how I ended up hearing about it, and I think The elderly couple that had allowed that did not really understand what they were signing on to. So I appreciate that we're all trying to figure out what to do with our unhoused community. But I don't believe an ordinance like this effectively addresses that need. And that need, even if we do an expansion and some kind of managed encampment, I recognize there will always be campers and people who will take a certain amount of time before they're ready to go into treatment or seek services. And so just thinking about our limited availability of case managers, city employees, I just see this being more harmful than beneficial.

Council Member Pica?

Yeah, thanks. Very similar to that. I appreciate staff's willingness to look at any and all ideas because obviously if we had the solution, we'd be doing it already. So turning over every rock, looking at every crazy idea, I think that's absolutely valid and worth the time, worth the exercise. But very much like Council Member Grant, this idea is a non-starter for me. You listed a lot of the concerns that I have and a lot of the things that I was going to speak to, but I think they're pretty self-explanatory at this point. So I appreciate the presentation.

Council Member Gansbury?

Yes, thank you. Also, one, definitely against this idea and everything like that, but I want to take time out also, though, to thank everybody that showed up tonight. One, for the first time, we're having a lot of people get to see what a study session is. And this was an idea brought by somebody in this room, and we brought it forward. And there's tons of ideas like this that we try to generate all the time, that we all come here pitching our ideas together because it's the only time we're allowed to be all together. by the wayside after we're done and everything because different things that different people feel for their rewards and things like that. But this one in particular, I will always be, if I've said it from the dice and everything, that to me moving a homeless person in a tent from one place to another place in that same tent is not humane no matter how I try to cut it. So unless you're moving them to a shelter or a safer place in a safer environment, it doesn't work. And this can't guarantee the safety of the unhoused person first and foremost, but then everybody in that neighborhood around that might have that PTSD or might have a thing that's happened in their past and everything, and maybe they just get in an argument and things like that also. So for the safety of all of our neighbors and all of our neighborhoods and all of the citizens that we represent and was voted to talk for,

we always tell y'all that that's kind of where this lays tonight and everything is that it was a discussion and that it probably will not go past here tonight um i agree with a lot of what's been said i had questions also about notice and like neighbors being able to protest and given notice that their neighbor had applied for this permit neighbors having the ability to protest it and what that all would look like. So that was one of the concerns I had, too, that I wasn't clear about. And Council Member Bludgeon, go ahead.

Yeah, just adding on to what all the other council members have said so far, I would also be a no, not in support of this. Everything, every email I've received, every phone call, every text, everything, there hasn't been one single person yet in support of this. My concerns were what city attorney listed. I just, I feel like it's kind of up to us. Like if we did allow something like this, I would be so nervous for the people that, because I know there would be some because people have big hearts and I mean, It would be hard for me to not, you know, want to do it if I thought I could. It wouldn't be allowed in my neighborhood, as he talked on. But insurance liability is a huge issue with me. Like if something got damaged, would the home insurance cover that? Or if there was a fire, like it just concerns me so much of, Would the people that allowed it in their yard, would they just be left with no home? And because it didn't cover it because the fire was caused by. So I don't know. I just have so many questions about things like that. And so I just see it as a huge liability. So I kind of think it's up to us to kind of keep the Norman residents from doing this and just because of the potential of something to happen. so yeah um because of all the feedback i've received and the conversations i've had yeah i would not be in support of this so currently this is a prohibited activity in the city of norman yes allowing someone to camp in your front or backyard we've been talking about it in terms of i mean the example being

If you want to let your kid stay outside overnight in the backyard, you put up a tent. Again, that person has a place to live. He's living in your house. You're just letting him play outside in the evening. We had an event or an occasion where somebody, the circumstances were husband and wife lived in the house. They had a daughter who had cancer. She passed away. Her boyfriend didn't have a place to live, so they were letting him stay in their backyard for quite some time, I mean forever. say, for an extended time period. And the difficulty where we did get a lot of complaints by the neighbors because there were a lot of comings and goings, like late in the evening, and they've got video and all this kind of stuff. We did work it as a zoning violation because, again, in R1, you're allowed to have one single-family residence. And to the extent that you're allowing somebody to set up a separate residence, there are a bunch of issues that have to do with things like minimum housing requirements and what you're required to provide to have minimum housing standards. Things like restrooms and plumbing and electricity and potable water, none of that's being provided. So you're really falling below. And again, on an R1 lot, you can have one single family dwelling. So it got worked as a code violation, ultimately got resolved. But some of those issues that we're talking about were what you were seeing under those circumstances that were making that difficult. And kind of sort of what little bit of what Councilmember Blodgett was talking about, the safety issue, is if we were doing this or if I were to sort of to say anything might be doable, it's more the Seattle model of the transitional housing done by religious organizations because they're going to have resources to be able to house those people. And the other thing that I would suspect they would have is security to resolve some of those potential conflicts. Well, You know, if you're a true landlord, you can do a little bit of a background check. So you might have an idea as to who you're actually allowing to move into your property. Under these circumstances, you don't have that. You don't have the ability to do a background check. You may or may not know anything about the person's prior history. You know, I do think, and we've talked about this amongst our staff and the concept of obviously all homeless people aren't the same. You guys were here when we had the council meeting we had a couple of individuals come in that I Probably wouldn't have a problem with any of them But that may not necessarily be the norm there are people out there that I probably would have a problem with them being in my yard and allowing them into my residence, use the bathroom with my family being there because I don't know anything about them. So it does present a significant issue with regard to safety. And we think about it in terms of when we do our special events ordinance, we have a specific provision. You have to have security because we know that those events potentially are going to raise security issues, and we want you to be planned for that. In this type of a set of circumstances, and again, I didn't see anything in the Wichita ordinance that specifically talked about the security aspect of it. But again, it's limited to 72 hours. Don't know, you know, hopefully, don't know whether they've had any bad experiences as a result of that. But there is that issue that gets presented specifically as has to do with security because you really don't know. And most of us, you know, I don't have the ability to say I'm going to camp in my yard, but I'm going to hire a security guard to come watch you camp in my yard.

SORT OF REMINDED ME OF WHEN GOVERNOR FOWLER AND LEONARD CAME OUT OF THE BACK PLOT OF THE GOVERNOR'S MANSION ILLEGALLY FOR A YEAR.

I SAW THAT BROUGHT UP IN SOUTH FLORIDA.

YEAH. SO BECAUSE THIS ISN'T CURRENTLY ALLOWED IN NORMAN, IF WE DID ALLOW IT, WOULD THIS BE AN EXPANSION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE CITY OF NORMAN? YOU CAN'T DO THIS WITH YOUR PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHT NOW, AND IF WE ALLOWED IT, YOU'D BE ALLOWED TO DO MORE WITH YOUR PRIVATE PROPERTY THAN WHAT WE ALLOW YOU TO DO CURRENTLY, RIGHT?

Arguably, yes.

So the state reps are against expanding private property rights. Just want to make that clear.

They're against it, and I'm not 100% clear on what the basis is. I think I understand what some of the, I've read their statements.

They want us to keep the government in the way of people exercising their private property rights.

You could argue it.

Is exactly the way that I'm taking it from you is that right now we restrict your use of your private property? we're discussing allowing you to do more with your private property and People running for governor don't want us to let you do more with your private property. It's very fascinating to me Yes, and I would just ask to are there any Were there any bills that came out of the legislature this year that addressed homelessness? Any solutions to homelessness? Any solutions to camping, shelters, health care costs in Oklahoma, cost of living in Oklahoma? Any of that? Did the legislature? passed any bills this session that addressed any of those things? Not that we could find.

Actually, that one that got signed by Governor Stitt that literally said they have no solutions, but they will penalize cities of 130,000 and counties.

So the state government has no solution to the issue of homelessness. They have no solution to... increased costs of living in the state of Oklahoma. They have no solution to increased cost of health care and property insurance, which Oklahoma is second or third nationwide in highest property insurance, by the way. So the legislature hasn't done anything to really address this at all, but they are, just to be clear, critical of us exploring every option that's out there.

Mr. Mayor, a few legislative cycles ago, they actually removed the county's obligation to provide support and care for the indigent population of Oklahoma.

I think so also, Mr. Peacock.

Yes, so I just wanted to be clear about that, that we are dealing with a serious situation in Norman and in the state of Oklahoma and the United States. Mayors I talk to across the entire country are dealing with this situation of homelessness and encampments, and right now our policy with encampments is they build up to the point where we have to go in and break them up, and then they migrate to another spot and build up another camp until we go in and break that one up, and then they move to another place and up and we just keep doing this for years and years and years with no actual solution to the issue of homelessness and it's not solving any problem at all and as soon as we break them up even the governor's little safe act deal there's already tents back there were tents within three days of the state troopers leaving there were tents already back up in that exact location where the governor took his pictures and posted them on social media. So I look forward to them following up, and I also look forward to the state of Oklahoma maintaining its own property. The state should never let their own property get to that situation in the first place. It is not the city's responsibility to maintain state-owned property just in case the governor or anybody else is listening. You need to maintain your own property. It's your responsibility, not ours. So I just want to be real clear about that. And I also want to just share that I first heard about this idea two years ago from a 90-plus-year-old property owner here in Norman who is a lifelong Republican who does not support the homeless shelter, who voted no. She does not want the government using tax dollars to fund homeless shelter. You know what she wanted? She goes, I own a bunch of properties. I want to be able to allow people to camp on my property. I want to use my And so right now you won't let me to. So that is a local resident who has been talking about that idea for a couple of years. And then with recent issues with encampments and breaking them up and it just being this constant cycle and nobody seeming to have a solution, we really have to, and we've told people, if you've got an idea for how we can address homelessness in Norman, let us know and we will discuss it. And that is how this ended up on the agenda. So I just wanted to be real clear about how we ended up here and how what other people are not doing about it statewide.

I'm a heavy, heavy, heavy supporter of private property rights. I can't find somebody who don't support it more. But I also believe as a farmer in the actions of what you do on your property is your business. But when the actions of your property start leeching out onto the neighbors around you, then it is no longer your property being affected and it's the whole neighborhood being affected or the whole community. So on the targeting of this I'm absolutely going to have to not support it for the fact that it will spill over on neighboring properties and that will be an impact on them and that violates their private property rights. And I do have a tenant in Ward 5 willing to take on a dozen people, but only a couple would end up in Ward 5. The rest of them would end up in every other ward in this town that he owns houses in and to monitor that I mean, if you're putting them in your backyard, that would be one thing. But when you're going to put them in the backyard of every house you own in town that you're not going to live at, so you're not going to have to see the impact on the neighbors, that's, once again, the overflow. So I don't know. I'm not going to argue with you on them not supporting private property rights as much as I think they're respecting everybody's private property rights, not just certain individuals that want to take this action on. That'll be all I have to say. Thank you.

I agree with you. That's always the debate about property rights is how much right do you have to disturb someone else's Thank you. Councillor Gansberry.

Well, first and foremost, I definitely appreciate your comments that you just made, Mayor. I was trying to think for myself if I was going to hold mine to remarks in there later tonight or not, so I think you gave me a perfect segue for what I was kind of needing to say also. I'm one of those that want to make it clear to all the representatives that we have in our state and everything, most of you are in the election cycle, need to be out knocking doors and find out what people really care about. You know, as a whole here, this council is going to make $900 this month if we attended every meeting we're supposed to, then minus taxes out of that to solve the homeless problem here in Norman, Oklahoma. But we've taken an oath to do that job and to try to come up with a solution, and we are trying everything possible. that we can think of to try to see what might work in this community and everything like that. And a lot of our ideas have gotten the same place that looks like this one's going to get tonight. When we all get together, we find the reasons why certain things don't work for the public and for those that are needing housing. But I want to take a second real quick just to, as a councilman, I don't like the fact that my taxpayer money went last night to a bunch of people running for election, taking time out of their busy schedules to comment about politics in Norman, Oklahoma, whenever I believe that those same politicians up there had a chance to play a very, very important role in Norman, Oklahoma, and failed to live up to that obligation. As we know, our governor likes to call this project that he does Operation Safe, correct? We're all aware of it. We're all aware of how he thinks it's great and how it's working. Do you know it worked in Oklahoma City a little bit because he gave away $800,000 in state funding and 27 people that were homeless are living in state housing from him to do that. Now let's move to Tulsa County. Tulsa, he wrote them a check for $560,000 to help with their situation, and now he helped them get past a $10 million project as a community of Tulsa to try to go towards homelessness there. Now, I'll just let you know what Governor Stitt did when he came to Norman, Oklahoma, okay? He mentioned, several articles I have quote him, he mentioned personally that he called Oklahoma City Mayor multiple times. He contacted Tulsa Mayor multiple times before arriving on site. Holman, did we receive a contact from... Letting us know that he was coming that day to do the encampment.

I did not, and neither did city manager or police.

So he came into our town with not even equipping us with the common knowledge of, hey, I'm going to clean out an encampment, which means all of our city agencies that are in place to help these clients were not able to be in place when it happened. They only could react. to the situation that was being handed over to him. And also try to look up some legalities because I do love the, you know, making sure that homeless at least know their rights as citizens in America as a whole. And there's no constitutional court case that's ever been heard that says that there's an obligation to help during encampments when you're cleaning them up. It's not unconstitutional at all. But I did find some general state laws and government laws and stuff that says that, according to a notice period, an official must generally provide advance notice before sweeping an encampment, grace period, to allow those affected a chance to move. And as you just stated, Mayor, we did not get that opportunity. Also, when it comes to property seizure, that they cannot simply destroy personal property belongings. Seized items must be usually held, cataloged, and secured in storage, minimum 30 to 90 days to give that person that you just uprooted their whole entire life a chance to come back to their pictures and everything else that was part of their living and experience, especially the hard money that the city spent and organization spent to get birth certificates and all that stuff like that for these people and everything like that. That wasn't even upheld that day, okay? And then I found a nice little quote from that same said governor and everything that he gave to a nonprofit called The Frontier. And through his spokesperson, this was before Norman's Operation Safe, and the words of our governor, what he said would happen. So November, during this interview, he said, should Operation Safe continue to be a success and move to other municipalities, which I believe Norman is, It says, we will use a similar approach, ensuring that any funding available to municipalities and nonprofits is stewarded well, and that strict guidelines and expectations remain in place. Going by his own words, I do not believe he lived up to that quote when it came to Norman, Oklahoma. And so finally, I guess the last person I'd like to comment on, at least in here and everything, is also our good old Senator Standards, you know, and everything like that. And a quote from her from the front here also, same time this article ran and everything like this. This was her exact quote. and it was about our enchantment that happened here in Norman, was the efforts undertaken today strengthened the working relationship between city, county, and state for a shared mission of making Norman safe. Do we all feel that that's what happened? We don't receive stuff from the county to help with this issue. We don't receive anything from the state, obviously, to help with this issue. I clarified to every city official tonight that I could find that would be in contact with the governor. Nobody's been contacted about getting reimbursed. And now I believe that I get to speak on this for one reason. I personally cleaned a state property where we had a very large encampment behind our food and shelter. I did not receive one penny from the state, one assistance from the state of Oklahoma, one thank you from the state of Oklahoma. I did it because I have kids living in those places that I don't want them out there messing with that stuff and everything and getting hurt and dangerous. Okay? So if the governors listen, if the news media could get this to the governor specifically, like the mayor said, take care of your own property before you waste your time trying to tell us making $900 a month how to solve this homeless problem that all the congresspeople and everything like that at the city and at the state legislature could not solve during an elected election. Reason that they all run for office there.

They could solve the problem making all their money But by golly Dave will solve it for his $90 I Was just gonna say I'm just a fan of absurd things so I was really curious to see how this was gonna play out tonight and You know, everybody's aware of the term NIMBY. You know, maybe the city of Norman just kind of coined the term NIMPHY, you know, not in my front yard. So maybe there's something good out of this conversation. And that's all I've got.

Yeah, I'll just say that. It's really unfortunate that this burden has fallen all the way down to where it is the city's problem with the limited resources that we have. When we see opportunities squandered and opportunities revoked at higher levels of government, that could make an impact in this matter. I'm glad that we went through this exercise. I think that even if it doesn't pass, honestly, I don't think I could support something like this, even though I definitely wanted to go through the exercise of seeing what it would uncover. I think there's things that we can learn from this that we can move forward and do our other ideas as we look to tackle this. But I sure hope at some point it's not just up to us to be the ones to tackle it. So that's all I got.

I could not agree more. Yeah, Councilor Bruce, go ahead.

You don't have resources What what makes us think we're so capable of handling a Homeless individualized mental problems. We're not capable, right?

Yes, we need the state It has more resources and more ability to do something And federal government. I mean, everybody. We're literally the cities. And like I said, I just came from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, over 200 mayors nationwide. And this was a primary focus of it. And every city was talking about it. And this similar situation where some states, there's more help and support from the state than others. But in a lot of states like Oklahoma, the cities are left to themselves to try to address really a nationwide issue. Economic issue health care issue all those things so I also agree that I don't think this policy is tenable as I would commend anybody that did exist that would be willing to Take on the liability and increased insurance cost. I'm sure That would come along with that, but I just don't see how it's possible you know about private property rights, but how far does that extend? And if there was, you know, on a rezoning, you get an opportunity to protest a rezoning and speak at council and say you don't support it, and council can say no, but in this case, you might be a neighbor that has two tents in the front yard of your neighbor's house and you had no say in it. So, yeah, I think the conversation definitely needed to be had about this because we really have to turn over every Every rock every idea that people have about how we could better address this issue because again the current situation of just break up the encampment another one pops up and break that one up and another one is just not Sustainable and it isn't working. So It doesn't seem to me that there's any support for moving this forward at this time.

So If there's no further question call that one more thing On a second note of his I'm gonna there was a list of people like he does Shannon and Danny Sterling, Lisa Stanbridge, Jacob McHughes. I can go all day long. I have made my phone number so public, you can't miss it. And not one single person ran to pick up that phone. They all ran to the press to run their mouth and make a mountain out of molehill. But not one single person had the guts or the spine to pick up a phone and call any one of these council members and ask where we stood on this. Instead, they stirred the poop pot to try to get a vote. And I hope every single person remembers them names when that election comes up, because that's... I ain't gonna say it, but my favorite word is out in my chicken pen. Okay.

Okay. I appreciate that. Appreciate all the comments. Again, yeah, it doesn't look like there's any support for moving this forward as it is. All right. All right. Thank you, everybody, for the discussion. Thank you, staff, for doing the research on that. I'll move on to Item 2, which is a discussion regarding updates to ordinances related to city parks.

Jay Solson, Director of Parks and Recreation. Hard act to follow, but I'll... TRY TO DO THAT. SO THERE'S BEEN A FEW ORDINANCES THAT HAVE BEEN FLOATING OUT THERE FOR A WHILE NOW THAT PARK RELATED THAT WE WANTED TO COME GET YOUR INPUT ON ALONG WITH OUR NEW PARK RULES WHICH WERE RECENTLY ADOPTED. THERE ARE SOME OF THOSE THAT I THINK RELATE WELL TO EVEN THE DISCUSSION WE JUST HAD. We'll hop into those right now. The things we'll talk about are parkland dedication, which I want on some of these. They're very well connected, but they've also existed for a long time. So our parkland dedication has not been updated since 1976. We also have our park development ordinance, which HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED SINCE 1994. WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT IN NORMAN, THAT'S HOW WE DEVELOP OUR PARKS. A PARK PLAYGROUND IN 1994 COSTS $35,000. RIGHT NOW, A PARK PLAYGROUND IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD IS UPWARDS OF $200,000. I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE HEARD THAT FROM ME A FEW TIMES, BUT I HAVE TO KEEP ON PREACHING UNTIL IT ACTUALLY GETS TRACTION. TREATS DETECTION ORDINANCE ESTABLISHED IN 2018. staff members that would like to get some of that updated and follow a little bit more closely to what state law actually allows and then park rules there's been a lot of discussion especially with things that's happened recently as a relation to a Cape Park that we would like to go over and Park Commission requested some possible ordinances um related to to the park rules so but first we'll we'll hop into the park land dedication ordinance and i know we have some stuff after this so i'll try to go as quick as possible established in 1976 to provide lands for neighborhood parks this ordinance has done very well we're now at 70 plus parks in norman uh just so everybody knows every time there is a neighborhood development part of that development means that that developer has to come forward with some kind of park option. The option could be a city park that's inside there. If you're within a mile of another city park, that would allow you to basically, that neighborhood wouldn't have to build their own city park, but that neighboring park would become that neighborhood's park. There's a private park option, and then what we've seen more recently is like a fee in lieu of land. That's basically when a development developer developer doesn't think they have an option to provide parkland. They just basically write us a check where we could go possibly develop parks or buy land for parks. These are the rules that kind of follow along with it, but anytime that we have a parkland dedication, we want to make sure we're following suitability of land and that's described in ordinance. We make sure that we're not getting A completely terrible piece of land that's dedicated by a developer, which is, I know that everybody has faith in our wonderful developers we have in time, but that's it. That's to make sure that we don't have an unusable piece of property. A lot of times, and we're kind of in the right season for that, if we get a lot of rain, in a certain area most of the times, which is what we want. That is where most of the neighborhood drains to, which sort of allows for a beautiful park, a lot of water, a lot of trees. That's all the things we want, but we also want to make sure that the park's usable for recreational type activities. We hit a little bit on fee-in-lieu land. That's, like I said, if the developer believes they have no option, they can pay us for basically the land they should be providing at a set rate that's provided to them on a market rate. Also, private park option, which we'll see as we go into this. I mentioned before we got 70 parks. We just discussed the budget earlier today. We're kind of at a point, I think we're, if we were making a graph, we're probably at the top of that graph where If we start adding a whole lot more parks through our park land ordinance, we're going to have to start adding staff. And we understand that there's a lot of needs from a lot of other departments. Where does that point break? Are we at that point? Have we passed that point? Or do you all feel like we should keep going in that? So I think if we describe our ordinances correctly, we can push a lot of developers to doing a private park option, which means the HOA would be responsible for providing PROVIDING THAT PARK AND RECREATIONAL OPTIONS. SO WHEN WE START TALKING ABOUT RECOMMENDED UPDATES TO PARK LAND DEDICATION FROM STAFF, IN FEE LUE LAND, IT WOULD MAKE IT EASIER ON STAFF IF WE HAD A SET PRICE. RIGHT NOW IT'S VERY BROAD SAYING THAT WE WOULD GO BY MARKET RATE SOMEWHERE IN NORMAN. Now, we want to tighten that up a little bit and probably communicate with our county assessor, find an average piece of what we would consider what would be used for parkland, which could be something in a floodplain, average price per acre, and then set that price and then maybe get our park board to, on an annual basis, to confirm that price. Because we do realize prices fluctuate according to whatever the market is, and we just want to make sure that we are not... BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OR WE'RE NOT RIPPING OURSELVES OFF WHEN WE START TALKING ABOUT THAT. FEE IN LIEU OF LAND, NOW WE'VE KIND OF GONE BACK AND FORTH. THERE'S BEEN TIMES IN TALKING TO OUR OLD DIRECTOR THAT WE'VE DONE VERY GOOD MAKING SURE WE'RE SEEING THE FEE IN LIEU OF LAND, THE IDEAL THING ABOUT THAT IS TO SET ASIDE LITTLE LAND AND USE THAT FOR FUTURE PARK PROPERTY PURCHASES. AND NOT NECESSARILY MEANING WE'RE GOING TO BUY MORE NEIGHBORHOOD PARKS WITH THAT, BUT LET'S SET THAT ASIDE AND MAKE SURE THAT IS USED FOR BUYING FUTURE PARK LAND. AND THAT COULD BE A COMMUNITY PARK, THAT COULD BE NEIGHBORHOOD PARKS THAT POP UP. SOMETIMES THERE'S AN OPPORTUNITY WHEN A DEVELOPER IS DOING SOMETHING THAT YOU HAVE A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP A REALLY NICE PIECE OF LAND, WHICH WOULD BE OF COMMUNITY BENEFIT. AND WHEN WE'RE KIND OF TALKING ABOUT UPDATING THIS, IF WE'RE GOING TO START ENCOURAGING OUR DEVELOPERS TO DO A PRIVATE PARK OPTION, OUR RECOMMENDATION IS PROBABLY TO EASE BACK WHAT WAS PUT IN THAT 1976 WHICH IS ORDINANCE WHICH IS WHERE THEIR LIMITED RECREATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES ARE A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT AND AT A HIGHER STANDARD IN WHAT WE DO FOR OURSELVES. SO HOW DO WE MARCH THOSE BACK AND KIND OF ASK A DEVELOPER TO MAKE THEIR OWN PRIVATE PARK? DO WE WANT TO MAKE THEIR REQUIREMENTS THE SAME AS OURS TO KIND OF PROMOTE THAT WHERE WE'RE NOT JUST FORCING THEM TO AN OPTION THAT KIND OF HITS AND HOLDS THEM TO THE BEST OPTION FOR THEM IS TO HAVE THE CITY BUILD A PARK AND THEN WE FOREVER INHERIT THE MAINTENANCE. WHEN WE START TALKING ABOUT IT, AND AS I HIT EACH ONE OF THOSE, IF THERE'S INPUT FROM, YOU KNOW, OR QUESTIONS ON EACH ORDINANCE, I DON'T KNOW IF YOU ALL WANT TO WAIT TO THE END TO KIND OF GO OVER EVERYTHING. Park development ordinance. This is kind of a sister ordinance to The last one we talked about in the fact that every time that there is a dwelling built There is a fee that goes along with that right now that is a hundred fifty dollar fee that's divided up into two setting five dollars goes to your local neighborhood park and And $75 goes to the community parks. So when you start looking at how that is formed, that is going into about, I'm guessing off the top of my head, 50 some odd buckets, which kind of pigeonholes us on certain developments where we can't access money we need to develop new parks. So when we see new neighborhood parks coming online, or if we get neighborhood parks that we are developing for that development, We are running somewhere between five to ten years behind the start of that development to when we build a park because we have to, once again, 1994 when that park was developed, $35,000 was the idea to try to gather all that money to build the playground. Now we're in excess of $200,000 plus. That's just a playground. That doesn't go into the park furniture, building trails, adding shelter, and all the other things that go along with that. WE'RE KIND OF PIGEONHOLDING THAT WHERE WE HAVE TO COLLECT ALL THOSE FEES AND FIND HELP THROUGH A CAPITAL PROJECT OR NORMAL FORD TO BUILD THAT PARK. THAT'S THE REASON YOU'RE KIND OF SEEING US ABOUT 10 YEARS BEHIND WHERE WE PROBABLY SHOULD BE DEVELOPING THOSE PARKS. SO WHAT WE'RE PROPOSING WITH THIS IS LET'S TAKE AWAY THE COMMUNITY PARK BUCKET. LET'S TAKE AWAY THE 55 INDIVIDUAL NEIGHBORHOOD PARK BUCKETS AND LET'S REDUCE THOSE INTO FOUR BUCKETS WHERE WE divide the parks into four different sections and we have larger buckets to actually update our parks with new items or develop new parks when they are coming online, which will help us put these parks in faster or replace the playground faster. And we also, along with that, as you hear that we were hoping that $150 per dwelling would get us somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to $40,000 so we could build a playground, let's go ahead and up those FEES THAT GO ALONG WITH EACH DWELLING UNIT, AND WE'VE BEEN WORKING WITH THE DEVELOPERS TO FIND WHAT IS THAT APPROPRIATE OR MONEY KIND OF AREA WE WANT TO START CHARGING. SO WE TALKED TO THEM ABOUT POSSIBLE THREE DIFFERENT FEES, DEPENDING ON WHAT KIND OF DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU DO. IT STARTS AT $200. THIS WOULD BE IF, ONCE AGAIN, promoting developers to build their own private parks like recreational features as we're doing it. Those are about, we're proposing $200 per dwelling unit on that private park. If we are within a mile of a public park, AND OR A FEE IN LIEU OF WHERE THEY BASICALLY THE DEVELOPER PAYS LAND INSTEAD OF GIVING US PARK LAND PROPOSING $300 FOR FOR EACH WELLING UNITS OR ALL THE WAY UP TO IF WE'RE BUILDING THAT PUBLIC PARK FOR THAT SPECIFIC NEIGHBORHOOD GOING ALL THE WAY UP TO TO $400. AND I THINK I COVERED KIND OF UNWINDING THE NEIGHBORHOOD AND COMMUNITY PARKS AND THE PRIVATE PARK OPTIONS WHERE WE KIND OF DIAL BACK WHAT WE'RE ASKING DEVELOPERS TO DO WHERE THEY COULD HAVE MORE OPTIONS.

I WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT REDEVELOPMENT. AND I WOULD ASSUME LIKE If there are areas of the city that are being densified, for example, and it's not green space, they're coming in and redoing an area, how does that work? Do they have to contribute to the nearest park? Just thinking that what I'm seeing right now, It kind of looks like it really only applies like green space new development.

So when a new neighborhood comes online and they go through a pre-platting process, part of the process is they come to you and tell us what option that they want to go through on. If they want a public park, if they're going to do a private park option or do a fee in lieu of or if they're in so many spaces of that. So that's all involved inside that plat. And if they're going with their own green space or recreational options, that's described inside that plat and it should have that green space in there. And they're also supposed to do park-like features and that's attached to that pre-plating process. So If you have some of the neighborhoods, I can't probably call them off the top of my head. But we can definitely look those up for you. But those are supposed to be all taken care of in the parkland decision at the pre-platting process.

OK. There's not a lot of opportunity for green space development at Griffin property. But I was just thinking about we're going to try and limit sprawl and build density in the core. I'm just thinking about what does that mean for those parks when you add more people to an area, but is there a mechanism to enhance the park that's not there?

So, Jason, in this thought, if you've got a block and it's got five single-family residential units on them that were built in the 40s, and 10 years from now there are five 16-bedroom rental units there, Are we collecting that fee even in a scenario where a single-family residential unit was leveled and multi-family units come back in?

So, it has to, the whole area has to be replatted, though. So the impact fee, it only comes with a plat.

Well, and I'll further clarify, if I may. With impact fee specifically, You get charged only if you add additional. So in that scenario that a city manager was addressing where it's initially single family unit, they paid a certain impact fee. They come back and redevelop and it's now multiple family homes. They pay for the addition. So they already paid one rate. Whatever adding dwelling units they have, they'd have to repay for.

There is a mechanism to enhance the... current park says.

And so whatever that impact fee is collected on the additional would flow into where it was collected from to support those parks in that quadrant, that area.

So when you talk about density, Bob Morris properties where they're developing those apartments over there by Ed Noble Parkway is a good example. So they paid a fee in lieu of. They paid $20,000 in fee in lieu of because they don't have a park inside their area. And then they go on top of that, they pay per dwelling unit. In a more dense situation, we're collecting somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $60,000 right now in our current system, just because how much density they're packing in there with your fee in lieu of plus each dwelling unit playing in there. So if you change that formula a little bit, you're collecting somewhere, I'm just throwing out numbers, $200,000, which would... COULD BE USED FROM ANYTHING OF A NUMBER OF BUYING, REDOING PLAYGROUNDS, ADDING PARK FURNITURE SHADE, OR BUYING NEW PARK LAND.

I'M BRINGING UP THE QUESTION BECAUSE SUNNERSH CITY IS WHERE WE'RE SEEING THAT DENSITY, AND WHEN WE WENT THROUGH THE PROCESS AND THE IMPLEMENTATION DESIGN PLAN, WE WERE LOOKING AT PARKS, AND THERE WASN'T REALLY BUT ONE, AND A VERY TINY ONE AT THAT. SO I WAS JUST CURIOUS, LIKE, HOW THAT WOULD EVOLVE AS THE DENSITY INCREASES.

So a thought about looking for where can green space happen, and I'm thinking about Council's conversation about Comanche and its abandonment east of the railroad tracks for a hotel and parking structure, that that would become a Paseo, and we're in conversation with that development group about what it's going to look like and who might manage it and operate it as an opportunity to find a new big green space. piece in the middle of our urban fabric.

And I would say that's just outside of Center City, but if we did it in East Downtown.

Go to the west side of the tracks on Comanche is also an equal opportunity. We've got a county hotel going there, but with the well and everything there, you really could take advantage of that opportunity.

Okay.

And they're special, and I don't want to get into it because I don't know exactly what we're trying to figure out, but there's different rules attached to Center City. So we can discuss that at a little study time at a later point in time. TREE PROTECTION ORDINANCE. ORIGINALLY A TREE PROTECTION ORDINANCE WAS PLACED IN 2018 TO MAINTAIN AND PRESERVATION OF MATURING TREES AND PROTECTING TREES DURING CONSTRUCTION AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE LONG-TERM VIABILITY OF EXISTING TREES AND THE CONTROL OR REMOVAL OF TREES WHEN NECESSARY. ALSO ADDRESSING TREES IN A PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY, TALKING ABOUT MAINLY TREES BETWEEN THE SIDEWALK AND THE CURB AND ESTABLISHING a process to apply for removal of those trees or figuring out those trees' healths to figure out if they should be replaced or even altering or adding fines to be used for replanting and removal of those trees. The existing ordinance also has a historical tree destination, which could be nominated and go through a review process, which would be now through Park Board. There's quite a few recommended updates with that, basically re-clarifying or redefining Some of the areas, too, are regulated trees under the new ordinance, and that would only be trees that are, once again, within the public right-of-way, which is usually between the curb and the sidewalk. Determine and clearly define regulated and prohibited activities for tree planting, maintenance, and removals, all within that regulated tree area. WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT DEFINING AND ESTABLISHMENT OF TREE DISTRICTS. WE TALKED ABOUT HISTORICAL TREE DISTRICTS. WHEN YOU START TALKING ABOUT COLLEGE STREET AND ALL THE SYCAMORES THAT THEY HAVE DOWN THERE, I THINK THAT WOULD QUALIFY AS A HISTORIC TREE DISTRICT. And this would promote neighborhood participation because it'd be like anything that we do historical-wise, that 51% of that neighborhood comes forward and asks for that to be a historical tree area. That would then become eligible as long as they submit a plan. And then if the city would participate in maintaining that historical tree district, if there was some kind of natural disaster or construction, the city would work with that neighborhood to try to reestablish.

And just for clarity, the historic tree district, if we went that route, those would solely apply to trees in the right-of-way, not trees on private land?

Yeah, and all of these, and this is making sure that we confine our regulated tree districts, which would be the only, we don't maintain the trees, we don't own the trees, those are still the owners who owns that house, but that would just be the area where the city would have say in what happens or could happen with those trees.

There's at least one property in Ward 4 near downtown where, when this first was being discussed, A man went and cut down four giant trees on his property because he thought we weren't going to let him cut them down. They weren't on public right of way at all. It wasn't going to impact him at all. And now there's just these four giant tree stumps on the middle of his property. But it was like, you didn't have to do that. This was only going to be for...

I was going to say, now that area has come up and those trees would be very beneficial to the people walking to the commercial parts.

His property would be worth more, too, if he had left them.

So I just had a curiosity on, because obviously we're first got some old trees. If there was a resident who wanted to... MARK THEIR TREE AS A HISTORIC TREE. IT'S BEEN THERE FOR OVER 100 YEARS OR WHATEVER. IS THERE A PROCESS FOR THEM TO DO THAT?

CURRENTLY THERE IS. WITH THE NEW ORDINANCE, WE WOULD WIND THAT BACK BECAUSE WE HAVEN'T HAD A WHOLE LOT OF PARTICIPATION IN THAT PROCESS. AND THERE'S NO BENEFIT THAT GOES ALONG WITH IT. It's just basically, you know, yes, exactly.

Okay, gotcha. Okay, thank you.

This would put, basically, if there's a historical tree district and there's a plan that gets submitted to Park Board, that if something, if the city needs assistance in preserving that, or like I said, if there's something, a storm that rolls through that knocks us down, we would help go back and replace those, help replace those trees and according to whatever that plan was submitted to us.

Yeah, I was just asking, because I know there are residents that are very proud of their old trees, and if there was a process, they probably might be interested, because I've gotten asked about that. But at the end of the day, it's still on them. And I think there's a tree society at the state level that they could still get that designation if they wanted.

Possibly.

Yeah.

And then there's the tree district, which instead of going to neighborhoods, that would be more on city staff, where we would understand and know where specific tree districts are, like Main Street, Campus Corner, UMP, where we want to make sure that there's a nice urban forest inside there that we would go in there and make sure that we help maintain that, establish a permit process for alterations and removals of the trees, and also establish licensing programs for commercial tree services inside the city. And along with that, establish protection plans and requirements for construction that goes along with platting of new construction projects. Park Rules Ordinance. So just to give some background on why we're bringing this to you today, as I said, on June 4th, Park Board did send a, for those who checked or emailed, did send a letter to City Council asking for consideration of park-related ordinances related to the recent homeless encampments at Francis K. Park. This is just basically in a concern of maybe putting some teeth to the park rules and making those into ordinance, anything that has a, what they see that takes away a recreational feature or recreational benefits or green space benefits away from a park due to encampments. In the letter, they also reference other cities in Oklahoma that has no camping-related ordinances in parks, including Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Shawnee, Moore, Noble, and Yukon. To go a little bit further, because I know that there was a lot of questions that were going on at the time of the encampment at Francis Cate. There was a lot of discussion what park hours were, who sets the park hours. Right now, the director recommends park hours, and we go back to the park board, and they basically confirm the decision of the staff. These are hours that are related to our parks. So community park, when you start talking about community, that's Andrews, Griffin, Reeves, Saxon Park. Ruby Grant, then our neighborhood parks. Those are our parks that are inside of our neighborhood, which Francis Cate would have been considered or is considered a neighborhood park. Special use parks are parks that don't necessarily fit within those categories of being a community park. or a neighborhood park when you start thinking about Sutton Wilderness and our bike park and Westwood and so on and so on, our new Bishop Creek Eco Park, a special use park. We also have trails and greenways, which are modes of transportation. So those stay open 24 hours. We also have community and recreation centers, YFAC, Little X are two that are left. at this point and in our cultural centers we put those as our set by director but really that we work with the operator to to set those hours and when we start talking about a park role versus ordinance one is a when you start talking about a park role that is a role that's either set by staff or set by uh park board the the enforcement on that is what could be leading up trespassing. So a little bit more difficult to, to, uh, have any teeth on that. You have to basically, the owner has to, which when we have signage up, that is our warning. Uh, and if, uh, the perpetrator or the people are violating any, a number of our park rules that are posted, uh, they get, uh, the, the written sign is the warning. And then, you know, that would, get us to please stay able to go out there and talk to the person who's violating that rule and if that person does not cooperate then trespassing could be technically you know invoked at that point and then an ordinance has more teeth to it so that could that immediately could happen like police could enforce that immediately by fine or removal When we talk about rules, the easiest one to point at would be our Sutton Wilderness Ordinance. These are just a number of things that are existing that has to do with our contract with the state and Sutton Wilderness. When we go back to sudden wilderness this was put in place in the 80s So some of these we was just talking about this with Rick some of these we don't Probably go back even if we don't change this or add it to it or make it more broad We need to make sure that all this is still relevant or not violating any estate law but as you can see that there's any number of these that kind of correlate with what you'll see here in a second our park rules that are set aside by or set up by our Our park board actually got voted in this past week ago. So littering, no operating any motorized vehicles or bicycles, starting or maintaining fire, camping, hunting, trapping, so forth and so on. I don't want to read all of those. But if we do... change or add some ordinance. One idea is to grab this ordinance and basically make it broad and make it take out the Sutton Wilderness references and maybe make it valid for all parks. But we also, if we did that, we want to go through there and update some of the stuff that we might see as obsolete or violates state law.

Council Member Grant.

So with the fishing, hunting, trapping, all that, so if you were going to go catch crawdads somewhere in one of these parks, if you're going to make it a broad thing, then that eliminates that activity for other groups. Like, is it Northeast Lions where people go do the crawdad thing? And I guess also Bishop Creek.

So when you start talking about fishing, that's only restricted to, if you go to our park rules, that's restricted by one license, which we don't control license. You have to be, if you have a state license. And also, too, you can fish at any of our parks. But it's the same thing. You don't want to basically go out and throw out a line or jug lines or anything like that that we don't want people actually getting into the water to fish. We want them to fish from the shore. So there would be rules that are involved from that way.

Okay. And I was also just thinking we have the Bishop Creek Echo Park coming online later this year, which you definitely don't want people fishing in. Is that supposed to be habitat for species?

We haven't necessarily addressed all the rules that goes along with that. I don't think that there's going to be a whole lot of fruitful fishing done there anyways because it's kind of shallow, and depending on the rain is how deep it's going to get. You were about to say something, Rick?

No. What I was going to say is the issue about jug line and trout line fishing, as a general rule, you have to be in the water. And that's one of the issues. If I'm going to set a trout line, I'm going to set it from this side of the pond to this side of the pond, I need to be able to cross it. So you would be in the water. And Jason and I had a long discussion about this yesterday, specifically on the swimming issue. And my example is, and I'm kind of telling it myself, we live up by Northeast Lions Club. There's a frisbee golf course out there. I know my oldest son and his buddy used to go get in the water because a lot of times people will lose frisbees in there. And a lot of them are kind of expensive. Kids will get in the water and throw little frisbees to take either to keep for themselves or to go sell. So we're talking about things like, and this is the lawyer part, what do you mean by swimming? Does that mean getting in the water and actually swimming or does it mean just walking around in the water? So when Jason is talking about the issue of, and that's why we brought up the issue of outlining our different parks and sort of how we designate them because we may need to go back through and look to say, for example, for some of our parks, some of this stuff applies and for some of them it doesn't apply. We also have talked about the issue of And this goes back to the enforcement part of it. It's right now, if it's just a park rule established by staff, if you're violating the park rule, police can't arrest you for violating the park rule. Police can only arrest you for violating your ordinance. So if it's just a park rule, the only thing we can do is trespass you. On our trespassing ordinance, we have to give you notice. And we talked about the issue of, well, what if You're there one day doing something, and one officer says, hey, I'm giving you notice to stop doing it. You can't be here. And then you come back the next day, and you're doing the same thing, and it's a different officer that doesn't know that the other officer trespassed you. We lose that opportunity, essentially, to cite the person for doing something they're not supposed to be doing. If we were to say, for example, and we brought up the issue of motorized vehicles. If we just, the way that that is now by rule, you'd have to trespass them. If council passed an ordinance that says no motorized vehicles in the park, I have to worry about trespassing you. If I see you on a motorized vehicle in the park, I can cite you right then. Now, we talked about the issue of bicycles because it was, okay, if I'm a little kid and I'm going over to Andrews Park to go to baseball practice and I rode my bike from my house here, that's not something we probably want to prohibit in that park because that's something that we sort of expect to happen. I mean, we have concrete over there. Kids ride their bikes to and from the park. That's what we expect. So we need We thought about, we're thinking about the concept of bringing back to you more of a, some of these ordinances need to be codified so that we can enforce them immediately. Some probably need to stay under the purview of the parks board because they may change here or there depending upon a particular park zone and so forth. So, and a lot of it has to do with our ability to enforce those rules. about having to go through the song and dance, well, it's a park road, so you're trespassing, I'll give you notice, and then figuring out how to document that and going back and forth. We also talked about the issue of when it comes to the camping issue was the big one. We've also talked about the issue of bringing back an ordinance that prohibits camping on all public property, which seems to be something that probably would be an appropriate part of this process if you choose to do that. But, yeah, I was going to say the part about the deadline. The reason that is because you have to be in the water.

And I know we're running out of time. Rick basically did my whole last slide for me. But those are the park rules that are described by or just recently adopted by park commissioners. The asterisk by those, we believe that there's already existing ordinances, so we don't need to repeat those. But these are just all options. And when we start talking about rules, we want to make sure that – Talking to you, if it's good with y'all, of course, but the majority of park rules stand in a purview of park boards and staff and identify roles that merit enforcement mechanism other than trespassings, for example, no camping, no fires, no hunting, no unauthorized vehicles.

Council Member Ganser.

Yeah, I just want to personally, for one, I definitely appreciate the Parks Board and their letter that they sent out to everybody with their concerns and everything like that. And I definitely want to see a continuation list for another study session or whatever it needs to be to finalize what the rules and ordinances will look like and stuff like that and take control of the parks back for the safety and protection of every citizen in order to be able to utilize them for their full potential that they were created for.

Senator Hinkle. Just a question about the motorized vehicles. I know that the ordinance was probably written when dirt bikes and four-wheelers were a lot more popular, but moving forward, would that include like Lime scooters?

That's one of the things that was going through my head is the concept of now you've got electric bicycles. So when we say motorized vehicle, are we talking about electric bicycles? Because most of them have the ability to be human powered and or powered by a battery. So that's something we probably want to be careful of when we're talking about those types of restrictions to make sure that we're really, really particular. Because you do have those hybrid devices out there that, like I said before, When I go fishing down at the Blue River, one of their big issues is no motorized vehicles. And the issue becomes, because people were in three-wheelers and all those types of things and really tearing up the area, and they're trying to prohibit that type of stuff. So that's what we're looking to prohibit. It's more like four-wheelers and dirt bikes and things like that. Some of those things that, you know, if it's raining and the ground's a little bit soft and you're using those devices on park property, you can kind of tear it up pretty significantly. It's not really, I mean, just regular modes of transportation. I mean, like I said before, when Jason and I were talking about the issue about bicycles, it was kids ride their bicycle back and forth to the park every freaking day. And I'm fairly certain that's not what we were meaning to prohibit. It's more those motorized vehicles. be really precise about that.

And us dealing with lime and flow bird when they first started coming out, we did have them geo-fence our parks because it is worrisome about an 11- or 12-year-old just grabbing a... a scooter and running into people that are just out having a nice walk. So we have, when we're, I think the park board's intention, which we have our chair that's over here, when you start talking about motorized, that's Cheryl, by the way, when we have motorized vehicles, we were, anything that was run by a motor inside of a park. So you can ride your, yes, a scooter, unmotorized bike or scooter in a park's fine, but you start getting towards this motorized preferences, no, not to have those in a park.

With lime and bird, so when you say geofence, does that mean somebody could ride it to the park, they just can't ride it to the park? Correct.

Yeah, the internal parts of it, like they can basically, we would have them geofence. Most of our parks have a sidewalk border. When you start thinking, they can ride them up to the sidewalk, but as you start getting in the meat of the park or the main portion of the park where the amenities are, the scooter would shut off. I don't know how well they've done it, but that was at our request.

I can tell you it works really well. No, I experienced it in DC. I got too close to the Jefferson Memorial and the bike just stopped.

And we have people that, you know, they get paid to go charge them. They drop them off in weird areas and park maintenance. So we'll move them to the closest sidewalk.

Okay. Any other questions?

Not to be a smarty pants, but technically we just say no engines if we wanted to keep gas power off of it because the motor is electric and gas powered is an engine. I mean just wondering I know a lot of people don't realize that and then secondly I'm just gonna throw out there people have said time and time again they don't want people moved from their tent from one spot to another so I'm gonna support the parks people and go with the no camping and no fires and all that if that's what they think is best for the parks I mean We're trying to protect our parks. That way everybody will have a park that they can use. We spend a lot of money and maintenance on these parks. So if the parks people who oversee these parks think that this will help keep our parks better and at the same time kind of stop the pushing homeless people from one location to another and maybe actually making it to where we can just get a location for everybody to be, then I am highly in support of what... seeing this go forward.

At the request, we worked with the fire department to remove all our grills and things from the parks. We did have some very close incidences in the past couple years where fires inside barbecues did get out of control. We actually had a small fire at Andrews Park Pavilion that's on the west side. So we've been removing those. The question is, you can still barbecue, but you have to bring your own barbecue and you have to have a rental permit to go along of that pavilion to go along with that barbecue. Or that rental.

So homes that work for like Summer Breeze and Lions, we've got people bringing up little hibachis. It's a park rule.

I guess we go out there and trespass them. Maybe for a special use agency.

They were getting a permit to use the park anyways.

Okay. So this will be coming back at some point for further considerations. Any other questions about it? Comments? All right. Then

and pick it back up after we're ready

Anyone?

What's that? I'm sorry?

The executive session is kind of time sensitive because of statutory time limits, so I can make it real brief if you don't mind. I don't know what the rules are about postponing, but we're not postponing.

Yeah, we'll be back tonight.

Yeah, we'll be back after this meeting is over. We're recessing next week.

We're just going to be here all night.

Which is exactly what she wanted to hear.

She's like, I can do it now in five minutes or in three hours in five minutes.

I'd like to.

We'll be back after the meeting. She can probably survive about three hours of sleep.

You know what I'm saying?

This is a good session.

Your calmness is nice.