City Council - Regular Meeting

Mr. Mayor, it's now 5 p.m. Are you ready to begin the meeting?

And we are.

Recording in progress.

Wonderful. Good evening and welcome to the regular meeting of the Petaluma City Council and Petaluma Community Development Successor Agency for Monday, June 8th, 2026. May we have a roll call, please?

Barnacle president. Cater Thompson here to Carly here now. Quint here shreds here. McDonald here we have a current.

Thank you so much. Tonight's our first order of business is a closed session, a conference with labor negotiators. And just to get the details straight, I'd like to ask our city attorney to read in.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. The council will confer with labor negotiators tonight in closed session under government code section 54957.6. The city's designated representatives are Peggy Flynn, City Manager, Brian Cochran, Assistant City Manager, Linda Lee, Deputy City Manager, and Charles Sakai with Salone and Sakai. The employee organizations that are subject of the negotiations are AFSCME Units 1, 2, and 3, PPMMA Units 4, 9, and 11, IAFF Unit 7, and PPSMMA Unit 10. Thank you.

Thank you. And as on all of our agendized items, we open for public comment on the item. And I'd like to ask our clerk to help us out with that.

We did not receive any.

And we should invite any public in the house forward. Can we read our messaging for that?

There's no one here for the closed session.

Thank you very much. And with that, we'll close public comment on the item. And we will move ourselves into adjourning to a closed session. And we'll return back at 6 p.m. to this room or as soon as we finish our business and can return. Thank you very much. We're now adjourned.

Mr. Mayor, it's 6 p.m. Are you ready to begin the meeting?

And we are ready to begin. Thank you. okay it uh we are recording and uh welcome all to the regular meeting of the petaluma city council and the community development successor agency for june 8th of 2026. don't forget if you wish to provide a comment on anything on our agenda tonight the general public comments are cards are in the back and please bring them to our clerk in the front when you filled them out and true for each item on the agenda as well I'd like to note that we do concurrent translations in multiple languages, and that information is on the QR code in the back of the room or listed on the agenda that you have with you. So with that, I'd like our clerk to take roll call for the evening.

Barnacle?

Present.

Cater Thompson? Here. DeCarli?

Here.

Now absent. Quint.

Here.

Schritz.

Here.

McDonnell.

Here.

We have a quorum.

Thank you very much. Let's all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And a moment of silence, please. As we begin tonight's agenda, I look up and down the dais and see whether any council member wishes to remove an item from tonight's agenda or modify. and not seeing so, then we adopt the agenda as you see it in your package, and we'll proceed into the meeting. We had a closed session just prior to this, and I'd like to invite our city attorney to explain the outcome of the closed session.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. There is no action to report tonight.

Thank you for the concise explanation. So, one of the great funds and honors that we have is to note proclamations to community members. And tonight, we have several. One to lead with is our National Gun Violence Awareness Month. And I'd like to invite Sam Ruby from Moms Demand Action, Gene Reed from the AAUW, and David Dodd from Unitarian Universalist Petaluma up to the front while we read this proclamation. And it reads, Whereas in America every day More than 300 people are shot and 117 are killed, and many more are traumatized by gun violence, and gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children and teens since 2020. Whereas gun violence and school shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, where we are 26 times more likely to be shot and killed than in any other high-income country. And whereas firearm violence is a preventable public health tragedy affecting communities across the United States, with research showing that common sense public safety laws can reduce gun violence. And whereas a national coalition of organizations has designated June as National Gun Violence Awareness Month to draw attention to this tragic reality and to demand life-saving changes. And whereas local groups like Moms Demand Action and the AAUW are advocating for common sense public safety laws through lobbying, community education, and programs like Be Smart. And whereas the City of Petaluma led the way by adopting in 2022 an ordinance 2008-31 to add regulations regarding safe storage of firearms in residences. And that action has led to similar ordinances being adopted in cities and school districts throughout Sonoma County. Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Kevin MacDonald, Mayor of Petaluma, along with all the members of the Petaluma City Council, do hereby proclaim June 20... 2026 as the 12th annual Gun Violence Awareness Month in remembrance of the victims of gun violence, and to renew our city's commitment to reduce gun violence, promote safe gun storage, and keep firearms out of the wrong hands, and encourage responsible gun ownership to help keep our communities and our children safe. Thank you for your work.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, council members, and fellow community members. My name is Sam Ruby. I am a proud Petaluman, a mother of two, and I'm honored to be standing here before you tonight representing the Petaluma chapter of Moms Demand Action. June is Gun Violence Awareness Month. A time when we pause to honor the lives lost, hold space for survivors, and recommit ourselves to the work of keeping our communities safe. The color orange, which supporters wear throughout this month, Padilla Pendleton, a 15-year-old Chicago girl who was shot and killed just one week after performing at President Obama's inauguration. Orange is the color hunters wear to say, don't shoot. And that's exactly the message we're sending this month and throughout every month of the year. Moms Demand Action was founded in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy by a mother at her kitchen table who was determined to turn her grief and despair into action. 13 years later, it has grown into one of the most powerful grassroots movements in the country because parents, educators, faith leaders, and neighbors across America decided that enough was enough. Here in Petaluma, our volunteers show up at the State Capitol, in conversations with local leaders, and in our schools and houses of worship, because we know that change happens at every level, including right here in this chamber. We are grateful to the Petaluma City Council for issuing this proclamation tonight. It matters. It sends a message to every family in this city that their lives and their children's lives are worth protecting. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Jean Reed, and I'm a member of AAUW Petaluma. AAUW has been working for opportunities for women and girls for nearly 150 years and has been active in Petaluma since the 1950s. We support public education, economic security for women, civil rights, and equity for all. So why is gun violence awareness important to AAUW? As in so many areas, women are disproportionately impacted by gun violence. Access to a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for our children and teens, more than cancer, more than car accidents. More than half of gun deaths are suicides, and having a gun at home triples that risk. Every death and injury introduces trauma to families, communities, and individuals. Our children are afraid to go to school. The impact of gun violence is not felt only by women, of course, but by all of us. Fifty-nine percent of American adults or someone they know has experienced gun violence in their lifetime. In contrast, I lived for many years in Japan, where guns are not common, where even the police don't carry guns. When we moved back to the United States in 1994, the cover of Time magazine that I saw on the coffee table in my parents' home showed a nervous smoker surrounded by guns pointing at him. This is the actual cover. While I understood immediately that the image was meant to indicate that smoking was becoming unaccepted, I was deeply disturbed by the underlining assumption that it's okay to try to solve a problem by using guns. It doesn't have to be this way. We can do background checks and control gun sales. We can require safe storage. California has good gun laws. But right now, there are new threats. There is actually opposition to restricting 3D printed guns. There's a proposal to allow guns to be sent to anyone through the mail. There's a movement to allow individuals to carry concealed weapons based on laws in their home state, even when that is prohibited locally. We need to strenuously protect the laws we have and to strengthen and expand them. I'm proud that the Petaluma City Council created a safe storage ordinance. As our elected officials, you have the authority and the responsibility to make sure that we have sensible gun safety standards. I encourage you to take steps to ensure that all Petalumans are aware of our gun safety regulations and to expand them and make our community a safer and a better place to live. Thank you.

Good evening Council Members and Mayor. My name is David Dodd and I am the current President of the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalists of Petaluma. Three years ago this past week, we hosted a gathering of faith leaders and community leaders from across Petaluma and launched a campaign we call Ring Out Danger. On the first Friday of each month since that inaugural gathering, places of worship across town and around the county and beyond as far away as Atlanta, Georgia, join in tolling their church bells, blowing their shofars, and making sacred noise to commemorate those lost to or wounded by gun violence. We begin at 9.35 a.m. and toll our bells for five minutes in observation of the time of the Sandy Hook school shootings. We invite all who oppose the senseless and violent epidemic to join us on any first Friday of the month, either at your own place of worship or at UUP, corner of 5th and B Streets. It is becoming increasingly difficult in these times to feel safe in gathering in any venue, including in places of worship, which have increasingly become targets of gun violence. Gun violence is a civil rights issue, therefore, as the fear of being shot makes it more and more difficult to exercise our constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of assembly and freedom to worship as we choose. I call on people of faith across all religions to join us in finding a way to end this stain on our nation. And thank you to the city for this proclamation, recognizing June as Gun Violence Awareness Month in Petaluma. Thank you.

Thank you. We also have tonight a proclamation for Pride Month, and I'd like to invite up Robin Riley, Board of Directors from Petaluma Pride, to the podium to accept the proclamation. Whereas the mayor and honorable members of the Petaluma City Council, the governing body of Petaluma, do hereby unite in solidarity and have common purpose to recognize, honor, and celebrate the diversity, shared humanity, and civil rights of our entire community and all its residents, And whereas each of us was born in the world the way we are and should live, be able to live, without fear, prejudice, discrimination, violence or hatred based on our race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation, And whereas the Petaluma community includes people of all ages and races who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or asexual, and each of us should have the same unalienable equal rights, benefits, and responsibilities that are shared and enjoyed by all. And whereas the history of the world has shown that continued human progress and the success of society and civilization is built on the foundation of inclusiveness and acceptance. Whereas embracing our differences helps to fulfill the principles and creeds written into the founding documents of our great nation. in that our individual destinies and those of our families and communities include not only the aspiration of our federal constitutional republic, but the support and success of all our citizens in realizing the fulfillment of its promise. Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Kevin McDonald, Mayor of Petaluma, along with the members of the Petaluma City Council, do hereby proclaim June 2026 as Pride Month in the City of Petaluma and encourage all our residents to join together in honoring our diversity and community. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. We would like to present this inclusive, so intersex inclusive progress flag as a gift from us to the city of Petaluma. This flag is the most recent rendition, if you will, and it has intersex, the circle represents intersex people. Excuse me. Thank you so much for this opportunity and good evening. Good evening, everyone. Pride Month is often viewed as a celebration of the joy we share in the resilience of our community and in working together in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. I'm going to back up and say I'm currently the president of Petaluma Pride. My name is Jennifer. Beginning as a protest against discrimination and violence directed at LGBTQ people, pride is a reminder that liberation is something we must continue to fight for together, all of us. Marsha P. Johnson said, there's no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us. And she wasn't just speaking about trans people, and I believe she wasn't just speaking about LGBTQ people. Racist and sexist stereotypes influence imposed norms and form the basis for laws. And we have witnessed transgender, non-binary, and intersex people facing escalated attacks framed as debates about gender. But at their core, they are about control. The control over people's bodies, identities, and personal decisions. And they affect the ability of our neighbors to participate safely in public life. We've seen that same desire for control in discussions about reproductive freedom, whether someone is seeking gender-affirming care, making decisions about pregnancy, or simply living authentically in their own body. The underlying principle is the same. People deserve autonomy over their own bodies and personal decisions. The harm of rigid gender norms affects everyone, extending far beyond the trans community. When society imposes narrow ideas about who people should be, anyone who falls outside of those expectations becomes a target. Black and Latina women have always been disproportionately subjected to having their gender questioned and their bodies scrutinized because, again, racist and sexist stereotypes define womanhood through this narrow lens. At the same time, boys, men, and other people assigned male at birth are often pressured by toxic expectations of masculinity, discouraging vulnerability, emotional expression, caregiving, and authentic self-expression. These rigid standards confine us all to narrowed societal norms with regards to our freedom and humanity. As a school psychologist, I can't help but thinking about how we talk about ACEs, which are Adverse Childhood Experiences, They are linked to long-term risks for health and well-being. So thinking about how we raise our children regardless of their gender, of their identity, thinking about how they perceive themselves in this world matters long-term. Pride reminds us that our struggles are connected. The fight for trans rights, reproductive rights, racial justice, and liberation is ultimately a fight against systems that seek to control our bodies and enforce conformity. Alok, a gender non-conforming trans-feminine award-winning poet, comedian, actor, LGBTQ advocate, says that the debate transcends gender, that trans people are targeted because we have a different definition of not just gender but about what love is. We are taught that we have to betray certain parts of ourselves to belong, and trans people remind us that we don't have to betray ourselves to belong. What if we not only thought of pride as a way to accept LGBTQ people, but rather a way to open up the awareness and the idea that we can embrace a reality? Sorry, we can embrace the richness of our uniqueness. Our race, our culture, gender, socioeconomic status, ability, the way we conform or reject conforming, we can embrace that all while moving through this world. Our goal is not simply tolerance but liberation. A world where every person can define themselves, make decisions about their own body, and live with dignity, safety, and respect. All of us in Petaluma Pride want to relay a message that we know to be true, The closer trans people are to being truly free, the closer we all are. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. That moves us to general public comment for the evening. And during general public comment, the public's invited to make comments on items of general public interest that are not listed on the current agenda, but are matters of the council's subject matter jurisdiction. Public comments are limited to three minutes per person, and depending on the number of persons wishing to address the council, time will be allocated in equal shares, totaling no more than 20 minutes. If we have more than 20 people wishing to speak, the additional comments will be heard after the last business item on the agenda. And I'd like to invite our clerk to let us know whether we've had any emails ahead and then to move into messaging for people in person.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We've had 12 general public comments and they've been posted to the online agenda packets. At this time, I will start a 30-second clock for general public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Let's see, we have seven cards tonight. And at seven cards, it'll be setting the clock at two minutes, if you will, please, Madam Clerk. And our first speaker is Robin Riley, to be followed by Chantel Rogers.

All right, taking off one hat, putting on another. Hello, City Council, City staff, fellow members of the public. I'm Library Commissioner Robin Riley, and today I want to offer a brief update on the Petaluma Library. First, I want to note for everybody's benefit that July 11th of this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Petaluma Library at its current location. And there will be programming on the day of that everybody is invited to, and there will be programming throughout the month to celebrate this. This also marks 148 years of having a free public library in Petaluma. And to me, that is a wonderful tradition in the public good and an opportunity for us to all reflect on what the common good should look like in practice as society changes. Second, I briefly want to note that we've just closed out a record-breaking recruitment period for the Petaluma Library Advisory Board, or LAB. We received 20 applications to fill seven seats and are set to have the most energetic and diverse LAB in its history starting in July. For those who we were not able to appoint to the LAB, we've appointed one to the Measure Y, soon to be Measure W, oversight committee, and referring the rest to the Friends of the Petaluma Library. I just want to give a shout-out to the people specifically. We have Tim May and Emily Roeder returning to the lab, followed by new members Leonard Sbrocco, Courtney Riemann, Peggy McClanahan, Jameson Bunn, and Megan Ancheta. Lastly, we have Nicole Borshin, who is going to be joining the Oversight Committee to ensure that taxpayer funds are used appropriately in service of the community and libraries. I thank them all for stepping up to serve their communities and look forward to reporting on their good work.

Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Chantal Rogers, to be followed by Maureen Gottsall.

Good evening. As we are approaching July 1st, when virtual comment via Zoom will be reinstated, I'd like to revisit the idea of expanding virtual participation to other city meetings. Opening up comments to residents who cannot, for whatever reason, participate in person would really expand the diversity of feedback given and could really enhance collaborative opportunity. I remember that the last time I brought this up, there was some interest, but also concerns about additional cost. I'd like to be able to quantify those additional costs. How much more does it actually cost to have someone at meetings to facilitate Zoom comments? And might you consider that expense to be a reasonable cost to expand citizen participation? Lots of meetings are actually canceled and so would not be considered in any expansion. If the cost burden would be too great, maybe a portion of meetings could open up this possibility, say the first meeting of each quarter or some other determined subset of meetings. It would be much appreciated if you would explore any options to open up commission and committee meetings to greater interaction with the Petaluma public. That would be democracy in action.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Maureen Gottschall, to be followed by Jennifer Boyle.

Good evening. I would like to suggest a few best practices for transparency on projects in development and in construction, on financial reporting and ordinance changes. On the consent calendar and regular agenda items, we often receive a one-page memo and an amendment written in legal language that takes real effort to decipher. That's a heavy lift for council juggling dozens of issues and harder still for the public. So I'd like to propose three simple standards for projects and development or construction, a continuous dashboard attached to every related agenda item. Many of these projects were first proposed years ago, so it should show that full history, the original proposal estimate, any changes to estimate and scope, and the original budget for equipment, labor, and contractors. one snapshot of when it began, what changed, and where it stands today. This should be included even when the item is simply hiring a contractor, so we can see the full picture first, then dial in the specific item up for discussion. For financials, any budget data cited in an item should include a snapshot of the relevant pages, not just a reference to the budget document. Council shouldn't have to hunt for separate documents to see full picture. For ordinance changes, a simple spreadsheet showing the current ordinance, the proposed change, its purpose, and its direct and indirect impacts. This is not extra work. It's information staff already gathered in preparing the memo. We are just asking simply to show your work in a spreadsheet as well. I ask council to direct staff toward establishing these types of guidelines when presenting consent items and agenda items for improving transparency and efficiency. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Jennifer Boyle to be followed by Tim Porteus.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council, City staff. Abuse. There is no way to sugarcoat the assault on every mobile park resident by the bad actor mobile park owners in Petaluma and just about every city they own in. In the last month, straight to our doors is intimidation, coercion, campaigns of retaliation because they can't win in courts. They can't win in arbitrations or in the court of public opinion either. Unlawful increases upon sale of ground rents has been happening under a defined city of Petaluma allowable increase ordinance that does not allow almost 400 to a $900 increase. The city has a rent stabilization ordinance that is very clear. There are no boundaries these bad actor large investment groups, park owners, won't take by using extortionist managers, by greed and gouging owners and the co-conspirators they use that don't even live in a mobile home or in some cases don't even live in Petaluma. They aren't just coming to take out the residents. They are coming to take out the council, the nonprofits, and anyone that stands in their way of gouging. For their co-conspirators, they use payback for us standing up to ridiculous recalls for standing against 340% increases for fighting gregarious litigation against us all. Fake calls to get cars ticketed and towed in Littlewoods.

Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Tim Porteous to be followed by Kelly Walker. Kelly Walker Oh, just started.

Thank you.

Tim Porteous Counsel. Fake calls to get cars ticketed and towed in Littlewoods. A third arbitration against Capri in two years when the last was dismissed for not having a base year or a meet or greet in attempt to fight a lawful ordinance by the city of Petaluma over a year and a half too late. unlawful business practices, consumer fraud in marketing, sales and rules, reduction of services simply because residents won't sign unlawful waivers or unlawful age rules, a tax on our right to organize and our right to litigate against frivolous lawsuits and arbitrations. We will never allow them to choose who our leaders we have chosen are. They send anonymous letters to avoid detection. We the residents throw these in the garbage where they belong or place them in shredded in drop boxes in the parks. Abuse unchecked is increasing to a point that could give tragic and has results. After the recent evil assault, we were not kidding when we said we will get even louder. We implore you to help us stop this. If residents submit that they are one step closer to homelessness, if anyone lets a senior or vulnerable resident give up laws and protections to stop the abuse, there is something very wrong with giving a business owner that type of leverage over the most vulnerable. Given permission for that business practice to continue under any guise of bringing residents to the table is another assault on us.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Kelly Walker to be followed by Tina Yonkers.

Right there and then you're there.

Thank you. Can't see you with that. I can't go out. This can simply not be okay. We told you we will not be silenced because we are one voice. No to greed. No to abuse. No to extortion. No to coercion. No to mental torture. No to unlawful business practices. No to unchecked violations by management. As a recent court case in federal court was dismissed, they screen takings and are shown they bring fervorless, malicious litigation with the intent to bleed residents and cities dry in legal fees. The taking is what is happening to we, the residents. The weaponization the park owners use must be stopped before it is too late for the most vulnerable. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Our last speaker is Tina Yonkers. Thank you very much. And that closes public comment for the evening. And I'd like to bring it back up to our council for council comments this evening. And tonight I'll start to my right with Council Member Barnicle. No comments. Thank you. Thank you. And Council Member Cater-Thompson.

Great. I thought I had a few minutes. I was at my Sonoma County Transportation Climate Action meeting today, and there's just a lot of discussion on EV bikes, what's happening. And at the state level, there's a lot of legislation moving forward and being created to address that. kids on bikes and driving dangerously, as we're all seeing. Our police department's doing a great job, but there's just so many kids out there with all of these bikes. I am seeing kids with more helmets than I have seen in a long time, which is good, but you're still seeing kids without helmets, and adults also. And so that's something that's coming through the state. We're also, let's see, what else did we talk about? There was a lot. Talking about the mascot study, which is the new bus system that's being coordinated with the SMART. And there's probably not going to be a lot of changes with the mascot and the timing that the buses come into Sonoma County, but there's concern about changes Route 51, which goes to Cotati and then to Santa Rosa, and we'll be addressing that within the year to make sure those services are still available. And I think it's just kind of like a learning curve to see how this new process is going to work as far as transportation. A lot of cuts in transportation just in general, and we're really trying to keep afloat, making sure that everybody has access The needs, SMART is up about 30% almost like every month. You're seeing more people using public transportation because of the cost of gas. And I just received, there's a, it's really something that people should be looking at. Let me see if I can find this, which, this is important. It's just from a press release from Attorney General Bonta announces. And they're expecting, like, you know, next year, 3.4% increase in costs just for food. Gas and electricity, everything's going to be going up. And then here we, the mobile home park people, you keep coming and thank you for coming because you're really talking about everybody. It's not just about you. Everybody's being affected. And keep it in the forefront. So I am worried about the community in general, even though we're a quote, more wealthy community. We have a lot of vulnerable people here, and this is why we need to protect them. And housing is so important, and we just need to kind of open our hearts to the fact that People need to be housed. We have an urban growth boundary, and we don't want to, you know, grow out into the rural areas. We want to have more infill, and we need to protect the people that live here and bring more people in who wants to enjoy our town. Anything else? I have graduations this week. My granddaughter's graduating from UCSD, and the other one's graduating from high school. Thank goodness. And it's Karen Now's birthday tomorrow, so she's not here tonight, and so happy birthday to Karen.

Thank you. Vice Mayor DeCarli.

Good evening, everybody. For airport, we discussed the runway closure period. They're going to be doing some construction out there in the next couple months, or most of this summer anyway. I do have to give a big thank you to staff, and specifically Gina Benedetti, who was able to take that time down from 23 days total of closure down to 10. So from June 22nd to the 26th, The airport will be shut down, and July 13th to the 17th, it will also be shut down. We also have our new airport manager starting. I think he's already started. We'll be meeting him soon. Just got an introduction email from him today. So that's great news. We have a new airport manager that everybody's really excited about. A lot of the commissioners are excited about, so that'll be a great thing out there. At Parks and Rec, We were kind of given a whole big rundown of everything that's happening this summer and throughout the rest of the year. You know, specifically for the pools, they're fully staffed now with instructors. They're going to have lots of classes this summer. The Petaluma Peeps, they have gotten the requested time slot that they would like to have for swimming. So thank you to those that made that happen. And they're very happy now. Over at the Senior Center, there's a lot of program expansion over there and activities happening. a new lion dancing program, lots of good food crafts and social services going on. And then over at the fairgrounds, you know, we have, well, that's coming up here pretty soon. And there's going to be some new headliners there. And then we did talk about the budget a little bit, which was discussed here, you know, last month. But, you know, Parks and Rec did lose $1.6 million. They had to freeze seven spots and, you know, You know, they were able to maintain emergency level reserves. You know, part of their budget was this is the first time the city is running year-round aquatics. And then, you know, they did have to cut things like luma ice. So I think in total now it's lost around $600,000 or so since that began. And then part-time seasonal staff reduction. And so those were kind of the big updates that we got at Parks and Rec from that budget meeting. And then also since the last meeting was a groundbreaking of the skate park. And so that's underway now. And that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Quint.

Thank you. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Eagle Scout Court of Honor, where Shea Tamura was promoted to Eagle Scout. Attending this event gave me a renewed appreciation for the work that the scouts do in our community. Last Wednesday's PBAC meeting, we had a presentation scheduled on the Petaluma River Greenway project from the Friends of the Petaluma River. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and it will be rescheduled. But not all was lost because staff had quite an extensive update. Just to name a few of the things that was talked about, there was a grant award announcement for the 26-27 Transportation Fund for Clean Air Corporation. excuse me, clean air call for projects. Petaluma Transit was awarded $160,000 for the Petaluma North Smart Shuttle, and Public Works was awarded $435,000 for about a half a mile of sidewalk and bike gap improvements That will fund a sidewalk gap improvement on North McDowell near the cottages. It'll replace a heavily used gravel gap section of pathway next to the airport and pedestrian walkway improvements at the fairground parking lot. So, you know, we continue to see staff working to, you know, these are all like little things that on their own they don't really get a lot of attention. But when you start putting them together, they start making a difference. And then there was also a thing that I thought was pretty cool. The city is announcing a naming nomination process for the multi-use trail on the east side of town. If any of you have been over there, it's the trail that runs from Casa up to the Junior High along the airport. I think it's commonly referred to as the Ring Trail. And so there's going to be a naming, I guess, contest where people get to submit what they want it to be named. And so that'll be really cool. Last week I participated in the Casa Grande Capstone interviews. I spent Memorial Day attending the ceremony at Cypress Hill Memorial Park. I had the honor of participating in the American Legion's rifle squad. That was pretty cool. It took me back to my military days. I'm excited to announce that the Sonoma County Library Admin Office will be moving to the Petaluma location. Is that true? The Sonoma County Library Admin Office will be relocating to a Petaluma location on McDowell north of Old Redwood Highway. And lastly, I want to wish my son good luck at his baseball game tonight. He's pitching against a very tough Petaluma American League team, which is Karen Now's league. She's Petaluma American. I'm Petaluma Valley. So if you saw me peeking at my phone, I was just trying to... So far, he's struck out nine and walked two. So that's all I have. Thank you.

And this is what you get with district elections. And I'm sorry that our library commissioner, who was in the front row, has stepped out just at the same time you were making that announcement. Good news. Council Member Shrimps.

Thank you. Amongst all the just regular meetings, no new information. However, I was invited by a local group, the environmentally concerned folks, to visit with a scientist from Washington, D.C., who specializes in electromagnetic spectrum impacts, named Theodore Scarato. He's written books and lots of scientific manuscripts, which I was given to read, to look over. And so after discussions with her, with the group, the basic information is this. Yes, there has been some concerns about like G5 or 5G towers and what's happening there with electromagnetic spectrums coming down. So a couple of things just as reminders. The U.S. has the highest allowed levels for electromagnetic spectrum of all the world. And so we have the highest levels currently. But there is what's coming is 6G and even 7G coming down the line, which is going to be a lot stronger wavelengths. The federal government is going to be pushing this forward. And because it's higher energy and more wavelengths, And sometimes even focused, even their thing theoretically, laser beam level to all the autonomous vehicles, robots, and smart gadgets in everybody's home. So when that happens, the level will be increased tremendously when we move up to G5, G6, G7 eventually. So just as a warning as to just look out for that, lots of research is being done right now on not just humans, but animals and plants, and they are finding some results or some changes from this very high levels of electromagnetic spectrum or radio wave frequency type of spectrums that are coming at us. So just to have an awareness, so down the road as things come forward, that there is research that's being done on this topic and we need to be paying attention. So that's that one. Then I just want to thank everyone. We've measure B passed for supporting SMART. We have two SMART stations here in town. So thank you everyone for supporting SMART with the measure B and continuing the funding of that for a long time. That's really going to help us out, especially at the North Station moving forward. Then a comment was made about the Zoom participation, which we're going to have here at the council. And I would also support adding at least the commissions at this point, because we have at least a few commissions, which are higher level than committees, which have staff and council member participation, which are more important committees with maybe larger and dealing with larger issues. So I would continue to support, yes, we can maybe move in that direction. So with that, thank you.

Thank you very much for my report. I attended this month's homelessness coordination meeting at the county. There's so much coming down with state budget reductions and whatnot. The impacts on CalFresh, SNAP, and also Medi-Cal are going to be huge come end of year here. I joined our economic development director, our new economic development director, Catherine DiPasco, who represented the city in front of the Chamber of Commerce about where we're headed with our plan. And she'll be helping with the workshop at our next council meeting. So that's going to be very exciting. And I think with most of the council, I attended a skate park groundbreaking. None of us missed groundbreakings. We all show for groundbreakings. But I also joined Janice Cater-Thompson and the SCTA team, that's Sonoma County Transit, and SMART staff in biking, evaluating the Redwood Bike Share Program. You see the white bikes on corners. They're trying to get the data together to find out whether that program can be continued. It's a pilot, and so it has to have the right participation. And I also attended, got to speak at the Memorial Day Ceremonies at Cypress Hill Cemeteries. And a big shout out to Councilmember Quint, who is there. and also helped out with the Casa Grande Capstone. We seem to be in all the same places. Capstone project for graduating seniors there. I did help with the pride flag raising at the Petaluma Library and I got to speak to the seniors at the Petaluma People Service Cafe 2011 about a state of the city and how it impacts with our senior community. We also tended to measure O oversight. Measure O is mental health at the county level. We pay a tax on that. And it's one of the things that supports our smart, our safe teams in Petaluma. And safes have just been a tremendous benefit in town. and a number of other meetings. And I just wanna shout out that it is really fun to see Eagle Scouts and other youths like the Casa Grande Copstone achieving. And so several of us show up for our community whenever there's activities like that. And with that, I'd like to pass on over to our, it would be remiss if I didn't say I'm excited about the fair, which is our next big thing coming up.

I'm so glad you mentioned that, Mayor, council, community, and staff. June 18th through the 21st, if you go to PetalumaFairgrounds.com, you can buy your all-inclusive ticket that includes the rides, the entertainment, the livestock and still exhibits, and so much more. Food is extra, but everything else is included in the ticket price. Also want to provide another airport update. On June 21st, the Petaluma Area Pilots Association will host its annual summer bash at the municipal airport. This is very similar to their display days, but kind of on steroids. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., it drew, last year, it drew like 1,500 attendees. It's free. It features historic aircraft. and family-friendly events showcasing the airport as a community asset, promotes aviation education, and provides residents an opportunity to experience aviation up close, and would encourage all to attend. And then, also wanted to recognize, thank you, Vice Mayor DeCarli, Dash Phillips is our new airport marina manager who started today, and he brings strong experience in airport operations, facility management, regulatory compliance, most recently served as a general manager at Skyshare at Noss Field Airport in Novato. We're super excited to have him on board. He is just full of experience and super excited to serve our community. And finally, wanted to acknowledge and give a brief update regarding the temporary closure of the pedestrian walkway along the wharf at the rear of the Great Petaluma Mill near 24 Hour Fitness. A portion of the walkway was temporarily closed on May 18th due to worsening site conditions and concerns related to ped safety. Portions of the walkway and adjacent wood fence had deteriorated to the point where safe passage was compromised. So this temporary closure includes fencing and detour signage directing the public to go around the building on Petaluma Boulevard. And city staff are actively coordinating with the adjacent property owner to address both short-term safety measures and potential longer-term solutions. So that's ongoing. And that concludes my comments for this evening. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you very much for all that. It's a busy time. This moves us to our consent calendar for the evening. And there's some 17 items on the consent calendar tonight. But one has been withdrawn, item 13, the hardened water tank has been withdrawn from tonight. So we'll only be reviewing the others. And I'd like to ask if any council member wishes to pull any of the items from the consent calendar.

I don't know that I have any I wish to pull, but items, what is it, 15 and 16, they're both related to the PIPS project, and it seems like we might be doing things a little bit out of order by, you know, later in tonight's meeting, we're supposed to approve the money, but the agenda items that we're approving here in consent, and items 15 and 16, essentially say it's already approved and done. So it seems like...

I do hear what you're saying. And before we invite staff in, I'd like to suggest the item 16 is the second reading on the easements. And, of course, the easements come before you award a contract. So I see that easements are necessary and it's a second reading. And 15 also, second reading, that's the budget in general, the appropriations in general. And when we adopted the budget, we kind of adopted all these. Do you want to ask a more specific question of staff?

Maybe just an explanation because it's, like I said, in 15 and 16, it's in there as if it's already approved and done, and we're doing that tonight. So maybe just an explanation on that if possible.

And who would like to respond from staff?

City attorney. I'll start, Mr. Mayor, and if Paul's here or other team members, they're welcome to chime in. So I do think that the sequence that you're seeing, that the council's seeing in the public is correct in the consent calendar. And that is, as the Mayor just correctly explained, we need to make sure we have the needed right-of-way for the project limits before we can award a contract to work in those project limits. It's conceivable that we could get the right-of-way and not get approval or funding for the project, but it's not conceivable that we could proceed with the project with funding without the needed right-of-way. So I think that sequence is correct. The mayor already addressed the budget, the overall city budget that the council has acted on already. And tonight's item later on the agenda, not on consent, about... debt financing for the project there's a great deal of detail in that item there'll be a praise presentation on that item as to why that's important for the um for the wastewater enterprise not just for the pips project but essential for the pips project and that is the correct sequence too because in order for us to be able to award a project which will come back to the council at a subsequent meeting we need to have have funding for the project That's an essential feature of public works contracts in order for them to be valid. So I think the sequence is right. I'd be happy to answer if there are further questions. Thank you. No, not on that.

Okay. Good. So then with that, are there any other questions of staff from the council on the consent calendar? And seeing none, I'd like to move it over to public comment, and I'll ask the clerk to fill us in.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We've had one comment on item number 16 and it has been posted to the online agenda packet. At this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not done so already. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Okay, there. That closes public comment. I see no cards. Then that closes public comment on the consent calendar. I'll bring it on back up to the dais.

I'll go ahead and move.

And we have a motion from Cater Thompson. And I'll go ahead and second the motion. And we have a second from Council Member Shribbs. And any other comments before we go to roll call vote? And roll call vote, please.

Barnacle?

Aye. Aye.

Kater Thompson, yes. Decarly, yes. Quint, yes. Schritz, yes. McDonnell, yes. Motion carries.

Thank you. And I'll note that that motion was for all items except the one I noted, Poll 13. So just to make sure the record's clear on that. And now we move to our public hearings, matters for consideration. We have a resolution to appoint individuals to city committees and commissions. By the way, this is such important work in the community. If you're a volunteer, thank you. If you can twist an arm of a volunteer, thank you for helping being on the recruiting team. And with that, I want to pass it over to our city clerk to introduce the topic.

Yes, I'll do a brief presentation. So good evening, mayor and council and members of the public. This is our annual appointments to our city commissions, committees and boards. So, just for some background this year, we had 24 open seats and that actually only included 1 vacated seat, which is excellent news. That means that people are staying all the way through their terms, which is great. We so appreciate our volunteers. The recruitment was open from April 6 through May 21st, and we received 48 applicants applications for those 24 seats. In terms of outreach, we had our amazing comms team did some posts on our social media pages, the city's website. We had announcements in the community update and during the city manager's comment during Council meetings. And we did a lot of direct outreach to folks who had expressed interest in CCB in the past. And we also had some wonderful help from our community partners helping to spread the word. And Council, of course, does a great job helping spread the word as well. So that's basically it. I open it up for comments from council and then we'll kick it over to public comment and then I'll bring up the slides to do the voting.

Okay, so any questions from council? Seeing none, let's open public comment and read the messaging and announce if any emails.

So we've had one comment online and it has been posted to the online agenda. Members of the public attending in person should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so. Speakers are reminded to be respectful in their comments and that this meeting is being translated. Please pause between sentences. for translation. At this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to bring their speaker card should bring their cards up to the clerk's desk if you've not already done so. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

We have three speaker cards tonight. Our first speaker is Zachary Mead, to be followed by Catherine Lidden.

Good evening, Marin City Council members. My name is Zachary Mead, and I'm an applicant for the current Open Planning Commission seat. My wife and I purchased a home in Petaluma last year, a lifelong dream and using every penny we had. Here we will raise our two young girls in the public school system, use smart train to commute to work in Marin, and make this amazing city our home. We absolutely love it here. It's beautiful and vibrant. I'm also a licensed architect. I spent the past 20 years dedicating my career to the design of innovative, thoughtful, climate resilient, and economically viable buildings. I have extensive knowledge of the California building code, residential code, energy code, green building standards code, and have permitted projects in over a dozen jurisdictions in California. I've worked with owners, developers, structural engineers, geotechnical consultants, city planners, and building officials. I've stood in the dirt prior to foundation pours and on top of newly constructed rooftops. I understand how zoning policy shapes buildings and affects the real-world fabric of our city. But none of this is as important as the reality that this commission appointment coincides with four of the five remaining years of our current housing element. Though our current Community Development Department is doing wonderful work, we are just barely on track for our 1910 dwelling unit target as of the May 4 staff report. I've seen in other jurisdictions what happens when housing mandates slip and the state reduces discretionary control, essentially allowing for free-for-all development. We do not want that to happen in Petaluma. Instead, we want to maintain control of the continued evolution of our city by encouraging development. Our planning team has done a wonderful job with the pending updated general plan. As that macro analysis transitions into zoning ordinance updates, let's encourage thoughtful and innovative development within our urban growth boundary. Let's provide permit-rated drawings for ADUs, especially as multiple and two-storey units will be allowed. Let's attack the missing middle by reviewing inclusionary requirements and in-lieu fees for small to mid-sized urban infill developments. Let's continue to improve our objective design standards by illustrating additional variations for our change of plane and window recess requirements to avoid monotony and allow for flexibility in construction costs. The Planning Commission will soon face a number of other tremendous opportunities, Let's encourage climate resilience strategies in the Petaluma North Smart Station PDA, including solar and shade orientation in consideration of existing sightlines. Let's ensure David Baker's team considers adaptive reuse concepts in the Fairgrounds Master Plan and sets the basis for an innovative resilience center combined community hub with no housing on that site. Look, I know I haven't been here for long, but I've watched many recent city council meetings and planning commission study sessions. I've done my homework, and I know the complexities that you face. I'm standing here because this commission appointment is an opportunity for me to expand beyond working just in the private sector and lend any experience and knowledge I have to this role. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Catherine Litton, to be followed by Robin Riley.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name's Catherine Ledan, and I am an applicant for the Climate Action Commission, and I just thought I would come and introduce myself to those of you who don't know me. I believe I have a lot to bring to the Climate Action Plan. I'm a former municipal finance lawyer who has spent most of my career working with local governments, state government, non-profits, to protect California's farmland and support local farmers. I live just outside the city limits on Eastman Lane, and I have a consulting practice that focuses primarily on agricultural land conservation, finance, and climate smart land management. I currently serve as the board chair for an organization called Zero Food Print, which works with local governments and up and down the food supply chain to engage everybody in funding regenerative agriculture. We also work with cities to help cities meet their compost procurement and mandates. So I have experience working in city government, not only in my law practice, but I was a planning commissioner for the city of Lafayette in Contra Costa County. I worked very closely with the city of Brentwood when I was the executive director of the Agricultural Land Trust there. And I was on the advisory committee of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. So I also want to mention that as an assistant director at the State Department of Conservation, I managed some of the state's climate programs, including the transformative climate communities and the sustainable ag management.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Our last speaker is Robin Riley.

Hello again, City Council. It was an honor to receive your vote of confidence and unanimous support in appointing me to the Library Commission back on March 2nd. I'm very pleased to say that this has already been, though short, a successful tenure in serving the library system and championing Petaluma in particular. For all there is that I could say, more than anything else, I want to highlight and uplift what Councilmember Quint reported on earlier. The most exciting thing that, in my view, that has happened is the approval to acquire 1400 North McDowell Street for the new headquarters of the Sonoma County Library. The deal is not yet done, but if all goes according to plan, operations will begin in September of 2027. And I want to note that this was not a universally loved proposal on the Commission. It was something that was debated at length. It's a big deal to acquire property, and people can understandably get uncomfortable with decisions of that scale, considering the financial implications. I want to highlight that as a former member of the General Plan Advisory Committee here, I was able to inform my fellow commissioners about the recommended zoning changes included in the draft 2050 General Plan, specifically that that parcel is slated to be zoned for mixed use and away from just sort of the industrial office park-specific zoning. That change, in giving more flexibility was extremely helpful for at least a couple of commissioners who were on the fence about that decision. They understand that that flexibility that we as a city are beginning to give more property owners creates more potential for how they can use that space, who they can partner with, and how they can really put that to use for the benefit of the community. While the headquarters is first going to be only facilities and administration, It has been pondered. Could we have an event space there to complement the library? The library is one of those places that provides free public event space. Could it also offer a mini library eventually? It's not in the plans right now, let me just be clear. I don't want to get anybody's hopes up. But it has been discussed as an eventual possibility because Petaluma has the single busiest library branch in the entire county. We serve a catchment area of 80,000 people, right? And long had people wanted an east side library. And one thinks about the folks in Pin Grove who have to choose between the Petaluma Library or the Cotati Runner Park Library. If we had something, say, out that direction, they'd have something in their backyard. or closer at least. So I just want to say, again, while the deal is not done, should this come to pass, this will bring jobs to Petaluma, be good for Petaluma residents, and I like the idea of more retail spend from other people in the county here in Petaluma. So thanks for your vote of confidence, and I'm excited about this proposal.

Thank you very much. That was our last speaker, and that closes public comments. I'll bring it back up to the dais. And before I explain... the rules by which we do all our voting. Any other comment before, and Council Member DeCarli?

I just have one quick comment. I know it makes things a little bit more efficient and easier to fill out the sheets ahead of time on who we'd like to vote for, but I think in the future we should wait and hear everybody that came to speak for themselves and wait to make our decisions out of respect for them so that they can, you know, that they can speak to us and say what they will.

I appreciate it. I think we all appreciate that. And we should note that though we filled in cards ahead, if at any point you want to say this is a vote I wish to change, we'll do that prior to calling it a final tally. You know, when we bring it up, we can make that point. Let's see. Okay, the rules. So appointments are going to be made if an applicant has a majority of council vote. Tonight, with six council members, it still means we need four votes. So that's one point. Council has submitted our first round, and the clerk has that ready to read. Any seats that are not resolved in that first round would need to go to a further round. And we'll consider each of these committees' commissions one at a time, with the clerk showing us that initial preliminary voting and then showing us that. And then the council will vote for the number of available seats for each CCB. If an applicant receives the majority of votes, they'll be appointed. In the case of a tie, they'll be a high tie, not a low tie. If it's just we can't decide the top end, then... we'll have an additional round with just those tied parties involved. If no applicants receive a majority, we'll do a second round of voting and include only those who received votes in the first round. If we do additional rounds of voting, we go until one applicant receives a majority. But we are not required to vote in any round Abstaining is permitted, and this may mean that a position is not filled due to lack of a majority vote. So the applicant with the largest vote total receives a longer term appointment. Some appointments are to fill a term one year, and some are for a full term, four years. The person with the highest vote count gets the long seat. In the case of a tie between a long seat and a short seat, we'll just do another round with just those two parties involved. So I think I've got our way. I think they got through the appointing part, the voting part. Let's see. I think we're back to you to lead off with our first committee.

Ask a question first.

And actually, that was a lot. Are there any other questions, Council Member Cater-Thompson?

Well, my question is, or I guess my comment is on, as an example, the Planning Commission. There were two applicants, but you have to be in the city limits within a year before you could apply. And so I just wanted that to be pointed out that Mr. Mead has only been here seven months, and so he does not qualify. But I just want to say that I really... We'll just see how the voting goes, but I just want to bring that up, that there is a...

I think we should clarify that before we get deep in. The rules are that you must be a year. If council wishes to direct staff to waive that, we could ask staff to come back at a different meeting with that waiver for us to vote on. but if we vote tonight on an applicant, it would only be for those eligible tonight, or the alternate is we direct to waive the rule, and then we don't appoint to the area of concern, and so not getting a majority would be not appointing, and we would continue. Then we would discuss the one-year part if you wanted to make a motion separately.

Well, I think what I'd like to recommend is I'd like to know why that was done, because it wasn't that many years ago, and maybe in the future bring that back for discussion if we think that's the right way to go and why we determined on a year. Because there are other things that you can move into Petaluma one day and then run for mayor or city council. And so there just seems to be a real discrepancy.

So I think I'll ask staff for clarification on how that rule got into place and what the current world status is.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for the question, Council Member Cater-Thompson. That's actually an original requirement in our Planning Commission enabling legislation from the 50s, and it's just been brought forward in all the amendments. Those kinds of waiting period requirements or durational residency requirements tend to reflect a desire on the part of the council for the candidate to have familiarity with the community and in particular regarding subordinate bodies with Local issues that they'll be considering potentially, and they're guiding regulations, et cetera, et cetera. But as the mayor's pointed out, it is the council that's legislative body that. Creates and on occasion. repeals legislation creating the subordinate bodies and the rules that govern them. There's no statutory requirement for that and arguably that those considerations could be better left to the council's discretion to take into account different kinds of qualifications that the council may weigh more heavily than, for example, just duration as a resident. So, as the mayor said, if it's the council's direction for us to come back with amended enabling legislation for the planning commission or other bodies with requirements like those we can definitely do that um there's a time factor because um the planning commission's enabling legislation is codified in the municipal code adopted by ordinance and that means it takes two readings in 30 days so about a total of two months um for that kind of a change but within the council's authority as the mayor noted um if the council prefers to wait and and to permit additional applications in the meantime or not um for staff to make changes to the legislation we can do that thank you

I'm not asking for that for tonight, but I would like to have that discussion at a later date, just as, you know, as a council to see where we want to go and actually look at, and I think it's, isn't the, if you run for mayor or city council, that's part of the charter. So that, so it's two different things. Is that correct?

So our elections generally, our districting, et cetera, are governed in the charter and there's implementing code provisions in the municipal code. The subordinate bodies, the creation of commissions, that have to have a council liaison and they have a maximum term limit, I think it's six years, are addressed in the charter, but otherwise they're a creature of the council's police power. And we also have committees that are not subject to those same restrictions. The council, you know, to hold elected office as a council member, that's governed by a city charter and by state law, and that requires being an elector in the city, et cetera. And the case law upholds Elector requirements, residency requirements for appointees to support their bodies too. But as I said, if we were to modernize the provisions that the council wanted to have that discussion, I would have an easy time in terms of the way the case law has evolved, et cetera, and I can provide more discussion about that when we talk about it. to suggest getting rid of that kind of a durational requirement and possibly replacing it or just leaving it to council discretion to waive, to waive qualifications.

Okay, thank you. I appreciate that, thanks.

Vice Mayor?

So if I understand you right, that I mean, I always thought that the charter was essentially written in stone unless something changed during a general election, you know, it was on the ballot, you know, a new charter. But somehow we're allowed to rewrite the language within?

No, changes to the charter require voter approval. But the charter doesn't specify that durational residency requirement. The enabling legislation for some of the bodies that the council has enacted does. And the council has the authority to change that legislation without a change to the charter.

Okay, and where does that language live? What document is that?

The rules governing Planning Commission eligibility. It's in Chapter 2.08 in the Municipal Code. A number of our subordinate bodies are actually codified in Title II, and those are the commissions. And a number are established by resolution, and those are committees. Okay. But the council has a lot of discretion, complete discretion regarding the committees and almost complete discretion regarding commissions as long as they have a council liaison and the term limit that's specified in the charter is preserved. And that's really all the charter requires regarding those. Okay.

Well, so while I do appreciate the applicant's desire to serve on the commission, I mean, other people applied for it as either their primary or secondary positions going in under the same rules. And so I would think that in this case, we have to respect that. And if a change is to be made at a later date, it can't be made here. And I think to try to postpone it by not getting a majority vote is maybe not the right thing to do.

Thank you. Noted. And as always, we encourage all applicants who are not selected to apply again in the next round. So back to the clerk.

Okay. So I will share the screen now. These are the initial votes. And as the mayor stated previously, these votes can be changed. I'll bring them up and we'll confirm everyone's comfortable with them before we move on. We'll start with airport commission. So these were the initial votes in it. Whoops. Sorry. There it is. It does look like we have some consensus on drew hugely and Colin Perry. They have currently unanimous votes. If everyone's comfortable with these two selections, we can move on to the next.

No objections, moving on.

Okay, great. So planning, sorry, Climate Action Commission, we did have some consensus. There was only one youth applicant, and she was unanimously selected, almost unanimously. But we do need... one more regular member. We only found consensus on two regular members, which is Jan Giroux and Ben Peters. So it looks like we'll need to do a second round of voting on this one. So for the second round, I'm going to delete the folks who have been voted in. And I'll also delete the folks who did not receive any votes. And we'll vote one more time. Council member barnacle and we're voting for one just for one because we don't have any more use applicants. So council member barnacle Jennings.

Jennings.

Smith. Jennings.

Jennings.

Sorry. And Council Member Scherz?

Lydon.

Okay. Sorry. Did I get everyone's votes correctly up there? Okay. It looks like we do have consensus on Christopher Jennings on this one. So just to confirm, the three regular members will be Christopher Jennings, Jan Giroux, and Ben Peters, and Noemi Blacklock as the youth member.

Okay.

Thank you very much. Climate or Historic and Cultural Preservation Committee, there was consensus on Caroline Hall, who was seeking reappointment. Is everyone comfortable with this selection? Okay. Planning Commission, in this initial vote, there was consensus on Christopher Neuschbauer, if everyone is comfortable with this initial vote. Okay. We will select Christopher Neuschbauer for Planning Commission.

Public Art Commission again we were able to have consensus in these initial votes with Mary song receiving 4 votes is everyone comfortable with this I'm I have a question on this and perhaps the paparazzi from appointment on airport things when it says that this he AC the film art council member is endorsed Is that a requirement that that person that their member be placed?

Yes. So this actually lives in, as Eric was talking about the enabling legislation of each of these committees or commissions, it lays out which members would be selected basically by a community group. And so these were the ones that were endorsed by these groups. I've marked that.

It kind of is a foregone conclusion, but council has some sort of leniency and historic committee, I think, has the same concern from the museum association and and so we are obligated to either. Or to no vote at all.

Correct.

Okay. Thank you.

So I will change my vote to Mary. Okay. Thanks. There's a little confused on that.

Okay, if we're comfortable with this selection, I'll move on. Next seat is public safety advisory committee. We're looking for three regular members. Through the first vote, we were able to find consensus on Marcus Holton. He received five votes. So it looks like we'll have to do another round. We're looking for two additional seats. So in this round, I will delete the folks who didn't receive any votes.

And that's when you're ready tell me there. So in this round we include anyone who received any votes.

But not a majority correct okay and we do need 2 seats here so vote for 2 please.

Particle valdo venos.

and I'm looking Nelson okay cater Thompson I'm going with Lorena Ramirez okay and Karina well no that's not right Danielle Nelson okay to Carly Kearney and Nistler

Okay. Quint?

Nelson and Ramirez. Okay. Shrives?

Ramirez and Nistler.

Okay. And McDonald?

Ramirez.

and Nelson okay so we were able to reach consensus on that one Danielle Nelson received 4 votes as did Lorraine Ramirez so just to confirm those 3 regular seats will go to Lorraine Ramirez Danielle Nelson and from the previous page Marcus Holton Okay. Senior Advisory Committee, we have three regular members and one vacated term, so a slightly shorter one. And we did have consensus on this one. The one question I have for you is that Dennis Posike and Roberta McLean both received the same number of votes, although Council Member Barnicle indicated he wanted the shorter term to go to Roberta McLean. Is everyone else comfortable with that or did we want to vote on

I'm comfortable. So I see that I mistakenly left one off. I would add my vote for McLean for the one-year seat.

For the one-year seat?

Yeah. Okay.

So is everyone comfortable then with Dennis Posigate, Melody Stewart, and Samantha Vance receiving the regular two-year terms and Roberta McLean receiving the one-year vacated term? okay something objections make it so okay I Sonoma County Library Commission and there was consensus on this with Robin Riley receiving 5 votes if everyone's comfortable with this okay you and Robin Riley will be the library commissioner Transit advisory committee, we were looking for 3 regular members and there was consensus on Michael Acton who received 5 votes. Dave Alden who received 5 votes and Eric Vasquez is a Gary who received 5 votes. Everyone's comfortable. We'll move on. Okay. Tree advisory committee we're looking for 3 regular members there is consensus on Eric McKee who received 6 votes and Patrick Shan who received 6 votes. But we'll still need a final member so we'll do a 2nd round on this. I will remove the folks who received. Receipt slips and then remove the folks who received no votes. So we'll vote one more time and you'll just be voting for one person this time. Barnacle?

Fishman. Fishman.

Okay. Fishman. Cater Thompson. Fishman. Okay. DeCarli?

Could you come back to me?

Sure. Quint?

Fishman.

Shribs?

I'm going to go with Mary Dooley.

Okay, McDonald.

Fishman.

Okay. Council member to Carly.

Did you duly?

Okay, thank you. That as Brian Fishman selected with 4 votes. And that is everything. So thank you very much. I'll update this PowerPoint and upload it to the website so anyone can view all of the votes. And then we're all done. Except we do need a motion on that.

Usually I'm the one forgetting to have the motion be made. So we have a motion by Cater Thompson. second and a second by barnacle and um we need a roll call vote for the entirety of our appointment barnacle hi cater thompson yes yes yes quaint yes

Shreds first history minor folks that did not get appointed tonight please participate we need more people to show up and to give their input and turns out those in sitting in the seats besides ones that may sit up here I have as much time and input and I listen to as much as anybody up here so please continue to join in wherever you apply to and I will continue that with a boy voted yes McDonald yes

motion carries unanimously thank you and there couldn't be a better way to end that item than that comment you made i certainly appreciate that and thank you staff for um Weaving us through all of that. Moving us to item 20, which is the urban water management plan, including the 2025 water shortage contingency plan, and delegating authority to staff to make minor non-substantive changes to it. And tonight we have Danielle, Danielle Favela. Mayor. Mayor, did we skip 19? Did we skip 19? Yep. We skipped 19. We were moving fast today. So, you know how I missed 19? I'll never know. But we have, tonight, we have a report coming in to receive and review the 2025 Independent Police Auditor IPA Annual Report covering the period January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025. And I'm glad to welcome Jeff Schlanger and Denise Lewis from IntegraSure to walk us through this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, council, staff. It's a pleasure to be here this evening. Again, my name is Jeff Schlanger. With me is Denise Lewis, and we have a presentation, and we're getting it up. There we go. So tonight we will be presenting or I will be presenting the 2025 annual report of the Office of the Independent Police Auditor for the City of Petaluma. There was a written report which was submitted April 15th, and this is the PowerPoint synopsis of that report. It covers the period of January 1 through December 31 of 2025, and our purpose tonight is to summarize the major findings, identify areas of progress, note areas where refinement remains appropriate, and place this year's work in the broader context of continuous improvement. At the outset, I want to emphasize that the Petaluma model of independent police auditor is one of independent oversight carried out in a collaborative, professional, and improvement-oriented manner. Can we go to the next slide, please? One of the most important developments during this reporting period was the permanent codification of the IPA role in the Petaluma Municipal Code. That action institutionalized independent oversight as a permanent feature of city government rather than something dependent solely on contract. This was significant for several reasons. First, it reflects the city's commitment to transparency, accountability, and community trust. Second, it provides continuity and stability for the oversight function. Third, it reinforces that independent review is intended not merely to identify problems, but to help sustain best practices over time. In our view, this was the single most significant institutional development of the year. Next slide, please. This slide reflects the philosophy behind our work. Traditional auditor models often focus primarily on completed investigations of misconduct or complaints after the fact. The Petaluma model is broader and more proactive. In Petaluma, the IPA reviews 100% of uses of force, displays of force, pursuits, and complaint investigations, regardless of whether a complaint was made, obviously, except for complaint investigations. That makes the process less reactive and more preventative. It functions as a real-time early warning and improvement mechanism. The aim is not simply to determine whether misconduct occurred, but to identify even small issues early, reinforce good performance, refine tactics and supervision, and support non-disciplinary improvement whenever appropriate. In short, the Petaluma model is designed to improve performance continuously, not merely to adjudicate failures. Next slide, please. This slide shows the broader three-year trend data. Across the three-year period, calls for service, arrests, citations, and complaints all trended downward. Use of force declined substantially from 2023 to 2024, and although modestly higher in 2025 than in 2024, that remained well below 2023 levels. Pursuits also decreased overall across the three-year period, notwithstanding year-to-year variation. It's important to be careful here. We cannot say that any single factor caused these trends. Policing outcomes are influenced by many variables, including policy, staffing, supervision, training, community conditions, and enforcement strategy. What we can say is that the overall direction of the data is consistent with the department's emphasis on de-escalation, proportional response, selective enforcement, and continuous improvement. Next slide, please. This slide describes the core methodology used by the IPA, by our office. Our reviews are not limited to whether a particular officer technically violated policy. We examined each incident that we look at in a full event, 360 degree fashion. That includes the legality of the initial contact, communications with the subject, communication among officers, tactics, planning, professionalism, use of body-worn cameras, supervisory review, and ultimately whether a different approach in that situation might have produced a better outcome. That is the essence of continuous improvement. The underlying philosophy is straightforward. Identify the small issues before they become larger ones and correct them through coaching, mentoring, training, policy refinements, wherever possible. The methodology also allows us to identify commendable conduct, not just deficiencies. It is as much a learning tool as an accountability tool. Next slide, please. This slide represents the volume of reviews that we did in 2025. And in that period, we reviewed a total of 141 incidents and investigations, which included 53 uses of force, 33 displays of force, 22 pursuits, 33 complaint investigations. I note that there is one fatal pursuit that has not yet been reviewed because the criminal investigation has not been concluded. From these reviews, 24 recommendations or agreed upon courses of action were issued by the IPA. It is also important to note that not every issue we identify results in a formal AUCA or recommendation. In many cases, supervisors have already identified and addressed the issue before our review, and the quality of the supervisory investigations has continually improved over the three years that we have been here. It's actually a positive sign because it indicates that internal accountability is functioning and that supervisors are engaging performance issues early. Next slide, please. In terms of use of force, our overall findings was that no reviewed use of force or display of force was determined to be out of policy. That is important, but again, not the end of our analysis. Even where force is within policy, there are often opportunities to improve tactics, communication, documentation, supervision, and or training. Again, we made a number of recommendations in this area, including reinforcement of transparency statements where practical, that is letting a person who is about to be arrested know that they are about to be arrested and why. Review of safe team utilization, refinement of handcuffing tactics, body-worn camera compliance issues, supervisory review quality, and transportation issues relating to the RAP. We also observed a substantial number of training opportunities that supervisors had already identified and handled before our review. In addition, we identified commendable officer and supervisory performance in several high stress incidents. This is worth underscoring. The report is not simply about shortcomings. It also documents strong performance that should be reinforced department-wide. Next slide, please. With respect to pursuits, this is an area where organizational risk tolerance matters greatly. The central question is not only whether pursuit met policy criteria, but whether the risk assumed was proportionate to the enforcement objective. In 2025, there were 22 pursuits that were reviewed, again with one fatal pursuit pending the criminal review. None of the reviewed pursuits were found to be out of policy. At the same time, several issues warranted remedial action and broader policy discussion. Our recommendations in this area included acquisition of – or recommendation for acquisition of dash cameras for patrol vehicles, counseling regarding body-worn camera activation, and policy refinement to prohibit pursuits initiated solely on the basis of low-level traffic infractions, including certain e-bike situations. We have had substantive discussions with command staff concerning pursuits involving suspected impaired drivers and the city's overall risk tolerance. This remains an important policy area going forward. Next slide, please. In addition to category-specific incident reviews, our office also conducts broader operational audits. On the complaint side, we reviewed 33 complaint investigations. We agreed with all of the complaint adjudications. Our recommendations in this area related primarily to investigative completeness, proper use of findings or adjudicative categories, full resolution of all allegations, de-escalation language, and certain training issues. We also conducted two what we call data reviews during the year. Data is an acronym which stands for detailed analysis of tour activity. These reviews examine a random period, approximately two days, two to three days of overall police activity rather than focusing only on the uses of force pursuits or complaints. The purpose is to identify broader patterns, validate operational integrity, and detect issues that might not show up in the narrower reviews. Both data audits confirm general compliance with professional standards while also identifying areas for targeted improvement. Next slide, please. This is a forward-looking slide. Our work is not only retrospective, it also helps shape forward-looking refinement. During the year, there were ongoing discussions regarding policy updates in several core areas. I've talked about pursuits, but in addition to pursuits, body-worn cameras, use of force, and restraints. One especially important area moving forward is the development of a formal early warning system policy, and we've been working with command staff on that. That system should help identify officers whose performance indicators suggest a need for intervention, support, or closer review before issues accumulate further. We also observe meaningful training during the the year, including training on the Peregrine Analytics Program, traffic investigations, strategic communication, vehicle pursuits, and missing persons. The combination of policy refinement, tactical training, and analytic capability is essential if the department is to continue maturing as a learning organization. Next slide, please. This slide addresses two distinct but important oversight functions. First, critical incidents. I mentioned that there was one critical incident during this period and that we have not reviewed yet. Yet, we have not reviewed that critical incident yet because the criminal investigation is still pending. Once the criminal investigation is complete, there will be an administrative review by the department, and we, our office, will thoroughly examine that process as well. The second area is background investigations. During 2025, the department implemented the ESOF background system, which modernizes and streamlines the pre-employment background process. After the annual post-audit found the department in compliance, we independently reviewed a random sample of 10 background packages and found no concerns. So this is another area where the department appears to be functioning well. Next slide, please. This slide is about RIPA data. Our RIPA review is intended to promote transparency and provide a factual basis for informed discussion regarding police stops and post-stop outcomes. The role of the IPA here is to assess the accuracy, completeness, and transparency in the reporting and presentation of the data. It is important to state clearly what our review does not do. It provides a basis and allows patterns to be seen, but it does not by itself establish bias or explain causation in any way. For the 2025 reporting period, comparisons between 2024 and 2025 were more meaningful because of changes in the 24 criteria that made comparison between 2023 and 2024 a little difficult. We identified no constitutional issues in our review of the RIPA data. We did identify some underreporting in certain stop categories, and the department is aware and working on those issues. Overall, this remains an area where continued accuracy, consistency, and careful analysis is important. Next slide, please. This slide outlines our review, our support, I'm sorry, of the PSAC. Our role is not just limited to reviewing incidents and policy. We serve as a resource to the PSAC. and through the PSAC essentially to the community. During 2025, one important refinement was the transition from our general oral updates to the PSAC to written monthly statistical reports to the committee. That change improved transparency, consistency, and clarity. It also allows the committee and the public to track activity in a more structured way. The IPA attended each regular PSAC meeting during the reporting period with the exception of the months when the committee did not meet because of the holiday schedule. We view this interface with the PSAC as an important part of the city's overall accountability ecosystem. Next slide, please. Looking across the year as a whole, several themes stand out. The first is the institutional permanence through the codification of the IPA role. The second is the continued maturation of our process, the agreed upon course of action process which accompanies our reviews as a practical non-disciplinary mechanism for improvement. The third is clear evidence of de-escalation in practice, including observed reductions in profanity during high-stress interactions and stronger professionalism generally. The fourth is stronger leadership and supervision, including more engaged and critical supervisory review. And the fifth is the continuing collaboration among the IPA, the PPD, command staff, city officials, and the PSAC. The broad work The broad picture is not that the work is finished. Rather, it is that the framework is functioning as intended. Issues are being identified, discussed candidly, and addressed in a constructive manner. Next slide, please. In closing, the central conclusion of this annual report is that Petaluma and the Petaluma model continues to support a culture of continuous improvement. The department appears to be engaged in genuine self-examination and increasingly effective internal accountability. The city has strengthened the permanence of oversight by the codification of the IPA role. The PSAC has become more informed and a better supportive body through our regular written reporting and ongoing engagement. The IPA's experience over three years suggests that this model, the IPA model in Petaluma, is having a meaningful effect at multiple levels of the organization, from command staff to supervisors to officers. That does not mean there are no longer any issues to address. There will always be issues. But it does mean that there is now a functioning structure in place to identify those issues, to address them, and to learn from them. We appreciate the cooperation of the city, the department, the PSAC, and, of course, all of you, and look forward to continuing our work. Thank you.

Thank you very much. It's always great to have you back with another year report. And any questions from council? Council Member Shribbs?

Thank you. Wonderful report. Nice to know we're doing so well and continuing to move forward in direction. Since you have a variety of jurisdictions that you also work with across the state or even further out, one of the things I'm working with and trying to figure out, because I work with a lot of folks on electric bikes, and electric motorcycles that are e-motors, whatever they want to call them. And there's nine bills in front of the state right now. Marin County and jurisdictions in Marin have created their own rules and regulations. Can you give us a description of your experiences, what you know of policies and practices that work and don't work, of rules that can and cannot, are difficult to enforce? and how can we be more proactive so when the state does do something, particularly I think the top one that's coming down that's probably gonna get passed is defining e-motorcycles away from e-bikes for sales and the like. So can you talk a little bit about your experiences so far in your jurisdictions, what's happening out there, and how we might be able to approach this and what can we do proactively?

Thank you. I can, and I'll do it briefly. Every jurisdiction that we work in and many, many more jurisdictions around the country are facing the same issue. And obviously across California, the legislature is addressing or at least attempting to address some of these issues. I think Number one, speed is obviously a major concern. How fast can these bicycles or e-bikes go? In New York, just recently, there was an incident on the Queensborough Bridge, double fatality of a bike that was able to go up to 50 miles an hour crashing into another motorized vehicle, and both individuals on those motorized vehicles died. So it can be very dangerous. And the legislation addressing speed is certainly a good one. Enforcement is another issue, right? How far do you take enforcement? And one of the things that we are particularly concerned with is pursuits of e-bikes, because along with the issues of e-bikes that everyone here knows about, are the issues of pursuits of e-bikes, where across the country there have been a number of fatalities, usually of young kids, being pursued by officers. So, again, much like our pursuit policy relative to DWIs or DUIs, it's a balancing. And the discretion of an officer, the discretion of the department, the policy of the department. is very important in that respect as well. My pleasure.

Thank you. Council Member Quint?

Yeah, I had some comments, but I'll hold that until comment time. Thank you.

Anyone from this side? Anyone? Questions? I did have a question. I mean, I love that the complaints are down 33%. And I think you should take credit for that. It's not that the public doesn't feel they have the access and so they don't make complaints. It's you're providing access and yet the complaints are going down. But the calls are going down 10%. How do you connect that data? Why are calls down?

You know, I can't say why calls are down, really. What I can say is that this is not unusual across the country. The trend is downward in many major cities. Calls for service, complaints, uses of force particularly across the country are down. Perhaps the Chief can... Well, let me phrase that just slightly differently.

Is there a class of crime where the calls are significantly, you know, is there an imbalance between which types of calls are down?

Yeah, so specific to our calls for service, we're actually seeing community-driven calls, so calls coming in from our community members down less than 1%. What we are seeing is calls initiated by officers is where that greatest change is. And most of that we're really attributing to the fact that we've done a high level of training. And so where our functional staffing is different from our allocated staffing levels, because as you know, and we've heard from community members often, why are there four officers at my home? Well, there's a training officer with the police officer who's in training there. And so our full... the effectiveness of our police force. We've been doing so much training. We are now at full staffing. We're getting through that training. And what I anticipate, what I've cautioned at the Public Safety Advisory Committee is don't be alarmed next year if you see That call for service data, especially with self-initiated and officer-initiated calls for service, come back up. You'll also see arrests probably come back up. We're definitely doing that in traffic stops. We've heard that from community complaints and traffic enforcement. So you're going to see traffic stops go up. That's always self-initiated activity, generally speaking. So I'll preface that with we don't want to be alarmed when you see that also coming up, which could attribute to With more interactions, uses of force could go up, complaints can go up. All those things can be proportional. It doesn't necessarily mean things have gotten worse. It means instead of, you know, 50 police officers, we may have 70 police officers out of the street, which generally speaking means that this is a safer community and it's doing what exactly we're hoping to do.

That's a great caution. I'm glad to hear that. It concerns me the usefulness of our force, but it does bode well for next year.

Mr. Mayor, if I may just add to that. In our report, the annual report itself, not the PowerPoint presentation, the RIPA data really goes through the different types of enforcement.

So that data is there to be looked at as well. Thank you. And the other question is, to clarify, the reviews you did, the 141 reviews, that's all cases?

All pursuits, all uses of force, all displays of force, and all complaint investigations.

Not sampling. That's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. Excellent. Yep. Thank you. And I'd like to take it over to the clerk to tell us about public comment here, both what we received and the messaging.

Thank you. We've received no public comments online for this item. At this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not done so already. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Thank you. We have Chantelle Rogers to speak.

Hello again. The first thing I'd like to talk about is one of the IPA's recommendations concerning pursuits, and that is, quote, revised policy to prohibit pursuits initiated solely on the basis of low-level traffic infractions. I don't know how many of you were on the council a few years back when I sent an email detailing an incident that had impacted my family. A car that had been being chased by a police officer came inches from running my husband over as he was getting out of his car parked in front of our house. He's not easily shaken, but he said he had never felt so close to death. The pursuit started with the driver failing to stop at a stop sign. The pursuit was called off as the now-speeding driver turned onto my block, which had dozens of people and kids out on a lovely late afternoon on a stretch that includes a park, tennis courts, a playground, elementary school, dog park, baseball fields, community garden, pool, and the mentor center. Of course, the driver didn't slow down just because the lights and sirens were turned off. He continued at a high rate of speed and blew through a couple of more stop signs and a light. I spoke with the police chief at the time who said that pursuit policies are constantly being reevaluated. I hope that this recommendation will lead to a meaningful conversation about adjustments to Petaluma's pursuit policy since pursuits are inherently dangerous and also expose the city to serious liability. As an aside, I was surprised to read that our police cars don't have dashcans. Can that really be true? Next, I wanted to talk about the annual breakdown of police activities. From 24 to 25, there's a decrease in calls for service and a significant reduction in complaints, as was noted. One consideration that is specific to this time period is the federal government's policies and actions towards immigrants and how that affects their interaction with local institutions of authority, including our police department. I work with immigrants through a couple of local nonprofits and I can tell you anecdotally that they're terrified of being hauled away and are committed to making themselves small and as unseen as possible. They would do anything not to have to call the police and certainly are unlikely to complain regardless of the circumstances. This may be having an impact on interaction numbers. Lastly, given that the police department is receiving fewer calls and we've been told that the department is finally fully staffed, maybe we could see a little more traffic enforcement on city streets. We're always looking for ways to reduce speed and make traveling in all modes safer, and writing tickets would really help that cause. Word travels fast when people start to get ticketed in cars or on e-bikes, so I hope to see more focus on that. Thank you.

Thank you. That was our sole speaker on the subject. And so I'd like to bring it back up to council for any comments. And Council Member Quint, you were...

Ready? Yeah, thank you. I mean, just a couple of things off the top of my head. I reflect back on my time attending the police academy or the community police academy before I was elected and had an opportunity to see the training that our police officers go through and really get a good understanding of how difficult their job is. and really gained a new appreciation for that. Through that and my time on council, what I've witnessed and what I believe is true is that we're really fortunate that we have an alignment in values between our community and our policing. And to me, it feels like That alignment is reflected in the report. It's no surprise that we have another year of a good report because I believe, I know our police department is doing the right thing with training and community involvement and respect for community members. So I see that. I've seen it with my own, in my own interactions with our police. And I would say I've noticed, you know, we've asked for more patrol speeding vehicles and road safety, and I've seen that increase. whether I'm on my bike or my scooter or in my car, driving through my part of town, where I mostly spend my time, I see more squad cars, patrol cars, parked in corners, not hiding, but they're at intersections, just monitoring traffic flow, and I appreciate it. Lastly, I would say, on the whole e-bike thing, I believe it's a really difficult thing for our officers to be able to look at an e-bike and know whether it's legal or not. And I believe they're doing a good job on that. I think it's a tough job. But having a son who rides an e-bike, I appreciate the fact that we're trying to enforce illegal e-motorcycles and get those off the road. And anecdotally, my son came home just two days ago and said, Kids from his baseball team had been telling him there was a group of them, probably, I don't know, four, five, six kids out riding e-bikes, and they were stopped, and two of the e-bikes that were illegal were confiscated. And that word spreads really fast in that community. And so I just want to... You know, I don't want us to get to a point to where kids don't have mobility. And the more that we get better at that, you know, I think it's just better for our community. So good job and thank you.

Good point. Thank you. Councilmember Cater-Thompson.

I just want to say whenever Councilmember Quinn speaks, I pause and I really listen. And I just really appreciate the way you reflect. It's appreciated, but I've also seen the same things, you know, just with, you know, officers out on Sonoma Mount Parkway because people are complaining about speeding. And so I'm seeing officers around a lot more. And I feel as though speeding is starting to reduce a little bit because more officers are out there. But I really appreciate what you said about kids and how the word gets out. you know, when bikes are being confiscated. I think that's great. And that's the way that I think we'll have, we'll be part of the reduction of accidents, kids being more responsible on e-bikes. But I still think we need the state legislation because this is Petaluma, it's not the entire state. And there is definitely, every city is talking about e-bikes and the concerns for safety for the kids. So appreciate, always appreciate when you speak.

Thank you. Councillor Barnicle.

Thank you. I'm going to follow up on one of the questions or points that Ms. Rogers made about pursuits. Do we have an intention to update our policy on pursuits?

From our perspective, it's something that is constantly under evaluation with the department and subject to revision. I think it's been revised twice since we have been here, and I'll let the chief speak to it.

Yeah, that's exactly correct. We've gone through revisions with the IPA in conjunction with our city attorney's office and the city manager's office and looked at that, and it's been something that is ever-evolving, and, you know... we've, as a result of a pursuit that our agency was involved in, had an individual that was fleeing from our officers tragically pass away. And that's something we never want to see. And we're constantly, you know, weighing the risks to the public, to the community, and to our responsibilities of upholding the law and making sure that those offenders are brought to justice where we can. And so we're constantly looking at that and constantly also looking at the new innovations that are coming in where legislation hasn't caught up to how we have to address those public safety risks and what we are doing a lot and our professional standards division lieutenants here who oversees our training is constantly training our vehicle pursuit policy, giving emergency vehicle driving tactics training, talking about those situations on when to initiate, when to terminate, what the supervisor needs to know, what are the speed conditions, and then we've invested in technology we have drones available to us now that we haven't had so we can utilize that technology we have license plate readers so that we may not need to pursue into certain situations and we can develop investigative leads we rely on our allied agency partners the helicopter all those other tools because our goal is not to put the public at more risk or put the drivers that are making poor decisions at greater risk of harm but our ultimate goal is to to police and to enforce the laws and to hold people accountable for those things to the best of our ability. So we consistently look at our policies and we constantly are doing that. We've done that twice so far.

Awesome. Thank you very much for that. So I'll just say I share many of the things that Council Member Quint said. I remember the very first time we had this report and it was, there was a lot of sort of, it was felt a little more touch and go and I just feel like each year it's constantly more reflective and also better results. So I really appreciate everybody just digging in and recognizing we're all human beings and the point of this is to improve and I genuinely think we're doing that. Of course, I'd love to see more enforcement always. The other thing that I'd love to see more is communications about enforcement. Like if you confiscate a couple of illegal motorcycles, like post a picture on your social media feeds and say, hey, parents, we're coming for them. um things like that because uh that's also how the word gets out to um and certainly it spreads through the high schools and then they you know basically are saying oh i better not tell my books oh shoot i better not tell my parents right or i don't want them to find out that you know this is illegal they didn't know right um but if you post it on online it starts to build more awareness with the adults in the room and things like that I still long for the monthly metrics of traffic violations in different parts of the community and things like that to just sort of get the word out that we're cracking down on speeding. It's really... The biggest safety issue we have in our community when you come to, you know, when push comes to shove. So I'd love to see more use of our social media and communications channels to really get the word out about the enforcement we are doing. And, of course, thank you so much for everything you do.

Thank you. Vice mayor.

Thank you for your report, and I just want to thank the leadership of the police department and the professionalism out in the field from all of our officers in putting themselves out there on the line like that. So, thank you.

Excellent point. So, I spoke at a grade school recently, and I said, one more question, and they said, What about e-bikes? Their point was, it's not fair. Why don't they have to wear a helmet? Why can they speed and things? And that's where a lot of us live. Why isn't it fair? And I wish their parents considered that more and brought that more. But that fairness question keeps coming up in the whole of the community. The public makes a good point. Right now is an awful time for the Latinx community. I mean, just awful. And the distrust and whatnot. And why isn't it fair? Well, hopefully we, collectively as a community, can make things more fair. But I know that when I call the chief and say I've got a community group that wants to hear from you, chief or a delegate will be available every time to speak to those groups to show that the policing in our town is fair. I really appreciate how forward you are at the PSAC. I'm sorry that our council representative isn't here tonight to receive the report with us. But I also know that the community policing, the neighborhood nature of it, the coffees, all those things connecting HELP WITH ACHIEVING HIGHER EVERY YEAR'S REPORT. AND I KIND OF ECHO COUNCILMEMBER point of an alignment between our police. And I want to say it's not accidental, not unintentional. The effort that goes in, the oversight that goes in, I mean, this is what communities should have together for the safety in their community. So with that, I mean, I appreciate everybody being here tonight. I appreciate the scorecard you lay out in front of the public. Great report. Thank you very much. It was a receive the report. I think we have received it and appreciate it. Now we'll move to our next item. Thank you. And our next item, if I'm correct, is item 20. which is the urban water supply management plan and shortage contingency plan. And to help us with this, we have Danielle Favella. And we also have Chelsea helping tonight. Thank you. And load up the slot. Will this be a minute to load up or are we good to go right now? Thirty seconds. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think we left the cats out for a second 30 seconds and

okay let's begin thank you good evening mayor city council city manager and members of the public my name is in the alpha Bella I am the water resources and conservation manager and I am joined this evening with Chelsea Thompson the director of water resources and utilities Tonight I am presenting the City's draft 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and Water Shortage Contingency Plan. These documents will be referred throughout the presentation as the UWMP and the WSCP. So tonight's presentation will walk through the key components of the 2025 UWMP and water shortage contingency plan, starting with the state requirements that drive this planning process, and then discuss Petaluma's water supply portfolio. We will review projected water demands through 2050, the results of our water supply reliability analyses, and our conservation programs. We'll also review the updated Water Shortage Contingency Plan, which establishes drought response actions for six different shortage levels. Lastly, we will summarize... Sorry about that. Lastly, we will summarize the public outreach process, discuss next steps, and conclude with the public hearing and adoption request. Most importantly, we will answer these three important questions. Do we have enough water to serve Petaluma's future growth? Number two, are we prepared for future droughts? And three, does this update meet the state's planning requirements? Based on the analyses completed for the 2025 UWMP and Water Shortage Contingency Plan, the answer to all three questions is yes. So first, let's briefly discuss why these plans are required and what they are intended to accomplish. The Urban Water Management Planning Act was established by the State of California to ensure that urban water suppliers engage in long-term water planning. Any agency serving more than 3,000 customers or delivering more than 3,000 acre feet of water annually must prepare and update an urban water management plan every five years. The plan requires agencies to evaluate projected water demands, the available water supplies, conservation efforts, and drought preparedness over a planning horizon for at least 20 years. For this update, Petaluma elected to use 25-year planning horizon extending through 2050. In addition to evaluating normal conditions, the state also requires agencies to analyze reliability during a single dry year five consecutive dry years, and perform a separate drought risk assessment that assumes that the next five years are equivalent to the driest period on record. These requirements help ensure that communities are proactively planning rather than reacting to future water challenges. So with that background, let's look at where Petaluma's water comes from today. Our primary water source is imported water purchased from Sonoma Water, which is supplied primarily from the Russian River system. We also maintain groundwater wells within the Petaluma City limits. While groundwater represents a relatively small portion of our annual supply, these wells provide important flexibility during droughts, emergencies, or periods of peak demand. The third component of our water portfolio is recycled water. The recycled water system currently offsets a portion of potable demand by supplying non-potable water primarily for landscape irrigation. During summer months, recycled water offsets approximately two to three percent of potable water demand. This graph shows total annual water production over time. The imported water is shown in blue. Yellow represents local groundwater production. The left axis shows total potable water production in cubic feet, and the right axis shows the population. So this graph essentially is showing you that the population has been increasing over time, but our water use has declined. Now let's look at how water demand is expected to change as Petaluma continues to grow. A large part of the UWMP includes analyzing future water use projections. The city's projected potable water demands through 2050 were developed as part of a regional water demand forecasting effort and completed by EKI, Environment and Water Incorporated. So nine Sonoma water contractors and members of the Sonoma-Marin Saving Water Partnership coordinated on the regional demand analysis update to ensure consistency across agencies that share common regional supplies. The above-demand projections evaluated multiple factors, including population growth, employment growth, planned development, historical water use trends, water loss, plumbing code efficiency standards, future passive conservation savings, and demand by customer type, for example, residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, et cetera. The analysis projects that potable water demand will gradually increase over time as the community continues to grow. But it's important to note that the actual potable water use in 2025 was approximately 7,446 acre feet compared to the projection of 8,705 acre feet as noticed by the red dot, from the 2020 UWMP. So while demands are projected to increase over time, actual water use over the planning timeline will vary from these projections. So next question is whether our available water supplies can reliably meet these future demands. To answer that question, extensive reliability analyses were completed using modeling conducted by Sonoma Water and coordinated with all water contractors, including Petaluma. The modeling evaluated three primary long-term hydrological scenarios, which include an average hydrological year that's modeled after 1999, a single dry year modeled after 1971 conditions, and five consecutive dry years modeled after the 1987 through 1991 drought period. These assessments evaluate long-term conditions from 2026 through 2050 in five-year increments. The state also requires a drought risk assessment, which assumes that the years 2026 through 2030 are equivalent to the driest five-year period on record. These analyses compare projected demands against available supplies to determine whether shortages are likely to occur under different future conditions. The goal of the various assessment is to test the existing system and identify any vulnerabilities ahead of time. So the good news from these reliability findings is that our results from these assessments were very positive. Based on the analyses completed for the UWMP, Petaluma is projected to have sufficient water supplies to meet all anticipated demands through 2050. No supply shortages were identified under the modeled normal year, single dry year, or multiple dry year scenarios. It's important to know that groundwater remains an important emergency and supplemental resource while recycled water continues to offset potable demand during the irrigation season. The findings also highlight the value of our long-standing conservation programs, which continue to reduce pressure on water supplies. At the same time, the plan does recognize that uncertainties remain. Climate change, future regulatory requirements, hydrological variability, and regional water supply conditions will continue to require active planning and coordination. Overall, the analysis shows that Petaluma is well positioned to meet all future water needs. A key reason for that success is the city's ongoing commitment to water conservation. Conservation remains one of the most cost-effective and reliable water supply strategies available. The UWMP documents a comprehensive suite of water efficiency programs that help customers use water wisely while reducing overall demand. These efforts include tiered water rates, customer education and outreach, water waste enforcement, leak management, system metering, and water loss reduction programs. Together these measures help improve supply reliability, support compliance with state conservation requirements, and reduce the need for additional water supplies. Importantly, conservation is not just a drought response tool, but is a cost-effective year-round strategy that supports long-term sustainability. So from here, let's take a closer look at some of the programs available to our water customers today. The city continues to offer a variety of programs that help residents and business improve water efficiency. Our programs are listed here, and for more information on our programs and rebates, You can visit our website or contact our water conservation staff. All that contact information is on the slide. These programs have contributed significantly to long-term reductions in water use. In fact, the UWMP documents that total potable water demand has declined by approximately 37% over the past 20 years despite continued growth in the community. In addition to conservation, state law requires us to maintain a detailed plan for responding to water shortages. The water shortage contingency plan serves as the city's operational framework during droughts and other water supply emergencies. It establishes predefined demand reduction actions that can be implemented when supplies become constrained. The plan is required under California Water Code and is incorporated into the Urban Water Management Plan. One important feature of the Water Shortage Contingency Plan is that it can be amended independently from the UWMP, allowing the city to respond more quickly to changing conditions without waiting for the next five-year planning cycle. The plan provides a structured and transparent process for escalating drought response measures when needed. So here's our water shortage contingency plan. These are the six stages that correspond to increasing levels of water shortage severity. As shortages become more severe, the city can move through progressively stronger stages, ultimately reaching stage six, which is reserved for extreme emergencies where available supplies are reduced by more than 50%. This stage approach allows the city to match response measures to actual supply conditions while maintaining flexibility and transparency. Each stage builds upon the previous one, creating a predictable framework for both customers and staff. Now let's briefly review some of the actions associated with each stage. I'm not going to read them all out. But stage one focuses on voluntary conservation and increased awareness targeting up to 10% reduction in citywide water use. At this stage, the city focuses primarily on public outreach. And the demand reduction actions are listed here. If additional reductions become necessary and the city can then move into mandatory restrictions. So stage two is mandatory with a target reduction of up to 20%. At this stage, all actions from stage one are still in place and outdoor irrigation restrictions become more structured and several water saving practices are required across commercial and hospitality sectors. The focus remains on reducing discretionary water use while maintaining essential services and minimizing impacts to public health and safety. Stage three reflects a more serious shortage condition with a target reduction of up to 30%. The emphasis shifts towards limiting non-essential water uses and prioritizing available supplies. Additional restrictions may affect ornamental water features, certain landscape irrigation practices, and water hauling activities more. Operational practices are also reviewed to reduce water consumption where possible. So stage four represents a severe water shortage condition targeting up to a 40% reduction in water use. At this level the city may consider additional restrictions on landscape installations that require potable water and further limit discretionary uses. Public outreach and enforcement efforts are significantly expanded and at this point the city's operational focus shifts heavily towards preserving essential supplies and minimizing non-essential water use. If conditions worsen, the city can then enter a critical emergency response stage. Stage five represents the critical water emergency with a reduction up to 50%. At this stage, restrictions become substantially more severe. Potable irrigation is largely prohibited as determined by the city manager, and additional restrictions on all new water service connections may be considered by city council. The city's priority during stage five is preserving water supplies necessary for health, safety, sanitation, and critical community functions. The last stage is stage six, which represents an extreme water emergency involving shortages greater than 50%. Under this scenario, potable water use would be reserved almost exclusively for essential health and safety purposes only. City Council may consider prohibiting all potable irrigation and all new water service connections, and emergency communication effects are then intensified. Fortunately, the city does not currently project shortages of this magnitude under any existing modeling assumptions in the 2025 UWMP. However, state law requires agencies to plan for even the most extreme scenarios to ensure emergency preparedness. So now stepping back from the individual shortage levels, let's summarize our major conclusions from the UWMP. Key takeaways from this planning effort include water demand is expected to increase gradually as Petaluma continues to grow through 2050. The city has sufficient water supplies projected through 2050 under all evaluated planning and modeling scenarios. Water conservation continues to deliver measurable results and has significantly reduced overall water demand over the past two decades. The updated water shortage contingency plan strengthens the city's drought preparedness and resilience. And finally, continued investments in infrastructure, regional partnerships, conservation programs, and long-term planning will remain essential to maintaining reliable water service into the future. I also want to mention that an important component of this planning process is public engagement and transparency. So here's My timeline, the city followed all public noticing and outreach requirements associated with the UWMP water shortage contingency plan update process. Notices of preparation were distributed in January early in the planning process and the draft plans were made available for public review on May 22nd on the city's website, as well as hard copies were available at multiple city facilities and the Petaluma Library. Public hearing notices were also published and additional information was shared through the community update and on the city's website. The review process provided opportunities for city residents, partner agencies, and other interested parties to review the plans and provide feedback before adoption. So as for next steps, as of right now, no public comments on the draft UWMP or the Water water shortage contingency plan were received prior to tonight's meeting. Following tonight's public hearing, staff will incorporate any final revisions as needed. And city staff is requesting adoption of both the urban water management plan and the water shortage contingency plan through one resolution this evening. Following adoption, the final documents will be completed and submitted to the California Department of Water Resources by the deadline of July 1st, 2026. These plans will then guide ongoing water supply planning, conservation efforts, and drought preparedness activities over the coming years. So with that, that concludes our presentation for tonight. Thank you for your time and attention this evening, and we are happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

I'm very happy to have you here. I'm very happy to know there's a good plan in place. It's always comforting. Any questions from Council? Council Member Quint? I'm sorry, Shribs?

Yeah, the expectations for the quantity of water we are going to have, I think I'm going to challenge some of the assumptions that you may be making within the modeling and to make sure that we have coverage on that because our water doesn't, we don't generate our own water, we buy it from someone else and it's regional and supplies to a lot of other folks. The building that's going on where water's even going down to Marin County, and there are cities down there that are building high rises, lots of apartments. Romano Park is building out rapidly in housing because they decided to do that. And that may be happening in Santa Rosa also. So we have at least a couple other of the customers for Sonoma County water for the Russian River that are expanding much more rapidly than we are. So are we considering the total use of water from our supply? Because my expectation is they're going to, because their population increasing, be getting more water and then we'll get less water in the future. So do we have a guarantee of total quantity of water coming from the Russian River that will be stable there long term? Do we have those agreements or are we making that assumption in the model?

So all of this information, so all of the water contractors you just spoke of all have to go through this same exact process and have to create Usually through the regional consultant that we use, create these demands, which incorporates all planned development. So if Rohnert Park has planned development, Marin, et cetera, that's all then baked into their demand projections through 2050. Those numbers are then given to Sonoma Water, and Sonoma Water is taking those numbers and doing that modeling to then determine if they have enough water for all 600,000 customers within 2020. their area? And the answer is yes. So all of this information is from Sonoma Water's 2025 Urban Water Management Plan update.

Okay, good on that. Then on a couple of the graphs, I'm not sure if you bring out, there's two graphs that you brought up for water use. Just ask questions about them. One with bars showing over five-year periods.

Okay, this?

No, this one.

Yes.

Okay, so here you're making an assumption that from 2025 actual to 2030, you have a close to 500 increase, 500 acre feet. And then thereafter, only 1 to 200 acre feet. So why is there a 500 in the next five years, but only 100 to 200 after that?

So originally... Originally, the 2025 number, because we did this all last year, so we didn't have actual water use for 2025. So we were using the projection from 2020. And from there, that's what created this kind of discrepancy, because our 2025 actual water use was so much lower. So actually, let me rephrase that. What we did is we had an estimated 2025 water use that we were using in the middle of 2025. That was based on historical water use. So that's how the projections, it was higher. The original 2025 water that we estimated was higher, which created a little bit of a discrepancy because our 2025 actual water use was lower. It's a little confusing. My apologies for misspeaking there in the beginning.

Just saw that there's discrepancy in the graph. I just thought I'd just make sure we understood why that was there.

Yeah, okay.

Because five versus one to two from thereafter. Anyway, because the growth is expected to continue pretty continuously.

Yeah, yeah. So originally I think the estimated amount for 2025 was around 7, it was almost 7,800 acre feet. And then we came so below once we had the actual numbers. But instead of giving you the numbers that were estimated and projected last year, I just wanted to provide the actual ones. But the projections were based on the estimated 2025. Okay, good.

Thank you. Okay, let's move to the next graph. Okay.

Oh, wait.

Oh, the original, the first one?

This guy.

Yeah, that one right there. Okay, again, looking at the modeling exceptions, sometimes if you look at the years, 2022 was the lowest, right? And we still didn't use as much groundwater as earlier years, like 2009. Mm-hmm. Okay, so that was again at the end of a almost a 5 year drought that we had. So the water use went way down. But if you notice that the population is not increasing all that much over between 2022 to 2025. However, the rapid increase in water use is much greater than the population. So on an individual basis, we're back using more water. So locally, within that little section of the graph, I'm just looking at using the modeling, whether or not we're anticipating in the droughts, whether we're taking these minor fluctuations in natural use. I'm thinking that in the current water use that's rising more rapidly. So in the modeling, are we saying in drought, a five-year drought, we're going to be trained enough to go back to the 2022 style of watering, or are we going to be able to get back down that low in a drought on a per-person basis?

Okay, good question.

I'm just saying, in the modeling, because there's the overall graph trends, but then there's the minor fluctuations. I'm seeing a minor fluctuation here that's different from the major trend. And I just want to make sure you use that, looking at the model and how it's operating.

Yeah, so everything you're seeing here was all fed to the consultants and to Sonoma Water. So they had all of that to take into consideration into their modeling efforts. And we do recognize that water use has gone up. The lowest year we've ever had on record is 2022. So naturally, we will be going up. And that was taken into consideration. All of this data was provided in the modeling efforts for Sonoma Water. Does that help?

Yeah. Yeah, back then in 2022, even we had, during the drought, and I had a little old lady of over 80 years old carrying five gallon buckets up and down stairs of water just to water her plants in the front from her shower. So she was complaining a little bit. She said she did it. But anyway, if that's what we were doing, if that in a drought, that's what we need to do, and we can do that. So the other thing I just want to mention besides the question is I did go to the EcoGarden tour. We have four homes here on site. And I talked to the folks that were visiting also there. And the popularity and the idea of EcoGardening with lower water usage and irrigations is much more popular. popular than it was just even a few years ago. And a lot of folks are moving in that direction. I'm seeing the quantity of front lawns areas converted. I've noticed a lot more, especially in the residential areas, has converted over. So we are moving in that direction. So I just like to say, as a city, we are moving in a very positive Less water use per household everything so that I'm not sure if even including that in your modeling as to the individuals that that trend is also increasing as a possibility. But I think the larger numbers that you've got in the modeling, so I just want to just go through things with that with you. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm just going to state what I think is implied between those two graphs, because one's in cubic feet and one's in acre feet, that from the high point in the early, in around 2000, We saw a 34% decline roughly to where we're at today?

Yeah, correct.

In terms of water usage?

Yeah, I think it's 37.

Right. Okay, 37. I can't tell from the numbers. So we're looking, and then our deepest cut was like over 40%, right, in 2022?

Oh, I didn't do the math, but I would believe that's correct. while okay I'm just want to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me thank you yeah of course and can I ask a 20 change he was a very low point in what the drug category where we in in 2022 so we started in stage 3 and then we went into stage 4 I think in the summer of 22 yeah it was the summer ish August or July

We remember.

Yeah.

It was a big deal. We all remember. Can you comment on efforts that Tustum County Water is doing to add capacity and tricks that they have for making their supply more reliable?

So I'm aware of FIRO. I can't remember what that stands for, Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations. I know that's a very, what?

Well done.

Okay. But I know, so that's helping tremendously. What else do they have? What I can do is I can get back to you. I don't have a whole slide on all of that information regarding their UWMP, but FIRO was a very big, big, big portion of how to operate the reservoirs to ensure that we're not releasing water when we need the water. So in a nutshell, but I can give you more information about that later.

No, I think we're just for the public benefit is that not only we work in our conservation side, but they're working the supply side.

Absolutely.

And so we're in a better place on that. And does this bake in any climate impact? Do they discuss droughts being single dry years being deeper or higher?

Yeah, so that's definitely a part of it taken into consideration. That's why they're using these hydrological scenarios from previous times with the highest impact, the driest years. So they're using that in their modeling efforts, so it's being... We're being, our demand is being modeled after the absolute most extreme drought that's ever on record. And they're still projected to have enough supply. So yes, they're taking into consideration very dry years, the single dry year, multiple dry years, et cetera. So lots of scenarios.

Okay, thank you very much. We have a question from Council Member Cater-Thompson.

Just a quick comment on the recycled water during drought times. You were saying like with street cleaners, you would use recycled water or with the water trucks for bringing dust down for projects. Yeah. I'm just curious why that's not being done now just automatically instead of using potable water.

Do you have an answer? Okay. So Recology has converted to recycled water use for street sweepers permanently. They've been using recycled water since the last drought. And in terms of haulers being restricted to recycled water year-round, there's only a few locations that they can actually pull water from. And so we make it voluntary when we're out of a drought just to reduce driving time to those fuel locations.

So let's go to public comment on this.

We've had no online public comments. And at this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

um we have one uh speaker card it's wayne eggstrom you're on good evening mayor council um i was listening to your report and what i didn't hear is any information about the paulie potter valley um dam project that is going to be actually starting in 2028. That also feeds into the Russian River. How is that going to affect our local water supply? And if any information is available, where can we find it?

Thank you very much. Thank you. And let me paraphrase back and ask for a little update on Potter and its impact on Petaluma or not.

Thank you. The Potter Valley project The impact of Petaluma's water supply is yet unknown. It's really early stages in the project. All project information can be found on the EEL Russian Project Authority website or IRPA's website. That's where you can find the most up-to-date information.

And can we say that it's not anticipated to have a significant impact on our water supply? not not through this planning period for the urban water management plan okay thank you very much thank you council um this requires a motion i'll move motion by council member quentin a second by uh cater thompson and may we have a roll call vote please barnacle

I. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Thank you very much this great presentation appreciate keeping us up to date. Our next item is item 21, a resolution authorizing the issuance of wastewater revenue bonds to finance wastewater system capital improvement projects. That is the PIPS parallel force main and pump station replacement and approving related agreements, documents, and actions. And we'll have a little moment here to switch the team at the front of the room.

Good evening, mayor, council members, city manager and members of the public. My name is Chelsea Thompson, director of water resources and utilities. Joining me this evening are Steve Wuerl, deputy director of water resources and utilities. He's joining by Zoom. Cory Garbaroglio, assistant finance director. Brian Cochran, assistant city manager. Paul Kaushal, director of public works and the CIP team who will be available to help answer questions tonight. Tonight we're presenting an overview of the proposed financing of two wastewater capital improvement projects through the issuance of wastewater revenue bonds. As we will discuss this evening, these projects are critical investments in the reliability and resilience of the city's wastewater system. The proposed financing will provide the funding needed to move these projects forward while spreading costs over the useful life of the assets. The city has historically been very conservative in its approach to financing wastewater infrastructure. Approximately 20 years ago, the city financed construction of the Ellis Creek water recycling facility with roughly $140 million of long-term debt. Since that time, wastewater capital projects have been funded primarily on a pay-as-you-go basis, with nearly $84 million in projects financed from available cash reserves over the past decade. The only wastewater debt issued during this period was for refinancing existing obligations to achieve lower interest rates and reduce debt service costs. Today, the city faces two major infrastructure investments that have been planned for many years and are critical to the reliability and resilience of the wastewater system. the parallel forest rain project, and the pump station replacement project. Due to their size, cost, and importance, financing these projects solely with cash reserves is not practical. As a result, staff is recommending the issuance of approximately $70 million in wastewater revenue bonds to help fund the essential capital improvements while preserving the long-term financial stability of the wastewater enterprise. The two PIPSC projects proposed for financing are not expansion projects. They're critical reliability and resilience investments that address aging infrastructure and reduce risks within the city's wastewater system. The first project is the parallel forest main project. Nearly all wastewater generated in Petaluma is conveyed to Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility through a single two and a half mile forest main. During wet weather events, this pipeline can carry flows of up to 36 million gallons per day. The existing forest main is about 53 years old and represents a critical single point of failure in the wastewater system. A failure of this pipeline would severely impact the city's ability to transport wastewater to Ellis Creek for treatment. To address the risk, this project will construct a second two and a half mile forest main providing redundancy and significantly improving system reliability and resilience. Importantly, this project is well advanced. Design is about 90% complete and nearing final completion. The city anticipates advertising for construction bids in July or August of this year, with contract awards shortly thereafter. Given the large size and visibility of this project, the city anticipates a highly competitive bidding process. Construction is anticipated to begin in October this year and be completed by March of 2028. The current project budget is approximately $58.3 million, including contingency allowances. The second project is the pump station replacement project. The existing pump station on Hopper Street is also about 53 years old and plays a critical role in the city's wastewater collection system. As one of the city's primary wastewater facilities, its continued reliability is essential to maintaining uninterrupted service and reducing the risk of system failures. The project will replace aging infrastructure that has reached the end of its useful life and provide a modern, reliable facility capable of supporting our wastewater system for decades to come. This project is planned to follow the parallel force main project by six to 12 months. Pump station project design is anticipated to complete by August of 2027. Construction is expected to begin in September of 2027 and be completed by October 2028. The estimated total cost of this project is $31.6 million. Together, the parallel forest main and pump station replacement projects represent critical investments in the reliability and resilience of the city's wastewater system. Both projects have been planned for many years and will address significant risks associated with aging infrastructure. The total cost of the two PIPS projects exceeds $89 million. As shown on this slide, the City's entire five-year wastewater CIP exceeds $132 million. As a result, even with the proposed bond financing, the City will continue to use a significant amount of its own cash reserves and annual revenue to fund capital projects throughout the five-year CIP period. Staff evaluated a variety of financing strategies for the two PIPS projects, as well as the balance of the wastewater capital program, including issuing more debt, issuing less debt, or issuing no debt at all. After evaluating those alternatives, we concluded that approximately 70 million of wastewater revenue bonds is the appropriate financing strategy because it is well within the city's financial means, does not require new rate increases, and allows the city to maintain a strong cash reserve. Maintaining a strong cash reserve is important for several reasons. It supports the ongoing financial and operational health of the wastewater system. It provides funding capacity for other wastewater capital projects. It protects the city against unanticipated emergencies, such as a catastrophic system failure or other major infrastructure need. And finally, maintaining strong reserves helps preserve the city's strong credit rating, which is important for ensuring continued access to capital markets at favorable interest rates. Issuing the bonds before construction begins will ensure that funding is available when it is needed. Having financing in place prior to the start of construction reduces the risk of project delays and disruptions that could result from funding shortfalls and helps keep these critical projects on schedule. This slide summarizes the key terms of the proposed wastewater bond issuance. The proposed bonds are secured by and payable solely from wastewater system revenues. They are not secured by the city's general fund. The bonds are proposed to be issued as fixed rate tax exempt obligations. They're also expected to be subject to early prepayment after 10 years, which means the city may have the opportunity to refinance outstanding bonds at lower interest rates in the future if market conditions are favorable. The proposed bonds have a 24-year term. which is a relatively short term for this type of financing and helps reduce total borrowing costs over time. The bonds have been rated AA plus by Standard & Poor's. This is among the highest credit ratings available and reflects the financial and operational strength of the city's wastewater enterprise. Investors look to credit ratings as a measure of the safety of bonds and bonds rated AA plus are considered among the safest bonds investors can buy. As a result, the city can expect to receive a very favorable interest rate compared to other bonds for sale at the same time. The one-time upfront cost of issuing the bonds is expected to be approximately $467,000. This includes the fees and expenses for bond counsel, disclosure counsel, the municipal advisor, underwriter, rating agency, rate consultant, trustee, printer, and other miscellaneous costs of issuance. This slide shows the city's debt service payments over time, including both existing and proposed new bond issuance. As you can see, the city has been paying about $8.5 million annually for wastewater debt service over the past several years. With the issuance of the proposed bonds, annual debt services are expected to increase only slightly over the next three years. Beginning in 2030, however, annual debt service declines as the city's 2019 wastewater bonds mature. At that point, annual debt service is projected to decrease to about 7.1 million for the following six years. After the city's 2017 wastewater bonds mature, Annual debt service declines further to approximately $6.1 million over the next 15 years. Staff intentionally structured the financing this way with debt service declining over time. This approach provides the wastewater enterprise with greater financial flexibility, ensures adequate cash flow to support ongoing operations and maintenance, and preserves capacity to fund future capital projects without the need for additional debt or significant rate increases. Ordinarily, the issuance of $70 million of new debt could require additional rate increases to cover the associated annual debt service. However, this financing was specifically structured to avoid the need for any rate increases beyond those already anticipated. In consultation with an independent rate consultant, the City has carefully analyzed current and projected wastewater rates and charges, projected revenues and expenses, debt service requirements, and planned capital improvements. Based on that analysis, staff concluded that projected wastewater system revenues will be sufficient to meet all anticipated wastewater system financial obligations into the foreseeable future. While future rate studies may identify the need for additional rate adjustments to support new capital projects or other system needs, the wastewater system's current financial plan does not require rate increases beyond annual inflationary adjustments. Staff also recognizes that utility costs can be significant financial burden for city residents and businesses. While maintaining and operating a highly regulated wastewater system is expensive, Petaluma has historically maintained competitive utility rates compared to other agencies in the region. This graph illustrates that Petaluma's water and wastewater rates fall within the middle range of neighboring utility providers. Going forward, staff remains committed to balancing the need of maintaining a reliable and compliant wastewater system while also preserving affordability for our customers. This slide summarizes the anticipated timeline for the financing and delivery of these projects. Over the next several months, staff will closely monitor market conditions and interest rates. When conditions are most favorable, the city will move quickly to issue the bonds to secure the lowest possible borrowing costs. The city also anticipates issuing the bonds through a competitive sale process. Under this approach, investors submit bids to buy the bonds and the bid offering the lowest interest rate or true interest cost wins the bid. This process helps ensure that the city receives the most favorable financing terms available in the market on the day of sale. The city plans to complete the bond issuance prior to execution of the construction contract so that funding is fully in place before construction begins. This approach provides certainty that funds will be available when needed and helps avoid delays associated with project financing. As discussed earlier, the city anticipates soliciting construction bids for the parallel force main in July or August of this year. With contract award anticipated in August or September of 2026, construction expected to begin in October of this year and be completed by March of 2028. Overall, the financing schedule has been coordinated with the project delivery schedule to ensure that funding is available at the appropriate time and that these critical projects can move forward without delay. In closing, the parallel forest main and pump station replacement projects are critical investments in the reliability and resilience of the city's wastewater system. Both projects address aging infrastructure, reduce operational risk, and help ensure the continued delivery of essential wastewater services to the community. These projects are well advanced in planning, PIP's parallel forestry project is well advanced in planning and design, and both projects are expected to be completed within the next 24 to 36 months. The proposed financing strategy has been carefully structured to ensure these projects are fully funded while maintaining the long-term financial stability of the wastewater enterprise, preserving strong cash reserves, and avoiding the need for rate increases beyond annual inflationary adjustments. Staff recommends adoption of the resolution authorizing the issuance of the 2026 wastewater revenue bonds and approval of the related financing documents. And with that, we'd be happy to answer any questions.

Well, thank you very, very much. I'm sure glad to see the item here. It's a reliability project, and we do not want to come in late on this. This would be messy. Questions? Council Member Shrives?

Okay. Can we go back to the map? Okay, that one there. Okay, just to clear something up as to reasons why. Because when we first got the new water treatment plant going, I was part of the group that went and got the money for that. And at that time, it was 20 years ago, we knew that this new line would need to get put in. We've known that for 20 years. I'm looking at the apartment complex. It's a new apartment complex that got put in there. And then we jockey around. Instead of using the easement over the current line, the green line, we have the red line that actually goes, oops, we're not going to go through the property where the old line is. We're going to go back into the street, go around it, and come back in again and come around. So... What was the problem with that property that we couldn't go use right and go right next to that other pipeline? Where is it that easement? What was the difficulty or problem with just going straight in that line and not have to jockey around their apartment complex?

I'm going to ask Lucas to come up to address that one.

Good evening Council, Mayor. So main reason is just environmental complications with it. The permitting would be a longer process to obtain a permit, longer mitigations. So it's a simple putting the pipe on the right of way, it's an easier path of least resistance. It's as simple as that. Specifically in that area and then everywhere else we are utilizing the existing easements because we're in already disturbed areas like parking lots and things like that.

Yeah, because I did hear the apartment company was actually supposed to be almost twice as large, but they ran into a soils issue that was there. So digging in that area is an issue that we would take on if we did that.

That is correct.

They ended up with lead from old newspaper incineration, I think is what the problem was with that property. So I just wanted to point that out, why we're going around instead of going straight through. Okay.

That is a great point, yeah.

Okay, just wanna make sure that that was why we're doing that. It wasn't because we couldn't get it, the easement at all. Okay, good. The next comes through the monies, the ins and outs and things, so there's graphs. And so, There's the other projects, and you've got the bonding done for past projects and this current project. However, what's not included in the other wastewater projects there is money's being used for several years. Are we going to be bonding for those projects? Because the bonding did not show anything about other wastewater projects. It just showed you bonding for this year, 2026, not for these future years. So are those wastewater projects, those $8, $7, $6, and $4 million, are they just coming out of rates, or are we going to need to bond for those also?

In the fiscal year 27 budget that was recently adopted, bonds are shown for the PIPS parallel force main and for the pump replacement project. The bond issuance is for all wastewater projects, projects, not exclusively for the projects that we're calling out tonight or that were identified in the budget document. So the bonds, once issued, will be drawn down, we anticipate, within the first three years, primarily on the parallel forest main project, but really any wastewater project that is next in line.

Okay, good. Just want to be clear that the $70 million bond is for both the PIPSC projects and all the other wastewater projects that will be continuing over the next five, six years. So that's included in the 26th bond.

Yeah, but not exclusively. We're still planning on using wastewater revenue.

Okay, because I'm looking at that, that's a total of four, six, seven, and eight, that's 15, and that's almost $30 million in other projects besides PIPS that's being covered here for the 70 million.

It's a mixture of wastewater revenue as well as the bonds over the next, yeah, planning, like three to five-year planning horizon.

Thank you. I just want to be clear where that money was coming from. It's from the same 26 bond. Okay. So that, that was clears up my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. So I'm going to Carly.

Thank you both for the presentation. I have questions too about that hook and the new line that John mentioned, Councilman Shribbs. Does the actual lines, it's hard to tell because it's not scale on the drawing we have, but does the actual line run behind that apartment complex or does it run underneath anything?

And we're talking about the existing?

The existing, yes.

That's a good question. We have the SBIL, so it's an easy identification, and I would be very confident to say that it was installed before the apartments were constructed, but the exact location, I can't answer that right now.

Okay, well there's a, I don't know if you can, but if you could zoom in, it looks like maybe the line passes under a string of apartments, or does it go west of those, towards the river?

And you're talking about exactly in the chunk where the red line then basically skews away?

Yeah, on the south end of that. I'm just trying to better understand. I know John asked some of the questions about it already, but why we couldn't go straight through.

Yeah, so to answer the first question, it's highly unlikely that you have actual buildings on top of the existing line. That would be a conflict with our existing easements and rights to our pipeline. So more often than not, you have the offsets that are required. no one is allowed to build anything on our assets and utilities. So it might show close because you might thicken the line a little bit. But if we go out in the field, you may have access manholes that are just 10 feet away or so from an actual building structure. Okay.

The only reason I ask that is because if you look overhead, what I guess you call the right-of-way looks like it passes straight through that. So that's why I didn't know if it went west of that or is underneath there. That's why I asked.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. And on that same note, even going further down the alignment of the existing Forest Main, where it's no coincidence that as you get more like offset from Cypress Drive east of Schoenberger and continue going towards Ellis Creek, our existing Forest Main is right in the south side of the parking lot of multiple commercial properties. The UPS facility, the Montessori School, and storage moving businesses so it's all again in that with that assumption and in mind that builders anyone that's trying to develop in an area that we have an asset they have to stay away from it so the same would apply to that area that we were talking about before okay now thank you and so if could you be explained just a little bit that it's it's a soil type concern and environmental concerns as to why we can't go parallel to the existing That was part of it from pre-existing facilities that were in that area. And beyond that, there's also jurisdiction of seasonal wetlands and things that you start to add any permanent impacts from installing a pipeline, cause an immediate offset of those permanent impacts. If it's from an acre standpoint of, say, a tenth of an acre of a seasonal wetland, that puts the burden on the city to then create a new wetland that you just impacted elsewhere. And you start to escalate those and we do have areas that we couldn't basically avoid impacts and those are then what's triggering a lot of the mitigations that we have that we're currently going through for all the permits that we applied. But in areas where we could then find an alternative path We just chose that and that was like one of basically early stages in the project was what are all the options of where we can put the pipeline and what are the impacts that it comes with. You kind of analyze those and then you end up with your either most cost effective alignment or the most maybe fast space alignment, whatever is the balance that we're trying to make on our side, right, in the design, in the project team. So in that specific area, with the permitting and the potential complications of having to haul the soil off-site during the construction, rather than just being able to reuse for backfill, it just made more sense to just go in technology lane, which is not causing a huge, like, you're not pushing the pipeline too far away from where you're trying to go, right? So it was that balancing act that I mentioned.

Yeah, well, part of what I'm wondering with this crook in the system is there's a couple hard 90-degree turns or approximately, you know, and so if you're considering things like the load that puts on the pumps or, you know, surges or, you know, damage to the new line or clogs or, I mean, what sort of probability is that?

I don't know if you're talking about the good stuff. That's what we get into it in the design side. And basically fittings is what you're describing every time you have a bend on the pipe, you have a fitting, a mechanical fitting often. And those are usually weak points. And that's where in the event of catastrophic event, that's where we're most likely gonna have a failure. That's what we see in like all of our utility system. So a recent change that was made, and that's something that may come up or not later in the discussion, or certainly when we talk about awarding a contract, is we looked at before the project was gonna install a PVC and ductile combination of pipeline material, we switched to HTPE. Basically, it's a much more flexible material, so we eliminated a lot of those fittings and bends, and we can actually, not bends, but fittings, which are stiff, and we can bend the pipe a little bit more. So it's all, hydraulically speaking, it's all taken into consideration, all the bends that you have, those cause friction, that's a head loss, that makes your pump have to work a little bit harder. kinda tails back to where Pip's pump station right now needs to be rehabbed. The pumps that we have right now are super old and they can't keep up with that demand. So it's almost like a self-fulfilling cycle in a sense that when you have the more bends, the more stress on the pumps, the pumps are old, so you kinda look at the system holistically. but sorry for taking a long answer there, but to go back on the point that you brought up on the bends, 100% taken into account, and we recently made a switch for more than just one reason specifically, but it does improve the flexibility for us to bend the pipe a little bit to the extent that it's allowed to by the manufacturer, versus having a lot of sharp angles like you mentioned, like 45s, 90s, 22s, which all cause eventually a stress on the pumping side.

Oh, thank you. And two more quick questions about that, and then I have other things. But when you talk about the net loss, you can have a zero net loss in wetlands. You'd have to identify another site. I mean, were there other sites identified? And then if we were to just go straight, what is the cost difference in doing that and everything that's going to take versus this crook?

Yeah, I'm not going to be able to give all the details exactly of like a potential cost of had we gone down the straight path and environmental impacts, but on the sites that, the areas that we couldn't avoid, we're looking at for one specific agency, regional water board, purchase of credits so that, which you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you can purchase a credit for that wetland that's being created and managed by a different party. It takes the stress from being the creation and managing on the city. For City of W, for instance, they don't allow certain things like certain credits to be purchased for that specific impact they're doing. There's a lot of different agencies with their own little demands, if you will, to simplify. So we're doing some self-enhancement at Schoenberger Park. For instance, one site that we're looking at to partner with Blue Point so we can just continue to enhance the work that they're doing right now by removing invasive species and continuing to just promote the native species. So that's already work that we have to do that we couldn't avoid because we couldn't avoid the impact. had we gone straight through the green line in that specific area. Like I said, there is an environmental piece which is costly, and not only that, but everyone forgets about, usually comes with a five-year monitoring. You do it, you don't walk away from it after you just spread seeds, if you will. You gotta monitor that for five years. You gotta say that it succeeded, it took off, and it's there, it exists, and otherwise it's a moot point. So all that burden is we avoid where we can, where we can't, we go through the painful process. It's costly and it takes resources. So the exact numbers from like an acreage or financial cost, to go through the straight line, I don't exactly know, but I just know it was a much simpler solution to go through technology lane, or going around the apartments, basically, in that specific area. And again, not to mention the, during construction you do, if you're touching contaminants, contractors, that's high cost for them, hauling away, disposal sites, you often have to take to Nevada, California, landfills don't usually take toxic substances. So it's just hard to talk about how a project can go sometimes from like 30 million to 40 to 45 to 50. It's all the little things that you just don't usually see, you know, just from plan sheets.

Yeah, no, I can appreciate the creativity in getting around that. I just, I'm thinking long-term longevity, it's, you know, straight to the easiest way. And so... That would be, I mean, you guys spent a lot of time working on it, I understand. But it's just a concern that I have, so thank you. And then I guess my next questions are about the multi-use path that's proposed. You know, I had asked ahead of time, you know, what that was going to cost in the project, and the response back was, well, at least $625,000. I'm wondering, is it appropriate to spend wastewater revenue on a project that's not related to water? Because that's kind of an additional thing that's not necessary to this project. It doesn't have to be done. This is an added feature that does not benefit rate payers.

So maybe I'll start that answer. Thanks Vice Mayor for the question. I mean, the short high-level answer is any capital projects on which we spend enterprise funds have to be for the benefit of the enterprise. So staff have looked at that question. I think we've got answers to those questions and the answers to council questions that are also shared with the public. And there's going to be some more follow-up on on those issues when we come back to award the project but but generally speaking um to the extent there's there's not um there's that's not needed by the enterprise or benefit to the enterprise then it has to be funded otherwise from other sources um I'll mention that 1 of the things that Lucas referred to, which is the change of the materials. There was a design. Change that that impacted the relationship of the path to the project, because it was thought that we're going to need to access because there were. I don't know, they were access points?

Yeah, access manholes that were part of the design that included PVC and duct that I mentioned before. So that had a direct correlation with the pathway for a place for staff to directly maintain and access the pipe. And you're not only maintaining the pipe for if there's an emergency, but also valves, any appearances, all those things that need to be exercised twice a year or so, so that was kind of a combination like a two for one that we saw was the multi-use pathway does serve in transportation use but also active maintenance for our pipeline. Those did get removed when we switched to HTPE and I think is where, if I'm not mistaken in that answer that we provided in the document was we are looking at the funding sources so that if there's no benefit directly association between the pathway and the pipeline, then wastewater and price funds will not be used to pay for the pathway was the short answer. Okay.

But I wanted to add to that that, you know, the council still has expressed eagerness to get the path in place. And there are a number of synergies and cost sizings from doing it now as part of PIPS, including mobilization costs, And getting it done earlier in time, avoiding extra inflationary costs. It sounds like, and we don't have the details now, staff are looking, but it sounds like there are other funding sources that will be available to ensure that the costs are not allocated to the enterprise that ought not be as enterprise costs. So we'll have more information about that.

Can you say roughly what other funding sources might be? Might there be?

No, I cannot. And I don't know if there are other staff here that can be, but we'll certainly need to and be ready to identify that when we come back to award the project. Remember, this is just for the financing. So those are good questions, and that, Luke has covered how the need of the PIST project for that path has changed, and how it therefore is incumbent on us to make sure that the funding source of that work's appropriate. and that it's not improperly allocated to the enterprise. So more to come on that.

The Q&A did reference impact fees and grant funding, the two sources that they brought up in there.

Okay. And so on the graph for the bond payments debt service, you know, around the year 2035, it lowers quite a bit. Are we going to potentially be able to lower water rates by then? though the water and wastewater rates that any is independent of this proposed bond issuance and we'll have to reevaluate needs at that time okay and then my last set of questions is around the pump station because you know in in looking at the material that we were provided there was nothing in there that actually talks about really the pump stations, describes what that project is going to actually be, what that's gonna look like, other than it's gonna cost at least $30 million. And so, in making a decision of Do we authorize $30 million here plus whatever interest that's going to be until the year 2050? I'd like to know kind of more like what that project is. And so I think seven, eight minutes before the meeting, we were given an assessment at the facility. There was an assessment report done. And it's over, well, in total, there was two reports, almost 250 pages. I combed through it as fast as I could, but it seems like overall the facility itself is not in the worst of shape. Again, I'd have to read the whole thing in detail, but I'm wondering if somebody can actually describe what we're going to do there because that's a lot of money.

I can jump in if you want. Steve World, Deputy Director of Water Resources and Utilities. So it is a lot of information contained in the condition assessment and alternatives analysis. I'll summarize very briefly. The pump station has significant structural concerns. So the advice from our engineering consultant was that a severe seismic event would leave that facility inaccessible for four to six months while emergency repair was carried out. So as much as the building itself has some good working mechanical, electrical, structural capacity, it is incredibly not resilient to current seismic design guidance and seismic dust practices. And looking at the alternatives analysis, the reason why we relatively quickly um pivoted to a new pump station rather than a rehabilitation comes down to the constructability and the logistics of maintaining the operation of you know four to five million gallons a day of sewage conveyance during construction of the new facility so if we were to look at rehabilitating that station we would need six to nine to 12 months of bypass pumping at up to 36 million gallons a day while we're building and rehabilitating the structure itself. And so it very quickly becomes more cost-effective to build a new pump station on the adjacent footprint at the PIP site on Hopper Street, rather than basically build a temporary pump station for bypass use, rehabilitate the existing station, put it back into service. And so that's what we have in the 2027 budget is, you know, a full pump station replacement. And the point is well made that it's very early in design. Our proposal for $70 million was really threading the needle between what we think we will need for the pump station replacement and the other capital projects, as well as sufficient construction costs and buffer contingency really for the force main.

Thank you, Steve. And so the new pump station is going to be across Hopper Street, across the railroad tracks, kind of behind?

Sorry, it's on the same parcel.

Oh, it is the same parcel.

Correct. Yeah, it's really because we have space on that site, the physical footprint, building a new station next to the existing on the same property where the former wastewater plant was located really becomes the most cost-effective approach.

Okay, and is the footprint of that property going to maintain, or excuse me, it's going to be the same still, or is that going to be... More or less, yeah, we're not changing, we're not looking at acquiring new real estate.

Like, we will plan to decommission parts of the old treatment plant that are still located there and utilize that space as needed.

Okay, so I'm almost wondering if, you know, I know there's a lot of talk about the Caulfield connector and...

is a portion of that going to be taken out so that caulfield is able to continue through and make a smoother connection it's a great question we have had some initial design coordination around change road alignments i think that's all very preliminary as well but we are certainly in in conjunction with the traffic design looking at you know how can we all make everything fit on the site

Okay. All right. Thank you, Steve. That's all my questions. Sure. Thank you.

Council Member Shribbs?

Just going back over the bike path, what percentage of that bike path proposed is actually overlaying exactly over where the pipe is going to be dug? So it's like 50% or 100% of the, so if we're going to dig a pipe and put dirt back in and we have to build it back up again to something, how much of that is actually, the bike path we proposed, how much percentage of that bike path is actually on top of the actual line that's being dug?

Directly on top, zero. None of the pathway is not on top of the proposed force main at any location. It's very close in between Baywood Drive and Marina. So in the parking lot area of the Marina apartments, so from Marina to Baywood, but from, I'm sorry, from Baywood to Marina, but from Marina to Casa, It's the pipe is in the actual parking lot of the commercial buildings and the pathway is in that top ditch area.

So what I propose is if you're going to be replacing the soil in the top surface anyway, then putting a bike path and pedestrian path on top of it. is part of the repairing process for that site so i'd say it's part of the pipeline since it's not outside the pipeline it's on top of that pipeline it's already being part of it fixing it of that property we're just fixing it to a slightly improved situation i would consider it part of the actual pipeline and i would actually accept to be part of of the rate

And I'm looking forward to you bringing the construction bids to us and us having another look at the project cost piece of this rather than the bond cost piece of this. And I guess, you know, my interest here is, I mean, I totally support a bond for a big one-time expense. You know, the trunk line is a one-off kind of thing you do, like treatment plants, a one-off kind of thing you do. So different than all the neighborhood distribution small pipelines that you do or even the pump station where there's multiple pump stations throughout the city and they're smaller. This is the home run. This is the one you bond for because you won't have another one like it next year. You replace the sewer on this street, you got to do it next year on another street and the following year, you know, these streets up next and we can't do our paving jobs if we don't get the sewer lines done. So I see why there's so much money in the sewer budget. I see why it takes a bond to get this done. But what it really does is it pushes us into a real ambitious infrastructure replacement program. We're the city that's really getting our infrastructure back up to grade the way it should be, taking risk out of it and things like that. How hard do you guys have to work to up your achievement in capital spending to get us from where we were? I mean, we're getting ambitious now. So are we going to be able to get all this work done in the 36 months and in the job after that and the job after that?

Good evening. Paul Koschel, Director of Public Works. Thanks for the question. We're working real hard. That's the goal, is to deliver the $132 million roughly for next fiscal year, for this upcoming fiscal year, which is a large portfolio of capital projects. We've spent over the last year or two and plus on these larger projects getting the planning, design ready, kind of teed up to get a lot of these bigger projects out to bid, as you mentioned, Mayor. So, you know, it includes PIPs. It includes the public safety facility. You guys mentioned the skate park. So there's a lot of construction that's going to be happening, a lot of construction spending that's going to be happening next year and the year after. We have a lot of – we have a CIP staff that's continuing to grow. We just onboarded two people today – three people, actually. Oh, no, two people and then one additional one on the way. a project manager and an engineer, assistant engineer. We have a new principal engineer that started about a month ago. So we're getting staffed up and we're excited to deliver all these projects. I think Jonathan may have some additional detail to add, but it's a big undertaking and we're ready for the job.

I don't have a lot of additional detail from what Paul was saying. I was going to talk about the staffing up. So, yeah, we have new CIP staff starting. Mayor, if you know any senior engineers, we still have two postings for senior civil engineers. That would be a big help as well. But, no, we're just growing the team, preparing more processes for us to deliver more, and just really happy to have all the new people on board to get all these projects done. Thank you.

Thank you. When Lucas started talking about HDPE and, you know, how all the joints are fused and it's all welded pipe, basically, I'm like, oh, let's get in this game again. And instead, I want you guys to be in the game. And if the pump station is challenging and, you know, and you're worried about that, I'd love a facile approach to the total CIP where you can accelerate D Street piping or other things so that we do hit them. The point is not to have money in the bank. The point is to have money built into the projects. And so we just take on an ambitious program here. And I'm kind of excited to be the city that gets a lot of capital where a lot of infrastructure replacement done. And not seeing any outlets. I think we're at public comment on this. So I'd like the clerk to weigh in.

Thank you, Mayor. We've had no online public comments for this item. At this time, I will start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk. If they have not already done so, speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Danielle, can we take the photo then? Let's start with Darren Rackeson as our first speaker and Nicholas Harris, our second.

Okay, thank you, council and staff. My first question was really about the pipe increase. So we saw that cost increase even from fiscal year 25 to fiscal year 26 nearly doubling. What I was wondering is if you guys got a breakout of how much of that is materials. How much of that is soft design costs? And then is any of that maybe how labor overhead is being attributed to capital projects? It's a trend we've been seeing over the course of this year where some capital projects are coming in higher than expected due to how labor overhead is split. And I'm wondering how much of that plays into that big cost increase we see, including, you know, one of the materials referenced as potentially inflationary because it's petrochemical was that material they said is going to be at those joints of that little jog the line does instead of the straight line. So I wonder how that plays into that question that one of the council members raised of kind of straight line and the costs affiliated with those offsets versus this material that has been cited by staff as like an inflationary cost driver. being added to create those bends that were required. So understanding the breakout of what drove that nearly doubling in cost for the pipe, because I think the path is probably pretty nominal, When it comes to the pump station, you know, I think it was already said, just understanding it sounds like the design process started in like March 2026, not super clear on exactly the final design and the cost drivers that are going to go there. So really understanding in the staff report it says that there may be an additional bond issuance in 2027 if we come up short or if that cost overruns. So I'm wondering with the timing of this, If we anticipate another tranche of bond funding, would it make sense to wait until we really have the design before issuing that? Because, and this gets into kind of the overarching about really executing it, it's just the cash, the blend of revenues, cash reserves, and this bond funding used in those, especially those first two years where there's like a big spend planned. I think to the mayor's point of making sure that work gets done, $70 million bond, $49 million in cash reserves for the wastewater fund, $4 million in the wastewater flexibility fund, plus what is currently a dropping wastewater revenue, I think it was $12 million last year, adding those together for those first couple years of like $103 million spend, That definitely dips into the reserves, and maybe the goal is spend that cash, don't have it sitting in reserves, but just making sure that we're not adding on too much with the fund balances and the current revenue realities plus this bond funding. And I think aside from that, all of my other questions have been answered. So thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Nicholas Harris. And Nicholas, there's cards attached from John Hanania and Wayne Eggstrom. Are they in the room? Thank you. Okay. So Wayne spoke up. Thank you. And so you note that in the clock and the clerk will run.

All right. Good evening, council and staff. I think just to start off, I think the ask after I get done talking about what I'm going to talk about is to pump the brakes on this. See, I think we need to zoom out, do a little bit more due diligence. I think the correct way to really be looking at what's presented to you tonight is to go back to the 2023 rate study. Back then, both projects together were $22 million. Now they're $90 million. When I hear that the rate study supports this bond being issued at current rates and that future rate increases aren't contemplated and anticipated, that increase of almost $70 million makes me go, how does the math math? So going back to zooming out, the projections on the staff report are going out to fiscal year 2031. But the rate study from 2023 goes much further than that and is reviewing it. I just want to read a part specific to wastewater. It says, for longer-term planning purposes, the wastewater CIP also includes a preliminary placeholder cost estimate for a major future rehabilitation and upgrade of the Ellis Creek Water Facility, which is projected to occur over the next five years and be phased in over a number of years. The future cost of these improvements is estimated at $200 million. roughly equal to $100 million with 25 years of 3% cost escalation. The financial projections assume that this major future rehabilitation project would be funded from a combination of annual revenues supplemented by hypothetical future debt. Some of that potential new debt service would phase in at the same time outstanding debt will be phasing down. Well, that's where this debt is coming in. The two previous water bonds are going to be rolling off in 2029. This report saying there's a huge project and that that's going to be supported by bonds. So is the statement true that the $70 million bond can be supported without raising rates? Was it also true that the $200 million Ellis Creek project facility project can be supported at these rates i think that's the question that needs to be asked i think that's the work that needs to be be looked at and that's i think the role uh that that the community expects of of the council um and i just want to recognize that this is uh an incredibly tough job uh that um I'm sure a lot of you would rather not be having to think about this. But that's really neither here nor there. I want to move on from the rate study. Talking about the $30 million pump house, that's really, I just think that that's another aspect that is deserving of pumping the brakes, taking a look at it, going from 3 million to 30 million seems like a lot. The public safety facility construction costs are under 60 million. And I understand that the 30 million includes overhead and escalation, but like it's, and I don't know what goes into a pump house. And I understand this is the big main under high pressure. So I'm sure it's substantial, but that's a huge jump. Just the fact that we're going from 22 million from only a few years ago to now 90 million, that really deserves some scrutiny. And I think it deserves transparency that if ratepayers are going to be facing an increase in the future, after five consecutive years of rate increases, that needs to be up front. And that needs to be part of the conversation. With all that said, I totally want to see investment done into our wastewater system and the infrastructure. The path, my personal feeling, and I think of the community at large, is that that really shouldn't be funded with the enterprise funds. It seems that that's clear from the written answers. I just think that it should be really, like if these projects are going to be lumped together out of convenience, that there needs to be stuff added into the resolution that you're going to pass. Really segregating that out, creating some visibility, some reporting of where that funding is coming from, how it's being spent, and then really identifying what cost center it actually is going to come from and long-term maintenance costs. Where are those going to come from? From whose budget, right? Because it shouldn't come from rate payers. You know, it's like a sales tax. And you guys know how I feel about sales taxes. But they disproportionately affect those who are struggling the most. And sewer rates are in the same bucket. But anyways, I can probably wrap this up pretty soon. I think that the bond proceeds, you know, and it's been presented here that, you know, this is the 70 million is for this project. And it's also been said, you know, the money is available to the entire waste enterprise. I just think that with the increases that we've seen from the estimates to what's being proposed, and how little information has been given to the public in regards to the pump station kind of basis of why that's needed, what the alternatives are, what the real risks are. You know, we live in a world of unlimited wants and very defined needs, and especially when it comes to what a municipal corporation provides to the residents. So I want to be really, really sure that we're spending that money wisely and that, especially debt funding, for me, I just really like to see that go into tangible investments, things that are, you know, dirt being moved and pipe being laid. That's what we all want to see have happen here. I think that incorporating a spend-down plan, Forecasting the amount of staff overhead that's going to be applied to this project and paid out of debt financing is really important and crucial to maintaining accountability and transparency. And then I'm just curious about the existing main in the MND. It says that PG&E stipulates it needs to be decommissioned and abandoned. Just kind of personal curiosity. I'd like to know what the future of the existing name is. Thank you.

Thank you. That was our last speaker. I'd like to bring it back up to the dais and see if anyone has comments on the matter tonight. And Council Member Katie Thompson.

I'll just make a comment. that we are a full service city. We want to make sure that when you flush your toilet, that it flushes and that the water goes where it's supposed to be going. This is a really old system and the system needs to be updated. I've been in the building where the pump station is. I mean, it's old and antiquated and cities have got to take your infrastructure And we have to make these improvements. It's just what you have to do as a city. We have 60,000 people that we're responsible for. And they want to make sure that their toilet flushes when it's supposed to. If this system breaks down, the city is in a lot of trouble. This project has been going on for quite a few years and been talked about for quite a few years. This isn't something new. This information is not new information. I think our staff has done an excellent job. of detailing what we're doing. But with any project, there's always, you have that flexibility in any project because you don't know if you're going to end up with problems during the project, something comes up. I mean, it's just, it's basic construction, but it's a huge project. And if you just look at the line where this system is going, this is a very large project. And we don't just spend money unwisely. The cost, as I was talking at public comment today, the cost of living has gone up in the last few years. And it's going to go up 3.4% next year just for food. And so everything is going up and we have, the city, our costs are also going up just like the cost of my home is going up. And we can't think that our costs are not going up. I mean, it's just, it's part of the inflation that's unfortunately happening. And it's not going to get any better until the 2028 election. And then after that, there's going to be a long time in reversing what's going on because we should be getting more federal funding. There's a lot of things that we should be getting, but there's consequences in elections.

Council Member Barnicle?

yeah um definitely heard on thank you for refreshing us on the 2023 rate study um i'll say i uh it was nice to be refreshed on that um also this project has been going on since i think probably longer than most people have been coming into this uh council chambers who are here tonight um and first and foremost people expect to be able to flush their the toilet and um i'm not going to be the council member who doesn't move this project forward because of how long it has been on the books to get this done i mean i think that when i first started attending council meetings and things like that council member king council member healy mayor barrett like these are people that didn't always see eye to eye on everything but everybody sort of had this like ghostly look in their eyes because if this project you know if this main fails we've got 12 hours before, you know, flushing toilets before people are standing in it. And that's not going to be my legacy up here. Things got to get built. I don't think our staff, I don't think anyone on our staff would bring forward this kind of money if it wasn't absolutely essential for our, you know, the health and safety of our community let alone the quality of life so of course i'm going to support this and you know we're going to have to bite the bullet on our rates when that comes up but this is not something that you can continue to kick the can on it's entirely irresponsible too so i'm happy to support it and move the item when we get done with discussion thank you i'll second that

Any comment, Vice Mayor?

Well, I am wondering if staff can address the nine minutes or so of public comment that we just had talking about, it is very concerning to me that we're bonding like crazy on a lot of projects. We're spending a ton of money right now at a time when money is very tight locally, at the state level, federally. You know, we're not getting grants. People aren't spending as much money. I mean, it's just tight, but we're spending more than ever right now. So, I mean, it would be really – I mean, I would insist that we see, like, I don't know, a little bit more, like, how this is actually going to work in the long term. I know there's projections every time, you know, a bond comes up, like, this is how we're going to handle it, this is how it's going to work out. We've spent so much money just this year alone for the future that it's a concern to me. You know, I know like Paul has a plan that he mentioned like with Public Works and how that's going to scale up. But the public and us up here only have kind of a surface level view of that. It would be nice to see and assure everybody like, hey, this is how Public Works is going to handle it. This is how it's going to work going forward. So to see how we're going to survive all these bonds in the future and see how Public Works is going to handle it, I think that's something that we all need to see. And going back to what we're actually talking about tonight in this bond, one of the things I mentioned at the beginning but sort of disappointed to see was We weren't given very much information as to what we're spending the money on. In some ways, it's kind of obvious, but with the public safety facility, we had every document you could imagine. Everybody came and spoke on it. We knew exactly what it was. Here, we're not getting that much, and we're being asked a lot. You know, going forward, I really want to see more documents that tell us exactly, documents, reports, whatever it is, telling us exactly what we're allowing the city to do. You know, it's been a comment of mine before that we're not getting enough information, and this is a very good example of that. So, you know, I know... I know that the sewer line has been on people's minds for a long, long time. It's an old project that needs to be done. It's of age now, and it's very important. So, obviously, I want to support that. I'm not happy with all the information that I've been given to make that decision.

Okay. Thank you. Councilmember Quinn?

Yeah, I, you know, in hearing Councilmember DeCarli talk, I, a couple of things came to mind. Yes, we did just pass a bond measure for the public safety facility. And, but, I don't know, half of that is being funded by excuse me, the tax measure that's not coming from the city, right? So we're getting a facility where we're having to, you know, foot the bill for half of it. And that half is to give our police department a facility that is not a morgue that was retrofitted to be a police department 40 years ago. And that project was long overdue. So I view that as we're finally doing something about it. And, you know, I say this respectfully. This is a project, I mean, I'd love to ask the question and get an answer in terms of when should this have been done, right? It seems to me like it should have been done already. And it keeps getting put off into, you know, other people, you know, it just keeps getting pushed off. And like Council Member Barnicle, I'm not okay with just continuing to let it slip into the future. Let's get it done. And let's give our city the facilities that they need.

Thank you.

Council Member Shribbs. One of the things you look at is not just the cost of doing the project, what is the cost of not doing this project at this time? And when the project gets delayed and things get dilapidated, what might happen and what is going to be that cost? And the cost of inaction at this time is going to be multiple times more than the cost of action. It's like in more time, okay, you're going to have losses, but also you're going to have gains. Okay, yes, so... You have to accept some losses. You have to put up it. You have to get it done. But I think it's up to us now to make it happen. We have to be a force of action at this point, because inaction will cost us even more than $70 million. Because if the wastewater treatment, if it does break, 24 hours later, if a disease outbreak of any sort, it's gonna be cholera and other things are gonna start happening. Households, just the damage to households from the waste that's coming out and backing up. That waste, we're talking about a billion dollars of cost total to the city, not if that is allowed to happen. We can't allow that to happen. So $70 million to get this project done and all the other projects done that are lined up and ready to go is the most efficient way of taking action, making things happen, and we've got to do it now. So we need to be a council of action. And the other part about the path, I think that's a minor detail. There might be something legal on that. But in any project being done, we require developers for mitigation monies. If you take out trees, you've got to mitigate here. If you do this, you've got to mitigate there. We should do our own mitigation. We're doing a whole lot of digging, disrupting a whole lot of road, disrupting a lot of people, taking out some of the park system, the trail systems for a period of time. So we need to mitigate. So if we replace a little bit of the park trail system with a bike trail system at a pretty low cost, and because it's right on top of where we're already digging and replacing soil, That is a minor mitigation issue that we should be doing ourselves. So I don't see that as being an issue personally myself. So I think it needs to be happening. And I think we should actually do more mitigation with this project since it's being done this way. If there was a developer doing this on land, we'd be asking a whole lot more than a little tiny little piece of bike path. So I'm all for moving forward. Let's make this happen. Let's be a force of action here, please.

Thank you. Well said. You know, I think we're coming to a real growth moment in our capital improvement project programs and our care and stewardship of our utilities. And I think we're right that the cost has crept up on us, and whether it's scope creep or inflation, I mean, construction inflation has been high over the last few years. But that's why I've argued that projects have to get done. We have to like pick one, design it, and get it done before it gets away from us and we can't afford the thing we wanted before. So I think as we move into more ambition, we need like a better back and forth. I think Council Member DeCarli brings up a good point. If we had a dashboard on progress during the year, you know, an eyeball on what the bid dates would be or what the construction window would be. So overall, we knew we were going to hit this big growth target. I mean, if we hit it last year, I wouldn't worry about it this year, but we're growing and we should have some metrics that we share with the community, share with the council about which things are moving ahead, how fast. But that said, I'm going to echo what everybody's saying. This is the project we have to ask, can we afford not to do this? I mean, this is one that's been kicked down the road to us, and now it's for us to not kick it to somebody else. We need to do this now. So with that, I'm open to a motion.

I'll move approval.

I'll second that. We have a motion from Barnacle and a second from Cater Thompson. So may we have a roll call vote, please?

Barnacle. Aye. Hader-Thompson. Yes. DiCarli.

Yes.

Quint.

Yes.

Schritz.

Yes. McDonnell.

Yes.

Motion carries unanimously.

Thank you very much. Thank you staff for the presentation and the team who was in the room for it. It's a big day in wastewater. Thank you. Our next item is our workshop for the evening. Our workshop is regarding two of our major roadways and the road safety and pavement upgrades for those, both Eli Boulevard South and Caulfield Lane.

Thank you.

And given the time of the evening, I'm sure we're very agreeable to all safety improvements. But I'd like to, we've changed it somewhat slightly from the agendized, or prior agendized effort in the Leico City Attorney to weigh in on what this little pivot is.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll do that succinctly. We, these, as you can see from some of the project graphics I think staff will be sharing that are in the materials, These two roadway and pavement upgrade projects, they cross each other, they form a T. And regarding one of them, the mayor has a proximity conflict that requires him to recuse, and I believe that's the Caulfield, is that right? And the other, Eli, he does not. And so what we've worked with staff to do, and thanks to staff for making it happen, is to bifurcate those discussions for a kind of segmenting, it's called to allow the Mayor to participate in as much of the conversation as he can, the part concerning which he doesn't have a conflict, and then we'll take that part first and then he'll recuse and hand over chairing the meeting to the Vice Mayor. and excuse himself while we continue the discussion. We could have combined these because they cross and they're interconnected, but we're separating the discussion for that reason. So thank you.

And just a note on it, the projects will be billed as separate projects. There's no real overlap to the work.

With separate funding, yes. It's not an artificial division we're making. Thank you.

Okay, and so with that, to help us here tonight, we have Bjorn Grepenberg, our Transportation Planner, and Jeff Studsman, Deputy Director of Public Works. Thanks for being here, and take it away. Great, thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Councilmembers. Excuse me there. Yeah, we'll try to be as succinct as possible tonight. I'll give a quick overview of the two projects. We'll talk about some of the policy and planning context that informs our design of street projects, and that'll be a repeat from our last presentation on the Rainier Avenue project. So we'll try to move through that quickly, and then we will break up the discussion into two separate sections, Eli and then Caulfield. Oops. And so just to set the framework here tonight, we are talking about Eli between, the full length of Eli between East Washington Street and Freights Road, as well as Caulfield Lane from Paran Street up to Garfield Drive. So why Caulfield and Eli? Both of these streets are included in the Sonoma County High Injury Network, which means that collisions happen more frequently and with greater severity relative to most roads in Sonoma County. As I'm sure everyone knows, both are busy arterial streets that are used to travel through what we're calling the southeast quadrant of the city, where street connectivity is somewhat limited. And so you see a large percentage of trips that are made in Southeast Petaluma funneled onto these two streets for both local trips and for longer crosstown trips. And so you see a broad community investment or a broad community benefit, excuse me, that comes from investing in each of these streets. And they're of particular importance for those traveling to four schools in the area. When we held our Safe Routes to School walk audits and task force meetings focused on the schools in this area, these two corridors came up frequently. And so for these reasons, both of these streets have been prioritized and identified for grant funding with approximately 80% of the funds for these two projects coming from outside the city. So paving projects are about more than paving. They represent a crucial once in 20 plus year opportunity to make design changes to our streets in order to improve safety, accessibility, traffic flow, and sometimes more. And we'll get into that a little bit tonight with Caulfield. And so the next several slides will shed some light on how we approach the street design process to determine what changes to make. First and foremost, the City's Complete Streets Policy, which was adopted in 2016, calls for all transportation improvements, including paving projects, to be designed to support safe and convenient access for all users. And these policies have really become commonplace throughout the Bay Area, throughout California, and throughout the country. in recognition that cities, in large part, especially in the second half of the 20th century, were really designed solely around the movement of cars, and those decisions often came at the expense of people who rely upon or are interested in using other modes, such as walking, biking, or transit, to get around. In 2022, Council adopted a resolution endorsing Vision Zero, which aims to eliminate severe and fatal traffic collisions by 2030. Since 2014, unfortunately, we've averaged about 11 of these life-ending or altering collisions annually. And tragically, one of these the last year involved the death of a man biking on Eli Boulevard South. Speed is the most important factor for us when it comes to reducing both the frequency and the severity of collisions. And this next graphic demonstrates that when struck by a driver traveling 40 miles an hour, just 2 in 10 people will survive. And when you lower the speeds down to closer to 20 miles per hour, there's a much greater likelihood of survival. We also use street design to make walking and biking more safe and appealing for those willing and interested in doing so, thereby improving mobility options and reducing car dependency. Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions for us in Petaluma, accounting for about two thirds of our emissions. And biking really has great potential, especially with growth in e-bikes, to reduce traffic and the associated emissions. We know that over two-thirds of trips in Petaluma are under two miles, which is a distance that can be covered by bike in 10 minutes. And then lastly, active transportation and safe streets have been highlighted as council priorities annually in recent years, and especially through the recent adoption of the active transportation plan in late 2025. So as we transition toward the recommended designs, there are several factors that influence these recommendations, including the amount of street width you have available, those city plans and policies I mentioned, obviously community input, resident input, and then taking into account all of the engineering best practices and design requirements, as well as professional judgment. And then lastly, but certainly not least, budget availability and the cost effectiveness of the various treatments or elements that are recommended. So first up, go through Eli Boulevard South. And these are two kind of different projects. Eli Boulevard South, for the most part, the pavement out there is in pretty good condition, at least between East Washington and Casa Grande Road. So what we're looking at with this project is applying a slurry seal that would extend the pavement life, keep that section of roadway in good condition. And with that comes an opportunity. It's kind of like, you know, a blank canvas to you've got to remove all the striping. You put down this thin layer of sealant to protect the roadway and then you've got to restripe it anyways. And so what do you want to do with that with that opportunity when you're restriping it to make some changes? So we obviously want to improve safety for all. We want to, where possible, reduce congestion and, where possible, also improve accessibility. And you see the note there that it is a lower budget and less extensive project than Caulfield. And you'll see we've got a lot more packaged into the Caulfield project when I get there. So looking at the lane configurations, first up, just kind of some quick numbers on Ely. The busier end is near East Washington Street, where you've got around 11,000 vehicles per day. And then it kind of tapers off slowly, gradually, as you move towards Caulfield and then towards Freights. In an average year, we see about five, a little over five injury collisions on this stretch of roadway. And we see a severe or fatal collision every other year. And then the speeds are high. The speed limit out there is 35 miles an hour, but you see the 85th percentile speed is above 40 miles an hour. And I'll just note that we've had over two and a half injury collisions per year at the Caulfield-Ely intersection. And for those years that we're reporting, 2019 to 2023, that was the second most dangerous intersection in the city. So we will talk about a couple of design principles here. First up, the benefits of lane reductions. These are strongly recommended by even the Federal Highway Administration on roads carrying less than 18 to 20,000 vehicles per day. We're obviously well under that threshold on Eli Boulevard South. And the reason this has become a standard practice and is so widely recommended is because it has a myriad of safety benefits, really without worsening congestion. And we'll talk about some of the considerations that go into intersection treatments to avoid that congestion impact in a bit. But when you narrow a lane from multiple lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction, you're eliminating that opportunity for aggressive driving behavior, weaving, unsafe passing. You're kind of taking away that opportunity for someone who is in a more aggressive mindset when they're driving to do those behaviors. It slows traffic by forcing people to drive the speed of the vehicle in front of them. it reduces the frequency and severity of collisions and just by you know slowing speeds and reducing some of those dangerous movements and then it lastly it eliminates what's called the multi-threat collision you may remember this slide from the rainier presentation it's the idea that on a multi-lane roadway you may have a driver in one lane stop for you but then the driver in the next lane over continues unaware that you might be trying to cross the street by foot or exit your driveway. And we've seen some really, we've seen examples of this on Eli Boulevard South. There's a video from one of our buses that shows someone getting hit by a car traveling very fast while crossing in a crosswalk where the bus had stopped for them in the curbside lane and the driver in the next lane over proceeded at probably close to 40 miles an hour and struck them. So that's the type of thing that we're looking to eliminate with a lane reduction. And then we've talked about the shift in thinking around bikeway design. You know, really for a very long time, there wasn't much thought given to the actual experience of people biking. You know, bike lanes have been striped right next to busy roadways, right next to the vehicle lane. And that just creates, you know, that's not a very inviting setting, especially for people who might be a little bit less confident on a bike. And so the idea is that when you increase the separation from traffic, you're creating a more comfortable facility that's going to appeal to a broader segment of the population. And there are national surveys that suggest that that number is somewhere around 50% of people who would be willing to occasionally get on a bike and are interested in doing so, but just afraid because the infrastructure isn't in place to support it. So now we'll run through some of the proposed cross sections or street configurations of Ely. I'll get to the East Washington intersection in a second. So this is kind of your typical configuration away from that East Washington intersection. And this first section going from that point out to Clydesdale, the roadway is a little bit narrower. So we've got two different cross sections we'll show. You can see in the existing configuration, multiple lanes in each direction, there is a combined parking and bike lane. But as I noted, that's putting you on a bike pretty close proximity to vehicular traffic and parked cars. And so here we're just widening that out a little bit. With the lane reduction, we're adding a painted buffer that adds some space between the bike lane and the vehicle lane. That also means if you're someone who lives on Eli, you know, the vehicle traffic is now a little bit further away from your driveway, a little bit further from your home, should be a more pleasant experience and easier to get out of driveways. And then, crucially, we've also got the addition of a two-way left turn lane, which... will really reduce the rear end collisions that happen out there when someone from one of the inner lanes is waiting to make a left onto a side street or into a driveway. They've gotta yield to oncoming traffic and they are in the through lane, right? Someone could be coming up behind them at 40 miles an hour, 45 miles an hour, and you're just hoping that they see you there with your blinker on. So this obviously gives a dedicated space for that movement. And then the next slide shows where it widens out from Clydesdale to Casa. And we've got two slides for this one. So along much of the corridor, we have very frequent driveways with a lot of, you know, single-family homes along both sides of the street. And so in those sections, we're recommending sticking with just kind of a typical buffered bike lane configuration. And so you can see we've widened it out, widened the bike lanes out, widened the buffer out, and just kind of maximized that space to create a more comfortable bike facility and really maintaining that similar configuration with the vehicle lanes. But then in areas where you do not have frequent driveways, which occur closer to the high school, kind of on the east end of the project or the southern end of the project, you can switch to a parking protected bikeway. The reason we don't recommend parking protected bikeways in areas with frequent driveways is because you start losing a lot of space available for on-street parking to make up for the additional sight distance needed out of driveways, if that makes sense. So as you're moving parked cars out into the roadway, now it's harder to see around those from driveways. You're going to want probably 20 feet of red curb on both sides of the driveway, it would end up wiping out most of the parking on that section of Eli. But again, when you transition from that section from Juliet to Casa or on the southbound direction or from Casa to Meadowview in the northbound direction, the driveways actually become very infrequent and that's a place where it might make more sense to go to a parking protected design. And I'll just note here, this is, you know, this eight plus four. I know it can look weird seeing parked cars out in the roadway. You know, this is basically the same width right now. If you think back to that earlier slide, or I guess we've got it right here, you can see, you know, those parked cars have about a five foot buffer from vehicular traffic from the driver's side. And here we've got a four foot buffer there. So still maintaining some separation, you know, cognizant of the fact that people don't want to be getting out of their car right into into traffic. And then from Casa to Freights, the roadway configuration does change significantly. Down there, we've got the introduction of a landscaped median island. There is some parking availability on the northbound side. And so here, it's basically just taking one of the lanes, turning it into a buffered bike lane. And then next up, looking at some of the intersection and crosswalk improvements. As this is a slurry seal project, just giving you kind of a flavor for the types of treatments you would see out there. Everything will be in more of the quick build fashion, so elements that can be kind of bolted into the roadway. You can see that rubberized curb that we've used on D Street, parking blocks, putting the signs out in the street, using some beige paint to kind of identify those areas. So that's the flavor of ELI, not really any concrete work happening. These are the existing intersection and crossing conditions. So it's a two-mile stretch right now where you have just seven marked crossing opportunities, just three uncontrolled crosswalks along this entire corridor. And then in the proposed conditions, we increased that to 12 crossing opportunities. And the big introduction here is the conversion of that very large multi-lane all-way stop intersection at Caulfield Lane to a roundabout. I think it would be cleaner for us to discuss that with the Caulfield item because that is technically part of the Caulfield project, not the ELI project. But just to give you kind of a sense of how that would work. The roundabout and even the approaches on ELI would be delivered through the Caulfield project because it is a paving project. And then there would just be some striping modifications on ELI with that project to basically to make sure that you conform at those approaches. But we'll hold off the discussion on the roundabout for the Caulfield item just for simplicity. So I do want to narrow in on that signal at East Washington Street, because that's where we do run into concerns around congestion with a lane reduction. We do want to be mindful of keeping capacity at our signalized intersections. And so that's what we're showing here. We would like to retain the existing lane configuration, more or less. We've still got, you know, this is facing north, so imagine you're at the signal looking up towards Sonoma Mountain Parkway. You've still got the exact same capacity as far as a left, a through, and a combined through right. You've still got two throughs coming in off of from Sonoma Mountain Parkway. And then what would happen is a little ways in, you know, maybe 500 feet in or so, that outer lane will merge down and that's where we'll transition to the configuration you saw before where, you know, parking gets added back in and you switch over to one lane in each direction with the two way left turn lane. What we have been able to do is just by narrowing the lanes, we have been able to keep a protected bike lane up to the intersection. That was really important to us trying to, you know, really create a comfortable facility at the intersection, which is where you would tend to have that more comfortable experience kind of break down. So there is some. So the only change really is removal of some on street parking near near the intersection in the southbound direction on Eli. And then again, it'll transition back to the other configuration and then you'll have on street parking reintroduced. So what we've heard, we held a community workshop back in February. We also talked to PBAC in March. Our community workshop was very well attended, probably somewhere around 75 people that came to that meeting. Overall, we heard a lot of support for the lane reduction and associated benefits. We had a lot of folks at the meeting who actually live on Eli Boulevard. We did hear concerns about safety and congestion at the Casa Grande student parking lot. Right now, that's... not a great situation where you actually have, you do not have any turn lanes and especially a left turn lane that serves that parking lot. And so that's one of the really nice things about the lane reduction is that it will allow us to create both left and right turn lanes serving that parking lot, which should clean up a lot of the issues and unfortunately illegal driving behavior that we're seeing and hearing about there. We also heard about the need for additional crosswalks on Eli Boulevard, especially at serving all of the bus stops. So that was a great comment that came in to us. We've actually added those crosswalks in to the presentation tonight. And then we also heard about pavement reconstruction being needed between Casa Grande Road and Freights Road. Unfortunately, that section is not in our uh five-year paving plan right now um but we have noted that that need and uh we'll look for opportunities obviously to find an op hopefully find an opportunity to uh to make that happen but that section would not be slurried because that would um just not not really be a good use of of funds so that section would just be restriped only for the time being And then looking at our project schedule, we held the community workshop, pedestrian bicycle advisory committee meeting. Tonight's our workshop here. The staff report talked about this a bit. We are still facing a somewhat uncertain timeline and we would really love to do this in summer of 2027, try to align it with the Caulfield project. Unfortunately, this is funded through a countywide grant that is also coming from federal, from the U.S. Department of Transportation, and both of those factors have introduced some somewhat unique challenges. We're still not, you know, we're still pushing the design forward, still trying to do everything we can to get this in in summer of 2027. It's just going to be a question of when the funds actually become available. So we'll definitely keep council and the community updated on that. And we will obviously continue to send updates through our email channels, social media, and postcards. And I do want to just flag, unfortunately, we did learn that some of the postcards we sent out for tonight's meeting did arrive today. They were supposed to hit mailboxes early last week, and apparently there was an issue with the printer. So I do apologize for that. and we'll obviously continue to solicit feedback my contact information is on the project web page and we're happy to hold additional discussions with the community if necessary so with that and turn it over to you for questions and i think public comment before we break it off for caulfield

Excellent, excellent. Excited to see paving occurring. Anyone want to lead off with questions? Council Member Shribbs.

Yeah, since I live near there, and that's a, Eli and Caulfield are a major route for me, biking with my trailers, getting back and forth, so I really appreciate getting more space for that, because it is very risky at times. But getting back to the, if you go back to the diagram on right by Eli and Washington, there are right there so that if if we're looking north there is a removal of parking on the west side of the street right there so I just wondering how long that that stretch is where you actually removing parking that's something we're still fine-tuning as we look at kind of the

some of the queuing capacity needed on the other side of the street, as well as the area where the, you know, how closely we can merge traffic to the intersection. So don't have a definitive answer for you there. But the goal is definitely to taper that outer lane down as quickly as we can while obviously ensuring safety for drivers and obviously in intersection operations. But that's certainly our goal is to minimize that impact as much as possible and certainly not bleeding into the residential fronted section.

Right, because there's a church on the corner, and even they, there's a couple cars occasionally parked there when services times are on, but as soon as the first residence, there's cars parked there in front of those residences, and it starts there, and it's continuous from that point forward. So I travel that route many times during the week. Then, as we're coming by, they, let's see, that I'll hold off on comments. Oh, the other question is on Washington. Was there ever consideration, instead of having the lights there, I'm thinking that a large roundabout would be really nice there. Why are we not talking about a roundabout right at that spot?

I think we'll save that one maybe for... time when we're looking at East Washington, just considering that would be the real impact would be to Washington. And I think that's where that would be the appropriate place to make that, to do that engagement and analysis. And also just, you know, looking at the scope of this project, again, it's basically a quick build project and around about at an intersection like that would be major, major project. But I mean, honestly, it's certainly worth consideration for a future project.

Okay, good. And just as a note to put in there, between Madison and Washington, because that's, again, where basically I live, and I come out and when I'm walking on the sidewalk there, I can put out my hand and I can touch a car that's going 50 miles an hour from the sidewalk. That's how close it's coming to me when I'm walking that sidewalk. But there is a large bike path on the north side right there that if we could actually move the street over, 10 foot and do that there. Anyway, just put that in your notes for next discussion when we're doing that intersection and that one block right there. That's the most unsafe spot in the entire corridor. And then that's the only real question I had at this time.

Thank you. Council Member Quint, anything? No questions. No questions. Coming down this side, Vice Mayor.

Thank you for the presentation, Bjorn. Going back to the very beginning of some of the stuff you were saying, you had mentioned that streets were originally designed around cars and not people. And so has that dynamic changed here? And, you know, I'm curious if we have any studies to back that claim and suggest that, you know, things changing from then to now, like, has that actually happened?

You're asking if there's any empirical evidence to state that streets were designed mostly for movement of cars? Is that the question?

No, no. Just to kind of back up what you were saying, like you said, originally streets were designed for cars, not people. Are streets today not for cars? Well, hold on. I don't know. Are we not in the same scenario today where the streets need to be designed for cars? Is it the same number of cars, same number of people proportionally?

I see. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for the question and the clarification. Yeah. I think what we saw happen, you know, obviously people – And traffic engineers, city engineers in the 50s and 60s, that was kind of, you know, the post-war boom, especially in the suburbs. You know, everyone's buying cars. And they didn't have a crystal ball that told them, you know, exactly how things were going to build out and how much traffic would use these roadways. And the reality is they designed, you know, just to give you to to put it in a very local context. Most of our arterials on the east side of Petaluma were designed for 25, 35,000 vehicles a day. And we're, you know, seeing a fraction of that. You know, if you think about like Rainier, for example, Rainier, both of the streets being discussed tonight, Caulfield, Eli, I'm trying to think of some Casa Grande Road, the multi-lane section of Peyron Street. I mean, we just, we have streets that are so far under capacity that the opportunity it presents is that you have other things you can do with that space to hopefully, you know, make it a more complete street, right? To either enhance the sidewalks, the bike lanes, reconfigure the lanes so that they're safer, right? The fact that there's no left turn lane on Eli, like that's, that's, that's not great. Think about all those people turning into their driveways and onto side streets. So it's, I'd say we're doing kind of a right sizing, right? We have current data. We know how many people are, how many cars are using these roads. And so, yeah, I don't know that they got everything right back in the 50s and 60s when they were laying out these streets. And so we're hopefully improving upon those decisions using all of this width that they gave us to work with.

No, I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is I would, again, we don't have, I guess, studies to show this, if I understood what you just said, but I would venture to say that demand hasn't changed much in the sense that, and I would almost venture to say back when these streets were designed, there were more people walking on the sidewalks and more people riding bicycles, to be honest. But I don't know. I mean, we'd have to have a study that actually shows that or if they ever collected data like that. And so... that in part makes me wonder then why are we making these massive changes because people now are they're used to these lane sizes they're used to these streets um you know i'll save some of this later for my comments but um i guess i just don't understand the comment you've originally made where you're saying the streets were designed around cars and not people because i don't i don't know that you know that that makes much sense um so In the proposal, there's several different sections of Ely, and the road changes design several different times. Do you see this as being something that's going to be confusing to drivers? Because now they're having to view this way, that way, a lot more colors in the street, a lot more things to watch out for, look out for, obstacles. Do you see this as being potentially more confusing or dangerous to drivers and vehicles and everybody?

We really hope not. You know, I do recognize and we've heard the comment that, you know, when we're applying new street, new design treatments, you know, there are questions around like, what does that mean? Like, what's a bike box mean? Or what's the green paint mean? And I think there's a bit of an adjustment to that. You know, as a driver, you are taking a little bit more information. But at the end of the day, this is, again, kind of going back to the engineering guidelines and best practices, this is really the direction that things are moving in. It's not a unique to Petaluma thing. It's happening throughout North America. And so I think as these elements become more commonplace and you start to see them more, people will sort of start to understand how to navigate them. But at the end of the day, all of this stuff, we really, we want to have a street that is safe for everyone. And that includes drivers, right? We're not trying to introduce any sort of dangerous conditions for drivers. We do want drivers to be safe out here as well. It's not just about bikes and peds.

Okay. Yeah, because I actually make an analogy to what we talked about earlier tonight with the sewer main, you know, and talking about how it now bypasses where it couldn't run straight through where the wetlands are. And, you know, what sort of impacts that that could have where now it's harder for that material to travel through the pipe and that creates problems. And so it's like, it's a similar concept where... you know, you start changing direction and moving around all over the place, you're creating the potential for more issues.

And I think, you know, especially with Eli, we're not you know, it's not like we're not changing circulation. We're not, you know, restricting any vehicle movements. If there are layout changes, right, if you're transitioning from a buffered bike lane to a parking protected bike lane and the lanes have to shift a bit, that lane shift is always going to happen at an intersection. We're not going to do that. In this project, we're not going to do that mid-block. We'll find a clean place to break off one configuration and then transition to the next using the intersection. And if there is some sort of lane shift, that can be called out with markings through the intersection. So, I mean, these are all things that we're definitely very mindful and cognizant of as we are designing these projects, is looking at the experience holistically from every point of view. If anything, I think, and I said that the Caulfield roundabout wouldn't be discussed here, but I will just say, Right now, there's only one place that drivers have to stop on this roadway, and we're taking that away effectively, right? We're actually, as far as we're concerned, the flow along Ely should actually improve with this project.

Okay. And then I have two more questions specific to this. I'll save the rest for the split. But how many parking spaces are going to be lost along Ely?

I think we'll have to come back with that number. It'll be specific to that frontage right there at East Washington. As far as in other locations, we would just be looking to do the standard 15 to 20 feet of red curb at the intersections just for visibility and safety and obviously compliance with state law. Most of them should already be red-curbed, but if there aren't any that are red-curbed, we'll be catching those through this project.

Thank you. Actually, I'll save my other questions for later.

Thank you. Council Member Barnicle? I'll hold mine to comments.

Okay. I did want to note that a lot of what we're trying to do is safety and a lot of it is climate. A lot of it is encouraging mode shifting. trying to get away from that conversation of whether the streets were originally designed for something. We have a goal in mind now. We have policy in mind now. That's what this is addressing. So I'm really happy we're moving in that direction. But I do have concerns about safety as well. Did you mention there were going to be pocket lanes at CASA's driveways? Right turn pocket lanes?

Yeah, so we can get a two-way left turn lane in there out in the middle of the roadway, or it may only need to be a left turn lane. So for northbound drivers, they can they'll be able to make that left into the drive into the driveway, which they actually can't do right now or they have to do it from the through lane. And then in the other direction, the southbound side, we're kind of playing around with a configuration where you would have a right turn pocket lane. or just an area.

That's in the area that's parking protected for bikes. Yeah. And I worry that, you know, a quick turn in front of a car has got to be a good sightline there.

That's something that we'll have to, we're going to be looking at very closely.

And I do love the center turn lanes. You know, I turn left into Friends Driveways, and you're right, you look in your rearview mirror all the time to see who's going to hit you from behind. But Along any of this, there's no landscaping component to any of this, and I would love to see, did you go through an analysis of where opportunities were for landscaping?

So, you know, in this project, it would really be kind of in the, at the intersections, but again, it's not, we can't really, we can't do any excavation with this project In a future project, if we come back and have to repay VLI, that's when it could happen. Our partners at SCTCA, I think, are pretty eager to see some form of beautification within some of the bulb out areas at the corners, whether those are planters or murals. All of that, we'll have to, I think, cross that bridge when we get to it. if it was if it was um if it was available would it be fundable from the same source yes uh yeah that's something that sctca is is working out um are what types of treatments uh they are including uh because it's again it's not just it's a county-wide um grant so several cities are participating and they're they're fine-tuned they're figuring out all of the different um treatment types, basically what's the toolbox that they want in play for each of the cities. But they have been discussing planters.

You've got to balance sight lines with landscape. Yeah, lower line stuff.

I think maintenance would become a big question.

Council Member Quint?

Thank you. Do you have any... Do you know how wide... Eli is compared to Lakeville Highway.

Oh, off the top of my head, no. I think Lakeville is definitely wider because you've got the landscaped meeting out there or the left turn lane.

So I measured several different spots just trying to get... an idea, and shoulder to shoulder I came up with 20, it, the places that I measured landed at 21 to 22 meters. Eli, do you have, do you know how wide Eli is?

The curb to curb on Eli, I knew it when I was doing all these cross sections.

668, 165.

Yeah. The narrower section, I want to say, is 64. Yeah.

64 what? Feet. How does that convert to meters? Sorry, I'm thinking meters. Well, what I'll tell you is when I measure, just doing a simple Google map measuring, I measure 21 to 22 feet. And then if you go up to, you get up right around, Caulfield, it actually gets wider and it's about 25 meters. And when you look at it on the diagrams on the side, sorry I'm getting into a little bit of comment here, but to me it feels equivalent to Lakeville. And so I guess my question is, is there anyone in this room if they were planning that neighborhood today, would they build a road as wide as Lakeville Highway through a residential neighborhood? I mean, would anyone in this room justify that?

Can we call that one rhetorical?

Okay, so that's a rhetorical question. But I just want to make the point, as someone who lives there, that we have a highway the size of Lakeville Highway running through a residential neighborhood. And so I guess my other question... So two more questions, and these ones I think will be simple. The changes that you're proposing, will they... create more congestion?

Now, based on everything we've seen, all the studies around lane reduction projects, it's well, well under the threshold where you might even might want to start to think about congestion impacts. But again, we've kept the capacity at the only signal. We've removed the always stop, which we know can be very confusing for drivers, especially in the peak hours. So pretty confident that congestion will be reduced with this project.

Very good. So reduce congestion. The next one, will it be safer?

Yeah. I mean, again, all the studies would point to a lane reduction. You're removing a lot of conflict points. You're kind of moving the traffic out to the middle of the roadway. Roundabouts, we'll get into that. So yes, definitely a safer configuration. Thank you.

All right, let's break it over to the public comment and public input on this. It's a workshop, so feel free to speak. Bring a card forward.

We received 21 online public comments, and they've been posted to the online agenda packet. At this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so. Speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Our first speaker tonight will be Darren Rakusen, to be followed by Nick Harris.

There we go. There we go. The clock is ready. Thank you, city clerk. Quick comment on this. I think it could apply to a lot of projects where we're improving street design alongside paving projects. And I think based on the data I was reading about numbers of injuries in either of these streets, I know we're talking about Eli, but number of injuries, I wonder if that's something we track after the fact. And if so, if that's already data that's being collected, I don't want to bog us down to data collection. That's data that's already being collected on streets as these diets and improvements happen, if that data can be presented to show the effectiveness of, because I think that would go a long way, getting empirical data on the impacts of what these street redesigns do. Obviously, there is research that grounds kind of the effect of collisions on the people being collided with potentially. That's important data. But what I would love to see is like when a traffic engineer looks at improvements like this, what are they assuming reductions in injuries are going to be? What are they assuming reductions in speed are going to be? Like do you anticipate a 10-mile-an-hour drop? Therefore, based on the injury calculations, that means you'll have this many less injuries. potentially serious injuries, that would be great data to have going into these conversations. And especially if it's something we can already collect for roads within our own city because we're already tracking that. I think that would be really, really useful in these conversations. I say that as someone on PBAC who I've seen a lot of the projects. I was on PBAC for two years. And yeah, just love to get our arms wrapped around that empirical data to kind of ground some of this. So thank you.

Thank you. Nick Harris to be followed by Grace Herrera.

Hi, good evening Council and staff. I had a question, maybe a little nerdy engineering question, but on the cross-section of Eli looking at Washington, the center dividing line shifts over from the middle of the road to off-center on the middle of the road. And I was just curious if roads are crowned and kind of like how freeways are and if that might introduce something – interesting in terms of vehicle handling considering we're not rebuilding that road and potentially changing the geometry of it. Second, the vehicle symbols on the cross sections, I think it'd be helpful to have some super duty trucks and dualies and things like that. I just looked it up. The Ford Raptor is eight feet wide from mirror to mirror. And some of those parking lanes are shown as eight feet. And some of the driving lanes are getting, I think, down to 10 or something like that. So looking a little tight. And then on the community feedback, and this may be more relevant to Caulfield, it'd be, I think, really helpful to get a sense of what are the actual metrics of the community feedback, what are people negative about, how many of them out of how many surveyed or were able to participate. And that's it for now. Thanks.

Thank you. Grace Herrera, to be followed by Chantelle Rogers.

I think Grace wants to speak on Caulfield.

Oh, I'm sorry. Your issue is the other street, Caulfield? Yes. We will move into that next. We are not there yet.

Not now.

No, we're still on Ely. Thank you for that clarification. Chantelle Rogers.

Hello again. I just want to throw a couple things out, being that these redesigns and street changes and reconfigurations that are happening, we're seeing the same elements coming up over and over. It seemed to be in the toolkit for the city in the project configuration. And one of them is this floating car parking thing. And perhaps present company excluded, I have yet to meet a Petaluma who liked that, who didn't think it was a problem, who, dare I say, hate, like people do not like this because it's counterintuitive. I think, actually, that it's dangerous. You know, if you put cars in the middle of the road, if they're all parked there, if you've got 20 cars, it's jarring, but at least you understand, well, wait a minute. But if there's only one here and one there, they're literally parked in the middle of the road. And it doesn't make sense to people. I think it's actually dangerous. You know, I live close to the roundabout coming out of... coming into town on Petaluma Boulevard South, and it's still sometimes like, ah! Why is there a car in the middle of the road? Just doesn't make any sense. I understand the road diet, and you have this road for bikes, and you want to make it safer for them. Make that bike lane as wide as conceivably possible on either side. But could you stop with the cars in the middle of the road? It just doesn't make any sense. You get out of that car, you've got cars on this side, you've got bikes on that side. I mean, how is this actually... I get it separates out the bike. I get that point, but I don't think it makes it safer for everybody. The other thing that's totally weird that's showing up everywhere are these signs in the middle of the road, right? So your stop sign, your yield sign, your pedestrian sign or whatever, they're always on the sidewalk. They're right there, there they are. The city keeps putting them in the middle of the road. I mean, they put them up on G and 8th a couple of weeks ago. Within three days, somebody obviously had slammed one of those signs down, and they had to replace it. Well, what if that was a bicyclist? What if that was a... I mean... The advantage of having that versus the danger that you're actually creating by putting metal poles in the middle of the road is unfathomable. I don't understand the logic of that. And just before I go, in case you think I'm against all of these things, I am the biggest proponent of roundabouts. I'm French. I love them. Put roundabouts wherever you want, and I'd be psyched. Thank you.

Thank you. And that closes public comment on Eli. And I'd like to toss to staff, again, whether they have a comment ready for both the question about Crown and maybe post-construction data.

Yeah, so we're not really concerned with the shift that will occur that puts the left turn lane for northbound Eli on the kind of past the center point of the road, center line of the roadway. That's something, that shift, again, can... will be handled with just we'll figure out sort of the length of taper required to make the lanes all move and make it all make sense not to, you know, not too jarring based on the speeds. There's calculations for all that stuff, you know, in the federal engineering guidebooks for us. The other question around data. Yes, I mean, definitely point well taken with collision data. Unfortunately, we're always lagging a couple of years behind. We don't even have collision data available. We just learned in our transportation injury mapping system right now for the last couple of years. So there's always about a year lag time for collision data. And it does take some time, obviously, to see those effects, right, to see collisions reduce on a street or increase. It takes a couple of years of looking at that data to start seeing trends. That being said, in our active transportation plan, we did include an action item to do an annual Vision Zero report to our Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee. We're happy to extend that presentation to council if desired, where we will be reporting on progress we're seeing throughout the city. And we'll definitely highlight some case studies there where we have had enough longevity with a project in place to look at some before and after data.

Thank you. I think the speed data, though, does come more quickly.

Speed data can be done very quickly, yeah. And we've done that in a few cases, and we can certainly do that here.

Thank you. All right. Comments? Council Member Shribbs?

Just for a comment to be aware of, coming off, again, north of Washington from Madison down to Washington. So I live right there on that street. The church is there, about 300 feet. And if you time the traffic between 8 and... and 8.20 in the morning on Monday through Friday during school days, that's when I can't even get out on the street because there's cars parked in the intersection all the way back to Madison. So it's just that particular 20 minutes of the day I completely avoid. So that is a congestion blocking point there to itself. So I know all those cars are coming in about 8.10 to 8.15 particularly. All those cars have got a... blend from two lanes all the way down to one lane so it might take a little bit more effort and a little bit more length for that but if you look at that time period specifically for the number of volume of cars coming through after a stoplight then then if you do that calculation figure out what it's going to take so so count the number of cars that's going to come in after that and we're talking about cars parked all the way from washington all the way past madison At that time in the morning, so that's when the volume of students are going or parents are going, taking their kids to school. Mostly it's kids driving themselves then having taught at Casa and use that parking lot for many years suggestions. I might you might think about is take the bus stop and move it. south to where between the two driveways. So the bus has plenty of room to stop there, because if you're going to put entryway into the parking lot and then coming out, it's both in the morning and in the afternoon. That's really congested where a lot of issues are happening. And that's where we've had recent deaths occur also of cars coming out of there after school because it's very congested. chaotic at those two times. So and the bus is in the way of if you have a turning lane going in, especially when there's because most of them are going to be coming from the north side coming in. So you have close to 100 cars coming in within just a few minutes trying to meet the bell. So at that point, I'd say we use that data for congestion and move the bus stop. Just think about that. If you just move it a little so it's out of the way of cars coming in and out where they can see because if the bus is there, you can't, the car's coming by. Okay, so it's just suggestions for you to think about. Thanks. Thank you.

Council Member Quinn.

Thank you. So the Federal Highway Administration classifies road diets as a proven safety countermeasure across multiple studies they found. 20 to 40 percent reduction in total crashes. That's straight from the Federal Highway Commission. A combined analysis of 45 sites in California, Iowa, Washington found an average of 29 percent crash reduction. Iowa studies showed approximately 25 percent fewer crashes per mile after conversion. Minnesota reported three-lane facilities experiencing crash rates roughly 46 percent lower than comparable four-lane undivided roads. Why does it work? A four-lane undivided road creates numerous conflict points. Vehicles stopping to turn left block a travel lane. Drivers change lanes to get around stopped vehicles. Speed differences develop between lanes. Side streets must cross four moving lanes. A three-lane road addresses these issues. by providing a dedicated center turn lane, eliminating weaving and side swipe conflicts, reducing rear end crashes, lowering speed differentials, reducing pedestrian crossing distance, simplifying side street movements. Does it always work? No. Road diets tend to work best when the average daily traffic is roughly under 20,000 people, 20,000 vehicles per day. Check. Some though some corridors above that threshold can still function well with proper design. There are many driveways and left turn movements. Safety is higher priority than maximizing vehicle throughput. The corridor serves multiple users, drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. That's when it works well. So that's what I have to say. Thank you.

What was that source again?

Some of that came directly from the federal transportation. In full disclosure, it came from CHAT GPT. Okay.

Thank you very much. Council Member Barnicle.

Yeah. I appreciate that, Council Member Quint. I actually had the studies that that was pulled up from because there's mounds of empirical data that show that four- to three-lane road diets work. In particular... when you have trips as low as we have on these roads. And also, I'll just point out to the roundabouts, We don't see the same traffic backup over on Casa Grande and Eli that we do at Caulfield and Eli. And it's because there is flow. It continues to flow. When you go to a stop sign and you look and there's four cars there and things like that, it creates the confusion and whatnot. The other thing that I took a class on communication recently and they said you can communicate with data or you can communicate with emotions and things like that and they used the Chicago Vision Zero as an example and they showed how Chicago had done all this great work to reduce traffic fatalities and things like that and then the person And it made you feel like Chicago was really just nailing it. And then the person showed a picture of this little girl. And her name's Lily Shambrook. And Lily was at the park with her mother, and she loved riding her bike. And Lily went, and where the bike lane ended, Lily's mother clipped a utility truck that was parked in the bike lane and Lily got drug under the truck for 50 feet and died in front of the preschool she was going to start at. Then at the end of the quiz on this, they asked questions about Chicago Vision Zero and all this cool stuff. And then they asked questions about Lilly and I could recite every damn detail because the emotion stuff just worked. And now I want to just show one other thing here because Councilmember Quint showed some really amazing stuff on the data front. I want to show what this four lane road diet will stop because this is the footage from the bus. This is a member of our community and here she is walking across the street and that would never happen if we had a four to three road diet on this street ever again. So when we think about what it is that we're doing with this, I have wanted to do this project for so damn long because this is what four to three road diets do. Because they stop stuff like that in their tracks. We will never have another collision like that because when somebody comes to a stop, that person can walk across the street. And we will never have that happen again. And we will not see the traffic and all that stuff. And even if we do see some traffic, it is damn worth it because that person's life is going to be there. And so I hope that what all of us walk away with tonight is that this road is going to be imminently more safe. The benefits to road guides are not to bicyclists, they're to everybody. The crashes, the reduction in crashes that Councilmember Quint talked about was not crashes with bikes or crashes with pedestrians. It was crashes with cars. Like that's just less crashes, you know? And so I am so excited to see this project move forward. And like you can see, I'm getting choked up because this stuff is real. These are real people's lives that we're playing with, and these are real people's lives that we're saving because that will never happen when this project gets done. And so I'm really excited to see this project move forward. I met with that person. I looked at that. I went to the four-lane stop. know why they moved the stuff in, because you can't see the stop signs that are out there. That's why they move them in, because people can see them. And all this stuff is for a reason, and it's to make our city safer. And I have wanted to do this since I got on the council. I met with this woman in 2021, and I have longed for this project, and I'm so excited to be bringing it to this community. Thank you.

And I think we're set. That's an input. Do you have what you need for the goal of the workshop on this project?

Yeah, thank you. And again, just to reiterate, for anyone watching at home, please do use the project web page to reach out with any additional feedback. And obviously, we've seen a lot of great emails and comments and some really detailed feedback come in through the public comments today, the written public comments. So thanks, folks, for this.

Thank you very much. And that concludes the Eli part, and we'll move into the Caulfield part. And I will be recusing on this as I have an interest in the area, and that falls under state laws as me leaving the room for that period. So thank you very much. Vice Mayor, this meeting is now yours.

Thank you, Mayor. And yeah, so now we will go into the presentation on the Caulfield section of the workshop. So Bjorn, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Vice Mayor.

So kind of mirroring what we did with Eli, starting with the project goals, this is a more robust paving project, as I mentioned. The pavement is in fair condition from Paran to McDowell. So you'll see one, a lighter pavement treatment there. to rehabilitate it. But then east of McDowell, our pavement is failed. So that's where you'll see more extensive pavement reconstruction. Again, with these projects, we hope to improve safety, reduce congestion, improve accessibility. This project will have concrete work, so we will be upgrading all the curb ramps. And then because it is a bigger project, we also have opportunities to beautify the street, add some landscaping, add some trees. We need to address some street lighting that was knocked over in a storm. We have kind of temporary street lights out on wooden poles from Paran up to McDowell. So we'll be replacing those with... new streetlights that meet standards. And then we will also be doing quite a bit of work to mitigate stormwater so that we're both sending less runoff into our stormwater system, but also cleaning the stormwater that does end up in there. And so this is a more extensive project, about a $4.5 million budget overall. And as I mentioned earlier, a significant amount of grant funding for this one. So looking at the numbers on Caulfield, average daily traffic, the busiest section is from St. Francis to Payram. That section sees about 15,000 vehicles on an average weekday. And then it steadily declines as you move east. The lowest volume section is out past, from Ely to Garfield, where it's just about 2,000 a day. We have an average of four collisions per year. I'll just note I did end up splitting the collisions between at the Caulfield and Ely intersection, so we're not double counting anything at that intersection between these two presentations. We have an average of 2.2 severe collisions per year on Caulfield, 85th percentile speed in the fastest section, which is from St. Francis to McDowell, probably won't surprise folks, is about 44 miles per hour. And I'll just note, I did run, we got the collision data from our PD. I mentioned it's not in the database that we have access to, but PD can still give us collision reports for the last couple of years, so I also looked at those numbers. And what really jumped out was the St. Francis intersection. We had six injury collisions at the St. Francis intersection in 2024 and 2025. That wasn't something that we hadn't seen a ton of injury collisions there in previous years, but that really jumped out for the last two years as a hotspot. So looking at our lane configurations, again, I'll go to the intersections next, but this is sort of your typical mid-block configuration away from the intersection. So starting with Payran to McDowell, away, again, away from that signal at PayRan. I've got a slide for that as well. We've got this condition, again, two lanes in each direction, no turn lane, but really no turn lane is needed on this section because you don't have driveways, you don't have side streets. It's sound wall, right, or fence line. So... what we're looking at here is introducing landscaped buffer areas that will separate the bike lane from the vehicle lanes and add some much needed greenery to this stretch of roadway that is very uh sterile i think to put it to put it nicely We do have a hatched median showing in the middle of the roadway, and this is just to allow emergency vehicle access in case of, you know, if fire is in the area trying to get through, they've got a space to operate. So we did kind of look at, like, if we were to put the median out in the middle of the roadway, what would the impacts be? And we just wouldn't be able to provide a very protected experience for the bike lane because now we would need to provide room for vehicles to get over into the bike lane. That kind of breaks down the protection. So we saw this as a win-win where we check all the boxes, we get emergency access, we get the landscaping, and we protect the bike lanes. So this next section is from McDowell to Park. On this section, this is looking east. So on this section, you do have some on-street parking that's provided outside, I think, a senior living facility or some senior apartments. And so we're retaining that parking there, and we don't really have any driveways. So in this section, we did, again, show a parking-protected bike lane to... continue with that protected experience. And then on the eastbound side of the street, we're showing a curb separated bike lane, no room for landscaping with everything out here. And then when we go back from Park to Cronulla, moving east, we get back to a very similar condition to the other side of McDowell. And so we go back to the configuration shown previously. I'll just note, too, I copied and pasted. There is a sidewalk here on the northbound side. So that was a mistake on my part. But otherwise, we're showing the same condition. And then going from Cronulla to all the way out to Garfield, this is where the roadway shifts. And now instead of fence line and sound wall, you have single family homes on both sides of the streets and pretty frequent driveways. So in this section, this is where we show a similar buffered bike lane condition, similar to what was shown on Eli. And again, the idea here is that were able to retain a lot more street parking. And it just felt feels like the right treatment, again, with all the driveways as opposed to going parking protected. So then looking at some of the intersection and crossing improvements, this is where we will talk about roundabouts. We do have two proposed as part of the Caulfield project. And we know roundabouts can be controversial, but they really have become widely regarded as the safest and most efficient way to move a high volume of traffic through a busy intersection. As shown in the diagram here, they reduce the number of possible collision points from 32 to eight when compared to a traditional intersection. And notably, the way that cars or drivers are kind of deflected and directed around a roundabout, you've completely eliminated the possibility of T-bone collisions and of head-on collisions. And those tend to be higher severity, higher speed collisions. So when collisions do happen in a roundabout, it's much more rare, obviously, but when they do happen, they tend to happen at more of a glancing angle, less of an impactful angle as you have with a T-bone or a head-on collision. They reduce congestion, noise, and pollution associated with cars stopping, idling, and accelerating. They present an opportunity to add trees and landscaping to an intersection, and I think that's particularly important when you talk about a really large intersection like we have at Caulfield and Eli. It's just a huge, expansive area of asphalt that we could obviously beautify. And just to highlight, we have had some comments, why not a signal here? First off, signals are probably more expensive than roundabouts. The upfront cost is similar, but then when you factor in kind of the ongoing electrical costs associated with a signal and ongoing maintenance, Roundabouts are more cost-effective. And then when you talk about the congestion benefits, this just really jumped out to me. The traffic consultant working on the Petaluma North Station Area Plan, they've been doing a bunch of different modeling for that plan as they start looking at some of the mobility and circulation proposed there, or just not even proposed, but just some of the initial ideas that they have. And they actually ran models of comparing the current condition at Corona and North McDowell, which is obviously a very busy multi-lane signalized intersection. And they found that if they replace that with a single-lane roundabout, it would reduce intersection delay by 19 seconds in the morning peak hour and 20 seconds in the afternoon peak hour compared to the existing condition. That's with a single-lane roundabout in that location compared to the current multi-lane signal. And that intersection probably sees... at least twice as much volume as the Caulfield-Ely intersection. So that really, I think was a very, you know, we knew roundabouts reduced delay significantly. We knew they're efficient, but that just to give kind of a local example of a intersection that we all know is very busy. Those were some pretty impressive results. So with Caulfield, This is a paving project. There will be concrete work, so you can expect to see concrete bulb outs, median islands. When we talk about some uncontrolled crosswalks out there, they would have flashing beacons. And then looking at some of the existing intersection and crossing conditions, you have seven formalized crossing opportunities across the 1.5 mile stretch from Paran to Garfield, two signals, four stop signs, and then just one uncontrolled crosswalk. And then in the proposed conditions, we've obviously added three uncontrolled crosswalks. And then we are proposing roundabouts at both the St. Francis intersection, where I mentioned we've had the recent collision issues, as well as the Eli Boulevard South intersection. People at the community workshop and even in some of the emails today have questioned whether St. Francis is large enough for a roundabout. It is a pretty tight intersection. It's definitely been an interesting design exercise for our consultant who is working on this, but they have been looking at all the different turning movements and vehicle types, and we're feeling good about the design that they are developing, being able to accommodate all of those movements. So it is a smaller roundabout, but we still think we can make it work. And obviously, As I noted with the Eli project, you know, you're taking two intersections that are, can be pretty confusing, you know, with St. Francis and Eli, just having that multi-lane all-way stop condition, just, it's not ideal. So we do think that the roundabout not only will improve the safety at those intersections, but just the navigability, the efficiency, and really should reduce congestion out there. With the lane reduction and some of the changes, the intersection we were really concerned about was Caulfield and South McDowell because we already have a signal there. You know, if you were to ask us what would we recommend there between a single roundabout, we might want to look at a roundabout there, but we've already got a signal in place. We think it's better to make those investments in the other intersections where we don't have signals or roundabouts. We're sticking with a signal at Caulfield and Eli, or at least that's our recommendation. And we have looked really closely at the operations here. We've looked at all the different lane configurations, signal timing possibilities. So right now out there, it is what's called a split phase, which means there's no overlapping green in the two opposing directions on Caulfield. So your eastbound traffic on Caulfield gets the green, and then in the westbound direction, they've got a red, and then it alternates. A traditional intersection, we do have some overlapping, excuse me, we have some overlapping green time where you've got the green left arrow that goes in both directions. And that is generally a little bit more efficient. And so we are with this lane configuration able to achieve that overlapping green. we would also implement a flashing left arrow that comes on after the green arrow has completed for a little bit more efficiency. So you're not stuck there waiting necessarily if you miss the green left. So again, we've run all the models. We've looked at this. We've actually, with this reconfiguration, able to achieve a slight reduction in delay for eastbound call field, and then really just kind of negligible change for the other directions. So feeling good about the safety and congestion benefits here. And then at the Payrand Street signal, we are again looking to retain the existing capacity at the intersection for westbound traffic. So you can see there, like we showed on Eli at Washington, same number of lanes there. We've just tightened them up a little bit so that we can get that extra two feet on each side to protect the bike lanes. but otherwise that intersection should operate the same. We'll look at how much queuing capacity is needed. And so those two lanes, those two through, oops, sorry, I realize you can't see my cursor. These two lanes will continue up towards the overpass as far as they need to go. And then once we've exhausted that need for queuing capacity, you'll see it narrow down to that configuration that I started out with, with the one lane in each direction. So some of the things we heard in our community meeting, again, overall support for the lane reduction, but there were definitely concerns on Caulfield about the peak hour impacts. I think a lot of concerns about what would happen at the South McDowell signal, and that's why we wanted to take such a close look at that. Again, mixed attitudes about roundabouts. We always hear that. I know a lot of people are uncomfortable or wary of them. We did hear some concerns about both safety and congestion at Caulfield and Cronulla. And so, we have looked at that. We are going to be…we are recommending bulb-outs at that intersection to shorten the crossing distance. We are planning on sticking with the existing all-way stop there. We just think that's an appropriate treatment there. really prioritizing the investment again in St. Francis and Eli with this project due to some of the collision history. And if you're looking for kind of a comparable intersection for Caulfield and Cronulla, what it would be like, we think that D Street at 8th Street, you know, similar volume, similar peak hour impacts, The caveat is that on Cronulla or on Caulfield, we'd still actually have left turn lanes at Cronulla, which we don't have on D at 8th. And then lastly, we did again here pretty broad support for beautification. I think people are excited to get some trees and some shade out on that section west of McDowell especially. so for our engagement we are planning to go to the tree advisory committee to talk about tree selection for this project for those long landscaped areas so that'll be coming probably later this summer And then our goal is to wrap up this design the very end of this year, have this bid and awarded in early 2027, and then construct from spring to fall of 27, try to concentrate some of the busier activity in the summer. And again, just encourage people to go to the project web page and reach out with any additional feedback that they have. And so with that, happy to turn it over for discussion.

Thank you very much for the report any questions councilman trips I'm just going back to the roundabout versus stop Comparing the st. Francis intersection with the Cronulla one So I said if I go through that very quite a bit and there's a lot more traffic on a call field then Comparing St. Francis versus Cronulla, I think St. Francis has just a little bit more traffic, cross traffic than Cronulla, except maybe, except for school when a lot of service is maybe getting in or out. But at one, you have a roundabout and the other one would be a four-way stop. And I was thinking, is there that big of a difference between the two? And why not put a roundabout in that spot so it's more consistent? Because when you come down Caulfield, you feel like you don't want to stop there. Because why am I stopping? Because there's no cross traffic for the most part. But if you put a roundabout, people would go through slowly. So why not a roundabout there, just like St. Francis?

Yeah, I think it's just... We really were looking at, you know, looking at St. Francis and Eli was our big focus just given, again, the collision history, the size of that intersection. St. Francis started to make more sense because of the recent collision history and also just there is more activity at that intersection. St. Francis is busier than Cronulla, and Caulfield is a lot busier in that location than it is up at Cronulla. And so we just thought that the all-way stop still works, you know, just with some minor adjustments to those crossing distances with the bull bouts. Felt that an all-way stop is workable there and felt that the investment was needed at a greater degree at the other two intersections. And I don't, yeah, I mean, that's not to say that Cronulla couldn't handle a roundabout necessarily. We haven't looked at it yet from a size standpoint. I'm sure it's pretty similar probably to St. Francis, but just kind of our initial thinking based on collision history, activity levels, just feels like the stop sign is appropriate there and it was less of a focus.

Okay, yeah, it's just like when I'm coming down there, it's like, okay, why am I stopping? Anyway, the other one is, since we are putting a lot of landscapes in the islands, do we have the ability to actually get water to those islands? Because they're pretty isolated and there's walls there. I don't see a lot of water meters, unless you're running off the main that's running right down the middle of the street and then running off that. So is there a water main that's running down that we could tap into? And how would that work? Do you want to take that one?

Yeah. I don't know where that is.

So as part of landscaping, we are proposing new water services. Right now, depending on how much we can water, we're kind of looking at three zones, kind of one on the west side of 101, one on the east side of 101, and then one farther down, kind of towards Park and Cronulla. So we would do a new service that would irrigate it with a new controller.

Okay. And one of the issues, if they look at the street trees and that usually anywhere from two or three feet of distance. And so I did this work a long time ago, but if you look at the trees, the larger trees, as they develop and all the roots are in two different actions and they're not very well established and then trees tend to tip over with the crack with the crosswind right there because the wind is coming in the opposite direction or the should say perpendicular direction so i get and um Because of that, very large trees might be a problem with wind damage and wind pushing it into or down, maybe even into the street, and the roots uprooting because there's not a lot of lateral structure there, just the wrong direction. So, anyway, just think about that as you propose to the tree committee and maybe think about smaller trees and shrubs going down rather than big trees, unless you can really put out a large six-foot bulb out where the roots can go laterally, not just in one direction back and forth, not in a line, but actually spread out. That might be an issue coming down if you're going to make it too narrow with big trees.

It's a good reminder of that wind.

Anyone on this side? No questions? Okay. I do have a few. Let me go back to here. So when you speak about the safety on this road and you talk about injuries being an average of four annually, severe collisions point to, are there fatalities? Have there been fatalities along Caulfield or in recent years?

I don't believe, fortunately I don't think we've had any fatalities fatalities that I saw in recent years in the collision reports. I didn't, yeah, I looked back to 2019. So it's possible there was one prior to that, but nothing in the last six years that I saw.

Okay, thank you. And let's see here, let me go back to some other questions. So this is kind of – it made me think after some of the public comment earlier. You know, if – based on what data we're collecting and what metrics we're going off of, if our predictions aren't correct, is there a plan to go backwards and say, okay, we're going to revert back to what was or something new? Or – because I've seen it with other roads where it's – things are a pilot. They don't end up changing. But if – what are we – I don't know. What are we really measuring to define success? I know Vision Zero is part of it, some of that stuff. But, like, if it doesn't measure up to that, what's the plan then for the street?

Yeah. I think, you know, obviously collision data is a big one. Speed data, you can look at that. You can look at – congestion, you could look at mode shift, right, look at number of trips made by people walking and biking. I mean, ultimately, any decision to make further changes to a street that would require kind of, I would say, considerable investment, those probably rise to more of a city council decision. You know, there are things that as we as staff are empowered to make minor, more minor changes. But yeah, if it was if it was significant, a significant kind of reverting back to a previous design, that sounds like more of a more of a council decision, probably requiring greater degrees of investment.

Okay, thank you. And that's all I have to say. Let's open up public comment. Clerk, do we receive any cards specifically on Caulfield?

We do have one so far. At this time, I'll start a 30-second clock for public comment. During these 30 seconds, members of the public wishing to speak should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk. If they have not already done so, speaker cards received after this time may not be accommodated.

Do we need to send in a second card?

I would say maybe yes.

Yeah, the way we structure this, this is where we're having the call field discussion that we didn't have previously.

I'll make a motion that we go past 11 o'clock.

All right, so we have four speaker cards. We will start with Grace Herrera. There she is. Hi, Grace. You have three minutes.

I just want to thank all for this opportunity. I just want I am grateful for the project of Cowfield. I live at the corner of Cowfield and McDowell. And I have been having a lot of problems with trucks. I haven't heard anything about trucks passing by many years already. And all these big trucks shake the houses. And then I came here three years ago. And I complain about that. And I heard that you were going to do something about the trucks. The trucks that I have 38 years living there in this place. And then this never happened before until you fix something over there in Washington. from the freeway and then after they they were working over there the the trucks start passing by but then later on you fix everything over there but the trucks continue and they check the houses and then i am an elderly person if you don't know i am 82 years old i need to sleep i am older than all of you i guess but uh it is it shakes like earthquake and it doesn't matter what time is it day and night one o'clock in the morning two o'clock in the morning three o'clock and it shakes and then i i have been complaining and everything now i heard this project that they are going to be done on cow field and i thank god for that and all of you for this, but I heard, I got a notification from you in December, and they said that in January, not in January, the year 2026, this project was going to be done. Now we are half of year of 26, and the trucks continue passing. Now I heard that this project, it will be until 27. The problem that I have here, and I hope you can hear me, I just, please stop these trucks passing by, big trucks, and they shake. They are passing that way and this way. And the projects that they are in front of, McDowell over there, they are elderly people living there, and they are complaining also. like I am complaining, the whole street on McDowell and then, and Cowfield. And I just want to thank for everything, whatever you are doing, and I just hope that somebody will stop these trucks passing By any time, they just, and I said the last time, if the foundation of my house that is at the corner of McDowell and Caulfield is going to break something down, who is going to pay for that, the trucks or the city of Peraloma? I just want to know. because I pay insurance and I pay. But these big trucks shake my house day and night. And I just want you to hear me because I am only I guess I am not the only the only one complaining about this. But I just want you to hear my complaint and my thank you also because the project apparently is going to happen. But please stop these trucks. Please send them back again to the freeway over there on Washington. That's what it was before. Thank you, Mrs. Herrera. Appreciate your comments.

Thank you very much. Next up, we have Nathan Spindell to be followed by Nick Harris.

Good evening, Council. It's quite late, so I'll be brief. I'm a huge fan of this project. I think it's a massive improvement for both Caulfield and Eli. Whenever I find myself on Caulfield, whether I'm in a car or a bike, I'm like, oh, here we go again. Like, it moves so fast and drivers are aggressive in those intersections. And I think the lane reconfiguration here will really make it a much more pleasant street and a safer street. And I haven't heard much people talk tonight about how there are four schools in this area serving probably 2,000 to 3,000 students. And their safety is super important to me. And whether they're in a car, they're on a bike, or on foot, I think everything we can do in this project to make it safer for them is really important work. I'm a big fan of this project, and I can't wait to see it built. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Spindell. Nicholas Harris.

Hi. Good evening, council, staff. So I live off of St. Francis between Caulfield and Baywood. Something that I can't understand from the presentation, and I'd like to have some discussion around it, is the Caulfield Bridge. So unless there's changes happening to Caulfield Bridge, you know, what happens now, and you've got to think about it in terms of commute time. So if you're driving down Lakeville, you're going to turn onto Caulfield. It's two lanes. It's kind of one lane with the merge lane, but it's two lanes collecting down into one. People are super aggressive. If you even use that, like, merge lane, people will flip you off. It's weird aggressiveness, but that's kind of typical with commute time behavior. Then once you pass through the parent intersection, it's two lanes on the bridge. Right now, those two lanes are gonna go down to St. Francis. You've got people like myself turning right on the St. Francis. You've got people turning left to go into that neighborhood on St. Francis, and then people continuing down through. I think that the lane diet past St. Francis, I don't think there's going to be a problem with that. But I think choking the traffic down before the St. Francis intersection, it's really going to create a parking lot on the Caulfield Bridge and the only way to prevent that would be to adjust the signals, and then that would back traffic up onto Lakeville, and that's unacceptable. If there's a traffic circle there, which my personal thought is it's too small, and at peak times, there's too much traffic coming down Caulfield, and the neighbors that are trying to intersect onto Caulfield from St. Francis are gonna have a really tough time. What's gonna happen is people are gonna use Baywood. That's just what's gonna happen because commuters are getting onto the freeway like myself. So we can use Baywood. Now we're sending a lot more traffic down a road that has a ton of pedestrian use. You have the Baywood Arms Apartments there. There's already safety concerns there. I'm gonna leave it at that, thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Harris. And do we have any council comment? Councilman Quinn.

Yeah, I mean, it's having the opportunity to serve on PBAC. It's, you know, I've seen this before. I think staff has done good work. All of, you know, my comments that I shared before on Eli sort of apply here. I think it's the smart thing to do. I think it's going to beautify a part of our city that's in desperate need of beautification. And I'm excited for it and looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you.

Councilman Kata Thompson.

Thank you. So I want to talk about trucks. Grace and I have been talking for about three years on this. So my question is the roundabout at St. Francis, can that be designed so those huge trucks can't go around it? But, you know, obviously smaller delivery trucks. So are we looking at that? And then looking at our truck routes is a separate item, but I think it's a good time to talk about this.

mike there we go um yeah so obviously we are currently designing this project with the assumption that caulfield remains a freight route as it is currently so any design any uh consideration of reconsideration by council of the of the freight route map uh could potentially trigger design changes. But I mean, I think at the end of the day, we're probably operating with the smallest roundabout possible. I don't know that we would divert from that here. Anyways, I'm gonna let Jeff discuss some of the nuances here, sorry.

Also to the design vehicle standpoint, we're designing also to our large fire truck ladder, so that's one of the larger vehicles. So it does act, because it's only single axles and not a trailer, it doesn't have a turning capacity, so it acts similar to a... Did you say the fire truck? Yeah, the large ladder truck that we have in the fire department. Okay. To help answer the truck question, we did have data on vehicle classification that used Caulfield as part of the accounts to be collected. We have that. Based on just looking at the section from Payrand to South McDowell and looking at just semis, there is 48 large vehicles using that road daily. So when we average that out to the number of vehicles on it, which is around 14,000, that's 0.3% of the vehicles are heavy trucks. Through some research of talking with UPS, USPS, and FedEx. I think one of the main users of that route is one of the contractors that does mail deliveries for USPS. Obviously they come up Caulfield to McDowell and then run down. So there are other alternative routes they could use. So I kind of leave it at that, knowing that .3% of the vehicle traffic on Caulfield on a given day is truck traffic. So it is a small amount. So if you were to restrict truck traffic, it is minimal in the big picture of things. And mostly the vendors that you're looking at is probably Safeway for that route anyway, if you're looking at big trucks. The other option, too, that we looked at is just kind of an interim low-hanging fruit is communicate to that contractor and ask them if they're willing to look at alternative routes, if it's using pay rent to Washington or going up 101 to McDowell and back down. So I think there's some opportunities in the short term if we wanted to try to address it now.

I appreciate that. Those trucks just damage the roads, you know, on residential roads. And I understand that on McDowell you're going to get some truck traffic. That's just what's going to happen, especially from Washington Street north. But they are damaging the road, and most of them are going to the post office. They're postal trucks that are contracted, and it's a lot of them. And I would like this council to open up the discussion on that truck route because it was never a truck route until, was it 2000? I'm not sure. It was in the 2000s that it was changed. I mean, she's, Grace has lived there for 38 years and never had that problem until 2000. that truck route was changed onto Caulfield. And this is a residential neighborhood, and I like to be protective of the residents who live here, that they have peace, and that their houses aren't shaking, and that it's not a lot of noise. Because I live close to McDowell, so I know that truck route and the truck sounds. And they're damaging to the roads. They're highly polluting. And there's a section on McDowell that we've been talking about that is all red because of pollution. And it's a large area. And I think we should consider that. And I'd like to ask the council to bring back the discussion on the truck route, especially going on to Caulfield, find out exactly. I don't know what the date was when it was changed in 2000, but go back and revisit that. Because, you know, we have people living here. We need to protect the people that live here. And they should not be polluted out. And their houses should not shake. And she lives right on the corner. But it's not just her house. There's a sound wall there. But the houses on the other side of the sound wall are feeling the same percussion. And I think the two lanes will make a difference. But it's not going to make a difference when those trucks have to make that huge, you know, that turn on or off McDowell. So I'm hoping that I can get some support to bring the truck route back to talk about this because we're, you know, this project is in 2027. And so we have plenty of time to have that conversation.

Are you speaking of McDowell or Caulfield?

I'm talking about from Lakeville and the large trucks that primarily it's to the post office get off at Caulfield where they used to. That didn't happen. I mean, they could get on the freeway. They could stay on Lakeville, get on the freeway, and then get off at Old Redwood Highway. And then that would be less damage to a large section of McDowell, so our paving would last longer. Because, I mean, some of the new section on McDowell North is failing, and it's because of those trucks. And yet it's new pavement, and there are a few sections.

I would support adding that to an agenda on a... Another night.

Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then, you know, whatever the decision is, it may change the way the roundabout is also. Or actually not because of the fire truck. So understanding that. Thank you.

Councilman Barnacle again, hugely supportive of this project. Um, I do think just the going from 4 to 2 is going to help a lot on on that. I had a friend who lived right next to the Buckhorn and to the pre and post of the petaluma Boulevard road diet was like night and day in terms of the sound that just came from that road. So I do think it will help, but I'm supportive of looking at it as we dive into this. And if there's things we can do, of course, let's give people peace. But thank you for the thoughtful work that's gone into this and excited about both these projects. Just a quick comment.

I do want to thank staff because, I mean, I'm watching the Rainier project and I'm just... amazed at how well that project is moving forward. The slowing down of traffic, and it's going to be the same on Caulfield and on Ely. And people deserve peace, and we deserve to be able to cross a street instead of a highway. We're actually crossing a real street, yet it's the same width. And you don't even know it because of design changes.

Thank you. Thank you for the comments. Well, I would like to point out first, I do like seeing more trees along that area because it's very open. It's a nice area, but it could use some trees. And so in regard to roundabout design, Is that pretty defined and rigid, or is there flexibility in it in the sense that instead of islands everywhere at each intersection, you use striping instead so that larger vehicles, if it's a tight area, can still get through there, not hit something, not have to... be worried about hitting something. Can you make on the, I'm not sure what you call it, but the inner ring of the roundabout, can you make that curb softer, you know, so that tires can get up over it? Because I see so many designs now where, I mean, those curbs are, they're vertical, you know, and everything seems tighter and it's, you know, you got to hit it just right to get through if you have a larger vehicle.

Yeah, so the kind of the combination of striping and vertical, that's something we're actually doing on Rainier, where Rainier, we have a lot more real estate. So we're going with, we've got the vertical splitter islands at the approach, the approaches there. But then on Maria, we don't have as much width. So that's actually just going to be a striped kind of splitter island. As far as the actual like treatment of the mountable curbs, I'm going to pass that one to Jeff.

Usually, I mean, I think most of the roundabouts you see, the center circle is, they call the apron. So it's allowed for mainly just big trucks making that turn can use that extra 10 feet of real estate for their back wheels to go over. I think on the side streets, you kind of mentioned it, we're using striping because even kind of rolled curb or anything would still have an impact. So striping is the way to kind of get around that by delineating it, but not being an impact for those larger vehicles.

Okay. Yeah, because I think it would be more beneficial for larger vehicles. And that's not even talking about, you know, as a freight route or anything, but people with trailers, campers. I mean, there's a long list of things everyday people drive and use that struggle through certain intersections we've been doing. And so anything to mitigate that and still make it easy for them to travel and not have to plan alternative routes where, you know, they live in that neighborhood, they've always been driving that street. So anything to do that would be appreciated. And so, you know, last thing I'll say, and kind of everything from the first half of the discussion, I feel, you know, carries over, but obviously our workshop here is for safety. And I think everybody in this room wants to see our streets be safer. Nobody doesn't, you know. And so, you know, nobody wants to see or create a situation that, you know, creates a fatality. And so I think it's not fair in some ways to try to project that onto others because they have a different idea. Everybody has a different idea of what safety is, and that's why we're here tonight to discuss it, is to reach a conclusion about what's going to be safest for our town and our residents and everybody that comes here. So anyway, I appreciate the presentation, the workshop, all the comments, and I will adjourn the meeting. Thank you.