City Council - Regular Meeting

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Okay, we're coming out of closed session, so do we have any reportable action?

Thank you, Mayor, members of the Council. The City Council did vote unanimously to authorize the initiation of one piece of litigation.

Okay, and then we are in recess and closed session. We plan to go back to closed session, and we will update you with any further details once we conclude closed session after this meeting today. So just a reminder for public participation, members of the public are invited to participate in city council meetings either in person or remotely using the city's online public comment platform located on the city's website and instructions are included on the agenda. Meeting agendas and staff reports are available at the website cityofredding.gov and also in the public view binder located on the podium on the north side of the chambers. All right, welcome everybody. We're gonna call this meeting to order. We're gonna start with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you will rise with me, thank you.

Councilor Audette, would you like to lead us?

Ready, begin.

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.

If you'll stay with us, we have the invocation.

Let's close our eyes, or when you feel comfortable, how to be connected to the almighty before this meeting. Oh great master of the universe, You have made us in your own image and redeemed us through your blessings. Oh great Lord, we beg you to look with compassion on the whole human family. Take away the arrogance and hatred which infects our hearts, mind, body and soul. Break down the walls that separate us, unite us in the bonds of love. O great Master, work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth, that all in times, all citizens and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne. O great Lord, your name brings prosperity and welfare of all mankind and provides spiritual energy. As your power extends in all directions, we beg you in the holy sanctuary to place your hand on our heart so that with your vision of mercy, our pains and sufferings are dispelled. O Master of the universe, your greatness is vital. May I offer this prayer to shower the glance of your grace on our elected officials, lawmakers, and guide them through to make fair and equitable decisions for our communities. For our members of the public, law enforcement agencies, sheriff, police, CBP, great firefighters, all be blessed, public health and medical teams who carry a great burden on our behalf to save us, to protect us on everyday basis. With this invocation, I recognize the whole human race as one, amen.

All right, thank you very much for that. We'll start with our roll call.

Council Member Audette? Here. Vice Mayor DeNuca?

Present.

Council Member Munz?

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Reznor? Present. And Mayor Lataw?

Here. All right, just for some housekeeping items for our agenda today, we're pulling item 2A. It's a presentation by Caltrans. We expect that to come back at a later time. So if you came here for that presentation, it's important that you know that that's not going to happen today. Also, item is being pulled at staff's request, item from Public Works 9.11G. That is where... There was consideration with the updated project cost for the City of Reading's organics diversion to energy operations project. That is pulled, so if you were here for that tonight, again, 9.11G, that is not going to happen tonight. All right, we have public comment, and public comment for non-agendized matters within the city's jurisdiction is pursuant to the Brown Act, and the City Council cannot take action on any public items. And for public comment tonight, we have six. We will start with Jacqueline. After that, it says letter of appreciation from Bonn. And then we have Robert. Nick, Leslie, and Todd Jones. If you guys would like to line up along that wall just to help us speed things along. And Jacqueline, if you're here, you are up first. And again, while Jacqueline's making her way up after that, letter of appreciation from Bon and Robert, Nick, Leslie, Todd Jones.

Good afternoon. I'm here again trying for a redo. I was so sick last time I didn't have my mind together. So I wanted to speak to you. For years I've been trying to educate the community and the elected officials on the perils of the camping and street homeless and the inhumane practices employed to enforce the local anti-camping ordinance that actually increased crime against both the innocent open camping as well as the innocent public. Now there is statewide data to verify what I have been trying to tell you about punishing all the street campers as criminals endangering public well-being. But the common practices employed by local law enforcement to enforce the anti-camping ordinances actually undermines the individual and state efforts to end homelessness. The data being collected in a local survey by the Developing Diamonds community has also confirmed that the vast majority of these overlooked and criminalized homeless have actually tried programs offered and found that they not only don't fit in, but are further traumatized and set back in their quest to rise out of their homeless condition. These overlooked and inappropriately served neurodiversions need and deserve the only specialized and uniquely affordable transformational housing project developed in cooperation with all segments of society to support asset development and to replace theories of blight extinction. Now the developing diamonds community is listening to the hopes and fears of the public and the homeless and assembling a committee of citizens with a common goal of following the directives of the new California law, SB 634. designed to support compassionate and evidence-based upgrades to local ordinances, policies, and practices to provide an effective and practical bridge between the homeless blight and the diversely empowered and beautified Reading and Shasta community. I invite you to a short presentation and discussion of this cooperative tomorrow at three o'clock meeting of Shasta Housing Collaborative at the parking lot entrance to the Salvation Army Building on 2691 Locksford Avenue. And I invite you to invite me for a presentation. to your council. You're going through a lot of changes right now. This would be a wonderful legacy to hand over to the new session and the new counselors coming in. And that's it. And so I want to give you some, I think I gave you some things out, some handouts last time, but I'm going to give them to you again. And I hope I see you at Larkspur tomorrow at Salvation Army. Thank you.

Thank you. I was very terrified to hear what the next noise was going to sound like, so I was cringing. All right. A letter of appreciation. I believe this is for Bonnie, not Vaughn, but on my screen it just says B-O-N-N.

Yes, thank you. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My good friend, Bonnie Simmons, asked me to come read her letter of appreciation on behalf of her. She is otherwise obligated at her own City Council this evening. Honorable Mayor and City Council, I would like to extend my gratitude to you, Tim Bauer from the Reading Sports Commission, Jennifer Johnston from Reading Tourism Marketing Group, along with countless others for your leadership, vision, and commitment in making the Ironman 70.3 Northern California a reality. The intentionality to showcase what the North State has to offer was truly evident. Hosting this world-class event made a difference and has impacted us forever. This event created energy in our community and brought a sense of pride to the residents that cannot be matched. We know how to show up for each other. I also want to acknowledge the countless amazing volunteers whose efforts ensured every aspect of this event ran smoothly and that the athletes were supported and cared for. Without them, none of this would have been possible. There was tremendous community spirit and pride from start to finish. Well done. Thank you to the Ironman team. What a class act and top notch crew. Thank you for coming to Reading. It was a pleasure to have you here. It was an honor to participate in the race and experience the overwhelming support. I have heard so many positive comments about how this event brought everyone together in an unbelievable way. The Iron Man 70.3 Northern California truly showcased the best of our community. Truly an honor to be part of it. I cannot thank you enough. We live in the best place on the planet. This event was a perfect example of what makes living here so special. It was the highlight of 2026. Iron Man 70.3 Northern California 2027 It's going to be so amazing. Thank you, Bonnie Simmons.

We are very proud of Bonnie finishing. She's a city councilwoman from Anderson, so we couldn't be more proud of her finish. So thank you for sharing.

Certainly. Thank you.

All right, Robert.

Good evening. Poll after poll and year after year, the number one priority for Shasta County residents is and has been public safety. However, public safety has been placed last and paid lip service to over the last several years. I'm not sure how we got from a big beautiful jail to a male daycare center for low-level criminals. How did that happen? I think it happened because The Board of Supervisors knew that the only thing that would fund that would be a sales tax. And in this county, that's something that is not trusted. And really, I don't think has a chance unless... LEADERSHIP GETS BEHIND IT AND EDUCATES THE PUBLIC AS FAR AS WHAT TAKING SELF-DETERMINATION FOR OUR COUNTY MEANS. THAT MEANS THAT GOVERNOR NEWSOM IS NOT GOING TO PICK UP THE TAB grabbing short-term cash grants for rehab is not the answer. We need corrections. Corrections, not rehab. We have plenty of rehab. We need attacks for public safety to include the jail. One separate one for public safety to include the DA and probation. Because if we don't have prosecutors to prosecute even these low-level offenses, then we can't fill the daycare center. So after they leave the daycare center with their ankle bracelets on that's not connected to anything, they're going to be littering the streets of 273 by the Good News Rescue Mission and inhabiting any of the homeless camps in the area where there is, of course, ample parking. So really the only thing I can say is, look beyond what our fear of the past has been and let's get together and see if we can do something that would be a permanent fix rather than a band-aid and cause more problems on the back end with people that are not from the county just hanging out. That's not a sustainable solution. Thank you.

Thank you, Robert. All right, Nick.

About a week ago, I was woke up at 1130 at night by a knock on the door that there's a fire. So I went outside and there was a house 100 yards from my house on fire. The flames were probably going 30, 35 foot in the air. It is surrounded by tall trees and we're just lucky there wasn't a breeze going. But I want to give a shout out to the fire department. They were there like ugly on an ape. They knocked it down in no time. And we should be very proud of the job they did and they keep doing. That's the second structure fire close to my house in probably three or four weeks. And there's a grain belt and then there's a drainage canal, the Henderson Ditch. that is overgrown, and if it had gotten in there and ran, it had the possibility to be a really detrimental fire burning a lot more structures than just the one. I took Erin Reisner down there two or three weeks ago, and she agreed with me something needs to be done. In fact, she told me that she's working on it right now. In the past, I took Mark Mazzano, Joe Comente, and Kevin Cry down there. And it's something that, you know, you'll at least got to clean it out. Besides the fire potential, there's homeless living in the ditch. Besides the fire potential, it flooded like hell last time we had that big flood, but every place else did. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention and thank the fire department. They do an outstanding job. Thank you.

Thank you, Nick, for those comments. That was great. Hi, Leslie.

Well, gee, I don't wanna be meaner than Nick, but. All right, let's start with our state legislative session, okay? That is wrapping up, which means you have between now and September 30th to write your letters to Governor Newsom, like he'll care, but that's our duty, to let him know which ones you would like to see vetoed or which ones you would like to see signed into law. One of the ones that I would like to see this body do, if at all possible, is a letter of support for AB 2700 that has passed unanimously all the way across the board. I talked about it last time. I think actually her representative was sleeping in the back row when I talked about it, but our representatives haven't done anything. However, James Gallagher and, oh, what's his name? I shouldn't try to think on the fly, have and AB 27 has gone forward thanks to them. Joe Patterson, that's the name. They have done a great job representing us here in the North State, all of us in the North State since our people have not. So I think this body should write a letter of support, a letter of thanks, whatever it is to try to get that through because that will eventually affect us. These types of fires are not going away. That being said, I urge our interim city manager and this council to look at where the money is being spent. Let's acknowledge the fact that one person up there was right this whole time. Other people tried to get a tax through by doing crazy things and telling us that it was all lies and we didn't understand it. Now that we all know that it is what it is, let's do a hard review. Let's look at our TOT tax. Let's look at how it's being spent in parks and rec. Let's look at how it's being spent across the board. This council needs to do a better job. We just saw that the management of the Civic Center could be done a whole lot less money than we gave the money for originally. I get it's great and easy to armchair quarterback from where I'm at, but let's start making some wise decisions and maybe listen to the person who's been right the whole time. That being said, the people out at the ballpark, they are working their butts off. They were threatened over and over to get that tax bill through or they wouldn't have a facility, yet they are still hustling and doing a great job. and they need some recognition. They have some big events coming up and it would be great to see this council support them. Also Shasta Supermoto has been going through over a year of H-E double hockey sticks. They have came out strong. They were one of the only two that submitted a proposal. I'd like to see them be rewarded for their 13 plus years of good behavior and building this community. They have an event this weekend. I'd love for you guys to go. Lastly, I'm super disappointed that it is not on the agenda, the thing about the homeless hotel criminal syndicate. And I think that we should probably fix some misinformation. The Good News Rescue Mission is probably one of our only nonprofits that is doing something well. So let's look into that. Let's look at how things are working and let's spend our money better. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Leslie. Todd.

Good evening, members of the city council and staff. I just wanted to get up here. My name is Todd Jones. I'm the CEO of the Reading Chamber of Commerce. We have the great privilege of running Visit Reading on behalf of the city of Reading. And I also wanted to get up here and talk about the great success we had for the inaugural Ironman 70.3. It's really important to say that, by the way, because the full Ironman athletes take that really personal. This is a half Ironman. Ironman 70.3 Northern California. And it was such an amazing weekend. You know, at Visit Reading, we've obviously had the privilege to work closely with the team at both Ironman and very, very closely with Reading Tourism Marketing Group and the Reading Sports Commission. So we've seen it coming. And, you know, there was certainly moments throughout the last 11 months where we weren't sure what was going to happen. And the overall takeaway over the last weekend, which I'm still kind of in the afterglow of, is I talked to hundreds of athletes throughout the course of the weekend and at the finish line, and I spoke with a majority of the Ironman staff, and they have never, ever seen a community show up like the North State did, and I could not be more proud of the Reading community. Obviously, we have a lot of opportunities where we bicker in the town square, both virtually and in person, but to see the community really rally together to have... All the volunteer spots filled, which has really never happened before, according to the Ironman staff, to have a great start line social on Friday night. I mean, the whole community rallied together. The bike course was amazing with the amount of support that was out there. And it's just, I mean, I couldn't say more. All the positive feedback was overwhelming on Sunday at the race. Mike Lataw, great job finishing strong on that leg that I let you down on, but you did it and you finished. And I mean, just really, I can't say more about how awesome it was. At Visit Reading, we worked with an amazing local film operator. We have a film that's going to be, a film, a recap video. It'll be about three minutes in length that we hope to have by the end of the month. We had operators all throughout the course that were taking footage and photography. and we're gonna market it bigger and better next year. Obviously, probably a few things to learn, but the city staff, the public safety, Travis's crew, I mean, everybody really showed up, and Ironman was super impressed, and we hope that this is an event that we're gonna have indefinitely in Redding. Hopefully not August, but if it is again, hopefully we get another break on the weather. But again, thank you so much to the city of Redding. You guys, it wouldn't have been possible quite literally without your support up there on council. And all the staff just did an amazing job. So great weekend, something to be proud of, and something to look forward to next year. So thank you for your support.

Thank you, Todd. Well, it just shows that what we can achieve if the whole village comes together.

Are we voting if the mayor runs every year? Yes, I vote yes for that.

Yes, I... That'll be you, Danuka.

You're next.

I think I vote against that. I don't think you'll get my vote unless you run. I just want to make that really, really clear. All right. Still waiting to collect that $1,000. I did win my height and weight class just to set the record straight. It goes down according to the height and weight. OK. All right. Moving on to the consent calendar. The consent calendar contains items considered routine and or which have been individually scrutinized by the city council members and are anticipated to require no further deliberation. If a member of the public wishes to address an item on the consent calendar, please enter your name in the electronic kiosk located in the lobby before the consent calendar is considered. It shall be the prerogative of any council member before the consent calendar is acted upon to, one, comment on an item, two, respond to any public comment on an item, three, request the record reflect an instance. or nay vote on an item or four remove an item and place it on the regular portion of the agenda for delivery of a staff report and or an extended discussion or deliberation. All right. Do we have any public comment on, let me see here. No comment on consent, so we'll.

I just have a quick question. Yes. I'm not pulling the agenda, just 4.11 F Caldwell Park, does this include fixing the parking lot and the entrance and all that?

Yes, Council Member DeNuca, great question. Director, many could definitely get into more detail than I could, but a great majority of the scope within this project is going to take care of deferred maintenance at that facility, including the parking lot. This is a great project, and we're very excited to get it to the finish line.

Okay, great. Thank you. I'll move to approve the consent.

I second.

All right, without any other comments, we have a first and a second. We'll vote. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. That passes, and we are moving along. We're on to our public hearings. This is continuing from our previous council meetings. Court challenged to take... COURT CHALLENGE TO ACTION TO TAKEN BY THE CITY COUNCIL ON ANY PROJECT OR DECISION MAY BE LIMITED TO ONLY THOSE ISSUED RAISED DURING THE PUBLIC HEARING OR IN WRITTEN CORRESPONDENTS DELIVERED TO THE CITY COUNCIL DURING OR PRIOR TO THE PUBLIC HEARING. THIS IS PUBLIC HEARING WITH 6.1, PUBLIC HEARING TO CONSIDER THE ADOPTION OF A RESOLUTION TO ADJUST THE CITY'S SCHEDULED FEES AND SERVICE CHARGES.

GOOD EVENING, MAYOR, COUNCIL, DIRECTOR OF FINANCE AND CITY At the direction of the interim city manager, the presentation on this item is gonna be a little different than it has been in years past. I'm gonna kind of get us started, cover some overview information, and then each of the directors and or assistant directors are gonna get into some more details about their individual fees to hopefully aid in the understanding of those individual fees. So with that, I'll get this presentation started. So kind of a quick overview of what the master fee schedule is. First of all, it's an important cost recovery mechanism. This doesn't mean that all fees are fully recovering costs. There are instances where through the years, council and other directives have made it to where we're not recovering all the costs that do certain aspects. But this is how we try to recover the cost that we're incurring for requirements that are borne by the city. And so ultimately the master fee schedule is a list of fees by department with different authority citations that give us the authority to charge those fees. So finance plays an important role in this process in that we're working with the departments and ultimately we prepare the schedule, but the individual fees themselves, if they're ever changed or the methodology has changed, that is done by the departments and finance plays as an overview of that. If there is a CPI or CCI increase approved on a fee, then finance is the department that will actually calculate that increase. And I'll go over an example of a couple of those here in just a minute. So as I mentioned, we're responsible for facilitating the master fee schedule process. We go through an initiation process where we send out a variety of emails to all the departments. And we ask them to go through all the fees and determine anywhere where they believe there should be a more in-depth analysis done than just increasing a fee by CPI or CCI. And then we review that information to ensure that the computations are reasonable and accurate And that, frankly, the fee belongs on the schedule and there's no issue with it being on the schedule. As I mentioned before, we do calculate and update the schedule for any CPI or CCI increases. We prepare the staff reports and we typically prepare the presentation. And then we distribute the adopted schedule to the entire staff for implementation. And then we ensure proper public posting of the adopted schedule as well. So, as typical, I'm going to go over the kind of inflationary adjustments for this master fee schedule. First, the consumer price index, which is as of March, is 2.82%, and the construction cost index is 2.44%, and that is measured as of May. We use a number of rounding conventions in this schedule. Any fees that are $10 and under, we round to the nearest 10%. dime and any fees that are ten dollars and over we round to the nearest dollar there are a number of fees within the schedule that have no adopted cpi or cci escalator and so those would be no change and not listed and or discussed this evening So just a quick example. This is an example pulled from Development Services, one of a CPI increase over the past number of years, three years of increases, and one that uses a CCI increase. As you can see there, we increase it by the 3.7% from FY24 to FY25, and then increase that fee by the 1.9% to FY26. And then in this proposed schedule this evening, we would increase it by the 2.8%. to FY27 and very similar computation there below while utilizing CCI. So there's a number of fees on the attached schedule that have no changes. The city clerk, the city treasurer, the finance department, the purchasing department, the police department, the electric utility department, public works engineering, water and wastewater, ITGIS, and housing and community development. the fees that will be changed on the schedule that's before you this evening are in the following kind of groups. The city manager's office has one small adjustment. There's a number of adjustments in community services, fire, development services, public works, and airports, and we'll be presenting the remaining slides in this order, and I will turn it over to our interim city manager to get us kicked off in this presentation. Thank you, Director Robinette.

UP FIRST WILL BE MR. JASON GIBALISCO FROM THE CITY MANAGER'S OFFICE TO WALK THROUGH COUNCIL AND THE COMMUNITY THROUGH THE COUPLE FEES THAT RESIDE WITHIN THAT OFFICE. SO THANK YOU, JASON.

GOOD EVENING. JASON GIBALISCO, MANAGEMENT ASSISTANT TO THE CITY MANAGER. really just a minor update. In 2021, we updated our animal ordinance and that update was not reflected in our schedule of fees. So essentially this is just cleanup language. So there's no additional new fee. It's all existing. And I can answer any questions.

When you say that DME, because it didn't exist before it said it was not available. So are you saying you were already charging people that, but we just didn't have it listed?

Correct.

Thank you, Jason. I don't see any other questions, yeah.

Up next, Honorable Mayor and Council, will be Director Menne to cover a few of the items within his department.

ALL RIGHT.

LET'S BUMP THAT FORWARD. THANK YOU, HONORABLE MAYOR, MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL, TRAVIS MINNE, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY SERVICES. WE WILL START HERE WITH RECREATION FEES, CIRCLE BACK LATER IN THE PRESENTATION FOR AIRPORTS. SO A FEW CHANGES THAT WE HAVE PROPOSED IN THIS SCHEDULE, FIRST ONE IS WHISTLE STOP PARK, ESTABLISHING A NONPROFIT RATE. SO RIGHT NOW THERE'S A CURRENT RENTAL RATE OF $500 FOR THAT FACILITY. We have a lot of nonprofit partners trying to do a lot of cultural programming. A lot of these are for the community benefit down at the park. And so we have elected to, after several requests and in the effort to stimulate activity downtown and activate our new downtown, we would like to establish a rental rate that is half of the current cost. We believe that we have a lot of support from the nonprofit community. And unless there's any specific questions on that one, I will go ahead and move on to the teen center which is a another new rate right now we currently we have rented the teen centers on a actively well utilized facility outside of our activities we would like to change that so we propose adding a $50 an hour rental rate for that building we have gone through a lot of comparables in our own facilities, looking at shade structures, looking at parks, things like that. Realistically, just having restrooms and a roof and the ability to lock that, we think that that is a fair market rate. We also did some comparable studies from other facilities in the community, and we believe that being in Caldwell Park and having those amenities, that should open us up to birthday parties and OUTREACH EVENTS AND OTHER TYPES OF THINGS THAT WE DO NOT NORMALLY HOST IN THAT BUILDING. SO I THINK THAT WOULD GIVE US A NICE LITTLE BIT OF REVENUE AND SOME ADDITIONAL ACTIVATION OF THAT SPACE.

CAN I ASK A QUESTION?

YES, MA'AM.

SO I HAVE TWO QUESTIONS. ON THE TEEN CENTER, CURRENTLY NOBODY CAN RENT IT?

You can. We just have a generic park rental rate and it doesn't adapt well for this type of use. So we need an hourly rate structure that is catered to specific events. So they would be sort of more of a custom thing. And we want to have a set rental rate that we can market to the community because we're trying to encourage that activity for our off times.

So currently, if I wanted to have a birthday party at the teen center, I had to pay a higher rate or you couldn't do it at all?

We can do it, but it is always kind of subject to whatever that specific event was, and we would charge maybe multiple increments of our standard park rental rate, which I think is in the $50-something range, maybe $56 off the top of my head. So we want to standardize that as an hourly rate. So it's just awkward and clunky, but we do not get those reservations as is. So we're trying to drum up that business.

Okay. And then for the Whistle Start Park, if you are a nonprofit, were you paying nothing or were you paying the market fee?

You're paying full boat.

Okay. So now nonprofits pay a lesser fee.

Yes.

But it wasn't free before.

It wasn't free before. No. Unless it's a city partnership event or the city is co-programming or effectively like a sponsor of some event or we're... otherwise engaged in that, it would just be full market rate.

Thanks.

Changed fees, so we've changed, this first one's not necessarily a changed fee, but it highlights as a changed fee because it's not following CPI. So essentially, our additional labor cost is if you had to have some special thing for your event. That could mean that you needed someone to do a garbage service or we had to do some additional labor outside of the normal rental rate. We have a straight staff time for that. And what hasn't changed is labor costs. So we did not propose any change to that because all of the wages have stayed flat over this period. Our other change would be the reservation and class cancellation fee, which is actually listed twice, one for a very specific class cancellation and one for all refunds. We'd probably clean that up and combine those in the next rate schedule, but for now they're broken out separately, but they have the same justification. Essentially, these take at least 30 minutes in just my department alone to process. We then accrue... CREDIT CARD FEES AS WELL AS FINANCES TIME. OUR ACTUAL STAFF COST TIME IN THE DEPARTMENT, IN MY DEPARTMENT SPECIFICALLY, IS $30 AN HOUR FOR HALF AN HOUR, MEANING THE FEE WOULD BE $15 BEFORE IT EVEN LEAVES OUR OFFICE. AND SO WE'RE PROPOSING A MODEST INCREASE FROM 7 TO 10. THIS WOULD ENABLE US TO RECOUP SOME OF THAT COST. We also have the field preparation fee, which is actually not changing, even though it comes up as a changed fee because it is not following CPI. Again, we have not had any staff time increases, and the products really haven't changed because we're talking about chalk for fields. So this is an item to go and prepare a field for a baseball game, and it allows us to get our staff out there and make sure that it's ready to play. And I can take any questions on these fees, but I do believe that is the last one in these slides. in this category. Oh, yes. There's no questions. Excellent, thank you.

Thank you, Director Meny. Next up, we have the Fire Department. Looks like Deputy Chief Summerlin.

Good evening. You get to see me two times tonight because the fire department has fees in two different areas of your fee schedule. One is strictly under the fire department and then we have stuff under development services because we're also part of pre-construction and all the things happen when you're in the building world. So you'll get to see me again. The first two fees that we're talking about today have been some adjustments based off of our labor costs. In the past few times that this has gone through, we have actually reduced what the CPI said because we didn't think it was appropriate at the time to be at that level. But this time we were directed by the city manager's office to take a really close look at how we charge and look at the true costs of what it costs to actually go to an emergency. So on the hazardous materials fees, we used the methodology that we used for the first responder fee schedule that we used to have that was already pre-approved by the city council. And what that's looking at is the cost of fire suppression, fire engine, three personnel on that apparatus, and about a one-hour response time for that size of vehicle to an incident. So hazardous materials response fees are something that is outside of responses to like a Department of Transportation semi-truck collision on a freeway where you have hazardous materials on the road. That's a totally different thing. That is handled under a federal regulation where the city can go after actual cost, dollar for dollar costs, no matter how much it costs. And it doesn't have to be in the fee schedule because it's covered under the federal government's regulations for transportation. The same thing, the same methodology was done for DUI collisions. DUI collisions in our system are pretty much generated from the attorney's office back down to the fire department. So when there's a case, police are involved, there's a DUI into a telephone pole, There's damage to city property and it's going to go to court. The city attorney sends an email down to our organization and says, hey, we need to find out how many hours you were there, what units were there, so they can put together a fee schedule and push it back into the court system for restitution. And that's what that fee is, the general dollar per hour per apparatus that's there for fire engines. Some DUIs, you have multiple fire engines, multiple truck companies, a command officer. So they can get pretty big when you're talking about actual response, depending on the severity of it, how many people are involved, vehicles, things like that. Do you have any questions? No questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Summerlin. Up next will be Director Pagan to go over some development services fees.

Good evening, Council. Jeremy Pagan, Director of Development Services for City of Reading. I'm going to follow Jay here and talk about new fees and then change fees as proposed for the Development Services Department. The first proposed new fee is a consultation fee, and really what you can think of this as is It's pretty often that we help folks at the counter or engage in phone calls or meetings with people that don't have a permit application submitted to us. Oftentimes, it could be a homeowner that has questions or an engineer and architect that has code questions. It sort of runs the gamut. This is primarily for folks. Believe it or not, we can sometimes have the same person come for 5, 10, maybe even 20 hours over the course of weeks and months. and they keep coming with different questions about their proposed project, but they don't have a fee submitted or an application submitted to the department. So we're proposing this as a potential cost recovery mechanism at the discretion of the department to begin charging folks after they've used up an hour or two of time to then continue discussing their project with staff. So that could involve anyone in the department. So what we're proposing is a weighted average of department labor costs. It definitely weighs heavier for our frontline staff. So that's plans examiners, code enforcement officers, building inspectors, and the like. And we're proposing that rate at $74 an hour. Again, that's not for our customers that pay for their permits. It's for customers that come to the counter arrange meetings with us that have not paid an application fee, and we're helping consult. I mean, it's called a consultation fee because that's really what we're doing. We're acting as consultants to help them understand the code and give them direction on next steps. The next two is a notary and recording fee, and it's simply for recovering costs for staff time to do that work. So any given day, we might have to record a deed restriction. We might have to record a covenant. We might have to notarize a document. And at this point in time, we don't pass those costs to the customer. And so the 120 is proposed just to have the notary time, the staff time to document the signatures, travel to the recorder's office. and perform that work, and then just passing along the Shasta County recording fee, which at this point is $14 plus $3 per page, and that would be indexed to increase along with Shasta County's recorder's fees. This one, construction waste management deposit, this one's a little bit complicated, so forgive me, but I'll try to go quickly. The California Building Code requires for a construction project that 65% or more of the waste from your construction project has to be recycled. Up to this point, we require customers to fill out a form that essentially says, hey, I promise to do this, and they sign on the dotted line. We've been doing that for years. However, our solid waste division, when CalRecycle comes to audit us or to ask us how we're doing with recycling construction waste, we found that our form with the signature isn't enough evidence for the state. And so what other jurisdictions do to remedy this and what we're modeling this after is Solid waste can produce trip tickets at the transfer station, and our contractors and customers can go and get a trip ticket to document the weight of recyclable materials that they brought, and then the percentage can be more readily defended when the state audits our records. And so this is a fully refundable deposit. $500 for residential, $1,000 for commercial. And what that does is they would submit their deposit when they pull their building permit, and it would be a financial incentive to make sure they come back and give us the trip tickets to document that they've recycled their construction waste. Once we get those trip tickets and we close out their permit, that would be fully refundable back to the customer. I'll pause at this slide if there's any questions on these four.

I just had a question about the consultation fee. How are you going to roll that out? The more discretion, the more conflict I think there's going to be. So how is the customer who's coming in 20 hours a week, how are they going to know that this new fee exists? What's the signage going to look like? And when do you start that clock?

Those are good questions. Really, you're right. It's a policy call. It's a discretionary call for the department. We wouldn't roll it out quickly, I can tell you that much. We do a lot of this work for free, quote unquote, already. And at my discretion, I wouldn't really kick it in until A customer's been there for at least an hour or two or more. We can develop policy within the department that we would advertise and probably post to the website so that people have a clear expectation. And we wouldn't just, you know, the second council adopts this fee, turn around the next day and begin charging customers by the hour. I plan to roll out a policy. I plan to post it in the permit center. We could also post it to our website. We have a section already for building official interpretations and policy. Probably put it there on our website. We could work with our communications team to do additional outreach. So it's not something I intend to just flip a switch and begin charging, but I wanted Council's blessing to at least have the option to begin exploring to recover these costs because they can be, in some cases, like I said, we can spend tens of hours for free.

Yes, boundaries are priceless. But I feel like if there has to be something that the staff is well trained at to say when people come in to the counter and start asking questions, it's, hey, just want to let you know. we're actually charging for time now. So this first hour, happy to help, answer all your questions. But if it goes past an hour, then you're going to get a charge. And so can you give me your credit card? That'll change behavior. That'll set a boundary for how long we're going to take at the counter. And if our staff is not trained in that, and sometimes they say it and sometimes they don't, there's going to be constant conflict over, I wasn't here for that long. You didn't tell me. I don't understand how this works. So if we're gonna set that boundary and we're gonna roll this out, it has to be pretty uniform and everybody has to be trained that this is the new system so that people know that and can then self-regulate how much they're gonna ask and when they're gonna come in and use that precious time wisely.

Those are good comments. I agree 100%. I don't have anything in writing at this juncture, but I would plan to develop a policy or at least a handout to make it clear with customers what they can expect. We have abilities to put signage. We have a rolling screen in the permit center in the back that does our announcements, so we can start peppering those announcements into customers as we roll it out slowly. So we have a lot of means to communicate. We do it pretty regularly with, like, code changes or, hey, this is how you apply for a building permit. We have a lot of those informational materials. So I agree with you that consistency will be key and messaging will be key, and I intend to do that. Council Member Audette, if I may.

This is one of the items that Director Pagan and I discussed in quite length. And we brought up a number of the points that you're talking about and how that if ultimately approved by council, we would sit down and figure out what that policy direction would look like to make sure, to your point, that we're communicating it appropriately to folks at the counter and then only using it when absolutely necessary. So your comments are on par with exactly what Director Pagan and I have spoke about. And again, if this is something the council is open to for this item specifically, we would be planned on coming back with a little bit more policy direction on how it would be rolled out.

I think I would be fine with it as long as there was structure created with it.

I would like this policy to come back. Yeah, let's let her talk and then we'll come back.

It's okay.

I would like the policy to, whenever you formalize this, would like to see that policy before you execute that.

We can definitely develop something. I intended to, and I can talk with city manager Webb regarding next steps and bringing that back to the council.

All right. I know we have our screens up, so it's hard to see who's in order, but don't forget to use your buttons. It's okay. Councilor Reznor has been patiently waiting.

I just wanted to say I have hesitation in improving that without seeing what the policy is. I like the suggestions given by Councilmember Audet, setting that very clear uniform boundary right off the bat. I do think will really curb the amount of staff time, but I want to make sure that our posture is like we are here to serve them. So I do want someone to come in and ask questions before they give us junk and then we waste staff time redlining junk. I'd rather them come and ask us on the front end. But I do think that those clear policy descriptions would really curb some habits. So I am okay in saying yes to the idea, but I'm hesitant in improving all of these and then not coming back without us having a clear policy of, you know, you get one hour for free and you have your credit card approved for $74, whatever that is going to be. If we're going to approve all of these, can we take that one off?

Council Member Reznor, that's a good point. It seems to be right in line with... Member Audet and Danuka's comments as well. Would it be amenable to council as a body for us to pull this one aside, move forward with the rest of the information and move forward with this one independently at a later date, which we can come back with some policy and some guardrails around this and a separate proposal for this specific fee. Would that be amenable to the body?

Yeah, I think so. And my question is, if you're going to come back with that, I'd be interested in data. How many hours are we talking about? How much revenue is this going to create? Is this more of an annoyance fee? In business, they say 10% of your worst customers are going to take up 80% of your time. But in business, that's all spread out with all your customers. So you're going to get some annoyance with maybe people that are abusing the system. However... There's probably good credibility that there's a lot of good people that just generally have a lot of questions that are maybe doing things for the first time. And a fee is going to prevent somebody from asking good questions that might be very good for the future to help make sure something gets done correctly in the future if they're trying to pull a permit or something like that. But I'd be interested in the data. get a better understanding of why we're having to do this, you know, and how many hours of abuse.

I can think about that. Admittedly, the data is a little bit sparse because these folks don't have records with our department because they're largely not pulling permits. And once they pull a permit, about six months ago, we started doing a time study in the department to better understand our our costs versus our revenue. And so we're doing that for permit records so we can track the hours we're spending on projects. So let me think about that some more and we'll figure out a way to present that to the council.

Thank you, Director Pagan. I think just one closing comment from my perspective. It's definitely Director Pagan's as well as my priority to make sure that we are still providing that service to the community at the counter. I don't want that to be overlooked. Director Pagan and I talked about that at nauseam to make sure that we're still providing that time, that we're still helping the individuals that are coming to the counter. There just is from time to time that there's a line that's crossed where at some point staff need to get back to their other work or help someone else. And I think some guardrails do make sense. And so to me it makes sense to come back with something on paper that describes those guardrails independent of this.

Thank you. I don't see any other questions. Very good. Thank you. I will proceed. Some additional new fees. If you look at your it didn't get too granular in this slide because it would have just gotten really busy. But if you look at my department, I'm sure you see a lot of red, a lot of strike and a lot of additions. And so that all stems or most of it stems from mechanical, electrical and plumbing fees. These fees are for inspection services. So this is when our building inspectors go out to a project and they're inspecting the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems of a building. And we've removed about 50 fees through mechanical, electrical, plumbing. And you'll notice things like, you know, Horsepower of motors and plumbing fixture count and things of that nature. We quite literally go through plans and we count the amount of fixtures and we count the amount of blowers. And it's a really cumbersome process to develop a fee that what that's how we have been doing it. It results in a lot of inconsistency. Quite frankly, it's a waste of staff time to kind of go through there and count the items. It's just sort of an archaic old way of calculating fees. So we're recommending just a per square footage calculation. So it's streamlined and simple. And so, in other words, if you're proposing a 5000 square foot commercial remodel of conditioned space, it would just be 5000 square feet multiplied by that factor. And I would pop a fee for the mechanical, electrical and plumbing system. So. It's important to note we're not trying to increase fees. We've ground truth this. We've tried to right size it. It's not an exact science because you've got a lot of different variables when it comes to types of construction and square footage and the like. But the goal here is not to increase fees, just change the way we calculate it. Another benefit would be when we continue to fully develop our online permits, we can automate the fee process so it doesn't take any staff time at all. If someone punches in the condition square footage of their project, out will pop a fee. It'll be consistent. It won't get messed up. And we can auto-generate fees through online submittals, which is another benefit. So all that being said, I thought it would be best to just give you three examples here of three different types of projects and how these proposed fees would shake out. So 100,000 square foot warehouse would equate to about $14,000 in MEP inspections. Actually pulled this real life, speaking of data, this is real life data from the Amazon facility. That fee is not what was charged. This is under the proposed new fee. And that equated to 93 inspections for that project. So that's about $130, $140 per inspection when you consider the size of that project, Drive time, overhead, half hour at the job site, doing your correction notice. It's about right size. We have estimated numbers that we put on a spreadsheet to kind of confirm admin time, inspection time, so on and so forth. Now, as you get smaller, the smaller projects actually don't pay for themselves. So a 10,000 square foot office would equate to about $1,300 in mechanical electrical plumbing fees. And that's from an actual real world example where we had to do 61 inspections throughout the life cycle of that project. So that's only $20 to $30 per inspection. The true cost of those inspections is likely around $100 or more. As projects get smaller, it does take our inspectors less time, but it's certainly not $20 per inspection. So we're trying to right-size things a little bit, but I think it's important to note at these fees, we're definitely not at full cost recovery. And then for the single-family home, we do a lot of single-family home construction in our city. These fees would equate to about $750. And on a recent 2,200 square foot home through our inspection tracker system, we did 25 inspections for that home. So that then equates to about $20, $30 again per inspection. So the smaller the project, the less likely we are able to recover costs. That's somewhat by design because they're smaller projects, lower budget. But we are trying to make the fee calculation simpler while still recovering at least partial costs. And then I'll touch on this one, and then I can pause for questions. But a shell building is just what it sounds like. It's a shell with nothing inside of it, except for walls and a roof and a concrete floor. And so the reason we need this one is if we charged a square footage fee for a shell, it would overcharge the customer, because there's not enough to look at. Generally, a shell just has utilities piped into it. They're capped off. It's a blank concrete floor, and it's a blank space that later gets improved through a remodel or a tenant improvement. So this fee, we're recommending just a flat fee of $216 each. So you multiply that by three, you get $600 some odd dollars. That would be a shell of any size because really no matter the size, the inspectors are looking at the same basic building components and there's not a whole, frankly, a whole lot to look at. If it was a 20,000 square foot shell and we charged them a couple thousand dollars for inspections, it would be an overcharge. So that's why this fee is there because we do get a lot of shell construction in town because Folks will build buildings and then they do the remodels later. And so this is a flat rate to ensure that we're just covering costs and not overcharging. I'll pause there if there's any questions from the council. Okay, I will proceed. My clicker is not working. Let's give it a second. There it goes. I want to make sure I didn't skip anything. SB 1395 is state law for low barrier navigation center. I know the council is somewhat familiar with this concept. Essentially, they're a type of land use that is allowed by right based on state law, except for state law does allow a jurisdiction to require an application and a fee so that we can review that land use and make sure that it meets state law. And so we're just proposing $1,071. That's gonna require four to eight hours of a planner's time to go through a checklist and ensure they meet all the requirements as well as some administrative costs. And then code enforcement. There's a long list there on the right. A lot of code enforcement activities are not cost recoverable. They are borne by the general fund, largely. And the code enforcement customers aren't like our development customers, as you can imagine. So they're not coming to us looking for permits. We're generally going after code enforcement, going after folks that are violating the code and trying to find compliance. So on the right, these are a lot of the different things that they do on a daily basis, title research, plan checks, document processing, so on and so forth. We're recommending to the council that we have some fees established so we can recover some costs from these code enforcement cases that's otherwise borne basically 100% by our general fund. And I'm happy to go into detail on either of these two if there's questions. Okay. and changed fees. This one is just a typo. I had to print out some documents so I get it right, but basically one of the columns last time, the rows got shifted down, and so the numbers didn't match up for like four or five of these items, additional plan review, appliances, demo, manufactured home. So while it does look like these are big jumps in the fees, They actually are not because we're correcting a typo. So for example, the manufactured home fee was 400 some odd dollars last time. It was not what you see in the schedule. $13 for appliances. I'm gonna get to the page so I can speak it more clearly for you. So manufactured home fee was 190. Now it's 569. So it looks like a fourfold increase. It is not. Actually, it was previously at 442 a couple of years ago. So the fees by nature of that typo got off kilter. Another example would be, let's see here. The demolition permit, it shows us 13, and now we're proposing 201. The demo permit and the 24-25 fee schedule was 187. So the 25-26 fees were incorrect because of a typographical error. We're not proposing to increase these by a large amount. We're just really adjusting them by a typical cost escalator. I have the papers here. I can answer more specific questions if you have them. But the intention here isn't for a two- or four-fold increase. It's to fix typographical errors from two master fee schedules ago. I'll get through the rest of these and then pause for questions. Tobacco retail license is not a new fee. We're just adding a CPI escalator to it in the fee schedule. And then lastly here, we did remove about 50 of those mechanical electrical plumbing fees, all of those per item fees that I just discussed with the council in favor of trying to do a per square foot fee again for consistency and being streamlined and all those good reasons that I already mentioned. I'll pause there for if there's questions.

We have a question from Council President.

Yes.

This is less of a question, more of a comment. We have not done anything with TRL, so it feels silly to put any sort of escalator on something that we're not currently doing. Just on principle, that feels funny to me.

Yeah, I mean, we just did it for completeness. I mean, we aren't assessing the fee or charging the fee at this juncture. If we get the program up and running, it'll allow for, I mean, just the general inflationary costs that have increased, even though the program's not being implemented. The overhead and those other costs are still increasing, but it could be council's discretion to not put an escalator on it. When are we going to start that? Well, I think that's outside the scope, perhaps, of this item, but I'll defer to City Manager Webb.

Thank you, Director Pagan. So, Honorable Mayor, Council Members, it's on my radar to bring something back before you in the very near future regarding getting the tobacco retail ordinance program up and running. Through our hiring freeze and other things that we're focusing on right now with the budget, that position was essentially held up in there. As we work through that together, the leadership team and yourselves, I would like to bring that position and proposal back to you here very soon. So I've been working with Director Pagan personnel department and a few of the other departments that are related to be able to do that. As I understand, it is very much a priority of the councils as well as the community. So hope to bring that back before you very soon. But just recognize, although it is eventually cost neutral, there is going to be a general fund initial cost burden to get it up and running until the revenue does come in. So I'll work with Director Pagan and others to best identify what that is. and get it up and running and start collecting the fees as fast as possible.

That's my only comment.

Thank you. As Deputy Chief Summerlin mentioned, he's going to come back up now and speak to the fire department and the fees they're proposing as part of their working with our department to review development projects. So I'll pass it off to him.

I told you I'd be back. Okay. The development review fee schedules, just like what Jeremy just spoke about, this is where all the permits are coming into the city. Everything from grading permits all the way through construction, everything that happens, there's always some form of fire department component to each of those activities as you build new construction in the city. What we're going to do is I sat down over the last year and really looked at this, our fee permit fees, and I just could not understand how do you take the value of a piece of property in a project and associate that with an hour per person to actually do the work and how long it takes to do a plan review. And it's some interesting when you look at some of this in the sense of how we are going to what we're going to ask you to remove is that the calculations one, I couldn't understand and explain to something somebody how we actually do it. What I'm proposing is something I can explain to you. It takes us three hours to do that type of project. This is the dollar amount per hour. That's how we came up with this money dollar amount for the fee. In this, it's kind of sneaky because when you are doing new construction and your project costs a million dollars or more, and anybody that's built things in this community know that a million dollars is nothing when you're talking about construction costs of large buildings. It looks like it's an inexpensive permit at like $300 or $828, but then you go over a couple columns to additional buildings. that you have to do, and we charge 56 cents per $1,000 above and beyond that. So if I do the math correctly, and somebody that has a calculator can correct me if I'm wrong, if you're a $30 to $40 million project, and I charge you $800 and then I charge you 56 cents for every $1,000 they're on, that's about $16,000 in permit fees. When I'm looking at that dollar amount versus how much it takes me to go out and have my staff do that work, it's a lot less than what that dollar amount is. So to give you an example of what we're trying to remove, assuming you're going to build a regional cancer center right down the street here, we as a fire department for the permit for that charge some $6,000. Under the new system, they would have been charged $1,200. That's the max that they would have been charged because that includes the amount of time it takes us to review their plan and then give them one inspection. If you, let's say, are doing North Regional Center and you're doing a remodel of a major large complex, those people were charged $4,000. Again, under the new fee that we're going to be suggesting to you, their max fee would have been $1,200 at the beginning of the permit. If you're like an O'Reilly's auto parts store, there would have been about $1,500 is what they were charged. Again, under this system, they would have been charged $1,200 at the time of permit. So for the larger projects in our community, it's actually going to reduce their initial permit fees. That doesn't mean that they don't call us in multiple other times to go do other types of inspections because they're not ready for us when they ask. But their initial permit and their cost to them is going to be reduced at larger projects. That's why we're asking to remove that so that when we move into these other things, we can. So under this, that fee schedule that you see at the top of your spreadsheet includes fire permits, and it also does fire alarm systems for commercial multifamily residents. Down below, you'll see another one that we're going to remove called or ask to be removed for the R1, R2, R4 fire sprinkler plan checks. Those are... Apartment complexes, condos, residential care centers, nursing homes, things like that, that are basically condo large complexes. Those fee schedules are going to be dumped into one new fee schedule for commercial property, for fire sprinklers, plan checks. So we're consolidating things. into a more concise, easier to understand fee schedule versus having to look in multiple places to determine, well, how many risers did you have? We know that a system that has 50 sprinkler heads or greater is going to have more than one riser based off of your size. So we broke that down into how long it takes us to actually do that plan review and then go out and do an inspection. So that's where the premise of all this came from, is to make it more simplified to actually understand where the money that you're spending is going. And then I can explain it to you that that equals three hours worth of labor from my workforce, and this is what you get for those three hours of labor. You have any questions on this? Because the next one goes back into more of the same thing in explaining some of the add-ons that replace what we're removing.

There's no questions here.

OK, so like I said, we're breaking these things down so that they make more sense. So we're going to do a light fire and life safety plan check and it includes an inspection that covers us doing the review of the plan review. and then us going to the actual establishment and looking at it. And so there's four different price proposals. So a minor TI, imagine you're a pizza shop in a strip mall and your business is doing great and the people next door, they no longer are there, it's a vacant spot and you want to enlarge your business because you're doing well. You opening up and expanding into that other business or the other spot within the strip mall is a minor tenant improvement. So that... It would be about $308 for the fire department to come in and do that review because it's such a minor review, and then we'd come out and inspect it. About an hour and a half or so of work. Small commercial, think of a coffee shop. It's really small. It's a very compact size of a building. You're going to be at about $600. Medium commercial, think of a small strip mall, building a thing like that. And then large and complex... plans. Think of Amazon. Think of a new church complex. Think of things like Far North Regional Center, where you're talking about a very large, massive undertaking, where you're really rebuilding a large structure. Those are into complex plans, and that's the ones that are going to be in that $1,200 range. When we get into commercial fire sprinklers, a fire sprinkler is different than a plan check. They are different permits within the city, so it deserved its own place so that you could see exactly how much the fire department charges you. One of the areas that we removed is you had plan checks for sprinklers, but then you also had how much it cost you per fire extinguisher. Sprinkler head and how many risers you had. There are two different charges in two different areas. They've been consolidated into one area and it's based off of zero to 50 heads is your base charge all the way up to 500 and more heads. That's the cost for the plan review and then us coming out and doing an inspection. The fire alarm is another permit. Again, it deserved, because it is a separate permit from all of these other permits within the city for all areas, it deserved its own explanation of what you're being charged for so that the consumer knows exactly why and what we're charging for and what they get for it. Again, you're looking at one to 20 devices, $462, all the way up to $1,200 for 100 devices plus. Again, if you're talking 100-plus devices, that's a really large building, and that takes a lot of time to do walkthroughs and to do the plan review check on all of that. And then the field inspection and re-inspection. So in the fire service, one of the problems that we have had is you get an inspection with your permit. Well, sometimes those are lined up with outside contractors. To give you an example, a developer's contracting with a Sacramento sprinkler company to come all the way up here. They say, hey, they're going to be here at 3.30 this afternoon. Can you come on in? Then you can do the test. But when we get there, they're like, hey, there was a wreck on I-5. They're not going to make it until 6 o'clock. Can you please stay? Well, that puts my people in overtime. So I needed something to be able to say, yeah, we can stay, but this is the charge that we're going to add onto your permit at the end. And that gives us that ability to do that. The other thing is just like Jeremy had was a consulting fee. We get lots of phone calls and we're not planning on charging for a phone call to us to say, hey, can we do this? That was never our intent. But when they say, can you come to our site? We want to run something by you. Well, now I'm driving somewhere. I'm taking a long time to go out to wherever they are, walk through the project with them, look at the changes that they're proposing, and then making a decision based on that. And that might even be coming back and looking at what the law actually says, doing the research of what they're doing. Does that make sense with what the fire code says? I had no way, I didn't really have a way in the old fee schedule to charge that consultation fee. We just have been doing it for them. The other thing is the way construction works on large construction projects. So think of yourself an apartment complex. You come in and you're built, the people come in and they start doing framing for the entire complex. Then the first section, once that's framed, you bring in electricians, you bring in plumbers, you bring in all the low voltage people, and they start working on the first third. Then when they're done, they get ready to move to the middle third of that complex. Well, they want to do sheetrock next. They can't do sheetrock until I come and inspect. So what we typically do in large projects, even though I'm only charging them for one, I'm coming three or four times to break it down into pieces so that we help them maintain a consistent movement for their construction project. Because as soon as I clear the first section, they can bring in sheetrock people and start building that out because I'm done. And then we come back for the middle section. We come back to the third. I really didn't have a method to be able to say, hey, if you're going to call us back 12 times because this is a really, really big project, I didn't have really a charging way within my fee schedule. And that's what some of this is all about is to be able to have an opportunity if it gets out of hand to be able to say, hey, we'll come out. No problem. It's going to cost you one hundred fifty four dollars for us to do that. Or if you want us to be out after hours, it's this amount of money. That's where we're at with these right now. You have any questions?

For humor's sake, if we don't show for the inspection at the time that we've been given to a developer, do they get a deal? Like, do they get money back? I feel like that's the thing we should consider. If we're asking them to pay more money for us to stay for a couple of hours, but that oftentimes is the flip side in that situation where there's someone who comes up.

No, but we'll come back out free of charge for them. And typically the only time that ever really happens is if there's a large fire and one of those people is investigating a fire because emergency response will always take precedence over the other thing.

I don't think it's necessarily a fire. I think it's other inspectors that maybe don't come, you know, at the set time.

There's an error in our system where there's a miscommunication of what time. We will always come back out at the earliest time and they won't get charged for it.

Cool.

Thanks.

Yeah, go for it. So somehow, if you have a minor TI in a thousand square feet shop or something, you charge $300, and if it's 100,000 square feet, large complex, new, you charge four times. It just doesn't feel right to me that, I know I understand what you're saying is that square footage is difficult to monitor, and also the cost of, you're going by the cost of your service hours.

So the square footage is the development service fee and how they do their charge. This is what the fire department, what we look at and with the fire code, because they're looking at the building code, we're looking at the fire code and health and safety code.

Yeah, but I'm just saying that a minor TI being charged $300 in a small 1,000-square-foot shop versus 100,000-square-foot $100 million project being charged $1,200. Okay. This just doesn't sound right to me.

Well, usually the difference is like he talked about a shell. So typically when they build out a shell, they bring in the fire sprinkler system for the entire complex. And that's what we evaluate. So when you do a tenant improvement, it's typically the sprinkler systems already there. And we're just evaluating if the head configuration for the new improvement is the correct coverage or we have to have them move ahead one or two feet to a different area because of how they configured their system. So it's not like we went back to the whole thing because they had already picked up the cost of sprinklers. It's just minor adjustments of a current system that's already been paid for.

So maybe let me explain to you again what I'm trying to get to is that a large project, which is 100 times bigger than a small project, is being charged only four times. You see what I'm saying? It's a 1,000 square foot business that's charged $300 or $600. And 100,000 get charged $1,200. That's only double the price. I'm just saying it's too low for large complexes. That's what I'm getting to.

It does not preclude us from adding more charges after the fact. It was a set base price for what we estimated the amount of work it takes to do plan review and then go out and do one inspection for that development. We were just getting rid of an extremely, in my mind, radical prospect of up to $16,000 for something that I couldn't justify, and I couldn't understand how that number came up with the work we actually do. Even if they called us out three or four times, we're not going to be anywhere close to that $16,000. Or if you added all these permit fees, even at the highest amount at $1,200, the cancer center still would have been less money than we charged them just for the $1,000. So we're trying to regulate it back to what's realistic to our job function and try not to gouge the builder and artificially elevate our fees.

I'm not advocating for $16,000, but I'm saying this is... The difference between small and large is so minor here.

It just doesn't... Well, I would think it's probably a baseline. So if they come out there and they're going to do an inspection, the reason why it's a little bit more for large is because it just probably takes a little bit longer. Not so significantly that it has to be four times the amount. But they're charging... for their time, and this is how long it will take. So the baseline, obviously, is probably about 600 is the baseline, and then you're just adding on a little bit more for the medium and for the large.

Right, but just the burden is much heavier on the smaller projects and the larger projects.

But it's just a minimum. Think of it like a minimum. Minimally, you have to do that work. So it feels like it's small, but all the other costs, there's plenty of more costs coming to large complexes.

Yeah, I don't know how you guys, but I just think that it could be bigger amount for larger complex and a lesser amount for smaller commercial. That's what I'm.

Well, and again, you're talking about our base rate. Yeah. And it's the beginning portion of it. And if it is so complex where it is multiple meetings and we we we have been doing this like Haven Humane. I bet you I've had 15 meetings with them about their water flow issues there. They're not charged for any of it because it's a conversation about a compromise that we're trying to make, but with the fire code says and what they want to do. And so we have meetings all the time with developers about what the law says, what they're capable of doing and what give we can give them within the law. And so most of this is absorbed in just how we normally respond. If you look back at how much the fire department charges for permits, If my memory is correct, last year we were $73,000 in permit fees. The year before, $72,000 total. That's not even close to how much it cost me to run my bureau. So we are supplementing business, which is fine. It's just a model of what we're doing, and that's just the way it is right now. But I also believe in pro-development. I don't want to gouge somebody with a permit fee that I can't personally sit here and tell you this is how I came up with that dollar amount. And we can debate, should I have more money? And I think that's a good debate. Am I charging enough? Should we add another hour? But when I sat down and ran these numbers, I looked at my two guys that do all my plan review, and they said, no, I can do that probably in four hours. If it's a complex, like there's like five buildings, well, each one may have four or five hours worth of work or days worth of work because you're not talking about one building now. You're talking about multiple structures within the same building complex. And those are handled as different and separate permits. And so it's... It's more complex than that. It's just, again, this is a starting point where I didn't want to gouge people on numbers that I could not explain to you. This I can explain to you.

Thank you.

Okay, no more questions?

Thank you, Mr. Summerlin. Up next we have, I believe, the Solid Waste Department. We have Deputy Director Clements.

Looks like I went too far. Went way too far now.

Wow, you were fast. Good job.

You know what? I know you want to get to the end of this really quick.

I'm so impressed.

I was trying to help you out, and then I got correct. Look at that. All right. So, Honorable Mayor, members of the council, Paul Clemens, Deputy Director of Public Works, I oversee your solid waste utility. There's four fees, four areas that are being affected by rate increases, and the increases are based off of previously approved rate packages that were presented to Council. So in 2020, the end of 23, there was a four year rate packet that was presented. And what happened during that year was there was a cost analysis, cost of service that was performed. And so some rates were increased, some were lowered, they were balanced out, and then it was a revenue need or generation from there and the increases were across the board. After this rate packet is done, we'll be doing that same exercise again. So the increases that are before you are based on the previously approved rate increase. And so for green waste coming into the transfer station, that is going up based off of that previously approved cost of 8%. And that was, again, a result of a cost analysis, and you have the proposed amounts there before you. The other part is household waste, the per ton rate and also a volume rate that is going up again by those same amounts. And then one of the things I want to mention about that is that the revenue from our transfer station is about 10 percent of the total revenue that comes in. for the solid waste utility. So by charging these fees, it keeps us from subsidizing the transfer station operation from our rate payers and their residential rates or commercial businesses. The other item that's going up is car tires. And again, that was based off our cost to receive and process tire waste. So if it's on a rim and we have to remove it and we have to handle it and process it, if it's something we have to shred or anything like that. So those costs were broken down by our labor rate, our equipment rate, fuel usage, and all of that in order to come up with the new fee. Let's see if I can go one at a time now to go to the next one. Oh, you know, it's probably better if you do it. Oh, whoever took it, right on. All right, here we go, got it right. So the next two items are for our master lock padlock fee. So we have some commercial businesses who need to lock their dumpsters to keep them from having people get in them and pull stuff out. And so the increase to that amount is actually $18 a month, or not a month, $18 for the lock, and that is our cost. So we're not increasing it. It's what we purchased the locks for. And the nice thing about that, if they come to us, is they're keyed the same, so our drivers don't have a big ring of keys to try to go through to find each individual lock. So we sell those directly to customers that request them. The other item is our non-curbside collection surcharge. And this item is going up based off of that previous rate packet that was mentioned. It's going up by that amount. And this service is provided to those who have long driveways, private roads, where we have to leave the main roadway to go in with a smaller truck to perform the collection. For those who are elderly or disabled, we do provide this service at no charge, but they do fill out a form and a request for a waiver to be able to do that. And that takes care of what I have to present to you, and I'm willing to answer any questions you might have.

No.

Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Director Clemens. And up next, we have Director Manning again to cover the airports, or airport, excuse me.

was correct. Thank you back again for a bevy of changes with airports. But let's see, we'll go with this first. Okay, so I want to preface this a little bit before, since I've learned so much about airports in the last eight months. We did a comprehensive look at fees in this period and we actually did a large market rate study. So we look at comparable airports I have four airports that we've looked at. We also used local real estate rates for commercial as well to balance that and look at the local market for this stuff. So one thing I do want to point out that is very, very important, there is actually a regulatory need for airports to continually adjust fees to be responded to market conditions. These come with your grant assurances. So every time the airport accepts a grant from the FAA, you actually have to agree to these grant assurances. And these grant assurances require the airport to have a rental and fee structure that makes the airport as self-sustaining as possible. So every time we see an increase, it is a gradual march toward that self-sustaining requirement that the FAA has. So let's start going through them. So first up is landing fees. So these actually aren't new fees, but the way that they're broken out in the schedule makes it look like it's a new fee. The big change here would be, other than the cost escalation, is that freight is being broken out as its own category. This also comes up in changed fees later on, so I will just tackle them all at once here. So these are all market rate comparables. So we were actually able to look at all four of those airports, which include Santa Rosa, Arcata, Medford, Chico, and get an average and look at our rates in sort of that regional comparison. Just as a data point, if you were a large commercial flight, like a United Airlines flight, it would cost $150 to land at the airport. These are built into rate structures. obviously at Pencils, and these rates are acceptable by major airlines. What has changed is that fees are going up. They have slowly marched up about a quarter a year over the last few years, and like I said, freight is being broken out as its own category. The remain overnight fees, the next fee, so this is something we do not currently have the ability to charge. There is one flight that does remain overnight. This is essentially like a parking fee. So if you're going to park your Boeing or whatever it may be, there is a fee for that. It is $25 a night per aircraft. Like I said, there is one, parks overnight, and resumes business in the morning. This impacts the operations area and is essentially an obstacle in the workspace, and there is a fee for that. We'll then go to public parking non-payment violations. So this is essentially an enforcement mechanism that allows the airport to give you a charge for your parking if you may have forgotten to act to pay for that. So if you parked your car for several days, forgot to pay the bill. This actually allows the parking vendor to then go and submit this charge through the DMV to be attached to your car registration. So there's no ticketing process, but it is then forwarded, kind of like a fast track thing where you get a notice in the mail, but it will be attached to your car registration. So this is a payment violation mechanism. It allows us to recover the costs that you would have otherwise paid had you paid parking, which is what we trust you would do when you come into the facility. So just a little bit on parking. Parking rates are not changing this year. They were changed, I believe, last year when we moved to the new system. If you were to park for a full week, it's about $72. Otherwise, parking is $12 a day for the long term, $24 a day for short term. So that means it is cheaper to park your car by $1 than to park your airplane, your large airplane. Yes, please call us. And there's no late fees for that plane, it looks like. So the next fee would be filming and still photography. This is a wholly new fee. We have not had this occurrence yet. We want the mechanism to be able to charge for it. This is not a couple pictures in the terminal. This is going into secured areas and shooting a video or shooting a series of photographs for your commercial needs. This is a ton of staff time, essentially. So this is a very common fee to have in other airports. But it does take a tremendous amount of staff time because you have to have personnel that is allowed to be back there escorting your non-authorized personnel at all times. So your vendor has to essentially have airport staff with them at all times. We have to be able to do anything and everything with the tower. to be able to move safely throughout the airport is quite the process to be able to bring someone into that area. Anyone that's viewed any of our training exercises would know there was quite a series of things that we had to do to get out there. And that's just in that one little area where special activity is happening. We're going to do extra, it will have additional impact. So this fee essentially reflects the staff time that it takes to be able to do something like this. And with that, I can take any questions on this slide.

There's a question from the vice mayor. I do have a question for other slides also. I can hold them back, or I can ask on this slide. For what? I have more questions on the next slides also.

Oh, yeah, just any on this slide. Otherwise, we'll just take the next one.

You asked this question already. Why is $25 per night for an aircraft and only $24 for one car? Why not more for the aircraft?

This is our first instance where we're able to charge that fee. We believe that's a reasonable fee that compares well to other airports, and so we don't want to go too far and above. It's also consistent with tie-down fees and other fees that we have for leaving your aircraft overnight. Just these are sort of bigger, larger commercial aircraft, and there's only... really so many places we can put them. So it's in line with the rest of the fees that we already charge for parking.

I get that point, but it seems to be obscenely low compared to a one-car park for $24. Why can't we, I mean, is there any reason that you can't charge them at least $7,500 or something? Because they're not staying one day.

We want to make sure that we are still good business partners with our commercial airlines, and so we don't want to go above and beyond. And as this is our first foray into this fee, we will be able to make adjustments in the coming years. Right now, we do not have a mechanism to charge anything. We think this fee alone will get us additional revenue of $9,000 per year.

And the other thing is that for somebody who forgets to pay the ticket, $104, even if they park for one day, I can tell you, even in the big cities, I mean, I go to the hospitals in Sacramento, let's say, that the violation for parking is we get charged like $50 or $60, not $100. That's a bit too much in my opinion.

Yes, so this is what we've... Essentially, our market research has shown that this was a common fee. Also, our parking vendor suggested this fee structure, and we did some fact checking.

This is also the first time you're charging that fees, right?

Yes. So the parking fee isn't changing. It's the penalty for not paying. However, they become the same thing. So you're paying for your parking. The rest is applied as a fee.

So this is the first time you're charging that extra fees?

Yes, because it's essentially the violation fee.

Right, right. It's the violation fee you're charging for the first time. So you are, first time you're charging an aircraft, or overnight, you're charging $25. First time you're charging for a violation for an average Joe to park a car, you are charging them $104.

We're charging them for not paying.

No, I understand that.

There's an easy way out of this fee is to pay up front.

I understand that. I'm just saying is that it's just irony is that you are hesitant to put more than $25 on United, but you are... We, as a city, are willing to charge an average Joe for a non-payment for one fees for $100.

So, United is aware of the charge when they park the airplane and pays the fee accordingly. So, there's just a different...

I understand what you're saying. When it comes to vote, I would like to oppose that.

Maybe, again, data is very important. Being able to come back and say how many people are actually paying a $100 fine, I mean, that doesn't leave a very good taste when... People are visiting ready enough to his point if he thinks this is excessive then maybe we need to come back and see some data on Yeah, what are the airports are charging or?

Yeah, if we want to circle back to parking We'll actually bring the airport's manager up at the tail end And then we can drill down a little on parking if we still feel like we want to do that We'll go through the rest of the fees if that's accepted. Sure.

Oh, can I have a council on this page?

Yes, ma'am

So I just want, just for clarity, not that this matters, but there is a late payment if you're late paying your parking fee. That's $15. But the non-payment fee is the big one, the 109. Is that correct? So if you're late to pay your parking fee.

I would bring Andy up for that specific question. He's going to deal with that more day to day.

But they're the late payment first. Yes, it's right here. It says late payment processing fee, $15.

Yeah, but they're changing that to non-payment, which will be $104 now.

No, it's not changing. It's still there. Anyway, okay, well, Andy can tell us about that.

Maybe what I'm seeing is this. It's a late charge when you're 14 days. So if you do not pay for parking, you're going to get an invoice.

And if you're late because you didn't pay, then you pay the 15. But if you don't then pay.

You'll get 14 days to pay when you get an invoice. That's what I'm reading.

So we would no longer invoice you. It's if you didn't pay, it would go onto your car registration. So this is the legal mechanism that is required by the state. We have to have this fee in the schedule in order to ensure we're going to get paid. Otherwise, we can send invoices till we're blue in the face. Right. We have to have some teeth to it. This provides us the teeth with the state to be able to attach it.

Yeah, I get that part. I just want to make sure I understand what would happen if I went to the airport and... my kid parks in the wrong spot. I think, you know, they think they're in the zero to four, but they, whatever, they just park in the wrong place. And I get a, I get a bill. Is it immediately going to go after 14 days to one Oh four? Or is there, Hey, you didn't pay. We want you to pay this. You have this many days to pay. Here's also a penalty because for $15, because it's listed here as a late payment processing fee of $15 and it's in red. So it's new. Do I get that? And then if I still don't pay that after 14 days, then do I get the charge? I just want to know the order.

He just said that they're not sending invoices.

Yeah, the parking is handled by a vendor. So we'd have to address a vendor specific question with the airport's manager. I don't believe those fees are related off the top of my head, but I'm not going to answer that until we have Andy come up. So we can do that now or I can circle back to that because I'm not going to be able to answer that question accurately.

I just had another question on this page on page about the so it looks like the hanger office single and the hanger office twin more than doubled. Is there a reason why that price went up so high? It went from $40 to $95 for a single hangar office, and it went from $69 to $190 for a double.

I believe we have about six airplane hangars with offices. Again, this is where that FAA grant assurance comes in. we have to respond to market rate. So when we do the analysis, we pulled in market rate analysis. So we have not only a ground rate analysis, but we also have comparables and most airport offices are actually used as storage. And so we looked at storage facilities, which should be much cheaper than an office because office would be air conditioned, have a front door, things like that. So we think that that's kind of the lowest level of comparable. However, when we do a per square foot cost, our current rate is still below the market rate. So it's a march toward what we believe the market rate as. Most are 352 square feet for the larger ones. Smaller ones are 144 square feet. So if you look at a 10 by 10 at U-Haul, it's $140 a month for essentially 100 square feet. So we would be substantially cheaper per square foot than market rates. We looked at Cluster self-storage, ACE mini storage, a bunch of other comparable, you know, essentially storage units that would be attached to a building that aren't commercial space. If we were to go for a commercial space, then we would be more in the $3, $4 a square foot range, and then we would be landing at a much higher fee.

I'm just wondering why the escalation is so severe.

Yeah, fees were held flat for several years with basically a CPI increase since 2023. So in 2023, you're looking at 38 and 66 for the single and double. From there, you're going up basically a dollar a year. But with the mandate, we're taking that mandate seriously to be able to get to self-sustaining, to not rely on the general fund for airport operations in the future. And to be able to tackle those bigger projects like airport or terminal improvements, runway improvements, things like that. We also want to be able to be responsive to tenant improvement requests and having additional rent revenue is going to be able to allow us to do that. So that's why it's a large jump this year.

But doubled, more than doubled.

Yes, but still it is $190. It is still well below market rate.

But why should, I mean, I'm on the opposite side of that from Councilwoman Tenessa, because why shouldn't it be market rate? Why are we charging less than market rate?

Well, which market? We're in Reading.

No, I understand that.

So we're not Santa Rosa. But comparable storage.

What are you saying is comparable?

Comparable is a similar storage, which is air conditioned and has all the amenities. Why are we charging less than the market rate for reading?

Because it's not just storage.

We shot right for the middle between both of those opinions to not be too oppressive and to get close to market rate.

It's not oppressive to be market rate.

Yeah. But we knew it would be a large jump. So this is sort of what can happen when you suppress the fee growth for a while, is that you end up with a big jump. And those are less palatable, and we recognize that. And that's why we did a robust... robust data gathering exercise to be able to justify that. So we do know it is a large jump. However, we're able to see that it is in line with what Reading would currently charge for things like that.

Did you want to bring Andy up now or later?

That's the last slide.

BRING UP ANDY LATER. I HAVE QUESTIONS ON THIS.

YOU HAVE ANOTHER QUESTION? NO, AFTERWARDS. I THINK WE'LL NEED ANDY FOR THIS. I HAVE SEVERAL QUESTIONS.

OKAY. SO AIRCRAFT STORAGE RENTALS AT REDDING REGIONAL AIRPORT. SO STORAGE RENTALS ARE ESSENTIALLY WHAT WE STARTED JUST TALKING ABOUT WHICH ARE OUR HANGER SPACES. REALLY THERE'S 391 HANGERS THROUGHOUT OUR SYSTEM. throughout both airports. Hangers varies by size, age, construction materials, amenities, and so they all have a different fee attached to them. Really the big change here is what we were already talking about is that office We have one hanger with a very unique office and it is responding to that increase in the rate for the office it has I think it's one that has an external door versus everything else is internal door only so it is a very unique hanger in the way that it is set up and Also, the port-a-port, that is kind of like a funny little shed building that you can park an airplane in. It's movable. They're a little bit difficult to use, and they are something that can be rented. I think we have six of those, and they're going up by less than CPI, so they're being pointed out here as a changed fee because it didn't go up by the full CPI amount. The miscellaneous fee, so this is a large category in the fee structure, but it mostly has to do with parking your airplane and hangar office, which we already discussed. So parking your airplane has a varied structure around the size of airplane, how long you're going to park. You could be a monthly person who essentially the tie down is they tie down their airplane so that the wind doesn't catch them. but also if you're going to park it over that course of that month, you get a monthly rate. Some people park for the night or a couple nights, and so they get the transient rate. And so these have slowly increased over the years by CPI or close to it. Right now it is rounded up very slightly from CPI. I think a CPI increase would be about $53 instead of that 50, or 53.40 instead of that $55 that you see there. This is in line with our market rate. If you look at Sacramento, As a comparable, they're at $73, and we have a bunch of other examples of that where they are close and similar in the fee. So like I said, these have slowly gone up over the years. If you look at helicopters, they've actually come up. If you go back three or four years, it was about $10 a night for a light aircraft graduating up to now where we see that it is at $10. $10 A NIGHT, SORRY, IT WAS AT $4 A NIGHT, AND THEN EVENTUALLY THEY WERE HELD FLAT. SO THEY'VE HAD SOME GROWTH, THESE OTHER FEES, SO INTERMEDIATE STARTED BACK AT SIX, MEDIUM STARTED AT EIGHT THREE YEARS AGO. SO THESE HAVE GROWN, BUT STILL YOU'RE, TO COUNCILMEMBER cheaper than a car so but these are core business people that are expecting to park their helicopter there every day all day and so these are the people that we want using the airport for business purposes certainly it could go up but again the goal is not to alienate and to be part of the overall market comparable we are still below but we are growing toward that market rate and to be in line with everyone else. So our goal is to not do rapid swings one way or the other. So we're marching toward being on average. With that, I can take any questions on that specific slide.

Go for it. I'm blown away that an average Joe gets $24 for a parking day, the cost of parking his car for one day, and a helicopter can be parked for $10 to $20, and a business jet can be parked for $25 a night. I understand that you don't want to make sudden big jumps, but this, I don't even know if the public realizes this. This is just ridiculous. And I understand that you don't want to make big jumps and you want to increase, but this is below market rates. Maybe if you outsource this parking of helicopters and business jet to a parking collection company, they're going to charge $500 probably or something. I'm not saying they will charge $500, but this doesn't make any sense to me. I think you need to revise these things to bring to market rate. But if other council members don't feel this way, then I would like these fees to be excluded from this approval so that I can vote against this piece.

So I would say if you look at Over on the coast, Arcata, they're between 10 and 25. So we're very much on average with them. If you look at Chico, we're actually over Chico. We're below Sacramento, but Sacramento is Sacramento, so it's a larger. So we have to kind of shoot for a range, and we're well within that market range. We can still progress upward, but we have to get to a number to where we see where we're testing the limit. So we've marched up for several years. They were held flat just one year ago, and we're marching back up one more time. So I wouldn't say that we're so far below that it is an issue. There's also several other funding mechanisms and fees that the airplanes will have to pay or helicopters have to pay for taking off or landing, things like that. So it's not the only mechanism. They're paying quite a bit more than just the one thing to be there.

I don't know how you explain this to an average Joe. So this is crazy.

It's $12 to park overnight at the airport.

No, no, $24 for short term. Only that's short term.

If you want to go overnight, it's $12 overnight.

Up to four days is $24 per day. No, no.

That's only because we park in the way up front.

And even if it's $12, it's still more than a light helicopter.

Yeah, because a light helicopter costs a lot more than that car.

So we also get money from fueling and from other rental rates. There's other rental rates that they are paying. It is not just one fee. So I'm sure Andy can explain a lot more of that if we want to get into a little bit of the detail on that.

Can I get clarity? Is what you're saying is you think... All these fees are too low and you want them raised to market rate. Yes, and higher rates. And can you give some examples?

Which ones do you think are too low? Parking of helicopters, small business jet, the hangar office rental of $95 per month for several hundred square feet. These are all much lower than what an average you can find or anything here. Which airports are you thinking of that? No, I'm not just talking about the airport only. I'm not comparing airport to airport only, but I'm saying even in our market, if I'm going to rent someone 300 square feet storage with air conditioning you mentioned, I don't think I'm going to give them anyone to rent that for $95 per month.

These fees are adjusted every year or every two years? Every year. Every year. So I think what you were saying earlier, which might help some of us, is you're realizing maybe these fees are not quite at market rate, but we're trying to avoid the sting to people that are already going to get some big increases. But what you're suggesting is give everybody else a much higher rate, a bigger sting, where we have the chance to be able to raise some of these fees now and come back in the year and do it again. I see the value in not really hitting everybody really, really hard all at once.

I don't think if you charge someone from a business jet overnight $25, if you say, hey, we're going to raise it to $50, they're going to say, no, no, no, we're not going to park in Redding. I don't think anybody would say that. Or if you say, hangar, hey, we're going to charge you the market rate, which is for the office space in Redding. I don't think they're going to say that. No, no, no, no. If you raise it from 95 to 150 or 200, we're not going to do that. I don't think so.

How far are we on some of these fees? Some of the fees that he stated where he believes some of these fees might be double or triple in other airports. Are we that far off on some of these?

So, Honorable Mayor, Members of Council, kind of what I'm hearing is it sounds like there may be a desire for a more detailed look specifically into the airport fees.

No. Is that not what I'm hearing from you?

No, I'm not hearing that. But in that case, I would like to exclude those fees separately so I could personally vote for other fees but not these fees. Yeah, that's fair.

That's fair.

I disagree. I mean, I think you're just not taking into consideration all the other fees that that helicopter, that plane, I mean, there's numerous. You know, they're going to pay probably several hundred dollars, including gas and other things that we're making money off of. I do think parking is a little bit high, but if we're not, if that's market value, you are... You were saying that you wanted everything to go up to market value, and $24 is market value. And in the other ones, I agree. We're not at market value, and the reason we're at $190 or whatever is because we don't want to make that big leap. You know, it all seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, the difference is the parking fees is administered by a third-party external vendor, and they would like to make significant profit on it. That's why all the parkings gradually and very rapidly sometimes go higher and higher for average Joe. But that doesn't seem to be the case for hangers and offices. Doesn't all business people like to make money? No, they do, but so should the airport. So airports can increase that too.

We can include that. I'm sure that staff can include that when we have a vote that you are voting. We do that all the time. I'm voting yes on item blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

and no on this line item. We can just note that in our vote.

Okay. I want to make sure that those line items are excluded from my vote.

We'll do that when we get there.

Council Member Danuka, I'm very happy to meet with you and Andy out at the airport anytime, and let's just totally go over those. And for next year, we'll be able to tackle it any other way and make sure that we're in line with expectations.

Can I ask a question? Yeah, Council Member. I just had one quick one on that same last page 8. Eight, I think. Yes. The photography and the filming, can we be more specific that it's commercial filming and commercial photography? That seems what you described, but that's not actually written here. And I'm wondering if we should be more specific. So that the public doesn't think that they are?

Certainly. I can understand why that could cause some confusion. Is that accurate? If we're allowed to make a change, we could just put commercial.

Okay.

Because that is really what that is.

Does that understand that?

Well, it's for secured areas. So it's really like it doesn't have to be for a commercial purpose, but it has to be in a secured area. So we're not talking about the terminal in public areas.

So filming in secured areas. Yes, ma'am. Yeah, as more specific as we can be, I think, so there isn't confusion later.

Definitely. You don't want to charge when you take your phone across the tarmac getting on the plane.

I'm just saying, you know.

Yeah, selfies on the plane.

I don't want to be charged for selfies. These are my goals.

Yeah. Okay, so I believe this is the last slide here. So ground rental rate. So this one is directly in response to, again, that FAA grant assurance. And we actually had an appraisal for ground rental rates. And so we have to go to that rate, which is $0.05 per square foot. And so that is established through an appraisal done by an independent third party. And the FAA is aware of that. So they would expect us to follow suit and change our rates. The next being facility rental rate. Again, per square foot per month rate. That is a commercial rate. We did an analysis locally. Right now, we do not have a mechanism to charge for this. We do not charge for this. This would allow us for, say, something like car rental kiosk if we wanted to put that outside of a contract or someone wants to rent. 20 square feet for a display or some type of other Arrangement we actually have the ability to charge for that so currently we don't this would allow us to actually Collect some fees for that and then landing fees we discussed that already that is essentially a changed fee with some additional cost to it, but we discussed that one in the beginning. It just happens to land in both categories because there's changes and new parts to it. So with that, I can take any other questions, and if we want to chat about parking, we can, or if we want to move on, I am happy to do that as well.

Can we just get some clarity from... Yeah, let's do it. If there's a late fee and a violation fee, or if there's a progression...

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, Andrew Solzweig, Air Force Manager, happy to answer any of your questions. I wanted to start off with the budget is... analyzed line item by line item, and we do a very thorough study every year to take a look at what our competitors are doing. Since there's no real comparison for airports, we have to look at other airports. And so we see where they're at with some of their rates. They're usually established a little bit differently. It's not always apples to apples, sometimes apples to oranges, but we do the best to try to figure out what makes sense for the market. So I'll start with the parking question. In the fee schedule, the $15, that's actually an error. That's what we were charging for missed payment or late fee previously. And so that actually would be going away. There's no $15 on the additional parking fee. So that should just be.

So scratch that out.

Yep, scratch that out. And then we're just, again, using a mechanism to be able to charge for people that don't pay. There's a question about percentage. We're roughly not collecting about 40% of our parking fees because of people not paying. That's significant.

So we're going from zero to it goes on your DMV?

It goes, well, it'll start with a, because of the license plate records that can be obtained, we can send the fee to the person for them to pay. If they do not end up paying it, then it will go on the DMV registration.

Are you going to get a bill? Sorry, are you going to, tell me what it's going to look like. So my kid goes there, parks in the wrong spot, something happens to where They pay something, they don't, I don't know, something happens, but there is a cost to them. They've done something wrong. Am I going to get notified about that and be able to pay it? Or is it going straight to the DMV and I'm going to get this huge charge?

It's not going directly to the DMV. So what will happen is if a person is aware that they need to make payment, they would contact our parking operator and coordinate that.

How would they know? How would they know, yeah.

How would they know?

Because we were told that there's no invoices going out. That's what you just said, or what you said.

Yeah, the airport does an invoice. The parking provider operator, LAZ Parking, would be sending the invoice. Because they're maintaining the entire system, they would be able to track and get the information of where the ownership of that vehicle is and be able to mail an invoice. Then they would take care of all of those processes.

This was like the fast track model. You go through, you didn't pay, so obviously you won't pay anymore. But they're going to send you a notice, you don't pay, then they can attach it to your registration.

Fast track doesn't do that after 14 days. I mean, fast track in the Bay Area gives you like 90 days. So it gives you a lot more time to be able to pay that. But has there been a cost analysis? I mean, the parking right now is on the honor system. I remember the old days of the parking. Somebody used to work.

We were trying to avoid saying that.

Everybody knows it's so I mean there's obviously plenty of signage out there We have lots of information out there for people most all let's say over half are paying honorably But but we this is our mechanism now to really enforce It's just not cost-effective for somebody to sit in that booth and collect money.

That's analysis that you guys know

Would it be cost effective to just put a little arm up? Like when you go to SMF and you're leaving, I think there's only one booth at the moment that even has somebody in it. Everything else, you're putting your ticket in and then paying with your card.

So the airport, a long time ago, I don't know when, used to have our mechanisms. But there's an operational cost to purchase those, which are pretty expensive, and then the maintenance of those over time. And now we have systems in place that we just don't need those. Our license plate recognition technology is good enough to be able to get us the information that's needed to be able to get them to pay. And then with this mechanism through the DMV, it would eventually force them to pay it.

I guess my question is, do you think that our current operator out there is sending notices to that 40%?

Because I don't think that that's... We have not been able to do that because we haven't had this fee established.

Oh, okay.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

This fee will go to DMV directly, but right now you can still send a notice to the people that, hey, you don't pay. The law doesn't prevent you from that. Yeah.

There's a cost to parking there. So if they didn't pay that, they can send a bill to say, hey, you needed to pay for parking. You're saying that you're skipping the part where you give them the opportunity to pay and going straight to enforcement.

To DMV.

That's intense. No, I think what he's saying is that they would get a notice, and then if they didn't do the notice, then it would go DMV. Sorry, I'm speaking directly to you.

But within two weeks, what if you're on vacation? This is Reading.

Oh, I agree with you. I'm just saying in what Tanuka was saying. I agree with you. The 14 days is intense.

I'm just trying to clarify. Do they get a notice that you did not pay and please pay?

No.

Will they get a notice first that you did not pay and please pay?

We've not been able to do that without this fee schedule update.

No, they will. What he's saying is that for this passes, they will get a notice.

Will they get a notice that please pay and you have this much time to pay whatever time?

Yes.

Before you send this to DMV? Yes, 14 days. But your presentation doesn't say that. It just says violation.

I think what we're struggling with is, can we reduce maybe the fine for being 14 days late? From my perspective, I don't know if the rest of the council thinks that $104 might seem excessive, or can we change the amount of days?

Yeah, because how do you contest that? They could just go to the DMV, and you now have to unwind this whole thing. What if you just parked in the wrong space, but you paid for it, but you parked in the wrong one, or you pressed the wrong number? Now you have to, like, there's real consequences if they go to the DMV and they attach this. Like, unwinding this is going to be really difficult.

I agree.

Can we just change the days? Do we have the ability to change the days from 14 days... to 60 or whatever you said that Fast Track does, can we change the penalty to, if you don't pay this in 90 days, It's a $104 penalty.

We can change the day. So in our communication coordination with LAZ Parking, because they do this at hundreds of different locations throughout the nation, this was their recommendation based on what they have done at other airports and other locations of what an appropriate, I guess, fine would be for not paying. And this system currently works with what they're doing, and so we took that recommendation.

They want to maximize the profit. I can tell you in Sacramento, I parked there at one time was wrong spot, was not, I got a violation notice. The entire charge was $60. And there was no, it was not within 14 days. You're asking for 104 days, $104, even after one day late. Yes.

Let's clarify that. If you're zero to 14 days late, it's the first amount.

Zero to 14. I thought what it meant is it's going to send an invoice, pay by this date, and when you don't pay it by that date, then it becomes late.

Now I just realized. Now I believe that City Manager Webb's comment about we would like you to bring us back some. Now we would like you to bring us back some fees relating to airport parking.

I can tell you, especially somebody who's not rich enough and they go park there and they get $150 or whatever, it's a substantial change of money for these people. And if it goes to DMV records... Now I'm going to say bring it back. It's not a great way to say welcome to Reading as a tourist or... And sometimes you may be running late. Let's say just you're running late and you just missed the payment for some reason. Your app doesn't work. And then lo and behold, you get $104 for parking.

So the parking vendor will reach out to the individual for a payment. But these are just folks who just haven't paid. So, you know, the... The rates would, or people's schedules changes, and so they work with the parking provider to say, hey, I was a day early, I was a day or two late, and then they work with the customer to make sure that that's adjusted.

So this is after you've had all of your chances to ameliorate the situation. You've had your chance to pay the fine day of, you've had your chance to contact the vendor, and now you're being penalized and made to pay. Okay. This is well after you've been noticed. I can understand that.

Now you have a late. What if you don't even know you did anything wrong?

I can understand that, but this slide. You will have been contacted before you, you will have been made aware and ignored it. I'm going to make a motion. That is what that is.

I will make a motion that we bring back airport parking face, please. Second. Thank you. Staff has consensus.

Aye.

Are there any other questions that we didn't answer?

We just need consensus.

We know. We know. We were just making sure you had consensus that we would have that.

Okay. Oh, goodness.

Thank you. All right, Honorable Mayor, so the next step you'll have, as City Attorney Ms. Wagner indicated, now is when you can open the public hearing.

Now we can see.

We're going to open up the public hearing, and we have one speaker, Nick, if you'd like to come up.

For this comment, when I mentioned taxpayer, I'm the taxpayer, I'm talking about all of the taxpayers. I read a deal just a couple days ago that nationwide, In the United States here, the average taxpayer now pays $8,200. I forgot my notes, but it was $8,200 and something dollars in taxes. And for the first time in history, they're paying more than food, clothing, and shelter. We're paying $7,800 for shelter. or for food, clothing and shelter. And then I looked at the master fees for the city of Reading and there's over 400 fees and permits and everything. This is absolutely ridiculous. When I look at plan checks, sprinkler check, landscaping, inspections, any inspection fee, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, taxpayer has already paid This guy's wages, whoever it is, they've already paid for the vehicle and the transportation to get there. They've paid for their office. They've paid for everything. He goes out and does his job and charges this. That is absolutely pathetic. Taxpayer, I'm talking about the landfill, not the landfill, the transfer station where we do the mulching. Taxpayer goes out there and pays $35, $40 to dump his grain stuff. He's paid for the grinder. He's paid for the property out there. It's all covered up. It turns into mulch, and then he pays a fortune for the mulch. This is just, you know, penny-pinching. You guys should be cutting fees and make it as easy on us as you could. You know, if we didn't have to pay so many damn taxes and fees, we'd have more money to spend in the economy, and you could collect a hell of a lot more sales tax. So I guess I'll leave it at that. I was curious about one thing. And I guess I'll talk to the fire guy here. I see that there's a big charge for going on a DUI accident. I wonder if there's a charge every time a fire engine or two goes to somebody that's having a heart attack or a medical call or something. Is there a charge for that? Does anybody know? We're being charged too damn much for the property that we've already paid for the people. I compare it to this. How about it, Dutch brothers? Every time one of those little girls that Aaron has hired and is paying decides she wants to charge the customer 25 cents for each beverage she's getting, it's the same thing. She's already getting paid. So that's my point. Have a great day.

That's good free advertising. Thank you.

With all due respect, Nick, I would just like to say one thing that we do realize we have overly taxed, but I do want to point out that most of those taxes go to the federal and state government.

Go to where?

Federal and state government. You know, Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, not in Reading.

You were talking about when I first said that we're paying $8,200 taxes.

Yes. I agree with you. I hear you. I just wanted to say that, you know. Thank you.

All right, there's no other comments there. We're going to close this hearing, and we'll take comments from council members. If there's any questions, feedback, motion.

If we want to omit something, our motion likely needs to include that, correct?

Yeah. Honorable Mayor and Council, I was going to recommend that before a motion was made that we make sure we very clearly summarize what was included in that motion.

Okay.

Given that there was a pretty robust discussion around parking and a few other things, I know Council Member Dr. Nenuka had a few comments, so I would just make sure or recommend that any motions that are made are very clear on what is included and what is not.

Okay.

I can attempt. What I have in my notes is that I would like to exempt an increase in the TRL, exempt an increase in the consultation fee until staff brings back a policy for council to review. And that council would like to exempt the parking relating to the airport and staff to bring that back for further discussion. That was just my personal preference. My personal preference and thought there was that we don't have implementation of that fee at the moment at all. We don't know is this process working, is it not working, any of those sort of things. So we have a fee. and we're going to increase it before we actually implement the program, that just feels silly.

I can agree with all that. I'm okay with all those things. I would like to make an alternate motion. I'm not sure I'll get a second on this or not. I would like all the airport fees to be carved out and be brought back after reconsideration from the staff.

I'm not for that.

I'm just for the parking we can bring the park the car vehicle parking back I Think that's what we were talking about earlier And I think what she mentioned on a comment if there's not support here is you can make a comment on the vote I'm just wanted to make a motion and if I don't get a second. That's fine understood I'm not seeing a second on that motion there. Okay. Was there was there anything else comments from council members of other items to exclude I

Then I would just specify that my vote should make a note that I do agree with Aaron's suggestions of exempting those things and bringing them back. In addition, my vote will be yes to all other fees except the ones which are the airport fees. Everything airport related? Yes.

Okay. We still don't have a second.

Oh, Jack made a second.

Oh, we have a second.

Okay. Honorable Mayor, may I interject very quickly? I believe there was one other thing that was discussed that I just want to make sure is included or not. There was a typographical error regarding the $15 fee within the airports, which I'm assuming we are going to correct. I just want to make sure that made it in the record as well. Yes, please correct that.

Well, then also in development services, those fees that...

The commercial film.

Commercial film? The fees that you said were misaligned. It's page three of eight.

Yeah, there were the fees, and Director Pagan's department that will confirm are correct, and then there was minor changes to the language for the filming within the airport. Those were the miscellaneous notes that I had captured that I want to make sure we include in the motion.

Can you include that in the motion?

I include the... edit to the commercial about videography, that the alignment of fees is fixed, and the extra $15 fee that's there for, sorry, the alignment within development services, and then the $15 fee is redacted from, or whatever, crossed out from airports. Travis, do you have something?

I just wanted to clarify, that fee is struck already, the $15. It's already...

It was not struck in our... I just am saying that because it's in our...

Okay, it was in the version that I have, so... Oh. Sorry.

We would love to always get the same version that directors get. That would be really rad.

Are we voting? First and second.

Not struck.

I don't hear any.

Apologies. But it wasn't, didn't you say it wasn't commercial? Didn't you say, Travis, that it was the restricted area? Yes. Is that a better way to say it? The restricted areas for filming? Yes, restricted areas. So will you amend it just for restricted?

If I may, Mayor Littell, just for clarity of the record. I know we had a motion, a second, an amendment to the motion, and the seconder. accepted those changes. Can I just ensure for staff that we got it all? And what I heard was the TRO exemption is being removed. Under development services, the consultant fee is being removed for now until it comes back with a policy on how that's going to be implemented. Correct. My understanding on airport was you were talking about removing the public parking non-payment violations, clarifying that filming fees apply only in secured areas. And you also wanted to remove and consider later the fees for small business jets, helicopters, hangar offices. We got clarification that the $15 fee is omitted, but we want to make sure that that's clear across the board. And then on pages three of eight in development services, the misalignment will be aligned.

The only not correct one is that there were four of us who said no to the plane or Or helicopter or hangar. So small business jet helicopter. We did not want that. There were four of us who said we do not want that to be back.

And then I apologize. The other one was the hangar office single. Okay. That's also remaining in this motion.

No, it's not in the motion.

If you adopt the resolution tonight, that fee will be approved. Yes. So then if I may one more time, the fees that you're removing from consideration are the TRO exemption, the development services consultant fee until a policy is brought back, the airport public parking nonpayment violations, and there's a clarification regarding filming fees in the airport fees only apply in secured areas.

Mm-hmm.

The $15 fee is completely eliminated. And then on the misalignment, the three of eight pages will be aligned. If there's a request for a separate motion on the other airport fees, we should take that separately. I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page. There isn't. Okay. Thank you for that.

But could you clarify for me, because I am okay voting for the rest of the fees except for the office, hangars, and helicopter and business jet parking fees. So can I make a note of that in my vote?

I would defer to the city clerk on how she would record that vote. I think the cleanest thing to do would be to take a vote on everything else and then vote on those three fees.

That's fine. I think I also heard we want to increase the font to 25 on these pages as well.

So maybe if we can include that in the motion. So are you recommending two votes then? Are you recommending two words?

Do we need that? That's what she's saying. If the person who made the motion and the person who seconded the motion accept that your first motion will not include small business jet, helicopter, and hangar, you're not voting on those? And then you'll take a second motion to vote on those. I concur.

All in favor?

Okay, so we have a motion. Second, let's vote before we change our mind. How about that? All in favor? Aye. All opposed? All right. And we're going to have a second motion. Is that what you heard? Yeah.

I'll make a motion to approve those ones. I'll second the motion to approve those.

Okay. Motion second. No comment. All in favor? Aye. All right.

All opposed?

No. No, you don't oppose or no? No. All right. Okay, we did it. So we get to move on. You can say something, yes.

What would you like to say? I just wanted to thank all the directors. I know that was kind of a pain to get through, but it was very helpful for me. So thank you very much.

All right, note taken. Thank you. Moving on to regular calendar reports and communications of departments, boards, commissions, and committees. Electric utility, how exciting. 9.5C, consider approval of Reading Electric Utilities' 2026 Wildfire Mitigation Plan.

Wow, Nick, really know how to clear a room.

Well, you know, this is good stuff. Good evening, Mayor, members of the Council. This is Nick Zettel, I'm the Director of REU. Pleased to present tonight... our 2026 wildfire mitigation plan update, coupled with a request to accept our independent evaluators report. So tonight's requested action, I'll separate this into two pieces, spend most of the time on updating the council on the 2026 wildfire mitigation plan. I'll dive into a little bit about the independent evaluators report. And then I'll give a little bit of color on where we're headed in the 2027 through 32 timeframe. Before we get too far down the road, I wanna talk about how this program works. I think that's important. So I'm gonna talk about how it works. I'm gonna get into some of the regulatory framework and then we'll dive in. This wildfire plan has been in place since 2018. It's a process of continual improvement. It surrounds five principles. So we govern the portfolio, we understand the risk, we reduce the risk, we reduce the future risk, and we support the customers, and it's a continual loop cycle. I think what's important here, what we focused on, MORE IN 2026 IS GOVERNANCE, SEPARATING OPERATIONAL RISK LIKE TODAY'S RISK VERSUS STRUCTURAL FUTURE RISK. AND THEN A FEW COUNCIL MEETINGS AGO IF YOU RECALL WE DOVE INTO FROM THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT ASPECT IN PUBLIC SAFETY POWER SHUTOFFS ENSURING THAT WE HAD AS MUCH OUTREACH AND CRITICAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT AS POSSIBLE FOR THOSE THAT WERE IN SCOPE. The compliance framework is broken into three pieces. As Senate Bill 901 was the law that was passed to establish the mandate for public-owned utilities and investor-owned utilities to prepare and implement a wildfire mitigation plan, the law was then handed to the Public Utilities Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission. Code Section 8387 sets the tone for what is required to be in the plan. The Wildfire Safety Advisory Board is then tasked with reviewing the actual plans and making sure that they are meeting the requirements in the framework. What's new in our plan for 2026? We focused intently on managing the portfolio programs. So the way we look at this is I'm the portfolio manager of the wildfire mitigation plan. The council is the ultimate executive team that would seek approval or not of the plan. But underneath me, there's multiple different programs and multiple different elements ranging from our compliance and safety officer being engaged to the risk oversight committee at REU reviewing different aspects of this, and then different divisions in the utility all having a role, whether it's operational, it's engineering, it's customer services, and those alike. We also focused on creating what we would call a shared operating picture that gives us our risk intelligence. So as you move into particularly a public safety power shutoff space where you need to have situational awareness because you're going to be taking actions within a seven-day window that is going to impact people's lives, and you're working to do what you can to keep your customers safe during weather-driven events, you need operational information. You need risk intelligence that's coming at you and is being updated in real time. I'll get to that in the next slide here and talk a little bit more in detail. And then last... We're really working on risk-based roadmapping using data, right? We don't want to make a seat of the pants decision. We want to make decisions that are data-driven that will drive what we're doing in the field, whether it's vegetation management, inspections, and in particular capital priorities through 2032 as we start to look at what we need to do in the highest risk areas to start reducing the risk as much as possible or removing it, right? As I mentioned, one of the items we focused on this year is part of PSPS, but also just getting some more operational intelligence was building an operational decision support system. We met with a lot of vendors. They're pretty strong in this area, but it's mostly these tools were developed for investor-owned utilities, say Pacific Gas Electric Company, Pacific Corp, Southern California Edison, large, I would say, investor owns with millions of customers. And the tools that they were offering were not really fitting a 61 square mile service area like Reading. And the price tag was not really fitting what we thought was gonna be worth what we're gonna get. So I'm very proud of our team. One member of our team dove into Claude and Codex. And I would say essentially vibe coded our own operational decision support tool. What this does is it looks out seven days, it pulls in, using APIs, it pulls in information on wind speed, fire potential indices, burn indices, different weather patterns, and it's grabbing local weather data at local weather stations. It's updated every hour, and then the fire data is updated every day at midnight. This is published on a server internally for the city. We have it. It also sends flags to us. It gives us warnings of when we're starting to hit certain thresholds. They're going to hit certain operational changes we need to make, whether that's moving our system to what we would call like a reclose or disablement all the way to a PSPS, right? And it's nice because this is hosted now within the city, inside of our network. We've shared it with the fire department. Actually, every department has this tool at their hands. And as you go through it, you get a lot of information coming at you that's not just REU specific fire data. Using data to make your decisions to inform what's happening in a seven-day window gets you out of a reactive stance and gets you into a proactive stance, and that's right where you want to be. And this is intentionally advisory in nature, right? This is not going to tell you this thing did this and it hit this number and this bar went red, and so therefore you have to do this no matter what. It's advisory. It gives us... information and guidance, but still, at the end of the day, we need to make the decision internally for what the next step is. So, dropping a little bit into the future here, the roadmap, 26 this year, we completed the updated wildfire risk framework. This is the biennial filing and independent evaluation. 27 next year, I'm really looking to apply some risk inputs that we're working with a consultant named Cloud Fire. They're kind of experts in this field. They're PhDs in fire risk and fire behavior. And we are meeting with them, and we are teaching them kind of the power business, so to speak. We're working together with them. And it's pretty magical. It really is. When you have experts in one field and experts in another field, and we learn each other's love language, so to speak, we really start to understand That, oh, this is a risk. And they say, yeah, and this is your consequence. So what they're doing is they are able to map an ignition at any point in the Redding area. And then what the consequence is to assets, people, terrains. And then we were using I would we would call it like a Monte Carlo type modeling situation where we run multiple, multiple simulations over and over to produce a predicted outcome. for every single given point. So now you're starting to understand where do I need to put capital dollars to minimize this risk? Do I need to underground this line over here? Probably not because it doesn't have a high risk and it doesn't have a high consequence. But over here where you wouldn't think it would, you should, right? So it gets you out of the headspace of, oh, I think I know what to do by looking at this and really gets it into a risk-based framework. We're very excited to have this. We're in the middle of working on it. My hope is that we can refine our PSPS areas and also refine what infrastructure improvements we can make to then model the risk again and see what it did. Did it go away? Did it get worse or did it stay the same? 2028 through 32, this is where we're going to start directing capital to the highest value risk areas. So we're in the middle of what we call a paper pilot to look at areas that are in the highest risk areas that are on the outskirts of town. What if we put what we call covered conductor or tree wire instead of the open cables that you see? So when a tree branch flies into it, it doesn't start a fire or do we need to underground it? We wrapped a paper pilot for a certain section, we're gonna move to a field pilot, nothing says, figure it out, like actually try to go build it, right? And I have to do the design work and do the calcs. Ultimately, what I'm looking for is by 2032, in our highest risk areas, I would like to see the risk either removed or substantially reduced to the point where you may have PSPS in the portfolio, but you just, it's gonna take a one 100 year or a one in 1000 year event that you're gonna pull that trigger, right? By the time we get to 2032, it's a good checkpoint for us to also say, what in the wildfire mitigation plan do we not need now that we've invested these dollars to reduce this risk? Do we not need as much suppression support from Redding Fire? Do we not need as much day-to-day vegetation or day-to-day inspection out in the field where those are dollars that go out And it's repetitive over and over, right? So that's kind of going to be our checkpoint along the way. We're going to balance our need with our risk and keep watching this as we go forward. Now jumping to the independent evaluation, this is required by law that every three years an independent evaluator selected through an RFP process who specializes in wildfire mitigation plans for utilities independently takes your plan and reviews it. And then we also have to make sure that we report it to the city council. So the independent evaluator in this case was Dudek. They really look over these four areas. Regulatory compliance. Do you understand the risk that you have? Is your mitigation aligned with your system? And do you have a PSPS framework? This is a little bit new. The Wildfire Safety Advisory Board last year said you probably should have PSPS. Hint, hint. Like if you don't have it, we're going to stop being an advisory board and start being a board board, right? So we have it. We did this in place. Dudek evaluated us. It all checked out. Overall, they concluded that our plan is comprehensive, it's risk-based, and it supports our public safety and system resiliency. So we had an A-plus on the plan. It's good to hear. That means the last step for us, if Council approves tonight, is we will package this up and send it to the Wildfire Safety Advisory Board, where that independent board will review it. And they are an advisory board only. What they do is they review it, and they are different experts in different areas, and they will give us advice and ideas on how ways we can improve it. And we take that advice, and we take those suggestions to heart, and we integrate it into the next plan. With that, I will take questions.

Take any questions for council this time?

I don't have any questions, but I just want to say as somebody who lives in an area of town that would be subject to PSPS. I was so impressed with the outreach to our communities. I think that government historically does a trash job of communication and connecting with the community and asking for feedback on a regular basis. I think we all sit in meetings and we say, okay, well, did anyone respond to our request? Did anyone engage any of that? And we're constantly critics of how terrible government is at Interacting with the public in terms of communication, and I just want to say that REU did a fantastic job. I'll loop everybody in if you don't live in that zone. Someone came and knocked on my door and asked if I had any questions. If you were not there, they left a baggie on the door that had all of these questions or all of these commonly asked questions or resources or what have you. And then I also got text messages. So there were multiple forms of contact, and I just was thoroughly impressed because I don't believe that there's someone who is in one of those zones who wasn't given multiple opportunities to ask questions and be informed, and that rarely happens in government. So thank you.

That's good to know. Thank you. We're also planning right before I would say we get into the thicker fire season for us this October. We're going to go through that outreach again. Because people do move, and people do move in, and maybe somebody who's missed. So this will be a continual outreach process just to make sure everybody's aware. Do we need to know somebody on the lifeline system? Do they have safety needs? Did something change in their lives that maybe the last time we asked they didn't have it, now they do? So, yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think that what it... What our approach is, these are our customers, right? I know we're a publicly owned utility. We're part of the city of Reading. But we are actually, we feel like we're actually in business. You know, we sell a commodity. And part of delivering that commodity includes a risk of wildfire. We need to make sure that our customers are safe. So we are intently take that customer focus. We also know that it takes about five different ways of outreach to maybe reach a person once. So you may even get an e-mail if you're on e-bill.

I'm sure I got one.

I'll see it.

I'm pretty sure that was Nick going door to door.

It was not Nick. I looked around.

That would be pretty cool though, Nick.

With that, I'll make a motion to authorize and approve items one through three.

I second.

Oh. Oh. Nope.

There's no public comment, nothing online.

I now will make a motion to authorize and approve actions. Thank you.

All right. Without further comment, we've got a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Doing good. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Nick. Just as a reminder, if you hung around for the public works report on writing organics diversion, hate to disappoint you, but we have postponed that. So we are moving on to public works 9.11 H consider report providing an update for the city of writings pump station. This is just an update. It looks like so.

Good evening, Josh Watkins, Water Utility Manager. Just a brief update of this project. So a quick history, Pump House 1 was completed in 1939. It's had upgrades over the years, new intakes, new pumps, rebuilds, things like that. But it is 87 years old. It's showing its age. One of the main problems is the intake screens. There you can see them. They're sticking out of the water. That's not a good thing. So in situations when the ACID diversion dam is not in place, we have problems. Usually that's in the winter because the dam's in place from April to October. But there could be situations where, honestly, where we need to pump more water and we're just not able to. So we... We identified the need for these new fish screens, and also we needed to increase pumping capacity for future build out. So the summary is pump house one is at the end of its useful life. So we went through a process to, I think I skipped a slide. Yeah, so in 2020, we hired Jacobs Engineering. They went through an alternatives analysis. We looked at a couple different situations, rebuilding in the same location, moving upstream. And we also looked at a collector well system to see if we could somehow get groundwater to augment the surface water supply. And we eventually settled on this new upstream, new river trail location. And so one of the key benefits here is it has a deeper intake. It's not dependent on the ACID's operation. And that's the Anderson Cottonwood Irrigation District. There's better access for deliveries, equipment, our staff. In fact, you can see there, there's an access road that's taken off to the top of the top picture, and that is coming in off of Overhill Drive. And so right now, with big deliveries, big semi-trucks, we have to back in on the River Trail. And so this new access will allow us to have deliveries, trucks, drive-in. There are They'll be able to drive all around the pump station and it'll just be much more functional. There's also going to be a benefit to the river trail because that location at Ginny Creek, it is technically connected to the trail system, but there's a series of stairs and it's not very accessible. And so this is going to open all that up. And in fact, we're also going to be able to restore Ginny Creek. There were culverts that were put in when the railroad extended north out of Redding in the 1880s. And so we will remove those culverts, remove the rail grade, and restore Ginny Creek to its original location. And the final benefit is Pump House 1 stays in service until we get the new pump station built, and then we'll take it offline. So the design is 100% complete. I have some Jacobs representatives here in the back, Kim and Rhonda. They've been here all night. Thank you for supporting us. So yeah, so the design is complete. Our estimate out the door is $74 million. Essentially the construction contract and the contingency is obviously the main piece of that. That's about $58 million. And then the project development to date or project development will end up being about 11% or $8 million. And then the contract administration through the construction process is gonna be just under $7 million. And then we have environmental mitigation credits that will need to be purchased. I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but we're estimating that to be in the $1 million range. So the next question is, how are you going to pay for that $74 million project? Well, we have expended about $8 million of water utility cash to date over the last six years. That's gotten us through design and through this environmental process that I'm going to talk about on the next slide. We are... We are on the State Water Resources Control Board fundable list for a $50 million state revolving fund loan. And in fact, that was approved in the latest iteration in Sacramento at the State Water Board this morning. And so we're still on that list. That's a great low interest rate loan. So that's gonna fund the majority of it. And then if it does come in at $74 million, One option would be to spend $16 million in water utility reserves to cover that difference. There are some other potentials in this funding scheme. We've applied for grants in the past. Several times you, this body, has approved going out for grants and grants. in a variety of forms, grants and loans, and we have not received any of those besides the SRF loan. We just have two Fish Passage Creek Restoration grants that are outstanding. Now, we wouldn't receive both of these, and we may not even receive what was asked, but for these two separate grants, we requested $8 and $9 million, respectively. If our fortunes come in there, that will just reduce the amount that we'll need to spend from water utility funds. And then we always have the option of going to municipal bond market to cover the difference. The bottom line is, After this project bids, we will come back to this body for an award of that contract and a budget resolution, which outlines the full funding. Obviously, we don't know what the price is going to be until the contractors put in their bids. So next steps, I mentioned the environmental process. We are really getting close to the end of that. As you can imagine, it's a long, arduous process. We're literally building in the river, the Sacramento River. So everybody and their brother has a permit for us to acquire. The light colored ones are permits or steps that we have accomplished. The bold colors were close. I'm not going to describe everything in here, but just imagine that they're all interrelated. And right now, the National Marine Fisheries Service, NIMFS, we're waiting on their biological opinion. And it affects the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit. It also affects the Bureau of Reclamation and their right-of-way permit. And then that ties into the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. They're ready to give us a permit, but they want to hear what NIMFS says. And... So it's a it's an interesting time. So we're getting close. I talked about the mitigation fees. Those will come back before council once we know what those are. We don't even know what those are until we get this biological opinion from nymphs. So as we're moving through, we've acquired right-of-way, private property acquisition. We've worked out a deal with Shasta Union High School District for some property that they owned that's on that access road coming down from Overhill Drive. And we're in escrow, so we're very close to wrapping that up. And then once all this comes together, we will advertise for construction. There will be a 60-day bid period and ideally a bid opening in early 2027. And we expect it's probably four years of construction. One of the unknowns is when we'll actually be allowed to work in the river. And it's going to be a very short window. We anticipate that maybe between February and April of every year. But like I mentioned before, we don't know until they tell us. I conclude with that, and I'm here for any questions. Thank you.

Just a comment. I wish we could have seen renderings earlier. It's probably too late because it sounds like the design's done, but that may have been a missed opportunity. I think it would have been really cool to create a public viewing area. You know, but it looks like that's going to be fenced off based on the renderings I'm seeing. But I don't know if we have any options to be able to change that to where the public can actually get inside there for a viewing of the river.

So, yeah, you're right. The pumping facility will be fenced off for security reasons, obviously. But in opening up Ginny Creek, there is an overlook on the creek, which is going to be just upstream from the confluence with the river. And then the river trail in that area is going to be much wider, much more open. and accessible to everybody, so.

Councilor Odette?

Just for some clarity, so in the staff report, it says that the utilities reserves are 62 million, but 42 of that is dedicated to other projects?

That is correct.

So are we working with about 20 million in reserves dedicated to this project, or is that just in general?

Well, it's in general. Depending on how the bids come in, depending on these other grants, we could spend up to that $20 million.

And when you talk about bonding, we're talking about the difference between the $50 million loan and if we didn't want to use our reserves?

If we didn't want to use reserves, correct.

Okay, so then we could bond for that?

That would be an option. One question there would be whether we could get a bond for that low amount of money. So maybe we would look at other projects that the water utility has identified in the capital improvement plan that we could package together in a larger bond.

Okay. So we're either going to use our own cash or bond?

Yeah. It's looking right now that we would use our own cash.

Okay.

But there's still... some information that's to be determined, right? With the bid, with the environmental mitigation credit fees and things like that.

Okay, thanks.

Sure.

That's good questions there. All right, any other comments? Do we need to make a motion to accept the report? No, this is just in for me. There's no public comments? No, we're good. Motion to accept the report.

Second. Second.

I was waiting on that, I know it's getting late.

So do we need to take a vote to accept the report, is that correct? Well, why don't we just vote? We're good at that. So all in favor? Yes. Okay, great. All in favor? Aye. No. 5-0. All right, we are moving on. 9.14, A, attorney, first amendment to contract WELL, I'M GOING TO TALK TO THE CITY ATTORNEY. CITY ATTORNEY.

GOOD EVENING, HONORABLE MAYOR, GOOD EVENING, HONORABLE MAYOR, MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL.

MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL. I'LL BE TAKING THIS ITEM THIS should not be taking this. I believe that was a clerical error and it should have been under the city manager's office. So this is requesting adoption of a resolution. This would be the 51st amendment to the city budget appropriating $425,010 to put towards the contract amendment for Burke-Williams-Sorensen to provide adequate funding in their contract to extend it through this fiscal year. So for clarity, that would take us from right now to June 30th of 27. And we believe that these funds would be appropriate to get us to that finish line. Of the $920,000 that we would be adding to the contract, bringing the total contract to just over 1.2 million, approximately 153,000 of that are true blue general fund dollars. And the rest of that comes from either savings within the city attorney's office right now, direct charges that the city attorney's office charges out to other departments, funds that lie within the personnel department that are earmarked for bargaining and other activities within the personnel department that Burke-Williams is assisting with, as well as a little bit of cleanup of, if I recall correctly, around $45,000 from the risk department that should have been budgeted but was not. So that's part of the budget reso as well. I'd be happy to take any questions from council. Obviously, from my perspective, I've been very happy with Burke Williams to date. We're getting quite a bit more than Ms. Wagner here. There's multiple attorneys from their staff that are helping with our contract approval and review processes and procedures, as well as helping us with the personnel department, a lot of the bargaining unit negotiations that we're either actively in or will be entering in very soon, as well as just general legal counsel. So with that, I'll hand it to you, Honorable Mayor, and I'd be happy to answer any questions that the Council has. Any comments from Council?

I would say that I've been very happy with the services that Farm has provided.

including marriage, but I would recommend to continue with their services and Councilman yeah, I just reiterate what Paul said I think they really bailed us out from some challenges we had I've talked to a few directors that were Theorizing they wouldn't want someone from outside, but they have been extremely pleased and happy with the accessibility of Bws and they've done a wonderful job for us so far. So I'm just very pass it all on. We're very thankful For you and all your peeps Council on debt This amount is not to exceed.

It's not that contracted is it's not to exceed this amount I It could be less.

Absolutely, that's a great clarification. So the contract amendment would increase the contract not to exceed amount to the 1.2 million. So obviously it could be less.

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second.

Okay. I also think you're great.

I would describe your service as a judicious, very judicious of this.

Yeah. We're very, very appreciative of you, and we've been trying to keep the weather very cool for you, so you'll keep coming back.

We're failing on that, too.

We're trying. Thank you. We have a motion and a second, so without any other comment, all in favor? Aye. Okay, all opposed? And that passes, 5-0. All right, moving on to council travel reports. Anybody have anything to report? No travel there. Any suggestions from council members, relative? Did I skip someone?

Don't worry, it's next month.

Okay. Any suggestions from council members relative to pent-up topics for the future?

We had discussed this in the past, but I'm sure staff is working on this about the Federal Lease being housed in some of the hotels. So at some point of future, you'll bring that back to us with updates for the public session.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay. All right, without any other comments, we are adjourned. Thank you, everybody.