Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

All right, good morning everyone and welcome to the Tuesday, September 8th, 2026 Board of Supervisors meeting. We're happy to have you all here with us today. We are going to start our meeting with a flag salute led by Placer County's own District Attorney Morgan Geyer.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Geyer. We will now move to our consent agenda. Is there anything that any board members would like to pull from consent? And is there anyone here in the chambers who has anything they'd like to pull off of consent? And anyone online? No, Chair. All right. I'll bring it back to the board.

I'll move approval of the consent agenda. I'll second.

Moved by Gore, seconded by Jones. This is a roll call vote.

Supervisor Gore? Aye. Supervisor DiMattei? Yes. Supervisor Jones? Aye. Supervisor Gustafson? Aye. Chair Landon?

Yes. We will now move to public comment. This is now the time for you to comment on any items that are not on our agenda for today. I would just remind folks at the three minute mark, there will be a timer and then you'll have 15 seconds to wrap up your comments before the mics are turned off. Is there anyone here who'd like to make a public comment today? Please come forward.

Morning. My name is Jared Lovell, a resident of North Auburn. The community has been discussing flock. This board of supervisors hasn't. The board authorized flock contract in March of 2023 and expanded the camera count in 2024, both on the consent agenda. It is time for the board to learn all you can about this product. Learn what makes it different from previous generations of automatic license plate readers, some of which Placer County also owns. Learn about the size of the surveillance network. Learn who retains perpetual rights to the data it collects. It's not the sheriff's office. Read about the outcome of the landmark 2017 California Supreme Court case, ACLU versus Superior Court. Learn about the innocent people whose lives have been endangered by false ALPR alerts and AI hallucinations associated with crimes they had nothing to do with. A 71% false positive rate in Roseville does not protect the public, but endangers us and police officers. In the best cases, Flock is returning an estimated 30% false positive rate. People are removed from their own cars and homes at gunpoint, sometimes more than once. Some have spent weeks in jail. Learn about the high levels of abuse of the flock system by officers and non-sworn employees. Can Placer afford that? And what would you say to a victim? Learn about the deflock movement in Grass Valley and the dramatic statement by their chief of police. Learn about the ongoing Auburn deflock movement. Learn about Flock's history of lying to the public, to officials, and police departments. The ACLU has an excellent article devoted to Flock's misrepresentations, evasions, and outright lies. This past weekend, Grass Valley PD even had to remove Flock cameras a second time because Flock was not cooperating with their cancellation request. If you learn about these things, I think you'll see that the continued use of Flock and similar products poses an enormous risk both to the people of Placer County and the Placer County Sheriff's Office. It's time for the board to lead the way on this issue. I hope the board will also attend or watch the Auburn town hall on September 21st, somewhat tangentially. I need to point out that despite the unwanted mass surveillance by flock, the system did not result in any suspects for the March 28th drive by air gun shooting on 49 and bell road. Sheriff's office owes us a better explanation of where that investigation led and why there have been no arrests. It's incredibly bad for free speech in Placid County if people can't stand by a road holding a sign without fear of being shot. Elections are coming up and all people must be able to speak and express their politics safely. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Anyone else here in the chambers?

Good morning, my name is Spencer Delling. I've been a resident of Placer County essentially my entire life. I was admiring the photograph up there, and thinking of that dam, I really am firmly convinced that the flock surveillance system is the crack in the dam that released the floodgates of tyranny. We just pledged allegiance to the flag, and the ending words are for justice and liberty. for all and having such a comprehensive surveillance system is really the antithesis of liberty and it's rather the institutionalization of a police state if you look at the historical records. Justice for all. It's being marketed under the guise of safety, but at what price? I think it's at the price of liberty and of our country that's based on the rule of law. Justice is founded in the rule of law, and the California state code and the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment, guarantees us safety from these sorts of measures, which are really tyrannous. So I don't have all the facts and stats that Jared has, but I'm so firmly convinced that this is antithetical to the founding of our country, to our state laws, and to how our county has operated for a very long time. I encourage you to further look into the legalities of this. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Anyone else here in the chambers? And is there anyone online?

Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Greetings supervisors, Diane Louise Alessi here, director of Christian Valley Park Residents Coalition District 5 over six decades in Placer County. Neighbors, you too listen closely. Upon the supervisors August 25th approval, of these loans, commitment letters to Hopeway Apartments for 55 years and the affordable housing destination at Placer One project for 21 years, both locking in 3% interest significantly lower than what it would cost the county or the public to borrow that money at. Board of Supervisors, you are asking taxpayers to subsidize a smaller project at a higher cost. The Penrins PC&R filed its lawsuit with USA Properties and HDP, and their partners returned with a revised funding deal, fewer units and longer construction timelines, apparently in exchange for their community support. The county reduced the Hopeway Arena affordable housing requirement from 240 units to 131, yet the reducing of the cost proportionately Taxpayers are being asked to fund the smaller project at approximately 22% more per unit estimate over that's over 10 grand more per door. This is not accountability. It is the taxpayer funded subsidy that shifts risk away from the developer. Commits all future preferred in lieu fees collected and wow, the proposed 25% residual receipts clause is especially troubling. The county is repaid only if expenses such as management consulting and developer fees are paid, third parties, invoicing. If those fees consume the project's profits, the residual could be zero and the public could receive nothing. This is abusive. The county's loans are also subordinate to primary lenders. If the project fails or is foreclosed, banks and other creditors are paid first. Taxpayers are left at the back of the line. We also need safeguards against ownership control or control being transferred through new LLCs, partnerships or other entities without clear public notice and recorded accountability. Public investments must not disappear into a maze of corporate structures. Finally, the county is proposing 3% simple interest commitments extending for decades, including 55 years for Hopeway phase one without clear conditions requiring phase two to be funded and another 21 year commitment to Placer one without clearly identifying funding allocations. These agreements need to be reached or rescinded and the contracts renegotiated we demand enforceable guard rails transfer accounting meaningful developer investment protections against excessive fees and immediate review of the 25 residual receipt provision taxpayers should not be forced to finance a risk-free free gamble with developers developer entities while the public carries the risk thank you we must never approve another house

Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments. Caller, are you able to unmute your mic? We can come back.

And we'll come back to you.

Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Hello. Yes, we can hear you.

Hello, good morning. Hey, my name's Lexana Tucker. I go by Lexi, but I live in Ophir. I submitted individual letters to all five of the board members because everybody's got a little bit of a different background. But there's just one issue that I need everybody to see together. Placer County did a really good job and they adopted the OFR planning record and the county's current administrative record doesn't seem to consistently reflect it. It was adopted in 1983. It's identified keeping the rural character of OFR and all of the things that go with it, the orchard, the agriculture, the pasture, the rangeland and everything else that could be important. And they deliberately reduced the theoretical development capacity down to recognize maximizing what could be built on it versus what could be extracted from it. Then later we know that actively the County can amend it because recently it did amend it in 2018 and they've continued to use it. But at the same time, other County material is starting to use something called Newcastle offer. And it's citing a 1994 date. After months of research, I still have not located any legislative action that repealed or replaces or lawfully remains it. And that matters because major decisions are being made now. including the PCWA, it's advancing a regional water treatment facility in Ophir with an initial capacity of approximately 10 million gallons per day. But it's actually built so that it can exceed that and goes to 30 and 60, and that's adding a substantial expansion on it. So if we weren't already dealing with that, on Ophir Road is 14.9 acres of proposed 95,000 square feet of storage. And so we're fighting everything that originally the county had agreed with and helped pass legislation for to defend from, like large water lines, transportation infrastructure, and other development pressure. Those projects can't be understood honestly if everyone begins at its own parcel boundary. So I believe that you guys could help me stop the piecemealing so that we could help the wildlife, the water, the Oakland, and everything survive this. So I was hoping that you could do that for me. And if we could bring it to an agenda or part of the meeting to find where the conflict, the identity exactly is, And what happened from now to then and find that we could move forward and not have another over resident proof that it exists, but, you know, ask the members of the board to bring the status of over in the general plan up to current county records instead of on the confliction of them so that we can correct it because correction isn't a failure of government. It means that a government is capable of fixing an error, correcting it and protecting what moves forward. Thank you.

Thank you.

Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Hi, my name is Sarah Spittler. Can you all hear me okay?

Hello? Yes, we can hear you.

Okay, great. Hi. My name is Sarah Spittler. I'm a resident just outside of the county, but come to Placid County pretty often. And I just wanted to say I'm pretty disgusted with the Control that you've given a private company to unrestricted data on our physical presence and movements over time without consent, without the ability to opt out through the use of the flat cameras. So we checked the board's archives with the Genesis footage, the original $238,000 flat contract in March, 2023, plus the $91,000 expansion, nearly doubling the camera count in 24, encouragement permits for the last year. Every single one was buried in the consent agenda and happened once the cameras were off. These decisions were not given an opportunity for public input as required by the laws defined in California's B-2034. records of every citizen's public movement were handed out to a private company in perpetuity, lumped in with the agenda with things like sewer easements and $5 property damage claims. Since the body excluded the public from the original decision, some citizens requested the Placer County Sheriff's Office log and did a review of the full history since 2023. What we found is that the reason field, the specific column, showing why each search happened, the sheriff's office refused and told us we would need a court order. Your own department's transparency portal states in writing, all systems access requires a valid reason. We're telling the public that this reason exists, refusing to let the public see it. But we also found that Placer County's cameras have been externally searched over eight and a half million times, nearly 238,000 of them through the NCRIC, which is a federally created fusion center where half the governing boards belong to federal agencies, including the FBI, ATS, and DHS. Its status as a legitimate public agency under SB 434 is in question. Separately, we found 4,721 searches conducted by non-California agencies directly in violation of civil code 1798.90.55B under SB 34, which restricts ALPR sharing to California public agencies only. Block has spent nearly half a million dollars lobbying Sacramento directly on the LPR policy, the very rules governing whether any of this is illegal. The company profiting from this contract is writing the rule book it operates under. We are both the buyers of this surveillance and the product, generating value by having our own movements handed back to a private company. At minimum, we can refuse consent to have more physical movements governed by a contract that this county buried in the consent agenda and audited by a process County won't let the public see, so we're asking to end the ALPR contract, remove the cameras, and pass an ordinance to put these decisions back in the community's hands. Thanks.

Thank you.

Caller, go ahead and mute your mic and give your comments.

Hi, is this working this time?

It is.

Thank you so much. Sorry about that before. Good morning, Supervisors Ann Nichols, North Tahoe Preservation Alliance. I want to ask one simple question about 39 North. How much public value is Placer County contributing to this private development? much of the land was assembled and held by the county and its former redevelopment agency purchase agreements totaling about 4.1 million were approved eight years ago yet the transaction still is not closed because it remains contingent on project approvals meanwhile the county has reserved 106 scarce taus for 39 North and has contemplated rebating 80% of the project's total hotel tax for 20 years, estimated at roughly 23 to 31 million. This is an extraordinary public contribution. Kings barn reduced the height and number of hotel rooms after strong community opposition, but cutting back on an excessive proposal does not automatically make the remaining project appropriate for Kings Beach. 39 North is still enormous for a small community already constrained by a two-lane highway, wildfire evacuation problems, limited infrastructure, and intense visitor pressure. This is where CEQA matters. Before approving this project, the county must fully analyze its environmental impacts. CEQA should not become an exercise in explaining why these impacts are acceptable. after the county has already committed itself financially to the project. Recent reporting about Kings Barn, the developer, seeking access through federal land inside Yosemite also highlights the broader issue. Scarce public assets can create enormous private real estate value. There is nothing improper about a developer seeking that value, but it's your job to protect the public side of that bargain. before granting further entitlements or incentives require both a defensible sequel analysis and a transparent accounting of every public benefit going into 39 North. Why should the public contribute tens of millions of dollars in land value, development rights, and tax incentives? Yosemite is not for sale. Kings Beach is not for sale. Thank you.

Thank you.

No further public comment.

All right, I'll close public comment and bring it back to the board for a board member and county executive reports.

Supervisor Gore. Good morning. I might have mentioned this previously, but I want to bring it up again because this Friday is September 11th, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And so I know there are a number of comments commemoration events taking place, but in Roseville, at the Roseville Town Square, we are going to have 3,000 flags that we're putting out so that the members of the public can come by, stop, reflect, walk through the town squares and just remember. So I want to encourage people, whether you come to Roseville or attend another event, take some time to remember and share it with our kids and grandkids. I think it's really important.

Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Jones? Yes.

Thank you. Just wanted to report a couple of things that me and my team did since the last board meeting. This past week, we did a trash tour. We toured the facility, the . Yeah, this last week. And I just wanted to tell people how amazing their new equipment is. It's amazing, if you ever have a chance, they do give tours there. But they have, all of this is fairly new anyway, a couple years old. But all of the belts, everything, the machinery sorts everything. They sort very little by hand anymore. And the way that the equipment is designed, it really does cut down on the smell. It was amazing to me, because I didn't think you could ever cut down the smell of a dump. It really did, it did work. And then also this past week, our community in my district, Mooney Ridge, they became the 150th Firewise community. So we celebrated it. They've got a plaque, a sign to put in their neighborhood, but it's really amazing, I know. People down in my area, especially all the housing developments that run along the border of Folsom Lake,

um very interested and have all become firewise communities because of their concerns for the for fulton lake anyway thank you thanks supervisor augustuson uh thank you i wanted to also announce an event in auburn uh for this friday um honoring the 25th anniversary of 9 11. it'll be held 8 30 at our placer county fire station on atwood 8.30 to probably just after 9, and we will have a piece of the World Trade Center beam at that event. So hopefully the public, if you're interested, could come to that event. Thank you.

Thanks. Supervisor DiMattei.

Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to thank the gentleman from DPW who had to, while the rest of us had yesterday off, was out at Sierra College. 12 bridges repairing the stop sign because apparently somebody can't read and drove right through it so again just my continuous support to put something like an overpass there so thanks that's all i want to do is thank him for because i saw him at like 4 30 yesterday afternoon fixing it i'm like what happened he's like somebody ran it over and i'm like shocker okay anyways that was it supervisor jones oh i'm sorry okay mr chadney

Yeah, thank you, Chair. Just a reminder that September is National Preparedness Month, and our theme for this year is Placer Stands Ready. So as we celebrate Placer County's 175th anniversary this year, we're reminded of the pioneer spirit that has built Placer County. We're encouraging our residents to embody that spirit and always be ready by first understanding local risks. Readiness begins with knowing the specific threats that matter most to your local geographic area, from severe weather to infrastructure disruptions. Sign up for Placer Alert emergency messages for the fastest notification of safety concerns near you. Second, build an emergency kit. Stock up on basic supplies, such as water, non-perishable food items, first aid kit, flashlights, and batteries, at least to last for a few days. And third, create a family plan, know your evacuation routes, establish out of town communication paths, and keep important financial and personal documents secure and accessible. So as we ask residents to do their part to stay safe, Placer County continues to do ours. We and our public safety partners are regularly training and practicing emergency response procedures. And we are at work updating several of the county's emergency response planning documents, including our local hazard mitigation and community wildfire plan. As you heard earlier, in District 4, we celebrated our 150th FireWise USA community just through fire, though followed by... Oh, my.

I'll just slow down, how's that?

Yeah, I got that, yeah. The wildfire risk remains a major concern in Placer County. This is just one example of the progress we are making at reducing that risk. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, with that, Twyla, it's your lucky day. We are gonna move to our department item, item 5A, agreement with Wayfinder Family Services.

Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. I was going to say I can talk really fast, but it doesn't sound like there's entire needs, so I'll breathe for a minute. Anyway, good morning, Chair Landon, Supervisors, Mr. Cook, Mr. Clayton. Again, for the record, Twyla Abrahamson, Director of the Children's System of Care. So Wayfinder Family Services is a statewide non-profit multi-service social service agency with more than 55 years of experience in serving vulnerable children, families and adults, including those involved in the child welfare and probation systems. The kinship support program is designed to support and educate relatives and non-related extended family members who are caring for children who have been removed by the child welfare or juvenile justice system, are at risk of removal, or are in adoptive guardianship permanency. The ReShorts Family Liaison Program is designed to provide mentoring and support services to families approved or in the process of seeking approval to care for related children and youth involved in the dependency or juvenile justice system that also require out-of-home care. So approval of this agreement, which we've had for a number of years, will allow both the kinship support and resource family liaison services to be offered in Placer County through June 30th of 2028. So we are requesting your board take the following actions. Approve an agreement with Wayfinder Family Services for the resource family liaison and kinship support services program in an amount not to exceed $1,072,234 for July 1, 26 to June 30th, 28. authorize the director of health and human services or designee to sign the agreement and to sign subsequent amendments that cumulatively do not exceed $100,000 consistent with the subject matter and scope of work with risk management county council concurrence. So this makes the total cost of this agreement with the amendment authority $1,172,234. Our funding is available in the fiscal year 26-27 budget for children's system of care and will be included in the 27-28 requested budget. And there is no additional general fund impacts. So, thank you for consideration and I'd be happy to answer any questions about this item.

Great, thank you. Any questions or comments? Supervisor Gore.

Thank you, Twilight. This is actually a question more in regards to families that aren't, have issues with Child Protective Services, like families that do kinship care just because a parent died or is out of the picture. What local services do we have for grandparents who are raising their grandkids that are not part of the system?

That's a terrific question. And these are the more formal systems, right, obviously. And so there are a lot, people call it either shadow or hidden foster care. And there are many people who are engaged in this. Most of these are local services that would just be come around from, you know, neighborhoods, churches, faith-based organizations. We do have some that if folks come and say, where could we get some of these services? There's family resource centers. You'll know them as Kids First, as Lighthouse, you'll notice also up in the North Tahoe area. Those family resource centers are open to all of those folks where they could come in and they could get maybe some diapers, maybe some support in terms of resume building, maybe even just what are the other opportunities around, whether other sources, maybe even through their insurance. But family resource centers are a great place for them to start.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate that.

There's also some support groups for grandparents around, too.

Thank you. Great question. Is there anyone here who would like to comment on this item? And is there anyone online? All right. I'll bring it back to the board.

I'll move approval.

I'll second.

Move by Jones, seconded by Gore. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you.

Thank you.

We have about two minutes until our 9.30 timed item, so just make yourselves at home. Talk to your neighbor. Meet someone you don't know yet. I'll just stand up for a second, I guess. All right. It is 930. We can now move to our 930 timed item recognition of the district attorney's office for an award.

my first time up here. Oh, welcome. Whoo. Good morning. Chair Landon, members of the board, Daniel Clayton, Sarah Born here, risk manager with the County Executive Office Risk Management Division. It's my pleasure to be before the board this morning.

Do you mind just putting the mic down? Just a teen's question. Thank you.

How's that?

Perfect. Okay.

this morning i'd like to invite up our district attorney and team to accept the 2025 eagle award for exemplary achievement in government leadership and enrichment from prism our joint powers excess insurance authority and this is for the da's one pill can kill campaign Um, so I see here today, we have a district attorney, Morgan Geyer and supervising deputy district attorney, Lisa Botwinick, and some other team members from the attorney's office. Um, but first it's my pleasure to introduce Tani Corona, who is a prisms member services manager, and she's going to be with the one presenting the award. Thank you.

Good morning everyone. My name is Tani Corona and I'm the Member Services Manager here at PRISM and I'm joined by our Chief Member Services Officer Rick Brush. I am thrilled to be here this morning to stand before you and to present Placer County and the District Attorney's Office with this award. Before I get started, I want to take just a couple minutes and share with you a little bit about PRISM for those of you who may not know who PRISM is. PRISM is a member-directed joint powers authority. Oftentimes you may hear that referred to as a JPA. We are a public entity, we are you. In fact, we like to say that all the time, we are you. PRISM's membership consists of 54 counties, 70% of the cities within the state of California, 10% of the school districts, along with other special districts and several other JPAs. With all of that together, we serve more than 1,700 public entities. With more than $2 billion in contributions, PRISM is the largest public entity in the nation. Our size is important because it allows us to create economies of scale, negotiate reinsurance coverages worldwide, and develop master service agreements with best in class providers that you're able to utilize. We have just over 100 employees at PRISM who provide services in areas like employee benefits, claims oversight, data and analytics, risk management, risk control, and we even have an actuarial services. PRISM is different from traditional insurance. We are a not-for-profit public entity pool, and everything we do is focused on supporting you and our members. Our goal is to provide broad coverage at a reasonable cost while creating stability for our members even and especially during challenging insurance markets. So why is PRISM here? PRISM exists because of you all, because of our members. We're here for our members and we are continually shaped by our members with your real world needs and experiences. Let's talk a little bit about the county. The county has been a member of PRISM since 1980. That's so great. You currently joined in the Excess Workers Comp program, but you currently participate in 14 different programs, including Excess Workers Compensation, General Liability, Dental, Vision and Property, and several others. As I mentioned, PRISM is member driven and our members play an important role in guiding our organization. I would like to recognize and thank Sarah Born here for serving on our board of directors. And now it's time to talk about the reason I'm really here and that is to present the Eagle Award. Each year, Members submit Eagle Award applications for consideration. The PRISMS Member Services Committee reviews all those applications and then they select who the award recipients will be. I'm honored today to present the Eagle Award to the Placer County District Attorney's Office for its One Pill Can Kill. I'd also like to comment that Placer County, this is your third Eagle Award, more than any member at PRISM. And I think that that is huge and deserves an applause to the county and the work that you're doing. Thank you. Another thing I wanted to share is these awards and these things that the county is doing, we share that with all of our membership. And so you are a role model to other counties and other public entities that will then be able to put together maybe their own One Pill Can Kill campaign. I'd like to just share a little bit about the campaign before I have the district attorneys come up here and present them with their award. Fentanyl is an extremely addictive and potentially lethal synthetic opioid. It is approximately 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Recognizing the urgent need for awareness and education, Placer County brought together county departments, nonprofits, and families who had experienced the heartbreaking loss of loved ones to fentanyl. Together they developed a comprehensive campaign focused on awareness, education, and prevention. The first step was creating a memorable name, hence the One Pill Can Kill. The county then developed a website filled with information and educational materials and resources for the community, and I also love it because it's there that anybody can access it. The team then created an educational program specifically for middle and high schoolers. the students. One of the campaign's most powerful outreach components is the public service announcements which you can still find on YouTube. It shows real life experiences of families affected by this crisis. Preventative work can be difficult to measure and no single effort can take full credit for changes in the numbers. However, Placer County has seen encouraging results with including decreases in both overall fentanyl related deaths and youth deaths in 2024. The campaign has also received incredible feedback from students, school staff, parents, and others that were attending the different assemblies and parent information nights. Participants expressed appreciation, not only for the important information provided, but also for the courage and the vulnerability of the family members who share their deeply personal stories. This campaign is a powerful example of what can happen when a community comes together in response to a crisis. Through collaboration, education, and the willingness to have incredibly difficult conversations, Placer County is helping young people and families better understand the very real dangers of fentanyl. On behalf of PRISM, congratulations to Placer County's District Attorney's Office. Your One Pill Can Kill campaign shows commitment, compassion, and leadership, and is making a meaningful difference, not just in your community, but hopefully communities throughout this state. Get ready to do an aww in a tepee. It's very pretty. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thank you. Would you like to take a picture?

We'd love to, yes.

Do you want to say a few words first? Sure.

I will just say to Sarah and our PRISM team, thank you. This is very meaningful. We did this with the idea to save lives. We have done that and we accept this not just as recognition but as motivation to keep our foot on the gas pedal. We're continuing to try and find more ways to innovate on both fentanyl and all public safety challenges in Placer County so that we can spread awareness, we can be tough when we need to be tough, and get the message out to save lives. So we really appreciate this award. We were just recently at our statewide DA conference. where we literally got to sit in rooms where some of the things we're doing here in Placer are being done throughout the state, sometimes with recognition for Placer and sometimes without, and that's okay as long as the work is being done, but it was very inspiring to see our work being replicated with the same motivation, which is to save lives, And I would be remiss without acknowledging the true leader of the One Pill Can Kill movement, which is Lisa Botwinick, our supervising deputy DA for community outreach, who has poured her heart, her soul, her time, her weekends, her nights into this program to make sure every student and every parent in Placer County knows who she is and she knows the team behind us. She has been able to to galvanize our county partners, our public safety partners, our public health partners, and most importantly, our angel families, our moms and our dads who have lost children, who have turned their passion, turned their pain into passion and have joined our coalition to help save lives. And of course, Stephanie Herrera, our communications manager, who has helped spread that word so that those ideas can be used in other counties. So again, thank you to Sarah. Thank you to our PRISM team. Thank you for all of your support for allowing us to do the good work here in Placer County. Stephanie, I'm gonna put you, or Lisa, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Do you wanna say something?

Thank you, Morgan. Thank you so much, Irwin, for this recognition. This program has meant so much to me in the last couple years since we started, and it will actually be back out next week at Buljon Middle School for our next round of student assemblies. But it's so empowering to see the difference this is making through our community, through the families, through the students, and it's just really, honored to be a part of that. And so I think Morgan for his innovation and allowing me the opportunity to try new things, step outside the prosecutor's typical box of the courtroom and try new things to make other differences in our community. So thank you very much. Thank you to Sarah for approaching me and asking if they could use one pill can kill to nominate for this award. I appreciate them seeing the importance of this program as well. And then thank you to prison for the ultimate award and recognition of granting us the award. Thank you to the board for all of you for your support. I know we've seen you at so many of our different outreach events, and that really means a lot to us at the district attorney's office. Thank you.

Thanks, Lisa. Yeah. I don't know. Let them maybe.

We'll have you ominously in the background.

Yeah. We'll supervise.

and before you all leave just want to say thank you so much for the work that you do i know that we've all stated how much we just love and support your work and um it's so important and lisa i think especially for you as you kind of mentioned the prosecutor side of things i it's so rare to find a prosecutor who has that heart and compassion and also is going out and doing something big like this and i'm sure a lot of that has to do just with time because i know that the prosecutors have that heart and compassion but being able to translate that into something that the community can actually use and that is going to save lives is just so unique and we're so fortunate to have both of you and your whole team and and thank you to sarah as well for nominating them And yeah, thank you for the award. Anyone else want to say anything? And OK, is there anyone here in the public who would like to comment on this item?

OK, and anyone online?

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Well, we have a problem that we don't very often have, and that is that our next item is at 10 o'clock, and we have to wait until 10 o'clock to hear it. So we will go ahead and just take a brief recess and come back at 10 o'clock for our 10 o'clock timed item. are we good to go now all right it is now 10 o'clock and we can move to our 10 a.m. timed item 2526 older adult advisory commission annual reports with Colby Good morning.

Good morning, Chair Landon, members of the board. My name is Colby Hightoff. I'm a program manager with Health and Human Services Adult System of Care. And I also have the privilege of serving as staff to the Older Adult Advisory Commission. It's been an honor to support the commission over the past year as we work together to improve the quality of life for older adults and people with disabilities in our community. This morning, I'm pleased to introduce William Reed, Chair of the Older Adult Advisory Commission, who will present the Commission's 2025-26 Annual Report. William is a retired industrial psychologist and has served on the Commission for more than 22 years. Throughout that time, he has been a steadfast advocate for older adults, people with disabilities, and their caregivers, providing thoughtful leadership and guidance on issues that affect our community. I've worked alongside William for the past nine years, and I've seen firsthand the integrity, wisdom, and compassion he brings to every meeting and conversation. Please join me in welcoming William as he presents the commission's annual report.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Honorable members of the Placid County Board of Supervisors.

Yeah. There you go.

Good morning. Honorable members of the Placid County Board of Supervisors, my name is William Naaman Reed. Chairperson of the Older Adult Advisory Commission. I'm joined here today with several of my commissioners to present the OAAC Annual Report. It is an honor to serve on the commission for over 22 years. I've lived in Placer County for almost 38 years. There's been a lot of changes within the county during those years. And when it comes to senior living, I think that this commission has been instrumental in making a difference in making Placer County a more friendly senior community. As you can see from this report, those efforts continue. Some of the major concerns for seniors relate to the California Master Plan on Aging and its goals. Housing, transportation, communication and information, community and health information, and affordable aging. There are many highlights from the year 25-26. The OAC has concentrated on the goals health reimagined. The 2025, 25 and 2026 have been a productive year for the OAC. We continue to work to assure that the commission fulfills its mission to provide an active voice in and for that advocacy of Placer County seniors. The Commission has been educated on many topics related to senior issues by having monthly presentations from a variety of agencies and organizations. These topics and presentations are listed in the annual report. The Placer County Commission-based organizations and their dedicated staff have continued to provide much-needed long-term services and support for older adults and people with disabilities in Placer County. During the 2026-2027, the Older Advisor Commission will continue to address the needs and providing outreach to older adults in Passer County and expanding the visibility of the commission to provide enhanced communication with the Board of Supervisors and other county departments. As a commission, we look forward to our 23rd year with renewed hope and resolve to continue to enhance the lives of our growing older adult community. In addition, we would like to invite you to the board to participate in our fourth annual stuffed animal drive for Placer County first responders. On Thursday, December 3rd at 9.30 a.m. at the Health and Human Services Center, we will be presenting these collected stuffed animals to them. Please join us. Supervisor Jones has been very active in the participation and helped us in this endeavor. And we would like to invite you again to join us. That is our report. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. Any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor Jones?

Yes, I'd like to comment. Thank you for that and thank you for the invitation for another year and I will be there, of course. It's always exciting to see. I remember the first year you did it, you didn't quite hit your goal and then last year you had so many stuffed animals. I think you were trying to find offices to stuff them and hide them in because people were taking home bags and pillowcases and stuff and they still had so many left over so you're going to bring them out i don't know if you gave them all away or not you eventually oh good good okay well i'm hoping you hit your goal again and uh and i'll put a collection box in my office as you know of course yep yep thank you yes and thank you for that i really appreciate everything you guys do and um i love being on the oaac with you this year and and i serve also william with you on the aaa four area for agency on aging so yeah so thank you guys thank you great is your um stuffed animal drive open to the public can people pop in and drop off

Yes, there's various locations throughout the county that have a list that they can drop them off there.

Oh, OK. Great. Yeah. If we could get that in or maybe that's in the info you gave us. I got this one. But if we can if there is info that we can give out like in our newsletters of different locations, that would be fabulous.

There is there's a list coming. Yeah.

OK, perfect. Is there anyone here in the public who would like to comment on this item? And yes.

Hi, I'm Cassidy Paganucci. I work at the district attorney's office with Placer Protect, which is the elder abuse task force team. And I get to be a board member for Older Adult Advisory Commission. So they're awesome. They have exposed me to a lot of resources and opportunities in the community. And if you want to learn more, we're inviting the public to our Protect Fair on September 24th, 10 to 2 at Maidu. They'll have a table so you can learn more about how to get involved. And then the locations will be at the table also. and you can participate with this stuff to Animal Drive. So thank you. They're great.

Thank you. Anyone online?

Yes, Chair. Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Hello?

Yes, we can hear you.

Hi, my name is Lexi. I wanted to start off by thanking everybody because it's wonderful to have this kind of thing in our community for older adults and people who are disabled. I wanted to follow up with saying, hi, Colby. I submitted a request to the older adult advisory commission for complete meeting audio searchable transcripts and online access for meaningful retention. And I was told that it would require more staff time, more technology and more records management capacity. I ended up challenging that response in writing because that's outdated. Automatic transcription is cheap and routine, and the county is already recording meetings and already assigning staff to repair meeting records. The practical question isn't whether transcription requires an entirely new system. It doesn't. You record once, you generate the transcript automatically, you have the staff correct any obvious errors, names, technical terms, then you can publish the audio transcript agenda minutes altogether easily. For older adults, caregivers, people with disabilities, and people with hearing or health transportation, scheduling barriers, or anything, surgical records are not enhancement of their access The Brown Act is the minimum legal requirement. It should not be used as the county's accessibility standard. Thanks.

Thank you.

No further commenters.

All right. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for the work that you do and for serving our community in this way. It's really hard to find folks who are willing to give up their personal time for the community, especially nowadays. And so just really appreciate your long tenure on the commission and thankful for the work that you guys do because it's so important. And so with that, I don't see any additional questions and there's no, oh, it is an action item.

I move to approve.

Second. Moved by John, seconded by Gustafson. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming.

Thank you.

All right, we have about 30 seconds, so very slowly Mr. Morehead can walk up for our 1010 timed item sunset traffic fee district and capital improvement program update. Oh, I guess it's like 20 more seconds. Sorry.

Maybe I should have walked slower.

I feel like we should have a countdown or something. OK, you're good.

Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the board, Richard Morehead with Public Works. As you said, I'm here today to discuss the Traffic Feed District and Capital Improvement Program update for the Sunset area. I think everyone knows that the Sunset Area Plan, when it was approved, we did all of the environmental analysis, and that defined the future roadway networks that were needed in the area. What we did find as part of that process is that east-west roadways are vitally important to serve that area, not just to serve the Placer 1 now, which was Placer Ranch, and the Sunset Area Plan in its total, but it also frees up capacity on those north-south roadways as well. Within the fee program today, we have two of three east-west roadways in there. There's Athens in our fee program. We also have Sunset in the fee program. We do not have Placer Parkway in the fee program. We're proposing to add that portion in there, that roadway in there. For sunset, we are currently moving forward with the design, the preliminary design on that. We have right-of-way defined, so it's really just a schematic at this point. And that'll take, I think you're aware, it takes many decades to get from this concept to approval. I think I shared with Parkway it was 1999. We're under construction with phase one today. That won't take that long, but it's some time. So we're proposing to remove 500,000 off of the amount in the CIP from that sunset over-crossing line item. And then the Athens industrial grade separation, ultimately at the intersection of Athens and industrial, there would be a grade separation that takes you over the railroad tracks, lands you back down on industrial. We're proposing to take 500,000 off of that as well. Both of those pretty preliminary estimates, really high cost on both of those, I think 77 and $83 million for each one of those projects, and add that as the line item for Parkway so it doesn't change the bottom line. The other thing we're doing is we're updating the cost for the reimbursement. We paid to Placer One as part of their development agreement when they came forward. There's a segment of Sunset Boulevard between Fitbit and Foothills that they would be reimbursed for cost for. And we've reimbursed them for that. It came in lower, so we're reducing that line item amount in our CIP as well. The Parkway project, you know, we went back and looked and it's about the latest traffic analysis that was done in the region was a SPARTA fee update that we did. About 35% of the traffic uses that phase one of Parkway to get into the Sunset area. So certainly a justifiable use to add it to the CIP. In addition, if we use funds out of that CIP or out of that traffic fee district, if it's in the CIP, there's no interest has to be paid on that. If we use money out of that to help fund the project, then it's a loan, you track the loan, and it's done at a pool rate and can get pretty pricey, quite frankly, for payback on those. We did reach out and we sent it out to the BIA and our funding partners and didn't receive comments back. But the end, the fee per DUE actually gets reduced $13 because of that reduction in the sunset cost that we saw. So it's going from $6,167 per DUE to $6,154 per DUE. And with that, I'll read the action in. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. But I'm here today to request you conduct a public hearing to adopt a resolution adopting the Sunset Feed District Nexus Study and modifying the Sunset Traffic Feed District and Capital Improvement Program to reflect a comprehensive update to the infrastructure projects, growth projections and cost, effective November 9th, 2026, and determine the proposed action is exempt from environmental review pursuant to CEQA guidelines sections 15273. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

All right. Thank you. Any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor Gore.

Can I just clarify, Rich? Thank you very much. So the plan was done in 2019 and the fee, it's been eight years since we've updated it, correct? I mean, we probably did the CIP.

We've updated some stuff in the fee. When Classroom 1 came forward, they came forward with more comprehensive cost analysis and we did do some updates at that time. But we didn't add any projects, that is true, or modified projects, yeah.

right so this is the first real complete update for all the roadways out there based on the traffic impacts and what we anticipate yes that is true all right thank you okay i will open up the public hearing is there anyone here who would like to comment on this item okay anyone online no chair okay i'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the board I will move approval of the item.

I'll second move by Gore, seconded by D. Matei. All those in favor. I. Any opposed and no abstentions. Thank you. Thank you.

That's rich.

Okay. Once again, we have about five minutes until our next item, so we will just take a break until 1020 and we'll be back at 1020. We are back for our 1020 timed item and Crystal is ready to go.

Oh, it's on.

Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair. And good morning, Madam Chair and members of the board. I'm Crystal Jacobson with the Community Development Resource Agency. And the item before your board here today is the CDRA user fee study and fee schedule. I want to start with some introductions. With me here today is Chad Wolford with Wolford Consulting. He's the consultant that prepared the fee study before your board today. And then we also have Paul Hellman, our agency director. Samantha Henley is our acting administrative and fiscal operations manager. And then we also have some other leadership here from CEDRA in the room, including from building, engineering, planning, and Tahoe operations. So they're all behind me here. Before I get started, I did want to note that this fee study was a significant effort. It really took a team of people, which is why you have a team here in the room today. We studied about 1,800 fee activities. So I do just want to first give a shout out, not only to the folks here in the room, but to their staff who spent significant hours assisting with their division's fees. So this effort needed a lot of subject matter experts to ensure that the data that went into the study was accurate. And so it was really a heavy lift by all. And I want to acknowledge the teamwork that went into it and thank them for their support in getting here. I also would like to thank the County executive office and County council for guiding us on the fee schedule that's before your board today as well. So with that. I'm going to turn and read the actions requested into the record. So we are requesting that your board conduct a public hearing to, A, adopt a resolution adopting the 2025 Community Development Resource Agency user fee study. and approve the Community Development Resource Agency user fee schedule, which shall impose new fees, increase certain existing fees, and decrease certain existing fees, be effective beginning January 1st, 2027, and generally phase in over a three year period, as more specifically described in attachment A of your staff report. And B, determine that the proposed action is not a project under the California Environmental Quality Act guidelines, section 15378B5. So with that, I just want to start with a little bit of background. While your board has approved annual adjustments to our fees to adjust for inflation, so every year we're before your board with annual adjustments, the county has not adopted a comprehensive fee schedule in over 20 years. And there's a lot of reasons for that. CDER was formed in 2006, so we're about 20 years old now. And right after that, we had the economic downturn of the Great Recession, so there wasn't a whole lot of appetite to really take a close look at our fees during that time. There was a slow rebound. So it wasn't until about 2019 or 2020 where we really started to think about the need to assess our fees. So this effort was prioritized in 2023. The goal was to assist with fiscal analysis to really better understand the true cost for CDRA services. So the study, and you'll hear from Chad here later, but the study includes staff time spent on permits and tasks as well as direct and indirect costs. So it's really the full cost of the business that we do. The other goal is really just related to cost recovery and so it's important in addressing cost recovery to do a study to show what the true cost is so that we can adjust our fees so that we bring up our cost recovery rates, which in turn provides revenue needed to be resourced right to deliver the services. So what's important to note is that what you'll see in the presentation today is the true cost or the maximum potential cost of the work that we do. And since we haven't conducted a study in over 20 years, you've probably seen in most cases the study found that overall our cost recovery is pretty low. It's not unusual, you'll hear more about that. But it is important that we do this study to figure out what that true cost is and that we make some adjustments to hopefully increase our cost recovery so that we could be resource right to carry out the work that we do and be relevant. And then in terms of the scope I just wanted to touch on, it is comprehensive as I mentioned. It includes all building fees, planning fee activities, engineering and surveying. And we also studied the short-term rental program which is fairly new. But we just wanted to make sure that we were studying that to make sure it was accurate. So just to touch on outreach, we have done a lot of outreach on the fee study and the fee schedule. Starting in January when we released the fee study, we held virtual public webinars. We had two of them. For the virtual public webinars, we presented on the summary of the fee study, the methodology, and sort of shared the results out. We sent customer notifications to approximately 10,000 repeat and regular building engineering and surveying and planning customers, and then also STR permit holders, about 3,300 permit holders. We've also had ongoing stakeholder coordination beginning in January where we met with key stakeholders to talk about the study itself. And then as we began to pull together the user fee schedule and draft that, we also met with stakeholders in June, July, and August to share out the fee schedule and make adjustments where we could based upon feedback that we heard from our stakeholders. So there's been a lot of outreach done to date, and we feel that the fee schedule is reflective of comments that we heard during that time. And then real quick, I do have a summary of the outreach here that we have heard today. I'm not going to read off all of these, but we did hear a lot about just maintaining regional competitiveness and consider cumulative impacts of county fees going up and increases that you're seeing, not just with CDRA, but with other agencies in the county. We also heard one of the key items that we heard is phasing in of the fee increases. There's a desire to not, you know, it took us 20 years to get here, right, and to not just adjust the fees all the way to the proposed fee, but to instead phase it in. And so we do have a phased approach that we're proposing here before your board. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and just turn over to Chad. He is going to walk you through the FEAST study since he prepared it and talk about the methodology and approach results and key takeaways. And then he'll toss it back over to me to walk you through what we're proposing for the FEAST schedule.

So Chad.

Thank you, Crystal. Good morning, everyone. Again, my name is Chad Wolfer. I'm the principal of Wolfer Consulting. I've been doing fee studies about 28 years. I've done hundreds of them. That's it for my background. So my purpose today really is to explain to you and to help you and everyone understand the methodology and approach we took so that you can really appreciate and, if you need to, critique what we've done here. And so what I'm going to share with you first is really a snapshot of the methodology. Our main purpose here is in the performance of a fee study. Again, we call it a fee study, but it's not a fee study. It's a cost of service study. Fees are ultimately policy choices you'll make, but what we do in a fee study is try to provide information to help you make informed decisions about that. that informed the information we're providing is what it costs to provide these services so we actually did a unit cost build up process whereby we start out with an hourly rate calculation for each and every position every position classification in each of the four study areas was we created a or calculated an hourly rate for each and every one of them that hourly rate is simply the cost of the position divided by how many billable hours they have in a year that gives us a cost per hour normal standard stuff if you were to build up your own fee study probably exactly what you would do billable hours is what we call in a fee study what you might hear of it otherwise is productive hours right it's the net hours you have available to work in a year then we take that position and the hourly rate of that, and we find out for each and every individual fee how long it takes to perform that service. So the hourly rate times the hours to complete that task is the cost for that position to perform those services. It's pretty elementary. The thing that we do also is we make sure that we put in all of the associated costs, not just salary and benefits, but services and supplies, expenditures, contract costs, overhead, et cetera. Those are all built into the hourly rates so that we have a complete cost for the county to provide that service. Ultimately, we take the cost for every individual position for each individual fee and we total all that and that gives you the total unit cost for a particular fee. I'm gonna give you a visual of that in a minute. less than a minute right now. So the process is this. This is really a truncated version of what the worksheets look like. We start out, and imagine this is a single fee and a single position. Now, what I'm going to explain to you here, the process, think about we did this thousands and thousands of times. There were almost 18,000 fees and non-fee services that we built into the study. And so we did this. So imagine for a particular fee and a particular position, we said, how much time do you spend on intake? half an hour? How much time do you spend on document review? An hour. Inspection, two hours, et cetera. Now there's four categories on here. In reality, in the study we used, in most studies we used 15 or 16 different activities here. So instead of these four I'm showing, we did it 16 times for every position and every fee. I'm not even going to do the math here, but 1,800 fees, 51 different employees times 16. There's hundreds of thousands of cells that we went through in this model. And we had quality control steps for each and every one to make sure that things were right, things balanced, that we used the time up. Anyway, so back to the methodology. What we did is we take each of those time estimates and multiply them by the hourly rate. I simplified the math here at $100 an hour. Ultimately, if this fee service was four hours times $100, $400, right? Simple math. And then we added on overhead, indirect costs, other expenditures to give us $100 add-on. So in this hypothetical fee, the total cost is $500. Now, if we compare that to the current fee, and this hypothetical example is $300, it means there's a funding gap of $200. We did this analysis on every single fee. And if you wanted to go through the appendices to the reports, you could see the result in every single one of these. And then what we did is we extrapolated that to an annual figure by taking how many of those fees are done in a particular year, and that's what the 10 represents in this example. And so if the total cost is $500, and there are 10 of them a year, there's a cost of $5,000 a year. If the current fee is $300, 10 of them a year, the current revenue would be $3,000 a year. So that funding gap of $200 per unit is actually $2,000 per year. So when you see the tables in the report and the summaries, that's how we built them all up. Each individual fee, we calculated that cost and built it up in that manner. So this is the representation of what I just mentioned, where we take every single fee, add it all up, and that total there is what you would see for that, you know, each fee and then each department division or program area that we looked at, there's a summary amount of what their cost recovery is, and this is how we got to it, by building it up fee by fee by fee. And doing that unit cost analysis, does a couple of things. One is it makes sure that it's very accurate. It makes sure that it's very directly related to that service provided to the staff effort, which is related to the complexity or the length of time it takes to complete every task. So if fees are adopted in relation to the cost, then we find that the cost or the fee is really associated to the labor provided to that fee payer. So it makes it very, very fair, very, very reasonable, and very, very linear when you try and track back from those things. So I mentioned that they, what I just said there was kind of the first bullet where the costs relate to staff effort. And that makes it very directly related. As I mentioned, the costs are specific to each individual staff position. We don't have an hourly rate that just applies to everybody. Each individual classification has its own. So the hours applied to them is at their own amount. So it makes it very accurate. We went through every single expenditure line by line by line to identify whether it belonged in the study or it should have been excluded, if it should have been adjusted in some way, if it's a one-time cost, it needs to be annualized, or if something should be put to certain fees and not others. We went through every single fee individually, And we made sure that we spread overhead not just to fee activities but to non-fee activities as well. So a number of departments, divisions, programs have services that they provide that have no fee related and never would have a fee associated with it. But we made sure that we identified the cost of that and spread any overhead, any indirect cost to those as well. And in the results that you see, there's cross-divisional and cross-department costs as well. What that means is if engineering and surveying supported planning on a particular fee, those costs are built in as well and vice versa. And there is a bit of that cross where if an application comes in, not just planning looks at it, but engineering will also look at it as part of the planning process, et cetera. So those costs are built in as well. So here's the results. What I want to share with you about this, the first and foremost thing is we look at this and it looks kind of crazy, right? It's big numbers. There's a huge gap in the difference between what the cost is and the current fees. And as Crystal mentioned, 20 years since your last study, a lot of things can happen in the interim. Yes, you may have done some inflationary adjustments over the years, but in that time there's been regulatory changes, there's been staffing changes, there's been costs that far exceed, say, CPI or some sort of inflation factor. What we see here in the percentages are absolutely common in my experience. And again, I've done hundreds and hundreds of these studies. I've done them over many years. This doesn't shock me at all. The one thing that does shock me is seeing something like short-term rentals where they're actually over-recovering slightly. That's fairly uncommon, but it does happen. And usually that's because there's been some efficiencies found in the process, and so they've been able to reduce their efforts over the years. Anyway, so what I'm saying is what I see there doesn't shock me. It's pretty normal in the types of studies that I do, particularly development-related studies like this. So that won't necessarily ameliorate your own shock to it, but I just wanted to share with you that this is not an uncommon result as we get through this. So the other thing I wanted to mention here is that These results you see in this table, which is the same table that you see in the report and so forth, these are only fee-related services. There's about another, I think, about $12 million in costs that are non-fee-related. In that $31 million cost figure, that doesn't include non-fee services. So we're really focusing on the fee-related services here. And so adjustments to fees and such will affect these numbers, but won't affect necessarily everything else that's going on in the departments. So from these results that you've seen, kind of the key takeaways are that obviously the big one is that there's a funding gap of $16.1 million. That's the difference between all of the fees at their current fees and all of the costs that we calculated in this study. Overall, the cost recovery is about 49%. That's for everything. If we count the fees, which I did, the majority of those fees don't recover costs. 91% of individual fees by tally don't recover their full cost. The other 9% are either over-recovering or they're right on at this time. So if there are no fee adjustments, Obviously, that $16.1 million gap will either remain or possibly grow, could decrease depending on how things go. And where that $16.1 million comes from, it's a number that exists, right? It's costs that is currently being borne by the county. You'll continue to have to draw on other funding sources for that to make up that difference as opposed to fees. That's generally, I don't know what your decisions will be on this, but that's generally general fund is what that would be. So that was my description of the methodology. Again, my goal was to help everyone understand and kind of appreciate what went into it. I know Crystal mentioned the efforts of staff, and I want to sort of echo that. I mentioned the staff that were involved They had to go through thousands and thousands of individual cells to identify where their time would go into completing tasks. So it was an immense project that they went through, and I really appreciate everyone's help on that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chad. Okay. So I'm going to move into the fee schedule and then we'll all be available for questions if you have specific questions on the study we can get to that a little later. But I'm going to walk you through the fee schedule which was informed by the fee study that Chad just presented on. So again, we have about what we identified is about 1,800 or so fee activities. So these are the activities that we conduct that are related to, you know, permits and fees that we collect. There are many nuances between them, but because there's, you know, we've got multiple divisions here that have different fee structures and collect different fees for different permit types. So when developing the fee schedule, we reviewed the fee study, but then we just, it's important to note we really took kind of a surgical approach in looking at the fees individually. just to make sure that we were being reasonable when we were setting the fees for your board's consideration. So again, I just want to point out the fee study outlines the true cost or the maximum potential fee levels that can be set rather than what is likely to be achieved in practice. So within a local government environment, fee setting decisions often require balancing cost recovery objectives with broader policy priorities, including things like housing and community affordability. economic development goals, or just potential impacts on, you know, the fee increases on customers and stakeholders. So there's a lot that goes into it. You don't see folks setting the fees all at, you know, the 100%. So the proposed fee schedule before you today results in about 75.9% cost recovery overall for CDRA. It varies a little bit by division. and again that's just for fee activities and so you know currently we're at about 49 which is what chad mentioned the study discovered we're proposing to bring that up and we will say you know based on conversations with chad industry standard for those that have prepared current fee studies typically is around 75 to 80 for a you know comprehensive community development agency So with that, I'm gonna go into talk about our proposed approach. So we're trying to do kind of a number of things here. One is to modernize our fee schedule. And really that is to establish a single comprehensive schedule that includes all the divisions that is relevant to our current practice. and ongoing county efforts to comply with state requirements regarding housing fees and really just to align our fees with current activities that we perform today. I did want to point out that there's a lot of tasks that we conduct today and activities that we didn't do 20 years ago. So for example, We have all this specific plans in the western part of the county that have come in in the last 20 years and we are now implementing those. There's a lot of activities associated with that implementation that we didn't do 20 years ago because we didn't have those types of projects. And then also just new, as Chad mentioned, new state requirements that have come on over the last 20 years requiring us to conduct new tasks in the work that we do that we didn't do 20 years ago as well. So a lot of change has happened in the 20 years and so that's really the reason for the fees that you see here today. Another objective here is targeted fee offsets. And I have a slide at the end of the presentation where I'll kind of dive a little bit more into some examples there, but we are proposing offsets for permit activities or fee activities related to housing element implementation. So if the permit is associated with some sort of affordable housing project, Also building maintenance and repair, and I'm going to touch on these more as I go into my presentation here. And then small-scale projects, fostering economic development and local investment, job creation for these small projects that we have in the county. And then two other things that I wanted to point out, and I'll get to these more as we move on here, but we are also looking to establish a general plan maintenance fee. I'll talk more about what that is in a minute. And then expand the process for code enforcement cost recovery. So that's kind of the overall approach. So what I'm going to do next is dive into the divisions and just touch briefly on what we're proposing for each division. So for building, we have set the fee schedule so that production, housing, and large commercial is about 100%. cost recovery. So those are the large projects. We are proposing offsets or reduced fees for small commercial industrial projects, and then also projects that we believe implement our housing element. And so those are permits related to things like ADUs, manufactured housing, small, even some small single family housing, modulars, factory built, and you can see manufactured in tiny homes. We actually have a housing element policy that calls for this. So by doing this in the building fee schedule, we are checking that box and implementing that policy in the housing element. Also proposing reduced costs for building permits related to maintenance and repair, and we're setting those, I did wanna mention for, sorry, for the housing, the building permits related to housing, we've set those at about 55% cost recovery. For building maintenance and repair, we have set those fees at about 50%. And so the idea here is that we want to encourage compliance for those types of permits that are really promoting public safety, things like re-roofs and hot water heaters, water line repairs, that sort of thing. Here's a jurisdictional comparison for our building fees. So we did wanna look, this is something we actually heard in our outreach is, you know, how are we comparing, right? Again, it goes to that comment about maintaining competitiveness in the region. And so we wanted to take a snapshot of how our fees line up. So these are obviously just some of our fees, but we thought we'd provide an illustration here of how our proposed fees are lining up with our neighboring jurisdictions. Generally, we feel like they're pretty comparable. Some cases they're lower, but we do feel like they line up in terms of being comparable with neighboring jurisdictions. Moving on to engineering and surveying. There's a few things that we were looking to do here. One is to increase initial deposits for at-cost fee activities to better reflect actual project costs. For those what we do is it's based on the size of the project. So we use an engineer's estimate to set that deposit. Those are large commercial, large subdivision, mass grading sewer lift stations, those really, really big projects. We're also looking to continue reduced fees for small grading permits and smaller improvement plans. I missed one here, but we're converting large projects. So all those large projects we're proposing that they go to at cost because they're big and so the deposits scale upon the project size. And then the reduced fees are for smaller projects, small grading permits. And those are really, we consider them our mom and pop kind of customers. And things like sewer extensions, parcel maps, bridge replacements, small grading projects. We're also modernizing our grading permit categories. We did realize through the study that we've got all these different types of grading permits, like ponds, high elevation, retaining walls, and so we've sort of categorized them and adjusted the fees depending upon the time it takes to process that specific type of grading permit. And then we have established some new minor fees in engineering and surveying for special inspections, certificate of corrections. Again, these are tasks that we've discovered through this process. We are conducting fee activities, but we are not taking in a fee. So there's some fees associated, new fees associated with the fee schedule there. Here is a comparison for engineering and surveying. What you'll see across the board is a lot of times it's a deposit plus time and materials. So most jurisdictions are doing the same thing. It looks like it varies here but I think the key is to look at it's really in most cases a deposit is being taken in for the work that engineering and surveying does. That's kind of standard practice.

Does the deposit mean it's part of the overall cost, or is it just, to me, a deposit, you get it back? So can you clarify?

It's part of the overall cost. So you'll take an initial fee in, and then a lot of times it goes, it'll go over that, you know, depending on the size. But we get that, that deposit is based upon an estimate that we get for what the cost would be for that size of a project. But yeah, that goes to the overall cost of the permit.

If I could follow up on that, Madam Chair.

Sure. Thanks. Oh, I'm sorry. So the minimum $4,000. Oh, I'm going the wrong way. I'm sorry.

Let me go back. Why am I? No, I'm really OK. Well, I OK. Oops, here we go. I was hitting the wrong button. I'm sorry about that.

No, no problem.

I was just giving you a sneak peek there. Okay, there we go. So you said that the deposit is based on the value of the project, but this says minimum of $4,000 for an improvement plan review.

Yeah, I might, on the specific questions, I might have to call upon some of our engineering staff.

I just wanted to be clear, because the town of Truckee I'm more familiar with, and there's a percentage of value that they typically look at, but I

might have a question on that later thanks okay yeah we did um we we i'm not an expert on all of the fees so um we i did bring in the team here who helped me on that so i might have to have them i don't typically i'm not involved in collecting that fee so i'm going to have to have them help me answer that sorry about that okay so i'm going to go ahead and move on if okay Okay, I'm gonna move on to planning. So for planning, there's a number of things that you see here on the slide. But really, we are looking to consolidate and streamline the entitlement categories. So we did look at what other jurisdictions are doing in terms of their fee schedule and realize that there's some opportunity to make some changes here We're looking to adjust or increase our flat rate fees and simplify the schedule. We are proposing some offsets or reduced cost for things like minor land divisions, also use permits. There's two different types of use permit category, minor use permit categories. There's a type A and a type B. There's a flat rate charged and then higher rates for larger projects. So we're trying to scale the entitlements so that the smaller projects are paying a smaller fee. Same thing with variances. They're flat rate if they're standalone, at cost if they're bundled with other at cost entitlements. And then for pre-developments, we have made a change there. I don't think it's up on the screen here, but I did want to point it out. We had a slight adjustment for pre-development meetings and established a new fee for pre-development where there's a credit option if it's a voluntary pre-development. So we give that credit back to the project if they come in. And then adjusted, we've adjusted initial deposits for at cost, continued approach for lower cost deposits for multiple at cost entitlements. So if they're bundling a project, let's just say they've got a rezone and a subdivision or a use permit, there is a reduced fee there because you're bundling those entitlements and we're not charging the full cost of each of those entitlements if it's bundled. We're also looking to update environmental review fees. So we've created a minor and a major category there. Again, the minor is for the smaller projects. It's a flat rate and then a deposit plus time and materials for a larger projects is something that's going through an EIR, environmental impact report. We've also separated out appeal fees. We found through the process it takes a little different effort for an appeal to the Planning Commission versus the Board of Supervisors. And so there's two different appeal fees. The Planning Commission is a little reduced, a little lower than the Board appeal fee. And then just overall kind of modernizing the fee schedule again, collapsing some fees, adding some new administrative fees that you'll see here listed. These are just some of them. SB 330 and SB 35 pre-applications, those are the housing streamlining requests under a new state law. So again, something that we didn't do 20 years ago. but it is an activity, a fee activity that we conduct. And so there are minor fees there. Those are actually being, we're proposing those to be offset at only collecting, I think 30, about 30% of the fee there. And again, that's in support of our housing strategy. Substantial conformance is another one that is new, and most of our substantial conformance requests are coming in as a result of the specific plan implementation that's happening in the west part of the county. Some of them are really small, you know, reviews. Others are larger that take a lot of effort, and so there are, there's some discretion there where the planning director can set a lower fee if it's a smaller type activity versus the larger activity. And then you'll see the PCCP land conversion authorization. That's the Placer County Conservation Program. This is new as well. This is separate from the work that the Placer County Conservation Program staff do. This is the work that planning does to review these land conversion authorizations. And so there's two fees set. There's a minor and a major there as well. So a minor for the smaller type projects and a major for the larger ones. And then finally I did want to point out we also have a small fee for mitigation monitoring and reporting program administration. So this is our staff that are essentially after a project is approved, they're monitoring all of the mitigation that was included in their environmental document. So we can condition projects so that they would pay a deposit and pay for that monitoring. And here's a comparison of planning, how planning lines up. It is sometimes, it's kind of a challenge to look at the comparison because we'll say it's not always apples to apples. A lot of times their fee schedules differ and so we try to go, so you'll see here the NA, for example, for minor use permit under Roseville and Lincoln. they don't base their fee structure or fee schedule structure the same as we do. So it's a little bit challenging in some areas, but in general, we feel like we again are competitive in the area. Moving on to the short-term rental program. This is a fairly new program. I think it was adopted by the board in late 2019 and went into effect in 2020. And then it was, we actually revisited the fee schedule for that in 2022. So what we found is that those fees were recovering pretty well, which is good. We are proposing a reduction to our fire life safety inspection fee to reflect our actual cost of service. And so this is work that initially the fire districts had conducted and now CDRA is conducting it. We have four fire districts, I wanna be clear, There are three districts where we are conducting the fire life safety. There's one remaining district where there's about 160 or so permits associated with that district and we have an MOU with them and they're still conducting that. So you'll see in a second here, I'll show you the comparison. It kind of is reflective of that. But we are proposing to reduce that fee because we found that we are doing the work at a lower rate. And so those fees that we initially had were more aligned with the fire district cost. We're also proposing to establish a new administrative hearing appeal fee. So this would be refundable if the appellant prevails in the appeal process. What we found here is we get a lot of appeal requests on citations that we issue through our enforcement program. And there's a lot of costs associated with those. And so we studied that cost and also found that most jurisdictions have some kind of appeal fee. So again, we're proposing a fee to cover that cost But again, it would be refundable if the appellant prevails. So here's a snapshot of the comparison. You'll see our application fee is a lot less, actually, than our neighboring jurisdictions here. Where you see a lot of variation is in the fire life safety inspection fee. And you'll see we have a fixed rate for hours at about $250 dollars. I'm having trouble with this door. Anyway, and then I did want to point, we conduct the fire life safety, but those properties still have to go out and get a defensible space inspection from the fire district. So that's where you see that added cost. So while they'll incur that $250 or so for us to do the fire life safety, they still have to go to the fire districts to get the defensible space inspection. And so in these other districts or other jurisdictions you see, they'll bundle them together. And so that's where you get the higher fee here. So I did want to point that out. And then Yeah, I think I just wanted to point out that the town of, it's the Placer County, you'll see the second line here, Placer County Truckee Fire. That's the district that is still conducting the fire life safety fee for us. So they're collecting the fee and conducting the inspections. So we do inspections for all the districts outside of that area. moving on i want to just talk about some policy some fee policy changes for your board's consideration today one is a general plan maintenance fee so this is new we don't have this fee currently and we're proposing establishment of it to provide a dedicated funding source for the ongoing implementation monitoring and maintenance of the county's general plan we did a lot of research on this and found that many jurisdictions in california have this fee including neighboring agencies But the fee structures and the methodologies really vary widely. The proposed fee that we are presenting before your board today is a fee of 50 cents per $1,000 of building valuation. So this would be for building permits with a maximum fee of 20,000 per permit. And I did wanna say that this is modeled after what the city of Roseville does. So we did kind of look at what folks are doing locally and are modeling ours off of Roseville. And again, it would apply to all building permits So the general plan maintenance would encompass ongoing planning policy regulatory activities necessary to keep our general plan current compliant with state law and just really responsive to changing community needs while supporting early growth and development so it could be things like a housing element update a A SAFETY ELEMENT UPDATE WHICH WE ARE REQUIRED TO DO MORE REGULARLY BUT IT COULD ALSO APPLY TO ZONING ORDINANCE CHANGES AND THAT KIND OF THING. IT WOULD HELP REALLY DEDICATED FUNDING SOURCE TO HELP OFFSET THOSE COSTS THAT WE RIGHT NOW RELY ON THE GENERAL FUND FOR PRIMARILY. So for code enforcement, we're proposing to expand our cost recovery efforts, really just to improve that cost recovery for the code enforcement activities. And this would be for permits, when permits are obtained after a violation has occurred. So under the proposed policy, permit fees would generally be doubled for permits obtained to correct violations related to grading, planning, or building activities. um this cost i think it's important to note that this cost recovery approach is authorized in the california government code as and is also codified in our ordinance so so the framework is is there for us to propose this approach to implement it the proposed fee schedule includes a notice of the doubling fee requirement while providing some discretion with the cedra director to waive the additional fee in cases where a current property owner did not cause or participate in the violation. So there is some flexibility there. Okay, I wanted to talk through some targeted fee offsets. So this, I mentioned this at the top of the meeting. You know, we're proposing offsets for things like building maintenance and repair, economic development, small scale type projects, and then housing element implementation. So we kinda wanted to show what that looks like. So we pulled out just a few different permit types. and are showing the full cost again the full cost is the maximum potential fee so that's what the study showed to be our full cost for doing those activities and then what our proposed fee is and then what the cost recovery is for those so for building maintenance and repair we're proposing that at 50 percent cost recovery so offsetting that cost by half When we get to the economic development, we're really trying to offset the fees for small projects. And so you'll see we've included some building permits here. And those come in. It's not offset significantly. It's at 90%. But when they're undergoing a planning permit, we're proposing the offset to be higher at 50%. And then for housing element implementation, you'll see some permits here as well. So we've got building at about 55%. And then cost recovery, so 45% is being offset. And then the two that you see at the bottom are the SB 330 pre-application and SB 35. THOSE AGAIN ARE HOUSING STREAMLINING REQUESTS THAT COME INTO PLANNING AND SO WE ARE PROPOSING THOSE TO BE OFFSET ABOUT 70% OR SO, SO PROPOSING THAT AT 33% COST RECOVERY. SO I REALLY WANT TO NOTE THAT IN DEVELOPING THE FEE SCHEDULE We look collectively at the fee schedule with all the different divisions, and so we're not proposing the offsets to be the same for each division. For example, in planning, you'll see that most of the housing permits in planning are low. The reason is really that the planning process, there's an uncertainty in the planning process and discretion. you'll see a lot of the planning permits a lot lower in terms of cost recovery than building, for example. So we kind of took a whole collective approach when we were proposing our offsets. also want to point out on on the planning side it's not listed here we also study the cost of around density bonus requests where housing developers request to construct more residential units and local zoning allows there are state thresholds for a project to qualify so there's a lot of work that goes into those requests We initially had, we did study that cost and we initially had a fee. We actually reduced that fee based on stakeholder input and so we're proposing to fully offset that cost. That's just another example of how we're proposing to offset projects that are really, you know, meet our housing priorities. Okay, I'm gonna move on into implementation real quick. So if adopted, we would be over the next couple of months here looking to implement the fee schedule, including some county code amendments. We've got areas of the code that we found that call out specific fee amounts. So those need to be adjusted. And so we actually have an item coming to the board scheduled in November for that. We're also looking to prepare technical and operational updates, so our permit tracking system, for example, has to be reflective of the fees, so there's significant work there. Coordination with departments and divisions on the allocation of fees, as Chad mentioned early on. We have a lot of different, we actually have Environmental Health and Department of Public Works working on some of our projects, and so there's some decisions that need to be made about how we allocate our fees. And then update our billable rate schedule, continued stakeholder communication. And then again, we are proposing that the fee study becomes effective on January 1st. And I think importantly, another thing that needs to be done is ongoing maintenance. So we don't really want to get into a position where we haven't done a comprehensive study in 20 years. And so we want to do regular reviews of our fee activities and make sure that we are relevant to the work that we do. is my presentation. I'm going to go to the recommendation. And since I already read this into the record, I'm just going to leave it up on the screen. And we are happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

OK. Thank you. Questions, comments? Supervisor DeMattei?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, guys. On slide number 8, it was the payroll slide. You only used 20. If you can go back to that, please.

Chad, that might have been one of your slides.

It looks like you only used 20% or 25% for our overhead and administration costs. I think that it should be closer to 40%. So would that affect other things? Because it's pretty expensive.

This was purely hypothetical for easy math. The actual overhead was in the 24% range throughout the entire study. About 24%. That was everything combined. And that was a overhead of countywide overhead, CEDRA admin overhead, and there's some top overhead. Those factors were all built into that.

Okay. It just seems cheap. I wish I could do that.

So this, yeah, this is just an example. 22%, excuse me, 22% overall of those factors I just mentioned.

Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions right now, Supervisor Gustafson?

Yeah, I had a couple. Thank you very much. And great amount of work, I know, goes into studies like this. And just from my limited professional experience in them, it's very complex. So thank you for all the effort, because I think it's important. A couple questions I have on the general plan maintenance fee. That one is maybe I need to understand a bit better why just new building permits versus all taxpayers. I mean, there should be a general fund commitment to that in my mind. But that's a point for a policy discussion of the board. And I know it's relatively small, but all of these add up. And so I just want to make sure we talk about that. So I like the approach of phased on value of improvements because you can say this is in this category, but if truly the improvement is much less valuable, then we're discouraging people to improve properties and do things that make sense, but we've priced them out of that or they avoid doing it. I think we want to make sure that we've thought that through as we move forward, that we are encouraging people to be able to improve their properties beyond just maintenance and repair. So for instance, we have a lot of fire codes coming down, the zero, zone zero, home hardening, those sorts of things that I want to make sure we're incentivizing people to do to protect the whole community from residential spread and what we've seen in wildfires in the other areas. I just want to make sure we consider that on simple home hardening ideas. And so you may have, I'm seeing nods, so maybe you have responses. And then sometimes, in my experience, in my own career, staff missed something on a submittal. and then it is having to be resubmitted. And I brought this up in our meeting, Paul, when you briefed me. When does the manager or supervisor have discretion to say, oops, our mistake, we're not gonna bill that hour? because we had to re-look at something that we missed on the first submittal or submission. I just want to make sure that we're encouraging that because we're all human. We all miss things. We all have tight schedules and things get past us, but I don't think the consumer should necessarily pay for that if it's something that our staff missed, especially on a deposit basis where they're billing against a deposit. Those were some of my questions. I do like the approach very much of the small building maintenance waivers and those targeted fee offsets. And I would just like to encourage that we make sure that they cover some other types of residential improvements that are not necessarily expanding square footage, but are making the community safer and the home safer. on those. Thank you. And I'm ‑‑ you can answer those individually or as a group, whatever. Thanks.

Trustee Laura Smith‑ Yeah, why don't you go ahead and answer those first.

Trustee Laura Smith‑ Yeah, I might ask for some staff to come up. And I'm going to actually go to that one slide, too. I know you had a question about the engineering and survey, so I'm going to go to that slide as well so we can get that question and answer for you. So on the general plan maintenance fee, my understanding, and I might also look to Chad for this, is that you can spread a maintenance fee across planning and building, but not so legally, right, through government code, but not any further than that. And so we looked at what other jurisdictions are doing throughout the state, and some of them are applying them, you know, through planning and building, but most, I would say, were applying them to building permits only. And so then we kind of honed in and looked, you know, what our neighboring jurisdictions are, you know, what are they doing, and that's where we came up with our methodology. But you can apply it to planning. You can also even take it more narrowly and just apply it to new construction. We talked about that and then got some feedback on that that might be better just to set it across to all building permits instead of just new construction. And so, yeah, that's my answer there, unless... Paul or Chad or anybody else has anything?

Yeah, I think that's a policy discussion for the board. Yeah, thank you for explaining why.

The only thing I'd add there is that things like a general plan update, typically you're not going to have much need to do that if there's no growth, if there's no development. So, planning entitlements, although it can be very major, sometimes nothing materializes, so you don't actually experience any development. So, we thought, you know, with the planning, with the building permits, there's evidence of actual construction and growth happening, and that really is a little bit more nexus to the need to update either your whole general plan or certain elements of that. Obviously, you have to update every eight years regardless. It's just a state mandate. And this fee could be utilized to offset the costs that we incur every eight years. And that's a multi-year effort each time we do that. Trustee Laura Smith- Yeah.

And then related to your questions about the building maintenance and repair, we definitely didn't take it. um, you know, far enough to where we were looking at, you know, upgrades to, to help with things like home hardening. Um, it's definitely, those are, those are good comments and we could certainly look at that. Oh, sure. I'm going to ask Gabe Armstrong to come on up and help with that one.

Good morning, Chair Landon and the Board of Supervisors and executive staff. So under the maintenance parts of the code and the fee study here, re-siding, re-windows, re-roofs are all part of home hardening. And so they are reduced in cost already. And then changing out vents and that kind of thing, that would kind of just wrap into a re-siding kind of project. or very minimum permanent fee for that kind of thing. But other than that, that is home hardening for the most part.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that because I think a lot of homeowners are interested. And we obviously want to encourage that. And it would be great to call that out if we move forward with these to make sure homeowners are aware. because often it's the existing homeowners who aren't trying to get a project through and don't have an applicant, don't have consultants that are going, I needed a permit. In fact, my own staff, I'm not going to point out names, didn't know about hot water heaters needing a permit. And so we're sending out inspectors this afternoon, I think. Because often homeowners don't know what they need a permit for and are just trying to do the right thing. Their hot water heater is broken. They need a new hot water heater immediately and don't think about that permit. So we want to make sure we help explain it. Thanks, Gabe.

Thank you, Gabe. I wasn't even equating those. That means repair with home hardening. So thank you for that. And then perhaps we could have Ben or Adrian come up and answer the question you had on the minimum 4,000 fee deposit that I wasn't able to answer. Thank you, Adrian.

Good morning. Adrian Compton, Engineering and Surveying. And the slide is up. Thank you. This fee is for civil engineering improvement plan review and the associated studies that typically get submitted. And the time involved for staff to review it typically exceeds the $4,000. It goes to a number of different divisions. Okay. So ‑‑ It's often higher, yeah.

It's often higher. I think the question was that I asked specifically was town of Truckee is doing 5%. Is that right? Is that how I read that? That project's less than $50,000, they would do a 5% deposit fee?

For the deposit.

OK. And then work against that.

OK. Thank you. Can I clarify on that, Cindy? These fees are billable hourly, correct? Other ones are flat fees. But this one, because there's so much work, those are billable. Is that correct? I just want to clarify.

Well, it depends. For our large projects, it's billable. For the small projects, it's a fixed fee regardless of the time.

Okay.

For the small projects, we find that it's not proportionate. Typically, the small projects have a small consultant. Maybe they don't do development in Placer County all the time. So to actually charge for time often will far exceed what our fee rate would be.

Okay.

Thank you.

And then I think because I had the same question that I sent on the multiple reviews and if it's something on our end, so maybe you can speak to whether someone gets charged if it's a mistake that we missed or something on a third submittal.

Right that's a great question and I did see that we got some questions on that from members of the public as well. So we do review the deputies all the invoicing that goes out that it lists staff time spent on a project and so that is reviewed by the directors that the deputies here today and so they're looking at that before it is sent out and there is an opportunity to make adjustments if it's found that there's an error in that invoicing. And so I welcome if anybody else wants to get up and speak to that, but that is our standard practice.

So if an applicant says, well, hold on, why am I getting charged for that? Because it was on your end, then that gives discretion to the planning director to determine that. Correct. Yep.

Okay.

Good.

Good morning, Chair Landon, Supervisors, Chris Pahuli, Planning Director. To answer the question, yes, we do have some discretion to make those types of determinations and have in the past when either there's a mistake or occasionally we'll have a new staff person that gets assigned to a project and we certainly take those opportunities to see if maybe there's an approach we should take where we don't bill some of the cost to an at-cost project.

Thanks. Supervisor Gore? I think on that note, and I appreciate that, I think we should make that sort of like a regular practice. Like, if we mess up, we own it. I mean, we're all going to mess up, we're all going to make mistakes, and that's okay. But when people are working on projects, spending a lot of money, um and then it takes longer because we made a mistake all happens let's own it i think that's just good business practice right let's own our mistakes we made a mistake we're not going to charge you extra fee and we're going to move forward so i i just i think that that's needs to be expressed as sort of a department value department value right that It's okay to make a mistake, but let's just own it and not charge our residents, our applicants, a fee for something that isn't their fault. A couple of other things I wanted to ask Paul. I mean, this was a large study, right? A lot of hard work. There were some areas where you looked to streamline things. As you've been here now a couple of years, are there processes that we've streamlined prior to this effort? Because I'm hoping that even though you did the study, you were looking at how you're going to streamline this, not do every elongated process. So can you talk about how we were looking at streamlining in the midst of this study?

Yeah, I would say that it became evident as we were estimating the time that we currently take to do things that we clearly identified that there are ways, we haven't implemented them yet, but there are ways that we have in mind to streamline those processes to take less time. And that's part of what Crystal mentioned, the ongoing monitoring of this. We will be looking at, you know, how accurate these estimates are over time and where we are able to streamline things and do things in a more expeditious timeline, we will be coming back to the board potentially to recommend some adjustments to the fees. In some cases, it just means that we're going to recover at a higher cost, a higher rate. So let's say we're proposing a 50% cost recovery and we can get up to 60. That may not require, depending on what the CO would like us to do, a check back with the board to see if that is a fee we want to reduce from our current fee. Or we could come back annually regardless, just to give you an update as to how this is playing out. Because again, this is something we have not monitored closely at all over the years and we really didn't have an idea of what our cost recovery rates were. We now will be able to track that, look at each individual fee type and see where we are on the mark, where we missed the mark. Again, things like AI obviously are very prominent now in the discussion of how to make operations in a department like this more efficient. We haven't got to a point of implementing anything like that, of course, but there's a lot of discussion in the industry about the opportunities out there to use AI to help assist staff to do their work more efficiently and obviously if we gain some efficiencies there it makes sense to come back and look at the fees and decide as a board do we want to reflect that savings in our fee schedule reduce some of those fees but clearly yeah through this process with all the staff involved and the managers reviewing the inputs looking at what we are currently doing and how we could do things better that's at the top of our mind now as we go forward as to how do we actually achieve those efficiencies and improve our processes. We put a lot of hours and effort into doing this, time that we normally would have been spending doing other things. So now that we have done this study, we've kind of gained back some of that capacity to take on. And we had other things going on at the same time as this, our DigiPlan implementation, moving our permitting process to the cloud. A lot of IT type of things we've been doing over the last couple of years that have taken a lot of effort. And so now with this behind us, hopefully we'll have more time to dedicate to looking at process improvements, ways to do our jobs more efficiently.

that's helpful thank you and I think the monitoring will be helpful right to see actually what you anticipated based on all of these studies plays out and that what changes do we make as a result so I appreciate that very much thank you one question on slide number 24, which is the targeted fee offsets for economic development and the small-scale projects. I like that. I think that's important, especially as you're trying to get small businesses and help them be successful. Do we have comparisons from other jurisdictions as far as what they charge for like a restaurant tenant improvement? or a small business building permit, that to me would be helpful to understand, because I think that I want restaurants and small businesses to come to Placer County, and I definitely want our fees to be a little bit less than Sacramento or El Dorado, but also, you know, neighboring So I'm curious as to those cost comparisons.

Yeah. So we didn't put comparisons on this slide, but we can go back to and look at ‑‑ I'm doing it again. Sorry. So if we go back to planning comparison, so minor use permit is typically a small scale type project, so you can see how we line up there to Sac County. I don't have I don't have the comparison showing the exact, you know, sort of what their offset might be, but just the comparison of what we what we would be proposing versus what they what they're charging. So that's an example on the planning side. And then I can go back um, to the, you know, to the building side and you can see, so I might look to Gabe to see like one of the, it might be like the, the occupancy TI. I think the third item down might be a good comparison.

Um, I might look at Gabe for that, for like a small scale commercial.

See the Bee Occupancy TI, 2,000 square feet, would be an example of, say, like a small project that's coming in that might be commercial or maybe it's an office, that sort of thing. And it shows you how we line up to other jurisdictions.

OK.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Supervisor Gustafson?

Thank you. I forgot a couple other points. We did receive some public comment on appeals. Two of those were on the cost of appealing to the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission. I want to make sure. Those fees just cover CDRA's time, not county council, not board of supervisors, not all the county clerk, all those other fees. Because I think for the public, those are huge increases. But I can assure the public that most of those appeals, when they come here, take countless hours of additional time that isn't reflected in those costs. Am I correct?

It's a little bit more nuanced, so let me talk through it. So the cost of the appeal certainly is for the administrative cost of either CEDRA or the clerk of the board in handling those appeals. So there is a split with the appeals to the board with how those REVENUE RECEIVED FROM THE APPEAL IS DISTRIBUTED. BUT IT IS, TO YOUR POINT, THE ADMINISTRATIVE COST OF PROVIDING THAT APPEAL OR OF PROCESSING THAT APPEAL. FOR AT COST ENTITLEMENTS THAT that are appealed, those costs that you mentioned, the planning staff, other department and division costs, that is billed to the applicant. However, flat fee or flat rate entitlements are not. And so there is a significant offset as you might imagine for a flat rate project that is appealed first to the planning commission and then on to the board that is being funded out of the general fund.

Okay. Thank you. Because just looking at the most recent ones we've had, we've also gone back to MAC meetings. Correct. We've had IT staff alone with fees that are this much to hold a joint MAC meeting in one situation. Those are being billed to the applicant, those costs. On that one, if I'm speaking of palisades and the appeal process.

Not the administrative costs, but the direct costs that planning and other division staff are charging to the project do get. and do get paid by the applicant.

So those are added on and above this. Correct. Okay.

And then the final appeal that was- Cindy, before you jump onto that, so Chris, what's the current cost of an appeal to the Planning Commission or an appeal to the board?

Because I see the new cost- It was 770, 774.

So it's about double the cost or the fee is about double.

Right.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that.

And that was the question that came up from the public, but that was just the administrative fee portion. The costs are much more, yeah.

Yeah, the current fee is 774 and there's no difference between the appeal fee to the planning commission and to the board.

Thank you. And then the STR appeal was also questioned and I think the commenter thought it was an appeal from the general public about this. This is really somebody who's trying to get out of paying their citation. That's correct. That's that appeal process.

Correct.

I just want to make sure. Then finally, one of the writers, I think we've had four or five letters this morning, asked about PRAs. I don't know if Clayton, if you want to address that, but I think a PRA is entirely separate and not included in this.

Yes. By statute, the county's not allowed to charge for collection of documents pursuant to a Public Records Act request. So that would not be part of this fee schedule.

At all. And they could still be requesting on a project, a PRA on a project that's underway, but they wouldn't be charged for that.

It's worth noting that our PRA activity has gone up a lot over the last several years. We spend a lot of time and effort overall throughout the department on PRA responses.

Absolutely. And I think that's true for the sheriff, for the DA. I mean, there's, you know, every department, every office, board of supervisors, those PRAs are very time consuming. But we cannot charge for those beyond the

Correct. And I would just note, too, that our office spends a lot of time on them as well. The redaction, any time confidential information is included within public records, somebody has to go through and line item by line item strike out that information before it's produced, which is a time consuming process.

Well, I think the questions were good and I just wanted to make sure we clarified them on the public record. Thank you.

All right. I think at this point most of my questions have been answered. So thanks to everyone else for asking the questions. I think I still had a couple that I had sent to you guys ahead of time. Along the lines of the monitoring, one thing I would love to see is after this first year if staff could come back and just give us an update on the permit volumes, the turnaround times. maybe any progress that you have made toward streamlining things if by a year from now there are some ai implementations that we've put in place just kind of updating us on those things i would love to see that before we just automatically roll into the second year increase we could kind of see and reevaluate whether we need to still go that way or not And then on the offsets, just wanted to make a comment and say thank you for kind of separating out those smaller versus larger projects. And one of my biggest concerns was just impact on our small mom and pop places and the agricultural industry and if they just making sure that we're being cognizant of the impact and burden, but I know you are being cognizant of that, so I appreciate it. And then I had had had the same question about Anthony on the frontline services versus the overhead. And so I think I got that one answered on the PCP fee. Maybe Greg can speak to this one just because it's a new fee. Is there is there a reason we didn't have it in place before? And why is it coming into place now? I mean, I know it's part of the study, but

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the board, Greg McKenzie, your PCP administrator. There's some history here, like most things. So the ad hoc committee for the PCP comprised two Board of Supervisor members, two Lincoln City Council members. Decision by that group was to have the Land Use Authority vested with planning, engineering services, environmental coordination services at both the city and the county. And so they're obligated to implement the program. So to take in applications, review processes, applications, and then issue the permits at the end of that process. To be very candid, the ad hoc committee asked me, okay, what's it gonna cost to go through that process, and I couldn't reasonably estimate at the time what that would cost, and so their direction was to, hey, let's wait and see. We'll implement that fee once we understand it better, and we're now five years into implementation, and hopefully we now understand it better, and hence we have the fee proposal for the administrative side.

Got it. Okay. Thanks. And then on the pre-development fee and I just wanted to check on the credit option to get it back. Do they is the option that they would receive back that whole fee as a credit toward whatever their application fee is?

That's correct. And to clarify, those are for projects that are not required per the county code or through our zoning ordinance to have a pre-development. So, pre-developments are required by our code for any major entitlement that is under the jurisdiction of the Planning Commission or the Board of Supervisors. However, we see quite a bit of activity at the minor land division. even some minor use permits that come through voluntarily and apply for a pre-development. And so under the proposed fee schedule, there's a lower fee for those voluntary pre-developments, and that fee, if they submit a formal application, would be credited to the cost of that fee.

Got it. Thank you. I really appreciate that change, especially knowing some folks who have wanted to do something on their properties and some type of events and have been discouraged from coming to the county because of the cost of that pre-development meeting and just decided they'd ask for forgiveness later.

So hopefully with this, we'll see some improvements with that.

So appreciate that. And then to Supervisor Gustafson's comments on the general plan maintenance fee, I'm I definitely would like to have that discussion with the board after we have public comment and just to kind of determine how we do want to move forward with that, just as we have the conversations around the burdens on affordable housing and what that is going to mean for them. So, Supervisor DeMattei.

oh no thank you chair um just one other thing we talked about over cost and when i was at bigford to go take a tour i just happened to get there and there was a solar company that had drove up from vallejo to wait for an inspector their time frame was eight to ten it was three minutes after ten when i got there they had been calling and when i was there i heard the phone call and he just got a recording So, it's costing some of our people to kind of do business here because the inspector showed up sick, right? He didn't show up, he was sick. And there was no way that nobody got back to him, to this group. And I don't know how many people that that inspector may have had that day to go look at their projects. But if we're expecting them to pay these fees and by some crazy chance our guys don't show up because they're sick, which happens, and they're not contacted, and it's cost this guy probably $15,000, $2,000 to drive up from Vallejo, have two guys sit here for four hours and wait for nothing, then have to go and then come back, there should be some provisions as we can credit that in there because it was our mistake. And they shouldn't have to pay for that to come back all the way to Placer County from Vallejo. just wanted to put that in there somewhere so it doesn't look like you know we are on their side we want them to come here and do work here but we don't want to overcharge them and have to have them have an expense to them that they did not think they were going to have to incur yeah i appreciate that um i might see if yeah gabe wants to respond to that okay

So I realize I didn't properly introduce myself last time. I'm your deputy director for Cedar Tahoe and your acting building official, Gabe Armstrong. Okay, so we do have that two-hour window, which is extraordinary compared to any other jurisdiction that I'm aware of. And we have required our inspectors, so he did fail and, you know, he's had a talking to. We are required to call if we're not going to be inside that window if we're going to be early. We need to let them know because maybe they don't want you there early. They're not ready for you. And we're guaranteeing this. We're trying to guarantee this to our window. So same on the other end. If you're running late, you need to let them know. But you're also supposed to check in with your supervisor or your senior inspector and say, I'm falling behind. You know, we have other people. Maybe they're doing plan check or something. They can rush out there. and pick up some of your slack so that we stay on schedule. So really, that shouldn't have happened. And I apologize for that.

Well, credit to Blake for getting out there in time. I mean, they had 18 minutes still on the clock. But I don't think anybody was going to show up if he was sick. But the fact that they were calling and I heard that he was on. speakerphone and, you know, welcome to Placer County. And I'm like, wait, who are you trying to get ahold of? Because I've been, so that was the story. So.

And the other thing is that we are doing video inspections for solar, which is same day. So if you're on a project, and you're thinking you're going to be wrapping this up within the next, you know, we want a two-hour window for our inspectors. So at 1 o'clock, you think you're going to be done at 3, you can call it in, schedule it, you can do it online, and we can do a video right there and get it done for you.

Yeah, no, the two-hour window is fine. I mean, I've had to wait for inspections. It's no big deal. And sometimes you're not ready in that window. But this time they just, somebody showed up sick, but nobody got out to the contractors saying, hey, our guys aren't showing up all day today. So...

we should if we're expecting them to pay i would expect us to give them some kind of credit for not showing up that's a good idea appreciate that thank you thank you for that uh just one sorry one more question before we go to public comment on that general plan maintenance fee um so on a typical let's just say there's like a large subdivision development they would have to pay 50 cents per thousand dollars evaluation per house right right now at the proposed as proposed for the building up to up to that 20 000 cap right okay and um So for like a $400,000 house, is that the 20,000? There would be a cap on that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is a lot.

$20,000 for that $20,000 cap would only apply if it's 400 million or more in value. You're talking about major industrial commercial.

So sorry, I must have added a couple of zeros on there or taken off a couple of zeros. I was like, that's insane.

Yeah, that's the key cap. So the fee will never be higher than that.

OK. Got it.

$20,000 per permit.

OK. Thank you. OK. It looks like we're good with questions for now. So I will open up the public hearing. And is there anyone here in chambers who would like to speak to this item?

Good morning, Chair Landon, members of the Board of Supervisors, Jeff Short with the North State Building Industry Association. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. We appreciate the tremendous amount of work that's gone into this study. We also appreciate the communication that staff has had with us, as was displayed ongoing throughout the process. Very helpful. I think that this, a lot of positive changes are being proposed to you that we're in favor of at the structural level. Definitely an acknowledgment of the modernization of the new structure and of the changing nature development in Placer County to more of a suburban master plan led development. That said, we do still have some major concerns over the increases being proposed with some of these fees as outlined in my letter. The big picture level, we remain concerned that this study, again, while excellent and I think serves as a good starting point, is a reflection of what the current cost of service is. As per the discussion that I think you guys have already had, we expect the county to become more efficient as new tools are offered, but also just, as we've seen in other jurisdictions, as you continue to do this type of master plan development. We think that things will get more efficient and more streamlined. So we want to acknowledge that. We also think that cost recovery is one aspect of how these fees should be set, but it needs to be balanced with the understanding that new development, including residential development, brings in additional property taxes and sales tax to the city. And so there is an economic benefit from having this type of development in the county and so we hope that that is part of the recognition that you all see when you when you're setting these final fees as you know finally a number of fee increases are proposed in the county we've got a park fee coming up the public facilities element is going to be coming up we expect transportation fees to be coming up soon from a variety of sources not all within the county but affecting the county i know that pcwa is going to be asking later this month for a 10% increase to their water connection charge. Again, not necessarily something under your control, but affecting the development that's gonna happen in your county. We wanna make sure that we are still able to build housing for people who are in our county and in our region. And so housing affordability remains a concern of ours. So for all those reasons, we'd ask you to consider maybe lengthening even further the timeline that's being proposed. We appreciate the initial proposal of three years, but consider longer or consider a cutback of a certain percentage of the fees being proposed in recognition of these. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Anyone else here in the chambers who'd like to speak to this item? Anyone online?

Yes, Chair. Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Chair Landon and members of the board, my name is Danielle Hughes and I'm representing Tahoe Spark. I ask that you continue item 4A and not adopt these fees today. I respect and understand why the county is evaluating these fee changes and appreciate some of the clarifications presented. but homeowners received the finalized proposal on Friday immediately before a county holiday and a Tuesday morning hearing. That was not meaningful opportunity to analyze these changes or obtain answers. My written comments show data summaries from these studies that is not consistent with staff presented here today, but it appears to shift costs to a declining residential population while benefiting short-term rentals and corporate interests. We are in unprecedented times of corporate takeover, urban-centric policy decisions when the market is inflated and crashing. You are proposing fees for code that has not complied with California Public Resources Code 25402.1 , The proposals raise residential solar fees 110%, EV charger fees 102%, and fire safe driveways 660%, while several short-term rental and major development fees decrease. The study identifies $16.1 million recovery gap, but it does not identify which applicants and projects consume staff time or distinguish modest resident projects from corporate, resort, and large commercial second home development. Before acting, require project level cost accounting, market analysis, enforceable public benefit findings, and a Tahoe specific legal analysis of energy code measures that have not been demonstrated cost effective for this region. My written submission preserves those objections Continue this item. Make those creating these costs and receiving the benefits, pay them, and work with your community to better understand the resource constraints and community concerns. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Greetings again, Supervisors Diane Louise Alessi from Christian Valley Park District 5. Okay, I have some questions. This is how or where does the public track all of the hidden subsidies? In other words, to these huge subsidies of like, for instance, the 3 million for the Hopeway, which is a developer fee waiver hanging out in the wind. Where do we see the running total of these fee waivers and who they were granted to? Are you offsetting through the little private homes permits pullers? I would guess that's probably true. How much is this particular study costing us and what budget buckets are those costs coming from? Read the so-called deed restricted ADUs. How much in county staff time are we subsidizing or losing through that? Who is eligible for the SBE 330 fees and is that predicated on the GIS mapping that is available for the overlays? What was not mentioned is the elephant in the room, the in lieu fees. And they are not high enough to replace a low, an extreme low AMI or AMI. So why is that not being addressed? It's grossly inadequate. How much of this is getting attributed to staff costs when you're doing these in lieu fees? So that reduces it even more. And I want to just address quickly the CPRA. Those are going up because the lack of transparency and the corruption in all levels of government. And the demand for the private entities information, you guys have it in your contract. Within five years, you can pull their financials. You need to be the clearinghouse for that. It needs to be immediately put up on your website what your private partners are doing on their financials. And that is where I'm going to yield. Oh, one last thing, I'm sorry. corporate property taxes that were just mentioned, those get locked in. In other words, under the Prop 13 provision, if a corporate entity holds that property in perpetuity, it is not going to flip over like it does with Prop 19 for us poor little peons. So I'm just gonna let it go with that, thank you.

Thank you. Caller, go ahead and unmute your mic and give your comments.

Hi, Ann Nichols, North Tahoe Preservation Alliance. I support fair county costs being paid fairly, but this proposal confuses private development services with public participation. The county proposes a new $150 charge for planning research, increases a board of supervisors appeal from 774 to 2000. It's more than double. These charges should discourage residents from requesting, will discourage presidents from requesting information or challenging decisions affecting their neighborhoods. At the same time, the annual STR renewal fee is reduced and the fire and line safety inspection fee is cut by more than half from 507 to approximately 250. That is backwards STRs are commercial operations in residential neighborhoods. More seriously, there is no breakdown in costs of all the money you're losing between Eastern Placer County and Western Placer County. That's two very different areas. You can't lump everybody together and make one side pay for the other. In fact, Eastern Placer County may be more expensive for all the planning because of our unique location and limitations. It's particularly troubling in Kings Beach. Placer County has already incurred millions of dollars in public costs through its handling of the Kings Beach redevelopment property and the still undisclosed, unclosed rather, Kings Barn transaction. That's eight years of staff time. The feed did not mention this. And before improving these increases, the board should disclose whether any staff time, legal expense, administration, holding costs, redevelopment support, or other costs associated with that history are included in CEDRA's direct or indirect costs. Residents should not be asked to replenish public resources depleted by poor county decisions. I ask the board to continue this item and require first affordable appeal fees and public interest waiver. Second, a breakdown of Eastern Placer County and the rest of Placer County as far as how these expenses are incurred or paid for. And finally, a public accounting fund who pays more, who pays less and whether any Kings Beach redevelopment costs are included. What's really disturbing is this. I think I heard it right. A full offset for increased density requests by developers. A request by pre-development is free. Requests for pre-development is free. 100% cost recovery for big projects. Is that who you're really trying to help? I guess so. Cost recovery is not enough. The schedule must be fair, transparent and protective of public participation. Thank you.

Thank you.

No further commenters.

All right. I will go ahead and close the public hearing. And would you like to speak to some of the questions that came up?

Yeah. So the question I might look to Gabe to help answer the question on this for building for there was a question about solar fees and fire fees in the building schedule and the consistency of those fees with government code. So, Gabe, I don't know if you want to speak to that.

Hi. So the solar fees are set by state mandate. We can't go above. So whatever fee increase we did is not maxed out above the state mandate.

Great. Thank you. Thank you. And then just looking at some of the other questions here. So for the ADUs, there was a question about the subsidy for ADUs. We're proposing to reduce the cost of the construction of ADUs by 50%, and that is in line with our housing element policy. And so we have county policy that's, you know, that your board adopted. And so we are trying to implement that through the setting of the housing, the various different affordable housing fees that I mentioned earlier. On the SB 330 and SB 35, there's a question about eligibility. There are certain thresholds and standards in the state code for folks to be eligible. And so that actually plays into the cost for us to assess those requests. So staff spends time assessing to make sure that they meet those those requirements per state law. And so that cost is what wasn't analyzed. And so we know that the full cost or the true cost of the time it takes to do that assessment, but we are proposing that those fees also be offset by about 70% because we believe that that is in line with the board's priorities on housing as well. So that one has been reduced. Talk about in lieu fees. The study here is, these are user fees. So these are administrative in nature. They are not impact fees. So while I understand that there's other efforts going on in the county related to impact fees, this is not, we're not looking at the housing in lieu impact fee. This is just related to the cost for us to review permits.

That fee we're going to review later this year, correct? Yes, just to clarify.

OK, thank you. And then let's see some of the questions here. The density bonus, I just wanted to mention that as well. That's a requirement by state law that we do need to review those requests that come in. And we did analyze that. Um, and, and there are some, there's some costs associated with that. Uh, we have, um, not included, we initially included it in our fee schedule, but we got some comments back about, Hey, that's a requirement by state law. What, you know, um, that is in line with, um, the state's goals on, on, um, affordable housing construction. And so we made a decision to remove that altogether from the fee. Um, and so to offset that cost of our reviewing, uh, requests for density bonuses as a relate to projects that come in. And then the no breakdown in Tahoe costs, we did, you know, this is a collective CDRA effort looking at the full cost for services. So we did have Tahoe staff, you know, if you look through the study itself, you know, the factors that went into that and the data, there's Tahoe data that was included in the study. Now it's not called out specifically, but it was factored into. the results of the study, including time spent from Tahoe staff on different projects, as well as the data, like the volume data for permit activity in Tahoe that was all taken into effect. It just isn't necessarily called out specifically. Then on the STR side, the fee that's being that we're proposing to be reduced, we can't charge more than it costs us to do the service. That fire life safety inspection fee that I mentioned that is dropping, and it is dropping significantly because the cost for us to do that service is less than what we had initially adopted, which was based upon the fire district's fee schedule. What we are doing, we're doing video inspections for fire life safety and then leaving the defensible space inspections to the fire district. So there is a reduction there, but it's really because we can't be charging more than it costs us to do that service. And then, yeah, I think that's all I kind of had highlighted unless there are any other questions that you want me to. Trustee Laura Smith- I don't think there was a ‑‑ yes. Chair Greg Musil. : Not on that.

I just was looking ‑‑ relooking at that schedule. For residential pools, what if it's larger? Is that a just max fee or if it ‑‑ say somebody puts in a thousand square foot pool, which is a pretty big size pool. Where it says residential pool.

These are just select fee types that we chose to provide for the comparison purposes. So that is not the only pool permit type. It's just the one we chose to show for this comparison.

Thanks for clarifying that.

Yeah, Gabe, if you want to add to that. Yes.

To add, there is a little bit of a different fee for Tahoe. You'll see in the fee schedule homes above the 5000 square foot elevation because of the snow load. There's extra inspections, much larger foundation systems, you know, the roofs, the whole thing. And then on top of that, we also do have a little bit of an extra fee for luxury homes.

Got it.

thanks gabe all right and i just want um you shared at the beginning of the presentation you did a lot of community outreach on this or stakeholder outreach right so there Folks in the building industry are aware of this. You've been interacting with them, et cetera. And then for the homeowners that it affects, at the end of the day, we're basically charging them the cost of us to do the inspections, et cetera, correct? I just want to make sure, because somebody said, hey, we shouldn't be taking this now, but we've done a lot of outreach. We have. the folks that it really affects are very aware of the changes that we're making.

Correct. We actually polled 10,000 of our repeat customers, so folks that come in more than, that have come in like two times or more, and we had 10,000 of those. So we've sent email notifications to those customers, inviting them to the webinars. We've met with the Building Industry Association that are here today, but also the Contractors Association of Tahoe, attended their meetings, provided all the information as it has become available.

All right, Supervisor DiMattei.

Yeah, Gabe, you mentioned that there's a higher fee for a higher end house. Isn't it just based on square footage? Or because it's what is considered higher end than your neighbor's house? We'll just keep you at the mic. Thanks, Gabe.

Chad might need to help me with this one. Not higher end, higher elevation. Wasn't it? There's luxury, too, though.

Luxury. You said a luxury home.

Yeah.

So what is considered luxury? Is there a definition for that?

We might need one, an exact one, but it's over a certain amount of square footage. I forget what that number is. was trying to look it up here as well so if it's so basically i think if you go to like a 10 000 square foot house you're you're more than likely a luxury house and then there's a luxury so we have a luxury fee that's because and it's it's because of the type of materials that they use there's a lot of alternate method requests there's something you know the designs are you know elaborate we don't it's not something that we just walk in and go hey like a track home and do a quick frame inspection, we might have to look at just one section of it. We're dealing with engineering letters, because that's not what's on the plans anymore. There's a lot. These luxury homes are, I mean, they take years to build. Right. OK. Just wanted clarification.

Thanks.

Supervisor Gustafson, did you want to speak on that or something else?

Not specifically on that, but I think in context in relative to one of the callers being concerned about, and I share this concern of our average property owner and what we can do. And I feel that what we, that staff have proposed fees that recognize that we are trying to take care of our local residents and the structures that you've proposed and make sure that others are paying their full cost. We can't charge more than the full cost of providing the service, but we certainly need to get these folks because otherwise right now we are funding that. The locals are helping fund some of these large projects by that $16 million. Offset of general fund that could be going to other purposes. So it's it really is important that we do something And I've expressed some of my concerns and just making sure I agree with as we move forward using technology I really want to look at our cost efficiency of staff and what we can do to minimize those costs, especially for the smaller property owner or business owner, because those are truly the ones who question whether they can afford to do something. And on top of that, they're going to get reassessed. You know, so they're not only looking at our fees, the cost of construction, but then their property tax bill when they're done making those improvements. Trying to be as effective as possible is really important, I think, to our stakeholders and I think we've heard that and I appreciated the caller's comments about who's really paying the price and I think you've done a great job of indicating that we are subsidizing right now some of these projects and we need to bring those fees up. At the same time, I want to make sure that we're really doing everything we can to look at our staff efficiency and what kind of programs that we should invest in to help them be more efficient. I love the use that Gabe has put into practice with the visual inspections for those simpler duties. That has really helped in time and savings. And we've seen that with the STRs on the fire inspections. Anyway. Just my thoughts. And then I'm neutral. We can charge a general plan fee, but should we? And it's like everything else. Is that the best way to pay for updates to our general plan? And I hear the point of, well, if there isn't construction, then we don't need an update to the general plan. But I think state law says we have to. And then should we be putting that added thing on to those that are trying to help us implement general plans? It's they're paying a lot of other fees and costs and their increased assessed value to the county and to the special districts and to the schools is all beneficial, not just to the county, but to all the public agencies. And so is that really where we should be setting that aside or should the county be setting aside a pot of general fund for those kind of state mandates? That's the question I'm debating in my head.

And do you, to that point, do you have an estimate of how much, just on an average development year, how much would you anticipate would come in because of that fee?

Roughly 350 to 500,000 a year.

What was the cost of the current general plan that we're working on? It's taking us three plus years. How much does it cost, Chris?

The allocation currently is 3.5 million for the general plan update. I think something else that I just wanted to mention while I'm up here is that there's certainly going to continue to be a need for general fund to support not only the general plan update, but also the housing element updates that we need to complete each eight years. This funding source would really be used to help pay for some of the consultant cost, but certainly there are a lot of costs associated with our staffing to process these initiatives to support the general plan and the housing element.

Can you clarify, then, how often does the state mandate a general fund update? Because what, you know, Paul said, right, if I'm Sierra County, things are pretty much business as usual. You know, they add some businesses, they add some homes, they don't have huge development. Does everyone have to do one within a certain amount of time for the state?

There's no state mandated requirement to update your general plan. However, there are various elements of the general plan that are required to be updated by statute. The housing element is one that we've talked about. We're also in the process of updating our safety element due to state requirements to update it. There's also each legislative cycle, there may be new bills that come out that require certain updates to different elements. there is ongoing maintenance of the general plan. And I suspect that when we complete this general plan update, as was alluded to earlier, there may be zoning ordinance amendments that need to be processed to support the programs in our general plan. So again, this is looked at as maybe a way of offsetting some of the cost of the implementations, certainly not all, and there will continue to be a need for general fund support to achieve our long-range planning initiatives moving forward.

Thank you. So can you clarify, Crystal, what other local jurisdictions, because you said there are other jurisdictions that have this type of fee. Can you share who else that you are aware of have them?

There are so many. I'd have to pull that up, but I can, I can, yeah, we have a spreadsheet.

I don't know if anyone has it with them, but we let that think at about 15, maybe jurisdictions, uh, within the general region.

Chris, do you have, I don't, but I was gonna say, um, as was discussed earlier, Roseville has one sack county city of Sacramento. They also have general plan maintenance fees.

And truly, they really were across the board. There was no consistency at all. It sounds like, Crystal, you might have some more detail.

Oh, Chad just mentioned that every jurisdiction he's been working with has one or they adopt one as part of their study. It seems to be sort of the growing trend really in jurisdictions in the state of California as a way to recoup these costs because of that effort that Chris mentioned. I actually have a list. I could pull it up here, but we called around, looked around, and there were a lot of counties and cities and including neighboring jurisdictions. I think almost all of our neighboring jurisdictions are doing it. The thing, the fees really varied though. That's what we noticed is we were hoping to find some kind of like consistent approach and it was really different across all those jurisdictions. I could certainly pull it up here.

And right now the proposal is $0.50 per 1,000 square foot of building valuation on. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000 on building valuation.

so a 500 000 home if that's the valuation of that permit would be 250 dollars i think i misspoke before the cap would apply to anything 40 million and above i think i might have said 400 million okay we were both off with ours so yeah it's basically that yes but also every building permit of all of our new homes which And that could be, you know, modified to be only certain types of building permits. We did look at that, whether we should apply it to every building permit or just those that do add, like a new home or an addition to a home, anything that adds more square feet, we could break it up that way. It would be a lot more bookkeeping effort to go through and identify which permit types would be applicable and which ones would not.

So what about a home improvement project?

It would apply under the proposal. Any building permit, there's a valuation that must be provided because there are some state fees that are based on valuation. So we would have, we have valuation for every permit that we issue.

Okay. So I'm adding one of my patio cover to my house, right? I have to pull a permit for that. And so there would be based on that evaluation for the just for that cover, just not for the cover, just the work that would be a little bit of a fee. So it's not just I mean, it's everybody paying a small portion for the future planning of Placer County. That's what you're looking at.

It adds up because again, you know, some would be very, very small. Some would be paying $10, but some would be paying 20,000. So again, it adds up to almost a half a million a year under today's dollars. Uh, based on what we've been doing the last couple of years, we've been around a billion dollars in valuation last year, which would be 500,000. It just, it varies year to year, obviously, but, um, somewhere in that ballpark.

And if we were to do that, those funds would sit in a specific account pot that we would just utilize only for updating housing element projects like this. I think that that's important because if you're going to have a fee for a specific project, projects, you need to set those dollars aside. You can't be using them for something else.

And I think this board or the recent board that approved the general plan update project was a lot of dollars. And again, it hasn't been updated for over 30 years comprehensively. So if the board wasn't willing to spend that, because we didn't have a fund set aside, it was all general fund dollars going to that consulting cost. If Future Board has this pot of money sitting there, I think they'd be more inclined to use it because it can only be used for that purpose than to delay doing something that's necessary because they don't want to impact the general fund. I think it's a good thing for your successors to be able to have that pot of money available if the need arises to use it it could be just incrementally used for smaller efforts but it could be used for a large effort like the next general plan update in 20 years or whenever the board future board decides it wants to do that but having that money set aside earmarked means it can't be used for anything else you mentioned all does a demolition permit falls under the building department so would a demolition permit be

susceptible to having that fee?

Is there a valuation on a demolition permit?

I mean, you're going to add on. You're probably going to demo something and put something back. So I'd imagine that we would not have a fee on a demolition permit.

Yeah, I don't think we have a fee for demo. There's really no value in a demo. Other than bringing the land back to maybe a good place.

Well, if somebody had an old house and wanted to tear it down and demo it, you have to get a demo permit. Right. So make sure there wasn't extra fees to get a demo permit to go rebuild the house.

No, we don't put a value on it. We would charge you for the time it took to do the review and the inspection.

You get a credit for taking down old stuff. Thanks, Gabe.

You know, and I think my issue isn't so much that we need the money. We obviously have... We are subsidizing general plans. The question is, who should that be billed to? And the people that are doing the work to improve our communities are paying many other mitigation fees and many other CFD fees and other things. It's really our older legacy development that probably, well, we know isn't paying fair share toward these efforts. And so I'm just trying to look at that equity. And the other fees, I... I can agree with. This is one that's an

just a reach for me and and that's just my view and if we can help save some money to new development and encourage people to do these projects to me we should yeah i think it's fair maybe this is one that we could kick to when we do a one-year update and if this were to come back at that time and we evaluated maybe at that time there are things that have happened that are streamlining that are saving us money somewhere that maybe we can reevaluate at that time. But I agree. I mean, it's a small amount. $250 for a $500,000 home is not very much. It's a lot better than $20,000 for a $400,000 home.

I guess I go back to why does that property pay it and their next door neighbor who's not doing it? I agree.

I think, you know, as a board, we've obviously discussed

how do we help relieve the burden on affordable housing and this is just another one of those death by a thousand cuts i guess of just another little thing that maybe we actually could so make some difference into that point right so we don't want to add more fees on new homes and even new businesses right that it gets expensive and it's challenging already doesn't make sense to look at just building permits right if i'm doing an addition onto my home or I'm making an improvement to my home, 10 bucks is not that much in comparison. It allows us to add up some dollars, but to your point, The folks we're developing are spending a lot of money and they're increasing the money that comes into our economy. We have dollars coming in because we have property tax and sales tax coming into our community that helps us provide all this good stuff. So they're already doing that, right, 100%. Does it make sense to share the burden with, like you said, legacy residents, legacy buildings? or not, because I'm weighing that out. Because maybe not, maybe not. I just want to talk to you all about that.

Well, I just look at it as general fund. That's what general fund is. That's true. It's everybody's collective discretionary funds for those. This was just a small area that I couldn't quite see how people doing what we want them to do should charge a fee to our general plan update where often but I like the approach of what let's wait a year on that one and see where we come back and we'll also then hopefully have a general plan we're getting close to adopting so we can see the benefit of it I don't know no and it's one of those things if we know we're going to do it then we start setting aside general fund dollars to do it yeah in the future yeah because I get the point of doing it but yeah more fees more fees more fees yeah that's one fee that I would not adopt

It just doesn't make sense.

Supervisor Jones has been very patient.

I was only going to chime in on some of the callers. I think they were mistaken as far as the fees were concerned that we haven't had an update on this for, what was it, 20 years or longer?

A comprehensive, yeah, we've adjusted annually for inflation.

Yeah, but we're woefully far behind by the numbers after the study's been done, and so We need to start thinking about the future. I mean, we've talked about planning for growth as it is. And as more people move here, we're going to need more houses. More houses are going to be developed as more houses are built and developed. And we need more staff to process all of those things. I mean, it ultimately falls back to the same thing. And so it's going to cost us more to take care of more. And so if we don't do it now, then we'll be even probably could

triple or quadruple how far behind we'll be in the future in the near future um mr cook thank you i've heard that the board's looking at the general plan maintenance fee and anticipating what the next steps would be for that if there is an interest in removing that out of the fee that would be brought forward today The best move that I would suggest would be that we actually continue this item to a date and time certain. And the reason for that is that fee is included in the fee study that's being adopted by way of the resolution and moving it out would be problematic to do here on the fly. So I would suggest if there is an interest in it that we continue this hearing to get it cleaned up in the proper notations in the in the resolution itself. One thing I should also, I also wanted to mention is that general plan maintenance fee right now, based on the Nexus study, is applied to all building services permits, which would mean mechanical, electrical, plumbing permits as well, not just the building permits.

Clayton, one question on that. Would it be another option to adopt it as proposed and then come back with an amendment to delete that fee at a subsequent meeting? Because a lot of things get set in motion once this is adopted. So if we're able to potentially have something adopted today, that could be helpful.

Yes, if the board wanted to adopt this fee the way it is, then that would essentially put all of this as an approved one, and then staff would have to come back. The effective date for the resolution is January of 2027, so there is time to do that. I guess that would be the board's action then to approve the fee.

Right, it would be with direction to come back to amend the schedule for that one particular fee. I just wanted to see if that was an option available to the board.

It certainly is an option. To me, the cleaner path is to bring forward the correct action if that's where the board is headed, especially since we do have an effective date of January.

Chair Landon, if I might also, I did get the information just for the record for jurisdictions that have the fees. I kind of, I wanted to share that if okay with you. So locally city of Sacramento, Sacramento County, El Dorado County, Roseville, Lincoln, those are local jurisdictions. And then others Alameda County, Chico, Eureka, Fremont, um marine county pasadena the list goes on and on san diego san luis obispo santa barbara santa cruz santa rosa vacaville so a number of jurisdictions just for the record thank you supervisor dimente

Maybe that's why we're the fastest growing, we have less fees. I would, I'm not gonna make a motion yet, but I would agree with Clayton that we would, to take this out just to postpone it, I think it would be easier, cleaner cut deal. I'm not in favor of having that. fee policy in there for the general plan i think that we have enough fees and we're pretty stable at plaster county we're very fortunate and probably better than any of those counties and cities that were mentioned so i'm not i think we have enough fees and there's enough money that we're making right now that we don't need to put another fee on top of more other fees so this is my opinion

Quick question on just the protocol. So if it's continued and they bring it back the next time around, do they have to present everything like they did today? Or is it like, how does that work?

I was actually just going to mention that. We did have a full presentation. We've had public comment. We are certainly in the deliberation stage, so at this point we should probably close the public hearing and then decide on the motion to be taken. If it's a motion to continue the item, then it could just have the action brought back and it could be a fairly streamlined process for purposes of the next item. And you wouldn't necessarily have to take public comment, but that certainly could be a motion.

OK. Just for the record, the public hearing was closed at 1150. Thank you.

Okay. Well, so we have a motion on the table. Was that motion? No.

Oh, it wasn't a motion.

I will make a motion. Sorry, I thought you made a motion. No, I was making a suggestion.

I think the question is, are we in agreement to keep or get rid of the fee? I mean, that's really the question for all of us, the five of us right now. We need to decide where we're at on that.

I mean, it sounded like everyone was in agreement. I would be fine having it come back in a year. That would be when we have the update on what the status is.

Yeah, but then you'd have to refer to Clayton. Would you have to have another public hearing to remove an amendment? No, no.

I mean, I'm fine continuing and then directing staff to bring it back as part of the one-year update so we can reconsider it.

But it has to be brought back before the end of the year, end of this year.

No, I just mean just take away everything I just said. Oh, gotcha. I'm fine with what you said.

I'm fine with removing that fee and moving to move.

If everybody's in favor of it, I would make a motion to continue this item.

And this should be continued to a date and time certain for noticing purposes. I believe the clerk has indicated. Well, can you tell us what dates would work, please?

We can bring this back as soon as September 22nd. I will defer to Cedron if that is too quickly to move this back. We could also bring it back on October 6. So I'll defer to Cedron which date.

And both of those would be at 9 AM or as soon thereafter? Yes.

If we're just removing one item, wouldn't it just be pretty simple to bring it back?

If the clerk of the board would allow us to avoid some deadlines and make it on the 22nd. It's a simple change to the fee schedule to still strike in that one row.

Yeah. We have no concerns. Correct.

OK.

So I'll make a move. We postpone this till September 22nd at 9 AM. With the strike. With the strike of the general plan maintenance fee.

I'll second that motion.

All right. Moved by DeMattei, seconded by Gustafson. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And no abstentions. Thank you all. We really appreciate all the work that you have done. Sorry that you have to come back again. All right. With that, we are going to adjourn our meeting until our next regular meeting on September 22nd.