City Council - Regular Meeting

You good? Okay. Alright. We are going to call to order the

Recording in progress.

City council regular meeting. First, we're going to be going into closed session, but first, can we do a roll call?

:Good evening. Council Member Janta?

:Present.

:Vice Mayor Holden?

:Here.

:Council Member Gialdo? :Here. :Council Member Broadway absent. Mayor Bass? :Here. :Thank you.

:Alright. And first public comment on closed session. I see nobody in the audience. It does not look like we have anyone for public comment. So we will now adjourn into closed session for three items here.

First one is pursuant to government code section 54,956.9, parent D, parent one, conference with legal counsel, existing litigation, Cameron Corona v. City of Rockland, United States District Court, Eastern District, case number 224 CV eleven seventy eight CKD. And then CS2, we will be discussing government code section 54,957, public employee performance evaluation, city manager, and CS3 pursuant to government code section 54,957, public employee performance evaluation, city attorney. Thank you. Excellent.

Okay. Well, we will get started. We've just come back from closed session and I am, I do not have anything for us to report out at this time. And now we will call the general session to order. First, we will start with the pledge of allegiance.

All right. Thank you. We'll move on to agenda review. Do we have anything from the dice? No one? No? Okay. Next, we will have citizens addressing the city council. It's an opportunity for the public to comment on matters not listed on the agenda. Public comment on items listed on the agenda will be taken when the agenda item is called. I remind everybody that, this is more a one way street. We can't really comment or have a back and forth when it comes to the citizens addressing the council, but if we do have anything that we can address for the, city to do pending your request. We will try our best. Do we have anybody who is here to address the council at this point?

:Mayor Abbas, I do not have any comment cards.

:Anybody from the audience? Nobody? Okay. Moving on, we'll start with reports from city council and then the city manager. I will start with my left council member, Geldahl.

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, since we missed a meeting, we've got a little bit, so I'll just run through by date. On the opportunity on February 28 to attend the Founding Forward program where students from our local high schools were recognized for their work and their excellence and they get to go back to Valley Forge and participate in a program there. I'm proud to say that both Brocklin and Whitney and Delaro all had students there making us look good.

On the first, there was a flag retiring ceremony. We held it in Loomis, but it was our local Cub Scouts. They had over 100 flags that people brought that were tattered or in poor condition, and then they burn them and appropriately retire them. The humor was there was actually a couple 49er flags in that pile. I'm not sure why they thought that was the retiring, but it was really impressive to see the kids do such a great job.

We had SACOG, there's been multiple meetings. The second was the policy and innovation, really reviewing the budget to prepare for the full board. On the third, we attended with others the Placer County officials meeting where we all have an opportunity to get together and do an update, and I always appreciate us having that opportunity to meet with the other cities and the officials in our neighborhood. On the sixth was the opening ceremonies for Tri City Little League. They outdo themselves every year.

They had the Painted Ponies horses there. That was lovely, and doing that with the mayor is a ton of fun, I appreciate that. And then we went from that event and went to the city employee recognition event, and kudos to everyone that made that happen. That was really a great opportunity to recognize our city employees what they do and bring people together from different departments that don't necessarily see each other all the time. Was a really lovely event.

So thank you so much for what you guys have done there. On the ninth, I went to Long Beach on behalf of SACOG, and SACOG received the Eureka Award from CALCOG, which is the California Council of Governments, and it was for a program called Engage, Empower, and Implement, and they were recognized, and I got to accept on their behalf for the uniqueness and kind of a new trend on how other cities and COGs can follow their lead on how to do some kind of unique programs. Proud to represent us there. On the thirteenth was the official opening for our softball at Kathy Lund Park, and again, along with the mayor, what a great event. They do such a beautiful job.

And the only downside was that my puppy is now two zero eight pounds, and when the fireworks hit, I found out he doesn't do fireworks well, and we got launched. But other than that, it was awesome. Thank you. On the sixteenth with the mayor and our city manager, we met with our the county for our three, I'll let you touch on anything you want to share on that, talking about some mutual goals. I had the opportunity to sit on one of the town halls on the eighteenth.

I was really impressed with how many people came and great questions and great conversations and I know you're having several others and each of us may sit in and monitor but it was really staff driven. And on the nineteenth was a SACOG full board of directors as part of our program to visit the other jurisdictions that we represent. It was in West Sac. It was actually at Sutter Health Park. Of course, was the morning before the Savannah Bananas, so we didn't get to do anything fun like that, but very good conversation.

It great to see what West Sac is doing. They have done a tremendous amount. A lot of push that they believe that they will be they're in the one of five for an expansion team and very hopeful that we would get our own expansion team after the athletics leave. Let's see. On the twenty third, had the opportunity, along with Vice Mayor and Ken Broadway, to welcome our three new firefighters.

We're very excited to have three of the nine that are coming and for their swearing in. As I understand that they have to do 10 shifts before they actually get their badges, but they are sworn in as part of our team and very happy to welcome them and expand our service. Also, the February 26, many of us were there to do a farewell for Robin Trimble, our CEO of our Chamber of Commerce for all her years of service, and I appreciate that very much. And on the first was also a funeral memorial at Sierra College for Paul Greco, long time coach at Roseville High, and then also for the women at Sierra College who passed away recently. Appreciated the opportunity to recognize his years of service and for his family.

And then last, just a reminder, Run Rockland is coming up. It's a couple weeks away. If you have not signed up, please do. It's a great opportunity, and we're excited for that to come.

Alright. Great. Thank you.

It's been a busy couple weeks.

Councilmember Halton.

Vice Mayor Holden. That's right. Just a few things. We had our Western Plaster Waste Management Authority board meeting last week or the week before. And the good news is that it looks like we will not be increasing our tipping fees this year.

And that's the first time in quite a while. We talked about our long term strategy to manage our tipping fee and maybe even bring it down a little bit, reducing our debt. So that's a welcome news from WATMA. While the council member Gallardo was at the Tri Cities, I was at the Pony League hanging out with Piper, the Lincoln Potter's mascot. I got a photo with Piper.

And hundreds and hundreds of kids roaming around doing all kinds of things, so great to have our leagues get going. One of these days, they won't have them at the exact same time, so it can't be in two places at once, although the mayor tried, pretty much. Then I had a chance to go to the Whitney High School baseball fundraising dinner, which was very fun, and the Whitney baseball players did a great job with that. And then I attended the first town hall, I think, that was over at Sierra College. It was, yeah, I think our employees outnumbered the residents just a little, but we had a good, a decent turnout from that part of town, and lots of good questions from residents over there.

So, and then just the things that councilmember Gallardo mentioned. I won't repeat those, but lots going on and a lot more going on in the weeks ahead. So that's it. Council Member Genda. No reports.

Okay. Yeah, there's been a lot going on. I think the on the night where we had the two at the same time, I was I went to those two events, then to the employee dinner, and then to the SPCA after that. And I changed in the parking lot of Whitney, so in my car. So, yeah, we had a couple of items that were brought up.

I went to the GSEC board meeting, Greater Sacramento Economic Council board meeting. We did discuss some of the challenges that are occurring downtown for Sacramento because the government employees aren't returning to work, and so they have their own issues downtown in Sacramento that are just exacerbated by the stay at home. Of course there's some benefits to that as well, but just discussing how that impacts the economy locally, there was the discussion about bringing a major league team, expansion team to West Sacramento. The other two big contenders are Utah and Oregon, Portland and Salt Lake City, and they've kind of got a head start but not necessarily a leg up on us. So we'll see what happens there.

I did notice that both Salt Lake and Portland, Oregon just adopted two professional female softball teams. So maybe that's the thing we need to bring over here so that we can attract a major league team, but just a thought. And then the county meeting that we had. It's an ongoing discussion largely centered around some of the commercial buildings that have been picked up by the county and purchased them, and what that does is obviously it takes commercial pieces off the monopoly board for us, which then has a cascading effect on tax and revenue. So it's just an ongoing conversation and I appreciate that we have some allies right now that are trying just as hard I think on the other side of the aisle and we're trying to see eye to eye on some of the smaller refining points.

So I appreciate the board of supervisors as well as, our city manager and council member Galdo getting into the, the numbers and the nitty gritty and trying to get to a solution and I think we're close. On that, I don't have anything else. And for the city manager, your report.

Thank you. First I wanted to mention, our first two town halls were mentioned. I appreciate vice mayor Halden and council member Regaldo for being there. Our next town hall is tomorrow night. It is our Zoom only town hall. You can register on the city's website if you'd like to attend or you can just click on the link at six p. M. Join us again on Zoom tomorrow, March twenty fifth for the third town hall. Then our fourth and final town hall will be here in the City Council Chambers next Tuesday, the thirty first. That one will be a hybrid option.

You can participate here in person or you can participate on Zoom. That information is also on the city's website. And in addition to Run Rockland, which I was going to mention, which is on April 12, the day before on April 11, the city's annual cleanup day. So information about cleanup day, locations for the dumpsters, and how to participate is also on our website, rockland.ca.us. And this completes my report.

One that we can't forget also is on Easter Sunday is our egg hunt that our firefighters put on, which is phenomenal and is a five minute program. If you don't get there early, don't come. It is so packed and it's so fun. But I see they're starting early with some events. But just a reminder, get there early, be ready, because those eggs go fast.

Thank you. Great addition. So now we'll move on to the consent calendar. Item C1 through C15 of the consent calendar are considered and acted upon by one motion of the city unless somebody would like to pull any of these items. Is there any item that we would like to pull from the consent calendar?

Mr. Mayor, if I could, item C15 just for a little more information.

Absolutely. So we will ask for a public works manager, Rick Lawrence. Or do we want to move first for the rest of

them?

Did you want to move forward with the vote? Forward with the Do mind just answering a Yeah,

just if you could just give me an idea about the increases on that and our grazing costs, that's all I'm looking for.

Sure. I believe the information you were asking me about had to do with open space monitoring. So when College Park annexation is completed, we will have about a thousand acres of open space that the city is responsible for both monitoring and maintaining. This open space monitoring contract costs approximately $100,000 to $150,000 a year. The contract is for three years with two one year extensions.

Then council member Galdo had also asked, in addition to our biological mitigation monitoring, which is required under our general open space management plan, we also graze using the goats and sheeps for fire prevention mitigation in our open space, and those costs are about $550 an acre. So at a thousand acres, that's about $550,000 a year in grazing costs.

When we started that program, how much were we paying an acre?

About $50 an acre.

So it was $50 an acre, now we're at 500?

Correct. And if you have any history, Justin can definitely probably provide more color commentary on it.

People need to raise more goats. That is all there's

At got what be point do we buy goats?

Yeah. Well, we use about 3,000 head, so I'm not quite sure we are have the capacity to become goat owners. But yes, it is definitely something that when the city started doing it, were ahead of the curve. It has become much more, I'm going to say popular, but the areas that the city grazes are areas that are difficult to reach with mowers anyway so we would be doing a lot of handwork anyway. Goats and sheep are probably our most cost effective program regardless. It's just gotten more and more expensive even though we do competitively bid this on a regular basis.

And it's just that many more cities that have jumped on the goat and sheep bandwagon, I take it.

I mean, I've had passing conversations with other council members from other cities about the idea of doing a, I don't know if it's like a goat joint powers authority or whatever crazy type of entity we'd build for that, but I don't know. Maybe it's something to look at in the future. Lincoln's got land.

Lincoln has a farm program and a lot of space. Maybe we could

We can see

our college here on it.

Got four H kids. Yeah.

Right. Thank you. That was all I needed.

Looks like we have a future agenda item in

the works.

Yeah,

exactly. Okay. And with that, I have to open it up for public comment. Public comment on GOATs? It's okay? All right. I'm gonna close public comment, and we can come back and

Yeah. Mr. Mayor, I'll make a motion to approve the consent calendars, items c one to 15. Okay.

I'll second.

Okay. We have a first and a second. I will be entering just a no vote on C11B. Otherwise, I am also I also approve. It's a unanimous consent with the exception of that one no vote. All in favor, aye?

Aye.

No? Abstentions? Passes unanimously with the aforementioned exception. All right. We are now moving on to the presentations. First, we will have the Rockland Fire Department with their 2025 annual report. Looks like we've got our Fire Chief, Reggie Williams.

Good evening, mayor Bass, vice mayor Halden, counsel, Reggie Williams, your fire chief. Tonight, I'll be presenting the twenty twenty five fire department annual report. And I'd like to thank you for your support, your continued support of the Rockland Fire Department as well. So highlights for the 2025. We had a 1.58 increase 1.58% increase in responses, which resulted in approximately 100 calls additional this calendar year.

We added new technology to include all band radios for each firefighter, Starlink devices for the battalion chiefs, and to this date, we have not had any radio failures with our new equipment. We've also received a new type five wildland firefighting vehicle, which was essential to our fleet. This will allow us to get into tighter spaces and provide a more rapid response. The department organization chart last year consisted of 44.5 full time equivalents. As you are aware, we have the safer grants, which we're going to bring on nine new firefighters, and that's going to bring our new full time equivalents up to 53.5 positions.

A quick overview of our budget summary. Last year's operating budget for the fire department was $15,500,000 A portion of that was because of the new fire apparatus. And as you can see, fire operations accounts for 87.62% of our total budget. Our fire prevention staff is lean and mean, but they do a really good job. We have, as you see, the deputy fire chief, administrative assistant, two fire inspectors, and a fire plans examiner.

During 2025, we saw a huge surge in battery energy service systems and solar projects, and that was primarily due to the federal tax credit reduction. But even so, we were able to conduct 1,680 fire inspections throughout the year and a total of 1,901 plan checks. That was done by both the inspectors and the fire plans examiner. Fire and arson activity. The fire and arson unit, which was recently adopted in our municipal code, conducted a total of 12 investigations to completed by that unit.

Five of those cases did include arson. Three of those involve public resource code violations, and six cases were forwarded to the Pasco County district attorney's office for criminal prosecution. The fire department continues to provide community outreach. As you can see here, we had 59 events last year, reaching over 1,100 folks in our community. With that, we did had 56 school age public educations, not including career fairs, and we attended a total of three career fairs with Victory High School, Rockland High School, and the Sierra College Veterans Fair.

Our fire operations consist of roughly 36 line personnel and a deputy chief of operations. Staff worked closely with city manager's office to apply for and subsequently be awarded the SAFR grant. I'd like to give a special thanks to Elizabeth Sword and battalion chief Rob Zaccha who really drove this process for us leading to our success. Without them, we don't think we'd have been successful. So we do really appreciate them.

Calls by station remain flat. We've seen some changes in Station 20 Five's area as far as the an increase in workload. But as you can see here, of the three fire stations in the city, Station 23 remains the busiest. And next year, we'll provide a report that covers kind of where Station 22 is gonna be located on Sierra College and break that piece out of it to determine what Station 20 Three's response area will look like versus 20 Two's area. Our incident types, again EMS is emergency medical services is the bulk of our responses sitting at 66%.

I like to always when I show this chart highlight what a good intent call means. A lot of people will ask that question, what does good intent call? A good intent call is when a 911 caller calls our dispatch center and reports something like smoke coming from a backyard or a vehicle accident and maybe we arrived there and that wasn't so that wasn't the case. It was a good attempt call, but we responded and realized that there was actually no emergency. As you can see by this bar graph our trends continue to increase.

Again last year in 2025 we ran 6,403 incidents. The year prior there were 6,302 incidents and that accounts for the 1.58% increase that I mentioned in my opening. Mutual aid. Mutual aid has fluctuated a little bit. Typically in previous reports you've seen where the department has actually given more mutual aid than it's received.

This year we were slightly lower than what we have received, providing 269 mutual aid responses and receiving, 271 responses. Part of receiving mutual aid, has to do with the availability of units in the fire station. And as we get busier, our unit utilization hours will increase and the fire our firefighters will be less available than in previous years. And you may see an increase in mutual aid responses. With the addition of the new fire station, I believe that those, mutual aid received responses will be reduced significantly.

Peak response times. Again, over the past five years this graph has remained almost identical to previous years. The department is the busiest between 08:00 in the morning and 08:00 at night showing a kind of a well balanced bar graph. Incidents per week, this is my most unreliable data because it changes year over year. And over the past, in 2025 you can see Wednesdays for whatever reason were the busiest followed by Fridays of that week.

In incidence per month, in this bar graph again, little bit unreliable because it changes year over year but in this particular bar graph you'll see that June, December, and January were our busiest months of 2025. In lift assist, this is a fairly new graph that we've provided. In 2025, we responded to 345 lift assists events. That's when a citizen or a care facility calls us to help assist them. That's an average about 29 per month.

And as you know, we did put language in the ordinance whereas if a residential care facility for the elderly calls us to do that work, that we do send them a bill for that, but we do not charge our citizens for this service. The EMS call density, again, if you're looking at this heat map, you'll see where the, bright yellows and reds are kind of our highest concentration of medical calls. I'd like you to pay attention to the the Park Drive area up in the Upper North Northeastern corner because that's gonna come up in a in a later response time map. And you can see how by looking at this heat map we don't have a lot of responses up there but I'll elaborate a little bit more in a future graph. Fire density, this map changes year over year as well.

Again, you can look at this heat map and see where our high yellows and high reds are. Thankfully, most of them are near a fire station which actually reduces our response times. But there's really no reason to say I can't say to you that each year we have fires in this location and they're going to get worse. We don't have that data here. And this is response times of all fire stations and these are priority one calls only or what we consider a code three call lights and sirens.

Again you can look at the graph and you can see from the dark greens which are the shorter response times and our reds which are highest response times. If you look at the eastern part of the map where Sierra College is, you'll see some reds up near the town of Loomis. We anticipate with the addition of the new fire station that that area will then become green as well as the area at the top of Sierra College. If you go back to what I mentioned earlier about Park Drive, again, we don't have a lot of incidents up there but it still does take us some time to get there. Those are kind of just difficult to reach areas and we're working on trying to solve that particular challenge.

But thankfully, based on our data, we just don't have a lot of medical calls up there. And again, these are our priority one calls in that area. And these are where our vegetation fires were last year. We had a significant fire that started in our city and burned into the city of Lincoln last year. It was our largest fire by far.

The majority of these fires that you see on the map are smaller fires within less than five acres, would say. We did have two fires that threatened Clover Valley, but none that actually got into Clover Valley. Thankfully, firefighters responded very quickly to extinguish those fires. One occurred off of Sierra College. Think if my memory serves me right, it was caused by fireworks, And the second fire that threatened Clover Valley was caused by a lightning strike that caused the fire there. And our firefighters responded quickly and extinguished both fires. And that concludes my report, and I'd be happy to take any questions.

Any public comment for our presentation with fire? Hello

just a question I want to know what portion of the fire budgets in terms of fire operations was, fireman salaries as opposed to just, daily operations budgets. Thank you.

So the fire operations budget that you see there, the 87.62% is the firefighters' salaries and some of their personal equipment. It's all kind of looped in there together.

All right. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. We're going on to

yeah. We're going make comments.

You want to make comments, Sal? Yes.

What's that?

Did you want to make a comment?

Yeah. Yeah. It's your choice. I just wanted to

don't run off

cheap. Just wanted to you and the whole department for all your efforts last year and ongoing. Just really appreciate it. I did share with you last year, a very good friend of mine suffered a heart attack and the department he he sent me a text about the department, but I'll just do a little brief excerpt. Rockland Fire Department really came through. Their prompt response to our 911 call definitely helped save my life. So just appreciate everybody doing a great job for our community.

Yep. Don't go I'm the one to mess this whole thing up. So you should've even gotten up. I should've given everyone a chance for comments. That's that's on me.

No problem. Well, want to say thank you to your entire team. I am so proud of what we do. I think one of the things we don't really share as much as we probably should too is that we have the Cadillac level of service. And if you call 911 with our fire department, you get a full fledged paramedic.

They can do advanced life saving, and that is not certainly the case at all jurisdictions, so it's something to be really, really proud of. Our team is just so good at working with the public and making those great connections. Excited that we have a I don't know if you call it a service dog, but we have a dog this year, and it seems like it's going very, very well for our firefighters as well as for the public to be able to see. Just really, there's a lot to be proud of in this. I did see our county supervisor sneak in.

Will tell you that at one of our meetings, when I hear about some of their concerns they have with fighting fires, perhaps even in Penryn, I suggested that if the county wanted to buy us another tiller truck, that we could put it in our new station and we could operate that for them and even be more helpful to those on our border. I will continue to spread that message. Thank you so much for what you do. And beyond excited that we nine new firefighters is incredible. That is just such an incredible service and to be able to have work to have that station on the other side where I think people will appreciate it very much. Thank you for a job well done.

Thank you. Councilmember?

Yeah. Thank you, chief. I know our firefighters every day, they don't always know what they're gonna face, and and they they're they're ready to go and and respond, professionally and and quickly. And I know budgets are always tight and they do a lot with limited constraints and with your leadership, but it's greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I'm going to echo those. I just want to also thank you. You know, there's a lot of quiet work that goes on behind in terms of just making the entire region safe, know, whether it's communications, improving our communications with other agencies and the stuff that you spearheaded, I appreciate, as well as the work that a lot of our firefighters are doing on the side, the stuff that nobody else sees and all the volunteering that goes on. And on top of that, I'm looking forward to that new fire station, and I appreciate the response times always being an issue that we're trying to get better at, especially, like you had said, protecting Clover Valley and those grass fires that are coming out of both by manmade and by nature. So I appreciate everything.

Thank you. I won't screw the next one up, I promise. All right. So now moving on to P2. This is the Rockland Police Department twenty twenty five annual report with Police Chief banks.

Alright. Well, good evening. Mister mayor, members of council, police chief Rusty Banks, and on behalf of the entire Rockland Police Department, it's my pleasure to present to you our 2025 Rockland Police Department annual report. As you can see, we have a full agenda tonight, and so we've made every effort to provide you with as much meaningful information as possible in a concise and efficient manner. With that in mind, we'll get started.

Always like to begin here because each of you play such a critical role in the success of our police department and the overall safety of our community. Thank you for setting clear expectations, providing the resources necessary to meet those expectations, and for your continued support. We truly appreciate you. There's a lot of words on this page here, which you can review should you desire at a later time. The one part I would like to quickly direct your attention to is the quote at the bottom where it says, these results were not accidental.

They were achieved through proactive policing, strategic technology enhancements, and a continued commitment to hiring, developing, and promoting the best people in the profession. What you're gonna hear tonight is a, it's a lot of great news, related to crime trends, partnerships, programs, and many other topics. You're gonna hear about how officer initiated activity and arrests are up, and crime is down significantly. I included that quote because I don't believe these outcomes are the result of luck. They're a direct reflection of the hard work, professionalism, and thoughtful decision making of our outstanding staff. And with that, I'll turn it over to one of them now, to take you through the remainder of the annual report which she created. I give you crime analyst Sean Baird.

Good evening. It's a pleasure to be here again to present the 2025, Rockland Police Department annual report. The document presented tonight will be posted to the police department's website and our social media in entirety for a few further viewing since we're short on time. Since 2005, Rockland's population has increased 48% with an average growth of 2% per year and average crime rate of 17.2. Total crime during this twenty year period averaged 1,044 crimes per year with twenty twenty five below the range of average.

For the first time, Rockland experienced a single digit crime rate and finished the year at 9.8 crimes per 1,000 residents. Rockland ended 2025 with a total of seven eighteen reported crimes, which is a decrease from twenty twenty four's total 801 reported crimes. Property crime decreased 9% for the year, which includes the categories of burglary, larceny, vehicle theft, and arson. Burglary, which includes residential and commercial, decreased 15%. Larceny, there were five twenty nine reported crimes, a decrease of 8%.

Of those five twenty nine crimes, 176 reported theft from vehicles accounted for 33% of all larceny for the year. Shoplifting decreased for the year with 180 reported crimes, a decrease of 15% from twenty twenty four. Vehicle theft decreased 16% and arson increased 14% to 16 reported crimes. Larceny theft continues to be the city's main source of crime, contributing approximately 74% of the year's total crime, with the majority of larceny categorized as theft from vehicles. The city averaged 15 reported vehicle burglaries a month, down from the previous year's 16 reported thefts a month, which includes the theft of catalytic converters.

Violent crime decreased 27% from the previous year, which includes the categories of homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Rape decreased 11% robbery decreased 77% and aggravated assault decreased 25% the communication center answered 69950 total calls 53871 were business line and 16079 were 911 calls law enforcement calls for service increased 1% to 27,737 Officer initiate activity increased 3% to 22,177 for a total of 49,914 calls for the year. 56% of police incidents were officer initiate activity and 44% were community generated calls for service. Oh, and 98.71 of the year's total nine eleven calls were answered within twenty seconds or less. 3,509 total citations were written for the year by patrol officers completed 4,127 case reports patrol had 344 felony arrests and 792 misdemeanor for a total of eleven thirty six arrests for the year overall total arrests increased 5% Response times for priority one and two calls decreased three and twenty three seconds respectively while response time for priority three increased slightly from the previous year.

K nine teams were deployed 41 times and because of their efforts apprehended 22 subjects with two bites. Community service officers responded to 3,605 calls for service, 2,323 of those were community generated and they initiated twelve eighty two calls. Three units completed six fifty six cases for the year. The four community oriented policing and problem solving units or COPS responded to 2,824 total calls for service, 1,888 as primary units, and 936 as assisting secondary units. They had 376 arrests for the year.

This year units followed up on 128 outreach referrals offering unhoused population local services. They cleared 76 camps of debris and inspected 18 smoke shop establishments. There were 135 reported injury collisions and three fifty five non injury. Although injury collisions increased slightly and non injury decreased total traffic collisions number total collision numbers remain steady from the previous year four detectives and their sergeant investigated 194 cases for the year. The team had 37 arrests and investigated 84 Internet tips.

The CSI team examined 599 fingerprints which led to 57 identifiable prints resulting in 10 matches. CSI team members test fired 66 weapons and linked four firearms to suspects using the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network or NIBIN. In partnership with the Rockland Unified School District, we launched a dual enrollment course that enabled students to earn college credit while studying courts, corrections, and law enforcement. Officers facilitate the program giving students direct exposure to the criminal justice system and career opportunities in public safety. Sierra College student resource officers responded to three twenty total calls on campus.

16 of those were calls for service and three zero four were officer initiated. They generated 14 cases. Rockland Unified School Resource officers responded to 786 calls, 239 calls for service, and 547 officer initiated, and they generated 107 cases. Property and Evidence booked 4,956 new evidence items and disposed of 3,005 items this year. Crime analysis assisted with 101 intelligence center requests for information in addition to preparing this annual report three records clerks and their supervisor handled 467 live scans and processed 2,200 report requests The unit reviewed 6,400 RIPA related records, processed a total of 4,187 case files in addition to assisting customers at the front counter.

The professional standards unit received one formal complaint for the department this year. An officer's used force when making an arrest only nine times during 2025, which is less than 1% of the total 1,136 arrests made. Of the times force was used, bodily force was used six times, canine was used two times, and a baton was used once. 57 volunteers volunteered over six thousand eight hundred hours saving the city of Rockland more than $276,000. Volunteers completed thousands of checks of local businesses, school, and parks and conducted two zero two vacation checks for local residents.

Volunteers also conducted 67 Buckle Up baby installations and two twenty eight children were fingerprinted by child ID. The DEA drug take back program yielded six eighty eight pounds of unwanted pharmaceuticals from Rockland households. A full remodel of our department gym was completed this year with funds obtained from a board of state and community corrections grant or BCSS making wellness a priority. The remodel included new equipment and improved layout and a modernized look to create a more functional and welcoming environment for employees at all fitness levels. We continue to work closely with our school administrators, district attorney's office, nonprofits and community groups, regional law enforcement partners to solve problems, improve safety, and strengthen trust in our community.

We've highlighted a few of those relationships we've built here on this page. In partnership with the Rockland Public Safety Foundation, we embarked on a unique project to preserve and restore an important piece of the department's history. It was inspired by historic photo taken at the corner of Pacific Street and Rockland Road and featured an 1870 Mercury Monterey. We set out to bring this iconic vehicle back to life as a tribute to our legacy. Twenty years ago, on 10/09/2005, officer Redding was struck and killed by a drunk driver while protecting our community.

He was just 29 years old. Matt was more than a police officer. He was a a son, a brother, a teammate, and a friend whose compassion, sense of humor, and dedication to serve left left a lasting mark on everyone who knew him. His legacy continues to inspire the men and women of the Rockland Police Department to serve with courage, integrity, and heart. This past year, as we reflected on the solemn anniversary, we encouraged our community to take a few moments to watch and learn about Matt's story, which we shared on social media so his life and sacrifice would continue to make a difference in the lives of others.

This concludes my portion of the presentation. I'll pass it back to the chief for more information and to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you, Sean. Great job as always. So there's two sections that, of the report that I'd like to briefly follow-up on. First, going back to the crime data at the beginning, I think it was on page four. So, when I initially received the preliminary twenty twenty five numbers, I asked for them to be rechecked as a single digit crime rate is not something that you see very often.

After Sean confirmed their accuracy, I asked her to compare our data with state and national trends to determine whether we were simply benefiting from a broader decline or if the strategies we've implemented were driving a greater impact locally. As you can see on the chart on the bottom right, Rockland has experienced a significantly sharper decline in crime over the past five years compared to both the state of California and the nation. We're down nearly six crimes per 1,000 residents per year as opposed to 1.1 at the state and 2.7 at the national level. We're very proud of these results and we'll continue to evaluate and refine our approach to ensure we are providing the highest level of service to this community. The second area I want to highlight is in our youth services section.

Two major efforts we've invested a great deal of time and energy into came to fruition in 2025. The first is our AJ 50 program where captain Morris and lieutenant Jensen are teaching intro to criminal justice at both Whitney and Rockland High Schools. The program has been a tremendous success and highlights the amazing partnerships that we have with both Sierra College and the Rockland Unified School District. Having RPD staff in the classroom builds early trust with students, strengthens long term relationships, and provides students with a firsthand accurate understanding of modern policing, including decision making, ethics, laws, and accountability. The final highlight, also comes from youth services and relates to our work with the school district on youth e bike safety.

As you know, the district implemented a policy banning class two e bikes this past December from all K through eight campuses with enforcement beginning on February 2. And I'm pleased to report that since the enforcement began, we have had we have not had one single vehicle collision involving a minor e bike rider. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but I'm very proud of the work we did on this project and truly believe that we saved lives. And with that, I'll turn it back over to you guys for any questions.

Alright. Thank you. Thank you both very much. Any questions? Leave it up. Just comments? Just comments? Okay. I will open it up to the entire floor to see if there's any questions from our audience. No? Comments? Start with comments. Councilmember Jander?

Thank you, Sean, for all your work on this beautiful report, and chief for the highlights, and all your work. And the e bike work that you did was phenomenal, because I know the state really wasn't a help, and set up a very difficult process to go through. And with your persistent work in front of the school district and and across the county, that was a huge success. And that's that's a 100% because because you just wouldn't let it go. You just wanted to to make sure we put something in place to to help our youth, and I'm looking forward to that chart really changing this next year.

And everything your department does, all the technology that you guys are willing to embrace and try out and put to use. I think the license plate readers have been a huge success. I don't always enjoy getting an email that says police incident, but after reading them thinking, wow, there's no way this is gonna come up with a positive solution at the end, you know, whether it's solving a complex break in in the middle of the night or or what have you. And not long after, there's always a resolution that, you know, through the hard work of the men and women of our department, you're successful in resolving all those issues. And that's huge.

So, just hats off to all the work that you and your department do We for our

have a great team.

Thank you, sir.

I'd just echo what Councilmember Jan just said. Just appreciate the day in, day out work that makes Rockland a safe place where people appreciate that day in and day out. And I think they appreciate the entire Rockland Police Department team and look forward to seeing that rate continue to go down, chief. Just keep I'll say raising the bar but lowering the numbers.

Councilmember Gallaudet.

Thank you. Well, Shawn, I always love seeing you here because I know it's going to be fascinating and I love digging through the details. But Chief and your entire team, this is incredible. I mean, we're all being very quiet, but let's just be really honest. This is pretty incredible.

I think the investment, obviously, in technology has been such a

help,

and I'm really pleased to see those. And as Council Member Janda said, my biggest gripe has been every chase that starts in Sacramento or anywhere else ends up at Sierra College at Walmart is driving me crazy. So I see this last week, you mixed it up, and it this time it ended up on Park. I was like, really? And I you know, even from the other direction. Does everybody have to get off in Rockland? But but we're on it, and you're and you're so on it with this team that social media has just been great because people keep saying, you're putting the message. Don't bring it here. We'll we'll respond to those minor incidents. And and if you're some other places, sometimes they don't respond to those.

And we do, and you nail it, and and it's getting such a positive message out there that I'm I'm just really thrilled. Our dispatchers, probably the unsung heroes, 98% of your calls are answered in less than twenty seconds. I don't know if anybody else has ever had to call somewhere else and you hear about people getting put on hold. That's really tremendous that they're able to do that. But just the team as a whole, and if I read this right, our point in time count, and I know you're so low key, but you're making that personal connection when you see unhoused individuals. It looks like it's eleven is where we're at, I think. I

don't think that the newest numbers have come out yet.

We don't have a point in time coming yet, so that would have been for last January.

Last January.

Got it. Well, you see

that and I know that it's those direct connections that's making the difference to help us. But I there are of course, it always makes me smile on the our car burglaries. It's because we're not locking our cars. Let's just be honest. Do we live in Rockland?

Thank you for bringing that up. Yes.

You know, when almost half our crime is the fact that your car is open and somebody rifles through it. But thank you. This there's so much to be celebrated, and we're ridiculously proud of the work that you're doing, and the professionalism that everybody is seeing and acknowledging. I just really appreciate it. So thank you for everything you do, and please share with our team.

Thank you. Will do.

First of all, thank you for the presentation. Again, great job. It's always a well done presentation. Just a couple of things. One, great work on the smoke shops. I know that's always been a thing for me, especially a personal story with a kid I knew. Getting some of that stuff out of there that they shouldn't be selling, it makes a huge impact, think, and it helps the health of our youth. The real time crime center, I think, has just been paying off dividends, and so I'm just happy to see the work that we continue to put into technology and the cameras. It's obviously getting us some resolutions faster. E bikes, thank you.

I just want to report that it was not a big deal in my family. When e bikes were taken off of Granite Oaks Middle School, it was not the earth shattering event that I thought it was going to be. You've done good on that one.

Thank you, sir.

Love the 1970 Merc that goes to all the events. I love seeing that car out there. But the two things I wanted to say specifically is I really love the energy of the entire force. Again, just same with the fire, the amount of work that goes into volunteering by the force, and also one thing I didn't say when we were doing our report, but the law enforcement symposium that was put on and Wendy Smith spearheading it, and we had it was two fifty over two fifty people at the Sunset Center showing up, volunteers from all over the place. It it was really great to be able to talk to so many of those volunteers, and they just kept saying, You have a great city.

This place is beautiful. This place is amazing. So it was just what an honor to have, some of the best of the best when it comes to volunteers coming to our city, and our volunteers are amazing. And then finally, just your continued effort to build trust with our youth is why I think we continue to have such respect for law enforcement. It's something you have to nurture and grow, and I know that it's been a priority for you and the force, so I really appreciate all the work getting into the schools, explaining to the kids why you're doing certain things, the e bike stuff, all of that, I think, builds the kind of trust we need for the next generation to respect our law enforcement.

So thank you. Thank you. Does anybody want take a break? Are you guys good?

We're good? Okay.

We're going to keep moving on then. Public hearings. These may be reordered by the mayor with consent of the legislative body. I don't think we're going to be moving anything around. So PH1 is the draft twenty twenty six-twenty twenty seven Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant Annual Action Plan going to be presented by management analyst Gabrielle Dufarsi. We'll have a recommendation after this.

Thank you. Good evening, good evening, Mayor Bass and City Council members. As you mentioned, Gabrielle Dufarsi, management analyst in the city manager's office. I'm here tonight to discuss and solicit input during the first of two required public hearings in the preparation of the city's 2627 community development block grant annual action plan. Under the CDBG program, the city Of Rockland is an entitlement community and receives funding annually.

To be eligible for this funding, the City must complete a consolidated plan every five years and an annual action plan. This plan details projects and activities as well as how the City will spend the allocation of funding to address priority needs and specific goals. A notice of funding availability and solicitation for proposals was released on 10/17/2025. In response to this NOFA, staff received applications from seven agencies for programs to be funded from the public services category. Copies of all proposals received are included as attachment two to the staff report.

Proposals were evaluated and selected by staff based on several factors, including overall quality of the proposal, experience of the organization, priority needs to be met, program outcomes, and budget. From the total allocation, no more than 15% of the annual award can be expended in this public services category. 20% of funds can be allocated to planning and administration activities during the program year, and the remaining amount of funds are proposed to be allocated to public facilities for accessibility and safety improvements in the city. The federal department of housing and urban development has not yet announced allocations for the 2026 program year, but recent allocations have been approximately 295,000 per year. Staff is recommending that the public services amount of funding be divided equally between three nonprofit agencies: Lighthouse Counseling and Family Resource Center, Seniors First, and Stand Up Placer.

Lighthouse Counseling and Family Resource Center will provide therapy services to children, adults, and families to support trauma recovery. Funding for Seniors First will support the Meals on Wheels program to provide home delivered meals and wellness checks to income eligible home based seniors. And finally, Stand Up Placer will provide crisis intervention, therapy, peer counseling, and legal advocacy for survivors of violence and or trafficking. The recommended projects align with one or more of the following goals in the twenty five-twenty nine Consolidated Plan, which include meeting the needs of low and moderate income youth and seniors, providing access to food and nutrition services, assisting victims of violence and assault, and completion of public infrastructure improvements. A draft of this 2627 annual action plan was made available for a thirty day public review period on January 23.

The city has received no comments during this time. Consistent with our citizen participation plan, the purpose of tonight's meeting is to provide another opportunity solicit input from the public and receive council direction regarding any proposed modifications. This concludes my presentation and I'm available to respond to any questions you may have. Thank you.

Thank you. I will be now opening the public hearing, calling for questions for council member and for staff responses. Any questions? No questions. All right. We'll now open public comment period. Anybody have any comments? None? Okay. I'm going to close public comment. Final questions by any council members to staff? No? All right. If there's no further discussion, we will take action on PH1 directing staff to prepare a final annual action plan.

So moved. I'll second.

Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Noes? Abstentions? The ayes have it. It passes unanimously. Moving on to PH2, this is the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan amendment and General Development Plan amendment PDG twenty twenty six-one and Environmental ENV twenty twenty six-one. We'll have principal planner Nathan Anderson.

Good evening. Thank you very much. Tonight, as you mentioned, staff will be presenting the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan Amendment. So this amendment proposes a new allowed use category within the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan, retail sales, exterior sales, and storage. It would also allow for deviations from parking standards under certain circumstances.

If the general development plan amendment is approved, both of these modifications could be considered as part of a conditional use permit. So a little bit of background, the 1,900 acre Northwest Rockland GDP area was originally approved in 2002. It has been amended numerous times since adoption. This area contains most of the last large undeveloped retail land in the city. Northwest Rockland is currently experiencing substantive private investment and development activity and staff has recently been reviewing the general development plan to confirm that the non residential regulations still work for modern retail development projects.

These regulations include table seven, permitted and conditionally permitted uses in non residential areas. While this table allows retail sales specifically occurring inside an enclosed building by right in the neighborhood commercial, commercial, and business professional slash commercial zoning districts. It does not allow retail sales or storage located outside of an enclosed building. This is somewhat uncommon as outdoor retail sales and storage is allowed in other commercial districts throughout Rockland, particularly those adjacent to the highway. Examples include Green Acres in the Rockland Commons and Pottery World on Granite Drive.

Failure to allow for these types of uses has the potential to limit what can locate in some of the remaining commercial sites within the area. Examples include hardware or home improvement stores, which often include a garden center component. To address this, staff is proposing a modified table seven to allow for these types of uses to be allowed through approval of a conditional use permit within the commercial and business commercial slash commercial zoning districts. The CUP would allow the city to set site specific conditions including screening, location on the site, circulation, lighting, noise, and hours of operation. In order to further support a project of this type, staff has also identified a concern regarding parking requirements While the general development plan and municipal code establish parking requirements for various retail uses, they do not specifically address parking standards for outdoor retail components, which may involve storage areas for larger materials but generate comparatively less demand for customer parking.

So, to address this issue, staff recommends modifying the general development plan to allow deviations from off street parking standards to be approved through a CUP provided the requested reduction is supported and justified through the entitlement review process. So while no physical development is proposed as part of this request, the amendment would apply to all properties zoned PDC or PDBPC within the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan area. This would apply to seven total properties. They've got the yellow boxes around them. They're all on the West Side.

Of those seven properties, only three sites within the general development plan area are currently vacant and do not have approved entitlements. These are shown with a star. Proposed changes would provide additional flexibility for these sites subject to review and potential approval by the appropriate decision making body through a conditional use permit process. Amendments would support economic development, objectives by enhancing the city's ability to attract high quality retail tenants to prominent, highly visible sites located directly off of SR 65. For these reasons, the Planning Commission and staff find the modifications to be consistent with the intent of the general development plan and the Rockland General Plan and recommend approval of a notice of exemption and the first reading of an ordinance to amend the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan as stated.

Concludes staff's presentation. Be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you. So first, council, any questions?

No questions.

No questions?

Councilmember Holden? Yeah, just one question. What prompted this change? Is there a proposal that's coming for this or?

Nothing has come in the door yet. There was a pre op meeting. We started looking at it and thinking about it. And it was just something that the staff wanted to modify to make it more consistent with other areas in the city.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah.

No questions.

Okay. No further questions. I will now open the public comment period. This is an opportunity. Anybody want to speak on this item? No? Okay. I'm going to close public comment. Final questions by council members? None. Okay. So we're going to take these ones separate. So see if anyone wants to take an action on PH2A.

I'll move approval of PH2A. Second.

All right. All in favor, aye.

Aye. Aye.

Noes? Extensions? The ayes have it. Passes unanimously. And then on PH2B, do I have a motion?

I'll move approval item PH2B, introduce, waive the full reading, and read by title only, an ordinance of the City Council, City of Rockland, amending the Northwest Rockland General Development Plan to add retail sales, exterior sales, and storage as a permitted use and to allow deviations from off street parking standards, both subject to approval of a conditional use permit within commercial zoning districts, Northwest Rockland General Development Plan amendment, PDG twenty twenty six-one.

Second.

All All in favor, aye. Aye. Noes? Abstentions? Ayes have it. Passes unanimously. All right. We are now moving on to discussion items. Discussion items include oral presentations, and recommending receiving file. For D1, we have the amendments to the Rockland Municipal Code related to budget process, and this will be presented by our budget officer, z.

Good

mayor and members of the city council. My name is Znusia, or otherwise known as Zee, and I'm the city's budget officer. The item before you tonight is to, the introduction of an ordinance amending sections 2.2802 o and chapter 3.28 of the Rockland Municipal Code or RMC related to preparation the preparation, submission, and adoption of the city's budget. For your reference, a red light version of the ordinance is included to highlight the proposed changes. The city has transitioned from an annual budget process to a biennial or two year budget cycle.

On 06/24/2025, the city council adopted the first two year budget for fiscal years 2526 and 2627. While the municipal code still reflects an annual process, the city is already operating under this two year framework. The ordinance before you updates the RMC to align with this change. Currently, chapter 2.28 of the RMC establishes the city's responsibility to prepare and submit a proposed budget to the city council. Section 2.2802 o requires that the proposed budget be submitted on or before May 15 of each year.

Chapter 3.28 provides the framework for the city's annual budget process, including preparation, review, and adoption of the operating budget, along with city council's authority over appropriations. The proposed revisions include updating section 2.28 o two o to change the deadline for submission to the proposed budget from on or before May 15 of each year to on or before May 15 of each odd numbered year, consistent with the city's two year budget cycle. Revisions to chapter 3.28 update references from an annual budget process to a two year budget process and introduce provisions for a mid cycle, budget review. The amendments also remove redundant sections, renumber the remaining sections for clarity, update references to the budget workshops, and revise the language to reflect adoption of a two fiscal year budget on or before June 30 of each odd number year. Additionally, the revisions clarify the city council's authority regarding budget appropriations and amendments as well as the city manager's responsibility related to the budget.

With that, this concludes my presentations, and I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you.

Any questions from council? No? Alright. Public comment. We will open that right now. Anybody have any comments? Seeing none, all right, we'll close public comment. And without any further discussion, anything? Nope.

All

right. Take action for a motion and vote.

I'll move approval of item D1. Introduce, waive the full reading, read by title only, and ordinance of the city council, city of Rockland, amending section 2.28 020 and chapter 3.28 of the Rockland Municipal Code relating to the preparation submission and city council's adoption of the

budget. Second.

All right. We have a first and a second. All in favor, aye. Aye. No? Abstentions? Ayes have it. Item passes unanimously. Discussion item two, this is for the 2025 general annual General Plan Annual Progress Report. Principal Planner Nathan Anderson will be presenting.

Thank you again. Tonight, I'll be presenting a couple of annual progress reports beginning with the 2025 General Plan APR. State law requires all California jurisdictions prepare and submit this annual report to HCD and the State Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation. The general plan APR summarizes the city's progress in implementing the general plan, including planning efforts, development activity, and advancement of key programs and objectives. So, the general or the city of Rockland last completed a comprehensive general plan update in 2012 establishing the framework for long term growth, land use, and policy direction.

Since then, the city has adopted several amendments to maintain consistency with the evolving state requirements and regional planning efforts. During the 2025 reporting period, the City of Rockland adopted three general plan amendments. The first of these approved in January modified the land use designation on a portion of the 12.7 acre site to facilitate development of the University Avenue Apartments project. The second general plan amendment approved in August modified the land use designation of an approximately 3.4 acre former Caltrans site which is part of the West Oaks Apartments project. And the final amendment approved in October modified the land use designations of multiple sites to facilitate development of high density residential and affordable housing consistent with state, regional housing needs allocation requirements.

We'll discuss this one a bit more when we get to housing element APR in a few moments. So, the city undertakes a range of actions each year to implement the general plan. These include processing development applications with land use, zoning, and design standards. Staff also implements housing element programs, advances the arena strategy, and coordinates with the agencies on infrastructure, transportation, and hazard mitigation. The city continues to monitor development activity and housing production to ensure compliance with state reporting requirements.

The city is also continuing to work with consultants on a comprehensive update to the general plan circulation element. This effort includes updating the city's travel demand model, utilizing new analytical tools and technologies, evaluating land use and circulation system scenarios, and establishing an appropriate methodology to estimate vehicle miles traveled, or VMT, in compliance with Senate Bill seven forty three. Modeling is wrapping up for this process in the next couple of months, and staff is hoping to begin the EIR process later this year. Staff remains committed to ensuring consistency with the general plan while responding to evolving state requirements, including implementation of the current housing element and ongoing coordination with regional and state agencies. The city will continue to monitor development trends and update the general plan as needed.

No actions required on this item. It's being provided for informational purposes only. Following this presentation, this report will be submitted to the state in compliance with reporting requirements. This concludes staff's presentation. If there are any questions, we'd be happy to answer them.

All right. Thank you. Turning to counsel. Are there any questions for staff? No question? Questions? All right. Opening public comment. Is there any public comment? None? Seeing none. Closing public comment. Then returning again back to see if there's any further discussion There's no action that needs to be taken on this particular item. Correct. Thank you. Discussion item number three, the 2025 housing element annual progress report and 2024 or 2025 housing successor agency annual report again.

Yep. That's me again. So, the 2025 housing element annual progress report and the housing successor agency report are two additional reports which I'll be presenting this evening. I'm going to take these out of order and present the successor agency report first and then circle back to the housing element APR just a moment while the clerk loads me up here. But I guess I can get I can get going.

So, the housing element or the housing successor annual report for low and moderate income housing asset fund LMIHAF has been prepared in accordance with the California Health and Safety Code. The report outlines the activities of the City of Rockland Housing's successor during fiscal year twenty twenty four-twenty five. The purpose of this report is to provide the governing body, in this case the council, with annual summary of housing assets and activities. All of the financial information is included within the report, but it's important to note that while not many expenditures were made during this fiscal year, the city has made several commitments from the low mod fund for low income housing in twenty five to twenty six, which will be reflected in next year's report. So, year's will be a little bit more exciting in terms of revenue spent.

Moving on to the housing element APR as with the general plan APR, the government code requires each California jurisdiction to annually submit this document to HCD and LCI. By April 1 of each year, the city must submit the APR which identifies progress towards meeting our arena for the twenty twenty one to 2029 housing element cycle and provides an update on the implementation of housing programs adopted in the housing element. The following discussion provides a summary of the information contained in the APR including total housing production, affordability determinations, accessory dwelling units, and housing units by income category. It should be noted that while PDF versions of this report are available for viewing, several include tables which are quite large like this one. This table alone is over 60 individual columns, so you couldn't even fit it onto this format and reflects new construction, entitlements, permits, and completed units for the entire APR cycle.

Accordingly, it's recommended that this report be reviewed electronically where users can zoom in for clarity rather than the printed format. So, this is all available online. You can go to it and you can you can review it. A few highlights. In 2025, the city experienced a noticeable or notable increase in entitlement activity compared to '24.

During the 2025 calendar year, the city issued 303 total building permits for residential construction. Of these, 44 units were deed restricted as low, 33 units as very low, 28 is extremely low, and the remaining 194 as above moderate or market rate. With three zero three building permits issued, 2025 represents the second highest year for permit issuance in the housing element period, exceeding, exceeded only by the five fifty nine units permitted in 2022. While the city did manage to permit some affordable housing this year, 64% of the permitted housing remains above moderate. Staff anticipates that implementation of the inclusionary housing ordinance will result in an increased number of affordable units in 2026 and beyond.

There was an approximately 86% in approved entitlements for housing from 2024 to '25 with a total of six zero four residential units entitled in '25, including the Pacific Street Apartments, University Avenue Apartments, and Whitney Walk projects as opposed to three twenty residential units in 2024. ADU production was mixed from '24 to '25 with a total of 18 units permitted and five units completed in 2025 as compared to 15 units permitted and 20 units completed in '24. So a slight drop there. Continuous progress has also been made on the housing element implementation, including annual and ongoing programs. The biggest of these was the completion of program 10 in September, which approved the Arena Alternative Sites Inventory, which successfully rezoned approximately 171 acres to provide for nearly 3,200 additional units of affordable housing.

In summary, 2025 was characterized by strong entitlement growth and steady permit issuance. Collectively, these trends indicate a robust forward looking housing pipeline with future construction activity likely to reflect the increase in entitlements approved during 2025. Staff is planning to submit this report by the end of the week in order to comply with the state's April 1 deadline. As with the general plan APR, no action is required from the council, but staff is providing this report for informational purposes and to elicit any feedback you may have. Thank you.

Thank you. Any questions? No questions. Questions. Okay. I will now open it up for public comment. Any public comment on this particular item?

Councilmembers. Greetings councilmembers. Benjamin Bjerkman, lifelong rural resident. I noticed a large discrepancy between the number of accessory dwelling unit permits and the accessory dwelling units completed. I was just wondering if there was a discrepancy of that, perhaps there were some units that just fell through, or if there was anything that could be used to explain the difference between those two. Maybe it just takes a longer time frame than posted perhaps. Thank you.

Yeah, you're correct on the final one. Often these construction timelines stretch into the next calendar year. So while the permits may be issued in 2025, the actual final would be in 2026.

Any further questions? I actually did have one for you. Is that so you mentioned we have to file this, and then what happens with what we file? Is there a report that we get back saying you get an A plus? I mean, I'm just curious what happens afterwards.

HCD is constantly monitoring our housing element to ensure that we're complying with our programs and with all of our the other state requirements. So they're going to check through it. A lot of it is done through a very simple format where the numbers go through and hopefully match up with what they're expecting. And if that happens, I think they leave us alone. If they have questions, they'll probably call us and ask us to explain them.

But do they give us a letter or something that says, This is how you're doing?

I don't believe we get a letter saying that we're doing well, but if we don't do well, I think we get a letter. So we don't want a

letter. Pass

fail. Yeah.

I just curious what if it, you know, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, what I would expect other jurisdictions that are not doing well on their housing production, what they should be expecting, what kind of documentation would be presented versus us. We're producing obviously a compliant report.

Yes. It's typically not about the production of units. It's really about complying with all of the other regulations. In our experience, if HCD is questioned, get in touch with us. We have a phone call whether they explain it to us. There's you know, emails and follow ups, but, you know, we anticipate that this is going to go through well.

Okay. Thank you. Any other yes.

I apologize. And actually, good discussion. Think thank you, Benjamin, for bringing it up. One of the things that we've on the ADUs, I remember when we very first got the housing numbers and we were trying to get credit for potential ADUs, and I think HED would only give us credit for like two or three because that's all we had done before. So it's been nice to see cause we do have areas where it's appropriate and people are moving in their elderly parents or what they need to do.

It has come up that staff can approve at a level that it was one of the things I was going put on for our future agenda to see if we can address that issue to allow staff to a higher level of approval so that people don't have to go through a significant process on their ADUs. So it's something that I was I don't know if that's where you want it on a future agenda, but it's something for us to look at.

Yeah, thank you.

You want to make that feedback as part of this, or do you want to bring it up?

A little of both, guess. Ask to put it when we do for future agenda items to address, but I just wanted to make you aware that it's something that's come up through this process also for our housing, in particular to make ADUs less onerous process.

I don't think I officially closed public comment, so unless there's nothing else, now I will officially close oh, you officially close it, and then we will come back for further discussions. We've got a little bit of discussion on ADUs that we carry over to the future agenda items. Is there anything else?

Mr. Mayor, one thing that and this kind of spills into the next item too, but one thing that jumped out at me was our production and the housing element where I'll say we're knocking it out of the park when it comes to above moderate. But what really jumped out at me was that our arena allocation is about 30% of the units are supposed to be above moderate, which means 70% of the units that are to be built are supposed to be moderate or below moderate, which seems very unrealistic to me in Rockland. Like, you know, that they would expect that 70% of the housing units we build would not be, you know, would be in that category. Is that the kind of thing everybody gets, like 70%, to be moderate or below moderate?

So my understanding of the way the six Cycle Arena was allocated, so the regional housing need allocation is handed down in a large, I would say, allocation by Housing and Community Development to the councils of government, so to SACOG. And then SACOG portions it throughout the agencies. And my understanding is they were apportioned fairly proportionally based on population and a few other data points throughout all of the region. So and then of everyone's proportional number, percentage of everyone's was similarly apportioned into each of the categories. All of this happened probably almost ten years ago now.

So there's not a lot of people who have that institutional knowledge at SACOG about how exactly it happened. But in theory, most of the cities and the counties in SACOG have a very similar percentage and proportionality.

I mean, it just seems if I went to your average resident and said, hey, the state thinks 70 of our housing should be for moderate or lower income, that most people would think that was really odd for us to do that.

I think some of it is that we're looking at trying to produce it now, it's based on numbers that are almost a decade old now. And a lot of that has to do with the type of housing that already exists in the region, most of which was already above market rate. And so in theory, was likely an attempt to balance.

I guess my only comment would be it's not realistic. And the development kind of proves that out, that there's not, you know, that kind of development on that, you know, at that income level. Alright.

Anything else? Yeah. I'm gonna piggyback on that. I know it does bleed into the next one, but, seeing these types of reports and then seeing those disparities of the numbers we're not gonna hit, it just reminds us that the way that these numbers have been allocated are so unrealistic that we have to wonder at what principle was missed when they were coming up with it. I think there is a disparity between the power of the SACOGs, and I appreciate all the work that Councilmember Gallardo is doing over there, but I do think that there's other cogs that are far more powerful and get their way far more than we are, personally, in terms of the numbers and how the entirety of the population is being spread out.

I think that when we're looking at these numbers, we kind of always have to remind ourselves of what do we have at our disposal to try and change the entire system. And I know that we're coming up on a new cycle. We have to be proactive about getting out in front, making sure that our SACOG is being heard. I know that the Department of Finance is the main group that determines ultimately where the population numbers are coming out. And unfortunately, for whatever reason, I don't know what their accounting looks like over there, but they keep saying that our population's increasing when we have every single other metric saying that it's not.

And I think that's in part because one, we don't want to lose people in the House of Representatives, and also because we want to keep those production numbers up by claiming that our population is going up when we actually have a lot of we have zero growth on incoming immigration and increased migration. So I think we have to be vigilant on the Department of Finance where those numbers are coming from, because right now they're defined as a black box. The entire production of numbers from the beginning is a black box that no one can really explain to us. And that bleeds into everything else and it's garbage in garbage out. And I hope that we can work as a region because it's not going to be more than just Rockland that's going to need to see those numbers.

But when we're producing these reports, that's always what I think of is where are we ultimately headed with this? Because we're just being reminded constantly, we're never going to hit these numbers. And I know I keep harping on it, but we've got to hold other people's feet to the fire. There's a website that actually shows the percentage of where people are, where jurisdictions are in their production. Shame on me for not having the actual website.

I'll post it out. But it's fascinating to see our you know, it's just bars of 50%, whatever. And then you get to the coastal communities and the communities I harp on all the time like Marin County. And they're like 5% in. And so what I'm asking yourself, like what gets generated when you are clearly so far behind, you are never gonna dig your way out?

And unfortunately, think the answer really is selective enforcement. Towards certain jurisdictions and not to others. There's no other answer because there has to be some way that these other jurisdictions are getting away with not producing almost nothing. And yet, all of our population sees constant, constant growth. And we're doing our part. So, thank you for the report here.

And just to share, we are working at the staff level and then with our policymakers as much as possible to be proactive and prepare. On a county level, on the cog level, and then conversations with our assembly member and hopefully future, the senator about conversations just like this. And then the piece that I think you've touched on, Mayor, very accurately is we can zone all day for zoning for units, but the cities aren't the ones producing units in most cases. And so how do we find a way for production to become prioritized over zoning? Because the zoning is one thing, but trying the right balance of incentives and other things so that we can balance the city's needs, what the state is telling us we need to do, but then have the state help us make that production happen as well.

So I'm trying to focus on some ideas for that as well.

Yeah, I hope that we see more success with the League of California cities. I don't I'm fiftyfifty on their their production, and I'd like to see there be more of an effort there, especially when they're helping us learn these ins and outs. If they were a little more proactive, that would be helpful for us to understand what's going on in the capital. All right. Well, with that, I do believe we have nope, there's no action to be taken on this. So if there's no further discussion? No? Okay. We will move on to D-four. Thank you. Inclusionary housing program and commercial linkage fee analysis. Assistant to the City Manager, Elizabeth Sword.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, city council, Elizabeth Sorg, assistant to the city manager, here tonight to present the city's draft affordable housing inclusionary program and commercial linkage fee analysis report. Every eight years, the City is required to reevaluate housing goals and policies for existing and future residents. This evaluation takes the form of the City's housing element, which is included in the City's general plan. As you heard earlier tonight, the city's current 2021 to 2029 housing element includes programs and goals to meet housing needs, including the city's current regional housing needs allocation, or RINA, requirements. As some of you might recall, during the adoption of the housing element, Program 19 of the housing element states that staff will explore the feasibility of an affordable housing impact fee and a commercial linkage fee.

An affordable housing impact fee and commercial linkage fee are components of a broader inclusionary housing policy. These policies take many forms throughout jurisdictions, but they always include requirements that mandate developers to include affordable housing units as part of projects. They may also include fees that developers can pay in lieu of constructing housing or in lieu fees. It's important to note that it is not possible to have an in lieu fee without also having an inclusionary housing policy that requires the construction of housing units. After the Joint Planning Commission and City Council Housing Workshop in March 2024, City Council directed staff to explore an inclusionary housing policy in Luffy.

Kaiser Marks and Associates has been hired to complete this assessment on behalf of the city. As part of the assessment, staff and the consultants solicited feedback from the development community in two public meetings, emails, and phone calls over the past year. Kaiser Marshton also collected data about current development from market data, city staff, other agencies, and other partners like PCWA and SP MUD. The report presented tonight is a culmination of the past year of research into the residential and non residential development in the city. Based on current market conditions and the city's housing obligations, Kaiser Marston has drafted their inclusionary housing program and commercial linkage fee analysis report and provided recommendations in the report based on their findings.

On 03/03/2026, city staff and Kaiser Marshton presented the draft report to the Planning Commission to receive recommendations from that body. The Planning Commission recommended the adoption of an in lieu fee that was competitive with neighboring jurisdictions, They also recommended that staff and the consultant evaluate the options to allow single family residential developments to meet their inclusionary housing obligations to the construction of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. Staff have included some of this additional research in the presentation tonight that you will hear. Following the presentation, staff and the consultant are requesting feedback from the City Council about the recommendations proposed in the report. And then following this meeting, staff and Kaiser Marston will revise the report based on feedback provided and return to both the Planning Commission and City Council with revisions to the City's existing inclusionary housing ordinance and potentially a resolution that establishes an in lieu fee.

So at this point, I will turn it over to Debbie Kern from Kaiser Marston and Associates to go over the report.

Thank you.

Good evening, mister mayor and members of the council. I'm Debbie Kern with Kaiser Marcin Associates. Kaiser Marcin is a land use economics advisory firm, and we have three offices in California. We've been in business since 1973, so for a long time. And we primarily serve public sector clients in California and we have helped many jurisdictions throughout the state adopt or update their inclusionary programs and commercial linkage fee programs to support affordable housing objectives.

And I'm joined tonight by two of my colleagues that there remotely. They're available remotely to answer questions. So I'll just go through our presentation and then we can start the discussion. Okay, all right. I'm here tonight to discuss the study that we've been working on, as Elizabeth said, for over the past year.

And I know you've got a copy of it. It's this voluminous document and I wish it was scintillating reading but I realize it's very dry and it's anyway. But I'll try to go through it and bring up the high points. So the purpose of our study really had it was to really inform the decisions that you're going to make about your inclusionary ordinance if you want to adopt one of an affordable housing ordinance. If you want to also adopt they're called a commercial linkage fee, which is an impact fee on non residential development and the fees are collected, are used to fund affordable housing.

And then if you want to go forward with that, then we would draft the ordinance. So those are the three pieces of our work program. And as, you know, based upon your housing element, the discussion earlier and what Elizabeth said, the main driver of this work is really to provide a tool for the city to meet its RINA obligations.

Now,

the inclusionary housing analysis, I'll start with that. So this is looking at the program for assisting, requiring new development of residential to assist in the construction of affordable housing. So we looked at a market state review and that included a review of your RENO obligations in progress. We also performed a financial feasibility analysis and what that is, is looking at the development economics of new residential development to see what are the development costs, what are the values of new development, and then what's the profit margins, and then seeing how much wiggle room really or buffer there is to interject a requirement for affordable housing and still keep development feasible. We also prepared a residential nexus analysis and that's really to just provide additional context for the program, but it's not a legal requirement to adopt an inclusionary program with an in lieu fee.

If you were to do impact fees, then you're required to do a nexus analysis, but the city wasn't. But it was listed in the housing element as an objective that you wanted to do. So we prepared the nexus analysis. We also surveyed other jurisdictions in the area and actually went quite far out into the Placer County, Sacramento County area to understand what other jurisdictions are doing for affordable housing because you do operate in a competitive world and so it's important that your program be, you know, somewhat consistent with what everyone else is doing. Otherwise, if there's available land elsewhere, developers will go build elsewhere and you won't have any new development.

And then finally, we provided some recommendations for going forward. Just, I guess, you went over this RHNA, but we'll just highlight it again. And so the RHNA obligation that was provided to the city for this housing element cycle, the RHNA cycle of 2021 to 2029 is 5,661 units. And, you know, as you mentioned before, the biggest categories that they've assigned unit needs for, for very low and then also for above moderate. The categories that you're behind in constructing the biggest categories are in very low, which is not surprising, and then also low.

The market itself tends to build housing to serve the above moderate, so you actually have built more units citywide than the RENA target is for above moderate. So the next housing element cycle will be between 2029 and 2037, and then HCD will update these, the RINA requirements for the city. So the gaps, we have a gap right now for very low income units of about 1,700 units. The gap on low income units is nine zero four, moderate four fifty one, and as you mentioned, that's a really big mountain to climb and hard to see how you would make a big dent in that, but that's consistent with jurisdictions throughout the state.

All

right, now I'd like to just dive into the residential feasibility analysis. And so, the first step of that is to do the market study and identify what kind of housing is being built in Rockland and what kind of housing do you anticipate in the near term as you go forward. And so those are we identified these prototypes by working with the development community and then looking at, you know, building permits and what's being built. And then we modeled the development economics of those prototypes. And then we evaluated the potential again for those projects to contribute towards affordable housing.

This is a summary of those prototypes, and we identified, let's see, four different types of single family for sale prototypes ranging from low density, you know, large units, 3,400 square foot units, to single family attached, which would be townhome units, and then two other detached prototypes. And so that's what's mostly been built in Rockland to date, and very few townhomes and not that many apartments either. It's anticipated, given that you don't have much more, you know, vacant land out there, that the density of construction will naturally increase as it has throughout other areas in California, wherever you when you have the when you lose your green fields, then the density ratchets up naturally. So that's why we modeled these higher density prototypes too. This table here just summarizes looking at what is the difference between price market rate prices versus affordable prices.

And so a highlight here is we have for the low density single family detached unit, the average prices in Rockland are about $1,300,000 and then if you were to look at what could a moderate income household afford to pay under the formulas that are prescribed, it's about 5 and $13,000 So the differential there is $887,000 a unit. So that's a huge gap. And that's why it's very difficult for a developer of low density to actually provide affordable units of like kind because that delta is so big, you wouldn't be able to construct very many units. And the delta goes down as density goes up the gap. And so actually market rate townhomes are moderate, are priced to be affordable to moderate just naturally.

They're naturally moderate by design, and so are apartments. This bar chart just graphically shows what the components of the feasibility analysis are. And so when you look at development costs of a project, the components are you have to buy land, you have to value land, you have to improve that land, there's on-site costs, then you also have to build stick construction, And we have indirect costs of fees and permits. And it's not just city fees, it's all of the other service agencies that provide services. And then you have other indirects, architectural engineering costs, legal costs, etc.

And then you have a profit, because developers won't build without a profit. So those are the components. So the value of construction has to cover all of these items. In this example here, this is just an illustration, and the total costs are about up to $650,000 that have to be covered. In the feasibility analysis, when we modeled the development economics of each of these prototypes, then we looked at, well, what metric are we going to use to identify feasible projects versus ones that are challenged?

And we did that by looking at what are the profit margins. And for for sale, we looked at that as a percent of sale, profit as a percent of the sale revenues. And we established a target of 10% of sales as being the target profitability margin for developers. And we, you know, project is different, every developer is different, and you know, you have large developers at economies of scale, their profit margin requirements are different. So we just, you know, we're trying to deal with order of magnitude.

So this is what we have used, and we've identified projects as being feasible or strong feasibility as if they're within 3% of that 10% target. So if they had a profit margin of 7% of sales, that would be feasible. Then we have marginal feasibility, and that's if they're within 3% of that. If they're less than 3% of the target, their profit margins, then we're saying that those are challenged. And we're not saying that it's impossible to develop with those levels of profit, We're just saying that they're not consistent with industry standards.

But, you know, like I said, every developer is different. Every project is different. You have costs. You know, some of the projects here in Rockland, you have to do huge site costs because of granite. But that doesn't affect every project.

So there's just lots of differences and I just want you to keep that in mind. This table just summarizes when we look at the profit margins and the development costs of our prototypes without any affordable housing, so it's just a market rate project, and what are we looking at in terms of feasibility. And so what we're finding is that all of the single family, with the exception of the townhomes, the market rate projects, they meet those target thresholds of profitability and developers can go forward with those without any affordable housing. However, for townhomes and apartments, we're showing that the returns are less than the targets, and they're quite deficient, and so we have identified those as being challenged. Now, there are some apartments being built, there are some townhomes being built, but again, they're not achieving the same levels of profitability.

When you look at the prices, as I said, they're affordable to moderate income households, and so the market rates are. So you just don't have the same profitability. The next step in the feasibility analysis is that we then looked at infusing a range, a spectrum of affordable housing requirements on these projects. So we looked at if you required on-site construction of low, moderate, very low income units, if you required a fee instead of providing on-site units. We looked at if you have your fee at different per square foot amounts.

We looked at if you have a fee that's equivalent to providing off-site units in tax credit project, and those costs are less. And that's, for example, how Roseville meets a lot of its affordable housing. Is it developers of market rate units? They contribute towards building tax credit projects on one parcel in a specific plan area. They're higher density.

That cost per unit is much less. So we looked at these different ranges, and this next table summarizes what we found and what happened to feasibility when you start, you know, weaving in affordable housing. So we found that the low density, medium density, medium high density single family detached, all of those prototypes could afford to provide on-site units, on-site affordable units of 5% at low or 10% at moderate or 105% low or 10% moderate and still be feasible. Now, you get into marginal feasibility when you start requiring very low units, or 10% very low. But at the 5% low, we found that that could be absorbed and still maintain feasibility.

And then the fees that would be required for off-site, you were to provide 5% off-site units, those are all feasible for all the for sale prototypes, as well as fees of $5 up to $10 a square foot. I know there's a lot of numbers, but it's kind of interesting because you can see what this table does is it identifies per square foot what is the equivalent cost to providing say if you were to provide 5% on-site low income units, instead of that if you paid a fee that would be equivalent in burden to the developer, that fee that he would have to pay would be $13.44 a square foot on all the market rate projects. And so that would be the cost that would be equivalent to providing an on-site cost. When you look at the cost of providing 5% off-site, it's $1.97 a square foot. That's obviously a huge difference.

And so if you establish fees that are more in tune with providing off-site construction, it's a big savings to the developers. Okay, so that's sort of the findings of our feasibility analysis. I'll just now go into the nexus analysis, the residential nexus analysis. And what a nexus analysis does is it quantifies the impact that new market rate unit construction has on the need for the demand for affordable housing. And the way it works, this is the flow, the framework, is that if you start with new housing units that have new households, those households go out and spend money.

They buy goods and services. Those goods and services, when they buy them, create jobs. Those jobs have an array of income levels, you know, salaries. You know, you tax lawyers that make a lot of money, and then you have retail workers that don't make very much money, or hotel workers. So through that job creation, it creates demand for different levels of affordable housing.

And so it's this complicated model that we use that we've developed, actually, that goes through and then looks at all the census data to identify then what are those impacts. And this summarizes. Now, you like I said before, if you were to be adopting an impact fee, then you would be constrained your fee would be constrained by this nexus analysis. You can charge anything less than what the nexus analysis yields, but the nexus analysis would establish the maximum. You're not constrained by that because you're going to have an on-site requirement or you're thinking about that with an in lieu fee.

But what this shows is the NEXUS analysis shows that for every 100 market rate units, for example, that you have a requirement of up to 25 moderate income units for low density. For medium density, it's for every 100 market rate, you have a requirement of 20 units of up to moderate. And then you look at that on a percentage, it's about 20%. And then the requirement for very low up to 80% is 15%, 5% for up to moderate. So some of those are up to 20%.

So these are the findings of the nexus analysis. So you can see with different product types, those maximums go way down, like for rental apartments. The maximum of, for example, if you were to have on-site low income, the maximum that you could levy would be a 7.1 on-site requirement. Now, I'd just like to turn to the survey of other jurisdictions and what everybody else is doing in the area. And so, the jurisdictions that we looked at include Sac, City Of Sacramento, Roseville, Loomis, Folsom, Elk Grove, Placer County, and then we also looked at Lincoln, and then I guess we did some work on Rancho Cordova, too.

And so many of these jurisdictions, if they have an on-site, they have a 10%. There's only one jurisdiction that has basically an on-site requirement, and that's Loomis. And all the other ones gets an option of on-site or fees, okay? But 10% is often the metric that they use. The affordability levels range from Sacramento has low income requirements.

Loomis and Folsom have low and very low. Placer County has a mix of moderate, low and very low, etcetera. Folsom, for example, doesn't have any requirements on rental units, and so they vary. Now, Roseville does not have a citywide inclusionary program. They have a goal of 10%, and then they implement all of their programs through the specific plans.

They've divided the city up into all these specific plan areas, and within those specific plans they've identified specific parcels that are really the affordable housing parcels. And so that is where the affordable housing is built is on these parcels. So they, in fact, they claim that very little fee revenue is generated. It's mostly they're building off-site affordable tax credit units. And that's what they're doing.

Let me see. And you can see the fees that are in place. They're really in the three Sacramento's at $3.56 a square foot. Folsom's at $3 a square foot. Loomis has not adopted a fee yet, but they're considering one.

Elk Grove is between $3,800 and $6,400 a unit, and Placer County is at $2.73 per square foot. In terms of the optional alternatives they allow for satisfying the off-site, the on-site requirement, some cities or jurisdictions like Placer County does allow ADUs to satisfy the requirement for on-site. And other jurisdictions, a lot of them have off-site that they allow that. Some of them require, for example, Elk Grove, they don't have a specific requirement, but they require every development in a new area to establish an affordable housing plan that the city has to, you know, agree to. Loomis allows that you can, instead of building units, you can do preservation of units that are at risk of becoming non affordable.

So there's a full range of alternatives that different jurisdictions allow. Now, the Planning Commission expressed particular interest in ADUs as being a tool for meeting the requirement. And so we did a little more work on that. And as I mentioned, Placer County is using this as a mechanism. And ADUs can be used to meet the arena, as you know.

But the city has received guidance from HCD that the city Rockland can only claim five ADUs per year towards the arena, and that's obviously not very many. And there's also issues about, say if you were to adopt the program with ADUs being permitted to meet the inclusionary requirements, you only have five that are able to do that, how do you allocate that five among all the different developers, you know? And so there's an equity question, and there's also questions of making sure that it produces something that's meaningful to the city's policy objectives. But it certainly can be a tool that jurisdictions are using.

Okay.

Following, you know, taking into account the survey, the feasibility study, the RENA, these are our general recommendations, is that you establish an inclusion. Well you update your, you have an ordinance already, but you update that and you have a provision at least of a minimum of an in lieu fee that would be permitted, and developers could meet their on-site obligation by right by paying that in lieu fee. So it wouldn't be something that would be at the discretion of the city, would be by right. And we're suggesting an on-site obligation of 5% units at low income, and that is because that's in line actually with the nexus analysis, and it's also in line with the feasibility analysis. It's somewhat less than what other jurisdictions, but I think there's a big disconnect between the on-site requirement and the fees that other jurisdictions are charging.

And then we would allow an in lieu fee by right of up to $5 a square foot on market rate units. And for apartments and townhomes, multifamily units, they are challenged now. We would suggest that you consider a reduced fee initially on multifamily to encourage the construction of multifamily, and that you exempt projects with fewer than nine units from this inclusionary requirement or the fee requirement. So those are our recommendations in summary. Now I'd like to turn just to the commercial linkage fee analysis, and that's looking at, again, establishing an impact fee on nonresidential development, and the fee revenues would be used to support affordable housing.

And it's very similar to the residential nexus analysis. It's the same logic. And again, this analysis then establishes the maximum legally permitted fee that you could charge on non residential development because it is an impact fee. It has been done to be in compliance with the California Mitigation Fee Act. And so this is the framework.

Instead of starting with households, in this case you start with the job. You start with you're constructing new industrial space or new retail space. That space then houses new jobs, and then those jobs have salaries, and then those salaries then dictate then basically what those households can afford, and then you get that distribution of need for affordable housing. This chart summarizes those findings. And as you can see here, the fees that are yielded by the NEXUS analysis are very high.

For example, for retail commercial, if you were to mitigate the demand that's generated for, you know, between from extreme low up to all the way to moderate, you would charge a fee of $72.5 a square foot. And that is obviously, you know, nobody would ever charge that amount. And so, but this is just the maximum amount that's permitted by the nexus analysis, but in reality, you know, the fees are much less that cities are charging to commercial development. So in the survey, you can see that, for example, Roseville or Western Placer County doesn't have any fees on commercial development. Folsom has a fee of $2 The highest fee in Sacramento is $3.33 per square foot of office space.

The county of Sacramento has a $3 highest fee, again, on office or hotels. Elk Grove, the highest fee is $3 on hotel space. And in Citrus Heights, the highest fee is $2.28 on hotels. And then the highest fee in Rato Kadorva is $1 a square foot on office. So, you know, we're suggesting that you have for your if you want to do a fee on commercial space now, many cities do not want to do fees on commercial space because they're trying to, you know, they're trying to incentivize development of commercial space.

So, you know, obviously it's a policy decision. But if you do want to go forward with a commercial linkage fee, we suggest that the fees be similar to neighboring jurisdictions. And that would mean, you know, for office, hotel, and commercial, between $2.75 and $3 a square foot. For R and D, we would suggest between $1 and $2 and that would be for warehouse too, all industrial space. And then you could apply a reduced fee in the downtown or any areas that are particularly challenged for new commercial development.

And then we would suggest that you exempt small projects of, say, less than 5,000 square feet. All right. So that really concludes my presentation, and then this is just the next steps, this is really what Elizabeth identified, that then we get your feedback. And if you decide that you want to go forward with updating the ordinance that you have or establishing commercial linkage fee, then we would then modify those ordinances.

Thank you. Anything else?

So that concludes our presentation, and staff and the consultant are available to answer any questions that you may have.

Excellent. Thank you. At this point, I will call for questions from council members. We'll start with Council Member Jenner.

All right. Well, thank you for the report and for all the work you've done to get to this report tonight. And congratulations for being in business for fifty years. More than Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, all those guys. So you got something on them. I have a few questions. I have some comments, but I'll save those for later. And I might be jumping around a little bit. But just kind of a general question. How many more moderate units do we even have to build?

And you may I don't know if that's for you or for staff. I don't know if we even have that. But, you know, try trying to figure out say, we do a a $5 per square foot fee. What what are we looking at potentially getting in fees? And how does that translate into what number of units?

We have not done projections of the revenue that would be generated based upon your pipeline of projects, and that would be something else, effort. And that's a reasonable it's a good question. What is

To the me that's really what it comes down to is we can put all these things in place but if it only results in enough money to build 100 units and we need almost 3,000 for low to very low in the next three years, you know, it's like, why bother? So that that's just kind of a general a general thought.

As a as a point of clarification, you wanting to know the number of moderate individual units left to build? Or did you wanna know the approximate fee if we were to establish a five

dollar fee per year? Combined.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I do have just kind of general Sure. Like, acreages amounts and the number of units we could expect on the acreages. So if that's helpful, I can provide you with that information

to give

you some context. In mind that we ran this analysis a couple months ago, but it's pretty up to date. So when we're looking at our high density residential, we're looking at, depending on where we are in the city, about 24 acres. Low density to medium density residential is higher. We're looking at closer to about 200 acres.

Additional medium density and high density combined, you'd be looking at, about 40 acres, and then that's kind of like the total of the amount of acreage that we have left. So when you look at the higher amounts for high density residential, if we went maximum density on those, anywhere from like a thousand to 1,500 units. Low density, you're looking at, you know, about another thousand or so units. And then medium density, you're looking at about another, you know, 550 or so units.

Okay. Of the high density, are those detached?

No. The high density would probably, given the size of the acreage, probably be the attached product. So like a multi family.

Okay. So just out of single family detached homes, probably the 1,000 and the five fifty?

Yeah. Just general just general estimates, obviously, just to give you some ballparks.

Okay. Okay. Good. Thank you for that. So in in your experience, over the many years you've been doing this, can you give some indications, once these policies have been put in place, sort of what's been the development activity after the fact? More recent, obviously, thirty, forty years ago, but in the last, I don't know, five or ten years, do you have any jurisdictions around the state that have implemented something new like this?

Yes. And because the question always is, does it really, you know, impede new development? And so, it's very difficult to do that causation, but we have data in terms of looking at what has happened to a jurisdiction after it, you know, put a program in place, and did the rate of construction go down? And we can provide you with that. And in summary, in generally the answer is no. That it did not curtail development. Roseville is one of the examples, and that has been so it there have been some cases where it has, but most most generally I would say no.

Yeah, so do you think I mean Roseville, Lincoln, Folsom, they've got a land a lot of land that they're continually expanding. We're very limited. You mentioned that in your report. So, in instances like that, do you think that putting something like this in place at such a late development stage, close to build out, would generate enough significant revenue to help?

Well, think so. I mean, but we do need to do that analysis. I would recommend you do that, that we look at Elizabeth has the counts and then we know the square footage of these projects in general and then we can multiply it out and then divide it and tell you what we think, you know, would be the yield of those fees. And so, but in general when you have, you know, when you have declining supply of land, doesn't well, but naturally that's a constraint. But that doesn't mean it's a constraint that's generated by the fee program, it's just by the amount of land. But we can certainly do those projections, you know, as to what you would generate.

I do have some back of the napkin projections if you'd like it as well. Again, very preliminary, but if we look at the amount of vacant parcels that we still have left and we calculate out whether they're on the lower end of the allowed density or the higher end of the allowed density, and if we assume that every single one of those projects develops at market rate and pays the $5 per square footage fee, right, which we know may or may not be the case, we'd be looking at generated revenue of approximately anywhere from 10,000,000 to $30,000,000 depending on the square footage of each of the developments.

Okay. So that's significant. Okay. Great. That's all I have for right now. Thank you both for your answers.

Just to pick up on that. I believe the Terracino Apartments cost about $100,000,000 to build is my recollection. So and we got two eighty units out of that. So let me pick a midpoint, 20,000,000 that we got. So if we had $20,000,000 we'd get a fifth of what Terracina gave us, which might be 55 or 60 units.

If the city were interested in entirely funding an affordable housing development, but what the city would do with the funding is put it toward a similar funding gap financing that we have now, which is really trying to help a 100% affordable developers close the gaps because they come with their own financing sources, whether it's low income housing tax credits, bonds, other donations that they have, And they approach the city regularly, probably on a weekly basis. They will call our office asking for assistance, to help close the gaps to make those projects possible. So that's what this funding would be going to. We we would not anticipate completely funding an entirely new project with this. Yep.

I mean, one of the problems I have is that we don't build housing. And and ultimately, we can't tell people what to do with their land. You know, if it's if it's zoned for multifamily, they can build the biggest luxury apartments, you know, ever. But what we're talking about here is telling them what to do, like what they can build. And or giving them an in lieu fee if they don't want to do what we want them to do.

So can I just ask you, you mentioned Roseville has all these specific plans? We don't have specific plans. That's just and we're not going to have specific plans. But if I was doing an infill project in Roseville where there was no specific plan, what would I pay for a fee or what would the requirement be?

I don't think they have any fees on properties that are outside the

specific So nothing.

That's my understanding.

Yeah, okay. Because basically we're an in fill city, basically. Point. There's nothing there's no grand place for somebody to do all kinds of things. So I did want to you mentioned that the state only gives us credit. We can only get credit for five ADDUs a year.

That's my understanding.

Yes. And I would ask other planning staff to jump in if I've misstated this. But in our housing element, every year when we report out on the number of units that we produce toward our RENO obligations, we are only allowed to report out on five ADUs per year to meet those RENO obligations for our deed restricted units. That is based on prior years when we had very low ADU production. Now that ADU production has ramped up, though, we don't have a mechanism in place right now to claim more than that, those five units per year.

Okay. I guess I thought that the state viewed ADUs as inherently affordable. Am I wrong?

They do. But if you recall during the housing element adoption process, based on past production in Rockland, they would not allow the city to meet the low and very low income RINA criteria with ADUs because we hadn't produced a lot of ADUs in the past. So we can only get five per year and so in the first year we knew we had beat that number and so it was already kind of humorous that we're meeting the numbers. So in the total housing production, there are ADUs in our above moderate count if they are permitted as a separate unit. But in terms of our deed restricted number, we can only count five per year in the current housing element as it stands.

And would it would I be that seems arbitrary to me. Is

that It is arbitrary, but it was arbitrarily determined in 2018 and then adopted in '21 as part of that process.

What I recall, and I could be totally wrong, when we're going through the housing element, that was all that they would allow us to put in for the housing element itself to get it through HCD. But in reality, if we produce more, why can't we get credit for more?

So we just

leave those on the table?

Because right now, we are not asking people who are producing ADUs to verify that they are deed restricted, which is the only way you can actually qualify for those low, very low, acutely low credits. And so without

asking are for sale?

Some of they're not for sale, but they are for rent as most of our

So rentable units would be deed restricted.

All of the affordable units that Terrasina has brought us, that Oak and Pine will bring us, are all deed restricted. In fact, we won't consider funding a project that does indeed restrict their units.

So are there ADUs that get built that we could, if we were able to, have them deed restricted, but we're not choosing not to because of the five unit limitation?

Correct. So if there's direction from the council to pursue this, we could look at it in either in the next RENA cycle or we could talk to HCD about possibilities in the current RENA cycle. But as it stands, we get five a year towards our deed restricted numbers.

Yeah. I mean, if we're producing more if we if we all of a sudden overproduce on our very low, blow it out of the the water and do 5,000 units, HCC is gonna say no.

You you can't count.

We would also have to. Right now, yes. But we would also have to establish a program to annually verify or have each of those individual property owners voluntarily enter into a deed restriction. So it's not as there's there's always a a catch, I

will say.

Yeah. Mean, doesn't seem like we should leave anything on the table. We even though they say we can't get credit for it, it's I think it's better to to be proactive and have those and then and then sort of push that on on the backside through HCD.

And you also it is, you know, administering them, it is then an additional burden. But you can have these deed restrictions where the homeowner that owns that ADU has to self certify that the tenant that they have in that space is income eligible at level of the deed restriction. So I have seen many deed restrictions that way. And that somewhat, I mean, because that's legally the city then would have to, I mean, to enforce it. I mean, to enforce it is another matter. But you can I mean, to meet the letter of the law, you can have a self certification?

Right. Okay. Thanks. In your report, I must say you floated the idea of a lower in lieu fee for apartments. Am I correct?

Yes.

Okay. Tell me the rationale for that and maybe the rationale for having any in lieu fee for apartments.

Well you could have none. Mean it's just that our analysis shows that market rate apartments, the construction is challenged without any affordable requirements. And therefore, they don't have a lot of buffer there to then lay in an obligation for affordable housing. You could see, you know, you can levy a fee and see if you don't get any, then any applications for apartments and the developers say, you know, we'd like to build some but we just can't afford it with this fee, then you could modify it, or you could start with a lower fee, or you could start with none, and then once you see, you know, developments starting to occur, then you could increase it. But it's, you have to come back and you have to amend your ordinance, but you know, we're sympathetic because we believe in the feasibility analysis and that it is a challenge given the market conditions today for apartments and for townhomes to afford an impact in lieu fee.

Yeah, I appreciate you calling out the sewer and water fees, which are part of that equation.

Yes.

That I think makes it very difficult for an apartment complex to accommodate another fee that we might spend.

Yeah, the market rents here are just not, you know, costs don't vary that much between markets to markets, you know, but rents sure do. And your rents, the market rate rents are affordable to moderate and so therefore it's just, it's constrained. And the same thing with townhomes. You know, once townhomes, if they get up to $1,000,000 then it's a different world. But when they're $650,000 or $550,000 excuse me, it's challenging.

In your analysis on the profit level for different homes, honestly, if your numbers are right, God bless the home builders because I don't know many people who would put in $1,300,000 for a $33,000 profit because there's a lot easier ways to make $33,000 Exactly. Than 1,300,000.0

But that's at the challenge level, know. The standard would be the 10%, that would be the target. What happens in some cases, you know, when we had the housing crash, we knew a lot of builders, you know, and they were basically trying to stay in business. And in that case, then they would go with these low profit margins just to keep their crew going and to keep in business for a while. So and then profit margins are very thin for big builders like you have KB Homes, they can do amazing things with because they're kind of like the Costco, you know, they're in a volume business. So it varies and their cost will be different than what we have in there and you know, it's just hard to model each kind of developer.

Yeah. Okay. I think that's enough for me for now. Councilmember

Galba?

It's just a fascinating conversation to absorb. Yeah. I it's it's so funny because I just keep flashing back on that conversation with the ADUs because I remember being so frustrated that literally they were going to give us I thought it was three credit for three, because that's historically what we had built. And so that was all they were going to do. And we all knew we have a builder out in the ranch area that is building large homes with an ADU lot.

There are many, many units, but we're not getting any credit or ability. And I was pushing at the time for staff to go put in 20, but I get it what you say, you can do it, but they're not going to allow it when we get it. And I know we're down to small numbers, but obviously the issue is we're trying to do catch up from years past when we didn't have this in place. One of the things that I'd like you, if you could, is to touch on the Planning Commission a little bit more about their conversation, especially around the fee and commercial.

I don't know, you want to talk about that?

Yeah, so the majority of the planning commissioners did recommend adopting an in lieu fee that would be available by right and having it be comparable and fair with neighboring jurisdictions. So we did not ask the Planning Commission to get into the weeds and identify a number. That's that's kind of what the report is for and that's what this discussion tonight is for. But they were supportive of a fee that was that was in line with other neighboring jurisdictions. I I do not believe we received unanimous consensus among the planning commission members about a commercial linkage fee. I believe some said that they were not interested in any commercial fee, then some some rep supported the report, which does have a couple dollar commercial linkage fee. So that was a little bit more all over the place.

Thank you. Yeah, that was just one that jumped out at me. It feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face to put any kind of a fee on commercial when I'm trying to attract commercial. And you can see at our neighbors that's not something that they're looking at also. But I think question wise, I think you guys covered the ones that I have. So I think that's all I have.

Alright, I just have a couple. First one is, considering you've done this for as long as you have, and I know you do a lot of these types of analysis, when you look at Rockland throughout the state, what are the more comparable jurisdictions? And by that, I mean our population, our landlocked, the landlocked aspect. Can you think of any that are out there? Because I get it we have to compare ourselves to our sister cities and everything. They're in a completely different situation than we are. I'm just trying to look for comparables, even if they're not close to us.

Well, it's a constellation of factors. Like we work in a lot of cities that are just infill cities. All the cities in the Bay Area are just infill cities. They don't have any land. But the price points are higher, so it's hard to directly compare those.

So, we established lots of programs in infill cities. But if you're looking for one that is directly comparable and then I have to I'm not so certain about all of the conditions within different jurisdictions, too, in the Sacramento region that if they are landlocked to the extent that you are. So I guess it's just, we can look at that. I'd be happy to look at that.

And you'd also mentioned you know of some jurisdictions that self certify on the ADUs. I'd like to know what those jurisdictions are. I'm not a big fan of creating programs where we're monitoring people's private property. So to the extent that we do continue with this ADU conversation, I'd like to know what that self certification looks like.

I something maybe we could I wouldn't want to use our consultant dollars for that, but we could see if there's a way to survey that through HCD or housing element review because it would be a part of their compliance program. The alternative to that in order to get the credit would be for, again, each homeowner to voluntarily deed restrict their ADU. So to my knowledge, are the two options.

Yeah, well, Placer County, their deed restriction and their program for this project, I provided all the documentation to Elizabeth. It has a self certification in there.

So it's one of the two and I think the self certification is the one the lower barrier for staff administration and for the property owner itself.

And then this is actually, I think, more of a question for staff, but I noticed the 10 units. Do we have anything that is on the market right now that's less than 10 units?

I don't believe that we have any developments right now that are 10 units or fewer. That is a best practice is so that people don't have to build fractional units is what it comes down to. Because when you're asking people to build, you know, 5% of their units on-site at low income but their project is only 10 units, you don't want 5% of 10 units. So that's kind of what that comes down to is to keep nice whole numbers. I can't think of any off the top of my head that are that small and I'm getting confirmation from David that that he can't think of any either. And

let's see. I think the rest is just comments, so I appreciate everything so far. Any other questions?

Yeah, just a couple quick follow-up questions, and either for you or for staff. What does a home a single family home detached have to sell for to be in that low and very low range, roughly?

Oh, we have that.

I

believe we have that. Debbie, I'll try

to find We have it, yeah.

For you here.

Yeah, I missed that.

Got it. It was one of the I think it's this slide, yeah.

That's Sales price, okay. So $2.50 more or less than 150. Is that, I don't see the top header, but

We have that, it depends upon the size, but for example, if you're looking at a medium density single family detached, okay, so the market rate price for that is $950 A moderate income household, under the formulas, could pay about $490 for that house. A low income household could pay about $235 and a very low would be $148,000 For a townhome, for example, see the market rate, we are showing a price of $5.50. The moderate income household at 110 could pay $4.60. A low income $2.20, and then a very low 138. And then what else you can have with these problems, when you start having moderate prices being very comparable to market, you know, nobody's going to buy a deed restricted house when that differential is like $50,000 You come up with that money through some down payment assistance program or something, and you just wouldn't it doesn't work.

So, there's additional problems with that when you start having those kind of problems.

Yeah, so the for sale prices are pretty significantly below the

are, like the gap is huge. Like, the gap on that large single family detached was 890,000 a unit

Right. For the ability to afford it is the same for the very low income because their income is limited.

Yeah, it's based upon the formulas are based upon, yeah, their income and how many people live in their household. And so, relative to bedroom size, it's the bedroom count. Anyway, so Yeah.

So from a realistic standpoint, it seems on the rent side, I mean, even though it's, you know, 1,400 versus almost 2,800, so half. But but from a from a subsidy standpoint, it seems like it'd be more realistic to subsidize rental affordability versus

Well, there's no question. That's why

sale for affordability.

And that's why even with for sale, when you allow people to pay a fee, a developer to pay a fee, then you collect that fee revenue and then you leverage it on a tax credit project because we were talking about that question about how much does the city gap is? Usually that cost, the portion of cost of an apartment project, tax credit project, developer can come up with about 80% of that. So the 20% is the gap on that. And then so your money, leveraging is much more beneficial. And for you to meet your arena, you know? You can't meet your arena with for very low with for sale. Mean, and there are people that have income levels at very low, it's very difficult to own a house.

Yeah, and

then you've got all the other costs beyond just You buying

just can't afford it. So, anyway

No, think that helps.

That's the way to do it. I mean, lot of people don't like high density apartments but not all tax credit projects are high density. You know, there's a variety.

Yeah, great. Thank you. So on that, just really quick, on that, what would you say is the subsidy gap per unit? What if we were to say, if we this amount of units, what's the subsidy gap on, like for example, apartments?

Well, when we did our I'll just say it. If you look at like the CHW project at Oak And Pine, for example, the city the amount of funds that the city put into that, including the value of the land that you had, was about $79,000 a unit.

Thank you.

That's what it was. And some of them are less, like those USA properties are. This is where they've come into other funds, like they are able to use this mechanism with the ground lease and to secure funding out of the ground lease, and that is an unusual way that they are doing things. And that's, it really leverages the city's funds. But in general, and based upon our experience, usually, you know, the commercially available funding for affordable housing are tax credits for 4% income tax credits, not 9%.

And then you have a first mortgage, and then you have a deferred developer fee. And then we calculate the gap really beyond that, and then we're estimating it's like, you know, 100 and it could be up to $130,000 a unit. But like I said, the CHW project was 79.

And just to provide additional context, developers will reach out to the city's housing department, I mentioned on a weekly basis. That's really not an exaggeration. We'll get solicitation calls from developers regularly asking us if we have any funding to help them with their 100% affordable projects. And because we have such limited funding at this point, we really have to stick to the $40,000 for every very low and extremely low income unit. But they have usually these projects are a mix of both low and extremely low, very low. So they're really working to fill that gap even above that potential $40,000 that we could supply. So there is an extreme gap and every affordable housing developer will tell you that they just can't meet that gap even sometimes if we offer to provide that $40,000 per Yeah,

that's very creative. Like CHW used those recycling bonds, those 3,000,000 of recycling bonds to help close that gap. So it's tough, you know, it's tough. And the average affordability level is about 59% of AMI for those projects. So you get a nice mix of extremely low, very low, because they have to have those to get tax credits. So it serves a lot of purposes.

Mr. Mayor? Yes. Just one on the examples that you gave us from, I was looking at Folsom and Roseville, I don't think I saw Lincoln in there. Can you?

Oh, we just, it wasn't, but we did do some research on Lincoln. They don't have a program inclusionary as far as I know.

I'm just curious how they're meeting their

numbers. I don't know.

Thank you.

So we know what HCD does if you don't have your inventory. They can decertify you and get you in trouble. We know what they do when they see a jurisdiction turn down an affordable housing complex that they think should be approved. They sue them. If we don't produce these, I'm going call them arbitrary numbers do they sue jurisdictions for not doing that? Can you point me to one that they've sued?

You know, I don't know. I don't know all of that. I'm not a lawyer, but

I asked the question because, you know, this is a broader philosophical question. We can't force people to build HCD's numbers. We can't do that. That's not what we're here to do. And we're talking about making housing that is being built more expensive by putting in lieu fees or by doing the percentages.

Either way you slice it, we're talking about making housing more expensive. And we're talking basically about let's create a government driven program to achieve a government goal. And at what point do we just say, you know, why are we doing this? It it, you know, it seems like it's, you know, government engineering trying to come up to provide these incentives or or to provide these little gap financing for people. You know, here we sit, we've approved a lot of affordable housing in this town.

And some of it gets built, some of it doesn't get built. And then we see the developer come in and say, can I have another five years? And, you know, at what point, like, you know, I mean and some of them don't get the tax credits, you know, and and they're just left. And so I'm just kind of talking out loud here. I just feel like we're trying to do something to really micromanage a problem that's way beyond Rocklin, you know, the affordable housing.

I sit here still shaking my head over the idea that the state thinks that 70% of the housing built in this town should be at the moderate or lower end?

I think it's because of the income levels. When you look at the household income levels in all of California, you know, it's pretty shocking.

Yeah, I

We just are not. I mean, it's just there's just this huge disparity.

But, you know, one thing that we can say that others can't say, I moved here in 1999, the town was half the size in terms of people. We've built a ton of housing, alright, that communities in other parts of the state haven't done anything, let alone or even communities around here haven't done anything. And we've doubled our population and we haven't doubled it by not building housing, we've doubled it by building housing. And, you know, we've got a lot of people who've come here. Rockland's a great place to be.

But, you know, to sit here, like, now we have to contort ourselves more. And I'm gonna stop because I could go on and on. I don't wanna do that. So I get off my sub soapbox there. Alright.

I did want to ask you because you'd mentioned that there's a people that need housing. But when you say that, are we talking about homeownership or are we just talking about the question of the gaps between the homes for sale versus apartments? Are we saying that we just need more apartments? Because I think the homeownership thing, that sailed for people of lower income. So we're really just talking about building more apartments.

Well, from an administrative perspective and the bank, you know, leveraging your money, you get a lot more from your dollar by building apartments, by putting your money towards apartments. And some of those units will be low income. Like I said, the average AM, it's 60% of AMI, so that's kind of low. So you get that way you let the market rate handle the for sale really and then you focus on apartments unfortunately. I mean obviously lots of cities want to encourage home ownership.

You know, all want to be homeowners. I mean not everybody but you know a large percentage. The cost of that is very high and the administration of that is very high because that then a city has to then go through and certify that the that it's owned by that it's occupied by

an

owner and then you get into HOA dues going up and people can't afford those. I mean, I've been all through these progress.

Yeah. Just I just wanna make sure that we're clarifying what's what's the reality versus what we're really trying to achieve here, which if we're trying to achieve these numbers, we're not trying to we're really not going for homeownership. And I just wanted to make sure that we're we can have this conversation, but to the greater public, I don't want to give anyone the opinion that we're building housing that is meant to give people a gateway to homeownership, because that's not what's happening. That's a bigger issue. It's just

Well, some cities do that. They put all they require that you build on-site. And if you're building, you know, a 3,000 square foot home, some of them require that those affordable homes, you know, that 10% have to be affordable and some even require that those be 3,000 square foot. But, you know, other cities say that's just not what our public policy is, and it doesn't work very well, and it it doesn't create very many units, and so we're not doing that. It's all it's all a policy.

It it is a policy. We have it right now with the Quarry Row project, and the current ordinance in place requires on-site. So whether you're building a detached or attached project in Rockland, if you were gonna do it right now, you would be requiring that. And I think because there's a the state doesn't say for sale or for rent, they just make an assumption which is bearing out by the numbers that higher density is going to be easier to build. And so there's an assumption that a lot of those affordable projects are going to be rentals.

But there are also other programs that the city can explore especially in the next cycle, the housing element about first time homebuyer programs or things of that nature to try to help people get into homeownership if that's a goal of the city or the city council. So there's some opportunities that we can look at in other areas if that's a desire.

And I can understand that. I just don't given the infill nature of the rest of Rockland and the astronomical and comical numbers that were being given, I don't think that that is that juice is going to it's not going be worth the squeeze. So I'm just but we can have that that's part of a discussion.

Yeah. Mean, looking at the bottom line of the chart on our screen shows you what it currently takes to buy these units. 223%. It's not even close. It's even moderate.

And I say that in part because there's part of a letter that we're gonna get to from the VA that I agree with. And then, but also the fact that when we, if we conflate home ownership and square foot of a home versus what we're gonna be getting with an apartment, I think we're having two different conversations. And so when I see affordable, I don't conflate that with ownership. I just think affordable is apartments at this point because of our situation in Rockland, the astronomical numbers we have to hit. I would just want to be I think it's our job to be very transparent with the public of what we're talking about so that they don't think we're building affordable homes so that people can get into homeownership, but that they can, well, at this point survive in apartments and whatnot, because that's the only way we're gonna hit our numbers.

I'd say that everyone up here has a pretty sharp pencil, and we can do the math. That's where I see us being able to hit these numbers with the limited amount of land that we have. That's just my opinion. I don't see it happening with anything else. Is there any other questions?

Yes, let's move on.

Okay, great. All right. So now thank you for the presentation. We'll now move on to the public comment portion, and I will now open public comment.

Good evening, Mayor Bass and City Council. Jeff Short, North State that. You're I'm not I'm I'm you're to fair discussion I've seen on this topic from a consultant in a public agency that I've seen. So kudos to that. That said, I do want to point out some of these fundamental disagreements.

First of all, while I appreciate the city and the consultant for not only soliciting our feedback but unlike many jurisdictions actually incorporating that into their study we do think that there are still some fundamental problems with some of their assumptions about profitability and costs and what homes can sell for. We still take issue with anyone saying what an appropriate level of profit you know should be or can be in this type of a study. And of course ultimately we think that housing does not create the need for more housing. That is not we're the only industry that's actually providing housing and so blaming us for the need for more housing is an absolute backwards way to look at setting this fee. That said, if you're going to have an inclusionary zoning policy we absolutely still want you to have a fee.

We want that fee to be reasonable as I've discussed here many times. But I think it's important that we take a look at the purpose of the fee and that gets to the point that I think you were making right at the end there Mayor Bass. We think that there are two ways to generate affordable housing and it's not just Rocklin. It's jurisdictions in any circumstance trying to meet their arena numbers should be looking at and that is apartments, especially tax credit apartments and its ADUs. I did make a math mistake in the letter that I sent you.

It wouldn't be 95 homes, it'd be a 100 homes out of the 100 unit project paying the fee. So we actually think that based on that target of hitting the city's gap financing, the fee would actually be a dollar and 36¢ would equate to the $60,000 gap per unit that a 100 that you know that 100 unit project would have trying to get to that 5%. That said, we still hold that $2.50 is that competitive number that the planning commission asked you for. It's a fair number we think given the 5% requirement. It still is over what we believe our obligation would be while giving you some of those fees that you need.

I would also point out that fees can be flexible while we think they should be set and based and usually used for gap financing they could be used to tie up additional land for affordable housing if the city chooses to as well. With my last remaining second I do want to point out that ADUs are a tremendous could be a tremendous asset. There are builders not in this room who would be eager to add even deed restricted ADUs to their apartment if they could use that to meet their obligation. I've talked to them.

Stuck the landing. Alright.

Good evening. Good evening, Mayor Bass, members of the Rockland City Council. My name is John Talman. I'm with West Park Communities. 1430 Or 1420 Rocky Ridge Drive in Roseville. I as Jeff said, appreciate staff and the consultant's presentation. We fundamentally disagree with the notion that a new house generates the need for affordable housing. That means that each one of you that purchased a home created the need for affordable housing in Rockland and we just fundamentally can't see that connection. It also ignores the symbiotic relationship between land uses. You don't get commercial without rooftops.

And to suggest that it happens otherwise, it just doesn't follow the economics of land use. Single family housing comes first, commercial comes along, multi family, it all works together. And to say that single family homes generates the need for affordable housing because it demands services, forgets the fact that those services that they're paying for are generating sales tax that you all use to provide services to the residents of the community. That being said, we do understand that the home building industry is a component to the solution, not the single solution. We think a broad based approach to providing the funding for affordable housing is appropriate I.

E. A commercial linkage fee. I understand that it may be distasteful but it's part of what is important to the community. All segments of the community should be contributing to it. And if the fee is distasteful and commercial then perhaps taking some of the sales tax revenue that the new homeowners contribute to the community when they go and seek out those services can be used for that same source without asking the retailer to pay a fee.

With that though, I will say that we would ask you to consider as you're thinking about this fee over the next few weeks, that imposing a fee on new housing has a good potential pricing that young family out that wants to buy that house. You know, every house sold in Rockland is affordable. It's affordable to that buyer. And if you raise the cost of that home, you may price that family out and they won't either be able to live in Rockland or they may not be able to move up to the bigger house to provide for their family. So, we would ask that you consider every tool in the toolbox, ADUs, commercial fees, anything that you can do to provide affordable housing in Rockland.

We ask that we concur with the consultant's recommendation on a 5%. I agree with Jeff's compromise number of $2.5 a square foot. And again, would emphasize that some component of the commercial, whether it's an actual fee on commercial or some contribution from sales tax to provide for your affordable housing funds. With that, thank you very much for your time. All

right. Thank you. Do we have any other public comments? All right. Seeing none, close the public comment period out, bring it back, for questions and discussion. I want to start. Councilmember Gelda? Already. Okay.

No, I don't have any further questions. Okay. Other than, I guess, what we're looking for tonight. Are we, we at that timeline, I'm certain what you're looking for from us this evening.

Well, the timeline is tentative and we just wanted to put it out there because there have been many questions along the way about how long this process was taking and what the next steps were. What we're seeking tonight is the council's feedback and if we identify a consensus in terms of components to that would be put into revisions to either the current ordinance or if it was so significant that it warranted a repeal and replace what types of changes you would like to see, we'll take that down. We'll work with the consultant and the city attorney's office to make sure that we bring back something through the planning commission and council that meets that consensus direction and if there is any direction on what type of fee or fees if any you would like us to bring back for your consideration as part of a resolution that would happen as well This goes to right now the current ordinance on the books does have three components. You can build units on-site, you can build units off-site, or you can rehab units. It says you can pay a fee if such fee is established but as you know as of yet no fee has been established.

It doesn't contemplate ADUs as an alternative and it doesn't contemplate as you know it has the three specific criteria for the percentage that would need to be built which is based on low very low or extremely low units and ratchets backwards. So if you're going to build extremely low units it's 5%, 10% for very low and 15% for low. That's what is currently on the books for the city. Based on all of the feedback and the detail and all the very detailed analysis that Debbie and her team has done, we're seeking your direction on what changes, if any, you'd like to see to that program. Additions, modifications, and then again any direction on fees to consider.

I'm full of thoughts so I'm just going to rattle them off here. So to be blunt, my first preference is that we drop this whole idea of an inclusionary housing ordinance because it's gonna increase the price of housing and it, you know, imposes requirements on people to what end? So that maybe, maybe we'll get a few more affordable units and maybe the state will pat us on the head for doing for actually building things. But we don't build anything. And I just I don't see us really making a difference.

I see us disrupting the market and you know, when I look at what we have in the pipeline for affordability that we've, you know, whether it's The USA properties on University Avenue, the Sierra College Apartments, the Pacific Street Apartments. You know, we've got all those things in the pipeline without an inclusionary housing policy. And all of those things have moved along. So I think, you know, I just don't think that the state is gonna come after us for not actually producing housing because we don't produce housing as a city. That's not our job.

So if we're gonna go forward with something, you know, to me, I wouldn't include apartments because I just don't think there's any room there to get more out of these apartment buildings until we have a dramatic change in the fee equation for apartments today. I think I'm more comfortable with something on single family housing, an in lieu fee on single family housing. And I mean, I don't even think it matters what percentage we put on single family housing because it's not gonna happen. Nobody's gonna do it. But, you know, maybe we even have that graduated where smaller single family housing has a lower in lieu fee than larger single family housing.

And we could have a little bit of a scale because I do think want builders to be thinking about the 1,500 square foot house that maybe somebody can attain, not as an affordable house, but something that they can attain with their income. So if we're going do an in lieu fee, I think we should think about that. On the commercial side, I've watched and I've stayed in close contact at Whitney Ranch Retail, which is our big new commercial thing. And in all likelihood, we're gonna have almost no family owned businesses. There might be a few exceptions out there.

And I've tried to encourage family owned businesses to go there and the answer is always the same. The cost of new construction in California makes it prohibitive. So again, do we wanna add just more to that and make it even harder for people to do something? And the reality is we're not awash in new commercial constructions that's gonna be happening in this town anyhow. You know, But those are my thoughts.

I I really I do hope that the council steps back. I know we've been on this path, but we don't have to stay on this path when it comes to, you know, doing an inclusive housing ordinance. You know, pointed out Roseville basically doesn't have one. They can cook all kinds of things into their specific plans, but that's like a development agreement, basically, that they're doing and they're horse trading. But if somebody wants to go do an infill project in Roseville today, there's no inclusionary housing ordinance over in Roseville today.

And we see some of our other neighbors, I don't think anything's being built in Loomis, whatever. You know, and I think people can't really understand what doing over there. But, you know, and I'm sorry, did we hear anything about Lincoln? Is Lincoln doing anything? Nope, Lincoln's not doing anything. That's enough for me. Sorry, don't want to talk too long.

Great way to kick it off. So, a couple quick questions. You mentioned, Ali, that a current option is to build off-site. Is that contributing to someone else's project or they have to go do another project?

So the ordinance is pretty open ended intentionally to give flexibility for that. But if, say, a development were to come in on a parcel and they have a 15% inclusionary requirement to build those low units, let's say for ease of math, it's a 100 unit project, so they would have to build 15 at low. Right? They have the ability instead to build those units elsewhere in the city. Now whether that would mean contributing financially to another project, whether that would mean just building 15 individual units, the ordinance doesn't specify. So I think that would be a negotiation at the city council level through a development agreement to discuss how that

would go forward. Possibly have an in lieu fee already based on that. Because the probability of someone who can't build 15 units out of a 100 to go build 15 a 100% is slim to none. But but they would most likely be able to to contribute to a project to to 15 units.

If that was something that we thought was appropriate and the city council agreed that that was an appropriate way for them to meet their obligation, then I believe that the ordinance is flexible enough to allow that. I mean, would look to Google counsel if my interpretation of that is wrong. Yeah.

And then does the current emergency ordinance have an end date?

It is not an emergency ordinance. It is just a regular ordinance. So there is no end date.

There's no end date. So the only thing we can do is repeal it, which I support, or add a add an option of of an in lieu fee in addition to that. Or completely wipe it out and come up with a new ordinance which we don't have in front of us.

Right. At a at a separate agenda city council meeting, if that was the direction of city council, we would have to obviously agenda is repealing that, but we could also amend it. And so if you wanted to make tweaks to the affordability levels, if you wanted to add any other options to the ordinance, it's like any other ordinance, you have the ability to either repeal and replace, or you can make amendments, or you can entirely remove it. Again, I'm looking to legal counsel if that's not incorrect. But it's an ordinance. You certainly do away with it entirely.

Yeah. I I pretty much agree with everything the vice mayor said. Don't touch commercial. I mean, we don't have a lot of commercial left. What we have isn't easy to come by. I completely understand the argument presented, but at this point, where the city is in its development is not feasible. Yeah. And everything else Councilmember Holden said, I support. Thanks.

You know, I think what you hear on the conversation, and probably for me the frustration is, I understand why we're having the conversation and doing this, but we're just too late in the game, quite honestly, for this. What we gain is not going to get us what we want, is my concern. It's not going to give us generate a ton of income that we're know, other cities have the ability to provide some property, or they have been doing this and they have some funding resource. I feel like we're going through a process with great intent, but I don't know that it's going to do us what we were hoping that it would do, because I just don't think we're going to generate a lot. And I totally get the conversation and the idea behind the commercial, but we are so focused on preserving the little commercial that we have, and encouraging that I just can't see touching a commercial.

You know, I guess that's the frustration. I get why the intent to do this, but I think it's just a little late in the process, quite honestly, for us to be doing this now. I think we could have, years past, we could have generated some money to help, provide some incentive. I don't know that this is going to provide much incentive. I think on the other side, as the Vice Mayor said, we don't build units.

We zone for them. We're not building for those units. We do I think the concern is what comes at us. We don't do this, and we don't do anything to help incentivize, I know in January we're going to get new numbers. I have got one heck of a job ahead of me to try and negotiate that process.

If we were going to do anything, the $5 fee is way too high for me. Why would I be higher than the Placer County, or I probably could live with a $3 fee. I could live with that if I had to do it. But I'm just not sold that getting the fee is going to help us. I really don't know that we're going to gain anything.

Yeah, I if anything, I'd be supporting something that was tiered. And by that, I mean unless you're going to be building luxury, and then at that point, you know, thanks for coming up here and selling your home in another more expensive place and you've got the money to do it. Other than that and even then that's where I'd be comfortable with the $5 and that's when you're building a 4,000 square foot home. I think after that, we're punishing homeownership. We're not encouraging it.

So even at 2,500 square feet, a $2 is where I'd be. I don't like the idea of us constantly tacking on the fees. I mean, the cost of home building itself has all kinds of villains within that pocket. We could spend all night talking about all the things that could be cheaper. But at this point, the idea of adding more fees to the single family homes, we're going to have to get more paying out of it.

I don't know if we're necessarily out of time. I definitely did my best to get through everything, and compliments to the consultant for two things. One, I did think that you did a great job, but also the fact that you're being complimented by people in the room that are very smart that I've talked to and I've had. I don't even know if they're ex partes anymore. We're just having conversations about housing and these guys know their stuff.

Jeff knows his stuff. To get the compliment of the integrity of your report, Thank you for putting that together. So I guess there was a lot of information in there. I'm not convinced necessarily that we're out of time. It's just a matter of how we're gonna, if we were to spread any kind of in lieu fee, so that we're not hurting homeownership itself.

So on the more expensive homes, I'm fine with some kind of fee, but once you start getting down there in square foot, which are obviously more geared towards families that are maybe in the entry level. I'd like to see that not occur. But also going back to the conversation we had about where we're putting this money, we're really gonna be putting what money we have into the gaps for rentals.

And I do add that tiered piece, I think, is really critical and important. And also, just reminding myself, remember when we Doug first started and working on that project, and they did say the fees that they're paying for sewer, in particular, some of the things that we don't control, were higher than what they paid in the Bay Area for that development. So that's really I mean, when you have big commercial people saying, How in the world can these fees be this high for a couple of the restaurants that are going in there? That really is, you know, we've been focusing on trying to control our fees, and then now we're looking to do fees. But if we do, I totally agree.

We're trying to do a 1,500 square foot or smaller home. We need to incentivize folks that are starting out first time homeowners. If it's something, and I'd probably be closer to 3,000. If it's 3,000 feet and over,

yeah, I

could probably live with a fee for that.

So, think I do wanna just talk about it, mention a couple other things, because I do appreciate Mr. Tallman's comments about how the fees are affecting everyone. And I think we're probably in the same we actually are in more agreement than anything. We just happen to be the messenger on what we're doing here and the fees that we're even contemplating. It's the same thing with fire zoning, where the state forces us to all agree on fire zones, even though we don't agree that Sierra College Football Field is a high fire zone.

But then everybody's insurance goes up, right? And it's our fault. So, the pushback, when we're talking about what will the state do, And that's where I would probably maybe slightly disagree with the vice mayor, is whether the state will come after us, because we've been following the state and who it pays attention to and who it doesn't. And I do think that we have a target on our back for whatever reason. Maybe it's my comments.

But I do think that we are under a microscope, and so I worry that if we don't find the solution, at least trying to find the solution, if we just give up, not give up, but if we have this level of defiance and not at least attempt a solution, that's maybe sending its own message. And that's why I say I'd prefer a tier where we're looking at a high square footage of over like 3,000 square feet, and they all come down. I'll negotiate against myself, you know, dollars 4, dollars 3. But going below that, I don't think is worth it. So I guess what I would also say, and what I was getting at in the beginning about the complexities of this issue, and really the weight of what the consultant has done, is that getting the report, going through it, having these discussions is a part of it.

I don't wanna throw it out. I won't vote for throwing it out completely, but I would think that the only way we can count to three on this out of five is if we see something that is tiered and focuses on the higher square footage, and that's about it. So it's not gonna be something that goes after, you know, the lower square footage homes and entry level homes. That's just my opinion. I'm open to further discussion where we might come with a compromise.

I guess I have a question. Let's put aside the percentage idea for a second and just have a fee. Is it permissible to just have a fee on certain homes that are x square feet or more and use it for your housing program? Or does that create some kind of legal mumbo jumbo?

So I would ask, Debbie, if I get anything incorrect, please by all means hop up. But the ability to establish the in lieu fee is because it is a fee in lieu of constructing the units. That's why the in lieu fee does not have to comply with the mitigation fee act. If you were to individually just levy a fee on a type of development, I believe that that would follow that, and so it would

be a different analysis. Modifications to the ordinance would have to include saying that the inclusionary requirement is only on developments of units of x square footage, and then in lieu of the inclusionary requirement.

And we could we could say the inclusionary requirement is 5%, 10%, whatever. Nobody's going to do it. And then here's the fee.

I think it would be in that vein.

Yeah. You can certainly levy different fee amounts for different sizes of units, but you have to understand, you put whatever the threshold the per square foot kind of naturally doesn't because a 1,500 square foot house with a $3 fee pays less than a 3,000 square foot house. If you have something that's just based on a threshold of size, you you will get houses, all the houses that are built will be a little bit less than that threshold.

Not in Rockland.

Well, I'm just saying. The other thing you is know, the prices that housing costs yes if you make housing if you add costs but the prices that people pay are based upon market demand.

Yeah and I get that and I want to make very clear that when I made that comment it is because we are running out of land. We're building on top of ridges that are pristine and we're giving them up, unfortunately, to these big gigantic houses. So if we're going to basically completely destroy our horizon, we might as well get the fees out of that as opposed to whatever else is gonna be built in Rockland. And that's all I'm getting at because we're literally at the point now in Rockland where any one of us knows exactly what project is going up where by the time they are starting to put the shovels in the ground, it doesn't become theoretical anymore. And we're way beyond theoretical here.

So it's what homes are gonna be built, these gigantic homes in certain areas that we can then at least get some fees out of and then not burden the rest of them. And that's all I'm getting at. And I don't think that this type of fee is gonna keep anybody from building on the Ridge of Clover Valley and saying, you know what, I'm gonna put a townhome up here instead of the garage where my Ferrari and my five Porsches get to stack up on top. That's a true story.

No, no, you could certainly have higher fees on different size units. I would just make it so it's easy to implement, that's all. So you do the best practices are you don't establish fees per unit, you do it on a per square foot basis. But you can have different categories of homes and have different, you know, have a tiered layer of tiering of of fees.

I'm just inspired by Roseville. I wanna come up with something super unique and and interesting for housing. Thank you.

So we could do then a dollar a square foot if you're 1,500 square feet and lower, and 2,500 square feet, you're $2, and 3,000, you're $3 and 3,000 over.

Does that make it impossible to administer? I'm just curious.

We already administered fees on a per square footage basis. So, I don't want to speak out of turn for David and his team, but they would have the analysis for each of the homes that are being developed. The fees would have to be calculated on each of the individual square footages, but it is possible.

I get what you're saying. It's already done by the square footage, but I think that is a clear indicator of what we're trying

to do also. And I'm also just trying to see if I can get to three. If we're going to do something of this nature that's palatable, I'd like to be five. But, you know, and if we can move the numbers around, it doesn't sound like everyone's completely against a fee, but where is it gonna be manageable for everyone here?

That could be implemented, something like that. We just need to make sure that we have a structure in place before we bring it back to

you. Right.

I mean, I I still hold by my preference to remove it completely. I understand the state. Well, we don't really understand the state. That's the thing. But there's no building requirement yet. And that's a major movement, I think, for that to happen. That would be catastrophic. So, by putting this in place to potentially get the state off our back, it's almost like we're going beyond what's being required, which I don't so that's sort of I'm not that concerned from that. So, I would prefer to repeal. I mean, any time you add a fee, one of two things are going happen.

We're going to get less units because the cost is going to go up or you're going to get more expensive of what does get built because that's going to get passed on, bottom line. I guess if something came back and it was $1 a foot for 3,000 or more square feet, in the examples, ridge tops you talked about, might be palatable. But again, that number is limited. I don't really know what that's going to generate. And is it even going to move the needle? And then we're doing all this for a very little gain. That's kind of where I'm still at.

So, I mean, I'll my first choice is that we've we not feel like we have to do this because we've spent time talking about it, because we've spent time studying it, that we now feel like, oh, we've got to do this. And I just I recoil a bit at this whole government engineering for a result that, you know, it's let's let's it's a wing and a prayer. Like, let's see if we can manipulate people to get to this, you know, end goal and, so my first preference is

that

we repeal the ordinance we've got and say we took a good look at it and we feel like this is the best course. The idea that we are very much an infill community at this point. There's not much for people to do here. So if we had been looking at this twenty years ago, thirty years ago, maybe we could have had a system that would have made more sense. But I think I'm afraid of just creating more complexity for, you know, than it's worth.

And just, you know, again, every fee we put on increases the cost of housing. We know that to be sure.

Yeah. So, we have

go ahead. Well, I think it's important that we, and I say nobody's wrong in this conversation, but I think that there needs to be a way to consider meeting in the middle somehow to make this work. Just knowing from our past conversations and what I anticipate in our future conversations, I think we need to be open to look at something that we could do that would be a reasonable meet in the middle.

Just real briefly, I don't want to discount this whole process. I supported this process. I think this is very well worth going through. This report is fantastic. It's super detailed. Hats off to the team that put this together. But for me, I needed this information in order to kind of get where I'm comfortable going. So, didn't say that earlier. I just wanted

to get that out there. All right. Well, I have to say we're it looks like we're at an impasse of two that want to give you further direction in one way and two that want to give you direction in the other. No action needs to be taken at this time.

No action needs to be taken at this time. I know it's difficult tonight because we have an even number up on the day. It's so difficult to to move it one way or the other. Originally in the conversation, council vice mayor Halden and councilor verjanda had said, prefer repeal, but and so I don't know if you would like us to continue working towards that but or potentially just place it on a future agenda for further discussion. I can do that as well.

Yeah, my preference is to repeal. I mean, don't need to see it come back, but that's me.

And if I mean, I'm good with the repeal. But what I don't wanna do is to not repeal and not do anything because then then we're doing something, which is letting letting what's in place

Correct. Because it doesn't make sense. At this point, if we walk away right now with no direction, then the current ordinance stays

Right.

As is. Yeah.

And I think that's important because that was one of the things we heard from the community is give us an option in lieu of option if we have this in place. I and I and I say, to be fair, if we were a full council tonight, I think there would be some robust discussion happening. And I think it's fair to have that full conversation. I say I I'm I'm somewhere in the middle, though, quite honestly. But I I'm not ready to repeal and do that or just give that direction without a full counsel here now.

And and I think without asking Debbie to come back again, we could agendize some options on this. I hear conversation about a tiered system and maybe a little bit more discussion about options for ADUs. If you're interested, we could agendize a discussion in April on those pieces only, if you think that would be helpful when we have when we believe we'll have a full council. I know, obviously, when there's an emergency situation like tonight, we can't control for it.

But I mean, for for me, if something came back to consider, I would also like an option of the repeal. I I don't know if that could be part of part of the package. You know, an option. Either here's an ordinance, tweak it, approve it, or here or you can repeal this one. Or does it have to come back completely separate?

Well, at this point, we're still just waiting for you to give us feedback on how to amend the ordinance. What I was considering in my mind was I've heard a little bit about tiered numbers based on certain per square footages. And so could we model out some estimates of what that could look like and how many, you know, by density, how what what type of dollars would that generate? Would that move a needle? Is there any concerns to have a conversation with the BIA just to see if they've seen anything that just do a little bit more research? But again, I'm just looking for ways to provide more options if that's what this group desires.

So I think it would be interesting based on what you've heard from us, which we might not agree on the repeal, but we do seem to have a little bit of a chatter about hey, maybe we have some fee on some larger single family homes. Maybe you come back for something like that. The repeal doesn't take a lot of staff work, don't think, because it's repeal. I mean, we want to just repeal

And you don't have to agenda. Mean, that doesn't have to be on. That's just an option as we have this conversation. I think it would be I think having some one more I think it's this is such an important issue that having another conversation with the full council. Let's look at those options of some tiering or staggering. And I say that you don't have to list it, but that's always an option.

Yeah. And some of my questions earlier related to how much fees can this generate, how does that translate into a number of units, I'm interested in that. So anything that comes back with options, I want to know what would that result in. Is it just a pot of money that we can't really do much with, or is it a significant amount and what we can get for it? So, yeah, I'm open to that.

And I fully agree because we need to know what it means to us. Is it worth that effort to do it? What does it get us? I think that's a great and as far as sizes, you guys know better than anybody what the numbers are on square footage. I think you would have a better idea to