Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

All right. We'll call this meeting to order of the Planning Commission, Thursday, August 28th, 2025. Roll call, please.

Roll call is as follows. Chairperson Orloff.

Present.

Commissioner Lam. Present. Commissioner Epstein. Commissioner Austin Dillon.

Here.

Commissioner Campbell.

Present.

All commissioners are present.

Great. Item two, reading of the land acknowledgement. The City of Roanoke Park acknowledges indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of the land. Let it be acknowledged that the City of Roanoke Park is located within the traditional homeland of the Federated Indians of Great and Rancheria, comprised of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples. Can we please rise for the pledge? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Item four, public comment. Persons who wish to speak to the commission on any consent calendar item or any item not on the agenda may do so at this time. Each speaker will be allotted three minutes. Are there any speakers? Seeing none, we'll move on to item five, consent calendar. Can I have a motion to approve the minutes of Thursday, May 22nd, 2025?

I motion to approve the minutes from Thursday, May 22nd, 2025.

Is there a second?

I second.

All those in favor? Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Opposed? Motion carries 5-0. All right, item 6.1. We'll have a presentation, informal presentation on the general plan 2040 update. I'll turn this over to Ali, who will introduce Barry Miller.

Thank you, Chair, and good evening, planning commissioners. Tonight, Barry Miller is joining us to provide kind of an update on what's happening with the general plan. We've been working on the general plan for some time, and we're getting to a point where we are getting close to releasing the updated document with a draft EIR, so we thought it would be helpful to provide a presentation and kind of give you some information on what it'll look like in the next several months. Barry Miller, I've worked with Barry Miller for quite a while on other projects, other general plans in other jurisdictions, and he's done an amazing job and is I imagine we'll be doing an amazing job with this project. So with that, I'll just go ahead and punt it over to Barry to begin the presentation.

Great. Thank you, Ali, and good evening, commissioners. I think it's been a while since you've had a briefing specifically on the general plan, and some of you may be new to the commission since the last presentation. So we're going to go through some material fairly quickly, and if you have questions or comments, we can cover those at the conclusion. It's a fairly short presentation, mostly just to keep you in the loop on some of the upcoming steps and where we've been, where we are, and where we're going with the general plan update. So first of all, I think most of you are aware of what the general plan is. We're gonna talk about the timeline for adoption, some of the highlights, and the draft EIR, and then next steps. So this is kind of an overview, high level, of what the general plan is. It's the community's vision for the future. We call it the Constitution for development, for land use and development. It is a physical plan, so it's focused on how and where the city will grow in the future. The general plan is required by state law, and what that means is that there are sections of the government code and various statutes that govern what must be in a general plan. There are also state general plan guidelines that talk about how you can organize, how you should organize your general plan, and what topics you cover. So this is a long-term plan. It is 20 years in the future. The current general plan was done in 2000, looks out to the year 2020. We are beyond that horizon at this point, and so the city began this plan update just prior to 2020 with the intent of moving the needle forward to 2040 and creating a plan that was forward-looking, that's thinking about what kind of community we wanna be in the year 2040. The plan is comprehensive, so you'll see in a moment it covers a wide variety of topics. It also covers all land within the jurisdiction as well as unincorporated areas adjacent to the city in what we call our planning area and sphere of influence. These are unincorporated lands that are of interest to the city, and they're also part of this plan. The plan is organized into goals, policies, and implementation programs. They're sort of a hierarchy. Goals are the broad statements, the aspirational statements about what we want to be. Policies guide our day-to-day decisions, and implementation programs are really more specific things that can be assigned to city departments that say by this year we're gonna do this task and so forth to implement these policies and move us toward 2040. So this is the time horizon. For the plan, you can see where we've been in this slide. The project began in 2018, so we're actually about seven years in at this point. That's a little long for a general plan. These are long-term projects, but this is usually four to five year time. It usually takes about that long to do the plan. We had a number of stops along the way, including the housing element, which all jurisdictions had to kind of divert their resources in 2022 and 23 to focus on getting the housing element certified. That's part of the general plan, but it stands on its own. It's subject to a lot of state requirements and state deadlines. We also had the pandemic in 2020, 2021. The work on the plan did continue through that time period, mostly virtual. What you can see on the slide is that there's sort of a sequence of gathering information about current conditions, creating a vision for the city, looking at different options for how the city might grow, then developing the policies, putting the draft plan together, which takes us to around 2022, and getting the housing element adopted, which was in 23. Where we are right now is at step nine, which is final revisions to the plan and adoption. So this is actually not a slide that's supposed to be in my presentation. I'm gonna skip this one. Let's go to this one. And this is a overview of what's required by the state. In the columns that go across, you see land use, circulation, housing, conservation, noise, open space, safety, air quality, and environmental justice. So basically, the state says that we have to have all of those topics covered in our plan. We don't have to have those be the title of each of the chapters of our plan. And what Roanert Park has done is combine some of the chapters and taken themes that are sort of overlapping, that are relevant to each other, and come up with a slightly different organization. And you can see in the rows of this table the names of the elements in Roanert Park's plan. So racial and social and economic justice and so forth. These are the elements of the plan with the housing element standing on its own. What I want to point out here is that we have a couple of optional elements that are not required by the state, but are relevant to the future of the city. One is economic development. that focuses on the future of our economy and finances. Another is climate change, which looks at that issue, which is cross-cutting and affects all of the topics relating to how we grow. And another is public facilities and services. That is also considered an optional element, meaning we're not required to do that. That looks at things like libraries and parks and other public facilities. Those are critical to the future of the city. So public outreach has been occurring throughout this process, particularly during that early phase. So 2018, 2019, there were a lot of community events to gather input on the plan. There are more than 1,000 people on the mailing list for this project, so quite a robust outreach program. with farmers market exhibits and pop-up workshops, workshops where we're at a community event, a town hall meeting, there was a visioning workshop, there were nine study sessions with the city council and multiple study sessions with the planning commission, mostly 2018 and 19, and a number of other city boards and commissions were involved. We also have been doing tribal consultation with the Federated Indians of Great Rancheria as part of this process that is required by state law, and it's been very robust and extensive and has made some positive changes to the general plan as a result of the input from, at this point, I think our 10th consultation will be on Tuesday. Wednesday, sorry, next week. This is the overall vision for the city that's in the general plan, that we are a thriving, family-friendly community that's safe, enjoyable, and safe, enjoyable place to live. The chapter of the plan called Our Vision, Our Future goes through different sub-areas of the city and talks about the vision for each of those areas. There are focus areas in the plan. Okay, I am seeing now that this is actually not my presentation, so I may have to skip through some of this. Yeah, it is the wrong one, so let me just, yeah. This is the presentation that we took out. Yeah, so pardon my advancing through this. Okay, we're gonna go straight to the next steps in the future timeline. and spare you the long version. All right, let's stop here. The Draft Environmental Impact Report. We did want to cover the draft EIR with you a little bit because the next time we're here with you talking about the general plan, the subject will be a public meeting to consider input on the draft EIR, which is going to be released in roughly two months. So you'll have a draft EIR. The general plan is considered a project under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, and there has been an environmental impact report prepared for this project. We call this a program level EIR because we're not looking at the impacts of one individual development project. We're looking at kind of the cumulative effect of development in Roanoke Park over the 20-year period of the general plan, thinking what are the effects of growth happening in this particular pattern, in this particular quantity, on all of the topics that you see in this box on the right-hand side of the slide. And the general plan analyzes potential impacts and also includes mitigation measures where needed to address those impacts for some of these topic areas. There will be a 45-day comment period after the draft EIR comes out. and the intent is that this commission will have a public meeting and listening session to hear comments from the community during that 45 days, so there's an opportunity for the public to address you verbally as well as to submit comments in writing. So during that 45 days, the document will be available for review by other agencies, state departments, different state offices, and by the community at large, and there'll be that opportunity for folks to come here. So you'll receive a presentation on the EIR during that meeting from the EIR consultant, and then there'll be an opportunity for the public to speak, there'll be an opportunity for the commission to ask questions about the EIR, and there's no resolution, there's no action at that point, it's strictly an opportunity for public comment. Okay, I'm gonna go on to the next slide, which, yes, good. This is what we wanted to see. So this is the draft. This is the schedule right here on the screen. We are showing September 22nd. It may be a week or two after September 22nd when the document is actually published. And at that point, we begin that 45-day comment period. And there will be the meeting I just described will take place then. The general plan is also going to be released at that time. So the draft general plan will be out for public review, and around the first of October is what we're talking about now. This slide hasn't been updated. The final EIR would be in roughly December, and then we would be holding adoption hearings at the beginning of 2026. So there are adoption hearings before the Planning Commission, you will have a resolution to consider at that point that recommends that the city council adopt both the EIR and the general plan, and be acting on that resolution following a public hearing, and then the document will go to the city council for their consideration in early 2026. So sorry for the jumbled slides there. Anyway, I'm here to answer questions, is also available to answer questions on the project as well.

Thank you. Thanks, Barry. Appreciate the presentation. I'll open it up to the commission. Commissioner Epstein, questions for staff?

No, not at this time. I'm excited about getting into the EIR, though.

Great. Commissioner Campbell? I have some questions, but I think I'll wait until the draft EIR comes out and can go into detail then. Thank you, though. Commissioner Austin-Dillon.

So where does the downtown development fit into this plan?

So specifically it's covered in the community development section and in the vision section. So there's an overview of the downtown plan. But the downtown plan continues to kind of live on its own as a more specific focus plan for that area. This is kind of the higher level umbrella which envisions the downtown plan being carried out as well as the other plans for other parts of the city, kind of looks at the big picture of how it all adds up. But there would continue to be the downtown plan standing on its own.

All right, Vice Chair Lam.

So this EIR will be the last part of the general plan. If we get that approved in early 2026, then the whole general plan will be finalized.

That's correct. You'll be approving both, or you'll be making a recommendation to the city council on both the general plan EIR and the general plan at the same time.

At the same time, got it, thank you.

I have no questions. Again, thanks, Barry. Appreciate your time. Nice presentation. We'll move on to item seven, code compliance activity. Oh, I'm sorry.

I apologize. I may have missed it, but did you open public comment yet in case anyone from the public had any comments?

I'm sorry. I did ask for... I did not, I guess. Was this a public...

Just for this item.

Oh, sorry, 61B, there we go. Is there any public comment? I'll open it up for public comment. Seeing none, close public comment. Sorry about that, thank you, thank you. All right, it's sitting right in front of me. We'll move on to item seven now. Code compliance activity update. I'll turn that over to, is it Christine or Ally's gonna present?

Yes, I'll go ahead and take it. So I don't believe Eric has, maybe he has presented before your commission before, but Eric is our code enforcement manager. He prepares an annual presentation to the city council, giving the city council an update on what's been happening with code enforcement, code compliance. and provides quite a bit of data to kind of give the council an understanding of, you know, kind of the breakup of our code enforcement activities. And in prior meetings with the Planning Commission, your commission has expressed an interest in receiving some additional information on code enforcement activities, and we thought this would be a good way to provide that bringing forward the planning, the City Council presentation and committing to doing that annually so that you are getting that same information the City Council's getting and maybe combining it every December we provide a development activity report and perhaps bringing the code enforcement compliance activity report as part of that presentation for future years. So with that, I'll go ahead and pass it over to Eric, who will provide you the presentation.

Hi, I'm Eric Steffens. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me. First time here before you, so I appreciate the opportunity to present our code compliance activity report, which we, as Ali indicated, we do present to the city council and then be able to answer any questions that you have related to our code compliance activity. I'll jump right in here. So key updates for 2024, we transitioned from, in terms of our case management platform, from GoGov to CodeTrack, which better integrates building permits and things like that, before they're two standalone platforms that we didn't really communicate to well. So it really integrated the movement from one platform to another, integrated our code compliance management software a little bit more effectively so that we can better manage our cases we were able to affect pretty significant title one amendment and in cleanup where we very much cleaned up the title one is our sort of the backbone of gives us our enforcement authority and and along with our citation process and so that was a very significant cleanup that we were able to effectuate which which has greatly improved our ability to enforce more effectively and smoothly. Overall case, we had a 22% decrease in cases from 2023 to 2024, which I think highlights the fact that we're just more effective in our enforcement overall. So we'd like to see that number down to zero, right? But we will not ever get there, but we are doing good work out there. So in this slide, you can see an overall trend in terms of new cases that have come in, a little dip in 2020 with COVID, and then it spiked up significantly back up, peaking in 2023 with 1,672 cases. Then I came on board, we did some structural changes, and then we were able to reorganize some code enforcement programs where we did a little bit more. We were able to reduce that number. a little better, more effectively. This just tells you some of the cases that we were working and some of the decreases and increases that we had. Overall, you can see decreases on almost every category, with the exception of public nuisance and public property violations, we see a little bit of an increase there. Permit violations, a little bit of an increase there. So those were one of the things that I'm most proud of is our shopping cart blight. We had a lot of blight, did a lot of effective enforcement there, and we've been able to bring that number way down. That was the thing that most seems to be the most plaguing to our community. It's that livability of our community. And that's really where we're focused is where, you know, making the community safer and more livable and addressing some of this blight and things like that. New cases by categories, another interesting graph in 2024, just shows you kind of the bulk of our cases. Predominantly they're shopping cart blight cases. Secondly, seconded only by property and public nuisances. And then homeless related issues, business and signage. Business license, we do, look at business license, so we did combine that category with signage. Signage is a very, very small number in the cases that we do receive. So we did combine those two categories. And citation and penalty trend. Overall, we issued more citations from 2023 to 2024, and the amount of those citations were much more significant. It just shows that we're being more, as you can see, we're trending down, so the citations are actually doing what they're designed to do, which is bring compliance. Although, let me just, there's a small caveat there. We do, our overall enforcement model is service before enforcement, so we really try to work with people before we start issuing citations. I mean, we give a pre-citation, a warning, and then people can call us and connect with us and extend those deadlines out so we can work with people to get compliance. We don't go right to citation. So we really want to work with folks in the community to try to get them, bring them into compliance, and this is sort of our last tool to get that done. And then new proactive initiatives that we stood up, Unpermitted Food Vendor Task Force, Um, we did get, uh, see quite a lot of unpermitted food vendors in the community. So we set up a task force and food vendors. It's, it's a challenging, it's a challenging thing to address. So it really, it's really bringing together multiple agencies, the county, um, law enforcement, public safety, fire code compliance. It's really a multi discipline sort of, um, problem to attack. So we brought together a task force to have those conversations and figure out what the best way is to move forward. Sidewalk obstructions and then graffiti abatement. So some of the new proactive and proactive enforcement initiatives. And just again another little small asterisk, our overall compliance model is reactive and not proactive. So it's really just moving forward with complaints that we receive. from the general public. If we do notice some significant trends coming forward, put together that analysis, bring it forward to executive leadership, Director Judice, and have those conversations about what the next step would be. And upon authorization from executive, the executive staff, then we will put together a proactive, a very narrowly focused proactive initiative to address whatever is trending in our community. But overall, it's a reactive model. Just a little bit of work that we're out there doing in the community. Graffiti abatement in the sense that holding private property owners responsible for abating graffiti on their property in a timely manner. This is sort of that broken window theory. This is the kind of stuff that really detracts from the community livability in our view. You see graffiti, blight, shopping cart blight, things like that. Really out there looking for that and opening cases and trying to get that stuff addressed pretty quickly. Continued some new proactive initiatives that we identified. We continue to do the shopping cart blight and abandoned shopping carts in the creeks and everywhere else. Looking for that and abating that. Hazardous weeds is another initiative that we felt was pretty concerning with the fire danger. addressing hazardous weeds in our community and working with our fire prevention. They predominantly do the hazardous weeds on commercial property, so our initiative is focused on private property, but really marrying those two enforcement efforts together to create a safer community. Homelessness issues is another proactive initiative. We have a dedicated compliance officer that really is actively looking for concerns, issues with our unhoused population, addressing the things that are sometimes associated with that, which is trash and debris and other things, and also offering and trying to get those folks into services. So having a really balanced approach of understanding who they are, where they are, trying to, you know, keep our community safe and clean while at the same time trying to help them to navigate into some services. So we have an officer that's dedicated almost solely to that. And then business license compliance, ensuring that our, you know, there's a level playing field for our business community in terms of just, if you're gonna operate in the community, you have to have required business license. And with that initiative, we, Once we identify a business that doesn't have a business license, we send out information to them and get them really trying to reach out, again, in an education outreach fashion, getting those folks to get their business license. And we really, I mean, we do have an ability to move forward with a stronger enforcement, but really the focus of that is education and outreach. Again, it's service before enforcement in everything that we do. And with that, that's just a general overview of our program. I'll open it up if there's any questions.

Thanks, Eric. Great presentation. We have a speaker card for Bess McKay, so I'll invite her to the podium.

Okay, is this on? Come on, okay, great. Thank you again for entertaining me. You may remember I was here on May 8th challenging the Walmart expansion due to a variety of reasons. During that meeting, myself and my neighbors, we became very aware through that presentation from Walmart of certain limitations that were put on them through their, what do they call it, CPU, And so one of the things that we all came away with was that we needed to report things. We needed to make code enforcement aware. We, in some cases, need to call the non-emergency police. And the New City website, by the way, sorry Eric, has made this much easier for a lot of people to find where they need to go to report things, as well as using the email and the phone number. I guess what I'm here just to kind of give some feedback is although we've been doing this, I'm not feeling like myself or my neighbors who I spoke with before I came are getting responses or adequate responses. Sometimes it goes into a black hole. Sometimes I get a note that says, oh, well, we're not open during this time. You need to call the non-emergency police. An example of that is two weeks in a row now After midnight, we've had people in Mountain Shadows Plaza. One night, leaf blowing, 12.45 a.m. The following week, another night after midnight, they were power washing. It seems like a waste of time. the city of roanoke park police department time to call them and tell them but when i report that to code i get a notice that they're not available at those hours and we should call them but it's more for awareness and compliance of noise ordinances or CUPs, et cetera. In looking at the presentation, I see that there's been citations and there have been fines. And I'm wondering if there's a publicly available list of citations that are issued, maybe not, or fines that were issued. So as an example, We really, as an Eleanor Avenue resident, don't have any idea if Walmart or Mountain Shadows Plaza has been cited or fined since we've really been or tried to be on top of the issues that are occurring behind our homes. Another issue, another example that my neighbor reported that they say went unresponded to was one night, about 9.30 at night, it was discovered that there were three pallets of frozen food sitting in the back lot behind Walmart. And they were there until the next morning. And so we don't know, we reported it, but we don't know what happened. I'm gonna trust Walmart that they did the right thing and they tossed it, but we don't know. So we're looking for a little more, clarity, responsiveness to our inquiries and just wanted to bring that to your attention. And Eric, if it's appropriate, there's a noise ordinance sign behind Walmart that I don't understand and haven't been able to configure that talks about noise ordinance hours. And I haven't been able to figure out what that means because those hours don't connect with the hours that we see in the CUP for the other associated activities that can happen. And that's really all. I thank you for your time. We are still in the process of the appeal of the Planning Commission's decision on May 8th. We went to City Council July 8th. It was continued and now we're waiting for Walmart to come back with a new proposal and come back to City Council again for that. So thank you.

Thank you, Beth.

I'll open this up to council, or the commissioners, excuse me. Commissioner Epstein, questions?

No, none at this time. Okay, Commissioner Campbell. Thank you for your presentation. Can you give us some examples of what a public nuisance violation is, please?

Public nuisance would be, the most prominent one is trash and debris, illegal dumping, a shopping cart blight, graffiti, dilapidated house, dilapidated property, overgrown weeds, vegetation, peeling paint on a property, on a house. That's a general, broad overview of what a public nuisance would be.

Thank you. Commissioner Austin Dillon.

Yeah, I'm curious about who's on the code compliance team? Like, who are those people?

Yeah. So it's myself, and then I have Officer John Loudon and Officer Jennifer Kelleher. That's the three of us.

And how do our compliance, I guess, numbers compare with Santa Rosa or Petaluma? Do we have data that shows that, like what the numbers are comparatively?

I haven't compared a direct comparison. I know the City of Santa Rosa does code a little bit different. Every jurisdiction is going to enforce code a little bit differently. The City of Santa Rosa is significantly bigger than us, and they have a... So the short answer is that I haven't done a direct compare and contrast, but I do know that our... Generally speaking, our model is... I personally, in the way we do our program, it's just very city. We're the friendly city, so it's service first, enforcement last. I know that sounds catchy, but it really is true. We really try to uphold the work with property owners as long as we possibly can to help them in any way that we can to get them into compliance. I'm not sure that other... Other code compliance programs are like that. Maybe they are. The other thing I know that we do is we do a lot of abatement in the instance. So, for example, if we're on patrol and we're out seeing stuff with homelessness or other proactive stuff, and we see some trash and debris, we have pickup trucks, we'll go ahead and abate that in the instance. Certainly my officers have that ability, and they can do that, and I encourage them to do that. So that we understand that, yes, it's the private property owner's responsibility to abate the trash and debris on their property. And we can go through our noticing process, which is send a pre-citation, it's 15 days, and then we move forward with the citation process. But I think what's unique to our program is we'll just abate that in the instance, just to get it off the street, get it out of the public view, just... And if we continue to see it on a particular property, we'll take stronger enforcement action. But I know that that's a pretty unique feature to our code program. But we're a smaller community. We do have resources to be able to do that. And, you know, I personally feel like it's just do the right thing. You know, we are living the community. We're in the community. Just do the right thing. So I think that's pretty unique to our program. I've never seen any other code compliance program do that. So in terms of other differences in our neighboring jurisdictions, I think that's the one thing that stands out the most. And our sister cities and neighboring jurisdictions, they have wonderful code programs, too. But I'm a champion of ours, particularly.

VICE CHAIR LAMB.

Thank you for the presentation. I love seeing the data. I think this is the first time it was presented to us, so thank you so much. I have a few questions. First question is around the shopping cart. So can you walk us through when you receive a shopping cart complaint, what does your team do to solve that issues? The second question is about a shopping cart is that I saw a decrease of 33% compared from 2023 to 2024. What have the city done?

to make that change i'll have to look at that data but um in terms of how we how we handle shopping cart most of all of our almost all shopping cart complaints are proactively we go out there and find them we'll see them in the community and we'll just address them in the instant so there's a couple things that we do in relation to our shopping cart abatement and program This was a pretty significant issue when I got here two years ago, very significant. We're picking up and identifying anywhere from seven to 15 or more carts just strewn throughout the community per day. So what we did is we went and we, every retailer that uses shopping carts has to submit a shopping cart recovery plan, which is reviewed and approved by the director And so in that plan, they're supposed to have a shopping cart recovery service. We find that that's not very effectual in our community. So the first thing that we did is we reeducated every retailer with their plan that they've submitted that was approved. We provided a lot of education and outreach. letting them know the importance and all the things on what to do related to shopping carts that leave their premises. And we also let them know that we would be doing proactive enforcement and issuing citations if necessary. We focus primarily on two elements of the plan, which is having the appropriate and state-required signage on every cart, And every card's required to have certain specific signage that says if you take the card, it's a misdemeanor and things like that. The other thing was is every shopping, all shopping cards have to be secured on premises after business hours. So I focused on those two elements, one, to identify the card when it walks away, and two, making sure that it's secured to the best of their ability after business hours so it just doesn't, find its way into the creeks and other neighborhoods off the premises. So focusing on those two elements, we started to do proactive inspections after business hours to see if retailers, in fact, did secure their carts after business hours, chained up or had some mechanism, usually chained up, but had some other mechanism to secure their carts on premises. And where there were loose carts, we issued pre-citations and let them know again, you gotta secure your carts on premises after business hours, and then started issuing citations after that when we found loose carts. So currently we're doing proactive inspections after business hours on all retailers that have this file shopping cart recovery plan, and we're issuing citations when we find violation for retailers that, and we did have some retailers in the community that were compliant And so if they were compliant after, I think we decided three rounds of inspections, that was a pretty good metric to determine that they were going to be in compliance, and we went ahead and closed those cases. The cases that we have remaining are retailers that have significant challenges in trying to secure their carts after business hours. So we stood up that enforcement piece of it, but what we also do is, again, if we're out in the community and we see a shopping cart, We will usually pick it up and return it to the retailer and let them know. We open a case, we photograph where we found it, and we photograph when we return it to the retailer. And we recognize that they have a cart recovery service. We recognize that that's our responsibility. But we also recognize that these are significant blights in our community and in our creeks and things like that. And we're already out there doing patrol anyways related to some housing and other proactive initiatives. Why don't we just deal with this blight in the instant? So we have returned, picked up and returned numerous cards to retailers, trying to be a good partner in enforcement with our retail businesses that have these shopping carts, and then also holding them to the standard of with some enforcement and citations. So we're trying to balance the enforcement with doing the right thing with also holding them accountable and responsible for the violations that they're responsible for. I hope that answers your question.

Yes, thank you. Does your team of three also go out and collect those shopping carts?

We do most the time, yes. So while we're on our routine patrol and we come across that, we will abate it in the instant, do instant abatement. And whether it's myself or any other of my team members, when I'm out and if I'm going to a meeting or if I'm doing some other enforcement activity, you know, our team really is just do the right thing regardless of what case you're on or where you're at. You're in the community, you're servicing the community, just solve the, we want to solve the problem in the instant.

Thank you. My second question is for graffiti abatement, what category does it fall under?

Graffiti abatement would be under the, let me see here. I think it, Would be a public nuisance. That's what we put it under.

Public nuisance.

Yeah. One of the reasons, I mean, to just give you some more foundation, when we were moving over from one tracking system and case management system to another, you know, it was... how we were reporting out was very challenging to sort of coalesce these two systems. We had some change in my predecessors, the managers that were reporting this stuff, gathering this data. It became very, very difficult. Director Judice, when she came on, her and I worked very closely together to identify how we were gonna move these into categories where we could more consistently and accurately report out to council what is exactly what we were doing. In some years, we would break out graffiti, and it was just kind of all over the board. So the categories that we've sort of coalesced some of these things together, like business license signage, working closely with the director to identify how we want to report that consistently. So that's how we were able to put these categories together so that we could measurably move forward year after year after year and report the same data rather than confusing council, confusing folks on how we're categorizing things and stuff like that. So that's why it's been put together with a public nuisance.

Thank you. My third question is related to permit violations. I saw that there is 42% increase. I mean, in numbers, it's just 15 cases changes, but what kind of permit violations are those most popular ones?

Unpermitted construction, usually, unpermitted construction. It's either proactively reported to us I'm sorry, reactively reported to us by community members reporting construction without the benefit of a permit. We do have building inspectors that are out doing routine inspections. If they identify something, certainly they have the ability to issue a stop work notice on that, and then they would report that to us so that we can open a code compliance case and then track that into compliance, making sure that the property owner, in fact, gets the correct permits.

Thank you, thank you very much. I have no more question.

Great. Okay, and then I can go? Anyway, no, no. I have a few questions. First, sorry, I just wanna say I think the city looks wonderful. I think your team, albeit a very small team, does a fabulous job in keeping us looking good. I didn't realize it was only three, but I congratulate your peer officers as well. With that, a lot of the categories are proactive in nature. So I guess I asked a question from the business signage category and property and public nuisance. Those can be more reactive than proactive, I would imagine. You have this small team of three and you're reactively dealing with a complaint, but how do you make that more of a proactive thing in terms of trying, is it that you don't have enough people to do it on a proactive basis? I mean, you could be going to an issue of blight in a neighborhood and pass four other properties that have similar issues, and yet you're only gonna look at the one that was reported and pass right by the other three. So my question sort of is around those issues.

Yeah, so with respect to, and correct me if I'm wrong, the question being sort of how do we decide between proactive and reactive? Really it's, so if we see an emerging trend with either complaints that are coming in, things that our officer's observing, other members of our team or community that's somehow surfacing an emergency, an emerging trend, I usually collect that data, bring it forward to the director, we'll have a conversation about, the director needs to be aware of any emergency trends related to code compliance in general. So often meeting, with her to let her know if there's anything coming up. And then from that, so to your question, that usually can either come from we're seeing an uptick in complaints come in on a particular issue, we're seeing an uptick, just our officers are seeing an uptick in stuff, public safety, even the director will bring forward stuff that from her vantage point, from either council or her vantage point, something forward saying, hey, this is an emerging trend and I would like you to gather some data so I'd be able to put together a program around that. So once we identify an emerging trend, sitting down with executive management to find out, is it in fact her desire to wanna put together a proactive initiative? And if it is, then I will put together I'll gather the data, put together what I think is a good program related to that. I'll present that to the director. We'll have conversations and she'll tweak her tool, how she wants that proactive initiative stood up. And then once we get that green lighted from the director's office, then we'll move forward with that. And once we do have a proactive initiative set up, then it's a report back to let her know Is it trending down? Is it effective? Do we need to somehow retool or change it to address it? Are we doing the right thing? So it's a constant sort of check-in. Also, if we find that the trend is no longer emerging, it's static or actually nonexistent anymore, then a director can authorize that initiative to be stood down.

Okay. I ask the question because... some neighborhoods might feel imposed if they want to rat out a neighbor, so to speak. And so the issue never gets dealt with because unless you're more proactive in when you patrol around the neighborhoods, you see RVs or boats on streets for weeks on end or whatever. Some neighbors may not want to report an issue like that to keep the community in a more positive light as opposed to creating an issue.

Chair, can I just add a couple of things? You know, Eric mentioned his team is small.

Three, yeah. Are you adding to the team?

I wish. And they do a really fabulous job. I mean, it's just amazing. The amount of work that they produce is just mind-boggling. Sometimes we talk about doing a proactive enforcement program on a particular topic, and they're immediately out there and getting things done and reporting back. So just kind of to your question about how to make that decision of whether to start a proactive enforcement program or not, one of the primary things we're thinking about is health and safety. If you're talking about somebody is constantly complaining about fence heights, not as likely to do the proactive enforcement. If we are hearing complaints about You know, the mobile food vendor program was a perfect example. We were seeing a lot of it. There's a lot of safety issues associated with unlicensed mobile food programs. Right. You know, when Eric put that together, he was being very humble. He really went into this program and did a fabulous job with education, follow through. He developed a task force that brought other agencies together. So it's really about, you know, what is the need and how much capacity do we have to be able to handle the program?

No, and I understand. And as I said, I think your team for its size does a fabulous job. I'm in insurance claims, so I sort of understand the health and safety, which is why I might ask about recreational vehicles on the streets because of dart outs and kids potentially being not seen prior to an accident. That's just on my list, along with, you know... Issues from a business perspective involving human trafficking at our hotels in town, amongst other things. I mean, we have a lot of, I think I last counted six motel-type locations that probably are rife with trafficking activity, so... And that's what I do for a living, unfortunately.

One of the things I wanted to just speak to with respect to every complaint that we get or service request, every service request is protected under the evidence code of confidentiality. So that's not released, the complaint. That information is not released, first of all. and all my officers, no matter what, are all very well trained and very seasoned, thank God. And so when we go out to get a complaint, we're already entering a negative space where it can be contentious. We operate very, very unbiased in our investigation, and we make sure to iterate that One, we can't tell you who the complainant is. And two, we really dissuade property owners from jumping to a conclusion related to, oh, it must be the neighbor I'm having trouble with. Because it may not be the neighbor. It may be somebody from an entirely different city that's driving through. So we were just very thoughtful about, one, letting folks know that their service requests are confidential under the evidence code, and then two, just being very, very thoughtful and tactful in how we're conducting our investigation out there to make sure that, because we want people to be able to report and feel safe reporting and not feel concerned that they're going to get retribution from neighbors or other people if they're reporting a legitimate concern.

Okay. No, thank you. I have no other questions. I'll...

I'm glad you went first. You had like 90% of what I was going to say. Okay. So, yeah, I'll keep it brief because the chair handled most of it and your response answered some of my questions. I guess what I would say is less of a question than more maybe a statement of, you know, I would appreciate, as the comments my colleagues made about how clean the city is and all that, I just would ask, and you do have an extremely small team, which... you know, maybe we should look at in the future of how do we increase that and, you know, what does that look like? Because you can't be everywhere. And I know that from a perspective of just the people, you know, the constituents that I speak to and the people around, there are some concerns about business licenses and about do people have, are they doing the business they're supposed to be doing in that space? And then I'm sure everybody read to Mark's point about, human trafficking by what just went on in Santa Rosa with the massage parlors. And I know that we have more than one, I've been told, in the city. You know, what are we doing to look at what does that licensing look like and what's going on? I know that the big topic is a law enforcement issue, but it could start at the code compliance. And it's easier, as you know, for you to get through the door than for them. And so... you know, how do we strike that balance between the very important reactive work you're doing to the complaints that the citizens have to that proactive, you know, the things that most people aren't seeing, but are very important and impactful to the city. And, you know, is there a way that, you know, us or, you know, down the line, the council or anybody can help support those initiatives because, I mean, just reading about what went on in Santa Rosa, it's terrible. And if there's any bit of that here in the city, I think we have an obligation to kind of suss that out.

Yeah, I will respond just because I think it's kind of going back to the things that we're looking at when we are starting a proactive enforcement program are the things like that address health and safety. We also, you know, hear things from other cities and the city manager hears things from other cities. So there's, it's not all just like what I decide, it's what is the, you know, what is the other departments hearing? What are they hearing? And, you know, we do collaborate with each other and try to come up with solutions. You know, homeless task force is a perfect example. The shopping cart, sorry, the mobile food vendor is another example. But yeah, we do start with what is, you know, capacity and then what is the, you know, priority in terms of health and safety. Does that answer your question?

Yes, it was more also a suggestion. And as far as maybe we need to look at that for our city since it's happening around us. And then the last thing I was going to say is in response to the public comment, maybe it might help to be able to do more outreach about who to call for those things. Because I don't disagree with the response from your office or And I don't like that citizens feel like they can't call the police at 1 o'clock in the morning about leaf blowers, because you should. That's what they're there for. And so I just maybe understanding that bridge, because nobody expects you to get up at 1 a.m. to deal with leaf blowers. But at the same time, the police should go out there, take the information, and then get it to code compliance. So somehow maybe get the information of maybe like the tree or come up with a graphic of how those complaints could work and find their way back, because... We can't expect you to be everywhere and do everything, and that's where the partner agencies come in. It'd be the same as if there was a fire code violation.

I just want to add that I also know that sometimes folks won't know the outcome of a situation, but how do we explain that to people, right? Like, you may not know what's going to happen with said leaf blower. I don't think that's right or wrong, but I do know that's how things work. especially with law enforcement.

Yeah, so with respect to, well, we try to be very, very responsive because we don't want things to fall into a black hole. And we're very active when we have a concern, especially a number of concerns related to a particular nuisance or issue. And it will come up to us, and we will be very responsive to that now. With respect to circling back to complaints, we'll give them as much information as we can. And certainly, all of our case notes and everything can be FOIAed and has been. And we currently provide a lot of FOIA requests, which includes every detail on the case, every note, every phone call, everything we've sent, including citations, pre-citations, and things like that. But we do make a diligent effort so that complaints are aware of to the extent that we can of what's going on with the case. And unlike we're not law enforcement. So, you know, in law enforcement, there's when you have an active investigation, you can't really share that out. Once we've determined that it's an administrative path rather than a criminal path, there's not that protection with respect to what's going on with the case particularly. So we do try to be very, very responsive to the community in terms of what's going on with a concern. One, we recognize that they want to know, and two, we want to share that with them to let them know that we're addressing the violation, if there is, in fact, a violation. So, yeah. I don't know if that answered your question.

Just a comment, trying to understand better. And now I'm a little more confused, so I do have a question. So are y'all police officers or safety officers, or what are you?

We are not police officers. Okay.

Are you just administrative staff for the city?

Right, we're just staff, we have the ability issue, administrative citations, and we all have training, our PC 832 training, things like that. We're all very well trained, but we are not peace officers.

All right, are there any other questions for staff? Okay, again, Eric, thanks for your time, and let your peers also thank them for a job well done, thanks. With that, we'll move to item eight, items from the Planning Commission. Commissioner Epstein, anything?

Yeah, I just have kind of a note for the staff and a request. So we've talked about it before, but tonight's discussion on the general plan kind of brought it back up for me of getting an understanding of the standards of coverage and what the plan is for that for public safety. Cause I think that's important as we move forward with planning out for the general plan, you know, What does that look like and how are we growing? But I know, and I brought this up before, we are well overdue for standards of coverage for both fire and law enforcement. Trying to get an understanding of, with the growth in the city that we've had, both population and physical structure-wise, do we have enough public safety to cover the growth? I know talking to public safety, they don't feel that we do. And so, you know, there are, those studies take almost a year. And I know I brought it up probably about at least a year ago. So I just would really like to emphasize and push to get an understanding of what we're doing about that. Because it's kind of hard to plan, even just if you isolate the downtown piece of this alone and nothing else changes. When we've got the downtown going on a Tuesday night, They're, on average, if we're lucky, at 7 o'clock at night, we've got four public safety officers working. So how does that now add a downtown, and how does that impact? We get one call for service downtown. That's one copper and a coverage. We get one more call, and we're out of cops. So what are we doing to look at that for the future, especially because our fire coverage relies heavily on the public safety model And those officers that are in the field in the police cars are built into the fire response model. So if we don't have enough staff on either end, how does that impact our growth? So I'd love to be able to get some type of response and timeline on when we're going to be doing that. Yeah. Thank you.

Commissioner Campbell. No questions. Thank you.

Commissioner Austin Dillon.

Back to the downtown design review board. I may have missed an email, but what is happening? What's the latest information that you have?

Did not miss an email. We are the city and the developer currently in negotiations, and that's about as much as we have right now. So will any updates that will happen, any changes that will happen, I'll keep you all apprised. And we are updating the website as things happen. But at this point, I have nothing to report on that.

Vice Chair Lamb.

Is there a date that's set for the timeline for the negotiations between the city and the developer?

There is, you know what, I believe there might be, but I don't know what that date is. I can do some digging and provide that for you in the next planning commission meeting. Thank you. You're welcome.

I don't have anything, so we'll move on to item nine, items from the development services staff, excuse me.

My apologies, I missed that.

Oh, item nine, you're up.

Oh, I'm up. I don't have a lot to report. I do want to just mention that the next Planning Commission meeting will be canceled because we don't have an item ready for you. So I will provide an update, either Christina or I will provide an update as soon as we find out about the following Planning Commission date. And I don't have anything else unless you, Christina, have anything.

All right. Thank you. Unless there's anything else. Meeting adjourned. I know a little bit about it, yeah. I'll talk to you about it.