City Council - Regular Meeting

I think we're good. Okay. Welcome, everyone. I am calling the regular meeting of the Ross Town Council Thursday, December 11, 2025 to order. Has the agenda been posted?

Yes, ma'am.

Any changes to the agenda?

No.

Number three, disclosure of ex parte communications on items where the Town Council acts in an adjudicatory or quasi-judicial capacity. Anyone? No. Number four, open time for public expression. This is limited to three minutes per speaker on items that are not on tonight's agenda. Ms. Rudd, did you have something you wanted to say?

Yes.

Well.

Okay, is that good? Okay. Mayor, council members, everybody here. I am here as a member of only 40 years in town, as an RN, and as somebody who wants to make sure that we take care of people. I think we need a Narcan dispenser in town. I think the post office, to me, is the logical place for it somewhere over there because that's where everybody thinks about it. OK, but we need this. If we can save one person, we've done a good job. The other thing is the automatic deferrers, OK? I know we all have, but there are no things that we're helping.

I didn't start your time.

They have done this before. It wasn't mine to do it. It's not me, huh? Continue, please. Thank you. They have ones that you can put outside. And I think the tennis courts need to have one.

And I think we need one also down at the post office somewhere. And we need to let everybody know where they're located, because there's no reason for us to teach people how to use them if there aren't any available for them to use. So that's it. Thank you very much. Good suggestions. So I don't know how to put this on your to-do list, but that's what it needs to be done, is on your to-do list. City Council Chambers, Thank you, thank you for adding to our list, I know I knew you we appreciate that you didn't have very much, but I don't think it's something I can do we will continue the discussion Okay, thank you.

City Council Chambers, Just one comment I was going to make is maybe we might be really good idea with our POA.

City Council Chambers, I know, but I think we even if we do our POA we have to make sure that. City Council Chambers, it's not going to be. Against I know I don't know what code that's what I will find a code.

To figure out what we will continue the discussion, thank you, thank you diane anybody else for public comment. All right, the mayor's report that's me, I want to provide another update on town facilities issues. On December 4 2025 the Ross valley paramedic authority rvp a approved a long term lease with the town of Ross keeping the paramedics in Ross, where they have been for more than 40 years. The leases eight year term begins at the completion of the new Ross paramedic facility or January 1 2029 whichever is sooner. And so we'll run until approximately 2037 in addition, a year ago, the Ross valley paramedic authority board voted unanimously that no further work would occur to separate the rvp a. Over the past year, the rvp a has been strengthening the Agency by revising its governance documents and financials and in 2026 it will seek approval of these documents for Members. City Council Chambers, Tonight Ross valley fire department chief mahoney will present emergency services response data data from July 1 2025 through October 31 2025 a small four month window. City Council Chambers, Unfortunately, false information about response times and many other items has recently been circulated to residents. City Council Chambers, Including claims that it took 16 minutes to respond to a call at branson and 10 plus minutes to respond to an injured resident at the post office. In fact, based on official data, the response time to Branson was 7.5 minutes and was for a false alarm, and 6.5 minutes to the post office. The January 8th, 2026 council meeting begins at 6 p.m. at Town Hall and on Zoom to provide the town's election code report and presentations from consultants for the Friends of the Ross Firehouse. Tonight we will discuss how best to accommodate residents if there are more than Town Hall can hold. As we close 2025, I want to recognize and express my gratitude to town staff. These dedicated employees ensure that the town runs smoothly and is extremely safe. We are fortunate to have such loyal and capable staff constantly working to enhance the lives of Ross residents. Thank you to all Ross department heads, along with department members, town manager Krista Johnson, town clerk Cindy Martell, recreation manager Maureen Borthwick, Planning and Building Director Roberta Feliciano, Public Works Director and Town Engineer Rich Simonich, Police Chief Pata, and Ross Valley Fire Department Chief Mahoney. In addition, volunteers continue to be the heart and soul of our town, constantly working and collaborating to enhance residents' lives and foster our strong community. We saw this very recently at the festive Winterfest event at the Marin Art and Garden Center. Thanks also to the Ross Police Officers for delicious hot chocolate. My sincere thanks to the following organizations and their volunteers, the Ross Property Owners Association, Ross Auxiliary, Age Friendly Ross, the Ross Historical Society, Advisory Design Review members, and our new town treasurer. Our town would not be the same without you. Finally, I wish you and your families the best of holidays and a happy new year full of optimism and hope. Number six, council committee and liaison reports.

I have a report for MCE Clean Energy. At the most recent meeting, we had two very consequential matters on our agenda. And these are matters that actually we had previously mentioned in our town council meeting and received public comment on. And those were the establishment of a permanent and independent, in other words, separate from the other committees of MCE Finance Committee. And then the other issue was a review or a consultant, some sort of a study done by an outside consultant, not by staff of MCE, but an outside consultant, a review of basically of governance. There's been some reporting about this in the Marine Independent Journal, and there's quite a bit of concern about both fiscal matters at MCE in view of recent results, including some rather large losses. But also the fact that MCE has some 34 directors because it spans four counties and then has representatives from all the towns and cities, including Ross. And it's unwieldy. Frankly, these meetings are long. It's hard to follow the proceedings. And so there is, I think, a consensus now that we need to review and we need to explore alternatives for governance. And the Finance Committee hopefully will help us do a better job going forward of managing the financial side of this. MC has grown to a large organization with a budget of some $800 million. And it's got to be done right and carefully. And so I was glad to see that these two measures pass. Now, we're not finished with these issues. It's back to a smaller executive committee now to further discuss this and then come back to the full board with some proposals, which I expect will happen in the first part of next year.

Just to reiterate what Julie said. Yes, the Ross Valley Paramedic Authority approved a lease with the town of Ross to keep the ambulance here. We hope it's long term. There are many provisions for Ross Valley Paramedic Authority to leave Ross, including if any of the regional parcel taxes fail. So we're hoping that it's a good partnership. We're hoping it's a good partnership.

Number seven staff and community reports Ross property owners association.

I'm Jeff Koblik from the Ross Property Owners Association. And just as we end the year here, I just want to say thank you to the town council and town manager, Krista and Richard, and all the town staff who have helped us put on a record amount of events this year. And I want to thank Elena Battella, who's here, originating the Live on the Commons and making that so successful. And we're just really happy to be able to work with you guys. And we look forward to the year ahead. We have some wonderful holiday lights up. I just got a donation tonight. So thank you to all of you who have donated. And we welcome that again next year so we can continue doing some of the good things that we've been doing.

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you to RPOA for everything. Town Manager Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. He's not here this evening, but I've been waiting a few months now. So I'm going to just make sure I want to let the council know that I'm happy to report that Alex Lopez has been promoted from assistant planner to planner. He's worked for the town now for three years and is really shown to be an excellent employee and really great with our community members that come in. And his promotion is well deserved. So congratulations to Alex. I'm also happy to report that the double portable behind the public safety building was removed earlier this week. After 20 years, we were pleased to say goodbye to it. So that happened this week and we've got a little more room back there. Town Hall is closed to the public from December 24th through January 1st. Of course, police and fire services are provided 24-7. Building inspections will be conducted on December 22nd, December 29th, and December 31st. the flood zone 9 advisory committee held its last meeting on november 18th i asked our public works director rich simonich to provide a summary that i could share with you and to the community and i'll read that here our safer bb2 project that's the san isomo flood reduction something building bridge 2 project county flood control district received a letter from fema's consultant last September 25th, requesting more information and some corrections on the county's July 30th CLOMER submittal. The county will be submitting responses to the letter by December 24th and will share them with Ross and San Anselmo. The comments were mostly technical requests for data and clarification on the hydraulic modeling used for the Clomer submittal. However, one comment was requiring that all communities, meaning Ross and San Anselmo, sign the acknowledgement form. It is unclear how the County of Marin Flood Control District will respond to this request. We'll keep you posted. The other county flood control project is the Fish Ladder and College of Marin project. Construction is nearly completed on the concrete channel removal and bank restoration project behind Kent Middle School near the College of Marin. This is an impressive achievement by the county with work completed in just five weeks. The county completed the access ramp, and the Granton Park Pump Station last year. Unfortunately, the county does not have a schedule on the removal of the fish ladder and channel improvements in Ross. The county plans to have a detailed budget study ready for a flood zone nine meeting in January and they should have more information on that schedule when they present the budget. The grant for this project expires this month December, but the state will accept, but not necessarily approve another grant extension to December 2026. And lastly, I am proud to report that my sister Jill and I received an award for best costume in Ross's Turkey Trot Race, held on November 15th, our second in a row. Here is my... Big thanks to Ross Rec for organizing the event and to community partners for their assistance. It was a fabulous event, wonderful weather, great to see people from all walks of life coming out. And it was a fabulous event, and not just because I received an award. So thank you for the opportunity to report.

Thank you, Krista. Yes, Matt.

So thank you, TAM Manager Johnson. One question for you. City Council Chambers, I think we talked about having Chris Martin come I know he's been he submits his reports, I think, just given all the. City Council Chambers, issues around the cloner etc, it might be helpful to actually have him give his report to us, and so we can ask questions yeah.

City Council Chambers, He came, I think it was temper maybe October rich do you recall. Yeah, he came and spoke to the Council in October, and maybe it would be good to have him here after the January Flood Zone 9 meeting.

Great.

Yeah, we'll work on that.

Yeah, maybe we'll just get on like a quarterly cadence or just so we can ask questions and have it here.

Yeah, we'll be happy to ask that of him and give him lots of advance notice. Thank you.

Thank you. Number eight, the consent agenda. There's four items. Does any council member wish to remove anything from the consent agenda? Does any member of the public wish to remove any item from the consent agenda? Anyone on Zoom? No one online. Okay. Could we please have a motion?

I move we approve the consent agenda A through D. I second.

Mayor McMillan. Aye. Council Member Dowling. Aye. Council Member Kirchherr. Aye. Council Member Salter.

Aye.

Mayor Pro Tem Robbins. Aye. With a vote of five, the motion passes.

Thank you.

I would just like to say thank you to the students and the supporters for the smoking, not smoking ordinance or non-smoking. So thank you very much for coming. Even though it was on the consent calendar, you never know. So thank you.

City Council Chambers, we're moving to the administrative agenda number nine town Council to conduct a public hearing and adopt resolution number two 546 authorizing maximum rates imposed. City Council Chambers, and collected by Marin sanitary service for refuse and recyclable material collection and disposable disposal services to be effective January one 2026. City Council Chambers, and determining that the town's franchise fees are justified by the town's costs of providing solid waste services and reasonable charges. for the use of town property for solid waste services. Town Manager Johnson.

Thank you. The actions before you this evening are to conduct a public hearing and adopt a resolution that the Mayor just described. As way of background briefly, trash recycling and organics collection and disposal services are provided pursuant to a franchise agreement between the Town and Marin Sanitary Services which outlines the services provided as well as a methodology to be followed to set customer rates every year. The jurisdictions in Marin that have similar agreements with MSS work together informally as the Marin Franchisers Group to share information and reduce costs. The group meets several times a year to oversee MSS's operations and work together to conduct a single annual rate review analysis rather than each jurisdiction having to conduct and pay for a separate review. MSS submitted their 2026 rate application using the agreed upon methodology that is in the franchise agreement that assisted in stabilizing rate changes year to year. The franchisor's group hired R3 Consulting Group to review the MSS rate request. R3 found that the MSS rate request of 3.84% increase for ROS rates to be appropriate under the methodology. Last year the rate increase was 3.61%, and the year before it was much higher at 6.39%. So this 3.84% for the coming calendar year of 2026 will result in an increase of $1.95 per month for a residential 32-gallon cart, with monthly costs totaling $52.83. Recycling is included in all accounts and customers can reduce their regular landfill container size resulting in lower rates to the customer. R3 conducted a survey of Marin County refuse haulers as part of the rate review. Using this comparison, the Ross proposed rate is lower than the Marin County average for jurisdictions that use MSS. As in previous years, it is recommended that the rate adjustment be applied across the board to all residential, multifamily, and commercial service accounts. Actual rates for all services are provided as an attachment to resolution number 2546, which is before you tonight for adoption. Garth Schultz of R3 Consulting is participating this evening via Zoom in case the council has technical questions. In addition, Justin and Jason, from the MSS team are here this evening to answer questions. They're here in person. Patty Garbarino extends her regrets for not being available this evening due to illness. This is the first rate hearing in 38 years that she has missed. We wish her a speedy recovery. Thank you.

Thank you, Krista. Questions, council members, Matt?

Could you just remind us what the franchise fee is and how that's calculated and what it represents?

I'm going to punt this over to Garth Schultz to make sure that you get the absolute most accurate language and response.

Hi, everyone. Garth Schultz with our three consulting group here. Just want to get a thumbs up to make sure my audio is coming through. Thank you so much. So, yes, thank you for the question, Councilmember. So what the franchise fee is for is it's covering the town's costs for a few things. Management and administration of the agreement with Marine Sanitary Service. ancillary solid waste services the town provides and then this use of the public right-of-way for the set out of containers which is a benefit to homeowners and customers uh in the sense that uh providing it through like a side yard or a backyard service would come a greater overall expense due to time and materials so in summary that's that's the the upshot i can pull up the report if anyone has specific questions around that but that's what the franchise used for

Yeah, so just further on that is just because we're, you know, how does it get calculated that 13 point is it's a large fee, which is the reason why I'm asking about it, but I was just 13.55 does, how does that is everyone has the same franchise fee, or is it all.

It's a little bit different for each agency. Your 13.55% as a percentage is a legacy number. I actually don't have the basis for how it arrived at that specific figure. What our study was to look at was to compare the revenues that the town receives through that franchise fee against the costs incurred and the value of the use of the public right-of-way. And in our study, what we found is that the revenues received from the franchise fee are are not more than necessary to cover the town's costs and the use of this right of way so we've looked at it on a dollars basis compared it to the revenues that you've received through that fee amount and determined it to be again not more than necessary and therefore appropriate for the town to continue to receive so sorry just if i understand that you're saying the fees that it collects against the costs it's it's it's neutral Slightly lower. So slightly lower fee revenues compared to cost plus property use charges.

Okay. And so you would, so if we want it to be neutral, we'd actually have to raise that fee.

Correct. Though I wouldn't recommend it because as with all things that are, uh, year-to-year costs versus revenues. There may be slight variances in future years. You might see higher fee revenues if there's more rate adjustments in future years. Costs change year-to-year. At this stage, it's not something that I, as a consultant to local agencies like the town, nor legal counsel that I've been working with on other similar matters. And I'm not an attorney, but they tend to recommend not making franchise fee changes at this time because there are elements of it that are subject to legal challenge throughout the state, not here in the town, but elsewhere in the state. It's a subject of legal inquiry.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions? Public comment on this item? Anyone in the chambers?

Good evening, Mayor, Council, staff. Thank you. Justin Wilcock with Marin Sanitary Service. And thank you. As Krista mentioned, Patty is ill and sends her regards. We just wanted to thank you for the opportunity to be here before you. And we've had a great year this year, a year of transition with the passing of Joe Garbarino almost a year ago. But as we look to the future of the company, things look bright for the company. We had a great event in September as we celebrated our customer appreciation day and continue to welcome all of our customers to come to the facility. to take tours, learn more about composting and recycling, and receive free couple buckets or bags of compost. This year we also had a group, the Landfill Harmonic, orchestra from Paraguay that play recycled instruments. So they live on a landfill and many of their parents make their living scavenging from the landfill. And there's an engineer that takes some of the discards that they find and make incredible instruments. And they have a school of about 300 students. that learn and play these instruments. We had them here. It's very inspiring to see. They will be back next year, so put that on your calendars. And lastly, we were honored to be recognized by the North Bay Labor Council as receiving the first business to be recognized as friendly to labor in the North Bay. uh appreciate our union workers and and the great work that they do in our all of our communities and in ross every day thank you thank you any other public comment in the chambers anybody online cindy there are no raised hands online there thank you so we'll bring it back for discussion or emotion

Sorry, I move that we adopt resolution number 2546. Second.

Mayor McMillan? Yes. Council Member Dowling?

Yes.

Council Member Kircher?

Yes.

Council Member Salter?

Aye.

Mayor Pro Tem Robbins? Aye. With a vote of five, the motion passes. Thank you. Thank you for coming.

Julie, before we get to this one, A lot of people are standing and we have extra chairs I think if you're standing, you can take a chair and put it along the side and sit down you don't need to stand through the meeting.

Thank you. Okay we're moving on to item number 10 town council to receive a presentation. related to ross valley fire department and the ross valley paramedic authority response times for the town of ross from july 1 2025 to october 31 2025. chief mahoney will be handling this matter mayor we just need a minute to set up town manager johnson will be introducing this matter oh we'll just need a one moment to get it all set up great thank you

I'd like to take just a moment to thank the Council and the community for our short delay in the beginning of a meeting. We do need, because the Council needs to use this room for any closed sessions, we have to keep the door locked and that means staff can't come in here and get things set up. So I appreciate your patience and the community's patience as they were waiting outside.

And sorry it's so cold.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. My name is Dan Mahoney, Fire Chief of the Ross Valley Fire Department. And for those of you who don't know me, I was a little bit personal about me as I was born and raised in the town of Fairfax. I currently live in the town of Fairfax, and I've been with the Ross Valley Fire Department for 26 years. And I'm honored to serve the towns of Ross, San Anselmo, Fairfax, and the Sleepy Hollow Fire Protection District as the Ross Valley Fire Department Fire Chief. Just to go over presentation expectations real quick, the following report will provide response times from July to October 2025. I'll be happy to answer any questions relating to response times to better inform the council and public. However, it'll be inappropriate for me to comment on fire station closures, reopenings, or service levels as these items have impacts on the current Ross Valley Fire Department JPA. and shall first be addressed at the Ross Valley Fire Department Board of Directors. The recommendation for tonight is it is recommended that the town council receive a presentation related to Ross Valley Fire Department and the Ross Valley Paramedic Authority response times for the town of Ross from July 1, 2025 to October 31st, 2025. A little bit of background. In January of 2022, it was agreed that the Ross Fire Station 18 would close July 1, 2025. On July 1 of 2025, the Ross Fire Station 18 was closed. And at the September 11, 2025 Ross Council meeting, a request was made by two council members to review response times back to July 1 of 2025 since the station closure. In 2019, a standards of cover assessment was conducted to inform the discussion of the fire station closure. One component of the document included response times. What is a response time? Response time is the amount of time it takes for emergency personnel to arrive at an incident. Response times have three components, 911 call processing and dispatch, This is the period of time between when a 911 call is received at the emergency command center and ends when the incident is dispatched to a fire station or ambulance quarters. Crew turnout time. This is the period of time when an incident is dispatched to a fire station or ambulance quarters and ends when emergency responders start driving to the incident. And the last component is travel time. Travel time is a period between when the fire or the ambulance unit starts driving to the incident and ultimately arrives at the incident. Response times can be measured in several different ways. The fire service commonly uses the 90th percentile. The goal is not to just know the average, but understand the consistency of response. The 90th percentile means 90% of responses were at or below the time limit. A quick example up on the screen. I apologize. I wasn't able to put everything in order, or else it would have been too small to read. But you'll see on the left-hand side, there's a column that goes from the greatest response times, and it works its way down to the least amount of response time all the way over to the right. For instance, the fire engine response at the 90th percentile was at 10 minutes and 56 seconds. So the numbers that are highlighted in yellow are actually the other 90% of the calls that the fire engine was able to respond to the incident under that 10 minutes and 56 seconds. So just because a 90th percentile number is a particular number, it doesn't mean that that is the response time that you're gonna get every single time for that incident. In 2019, the CityGate report used the following methodology to calculate the 90th percentile response time. They used fire in EMS incidents. A fire incident, for example, would be a structure fire or a wildland fire. An EMS incident would be any type of emergency medical situation such as difficulty breathing, a twisted ankle, or a minor injury to a finger. They also used emergency calls. And emergency incidents are considered incidents that are somewhat life-threatening or life-threatening. They're the incidents that you see fire engines responding to with lights and sirens. Examples of an emergency fire incident would be, obviously, a working fire, a structure fire, a house on fire, or a wildfire. Examples of EMS emergency incidents would be difficulty breathing, broken leg, cardiac arrests, things of that nature. The methodology also included non-emergency incidents. A non-emergency incident is when a fire engine is dispatched in response to the incident with no lights and sirens, commonly driving promptly and obeying the traffic laws. Examples of a non-emergency fire incident would be an extinguished fire, maybe something like an oven fire that's extinguished, or a non-life-threatening EMS injury, which would be a twisted ankle or maybe a laceration to a finger. The methodology also included incidents outside the town limits of Ross. So these were mainly incidents that were up in the Marin Municipal Water District lands, which is up in the Phoenix Lake area and up towards the east side of Mount Tam. So these are the response times for Fire Station 18 at the 90th percentile using the same methodology that the CityGate report used back in 2019. CityGate's 90th percentile in that report was 7 minutes and 55 seconds. They identified in the report that the closure of Fire Station 18 would add a minimum of two minutes of travel time to the response, which would bring the minimum response up to about nine minutes and 55 seconds. So currently, with the same methodology that is being used, that CityGate used, the fire engine response time from July 1 through October 31 is 10 minutes and 55, excuse me, 10 minutes and 56 seconds. And the ambulance response time is 14 minutes and 2 seconds. So since then, technology has improved. Staff or myself was able to extract incidents outside the town limits of Ross to give Ross residents another perspective of the response times within the town limits. So if we took the same methodology that CityGate used with the exception of excluding or excluding the Ross, the incidents that were outside the Ross town limits, The response times for the Ross Station 18 area would be, for the fire engine, it would be 9 minutes and 34 seconds, and for the ambulance would be 9 minutes and 52 seconds. So in closing, for those of you who read the staff report, I can't emphasize enough, this is a very small data set. These numbers are vulnerable to change. And in fact, they probably have changed since I've crunched them last month. A larger data set would be needed to evaluate a more consistent 90th percentile response time. So in the future, my recommendation is that any evaluation of response times include placing incidents outside the town limits of Ross in a separate category and removing non-emergency incidents. Because recommended response times are really related to emergency incidents, not non-emergency incidents. And that's the end of my report.

Thank you, Chief Mahoney. Questions, council members? Elizabeth.

So you mentioned excluding the the incidents that are outside the Ross Ross town limits. But city gate didn't exclude the incidents outside the Ross town limits today. So no, it doesn't seem correct to be kind of manipulating the data to exclude that and then compare it back to the CityGate data. I don't see, unless you can take the CityGate data and exclude those incidents that are non-emergency or outside of the town of Ross, I think it's not, isn't it incorrect to be pulling out those numbers and saying these are our response numbers?

No, that's the reason why I gave you both times. I included the response times outside of the Ross town limits, and then I also included the response times.

But I just think if we're being given numbers outside of the Ross town limits, I think we should see if we can get that from the CityGate study from 2019, because then we've got apples to apples, you know, incidents within Ross and incidents outside of Ross. So I just, that was my question. Is it Should we be pulling that out in an isolated way or should we be pulling it out and then pulling it out of the CityGate 2019 study and then having that as the comparison?

So the reason why it was not originally pulled out of the 2019 CityGate study is that the data didn't allow us to do that. So now that we have a different platform that we can pull the data from, and I was able to actually do this by hand and pull them out, I figured that it would be beneficial for those to know what the response time actually is inside the town limits of Ross.

I guess I still have a question. Is that correct? But then another comment is, I mean, you might not be the right person to answer this, but with an ambulance response time of 14 minutes, which means really the ambulance isn't providing much benefit in terms of public safety to Ross. I mean, should Ross be reconsidering spending $3 million for an ambulance if we're at a response time that's 14 minutes? But again, maybe you're not the right person to answer that.

Yeah.

That could be part of the discussion.

Again, I would just emphasize, you know, this is a very small data set. This is a third of the year. So I think, you know, really evaluating a larger data set is going to give us a better idea on the overall 90th percentile of response times.

I just want to make a comment about that. In looking at the second column, it appears that the ambulance arrived first 14 times, which is close to 40% of the time. Do you agree with that, Chief Mahoney?

I actually didn't calculate that number, but.

Terry. Yeah, Chief Mahoney, can you tell us a little bit about why the times are so long for the water district?

Yeah, so a typical water district incident would entail the firefighters getting rung down at the fire station, which means that they get alerted at the fire station. They actually don't take the fire engine to the incident. They transfer their gear from the fire engine to a four-wheel drive pickup truck so they can access the fire roads. And so that takes some time to do that. And then as they respond and they get to the incident, they have to unlock the gate down there at 299 Lagunitas and open up the gate and then drive up to the incident. And it's not uncommon that the incident is not on a fire road and they have to park at the trailhead and then pack the gear into the actual incident on a single track trail. you'll notice that um i believe it's the top four or five incidents um response times that are on the top of the list are all are all water district calls um do you know if the police the ross police arrived first to any of the instance um chief potter i'm not quite sure are you able to

Good evening. Yes, on at least half of the occasions of the calls that I have, and I've tracked about 20 calls, we've responded and we've been there within, we've been there first, but we're talking about the difference between a minute and 30 seconds, a minute and 20 seconds from our arrival to the time the ambulance pulls up. It's not the fire truck, it's the ambulance that I'm able to measure.

And your crew is arriving there first, before the ambulance?

On about half of those 20 calls, yes.

OK, thank you. And Chief Mahoney, was there any response from Kent Field Fire?

No, there were no incidents where Kent Field Fire responded in on medical aides. And then I forgot to, I believe I mentioned in the staff report, but didn't highlight it in my presentation, that there were no fire incidents within this period.

Thank you. Any questions, Bill?

With regard to the 2019 study, we've been referring to seven minutes and 55 seconds. That was for the 2018 year, is that correct?

Yes.

There was also another data set that wasn't there for 2017? Yeah. So 2017 and 2018. And do you recall, wasn't the figure for 2017 something like 8 minutes and 40 seconds as opposed to the 7 minutes and 55 seconds?

I don't recall that. I would have to go back and look.

In your experience, is there some variation? Well, let me put it this way. Ideally, if you're doing these kinds of statistics, you want a bigger data set if you can get it. You want more time, more territory. Here, we're limited on territory. We're talking about the town of Ross. But this is like a four month period, three or four month period. Isn't it correct that the data can jump around quite a bit? And it's not until you have a longer period of time that you really can get a better idea of what's going on.

Yeah, that's correct. The 10 minutes and 56 seconds for the response time with the same methodology as CityGate for the fire engine, that was 38 incidents. And so that is a very small data set. I believe and I recall that back in 2019, I think they wanted to go back about five years just because of the call volume in Ross and the number of EMS incidents that they wanted to evaluate is only about 100, between 100 and 120 a year on some years. So even that many calls is not that many. It's not as large of a data set as you really want to measure when you're looking at the 90th percentile.

All right, thank you.

So I have a number of questions, so maybe I can go with a couple and then if other people have them, I can go. So can you explain what NFPA 1710 benchmarks are?

Yeah, so that is a standard for fire department responses, and there's a lot of different benchmarks that they recognize there, and one of them is response times. And CityGate has the response times that they emulate their response times off of the NFPA 1710 response times. And I actually believe after talking to CityGate today that some of those response times are in the process of being changed. But for the sake of this discussion, we're going to stick with the 2019 CityGate recommendations.

So that NFPA benchmark is 7 minutes 30 or 8 minutes is what I've read.

Can you repeat?

The NFPA 1710 benchmark for all fire departments is it's either 8 minutes or 7 minutes 30. That's what they say. I don't know if Ross Valley doesn't subscribe to that, but that's the NFPA goal for 90%.

Yes, that's the recommendation. Now, whether agencies want to adopt that or not is something that is a policy decision that they have to adopt. But the CityGate recommendation recommends that there's seven minutes and 30 seconds, and eight minutes would be that if you're total emergency response force to get on scene.

Mayor Mrakas, Okay, so we're talking about seven minutes 30 or eight minutes from the national fire board for better or worse for 90% not an average, this is this is their standards that that most fire departments try to follow. Mayor Mrakas, Why, why do they want why seven minutes 30 or eight minutes, do you know why they want those times and and try to make sure it's at this 90% level or below yeah so.

Like I mentioned before, there's three components of response times. There's call processing time, and their recommendation is call processing time take one minute and 30 seconds. And then crew turnout time, the NFPA recommendation is two minutes for the crews to, from the.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm not being clear. Why not say 10 minutes? Why not say 11 minutes? Why 12? Why is it seven minutes, 30, or eight minutes? Why so prescriptive around those times?

Well, that's in a suburban area. Now, if you want to talk about different type rural areas have different response times.

I'm just talking about the NFPA standard. This is their standard. Do you have any reason why? Because the city gate report is very clear on why they say 7 minutes 38. They say they don't want people who are having a heart attack to die and they don't want fires to spread.

If you're gonna be disrespectful and start yelling at me, Matthew, I'm gonna end my presentation, okay? So I would appreciate that you have some professional courtesy and we have a discussion about this. So you can go forward, thank you.

My job is to make sure the public understands what the risks are. That's why I got elected. I know you have your job to do as well. And when I'm asking you a question of what these national standards are, I'd appreciate it if you explain it as a fireman would who is subscribing to the national standards. And if they have reasons of setting these goals at seven minutes, 30 or eight minutes, and you know what they are, it's just sharing that information with us. So we have these reports, and they specifically say that people can die of heart attacks, fires can spread to beyond controllable past those times. Now, I don't know if you agree with that or don't. You can say that or you don't agree with those times. But that's what the information we have. And you're our fire chief. And I would hope you would want to protect us. So if the national standards are wrong, Just say that, or you don't prescribe to them, or we don't need to worry about that. Say that. But I'm asking you what I have before me. This is the information I have, and I want to know what you think are the right goals or targets for the Ross Valley Fire Department.

So that was the information that the council had in front of them when they made the decision at a 5-0 vote to close the fire station.

Correct.

Yes.

So I'm asking, you don't have to... Let me reset this here. I want you to know something. I don't blame you or the Ross Valley Fire Department for what happened to Ross. I blame the Ross Town Councils that decided to close the station.

Matt, could you ask a question? Yes.

So again, Matthew, I'm here to talk about response times and report out on the last four months of response times.

OK, so what is the standard for the Ross Valley Fire Department? What is the time that you set as a goal for the department to show up? Do you agree with the NFPA goal, or do you have your own goal?

So back in 2005, the Ross Valley Fire Department adopted a standards of cover. And it's called out in the city gate study, I believe it's on page 19, that our standard to respond to an incident is seven minutes or eight minutes. It was called out in the city gate report that those are legacy times they need to be updated. We have not updated those standards yet.

Okay, so there's no current standard. Do you have, a suggestion or what you think you want that number to be? Excuse me, Mayor.

No. Excuse me. I'd like to add, so first of all, I think Councilmember Salter, in regard to your inquiry about the national fire standards, that's something for you to ask them. Right? Our fire chief and our fire board are not involved with their determination. So I think that's the answer to your question, ask them. And then again, I would like to remind the council this item is agendized to give a presentation. It's not an action item. It's to give a presentation for the chief to give a presentation about response times for that four-month period of time. We must adhere to the Brown Act. That is what we're here to talk about tonight, not all the other topics that have arisen thus far.

Thank you. Okay. If you'd like to go and I'll come back to you.

Okay. Chief Mahoney, I noticed then the engine response time when you, it's a response time when you exclude the incidents outside of the Ross town limits. that the 90th level is nine minutes and 34 seconds, correct?

Yes.

So all of the times listed for response are that or less, correct? So when I look at the data that you've given us, the response times for the 30 responses are anywhere from three minutes, 20 seconds, all the way up to like eight minutes and 38 seconds. So most of those incidences in those four months, at the 90% level are less.

Yeah, that's correct. And one of the other factors in here that I was unable to pull out were that includes non-emergency calls. Right so if we were able to pull out the non emergency calls that number would obviously go that that 90th percentile would obviously go lower. But um I really worked hard to hopefully get the Council that number I redacted it from my report at the last minute, because I was 95% confident with my numbers. but that other 5% I wasn't and I only wanted you to bring, I only wanted to bring numbers to you that I was 100% confident with.

So I have a question. I mean, we're focused on the numbers, you know, seven minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes. But I mean, isn't it the case that with the Ross station closed, the engines have to come from San Anselmo or Kent Field and whatever the response time is, we're a minimum of two minutes more, whatever that number comes out to be, correct?

Yeah, the travel distance will depend on where the incident is. And the closer the incident is to San Anselmo or Station 19, which is in San Anselmo, the faster the fire engine will get there.

Right. But regardless, we have longer travel. For most raw sites, there is a longer travel time now compared to before. I mean, that's what CityGate said, that there would be about a two-minute minimum added time. A two-minute minimum, yeah. OK. Thank you.

Which ironically, when you exclude the water district calls, The nine minutes and 34 seconds is really below what CityGate was, the additional two minutes on the 755. So again, these numbers could change. I'm not saying that they can only go down. They can go up also. But I would recommend that we really get a larger data set to look at the actual response.

City Council Chambers, Does it make sense to to look at these numbers and calculate an average response time instead of it, I think people think response time and they think. City Council Chambers, that's the number, but really that's the 90% number, so I think it might be helpful to say what the average response time number is instead of the 90th I think the common person understands that. more easily.

Yeah, I think, and I agree with you, I think the average number more people can understand, but I think when you look at the average number, you're discluding more than the 10% of response times above that 90%. So really the fire service looks at how can we get to a call 90% of the time and consider the other 10% are one-offs, incidents that may have taken longer because of certain circumstances.

So I was wondering, it's not in your data set, but could you let us know what the simultaneous demand has gone to in Station 19? Oh, OK.

If engine 19 was not available and another incident had to, or another engine had to respond to the incident?

Yeah, so the CityGate study talks about simultaneous demand where, you know, when there's two incidents going on at once, how is that changed now that station 18 is gone? Is there a higher simultaneous demand for the department or station 19?

I haven't tracked the numbers and it's just, it's just too early. I mean, it feels like it, it feels like just yesterday, to be honest with you, that, that, that just happened. So we're trying to, you know, trying to, trying to be vigilant right now. And I'm reporting out to the battalion chiefs every, every month to make sure that, you know, we, we kind of get, we kind of adjust and settle down to the new norm. And, you know, when we could definitely track those numbers, if we did a study.

Wouldn't it seem like if there was a simultaneous, incident and the engine at Station 19 wasn't available, the engine from Kent Field would respond instead? So these numbers, given that only Station 19 responded, kind of indicate that there wasn't something simultaneous going on?

Yeah, so there could have been simultaneous demands out, let's say, in Fairfax and Sleepy Hall, or Engine 20 and Engine 21, and then leaving Engine 19 available to come down here. But in that four-month period, the data shows that Engine 17 was not called to come over to assist. But you're correct, Mayor. If Engine 19 was not available, Engine 17 would come over to assist.

If it's available?

Yes, if they're available.

And then what about the unit hour utilization? Do you look at that figure for the department?

No. I believe the city gate reports stated that the engines were not reaching their maximum capacity for unit hour utilization. That was mentioned in the RVPA study for the ambulances because the ambulances do have a higher unit hour utilization just because there's less of them. There's more fire engines than ambulances.

Mayor Mrakas, And then, did you look at the have you looked at the response times to the other for the department widers just. Mayor Mrakas, Just just here okay so you don't you don't know if it's if it's I just curious your own like running the department, seeing if there's effects to the times to the other areas um they have to come down here.

Mayor Mrakas, No, and to be honest with you, there was what 38. 38 incidents, and to get the numbers that I was able to get you tonight took me about 30 hours. So, you know, as easy as it may sound to pull data and to try to extract different variables, it definitely, I've definitely had a lot of appreciation for consultants now.

I assume we're going to hear public comment and then bring it back to the council. As it happens, I have calculated the averages, but I don't think, since I calculated them, and this is a period for questions, I'm not going to mention that now. I'll wait until we get to our council discussion.

Yeah, I calculated them too, but you're much better at math than I am.

No, no, no, Julie, let's go with your numbers.

Why don't you explain to us why they have this 90%? Since the average is so much lower, why is it that the studies and the professionals and the consultants all want this 90% figure?

So from the way that I understand it is the 90th percentile really gives you a benchmark to take that higher number and try to meet all of your responses below that. And if you just take an average number, you're probably not going to meet that number half the time because it's average. So when you look at deployment models, you look at funding, you look at all these different things that can drive fire departments, the 90th percentile is used to really look at data that is similar to this.

This is the industry standard.

Yes, for now, not to say that there may be some instance that a department may use an average for for response time for another reason, but city gate recommends the 90th percentile and FDA recommends the 90th percentile so that's. I wanted to use apples for apples for what city gate used.

Mayor Mrakas, Okay, and my last question is we got a public comment from a retired Ross fire captain named Bruce selfridge he said that there were some modeling and studies done. Mayor Mrakas, Involving the watershed and that you know, one of the scenarios from him the scenarios that they found was it was very serious and dangerous threat to the town of Ross from a fire starting up there, have you seen those any of those model studies done okay. And then given the times that we've observed in this study, that the engine took, you know, 10, 39 minutes to 18 minutes to get up there. Is that concerning at all to you?

Well, first of all, I'd like to mention that the Water District, we are partners with the Water District and obviously our response zone does not fit within the Water District's area. We provide mutual aid as good neighbors to the Water District. They do have Water District Rangers up there that patrol the area and have medical skills and have a vehicle with water and fire hose on it. So we're not the sole responders to the water district ourselves. But as far as response times, as of right now, even when we would have a fire engine, when there was a fire engine down here in Ross, there were a lot of areas that we wouldn't drive the fire engine up the fire roads and we would count on You know, Marin County Fire Department engines or Ross Valley Fire Department type three engine to to access the the incident because you know these are larger larger fire engines that are designed to stay on pavement and not necessarily go roads. dirt roads. They can, and in some instances, you may be able to reach a fire with a fire engine, but there's a different dynamic that sometimes the fires also don't start right off the fire road. They're deep in the watershed where you have to hike in. But I have not seen those reports. I would like to see them, though.

Well, we can connect them to you, and maybe Bruce can point you in the right direction.

I have one last question, do you have a feeling about calls in the watershed based on whether and will the call volume go down in the winter and the call volume may go up in the summer it's seasonal.

You know, I was thinking about this, and back in 2019, and I didn't look at the data, but I really think that the watershed has had far more visitors now than they did back then. I think with, especially during COVID, where people recreation was mainly outside we had a number of calls up there and now with social media and people posting things and it's a pleasant experience that most people have up there that they want to they want to come back so um I think yes just like any recreational area outdoors in the In the summertime, we tend to run far more incidents up in that area. In the wintertime, it tends to die out a little bit. But now with the invention of e-bikes, we have a lot of people that are actually up in the watershed, mountain bike e-bikes, frequenting up there, which obviously the more people up there, the more opportunity there is for somebody to get injured.

Okay, we'll open it up to public comment. If you could line up at the podium, and please introduce yourself and the public comment is limited to three minutes. And if someone before you has made a similar statement, you don't need to make your full statement, you can just indicate that you're adopting a prior speaker statement. Thank you.

Can I start?

Go ahead. Bob Herbst, 7 Laurel Grove Avenue. I'm the president of the Friends of Ross Firehouse. As you all know, we're working on a construction plan to reopen our firehouse and return the 7 minute and 55 second response time that Ross Valley Fire District delivered to us when the firehouse was open. I'd like to put into perspective the 7 minute and 30 second response National Fire Protection Association recommended best response time for suburban areas. There's been questions, well, why? What does that mean? This is the CityGate report. This is page 22, section two, standards of coverage assessment. I quote, the brain can only survive four to six minutes without oxygen. Cardiac arrest and other events can cause oxygen deprivation to the brain. Thus, from the time of 9-11 receiving the call, an effective deployment system is beginning to manage the problem within a seven to eight minute total response time. Seven to eight minute total response time, that's your seven minute 30 NFPA recommended best response time. This is right at the point that brain death is becoming irreversible and the fire has grown to the point of leaving the room of origin and becoming very serious. So this is why it matters, guys. We've been talking about average times, 90th. But if it's your dad, your child, who has this emergency, and their response time is above the average, or their response time is at the 90th, is that OK? It's not, right? That's why they look at the 90th percentile response time. We don't want any bad incomes. Chief doesn't want any bad incomes, I guarantee you. This is his profession. This is his life. He's devoted himself to it. And Ross Valley Fire District is doing a great job. It's really our decision as the Ross Town Council to close our firehouse. in spite of the city gate predictions. As Chief pointed out, you guys made this decision. He didn't make that decision. So we have a chance to redo that decision. On January 8th, we'll be in front of you to present our plan, and hopefully we can find a new path forward and get back to these excellent 7 minute 55 response times. Thank you.

Hi, Stephanie DiMarco. First, I want to thank Chief Mahoney and the Ross Valley Fire Department for your dedication in protecting our community. We really appreciate it. Unfortunately, despite your best efforts, what we're seeing is emergency response times are lengthening. And in many cases, they will be unsafe levels, as Bob talked about. And we understand that this is a direct result of the town of Ross' decision to close our firehouse, and that your department has worked tirelessly to maintain safety standards despite this challenge. Unfortunately, a fire response system functions like a network. Each station is a node that supports all the others. You remove even one and the entire system is weakened. Fewer engines mean longer travel times, fewer backup options, narrower safety margins, and a greater risk that the system fails at the precise moment when you need it the most. The decision to close the Ross Firehouse was predicated on an analysis that rebuilding the aging structure would be too expensive. Over the past eight months, a volunteer citizens group, Friends of the Ross Firehouse, has been working with architects, builders, and public safety experts to demonstrate that this narrative that it is too expensive to rehabilitate and operate a fire station in Ross is incorrect. On January 8th, we look forward to presenting to the council and the community an alternative plan that rehabilitates the public safety building, restores fast emergency response times, and preserves the unique character of our town civic center. And also importantly, this plan will cost millions of dollars less than the town's master plan. You've heard from over 400 residents who have signed in support of reopening the fire station. The public sentiment is overwhelming. People want a fire station back in Ross. We look forward to the opportunity to share an alternative plan with you on January 8th. And we're hopeful and we're optimistic that the town council will see the value and the benefits of the plan and that we're all able to move forward together to our mutual benefit. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi. My name is Mark Lewandowski. I don't have a prepared statement. I just want to get up and support the 90th percentile over the average. When I hear statistical conversations like this, it really triggers me, and it's really important that we work with established models like the 90th percentile. In layman's terms, that means that 9 out of 10 responses are below the limit. By definition, average means half are above and half are below. And so if we try to change those models, we end up skewing things and ignoring the important response times. I'm happy to talk about more, but 90th percentile is important, and please pay attention to that.

Barbara Call, you've heard me speak before and so you're probably thinking, oh God, here she comes again. This time I have a proverb for you. It dates back to the biblical times, but it was updated in the 1500s by the English. And it goes something along the lines of this, there are none so blind as those who will not see. None so blind as those who will not see, not those who can't see, but those who will not see, they will not see because they have a stubborn refusal to acknowledge or understand the truth. So I hear all this arguing back and forth about, well, one minute, two minutes, ten minutes, five minutes. You know, the whole point is the town is not better without a fire department and without an emergency response system in-house. If you farm these things out to, say, Fairfax or Kentfield, what control do you have over what Fairfax does or what Kentfield does? I mean, are we a town or not? Towns have fire departments. They have emergency response systems. So I don't know why we're even discussing this anymore. I mean, it's just you guys need to do what's best for the town. The town does not want you to demolish the fire department. And the building itself is historic. They don't want to see that turned into some... civic center that is ugly and whatever. There's also another saying I have to share and that is something called the sunk cost fallacy. Sunk cost fallacy means throwing good money after bad. And I know you spent money already on this plan to demolish the the fire station and farm out the emergency response system, but that's all bad money that's been spent, and there's no point in throwing good money after bad money. You're talking about 21 million dollars, and the interesting thing is that I think you're selling the town on the fact that you're really only asking for 11 million because you've saved 10. And in my mind, 10 and 11 still equal 21. So I really think that the plan that the Friends of the Firehouse has, if you use your economics, is going to be free because you've already saved the money. And you'll get your fire station, you'll get the town having a better response time and We'll quit arguing about this issue and put it to rest. I hope you do the right thing. Thank you.

Madam Mayor, fellow council members, happy holidays. I'm Mike Rosenbaum, and I live at 14 Madrona Avenue. There will be no applause for me, I guess, tonight. I think we should have verifiable information. Both of the Town of Ross and the Friends of Ross Firehouse need to agree on one source of verifiable information. I reference the Chief Mahoney's presentation on page 114. No alternative facts. Everyone should stick to agreed upon data. I think we need to trust Marin County agencies. Council members should not question, impugn, or criticize reports from Marin County agencies as it undermines public trust. I do think we need to remove non-emergency calls. We need to clean up the data by excluding non-emergency calls, like the time Engine 19 was called to remove a neighbor's cat from DeWitt Avenue on October 19th at four o'clock. I have photos to prove and it's not AI generated. The other thing I learned tonight about Marin Municipal Water District, those data also needs to be excluded. I'm an ex-Ski Patroller, first responder, and I can guarantee you if you fall down on the hill of Ski Patrol, no one is going to touch you for at least eight minutes. No one is going to know at the top of the hill that you have a heart attack. So the Marin Municipal Water District is a non-urban emergency. And they're not ski patrollers or first responders stationed at the top to know when someone hurts themselves. So I think that data should also be removed when we come back on January 8. And I think you've done a wonderful job. I'm sorry you have to do this.

Hello, council members. My name is Nancy McCarthy and I live at 15 Wellington Avenue. What concerns me is what the future will hold. We all see the significant increase in building, not to speak of the School Street Plaza that's going to be like six or seven stories. I would imagine Fairfax is going to need a new fire truck to be able to reach those stories, not to speak of the increased building in San Anselmo. We're talking about a lot of increased need. So where will we be in a year from now or two years from now or three years from now when we've got a very significant increase in population and building. And I don't see how we're going to meet that need with what we have now. And I think that having a fire truck in the town of Ross is going to assure us that we're going to be the first priority, that it isn't going to be somebody else, and that they're not going to be waiting around for our fire truck to come. And that's what this is all about. That's one of the reasons why we live here. we came in expecting this kind of service and now we've lost it i don't know exactly what happened two years ago i don't even remember how i voted on it but um i think that that needs to be considered and i think you need to figure out where we're going to be because once we make this decision and we lose this firehouse forever it's over it's not going to come back we're not going to have a second choice And so if we see huge building or fires or whatever in two, three years from now, we haven't prepared for it. And with respect to the young lady who gave you phrases to consider or proverbs and your sunk cost, I would say that there's another one, which is your first loss is your best loss. And I think that that may be applicable here. Thank you very much for your time.

Anyone else in the chambers hey before we move to the online comments, we need to take a brief break, so we will resume at 735 Thank you.

Thank you. Absolutely. oh yes Thank you. Thank you.

All right.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. I know, but I have a lot of these. I've never heard of this, never had it, and it's dropping me, and it's driving me crazy, and it's driving me crazy. We are ready to start. I don't think it versus the soil. It just looks really bad. I've never been. Anyways. Thank you.

Okay, we're gonna resume, we're gonna resume our meeting, and we're gonna start with the, I think everyone in the chamber has made comments, so we're moving on to comments online. Cindy? Yes, Mayor, one moment.

Ms. Stroyer.

Yeah.

Thank you. Can you hear me?

Yes. Yes, I'm calling in to talk a little bit about the boomers use of biblical sayings to make their points.

I'm gonna stop you, you need to confine your comments to the agenda item. So could you please confine your items to what's on the agenda, or we will need to move on to the next speaker.

Okay, was this the item about how the Jews control the world and it's time to break loose of their domination?

I'm stopping you. Your comments are not related to the agenda item, so I am requesting that you terminate this commenter from the Zoom.

Thank you. Bye. GTVfly.com. GTVfly.

Cindy, would you please terminate that? He's off. Thank you. Okay, the next comment online. There were no other comments online, Mayor. OK, thank you. So we will bring this back for Ben, I need your guidance. This was a presentation. Do we need to have a discussion since it was a presentation?

You can have a discussion, but there's obviously no action or direction necessary or allowed under the Brown Act.

OK, so we can have a discussion. Would anyone like to say something?

I would like to thank the audience for being here and expressing your opinions. I think it's important that we hear you. I would like to thank Chief Dan Mahoney for really great data. I know you spent a lot of time, 30 hours is a long time to spend with data. So I'm really looking forward to it. I think this is a start. I agree with you, it's just a small amount of data. And I look forward to seeing the data when it's a 12 month set of data. And I really would like to see it when it's separated out from the municipal water and a non-emergency, but have all that information available. So I'm looking forward to report back in July of next year.

Anyone else? Elizabeth?

Thank you very much for the presentation. I think it's helpful to have the numbers. Just two comments. As I said before, it's obvious that it will take longer for an engine to get here to most spots in Ross from Kent Field to San Anselmo. So no matter what the numbers are, it's a longer response time. And the question is, is the community okay with that? The other comment is, with respect to taking out elements of this dataset, unless similar elements are taken out of the 2019 dataset, I think it's meaningless to take it out of this dataset.

I agree with prior comments about this is a great start. Going forward, and I don't want to impose on Chief Mahoney's time any further than we already have, but I'm wondering if in the future we can't get some more detail on these responses so we can get a better idea of which of these calls are the priority emergency calls. In a meeting with Stuart Gary that Elizabeth and I participated in quite some time ago, we were discussing the question of medical calls, medical responses. And this was in connection with the ambulance and our concern that the ambulance wasn't available as often as we thought it was. And Stuart made the comment that we don't have a lot of calls in Ross. In fact, he used the term poquito, very small. And it's true. When you look at this report, there's only 38 calls, which is low, partly because I think Ross is a pretty healthy place generally, not that we don't have problems, not that we don't need emergency medical care. Of course we do. But he also said that he didn't have precise numbers here, but he said generally in his experience, the truly urgent calls, that was the life-threatening calls, life or death, like cardiac arrest. somebody can't breathe. He said that's about 16% of the total. Now he's not saying that was 16% of our total, but you can see what we're averaging about eight or nine calls a month. And if you try to take 16% of that, it's not even one life-threatening emergency a month. Now these are Approximate figures and it would be wonderful to have some more precise data on that so we can see what is the threat. A lot of these calls, it doesn't really matter whether the engine gets there in 8 minutes or 10 minutes or 12 minutes. Somebody falls, of course, we want to help them as soon as we can, but we have three falls here that are part of this data. They just need somebody to help them up. They couldn't get up on their own. Maybe whoever they were with couldn't get them up, so they get some big firefighters to help lift them up. No medical care, no ambulance. So that would be an example of something that would be a lower priority. Not that we want to delay that intentionally, but I'm just saying. We want to get the resources where we can as fast as we can. Because as has been pointed out, sometimes life or death really is a very short time frame. And I don't think it's seven or eight minutes. I think it's two or three or four minutes. Can we get somebody there in four minutes? Yes, we did. We did it four times. But let's get some more data if we can to get a better idea of where we stand. And I do want to just address this issue of the 90th percentile, which I think Dan described very well. It's a goal. We want to be under that. Let's strive for that, as opposed to an idea of what the average is. Most of the time, when is the ambulance getting there? So I did the math, and I think Julie might have done it, too, so we can compare notes. This is, I'm not gonna certify this under penalty of perjury, I did my best, okay? Maybe I made a mistake on my spreadsheet. But I'm suggesting more of a methodology and what we might expect if we did this more precisely. If you take all 38 calls to which the fire engine responded, and you average that time, add it all up, whether it's in the MWD lands in the town of Ross, I divided the total by 38. And I came up with seven minutes and 17 seconds. And there was some reference to these standards that said you want to do something within seven and a half to eight minutes, because after that you get to irreversible brain death. So our average is hitting that, but not for every call. There are some that are more. Now, if you exclude, I did an alternate calculation where I excluded the ones up into the watershed. And I also excluded two that were in the 12-minute range where it was technically an EMS call, but there was no indication of any injury. It was just a lift case, what's described as a lift case. So if I excluded those seven, then the average dropped down to five minutes and 32 seconds. Now, I think one of the great things about this list that we haven't seen before, this is new, and I think it's because of this new dispatch system plus Dan's hard work. But we have for each call not only the fire engine, but we had the ambulance. Now we can compare the two. And Julie said, as Julie pointed out, the paramedics arrived first. And I think you said 14 times. I don't know. I counted 12. Again, remember, this is approximate. And we're just getting a start here on keeping track of this. So this is not cast in stone. But I did the same calculation for the ambulance times. And I came up with 8 minutes and 53 seconds for the ambulance. But that's where the ambulance, with one exception, is arriving in conjunction with fire engine. And then if you exclude those seven I mentioned earlier, then we get it down to seven minutes and I think it's seven minutes and 49 seconds. Now there's a couple of other interesting things here and now this is getting into some speculation. I only mention it because this is something I think we could refine and get a better handle on. First of all, you've heard this repeated a number of times, what the 2019 report said, which was if the bus station closed, then there would be a minimum increase of two minutes in the response. And I pointed out before that that really depends on where you live. Because it's really that number, the two minutes, it was driving time from San Anselmo to Station 18. And if a response were to the northern border of Ross, obviously the driving time would be less. And I think these numbers reflect that, where you can compare when the ambulance arrived first, how much sooner did it get there than the fire engine? And you can see that's not two minutes in every case. Sometimes it is, but sometimes often it's not. And that's because the fire engine, the paramedic authority ambulance came from station 18 and the fire engine came from 19. So it's not automatically two minutes. What your experience will be really depends on where you live and other things like did you lock your driveway and so forth. and shrubbery. But, you know, mostly it's driving time from these various stations. And then the other thing I thought was interesting, if you look at the ambulance details, sometimes there's a bigger difference between when the fire engine arrived and when the ambulance did. I mean, up to eight minutes later, or maybe five minutes later. And I looked at those and I thought, that's because the ambulance was doing something else. And either the ambulance had to come from Central Marin or some other place, the county, or was already out on a call. And I identified, I think, three or four of those that seemed where I could just say it was otherwise occupied. Some of the others were kind of closer, really hard to say, like two minutes. But I just started, I couldn't help but starting to do the math and because we've speculated a lot about just how available is the ambulance. We were We made our previous decision on the understanding that it would be available 85% of the time. And this is all really approximate, but it looks to me like probably the range is 75% to 80% of the time the ambulance is available, it is free. And fortunately, the fire engine is getting there on the average within anywhere from five to seven minutes. But this is preliminary. As Dan said, the numbers could change month to month. Things will look different, probably will look different as the year passes. But I think we can now get some more reliable information that can be a better basis to make decisions on. So those are my comments.

I just have a comment in response to that.

Can you wait, Elizabeth, and let's let Matt talk, and then I'll talk, because you have already spoken. Thank you.

So I have my own proverb. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. What you're hearing is they followed the same methodology that the experts and the consultants followed, and it's 11 minutes for the fire engine to come and 14 minutes for the ambulance. So let's nitpick and cherry pick the data to make it sound like it's really five to seven minutes when right in front of you is the numbers. Now, I'm going to tell you I'm a math person and a finance person, and that's why I am always digging into this stuff. The first thing is there is no doubt it's a small data set. Is this 30, 30, 30 incidences? So the fact that, Bill, I appreciate all your comments, but why are you nitpicking over 30 things? I mean, one thing could sway one way or the other. I'm not gonna read into these numbers as a Bible, but what I'm gonna tell you is the trend is clear. it is longer for an engine to have to come from san anselmo to ross and there's no doubt about that and it's adding more time we don't know is it two minutes is three minutes it's more time you aren't going to get the same level of service you had before and i'm very happy that this came out because before some people were saying hey it's going to be the same or better even it's not it's common sense it has to come from san anselmo The other thing I wanted to say was what Stephanie DeMarco said is so important. It's a network. We are part of a big department with three, four, you take something offline it's going to have a negative effect on the others when i talk about i always talk about wi-fi you know if you don't put those little extenders all over your house guess what you're not going to get signal coverage well the same is true we took our node offline you can debate why we did that if that's good or bad but it is a fact and when you take it offline you'll instead of having four engines coming and working together as a group, you only have three. And those three are going to be more taxed because of that. And I asked the chief those questions. He doesn't have the data yet. But there's no doubt in my mind it's more taxed. So we have longer times, and we have three engines that are going to be further taxed by this. Then we have the last public comment, which was I think the most brilliant, was we're also building all these housing and more infrastructure. The state's making us do more housing. Well, don't we need more resources, not less resources? So this is the moment to look forward and say, wow, maybe we should be building more capacity for what this valley will need in the next hundred years. We know fire threats are going up. We know climate change is real. We know more housing will be built here. Why would we take this opportunity not to try to add an engine back so that we can support the next 100 years of development here and keep all of our people safe. All of these things, please let me finish, Julie.

I just want you to focus on the agenda item.

It is the agenda item. This is exactly the agenda item. It's not, it's data.

It's the response data is the agenda item.

So the data is small, but very clear, 11 minutes for the fire engine, 14 for the ambulance. The last point I'm going to make is a lot of people don't understand the difference. They think that the ambulance comes for medical emergencies and the fire is only for when there's a fire. That is just not the case. The firemen are actually all paramedics and most of their calls happen to be medical because there aren't a lot of fires. So what we're talking about is a lot. I think when the council originally made this decision, there was a thought that the ambulance would be there. These numbers also conclude that The ambulance is longer than the fire truck. And so if you have a medical emergency, you want that engine to show up because they're paramedics. And when you fall, it's not just picking you up. Some people crack their head open or some people have medical issues that need to be attended to that the fireman can do. So again, the numbers are not good. This is a terrible report. And the numbers absolutely are showing that it's longer and you are less safe, as predicted by the CityGate 2019 study. So I hope the numbers will prove, I think that they will, because we'll get a bigger data set, but the trend is very clear. And so the decision before all of you as Ross residents is, do you want to have lower times or do you want higher times? That's really the decision before you.

Elizabeth, did you want to say something else? I'll just try to conclude by saying that when we voted unanimously in March of 2021, we knew, the council knew, that the response time would increase from seven minutes and 55 seconds to nine minutes and 55 seconds. We all knew that we all recognize that the study was based on calls only coming from station 19 not station 17 the decision was made before the emergency command Center. And I think the numbers show that the ambulance is in fact a wonderful reliable first responder responding to nearly 40% of the calls. And I did want to say, I wanted to remind people that when we were discussing this initially in September of 2019, we had a discussion about how it's really the first minute that matters. And statistics indicate that 90% of hospital cardiac arrest patients die. And Councilmember Robbins asked Stuart Gary if we could have a two-minute response time. And he said that was impossible unless you live in Israel. So we need to be realistic about what our response time should be and can be. And we don't want anyone to die. We don't want anyone to suffer needlessly. Um, we made the decision knowing that the Kent field station is 0.3 miles away and the San Anselmo station is 0.5 miles away and the paramedics are staying in Ross, which is confirmed by our longterm lease. So I think people need to keep that in mind when they're looking at these numbers. And I look forward to learning more after the fire station has been closed for a year. And I encourage you to hire a consultant or have the town hire a consultant to crunch all the data. And thank you, Dan, for all your time in preparing this presentation and bringing the numbers forward to us.

Julie, I just have one comment about when we voted to close the station. I mean, there were two things. Not all council members knew that all firemen are paramedics or EMTs. That's something that I think was a real misunderstanding. I think that if people had realized that, we might not have been so quick to get rid of the fire station. But we were assured, you said that we expected an increase in two minutes. We were assured that 85% of the time, there would be no increase in response time because the ambulance would be there. and it could respond in the same period of time. And we're learning that it's not probably not there 85% of the time. And certainly we're not seeing a seven minute 55. Second 90% response time.

Yeah, I think the number that Jason Weber gave us at the March 2025 meeting was 79%. But that wasn't the number we voted on.

We voted on 85%.

Well, I mean, it's sheer speculation as to whether anyone would have changed their vote based on six percentage points. So I would have changed my vote if I'd known more.

Okay, could I make one more comment before we close? Yes. You know, I don't want to argue back and forth on the council, but I'm sorry, Matt. I just have to respond to what you're saying. I think you used the word nitpicking about what I was doing. It was not my intention to nitpick. I was trying to make that clear that I considered this to be just a kind of a start and that we need better and more complete data before we start jumping to conclusions. And so Matt was saying, well, I don't have a basis to even come to any conclusions. But it's clear that everything's getting worse. And so if my stuff isn't clear, I'm sorry, Matt, I don't think anything's clear at this point. I think we should look forward to continuing this project, get periodic reports, and closely monitor it. It could be that we will see things that will change the whole picture dramatically. Let's just let things play out.

Are you saying we should have an open mind? Listen carefully.

I'm trying to think of a proverb. I know.

But we're still left with, it takes longer to get here from Canfield or San Anselmo than to get here from Ross. And the ambulance doesn't have the turnaround time we expected. I think that's the problem.

That's how you're interpreting stuff, yeah. OK, I think we're going to move on to the next item, which is item.

Sorry, maybe we can ask that we have the data updated quarterly or just sort of.

I don't I, I would not agree to that. I think we did ourselves a disservice by having only four months of data. We could agendize that and talk about it later. OK. Agenda item number 11 is the discussion regarding the Ross Common playing field. Krista, is that you?

Yes. Thank you, Mayor and council members. Rich Semenich, our public works director, is here this evening to talk a little bit about this issue and some options for the council to continue. He is starting his PowerPoint.

Yes, thanks, Krista. Rich Semenich, public works director. So I'm going to get my presentation up here, then I will start shortly. OK. OK, thank you, Mayor and Council. Earlier this fall, council members requested that we agendize the topic of the Ross Common Playfield restoration. Late in 2024, we had a similar presentation where we discussed certain options on restoration of the Ross Common and some capital improvement projects. As we moved into the budget process for this fiscal year and discussion of the capital improvement program, it was decided that we would not be pursuing any capital projects for the Ross Common. We continue our budgeting for our general maintenance of the field. So with that, we're bringing this conversation ahead here today. So just going to move forward with that. So a little bit on the timeline going back to 2011 when the renovation of the Ross School required relocating of the portables out into the field so they could construct the new school. That lacked a comprehensive plan to restore the field properly to a point where it wasn't damaged to the extent that it exists today. poor operation of the irrigation. We installed a 5,000 gallon storage tank to increasing the irrigation storage by 50%. But the wells were not filling the tanks up. So in 2018, or in 2021, we rehabilitated the irrigation wells that improved the capacity by 20%. And going back to 2018, the playfield turf was evaluated by Turf Grass Culture LLC. One of their main points was the irrigation system was inadequate to keep the field growing and staying healthy and vitalized. So moving on to December 2021, the town adopted a landscape master plan vetting the restoration of the Ross Common, estimated between 600 and $800,000, but the constrained facilities budget continued to prioritize town facilities. Also in December 2021, DPW requested to revise the practice of closing the field from a full closure to a 60%, 40% closure. So we've been doing that since December 2021. Moving to July 2024, we did entertain some various limited scope proposals with RPOA and DPW. Those proposals came in at about 130,000 to 250,000. They did not include the, the process of actually designing and developing bid documents for that, nor did it incorporate prevailing wage requirements for public contracting. Spring 2025 playfield restoration discussions during the CIP budget process resulted in no capital budget allocation through fiscal year 2029. So this is a Quick look at kind of a Google Earth of what the field looked like in 2024. You can see the distressed areas of the field, mainly in the location of the portables. And you can kind of see with these circular geometric designs here, that's where the sprinklers do not quite, we're not quite given the proper coverage to keep the field healthy and vital. Moving to 2024, this is about three years after we renovated the irrigation wells. There is a little bit of color saturation here to make it look greener. That is not the intent, but the purpose is to show that there's, even with plenty of irrigation, there is several distressed areas of the field. And again, the point is, you know, we're not, Public Works Department's not saying that this is, there's nothing wrong with the field. There's definitely distressed areas that are simply not getting any better regardless of how much we water the field and implement fertilization efforts or things like that. But the field is not getting worse. We are kind of keeping it maintained in the sort of status quo operational category. So this is a picture I took yesterday of some of the distressed areas, mainly along the blacktop. But there are several areas still, as you could see from the previous picture, all over the field where there may be an opportunity to do some restoration of the severely distressed areas of the lawn. This is evidence of bicycles coming in on and off the field. You know, it hasn't rained since, I think, just before Thanksgiving, but you can still see that just riding a bicycle on especially the distressed portion of the field is not doing any damage. any good for the for the field now if you had a full turf here yes they could handle this type of of abuse if you will a lot better than the current condition of the field but just kind of an example of the type of distress that that can happen just by daily use so Yeah, so I came out here yesterday for just about a 10-minute walk. Had some interesting pictures that I'm going to show you in a minute here. This is one taken by DPW staff on Tuesday. This is a typical divot caused by dogs digging in the field. You can tell it's some sort of paw marks in there. This is located in several locations about the field. This is another location where there's been digging by most likely dogs, but some some type of animal was taken by public work staff on Tuesday. So I have to move this from my screen here. So there are options to consider tonight moving as we move closer to budget discussions and what we have available for funding. First option, maintain status quo, which is basically under our current five-year CIP status quo being no new capital projects for improving it, just keeping it, keep watering it and our general current maintenance and fertilization regime. Next option would be to move forward with a nominal fertilization and additional signage prohibiting dogs. And I think prohibiting bicyclists on the common would also be beneficial. That cost is about $10,000 annually for the enhanced fertilization program. And no special closures would be required, just the standard December through March closure. The third option would be to move forward with a modest interim rehabilitation program costing, based on some estimates that we received from contractors, to be about $60,000 to $70,000 plus a $10,000 annually fertilization program. That would require a three to four month estimated closure. So what we would do there is we would remove about, I think, 17,000 square foot of the turf. And that's generally the amount of the severely distressed areas. So we kind of pick and choose these areas of seriously distressed turf and replace it with new sod, just going down maybe an inch or two into the existing ground and Tilling up the soil, adding some soil amendments, and placing some new turf in those locations. The final option would be that we want to maybe discuss is to move forward with a complete restoration project, which would require reallocation during the capital improvement program discussions. That would cost around $600 to $1 million for a full replacement of the irrigation system and removal and restoration of the top 12 inches of soil. And that would also include about an 8 to 10 month estimated closure to do the construction and then allow a 6 to 8 month period where the lawn would be completely closed off to allow it to get to a point that we could get the public back on there to enjoy it. But yeah, we'd really need about six to eight months of it to really establish itself within the new topsoil. So Public Works, discussing this with the Public Works staff just in a ministerial level, what we'd like to see is continue with some drainage maintenance and improvements. There's still problems there at the southeast part of the field that can be looked at. We're very interested in the enhanced fertilization program as well. regardless of the course of action we the public works recommends strongly that we return to the full closure between december and march you can see what happens when you leave the field open when it's uh when it's relatively damp even though we haven't had rain for for over three weeks We feel that a full closure would be the best way to maintain status quo and maybe even gradually see some improvement. We also feel that any long-term play field restoration option, long-term meaning that's the large capital expenditure, if you're really going to restore this to a top grade, sports field or whatever council envisions this to be. We would highly recommend that dogs, and I'm going to throw in bicycles too, should be restricted to post office lawn area only. Well, that would be for the dogs. Consider a split rail fencing along the back of walk and additional waste bags and more seating in that location to turn that into a dedicated dog area. So this is our thoughts. And again, sort of on a ministerial level for Public Works staff. So this is some pictures we took just yesterday. And on the left, I went out again for about just a 10 minute walk while the cleaning service was cleaning the our double wide trailer where we work. I was not expecting to see Anything but there for sure was a dog out there on the field. No leash, but the dog on the right that picture was taken by DPW staff on Tuesday. The one on the left on Wednesday. This is another picture of there. You can see the dog kind of doing its business there. This is all again during my my brief walk. And then. I took the opportunity to take this picture of the dog. And if this happened just during my one little walk yesterday, statistically, you look at your 85 percentile and 90 percentile, how much is this happening on a day-to-day basis? I'm not quite sure. Oh, there he is again. So again, back to the options to consider. Maintain status quo under the approved five-year CIP. Move forward with a nominal fertilization and signage improvement measures. Or we can move forward with a modest interim rehabilitation program where we patch up the most distressed areas of the lawn, mainly for aesthetic purposes. This isn't going to really provide the cleanup of all the divots and the irregularities of the field, but it'll look a lot nicer. You probably get a five to seven year life out of it before the sub-based soil that can't drain very well starts killing that off, any of the new sod. Before we move forward with the complete restoration project as described in the turf report, that from 2018 again estimated about six hundred thousand to a million dollars and and again that's a we'd have to commit to an eight to eight to ten month full closure on the field that concludes my report and i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you i i have a question rich if we were to move forward with option number three which is

a modest interim rehabilitation program. When would the results of that start showing?

After the three to, well, it'd be a month to install it, and then two to three months, we'd have to leave the field closed. And you would start seeing that the aesthetic benefits, you know, instantly, where we have those just, the distressed areas replaced with a sod. This would be kind of similar to what happened, you may remember, when Ross Valley Sanitation District closed off the field when they were doing their pipe repair back in 2019. And we allowed them to stage on the field their heavy equipment under the condition that they replace the sod in that location. They did replace it. It's held up pretty well, but it's becoming, it was brand new sod on about an inch of removal of the topsoil. But that section of grass is already becoming invaded by the weeds, the clover and the poanum grass and things like that. So you'd start seeing the benefits immediately, but within five years, five to seven years, it's gonna start City Council Chambers, Looking like. City Council Chambers, it's you know, taking a taking a hit again it's going to be very important that we do a full closure on the field, we go back to that regime, but you know, three to four months, December through March to really make this kind of investment. City Council Chambers, payoff to the extent that it actually would and questions Council members bill.

Rich, is there a problem with kids riding bikes on the field, and particularly e-bikes? I thought I saw some correspondence to that effect. I can't remember where, but that was tearing up parts of the field.

Yeah, I mean, during my walk yesterday, I showed you the picture of the bicycle tire marks right there, and then I saw the kids on their bikes. They were over on the blacktop. I actually had seen them riding on there. And yes, one of the correspondence had a picture of a big pile of bikes right in the middle of the playfield. That's included in, I think, in the correspondence that you have. So yes, bicycles on this distressed turf in the wet weather is very bad for the lawn.

And one other question. If we were to opt for one of the middle range one where we're spending 60 or so thousand dollars a year to beef up the playing field, but without replacing it, without doing the big one, is that, I mean, are we just, if we do get to the point of doing the larger project, Are we going to be able to use any of what we've done, or are we just going to start over again, tear everything up and completely replace the sod?

First, let me clarify that $50,000 to $60,000, that's a one-time capital expense. Oh, I see.

And the follow-up fertilization will be $10,000 annually.

I see. I got that wrong. Okay. But still, what benefit are we getting? other than just putting off the day when we really will have to redo the entire field?

Well, it seems to me that a lot of the complaints that are coming in from the public and council members and whatever is that the lawn looks bad. To me, it seems like a lot of it is the aesthetics. It's not some, I mean, it's a play field. It's not a sports field. It's a play field. And there are some irregularities in there. You know, we try to fill that up with mulch and we can kind of control that. But it depends on where you want to go with this field. I mean, if we're going to be investing 800 to a million or somewhere in that range, we need to really restrict the use of it and close it off. when we were supposed to during the winter, like the rest of the play fields and sports fields in Marin County and California and everywhere. So yeah, you'd basically, if we did the $50,000 to $60,000 project, and then we come back in two or three years and we want to do the whole project, well, we'd remove all of that sod that we put in with the $50,000, $60,000. you'd have to go with a complete replacement and all of that would be taken away.

How much staff time is it going to take for staff to, say, oversee number three, which is a moderate change? Is that a lot of staff time?

That's not that much staff time. So we had two bids, one was over 60,000 and one was under 60,000. The difference is if it's over 60,000, we have to go through public bidding. And that does kick in some staff time reviewing bid documents and scheduling the bid and that sort of thing. But if we selected the below 60,000, we can just do that, we'd have to do it approval through council because it's above 50 000 so it's kind of in that nebulous range so there's some staff time but it's not it it's not any more than a typical uh small capital project for at that level and um now i'll hold i'll hold off somebody else has a question so um you know as you know we had a

City Council Chambers, we've had a lot of Community input on this and it seems like the Community is interested in a you know, a complete renovation of the field now, so my question is, is there any reason we can't use. City Council Chambers, The you know the the tax money that we've that we have saved for this renovation project, and when I know we have. City Council Chambers, We have saved a lot for the building project, but I mean this isn't that different we were the building for the Community here or we're we're improving the field they're both Community projects so is there any reason. that that fund of money couldn't be used for this or this past year, there was a very favorable revenue in excess of expenses. Can that be a source of funds?

So through the mayor, I'll take that. So yes, the funding that the council has been saving up over the years in the capital projects fund is available for this purpose. Karen Hollweg, it's available for that purpose yeah and I would, though it during your discussion which we were, we are planning for your February 12 Council meeting your discussion about your your capital improvement Program. That's a good time to have that discussion because we now have an obligation a contractual obligation to build a paramedic facility has to be up and ready to go and moved in in January 2029 and so that's a contractual obligation that we will have to be um that i'm not we haven't run all the numbers just yet for that but a big chunk of that money is going to have to go for that but the count the town can build whatever it wants i mean the town doesn't have to build a paramedic facility if it decides not to it's just then the The town is contractually obligated to build a paramedic station, a paramedic facility within the lease terms that you approved unanimously. No, four to one on November 21st.

Then why are we listening to fourth in January if this is a total obligation?

Yeah, good question.

Anyway, another question is, uh isn't it possible to proceed to proceed with the total renovation without uh establishing a whole dog policy we do have a dog policy already for the field and it's not well enforced but we we have already established that and whether or not the dogs should be in the grove that's been controversial don't see why it couldn't be uh discussed after a renovation and let the community decide do they want to still let dogs be there and spend more money keeping it up or keep dogs out of that so the question is why do we have to couple a renovation discussion with dogs i think that changes the discussion from you know a civilized discussion about renovating the field to a civil war

So I'm going to take this because this is not a public works question. There are dogs and the dogs are supposed to be, they're not supposed to be any dogs on the playing fields at all. There is signage. We have police officers that as best they can. They talk to persons that they see that have their dogs off leash or actually dogs at all on the playing field. We have, whenever our recreation staff is out on the field, you often see them reminding folks. And yet, we still have dogs on the field. And the dogs are digging. And the dogs, it's a natural thing that dogs do when they do their business, even when they're on the leash. They like to try to cover it up. People that have dogs, we all know that. They scrape. So it's... It's human nature, the dogs are going to be on the field. And so, yes, you could you could decide as a council that you want to spend a million dollars and you want to do this big project, which, by the way, which require The field to be closed over a year, the entire field would be closed over a year, the entire school year. you would not, nobody would have access to the common. So that's also something that the council really needs to consider and the community needs to consider. But getting back to the dog issue, you could do that and you could not take the path of trying to get at this dog issue. And if you do that, you just know that this, it's gonna damage, it's gonna damage the field and it's just, and so you're asking, you depend on your staff or our professional And my recommendation and the Public Works recommendation is that if you invest that kind of money into a facility knowing that the dogs are off leash and that there's not much we can do to keep them off leash, that you might as well just take the money and burn it. Because the field is just going to go back to the same shape that it's in now.

But if our policy is now that they can't be off leash on the field, they can't be on the field, how will that be different with a new field? I mean, the problem is we can't really enforce it. I think we should. I think we should keep trying, but I don't see that. How would it be any different with a new field compared to now where we have no, I don't see how it's going to be any different.

Well, right now people can have their dogs off leash in the Grove area as long as it's not during student time.

But not the field.

Exactly. But it's human leisure. Part of the thing that people really enjoy the common is you have your dog off leash in the Grove area and people chat. That's wonderful. That's community building, right? But when people are chatting or on their phone or on their smartphones, they're not paying attention to their dogs and their dogs are going over and running over into the play field In digging, we see it all the time. So I know you have a lot of confidence in people as dog owners, and some of them really follow the rules. But there are a lot, and we have photographic evidence of it, where they don't play by the rules. So if you limit, if you make it a off-leash area next to the post office, which I've had a group of parents come to me and say that's where they would prefer to have their dogs off leash. And with the town put in some kind of a barrier or a hedge or a split rail fence or something that can kind of keep their dogs from going on Ross Common Road. That that is more of a physical separation that will help keep people from the dog just running over from the Grove area out to the playfield area. Very few communities have areas that dogs can be off leash that are not fenced in area. And for that matter, very few communities have dog parks that are actually lawns. Usually they are dirt and wood chips.

Oh, go ahead.

So, Rich, when was the last time that the field has had any sort of substantial renovation?

To my knowledge, since it was installed, I think in the 80s? In the 70s, there's never been any substantial renovation.

Okay. So, and then it went through, when was the school built? 2011. 2011. 2011. So we're talking about the 80s was when this field was put in place, and then it went through a really bad time when the school was built in 2011. And since that point, there has been no major, I know there's been these maintenance attempts, but there really has not been a big restoration, correct?

That's correct.

Okay. Because Kent Field, as we're all aware, or you're aware, they redid their entire field recently, and the baseball fields, correct? Correct.

I'm not sure that's I can't school can feel sorry it's the basis basis basis it's my understanding from our rec manager that they did just do a big renovation and they also close their field for up to three months every year okay I just want to just try to like put in perspective.

We we have not done a major project in a long time on this field. Our neighbors at basics just did one. And so did San Anselmo, which we received public comment on a major redo in San Anselmo Memorial field. So is it Do you think common that you know, people who work in civic government will will refurbish their field and do a major project?

Well, the school is not civic government. The school is the Department of State Architect. It's a completely different type of entity as far as I know. Yeah, Memorial Park was a controversial project. They could have got a free park if they turned it into a detention basin, but that's another discussion. So, well, yeah, I don't know if there are dogs and bikes and everything allowed on those fields. I don't know. I don't know enough information, really.

Okay, so we all understand. Everyone understands we have to do a better job of trying to regulate what damages the field, okay? I'm just asking about... Mayor Mrakas, This been a long time coming and other people in the area have been redoing their fields and doing upgrades okay that's I just wanted to confirm you agree. Mayor Mrakas, As premises, the second thing you said was that it was just something like it's a play field, but it's not like an athletic field I didn't understand that comment so.

What I mean is by an athletic field would be something more programmed at the high school level. Play field would be something where you're, you know, at most it's being used by a little league type organization.

Ours is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a play field. It's not a sports field.

It's the younger, the younger kids. I'm not a baseball person either, but from being educated by a rec manager that it's like T-ball and smaller, littler kids, not, definitely not high school, but

Yeah, there's a sign on the field, kind of a hidden sign, hard to see, but any child over 12 years old is not allowed to wear cleats on the field. So it's definitely not a sports field. It wasn't designed or programmed to be a sports field.

So I totally appreciate that it wasn't designed for that. Being a father and having children in the school and playing Little League, I can guarantee you it's a sports field. The school is using this field every day for sports, you know, activities, soccer, you name it, is happening on that field. But also a rec department is having lots of programs for sports on that field. Correct?

Yes, and it's play. It's after school recreation, play, and sport. They aren't offering programs that are for high schoolers.

No, I'm just saying it's being used for a lot of athletic sports activities.

Yeah, that's a question of semantics, really, Councilmember. And nobody here, at least to speak for myself, is, you know, I'd love to see a beautiful field out there that's dedicated to sports or is a play field and that's kept up and, you know, where you restrict vehicles, bicycles, and you restrict

dog use on it um it's up to it's up to um this governing board to determine how the money is going to be spent we're just going to totally get that i i just want to make sure we're all agreeing to the same things that the field has been a long time coming and has not been redone and number two it's used frequently for sporting activities maybe not high schoolers but it's used on a daily basis for the school and for our rec programs where there's lots of sports taking place on the field Okay. The last thing is on the particulars on RVLL, on the Little League, there was the president of the Little League sent in a letter to the council, but there was also, there've been numbers of complaints that I, I mean, I received them too, Rich, just so you know, from the, from Little League and from the parents about the condition of the Little League fields in particular. Can you talk a little bit about those complaints, the unevenness of the field, the length of the grass, the deteriorating of the pitching mound, like what, how would you rate the condition of the Little League fields?

Versus. I have no basis of comparison.

Well, BASIC would be the easiest one since they have two Little League fields.

Well, yeah, I've said at least two or three times in this presentation that this field is severely distressed, so I don't know where I need to go with it.

Yeah, but you've been receiving quite a bit of complaints. Is that fair to say on the Little League fields?

So the complaints, this is something that I would need, and I apologize, I don't have our rec manager here because she would really be the person that knows the most about, she is the liaison with Little League. she would know the most about it i've certainly i recall you know i they they've complained because we we mow the grass in the middle of the week and the game isn't until friday and they want it to be mowed the day before i mean there's there's all kinds of of complaints and it's not just ross that that's very that's very common rich and i and i'm You're asking him a lot of questions, and I'm letting you know that he's not the one that's handling Little League complaints. It is coming through our rec manager in our rec department. So I've apologized. It sounds like it would have been a good idea to have her here. I can certainly follow up with her about Little League specific questions, but this is not something that our public works department, they don't interface with Little League and the other user groups.

OK.

City Council Chambers, Thank you. City Council Chambers, I just have two other little questions, it seems like the bulk of the damage of the field was done when there was that temporary village during the raw school remodel that was going on until 2011. City Council Chambers, Have we approached the school to help with any kind of capital improvement project.

We've mentioned it to them over these past few years since I've been here. They have a lot of their own obligations that they're trying to deal with, so there hasn't been an overt, yes, we're going to give you money. We do a lot of partnerships with the school, and I think it was just a year ago when I described to you about how I think they provided a little bit of funding to the town. I think we had some kind of a project on the common ground They provided a little bit of funding, and then they asked us to participate in some of their costs to refinish the gym floor. So it's a little bit of an informal, can you help us do this? We did receive, the council received a nice letter from the school superintendent where he encouraged the council to do this project. You might have read in the letter he did not offer any financial support, but said he did want to be part of the process.

for which as any stakeholder they would be included yeah the reason I'm asking is it seems like you know Elizabeth and I were involved in that construction project and it seemed like there must have been some kind of a reserve set aside to restore the common as to what it was before the village was put there so I'm just thinking maybe that's an avenue to help City Council Chambers, Also, I think it was my understanding that those backstops and the little bases were supposed to be temporary and removed at the end of each season. I don't know if anyone has any recollection about that.

I'll have to ask again our rec manager about that because I think Councilmember Robbins has brought up that question before and I thought that I collected the information and got it back, but I honestly don't remember what her answer was about that. The school thing, I mean, between 2011 and now with the amount of turnover that we've had, I really, I'm not feeling very positive that we're going to be able to find a document and go after the school. I would imagine that they've spent the proceeds of their bonds and, you know, they've moved on to a lot of their own priorities.

When I walked around the Common a couple days ago, it seemed like the worst areas were the areas around the City Council Chambers, backstop and where the basis are for the for the for the baseball. City Council Chambers, And I don't know if making it temporary would help the restoration during the off season or not just something to we might want to consider.

um any other quest quest we're supposed to be asking questions any other questions i do i just want to make sure i understand right now in our budget do we have anything set aside for doing this renovation either on a 60 000 or 600 000 scale no no so if we were to do anything we'd have to wait until the new when we do uh the budget and figure out where our money's going to go that would be in march or april

Yeah, if in regards to the IRP project number three, option number three, is that RPOA has offered in the past to, and in the recent past, to provide some funding. So my intention would be to approach them and ask them to pay for half. And then it would be a matter of coming up with the other half, and we would first, you know, we would look to our existing budget, make sure there's not projects that, you know, can be, you know, so there's a chance. And there's just also a staffing. I mean, Rich has, you know, downplayed a little bit how much work goes into this, but it's a matter of taking it, you know, to council and getting the bid documents done and doing a project. We have to do it right.

okay so it would last for maybe about five years if you went with the the irp or it lasts about five years yeah before you start seeing the the weeds and the um start taking over again and by that time the paramedic facility will have been completed and we'll see how much money we have left and then maybe At that point, we could look at the million-dollar renovation, because I think you're right. It needs to be improved in some way. I mean, people use it. Yes, dogs use it, but people use it too. People sit out there and have picnics. It's just so. Thank you.

Okay, we're going to open it up to public comment. If you can form a line, and three minutes or less, please state your name, and you don't need to repeat comments that have been made before you.

My name is Bruce Goldberg. I live at 1 Aarons Lane. I've been in Ross for 33 years. Let the Civil War begin. I've always had a dog, and I spend a tremendous amount of time in the Grove with my dog. It's part of the charm of the community. It's part of the community. It's part of the fellowship. I'm embarrassed to say I've met some of my best friends hanging out on the Common. I'm there sometimes twice a day. What you're saying as far as dogs bleeding out onto the field is true. Most of the time, everybody gathers in the grove. Everybody talks in the grove. Everybody's on their phone in the grove. 80%, I don't know the number, 90% of the time the dogs stay in the grove. Is there times when dogs spill over? Of course there is. But most times I find my neighbors to be really, really concerned with the behavior of their dogs, making sure that everybody's cleaning up. If somebody is talking to somebody else and their dog does its business on the grass, they point it out and everybody says, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I missed that, and they go clean up. There's really a great feeling in Ross around the community of what takes place in that grove on a daily basis. i have seen in the past four months that um there's much much more of a police presence of ross police presence um at the time when the people come out with their dogs probably about 3 30 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon police officers getting out of their cars asking people politely to make sure that they move their dogs back over to the grove so they're trying to enforce that but i will say that um blaming the condition of a field that was put in then in the 80s and has not been basically maintained since 2011 on dogs. When I see gopher or mole damage all the time, I see irrigation problems. sinkholes all the time i see there's a section of the field which is very close to where the um the playground is the black top if you're looking at the playground to the left that's most of the year it's swamp it's mud um yes there are kids that go through the field on their motorbikes and yes they're popping wheelies and stuff like that but again It's the minority of the time. It's 10% of the time, or 10% of the kids. Most of the kids are going around. The problem is that the field hasn't been maintained, and it's not the dogs digging. It's not the dogs scratching up after they go to the bathroom. It's just a field that has not been maintained, and for the most part, the community is very, very concerned and concerned I'm losing my words, concerned and also very diligent about making sure that they're taking care of their field. They're very proud of the field and they're taking care of it. So thank you.

Good evening again, Madam Mayor and fellow councilpersons. My name is Mike Rosenbaum and I live at 14 Medorna Avenue. I currently am fostering a senior dog. Dogs are not the only party to be blamed for how Roscommon looks, but they lack representation at these meetings. Yesterday afternoon, I was warned by a town of Ross official that my senior dog had violated RMC 8.04 spot 161. When it comes to laws, she's an originalist like me, and after consulting Abner Devilday's rules on baseball, she can find no mention that the playing field as mentioned in the RMC code exists past the area of the dugouts. I'm sure that Ross did not mean to create a cricket pitch when RMC 804 spot 161 was written or revised. Dogs need a place to run and release energy and play. Moving the dog area to a space next to Ross PO is dangerous. More traffic from Ross Common Street versus existing Grover area, which is sheltered on numerous sides. More dogs in smaller space leads potentially more dog on dog interactions. Dogs must be on lease. You show me yours and I'll show you mine. Ross PD will not enforce this ordinance. I hope they have better things to do. Extendable, retractable leashes are longer than 10 meters and are easily found online. Dogs can do a lot of running and digging in 10 meters. There's no RMC code cited on the sign regarding dogs. I saw two coyotes at 7 a.m. on December 10th who seemed to live near Sylvan Lane using Ross Common without leashes and in the Grove and enjoying the Common. I think that both bikes, E and traditional, make more detrimental impact to turf than dogs do. Here's a question. Where are bikes allowed to go on Roscommon? There's confused signage. One sign states that bikes, skateboards, skates and skateboards are prohibited on pedestrian paths. RMC 928, spot 160. Please define as all paths inside of Lagunitas Avenue and Roscommon Street seem pedestrian to me. These new signs also only warns that bikes are not on Ross Common, RMC 928, spot 160. So where are bikes allowed? Just on the back playground of Ross School? I doubt RPD or town officials will cite a parent who picks up their child via bike from the Grove area or stops another child from riding their bike on training wheels or a balanced bike around the path. Regarding the playing field, please do not just blame the dogs. I think closing the Ross Common from November to March and let the field regrow is a great idea. I think you need to think more of a Trump-style border fence than a flexible plastic one to discourage our youth from going on it during the winter months. Little league backstops. Council Member Robbins was looking into this issue long before, and dugouts were not granted as permanent fixtures to the Ross Common. At Ross Valley Soccer, we had to put our goals away every night. Baseball does more damage to the turf than Ross Dogg could ever do. Town council should rework the lease on Ross Common now that Ross Rec is part of the town of Ross. Ross school historic use of portables contribute to the current state of Ross Common and should be looked at as a funding source. Finally, there's a naming field rights we should look into for some million sponsor, you know, crypto or something like that for the new Ross field.

Hi, I'm Patrick Quigney, 50 Wellington. I have three kids. Two are at Ross School. I spend a lot of time up there. We've lived here for 10 years. My wife, Elizabeth, grew up here. I coach. I'm on the Ross Valley Little League board. I hear about the dog issue. I was out there today, and I saw an e-bike. Not that I love seeing the e-bikes go across the yard, but I sat there and watched the guy go by, and it didn't do anything to the field. The field itself is run down. I hear a lot of talk about what happened with the school over in that corner, and yes, whatever happened there that area is terrible, but when you go off the field when you go on in that field anywhere. We run football practices their baseball practices there, I have to confine our kids to a small area because i'm afraid they're going to hurt themselves there's there were cones out in the middle of the field there's weeds everywhere. We did a petition that we started on Monday afternoon. At the time last night, I sent it into the town council. I think we had 196. Before I showed up here tonight, we had 235 parents, residents that have shown, and this is to revitalize and redo the entire playing field, comprehensive, knowing expense, knowing shutting it down. We've heard from low league organizations. We've heard from the school, PTO. We've heard from a number of folks. People have written emails. I think it's pretty clear. When I think of the town of Ross, hard stop, full stop, Ross Commons is it. And it just looks terrible for our kids. And I think it's something that we need to address as opposed to a Band-Aid piece. Looking into Memorial Park, They did the same project very recently. That's 3.2 acres. They fixed everything of the green grass. They have three larger baseball fields. Ours is 1.9 acres. They did it for $600,000. They closed the field in September. They had it back open for Little League, which starts March 1. So to say that it's going to take over a year, I don't know where that's coming from. But at the very least, we're blaming dogs, we're blaming e-bikes, we're blaming, it's going to take a year. Let's do the due diligence because I feel like we have represented that our town and our community needs and wants this. And let's make it a lasting memory for the next 100 years and everyone that follows.

Hi, I'm Mark Lewandowski. I live at 16 Southwood, soon 196 Lagunitas. I've lived in Ross now since 2019. When my wife and I moved here, one of the really amazing things that we saw was Ross Common. Ross Common and the school are the heart of the community, and it was the thing that drew us here, like so many other people from San Francisco, where we couldn't let our kids run free, we couldn't let our dogs run free, we couldn't ride bikes, we couldn't do anything. Ross Common represents a community space where anyone should be able to use it for any recreational purpose that they find useful. really want to challenge the idea that we need to close the field regularly in the middle of the school year when kids want to use it. I want to challenge the idea that we can't have an open space for dogs to play safely away from cars, have lots of space to run around. Dogs are part of our community too. I want to challenge the idea that we can't have a space where kids can ride their bikes safely. The e-bikes I get it. The manuals are annoying. They look dangerous. But doing them on Roscommon is one of the safer places that the kids can be doing the manuals. I don't know of anyone else, but I see plenty of those happening down Shady Lane as well. That is way more dangerous. It's dangerous to cars. It's dangerous to the kids. It's dangerous to people on the sidewalks. Roscommon is soft. It's much less dangerous. I want to really emphasize the idea that closing the field needs to be done. I don't think that we should be happy with a solution that does that. I think we should be looking for creative solutions to work around that. I think that giving our kids a place to play December through March or whenever it is closed is really important to the community. I don't know. I guess that's all I have to say. I do really appreciate the multi-use of the field between schools, between bikes, between dogs, for town events like Live on the Commons. These are all really important things. We need to find a field, a solution that supports all of these things year-round.

Bring that down a little bit. OK. Thank you. Dear council members, my name is Elena Batalla. I'm the current co-president of the Ross PTO, and I've served on the RPOA board for five years and was the co-president of the Ross Auxiliary. By now, you've heard how important this field is to our community. As publicly elected officials, one of your key responsibilities is to maintain the town's infrastructure and ensure it serves the needs of the people who rely on it. Ultimately, this decision comes down to what we value as a community. Our country is facing a significant youth mental health crisis with rising rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. While many factors contribute to these challenges, we know that time outdoors, physical activity and access to safe recreational spaces will help reduce stress and improve overall mental health. When the field is in good condition and accessible to our children, our children are more active, more connected and better supported. Just last month, most of you voted to ban tobacco sales in Ross. Not because it's an immediate problem here, but because you care about protecting our youth. Tonight, I'm asking you to act with the same commitment. Put our children first. At the very least, recognize what this community values and respond accordingly. I also urge you to phase the renovation into two stages so that the entire area does not need to be closed for an extended period of time. While this approach might be more costly, I ask you that you carefully weigh the trade-offs and think creatively. Preserving even partial access during construction is meaningful to the families and children who use this field every day. And I wasn't going to say much more about this, but the idea that we can't do partial closures is very hard for me to understand. Because in my backyard, in my house, I can do a partial renovation. I can partially renovate my yard. Even this wreath, if it were a real living wreath, I could fix half of it. yes it would cost more money it would have to bring a flower supplier maybe twice it would be a bit of a inconvenience but i think we need to weigh that and maybe bring that back to the public and decide what we want do we want it to cost more money do we want it to last longer or do we want to close it permanently for four months at a time so i really urge you to think creatively about how you close this and how you move forward with this project thank you

Good evening, Council. I'm Adrienne Liggett. I live at 10 Medrona. I am co-president of the Ross School PTO. I would just like to reaffirm that we would love, myself and the PTO, would love to see a comprehensive field rehabilitation. The field is long overdue for being upgraded, and I, like Elena, also would like to advocate for thinking creatively on how we do that. Ten months seems a crazy long time, so if we could really problem solve of doing half the field and then the other half the field. I also have a nine-year-old daughter. She's played Little League, lacrosse, soccer. She's even tried to do golf through Ross Bragg, but it was impossible because the field is so divoted. I can't tell you the number of times that she's come home with a sprained, twisted ankle from playing on this field because it is in such poor condition. Our children deserve better, our community deserves better, and I know we can do better. Thank you.

Russ Haswell, 21 Fernhill. I'm relatively new to Ross. 2021 is when we moved here. And the thing that I wanted to bring up is that when I first came to Ross, I'd never even been to Marin, basically. The common stood out to me as the epicenter of the town. And although it was a little run down, I assumed that we had a reinvestment plan to always be upgrading that particular area because it's where the town is, it's where the school is, and it's where the community comes. So I'm a little bit surprised that we don't and that we haven't invested at all in this. I'm also a baseball coach, so I coached Little League. four years on on the common um i'm now on the rvlo board with patrick and i'll tell you you may not think of think of that field as sports but it is a sports field those kids who are between five and eight years old who play on that field they're athletes The hops that they get and the injuries that we see every time we're out there, they just keep coming. And it's sad. It's sad for us to sit here and go, hey, sorry, but they're not developing as players the way that they should be. And they come away from this game a little bit afraid to play at times, especially if they take one off their forehead. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And I was supporting all these. Everybody who came up here, I thought, made a fantastic point. All in favor of this, plus I don't think it's impossible to phase something and keep it open. That seems like a very doable plan, and I think you guys should consider it. Thank you.

Anyone else for public comment in the chamber? Anyone online, Cindy?

There are no raised hands online, Mayor. Okay, great.

Thank you. We'll bring it back for... What are we doing here? We're having a discussion, all right? Who would like to start?

I'll just point out from the 2018 report, you know, the conclusion is, quote, the ideal solution is total redesign and reconstruction of the entire common field. This should include a drainage system, the latest irrigation technology, suitable root zone mix and grasses, designated use pattern. That was the recommendation from 2018. And everyone's, we're hearing from many members of the community that they would like this to look good and to be safe. And I think it's time to go ahead and do the whole thing. I think we can find the money. I think it's infrastructure every bit as much as the Civic Center project. The only question to me is, would we get two bids, one to do it once, to do everything at once and see how long that takes, or a second bid to phase it? Because people are asking, can the column be kept open for some of the time? you know, not close for a year. I don't know if that's possible, but that would be, you know, that'd be some, an outstanding question is, is it done all at once? And for how many months do we close the entire field or might we phase it in? But to me, hearing from the community, you're seeing all the letters and seeing the field, which I've walked many times recently, it's in terrible shape. It's muddy, it's uneven. And what is green is mostly clover, which means all summer long, there are bees there. And that's really dangerous to our children also. So I would hope that the council listens to the community. And I think the community is saying, yes, we need this now.

So, I mean, it's a no brainer. There's so few issues that come before this council that are absolute no brainers. And this is one of them. It is long, long overdue. It wasn't redone since the 80s, and then it was destroyed by the school construction, and for whatever reason it wasn't redone. We need to do this. The community is overwhelmingly for this. I actually don't know why anyone would be against this. Mayor Mrakas, The it's just like every element of our Community uses this field, it is the heart and soul of this Community. Mayor Mrakas, And we would be derelict, not because I mean I totally what I want the Community understand is that. Mayor Mrakas, Your Council members are very good at saving money and have squirreled away a lot of money for to rebuild the civic Center and it's very, very admirable. because we you know we're trying to do something big for this community but equal of importance is don't forget about the other priorities this community has and the the field is number one number one everybody i mean i can't believe how many they started that petition on monday and they got over 200 signatures everyone the school the pto has written in every facet of this the dog owners are talking about it So we need to do it. We just it's like there's no question we need to do the entire thing. And in terms of the money, because I know everything comes down to money, we had a $1.4 million surplus last year. OK, so we can afford to do this project. You were wondering about the budget. There's your money. It came from last year's budget where we were in surplus. Number two, I made a big stink about spending $2.65 million to underground the wires in front of here. And all of you said, oh, we have to do that. It's for the safety. We need to underground 2.65 million to just put some wires underneath for, I don't even know, 25, 30 feet here? that's how much you have decided is the most important goal 2.65 million so this is pocket change relative to that and the roi to the community that uses it who really every single day are on that field using it playing there is the priority not undergrounding for 2.65 million the wires in front of here so i'm only i'm very passionate about this because i'm really the only representative by a long shot who really represents this community and who's out there no no from the community who has spoken tonight and i really hope you understand how important it is to them that we actually do something this time so i hope you think about not just that but what we are going to be investing in future generations by doing this now thank you

Okay, a little more context here, a little more history. This is not the first time this has come before the Council. It has been before the Council repeatedly. Last year, it was a matter of, or maybe it was earlier this year, I can't recall, but it was a matter that was discussed a lot with RPOA because of the suggestion that RPOA might be able to get some private donations that would make this more financially possible. And I recall going to an RPO meeting and talking about this quite seriously, because it seemed to me like we might be able to figure out a way to do this. Unfortunately though, as time passed, Those initial maybe too optimistic predictions of the amount of money that might come in privately or through RPOA kept going down. And I don't remember the details. And I certainly don't intend to be critical. I really appreciate RPOA's support on this and the effort that's gone into it. But I will say that doing this project really is something that would be more feasible, and particularly if it costs more than say $600,000, if we did have some private participation or donations. I think it's something that would be a great investment, not just for the town, but for the public. in finally fixing this playing field. You know, I do recognize what Rich is saying is that you still have a big maintenance project after you fix it. It won't stay fixed. You still have a problem with dogs. You still have a problem with deterioration. And it is an open park. It's open to the public. It's open not just to Ross residents. Anybody can come and use the park. And probably we do have people from out of town who come there and use it. It's not like Basich School. Basich is a school. It's surrounded by a fence. You can't just walk in there during the day. It is a school. And people don't, I think, treat it as a park. People may go there for the playground or something, but it's a completely different deal than Ross. And we're not going to put a fence around it. So we should understand that whatever we do, it's a continuing obligation. I mean, we can't just let it go again. We have to keep it up. So I generally would support it. The question is how to pay for it, and I would be very interested in can we phase it so we can keep it partially open so there's a place for the kids to go. I mean, we faced this during the pandemic. Where were the kids going to go? I mean, they couldn't go. They needed to be outside. Where could they go? We had issues with dogs. And we were trying to kind of repurpose that entire common area to fit that. And we were creative. There was a lot of effort that went into that. I won't say it was perfect, but it happened. And maybe there is something that could be done here. as well, but it would have to increase the cost. I just don't know by how much.

I totally love Ross Commons and I don't have a dog and I don't have any little kids. And I think it has been a long time in coming to fix it. But I would actually like to see this more as a share of cost. So all of us have a commitment to keep the once it's done, to keep it usable. So I would say, can Ross Valley, can the RPOA make a contribution? Can the PTO make a contribution? Can the town make a contribution? Can Little League make a contribution? If all of us are using this and love it, then let's see if all of us are willing to put our money into it and not just depend upon the town to do that. And I also just wanna remind people that it's also gonna take some staff time. And I know I keep bringing up staff time, but we don't have a lot of staff. So it's gonna take staff time to manage the money, to manage the finances, to make it happen. But I'd like to see it not just be on the town. I'd like to see it be on the community

City Council Chambers, yeah I I would like more information at the February CIP meeting in terms of phasing in terms of more tangible how much is this actually going to cost. City Council Chambers, And how can we ensure that if we make this big investments that we, then what what will the maintenance be and how can we ensure that it doesn't get chewed up in year one or three or five it's really it seems to be a pattern. City Council Chambers, That we have these facilities or the Ross common and we don't put money away to maintain them and that's that's a big problem and a big theme. City Council Chambers, And so we it's not just the $600,000 it's going to be enhanced maintenance, you know year after year after year to make sure that we get the return on the investment, and I think that the dog question is. City Council Chambers, You know that's that's an issue on the bike the bike question is an issue and the wheelies on the field that's an issue, and we need to figure out how better, maybe we need a fence, you know, on the grove area. City Council Chambers, Dividing so that the dogs stay in that area, maybe that's a way to. City Council Chambers, appease the dog people and allow them to socialize with their dogs, but also preserve the investment in the Ross common and i'd also like to see you know exploration of costs of phasing and the timing. City Council Chambers, let's take a look at memorial park and how long that took. City Council Chambers, and. City Council Chambers, You know what what what is realistic and i'd like to continue the discussion at the CIP meeting in February, when we have a little more information, but I think you know this, the sentiment is fairly clear that in. City Council Chambers, The school project did a lot of damage in 2011 we haven't done any real upgrade to the common in decades, if ever. And it is the heart and soul of our town. So we need to make the investment and then preserve the investment. Thank you, Krista.

So and I get the fun job of managing council expectations because as Rich Semenich said to you, absolutely. We'd love, staff would love nothing more than for you, the council, to let us have a big chunk of the money that you've laboriously saved up for your civic center project. It would be great. You take that money. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that public works people live for, right? They get to go do this fantastic jewel of a project. And we, as employees, go out there and enjoy it and as council member salter said we have a lot of recreation activities absolutely we'd love it we love i mean all the stuff that goes on with the live on the comment series that is just fantastic people out there are dancing on the comment i mean how great is that however now is the managing the expectations so all these things that you just described that you want for your february um cip discussion takes staff time We don't have it. I have a public works director here who has projects that he is halfway through. He's retiring in August. I need his expertise on the projects that the council already has dedicated resources to in order to get those done. I do not have anybody else. I am completely tied up with are working on this implementation of the Facilities Master Plan and everything that's come up because of this ballot initiative. can't do it. And so I know that the community wants this and the council wants this and that's all great, but I just can't snap my fingers and make it happen. So as I've said in the staff report, if the council wants this to move forward, you're going to, I'll have to come back to you with, um, with a request for staffing resources. It would be great if I could get somebody like, you know, your next agenda, two agenda items from now is David Kelly. who's a PERS retiree, he would be incredible on this. But unfortunately, PERS has restrictions on how many hours that we can use PERS retiree. So getting a consultant firm, you know, when they come in, there's so much work that has to be done before you get to that phase. And I, we cannot dedicate, and it's really awkward to be talking about this, right, with Rich is here, but you know, we operate in a public setting, but I cannot have Rich being diverted to overseeing a consultant who doesn't know our community, who doesn't know our history, who doesn't know our funding, who doesn't know these issues. They're going to be constantly going to Rich. for guidance because we don't have an assistant engineer. All these other cities, San Anselmo, they have multiple people in their public works department that can work on projects. We don't have anybody. It is just this person sitting next to me. So, you know, you have, it's your city. It's your budget. That's fine. If you want town staff to work on this project, you're going to have to give me the resources to do it. And maybe you could say that you want to do that. Fine. But that's going to be part of it. So all the things that, Mayor, you just said that you want for this February meeting, can't do it with existing staff. I'm not going to be able to. call, you know, have conversations and negotiations with Little League and RPOA and all these groups to be able to come up with this money to meet the requests that council members dowling and kircher have just stated that you want to see you want more information so um i think the way to and and also you know the heart can i make a suggestion here why don't we just have this public works subcommittee work on this absolutely not and then you are not you are not employees yeah you can't because you just interrupted me so i'm going to finish right now And if I can even remember what was my last comment, but you know, the, so I, as part I was about to say is that the council, you have one of the hardest jobs. There's always going to be unlimited demands for your very limited resources, whether it's money, staff time. And the council has a really hard job of having to prioritize. The place to do that is in the budget process. The place to do that is during the CIP process. We're starting that off on February. We can provide you with more information about what We see from the staff perspective has to be done. How much money we're going to need for the facilities master plan process as it's moving forward with its obstacles that are being put in its way. But again, contractual obligation to build a paramedic facility by January 2029. which includes all of the site improvements, all of the environmental work. So we'll gather as much information as we can so that you can weigh the timing of it as best that we can. And in the meantime, I'll also look at what kind of options we may have for additional staffing. to help move this move this project forward because that that's what's going to that's what we're going to need somebody that can talk with these community groups, somebody that can come up with the you know, is it feasible to phase it or how much more money will cost to phase it? All of those all of those that kind of stuff we're going to need so I can work on that between now and February 12. So thank you for the opportunity to speak there.

I mean, we have a public works subcommittee. We have subcommittees for finance. We do these subcommittees so that the whole council doesn't have to divert its time and resources to things. This is the perfect project to take to the public works subcommittee. And I would then ask that subcommittee to work with all these groups, RVLL, the school, the Ross School PTO, and put together a committee to work on this project that won't divert from staff's time. and i can only tell you this because i have seen this group the friends of the ross firehouse completely operate separately than the town and they're coming forward in january 8th with a complete project with a bid from a construction firm and they're going to come present what would be what the staff can do so i know what our town can do I absolutely have seen Elena Bataya over here put on the Ross Live on the Commons. And I know that if I came to you and said, Krista, let's do this really fun concert on the field, you'd say, I don't have the staff. I don't have the time. We can't do it. I know this community, when they want to do something, will do it. And they'll put the resources forward. and they'll come together to do it. So please, we won't take any of your time or Rich's time. Let us go on the side and we'll work together to put together the plan and make it happen. And our POA has proven that time and again in all the projects that they lead for this town. So please, let's not use that as an excuse not to deliver for our community.

So we work very closely with RPO on many things, very successfully. They are fantastic. They provided quotes. They spent a lot of time, and they actually asked for a lot of time from contractors to put in quotes. This was in spring of 2024. It's identified in the staff report. But the quotes came forward with, guess what? no that no mention of paying prevailing wage we cannot build a project without paying prevailing wage no and so the information you you can have experts in this community that do a fan that are experts in their private companies it is a completely different ball game so if the council is going to have staff work done by people who are not public sector experts, either consultants or employees in the public sector, you're going to be building a project that is, you're going to be in a great, you have a great deal of liability. You cannot do it. So this idea of working with the subcommittee on this kind of project, who do you think is going to have to get all the information for the subcommittee? You're going to be asking staff to do it, and we don't have it.

I think what you said earlier is a good plan. Try to do as much as you can for the February CIP meeting. We'll see where we are at that point in time. I, too, am uncomfortable having volunteers try to shepherd City Council Chambers, This project, this is one of our biggest assets Center of town, so I think it's really important that it be done carefully and done right and done to last you know another hundred years, hopefully at least another 10 or 15 years or 20 years. City Council Chambers, So I think, to the extent you and or rich or someone else can gather. City Council Chambers, As much information as possible by February and then we'll have more information. And we can discuss and and reassess and try to determine a path forward that's that's reasonable for everybody.

And I think that you know I understand there are you know there's an ongoing building project with the civic Center but. This can't wait until after that's completed in 2030 I mean this needs to happen soon, so I do think we need to find. ways to make it happen despite it needing a lot of professional time, and we may need to hire other people to help it happen. And I think RPOA and others would be happy to donate money, funds, to hire professional people to make it happen.

The one thing that would be very helpful is help raising money, private money for this. I mean, that is not something that the town can do. It's something that groups like RPOA could do or other citizens could do. And that would be so helpful, but it also will provide more public participation and input as well as we go forward. So I see no reason we can't work together on this to try to bring it forward, because I think it's going to take all of that. It's going to take some effort on the downspout, and I think it is going to take some private funding. And hopefully we can start to zero in on something that we can do. There's still a lot of decisions to make about closing the field. Is it all closed for seven or eight months or nine months? Can we split it, et cetera? And hopefully, as we go ahead, we can start getting some very specific proposals together.

And how much does the town pay? It is the town's field. And how much do we expect from donors? Some maybe, it's hard, we can discuss that. What should the breakdown be?

Yeah, I mean, if you have a goal, then you can work towards that goal. If it's like, well, I don't know, maybe it's 600, maybe it's a million. We're kind of adrift, but if it's like we need $1 million, or let's say 600, I like 600 a lot better. We need 600 and we've got 300. Can you help us? Can we get to this point? I'm not saying we're going to have a bake sale or something like that, but there are ways to get the public excited and participating in this. I've seen this happen.

And then there's more ownership.

Right.

Yeah, that's true. But I'm sure residents may feel that, you know, that the 10, 12 million we saved, those are their tax dollars, and they want to spend that on this also. So there's probably a great conversation about where should the money come from. But I think we have to remember that what we've saved, it's their money already. I mean, that's their tax money. They may want to split it between the buildings here and the common. I do like the idea of ownership and having people contribute, but I think we'll just have to work out what's the mix. I mean, I think mostly the town's responsible, it's our field.

So are we saying that we all agree we want the full rehabilitation option? I mean, that's what I'm trying to like. If we give them direction, we want this option to come back in February with more of a plan around it. But we need to give the town.

It sounds to me like we're leaning towards it, but we really need to talk about it further. And the town manager is going to pull together some information with Rich that we can use at our February meeting. So we're not making any decisions now, but there's a leaning toward that. That's what I hear.

Okay.

I agree leaning preference, but we need more details, I mean maybe I think matt and I are like decided for it, maybe three of you are leaning towards it is that like how are you are you in on on.

i'm leaning leaning towards it, but you know, we do have so many other competing. time and money, and I don't wanna make this huge investment and then have it get torn up in six months or a year. I mean, that's just, as you said, Chris, that's just like burning up a million dollars. So we need to think carefully about what the controls are too, to preserve our investment. Okay, I think we've discussed this enough, right? We'll move on to item number 12. which is town council consideration to adopt resolution number 2548 to conduct the 2025 fourth review of the use permit for the lagunitas country club

Good evening, Mayor and Council members. So I'd like to just briefly summarize the staff report for the Lagunitas Country Club use permit review. LCC has an active use permit that was approved with conditions to address neighborhood compatibility, noise, and overall operations. As required, tonight's item is for the Council to conduct the biannual review. to evaluate compliance with the conditions and consider adoption of resolution number 2548. So in general, the Lagunitas Country Club has been substantially in compliance with the conditions of approval. This year, there were two concerns raised. The first one was a complaint related to noise for an event at the club on September 27th. The police department did respond to the complaints twice. And when the officer arrived at the club, the doors and windows were closed and there was amplified music inside. So based on that, there was no valuation to the use permit found since the amplified music took place indoor and the doors and windows were closed, so that was consistent with the use permit. The second one, and the Lagunitas Country Club acknowledged this, is that they did use their parking lot for valet parking for a Halloween off-site event. And so their use permit is clear that it is only to allow the operation of the existing club and the club activities. They're also a private club without public accommodation. Therefore, the use of their parking lot for valet parking for an off-site event is not consistent with their use permit. Staff did alert the club, and they agreed to discontinue the use of their parking lot for off-site events. They were apologetic. They didn't know. So they've agreed to stop doing that. So based on that, The LCC has demonstrated substantial conformance with the conditions of approval in their use permit, and so resolution number 2548 has been provided also on the dais with this conclusion. Thank you, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Also, the club manager and president are here tonight. Thank you.

Questions from council?

um no public comment anybody uh i can speak on the microphone i'm barrett connor i'm a ross resident i'm uh president of the board of directors at log news club this is brittany anderson she's our club manager um Thank you all for your volunteer service. We have newfound respect for your stamina and you're committed to the community. Thank you. We just want, the public comment is we just want to say that we are not unwilling to adhere to all these stipulations in the use permit. We are not hiding behind spacious egregence, which was in a letter we got from one of the neighbors. If we erred, we acknowledge that and we'll change our ways. We granted... Our neighbor, Valet Access, when he had this huge Halloween party, I don't know if any of you heard about it, he invited the entire town. He had a sign up that said, everyone welcome. He asked us if he could use it for valet. We said yes. We didn't know it was against the permit. We now know no more granting of that, which is... how that came out. And we take it so seriously that our president-elect has been here for three and a half hours just because we want to make sure there's some continuity. I step off the board pretty soon. We have continuity here, obviously, but we'll make sure that the incoming president knows. And that's really all we want to say, unless you wanted to say anything else. If there's any questions, we're happy to answer.

Thank you. Thank you for being here and sticking around till my 30. Any other public comment? Anybody online? Cindy? Anyone online?

There are no raised hands online, Mayor.

Okay, so we'll bring it back for discussion or a motion.

I move we approve Resolution 2548.

I'll second that. Can you call roll, please? Thank you.

Mayor McMillan.

Aye.

Councilmember Dowling. Aye. Councilmember Kircher.

Aye.

Councilmember Salter.

Aye.

Mayor Pro Tem Robbins. Aye. With a vote of five, the motion passes.

Thank you. Does anyone need a break or should we just keep powering through? Okay. No break. Hardcore. Item number 13. Town Council to receive a presentation from staff regarding the status of the implementation of the Town of Ross Facilities Master Plan.

Thank you, Mayor and Council Members. This is our second update on the Facilities Master Plan. And I'm going to speak really slowly so that we can start our presentation in any minute now. So we have David Kelly here this evening. He is our part-time project manager charged with the implementation of the facilities master plan. And I'm just going to hand it over to David to do his presentation. Thank you, David.

good evening mayor mayor pro tem members of council uh good evening i'm david kelly i'm your uh part-time project manager for the facilities master plan the agenda for this evening is to provide you with what i refer to as update number two on uh the work that we've accomplished thus far the first update was on september 11th so this is our our second update uh for the remainder of this year um part of the agenda this evening is to provide an overview or recap of the facilities. Master plans is really want to walk through that with Council. So you have a solid background and understanding of the master plan. I know many of you were on the Council when the when the plan was ultimately adopted, but there's some new Council members that were not. So I think there's some opportunities there to provide an update. In addition, we'd like to provide the Council with an update on the implementation progress with a focus on some of the work we've done to update the costs, as well as, I think, based on the initial approach, there were some questions from Council about our approach regarding the compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA. And then last but not least, to talk about some recent progress that we've made with respect to addressing the affordable housing that's planned for as part of the master plan. So moving forward, this reflects, the diagram reflects the existing facilities at your Civic Center complex. Just for reference, the Civic Center is just about 2.33 acres so not a very big site for all the improvements that are currently here as well as those that are planned the town council in 2022 retained or hired kpa architects to prepare a master plan for your civic center complex. There's really three key objectives, and I'm gonna walk through that with council. One was to conduct a really an extensive building condition assessment of the existing structures that are located here, as well as the infrastructure. And when I refer to infrastructure, I'm really talking about a lot of the hardscape, your driveways, your irrigation, your walkways and your lighting. As part of the work that KPA performed, they did an extensive program space analysis where it looked at each of the uses by department and broke down very specifically the uses in each one of those facilities by square foot, which then drove the square foot and ultimately the size of those buildings. And then last but not least, to develop some design options for council consideration. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that too. So starting with the condition assessment, what's reflected here is the scoring that was used by the professional team of architects when they assess the buildings. And they ultimately gave it a ranking from one to five, with one being very low and five being excellent. It's noted here that your public safety buildings in particular had fairly low ratings of 2.1, which indicates very poor condition. The report does include a whole set of photographs that provide documentation about the condition of the buildings. So overall they're CONDITION ASSESSMENT NOTED THAT THERE'S A SIGNIFICANT AGING INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGHOUT THE SITE, PARTICULARLY WITH RESPECT TO, AGAIN, YOUR EMERGENCY SERVICES BUILDINGS, YOUR EXISTING FIRE STATION AND POLICE STATION. THERE'S A NUMBER OF OPERATIONAL INEFFICIENCIES AND YOU SEE THAT WITH HOW THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION FACILITY AND TOWN HALL AS IT IS HERE IS SEPARATED FROM PLANNING. AND THEN THERE'S A NUMBER OF BUILDING AND SITE DEFICIENCIES. Really, the work that Kpa did was to confirm a number of other assessments that were previously done by the town in two thousand, two thousand, ten, twenty, sixteen, twenty, twenty and twenty, twenty five. So there's quite a bit of documentation on the property assessments, but that's all wrapped up into the master plan. So this is an example of the SPRACE programming, and I'm just using the police station as an example. It was done for each of the buildings. So for all of the uses within the police building is an example. There's documentation that provides the amount of square foot. What are the key attributes of that use? And ultimately what that does is drive the size of the building that's needed to provide the service that's planned. As I mentioned earlier, KPA developed three conceptual design options and those were just options A, B, and C, but there was kind of three overarching, or there was some overarching factors that they implemented as part of these design options. One included preservation or retention of town hall. So the building we sit in is really a key asset. Preservation of the major trees. You have some beautiful redwood trees. Maintaining the Spanish colonial revival style of architecture in any of the new buildings. So to kind of maintain the consistency of the design. Ultimately, the strategies and design options that were developed were included in removing the modular admin building where you're planning and public work staff sit now the modular fire dormitory and I think that Christopher mentioned got removed earlier, as well as removal of the public works building. uh constructing a new a new police station council's obviously discussed tonight or it's been referenced multiple times construction of a new paramedic station and that's being driven in part by the lease agreement that council recently approved and ultimately to modernize and expand town hall admin and public works so that it works as an efficient space for staff Last but not least, there's a number of critical improvements to site circulation and parking. One of the key elements of improving ingress and egress is to tie the main driveway to the Laurel Grove intersection so that it becomes a signalized intersection. That's very important when it comes to public safety access both by police department and of course your paramedics because there's usually they can control the signaling and that allows for that safe particularly response to an emergency. And Council also very wisely and astutely decided to use a portion of the Civic Center property to meet your regional housing needs allocation. There was a decision made to support up to nine regional housing units on the northern portion of the property site. fairly creative way to address meeting your housing needs. So again, the three options that I mentioned, concept A and concept B are very similar. Concept A really what drives it is the key difference between what you'll see next and concept B is that it was This option maintained the original facade so that what you see with the arches in the front of the existing fire station. But that was really a higher cost option for council. And I think it was a cost factor that led to council choosing concept B over concept A. So concept B is ultimately the option that you chose. And again, it was at the time the lower range cost option included the nine housing units. City Council Chambers, should note that the housing units really are not included as part of the capital costs calculation it's presumed that. City Council Chambers, The developers of the affordable housing would be responsible for at least the construction costs of the housing, though there will be more than likely, some of the site improvements would benefit the proposed development of affordable housing in the way of sidewalks and other but that's again that's.

City Council Chambers, ask you a question about that.

Yeah, maybe, maybe if it's okay with you.

I was wondering if we can ask questions while we go because it's such a long presentation.

See, it might be better to wait and let him finish and just make a note of your question and we can circle back at the end.

CONCEPT C AGAIN INCLUDED LOOKING AT TWO STORY CONSTRUCTION THAT ALSO WAS IDENTIFIED AS A MID RANGE COST OPTION TWO STORY CONSTRUCTION OFTEN COMES WITH ADDITIONAL STRUCTURAL REQUIREMENTS WHICH DRIVES UP COSTS AND AGAIN THAT WAS A FACTOR FOR THE COUNCIL'S CONSIDERATION The picture here is a reflection of the artist architectural style the Spanish revival that seemed to be an overwhelming desire as part of maintaining that classical architectural style for the master plan so, as I mentioned. The council did select concept B as the preferred alternative. This involves demoing both of your public safety buildings, both the existing fire station as well as existing police station and the public works facility. Those were noted to be structurally obsolete. And in particular, both of those facilities were determined to be seismically non compliant with the Essential Services Act. I think the is you'll see part of the option B is was to move it forward. closer to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. There's some strategic elements with regard to moving the buildings forward. One is to have a more closer approach to the Boulevard, but also to remove buildings outside of the flood zone. And we have been kind of documenting that, working with the Public Works Director, the extent of flooding that's located on the property. and likewise to improve the vehicle and pedestrian circulation. So right now, if you come to town hall, it's a little wayward how you make your way from a parking lot to entrance town facility. So improving that from an accessibility perspective, making sure and ensuring that access is compliant with the Americans with Disability Act. And really to set the stage for the Civic Center to be more campus like and more integrated for meeting the space requirements for the city, having it be more secure and having it be more safe as well as modern. So in a nutshell, the adopted plan represents a long-term vision for replacing outdated facilities, meeting the essential service act requirements, particularly for public safety buildings, that's both your paramedic and your police station, addressing accessibility requirements, and finally meeting your state mandated housing obligations. So this is a reflection of how the spaces are provided for and planned for on the Civic Center property. You can see, again, to the north is where your affordable housing is located. In that particular graphic, it just shows it as kind of being condo-like. But as I'll talk later, there might be some nuances to how that space is designed. What's really key, I think, is the redesign of the access from Sir Francis Drake and tying that to the Laurel Grove intersection, but also adding a new access point via Lagunitas Road. And that would be a one-way entrance point. One of the things that we are currently looking at and evaluating is you know, re repositioning the existing cell tower and maybe having it be positioned in that corner. But that's still in the works. This graphic, I think, is particularly helpful in identifying the location of the proposed location of new facilities, but also the area where existing buildings are currently located. And what you see is that the color buildings are the new proposed buildings so that the orange to kind of your left is is the new admin addition to to town hall the blue is your police department. The red is the paramedics where your gray building is the what what what is currently the. I think I think we're gonna get a pointer so we can get help with.

Like if you hover the mouse, right, there's a pointer and you can kind of, does it show there?

It's a little wonky. Yeah, it's hard to see. um you can you can kind of see from this graphic that this is the location of the uh apparatus bay for the for the fire station what's what's currently planned there is uh for that to be a parking area and again that that was strategic to address removal of buildings from from the from the flood zone uh last but not least Thank you. That's right. Thank you, Roberta. And then the affordable housing on the north end would have its own separate private driveway, and that would ensure the privacy for those residents and direct access to that property without impacting the rest of the civic center complex. We're also looking at a proposed property modification along this northwest corner, and that's in consultation with the public works director. This is the conceptual design that is excuse me. The cost estimate that is included in your master plan, and it reflects the price tag associated with the full development of the master plan is currently shown. So this number here, which is Just under twenty twenty one million is the is the total cost estimate in twenty twenty three dollars for full development of the master plan. I think council has provided direction to implement that in a phased approach. So we're looking at how the project can be phased. to possibly not rely on debt service. We also have the timeline that's set forth in the lease agreement with the Ross Valley Paramedic Authority, which provides the 2029 date. So kind of prioritizing that and also prioritizing the police station.

So, you know, can we just take questions on the first part before we move on to the update? And this is such a long presentation.

Can you just make a note of your question, Matt, and we'll come back to it.

And I'll move fast. I apologize. I know it's getting late, so I want to move forward. So again, I talked about what we're going to talk about tonight. The implementation roadmap, as I mentioned, is really phasing the project to prioritize the paramedic facility, as well as the police building. we've been working with kpa the architects who developed the master plan on updating costs they've completed that for the paramedic facility they're uh it's in process to update the remaining cost estimates uh and what we've asked is that they provide updated cost estimates through 2030 so that you can kind of really see the impact of that cost escalation on those cost figures that were originally provided in 23 numbers. Why is this important? Well, it certainly reinforces the financial feasibility of the master plan. We want to be reflective of the current cost environment. We've seen a lot of inflation impact construction, and we want Council to be aware of that, and ultimately support on an annual basis your long range capital planning efforts. In terms of sequel I mentioned at the previous update that staff went through the sequel initial study, which is appendix g the sequel guidelines, looking at all the resource impact issues and we've you know focused in and narrow down what the key issues are with staff subsequent to that we. had a meeting with the town attorney team to determine how best to move forward. The recommended process is to prepare a focused EIR to hone in on the significant issues. So in terms of next steps, we will want to contract with an environmental firm to start that process. There's a number of key studies that will need to be completed, including an updated traffic study, looking at traffic. average daily counts, as well as vehicle miles traveled for the purposes of CEQA, looking at biological impacts primarily related to Cordo Madera Creek, and then completing the historic analysis that was previously prepared. It was done, it was a draft, but it was never finalized, so we want to get that report finalized. And last but not least, the importance of conducting as part of the CEQA process and project entitlements consultation with our local tribal and indigenous communities. Your planning director has identified three communities that will need to do consultation. We usually do that as part of the CEQA process. In terms of affordable housing, one of the exciting developments recently was meeting with and having ongoing coordination with Cedars of Moran about development of a facility that would house neurodivergent adults on a program facility on the Civic Center. We wanted to ensure that as part of moving forward with them that it would be compliant with a housing and community development, or Acd requirements to ensure that you can count those units against your rena allocation. They've expressed very strong support in partnering with the town on permanent support of housing. And what we've identified is how they can structure the lease agreement to ensure that those units would be counted towards your arena numbers. And we're one of our next steps is to obtain HDD approval. One of the key milestones identified in your housing element is preparation of an exclusive negotiating agreement. and we'd like to uh assuming we we can get support from hdd for the model that uh cedars is proposing which we think is a great partnership uh move forward and bring that back to council for your consideration and basically what that would say is that there's you're comfortable with negotiating with cedars uh to uh you know as part of a long-term lease of the property uh for use for for housing One of the things that we did as part of this effort was identify relevant policies from your housing element, and your housing element has a number of policies related to providing housing for persons with disabilities. You can see here HE44 supportive housing. and persons with disabilities, and it's really consistent with the mission that Cedars is providing. We think it's a really potentially great fit. And again, as we mentioned, we want to develop the concept with them. We have been collaboratively doing that and ultimately want to bring that back for council consideration. One of the elements that is necessary to ultimately deliver capital projects is putting those projects out to bid, and they're currently there's really four processes available to the Council for that the traditional process is. basically called design, bid, build. And that's probably for the paramedic facility is one of the best options given it's relatively smaller scale. When you get into larger scale facilities, some of the newer alternatives, may have some cost advantages. We had a meeting with the Marin County project manager, Fabiola Gillen, who gave us an overview of the Marin County's process. They held a study session back in August. to discuss specifically labor requirements with this process called progressive design build. What that does is when you engage both a contractor and a designer upfront, but that's, again, we're gonna be looking at these procurement options and bring forward recommendations for council consideration on what makes the most sense for implementation or phased implementation of your project. There was some key lessons that were offered by fabulous issues, a great resource that was recommended to us by the marine county fire chief. You know she she expressed some concerns with Mayor Mrakas, You know low bid design bid for projects like you're like a police station, because they have so many specialized elements it's often you don't want to just put those out to a low bidder but again smaller scale facilities. Mayor Mrakas, traditional bid processes work. Last but not least, and Council knows that you directed staff to prepare what's referred to as an election code 9192 report or a fiscal impact study, assisting the town manager with really putting all the contract documents together with a very well qualified team of professional consultants. RSG has been leading up that effort. But in conjunction with the RSG, Mary McGrath, as well as city gate, Stewart had been working on addressing the both the capital costs and operational costs associated with the fire station. And our plan is to bring that forward on January 8. So That's all in process. There's just been a lot of time and effort that's been spent trying to address all the data needs, addressing the budget and what ultimately would be necessary to fund both construction and operation of a fire station. Mayor Mrakas, up in conclusion, the facility master plan, it was based on strategic modernization of of. where we sit today and all the facilities associated therein. There was a lot of community input that was sought during that process. And ultimately the goal is to provide and prioritize public safety. And that's one of the key aspects to facing the project. So with that, I'll turn it over back to council. I know council member Salter has a number of questions. Go ahead, Matt.

Okay, thank you. I appreciate the presentation a lot, actually, because for me, I'm new. So I actually walk, I was having questions as you were going through, because I've never really seen it presented before. On concept B, if you wouldn't mind going back to the slide on the budget for it. I was curious, and this might also be part of your discussions with CEDARS. There's a tremendous amount of money spent on site work and parking. It's almost $6 million. So have you, you know, what, for that budget, you know, I'm wondering the split between what a developer would pay, you know, that's, we're including that in our budget, but if we're creating this space for this affordable housing developer, you know, what, how much, I mean, I don't know that that's the whole site work. So I know it's not just for the affordable housing piece. Actually, I'm glad Rich came forward. But there's a big piece of the budget, I think, that has to do with the Lagunitas intersection and creating the paving and all of that. And so what i'm wondering is if there was some some thought about calling some of that money to making the developer pay, because a developer should, I think, help contribute to the site work.

yeah that's that's that's absolutely in line with with our thinking council member. ultimately what we need to do with respect to the affordable housing is finalized, or at least do additional work on refining what their concept is so that we have a perspective on what are the improvements that are going to be necessary to to support the affordable housing project. and ultimately apportion those costs to the various elements of the project. And for example, is we made an effort with respect to the cost estimates for the paramedic facility to City Council Chambers, Take the total improvement costs and a portion a portion of those to development of the paramedic facility, so that you know it's it's gonna are you going to do that for each of the buildings it's probably easier for us to sort of understand it when it's allocated to each of the buildings. yeah i mean we're gonna have to look at how we do that because you know certain costs maybe aren't attributable to one use or the other so think about for example uh parking improvements where where do you where do you uh what costs do you attribute to to what so i mean but those are things we'll we'll we'll have to refine and work on and that's some of the work that we'll do which part of the next step is to hire a qualified architect to to help us with the design work and to help apportion those site improvement costs to each of those uses.

Thank you. I'd just like to add in response to Councilmember Salter's question, though, about the housing portion is that Yeah, I mean, if this was a, you probably are more familiar with larger scale affordable housing projects. This is nine units. And so what is really exciting to me, not only is Cedars well respected and it's local, but they don't think they're going to have to go out and get tax credit financing or anything. They think they'll be able to fund it themselves. So, you know, we're, and also in the concept B, The housing is really, they have their own separate entrance. So they won't be going in and out of this new Laurel Grove intersection that we need to build so that the paramedics and police, it's faster for them to get in and out. Right now they get in and out and they don't have a light. So, it's going to be, I think, a little bit more of a stretch to ask CEDARS, an organization, to cover infrastructure costs for the rest of the site when it's very obvious that we're trying to keep them separate on the project. I mean, can you go back to the... The visual that shows you see how they have their own site. So we don't want anybody living over there really to be able to come and go from our public safety facilities and be walking around. So I just want to point that out like it's not going to be as like for the paramedics we were we were required by the paramedic authority to to put this lease in place is they insisted that we provide them with a total cost of what the project would be and so this is and so that's the reason we did it we'll have to be looking at City Council Chambers, You know, and it costs us do you recall how much it costs us to get kpa to do that.

City Council Chambers, In for the total cost they updated yeah it was just about $9,000 yeah for them to do that for us to have to do that work for each facility but.

City Council Chambers, I just wanted to add that about you know the housing is is separate.

Mayor Mrakas, No, and I totally get that what i'm saying is you have this big $5.6 million number, and I think it will be helpful to the way you did the paramedic I saw that update in the last report we had. Mayor Mrakas, If you allocate all that away, you know which buildings were sort of responsible for, but then there's utilities that have to be upgraded. And you know the paving and the sidewalks and everything that have to be put towards creating the space for the developer and I worked for developers, I know. Very, very intimately that we had to pay a lot to upgrade even the utilities, I mean just the the upgrades to the PG&E made us developer pay to bring certain you know lines into the site. So what i'm saying is if if we're doing that work once you allocate that aside, it might be helpful to understand better the cost that could potentially go to a developer. We haven't selected cedars right we can select who we want, but there should be some apportionment that would be there for parking utility upgrade sidewalks, etc. That we should see as a separate number as out of that 5.6 that might be able to be clawed back that's all right and there's there's some different options, and if, for example,

Mayor Mrakas, As part of doing improvements on the site, you could we could cut the improvements on the sidewalk here or the town could build you know the sidewalk and entrance and then calculate that cost and had that be reimbursed by the developer that kind of construction so there's different different ways to kind of.

And at a minimum, getting at your point, Councilmember Salter is that whatever happens with whatever deal is struck with every developer, we want to as an organization get credit for it, because we can show that to HCD that, you know, a lot of times they're going to want an affordable housing developer would want the town to help with soft costs. You know, we want to get credit for everything that we do. So it needs we need to figure out what that is. So that you raise a good point. Thank you.

One aspect that I wanted to mention, especially with Director Semenovich here, is the tie-in to the undergrounding work that they're doing. So at the director's request, I sat in with the meeting on undergrounding with PG&E so that we're ensuring our goal will be to have those timelines be co-coordinated so that the undergrounding work's done. We can tie into that when the buildings are being designed and ultimately constructed. So there's some coordination there with the undergrounding work that Director Simonovich is overseeing.

Okay. Then one other area I wanted to understand better is the CEQA. So what is the timeline that you envision for the CEQA and the environmental impact report? How much time do you think it will take to complete the study and be able to be in a position that we're capable of?

I'll be happy to answer that. City Council Chambers, I think it's premature until we get our environmental consultant and they move forward with the scoping and that's when you'll understand how long it's going to take. City Council Chambers, But you know if we go down the ir route, it takes a while it's not going to happen overnight, why, I was told from.

City Council Chambers, Any a lawyer that it could be up to like a year for an environmental study to be done, I know the reason they know is rich you had to do one also for the bridge, the windshield bridge cracked in there, they found some tribal remains.

The Wageship Bridge was a mitigated negative deck, but it was a pretty beefy one. That was over a year process.

of studies and going back and forth with what again that's federally funded that's apples no no i just wanted i'm trying to understand to answer your question that's not an unreasonable timeline okay so one year and then do we know a cost estimate for because the 21 million is just construction costs for to do the eir do you remember how much it cost the town to do that study for the windshield bridge i don't recall Okay. Do you have any...

I'll give you a ballpark number. It's fine. Ultimately, it's going to be based on getting the proposals back from qualified firms. But if I was just to throw out a ballpark, I would say $100,000 to $200,000, depending on the level of scope of work that's going to need to be performed.

And there's a historical element as well.

Right.

So there's the creek. Mayor Mrakas, The tribal there's historical there's there's traffic traffic study yes so it's a it's quite a long time in a big budget and we cannot move we can't put shovels in the ground till all that work is completed correct.

Mayor Mrakas, That that is correct, so we have really, we need to have full environmental clearance completed and a notice of determination filed before. know unless there's some minor work that can be done under you know categorical exemption or some other uh environmental document but generally we need to get that eir uh environmental document uh prepared and adopted by council prior to construction okay so at least a year out before we can do any construction because of this sequa process that has to happen yeah and One aspect to that timeline is that we wanna run the design process concurrently. So the design process and environmental can work concurrently and move forward. And they usually help to inform each other, particularly if there's some impact that is shown by the design, we can cover that as we're doing the environmental work.

City Council Chambers, And then the last piece is the financing, which you you didn't talk about here. City Council Chambers, Because we're doing this as a demolition of the site essentially in a rebuild do we need to have the financing in place for the project.

Mayor Mrakas, Well, I think I think this is my conversations with the town manager and based on the direction is received from the Council is to the extent practicable and the present extent feasible will be to phase this project with within the you know existing funding. But with that said, there's also acknowledgement on the total cost of the project that ultimately debt financing or some method of financing other than what you have in your reserves is going to be necessary. So that's going to be part of the conversation as the project gets refined, is how to finance additional improvements for the next five years.

Well, so the project cost is $21 million. Mayor Mrakas, So there's we don't have 21 million, so we need some alternative financing, so my question is where does that fit in that this sort of time we have a year before we actually need to put shovels in the ground. Mayor Mrakas, But we, we need to make sure we it's feasible and that's a really important part of like doing this project, because if we start it we can't just stop it if we have no money.

so just a reminder that the the project was 21 million dollars two years ago so in january at your january 8th meeting you'll be receiving updated information about the cost and absolutely it's going up um so we have to find even more money but the council when the council um adopted this implementation plan in june of 2023 they directed me to to go forward with phased implementation of concept B and so we are going to be looking at working with an architect to see can we phase this project and this has become even more important because we now have this deadline of January, 2029 for the paramedic facility. So if we are able to phase the project, but as you said, there's a big chunk that's devoted to the site improvements. We need to determine how much of that work has to be done in order to build this paramedic facility. And I'd like to, you know, I've mentioned the paramedics facility several times because we have a contractual obligation. But we need to remember the importance of the police station, which is literally falling down. So if we can get those, phase it in such a way that we can get those two facilities done. Of course, this is all up to the council. But we need to get, as a team, we need to get that information for the council. So you can look at... Do you want to phase? Is it feasible to phase it? How much is that going to cost? Is that what you want to do? Or would you prefer to wait until you've raised the money and do the project all at the same time? However, the cost of construction is going up so much every year.

Mayor Mrakas, Sorry, I don't I usually when you're phasing a project it's you're you know you're not demoing the whole site. Mayor Mrakas, But this is a complete demolition of everything, except for the town hall, so I don't, how do we phase that if it's. Mayor Mrakas, The public works buildings right in the middle of. You have to demo the whole public works building. So how is it phased? I'm just wondering how you phase it.

We haven't gotten to that point yet in part because we're busy doing this election code 9192 report. So we're trying to move all these things forward. We're making progress on the housing part of it and all the progress that David just described. But that's something we need to be looking at phased and see what we can do. I don't know. I'm not an architect. I'm really hopeful that they're going to be able to help us out because I'm concerned about the, you know, having this project depend on voters.

Is KPA going to help with that phase question for the January meeting? No, they're not.

They're busy doing the other, they're having to do two other parts of the 9192 report. So the phase question, the election code report is all about the economic impacts of what is in the citizens initiative.

Oh, no, I thought you were updating this, the cost estimates for the whole project.

Right, because the cost estimate for the whole project is what, And I'm blanking out right now, but David, can you help me on the why is the cost estimates for the project being updated for that, for the 9192 report?

The cost estimates are being updated, I mean, really, one, to ensure that you have current numbers for the master plan, but it's also a reflection of of identifying what the costs associated with constructing or rehabilitating a fire station, you know this this factor into the night the report so it helps inform that but I mean the primary issue in the report is is the master plan that's adopted by Council doesn't include a fire station. You probably will have to redo your master plan oh that's what they're looking at like if you added the fire station to this they're going to give us a cost associated with. What would it take to revise the master plan to include a fire station, what are the impacts of that so. But besides that the the. I mean we're approaching it from the perspective that the project can can be phased. but we really need the expertise of an architect to help with what does that look like? we do know that some of the uses for example the police department you can't if you're going to demo the existing building we're going to have to relocate that use temporarily so uh until such time that they the a new a new station is constructed now can you maintain the planning and public works modular we think so but again that's those are the kind of things we want to have an architectural expert assist us with what can and what can't be phased I see. Thank you.

Are there questions? Sure. Thank you for the presentation. Can you send your slides to us? Sure. Okay, thank you.

I mean, so long as it's done managers. Yeah, right.

Oh, no, and please, let's have them as a part of the packet for just the public. I mean, a lot of people aren't staying up for this.

We have a page on our website where we're adding the information about this, so that's a good idea to add that to it.

Let's see. Well, one question, you know, I mean, there's obviously there are ongoing discussions about fire engine and fire bays. The way it's designed now, could that be designed large enough to accommodate a fire engine at some point in the future?

If I can seek a clarifying question, Mayor Pro Tem, when you say fire engine, do you mean just a fire truck or are you talking about an apparatus bay?

Well, right now we're going to have basically a garage for an ambulance. And my question is, can that garage be designed large enough so that a fire engine could fit in there at some point in the future?

We haven't asked that question of an architect yet. I think, honestly, anything's possible. What it will result in is a larger apparatus bay to support an engine, and, and that would mean, you know, additional space would be necessary so you know that's the kind of discussion, we need to have with an architect to. to say, I know there's a lot that goes into the space planning for an engine and how much parking space and space around it for equipment. So we have to factor that into how much larger would the apparatus bay for the paramedics be to accommodate a fire truck and what kind of fire truck.

And it's not just as simple as if your question is leading to can we have, can we just, can we turn the ambulance, the paramedic facility which right now is at 2100 square feet or 2050 square feet, 2050 square feet in the conceptual plan. It's not as simple as just adding, is lengthening the apparatus bay so that it can fit an engine. A fire, a fire facility, a fire station facility requires, and it also depends on do we have our own department, or do we have, or do we continue to contract with Ross Valley Fire to provide that information, but it's, A fire station requires much different and much more square footage. So one of the things our report that will be showing the Council is it's with. With the housing and the other elements of the master plan, you can't fit, you're not going to be able to fit on this site, on this very constrained site, a fire station, a paramedic facility, nine unit housing, public works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So something would have to be moved off the site. And that's something that we'll be getting at about what the cost would be, because that would be that would be an economic impact of the Citizens Initiative, which again, is the purpose of the election code 9192 report.

Okay, and then I have some questions similar to Matt's. I don't think I really understand how this gets phased. I mean, it sounds like there's a goal to do the paramedic facility immediately and nothing else. Is that the phase? Is that how this works?

Mayor Mrakas, What I think again ideally prioritizing the the public safety elements that are currently identified in the master plan being the paramedic facility in the police station that that's those would be part of phase one would be those two elements. Mayor Mrakas, Of course, there are the other elements to accommodate that would be demoing the you know the existing buildings in place. Mayor Mrakas, It can have. Pointing back to the figure here, this is the new proposed administration facility right here. Maybe if I go back, go back to the.

You can kind of see.

So here here's the location of the current modular building. Here's police. So can can we, for example, retain City Council Chambers, The modular building, while the police station and the old fire station or demolished we think so. City Council Chambers, But that's again you know how you do that so is something we really want to would want to engage with the design team on how can you implement a phase project again supporting you know here's your new entrance paramedic facility here so there's not there's not a lot to DEMO. City Council Chambers, Where. where the paramedic facility is located but to construct the police station you would certainly need to demo the existing fire station and existing police station

But yeah, but we would still, so then you, when you look at that phase to build the paramedics and the police station, I totally think I see what you're saying. You keep that side fair. We'd still have to be able to afford that demo and to build those two really significant parts of the civic center. So you're saying the administration building. would be the phase two that we would wait on.

Right. I mean, it could even be, and I don't want to get too far out here, but I mean, it could even be, you know, there could be a phase one and phase one A and one B, you know, let's get the entrance and the parking area constructed to support the paramedic facility in the phase B, do the police station. So, I mean, just as an example.

I'm just saying we'd still need the money. I mean, that's the part that doesn't disappear.

City Council Chambers, And there's cost impacts to all those phasing to I mean, ideally, the most if you had all the money you'd want to do it all at once. City Council Chambers, Because you have to pay to bring the contractor back and you know all those elements that in doing in phases, but it also affords you time to be able to carry those those improvements out.

City Council Chambers, Do other people have.

City Council Chambers, Elizabeth another okay so you mentioned working with cedars for the the required housing um. which sounds like that could be a very you know interesting option but are there other options for example is there is there some way to build those houses so that they could be uh employee housing for ross employees or teachers or you know you know county employees to you know because cedars means cedars will take it over i mean i don't want to say take it but if you work with cedars then those will be that would be cedars housing which may be fine but are should we be looking at all at all of our options before we commit to a project with CEDARS.

Yeah, that's certainly a council decision.

I don't think we've heard anything about CEDARS until tonight. I had no idea that we were working with CEDARS.

Okay, excuse me. I have provided information to the council via email and to you and the mayor in person. So that's, maybe you just forgot.

Council can ultimately choose which avenue they'd like to pursue in terms of a partnership for affordable housing. You can seek a private developer that's going to do it all. There's pros and cons, and there's challenges with each of those options. really what we saw with CEDARS, they reached out to us. They wanted to discuss a potential partnership. And part of my role was to inform Krista as to, you know, how does that comport with your housing element and comport with your RHNA numbers and everything that I found to date is consistent with the policies in your housing element. And so, you know, it supports that concept but ultimately that has to come back to Council to decide if, if you would like to enter into exclusive negotiating agreement with with Cedars, or would you like staff to pursue another avenue, like, you know, seeking a preparing a RFQ or RFP, seeing if there's interest out there. uh on that we we've heard that because it's relatively small project it's difficult for developers to get the full financing unless you are a non-profit entity like cedars who who kind of has a funding pipeline that might support the the kind of uh housing that they'd like to develop but but ultimately it's council's decision in terms of it's helpful just to hear like what are the options and the possibilities and if in fact it's very difficult

to get a, you know, a developer, then you know, wow, wonderful that Cedars is stepping up to say they'd like to work with us. But I don't know that we've heard that we should be choosing and what our options are. And I think we should know what our options are before we commit to someone. But Cedars may be ideal. I just have no idea.

Another, I'd like to add that we, and you might recall I've sent information to the council about that, but we did meet with David Hanson of Branson School and walked, we met with him before we met with Cedar's folks. We walked around the site. He was very enthusiastic about it being off-site, off-campus housing for their staff and their faculty. because he said that they have staff and faculty that want to live close, but not too close. Because if you recall, the housing element also has housing on Branson campus. And so it was really great to hear his interest. He did say, however, that their focus is on building their athletic facilities. And I did have a meeting with Branson just this past week, and our planning director where, you know, they are raising funding right now to make improvements to their gym. So, you know, although they think it's a great idea, they're not, and he hasn't followed up with us. But, you know, one of the, so David has already put together, you know, started working on a draft, a request for qualifications for interest from affordable housing developers. And, you know, we can still do that, you know, and CEDARS could give us their interest too. That's another option. Tonight is just simply to let you know that, you know, we are trying to move forward on all these different, there's many different layers to this project. And we wanted to let you know that this, what progress has been made in the housing aspect of it.

a lot of great progress this is really a great report thank you bill do you have anything no great presentation um thank you for the slides too i look forward to getting the copy of it but i've also been taking pictures of it because It really helps to see the layout and try to visualize what would this look like and how could we move things around a little bit, depending on how things play out. So, but it is, I will say too, my impression is it's complicated. And it's going to get more complicated before it gets simpler.

And when approximately do you think we would be ready to hire an architect to help us with all the It's like a chess game. You know, if you do this, then you got to do that.

Any idea? Well, I've prepared an RFQ, actually an RFQ slash RFP for a design team to assist with the next phase. We put a pause on it just from the perspective of we're working on this section 9212 report and a lot of effort and time going into that. But also, too, we wanted to have that meeting with Fabiola because part of the contract with the architect is, you know, what is the procurement process that you're going to use? And there's a difference between traditional, again, design-bid-build and progressive design. There's also what's called the construction manager at risk. where that that design team you hire has different qualifications based on your procurement process so we're kind of looking at that and we you know that's something we we uh want to we want to move forward to advance but we also want to be mindful of what's the process we want to recommend to council for for this next phase of the design process so We're advancing it we're moving it forward and I think the goal would be as the timeline reflects is to bring that forward early in 2,026 is a contract that will be come to Council with with a scope of work and a proposal for your consideration to approve or an authorized town manager. to execute an agreement with the selected firm that would do the work.

Great. Bill?

The work, the architectural work, the architects would work with structural engineers or add them on staff?

Yeah, usually architects hire structural engineers as a sub-consultant is what I often have experience with. Some firms are large enough where they have a structural engineer on their team. But more often than not, they sub that work. So they have to compile a project team to meet all the elements of the design work. That includes often a civil engineer as well to design of the you know the civil improvements sidewalk streets storm drainage electrical connections landscaping etc so there's there's usually a design team has multiple components to it from civil design architectural design the structural elements and then there can even for often with police and fire there's some can be some specialized consultants for some of the specialized equipment

I think the structural aspect of this is going to be very important.

Absolutely. And we've heard that so far because of the proximity to Quarter Merida Creek, the types of soils that you have here, the flooding that's going to be, and then also meeting the Essential Services Act requirements. It's critically important.

And also just the phase development, not undermining other structures that are still existing or shoring them up if they need to be. All right.

Okay, can we move on to item number 14? Oh, sorry. Public comment? Online? Anybody?

No raised hands online.

All right. I just have one discussion point on this question. I think given the vote potential and I have trouble with this Civic Center project moving forward as a feasible project because of the acrimony in the town and the potential for a vote to build the fire station. So it's really hard to put forward this plan. The good part, which I just heard, is we have like over a year before you actually have to like do any demolition. But I just think we should really think about the resources that we're making the staff do towards a project that might be doomed. And I really think we have to think about that because we need two thirds of the voters to vote in some capacity. We cannot afford this. Krista just said the price is even going up again. So if we don't have two thirds support of the town to do this massive civic center, spending the amount of time and energy that's going into this is really not fruitful. It's just like a sort of Mayor Mrakas, So until I almost all i'm saying is, I think we we should wait until we have clarity around the fire station, because if they if the town has to come together in some capacity to pass the financing piece that's required here.

I'm hopeful that after January 8 the town will come together and maybe I'm being really naive but I think there will be a lot more objective information presented and I'm hoping people come to that meeting with open ears and open minds and actually listen instead of reading a lot of rhetoric that's been going on in town and I'm hoping we can turn a corner. I'm hoping perhaps we can explore alternative financing where if we're saving a million dollars a year, maybe we can have some kind of a financing vehicle where we pay off a million dollars a year from excess tax revenue. I don't know. There's probably something more creative that we could do that doesn't entail a two-thirds vote.

Mayor Mrakas, And i'm totally then we should talk about that right now so before the town is before they are working their butts off on these plans. Mayor Mrakas, figure out that we can afford and do this because, like we are all recognizing it takes two thirds of a vote to get the financing, we need, and I think we all know we don't have that unless there's an alternative yes. Mayor Mrakas, So why don't we put that as the priority figure out this alternative that you're talking about that you don't need the bond financing. because the project is not feasible as it currently stands.

Well, I'm hopeful that after January 8th, as I said before, people will turn a corner and people will realize you can't have the housing element on this site with a fire station. So what do you want to do? Put the housing element above the post office? Be in breach of our housing element? Put the fire station by the post office? I mean, I'm confident We can revisit that issue after the January 8 meeting that it's less than a month away. I nothing is going to happen between now and January 8 the focus is on the elections report that needs to be the focus right now after January 8 we're going to have to reconvene and you know. either agree that we're going forward or something else. That's what I think. We can't do the financing aspect between now and January 8th.

No, no, no, I hear you. I was saying if that is an alternative, maybe we're just all talking about what we're trying to get here. If it's go for the Civic Center, great, but we've got to bring two-thirds of the community.

If we do a vote, that's right. and i'm hopeful people will be enlightened and rational and reasonable after january 8th i i know i'm naive but i'm hopeful we are all hopeful for that i mean we all we all want a resolution to this we i we all know we want a reasonable resolution okay so can we move on to number 14. you know i have one suggestion if you're going to be coming back quarterly which i think is really helpful maybe if we could put

at the beginning of the administrative agenda instead of at the end so that you're not here at 10 30 at night i'm sorry it's so late that's okay thank you vice mayor mayor pertin thank you for your report too all right number 14.

Which is, we are discussing the logistics regarding the January 8th, good segue, 2026 Town Council meeting. Town Manager Johnson.

Yes, thank you. So the item before you is really just to discuss the logistics. At your November 13th meeting, the Town Council directed staff to explore alternative venues in which to hold your January 8th Town Council meeting to accommodate expected attendance. we contacted Ross School there it's not available the gym is not available Marin Art and Garden Center their Livermore room is available that evening and they have been kind enough to put a hold on it for us until we receive council direction this evening However, we also got information from our audio visual vendor and we are not able to you can have your meeting there, but you're not going to be able to do a Zoom hybrid meeting. You can't do both. And because, you know, this remote participation in council meetings is really now expected. In fact, there is a new state law that goes into effect in July and it's not going to, we won't be held to it because we're not over 30,000 people. To not offer remote participation is to eliminate the ability of people with child care or elder care responsibilities, people with certain disabilities, and people that are out of town from participating in the council meeting. So I did not even put it down here as an option because everything I've heard from council since I've been here is that you want to encourage more participation, you want to be more transparent, and not giving the examples of people that I just provided is just not something that I've heard the council say in the past. So, the options for you is to have it here where you can ensure that you can hold a hybrid meeting. We also thought that we can set up overflow space. at the Livermore room and in order to do so, Magic said they will not charge us a rental fee but we would have to pay for an on-site manager so there will be some cost. We could have our part-time office assistant work that evening so that she could as people enter into the Livermore room. She can provide them with speaker slips. Using speaker slips is a very common method that many towns have at their council meetings. They fill out the speaker slip. She transmits that information to our town clerk who will be here so that if we have a lot of speakers, they can be called and be given time to come on over here to be able to speak in person. And then they can watch it on a big, we have a big screen set up and they can sit there and watch. So it's essentially, it's an overflow space. We thought it was actually our esteemed town attorney's idea about turning the fire station bays into overflow space. However, the ambulance is based there, gets pulls out that could be pretty noisy and there's no heat. In the base and it's going to be January 8 so that would be a that would be a much shorter walk for folks, but you know it would be cold.

It might be difficult for some people in the room who may have disabilities to get over here.

I mean, there is an ADA pathway. It would take them a while.

My husband, it would take him a while.

Of course. We could also look into seeing, can we rent a golf cart to help people? There's things like that we could do to help people get over and just pay people a little overtime to do that. City Council Chambers, More than happy to look into it, but not being able to do zoom makes moving the Council out of this room. City Council Chambers, A really challenging. City Council Chambers, option it's not something I would recommend.

City Council Chambers, So I well before the meeting I spoke to our. friend who does marin tv behind us and she said that their um crews could absolutely do both the camera work and zoom and she gave me the name michael eisenmanger executive director and omid okay Okay, yes.

And so we have we have spoken to that individual. And we have spoken to Mr. Scott Ward, who's the director of government productions, who said that that it's it's not possible. So, you know, I we've, we've consulted with we've, we've spoken with the experts. They say that it's not possible. So we can certainly hire them to have a crew. And they could film it because you know, this meeting is recorded, which is great. And it's available on the town's website. And we could pay them to put a crew together and have all the microphones. That would be great. And we could do it over there. but it will not interface with Zoom to have a hybrid meeting. That's the key issue.

We're not getting a lot of people online to comment. I almost wonder if it's better for everybody to be in person because I do think people want to come and more could come at magic. Maybe it is better if we simply can't get the Zoom to work to do it in person and not have Zoom and have it recorded so people can follow up later, but they're not great choices. Magic without Zoom, we're here with very few people with Zoom, I kind of think I'd go down on the side of magic without Zoom because most people do come and I think people want to be there. I don't think it's really practical for them to be walking in the dark. It's not that well lit across the street, all the way over here, one at a time to comment. And then if this room is full, they're going to be standing outside one at a time coming in to comment. I just don't think that's very practical. So that's my thought. I'd probably do magic without the Zoom.

Mayor Mrakas, You know I I remember during coven when we were talking about branson there were I don't know 350 people on zoom so there was the only choice, then, yes, but I think people have gotten pretty comfortable with zoom nobody commented on zoom I don't know how many people were on zoom tonight. I think it's a nice courtesy feature to have. Krista, didn't you say that Mary McGrath is unable to attend in person? So that's a problem?

Oh yeah, that's a problem too. And you know, we haven't told FORF that they would not have the ability to do anything remotely. I don't know if they need to or not, but our architect, Mary McGrath, who is a big part of this, needs, is not able to. And she was able to be here. Our entire consultant team, I had them all ready to be here on December 17th because that's when Forth told us that they could do it. And then they were approached and they told our town attorney that they couldn't do it. So then all of a sudden it's on January 8th And I have a consultant who is absolutely key to the town's presentation who right now has said that she cannot attend. She's going to be out of state. So that absolutely is going to be a burden on the town to be able to provide. And remember, a big part of the stipulated agreement is that FORF has the ability to ask questions of town staff and town consultants they um I need to have Mary McGrath here to be able to answer I'm not all of a sudden going to be a fire architect fire station architect at the meeting I need her and why are we changing the meeting to February why don't we change the meeting to February

I think it's better to stick, yeah, but I mean, I was thinking.

Coordinating about 25 people.

Yeah, the stipulated agreement, I recall Mr. Town Attorney says we have to have it done by, we have to do this meeting in January. And I mean, coordinating the council is difficult enough. Then we have are the four folks who have now, you know, told us on two different occasions that they couldn't be here. And then we have town, then we have are the town consultants. And you have the community. So my recommendation is to stick with January 8th. You know, it's up to you about the Zoom. But we are really going to be, that is a big obstacle that I do not want to have. City Council Chambers, So my recommendation is to continue January 8 and have it here, and we can have an overflow area with a golf cart sorry so.

City Council Chambers, We have like at city group and all the places i've worked we've done these town halls are these very large. City Council Chambers, You know, for the whole company and they're streamed and there's Q amp a they don't use zoom they use a different provider have you looked at any of these sort of town hall live stream options.

so we have a vendor who is the director of government productions they do work for i believe the vast majority if not all jurisdictions in marin county yes they've said they've said no maybe we don't look for a government person but someone like i said town halls are very very common

I'm happy to do the research and come back to see if there's an option to that. There's a company called On24. There are these other providers, they're not Zoom. I'm happy to do the research just to see if it's possible. Mayor Mrakas, My inclination is if it's not possible, then we got to do it here because we got to give people the option for zoom and elsewhere, I totally appreciate that we want I want everyone here don't get me wrong. Mayor Mrakas, But I agree for the consultants that have to zoom in I think that the friends might have people I think they're. Mayor Mrakas, Their persons in Colorado springs on one of them so it's like you know it would be really hard the logistics that you're saying, but I want everyone to be here, so I i'm happy to krista to take this offline and. Mayor Mrakas, figure out from our events people at city like who do we use for town halls and come back to you and just see if it's possible to use another vendor.

I mean, if it were possible at magic with zoom, we would probably be all in. Is that right? I mean, that way everybody could come and we have all of our usual. Yeah, of course, you know, be filmed and there'd be zoom. So yeah, go for it.

And if you can, I mean, if you don't mind, I'll look into that tomorrow. I'll just send an email and see if it doesn't, maybe we can all discuss that. But it's like, if we can't find another option, then we do it here. If we can, then we another vendor. And by the way, completely outsourced, not Cindy doesn't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything. It's like, They come in with a crew, and they set up the cameras, and they even can do the Q&A. We totally outsource it to these professional people, and if we're okay with that as an option, we go for it. If not, we just do it here. That would be my suggestion. I'm happy to do that.

You have at least three, so that's it.

I haven't watched a ton of town halls because I find them to be very disappointing, but I have not seen ones where they've had people that are presenting PowerPoints.

Oh yeah, they do, they do. Don't worry, we'll talk offline, but you can do PowerPoints and you can have remote people speak. They're made for this. They're sort of made for these thousand plus huge events for companies.

Okay. And does the council have a price limit or is sky's the limit?

Well, no, I'll give you, I'll tell you what they say.

No, but I need to know now. So, I mean, I need to know what your limit is because this is the last meeting in December. So if somebody, if you have a company that comes back, I mean, just for... Just for the Community Media Center of Marin, who is our current provider, just to have a crew set up to have the meeting over there not Zoomed is $2,600 to $3,000 plus what we would need for Magic to pay their person who has to be, what's it called, on-site manager to us paying our part-time person to help set up, then I'm assuming that usually a private provider is more expensive than our local folks. So I would just need to know. So right now, let's say it's $4,000 to do this without Zoom at Magic. How much more is the council willing to increase that in order to add in the Zoom, the hybrid? It doesn't have to be Zoom.

What about a budget of $10,000? If it's more than $10,000, we're not doing it.

I think it's really important. I mean, I think this is a big meeting for a lot of people on both sides to really listen and hear and see what's on the table. I think there will be a lot of participation. I think we should really do our best to make it accessible to everybody. I mean, I'm okay with, I don't even know what it should cost, though.

Yeah, but let's just say they're saying for... Like, 50K is too much. Yeah, I would say 10 is, like, very reasonable that we would try to put this on for the town for $10,000. It's like putting on a little event.

In other words, we could always hit up our POA. Is there a time limit?

Maybe fourth could contribute half.

Oh, here it is. I'm so sorry. A fourth?

I mean, does that seem reasonable? If it's $10,000 or more, we're just like, it's not worth it, we'll do it here. Okay, but how much work is this going to take? How much work is this going to take?

How much what? I'll do it. No, no. So it's going to be... the town manager's time, working with you, and when's the deadline? When are you gonna say, okay, we're gonna go with this?

Oh, next week. Like if we can't find a vendor by next week that does this for $10,000, we're just like, we're doing it here.

Okay. I think it is better to do it at Magic if we can, but we need Zoom. And I say that because we have people from fourth who want to participate and it's not just one person it's designated persons we've got our people we're going to already going to fill this room half of it with just the people who need to participate let alone the public And I'm just trying to imagine people sitting over there and they want to speak. They've got to come across the street when it's really dark and currently cold out. And I just think that to have a really meaningful, productive meeting after all this preparation, spending a little bit of extra money to make it work does make sense. Not terribly comfortable with $10,000. Sorry, did we ask Branson? I guess it's not the end of the world.

Did we ever ask Branson? Because maybe their facility already has the video and stuff in it.

I have not asked Branson straight up because there's a challenge with that. You know, Branson is under very strict traffic controls and having us.

They can't hold events.

We've told them they can't have events, they can't have this, they have to have traffic monitors, they have to go through all this great expense, but yet we're going to say, oh, but can you have a meeting for us?

The parking there is kind of challenging, too. And you have to walk down and check in.

If we can't get it at Magic, should we be setting aside a certain number of seats for like the, you know, the town staff, town consultants, fourth consultants, maybe the fourth leaders, because those are the people who kind of need to be in the room to start. Oh, they have to. And then, you know, beyond that, I mean, we could sort of see from the town who's like, you know, essential to be here, and from who is essential, and then have some reserved seats because

City Council Chambers, And that violates the first amendment, if you start reserving for other people who aren't actual. City Council Chambers, People who are scheduled to speak so for has a list in our stipulation of who's going to be there, so those people we can reserve seats for, but we can't then make another. City Council Chambers, Another layer of invites to sit inside based on who we think should be there it's got to be our consultants their consultants. They're four proponents. They only get four people under the stipulation and then city staff.

Okay. Fine. I mean, at least then, you know, people who have to be here will know that they have a seat because I think a lot of people are going to line up early and fill up most of the other seats if it is here.

I think we need to, if we're here, we need to figure this out so that we don't have confusion or where is so-and-so when they're outside. Is that your job, then, to figure that out? It's going to be a long meeting.

It's going to be remote.

Oh, God. Very funny. But is that your job to figure out the number of four people?

Yes, it's in the stipulation. I mean, I'm working with their attorney. We're going to iron out those details. It's pretty self-explanatory already in the stipulation, but we'll have names attached to that, and then we'll have some sort of reserve seating for those people.

Okay. And, you know, thinking about the $10,000, we've already invested potentially up to $85,000 for the elections report. So $10,000 is what? City Council Chambers, A little more than 10% 12% of that.

City Council Chambers, yeah and just heads up for the Council, we don't have $10,000 in our budget so i'll have to come forward with an appropriation in February, after the fact okay.

City Council Chambers, Well, hopefully it won't be 10,000. yeah matt's going to get a great deal it's going to be 4 800. love it okay thank you um yes public comment anyone online cindy's awake there are no raised hands mayor okay great thank you all right yes there all of a sudden popped up a raised hand man oh wow did you want to take that wow

Not that one. Who is it? It's a regular. Oh, a regular person. A regular person. OK. I'm ready. Take it? Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Herbst, please go ahead.

Yeah. I think Marin Arden Garden Center would be great if you guys can figure it out. I've been watching all along, and we're looking forward to presenting to you guys.

Thank you, Bob. We're going to do our best. Thank you.

You're welcome. Thanks.

Okay. Now we are moving to the end of the administrative agenda. There's no public hearings on planning projects, so we're moving to item 15, no action items. A, council correspondence. Anybody? City Council Chambers, The future Council items, I would like to follow up with diane read in about the narcan and the defibrillator locations does that need to be on the agenda krista or can we just. City Council Chambers, Can we just have like maybe chief potter decide where the best location is.

City Council Chambers, Absolutely not i'm sorry. City Council Chambers, You know, no, I mean he's going to be sorry it's late at night, but. City Council Chambers, it's. First of all, the post office is leased to the post office. So everything, I don't know if you've heard about the struggles RPOA has of getting their absolutely beautiful second handmade wooden table into there. We have to get the permission of our tenant. Yeah, to have it in into that least space. So Chief Potter has told me that the police station is not a good spot. So it's really do you guys want it out here? Do you want to put a thing so it's something that the council needs to have a discussion about you could very well have people in the public that you know, maybe don't want an easily accessible Narcan on the Ross common with all the kids and dogs running around. So I think it's something you need to...

Okay, agendize. So I would like to agendize that. Okay.

Are you talking about just Narcan or the AED?

AED as well.

As well, okay.

Yeah.

So we've already been looking into the defibrillators at the tennis court because that's town-owned property that we do not lease to anybody. Okay. But again, at the post office...

So it was just put on a future agenda.

Yeah. Anybody else? Okay. The communication table at the Ross post office on January 8th, Terry and I were at the post office today for two hours and my hands are still frozen. So if it's raining or if it is below 55 degrees, I do not want us to sit there for two hours. It's too cold. It's too miserable. No one wants to stop and talk when it's freezing or raining. City Council Chambers, So that's a little asterisk but if Elizabeth if you'd like to sign up pending the weather available and then sell the weather is okay great anybody else want to join. City Council Chambers, Okay, all right, thank you Elizabeth. City Council Chambers, There is a maybe. City Council Chambers, You guys can work to you can you want to do it. City Council Chambers, Okay, great Thank you both 16 meeting evaluation.

long, but I don't think it could have been otherwise. I thought it was fine.

I would just like to say that I know that these issues are contentious and what I'm hoping all of us like agreed be that we all have an open mind to this January 8th presentation, but I would encourage Mayor Mrakas, All all of us to meet with the Members before and get spend some time on the looking at the proposal, just because I think if you just see it that day. Mayor Mrakas, It might you just it's it's up to you, you don't have to i'm just saying is that if you're open to meeting with them and digging in all of this stuff takes so much look how long it took just to look at like proposal be.

Mayor Mrakas, Their proposal will be circulated as an attachment to the agenda, so we will all get their written materials that Friday oh yeah I know that, but because of the Christmas break.

Mayor Mrakas, I get that you will get it like the Friday before January 2 right yeah but if you, you know i'm just encouraging everyone to be open to meeting with. them and looking over the stuff whenever is you have time over the holidays or because i just know that basically if you get it the second and then the eighth we're all coming back from things it's going to be a really hard time so i i'm just throwing that out there because i think it's um the group has put a tremendous amount of work and there's real consultants and i think the meeting will go better on the 8th for everybody if we feel like we've all spent time understanding it Mayor Mrakas, that's why honestly crystal when I was asking for a thank you for adding those slides and. Mayor Mrakas, I really appreciated that because I never really had that time I wasn't on the Council to see the proposal, he was taking pictures of the buildings like you kind of want to visualize things.

Mayor Mrakas, yeah and so never seen those before so that was great.

Mayor Mrakas, yeah so that it's going to be such a long meeting and there's a lot to cover on both sides, so all i'm saying is, if you if the Council would spend time with these people, I think it's in your it's an all of our best interests. City Council Chambers, And i'm happy to as well, like look at if we if the reports are learning things as much as I can to get up to speed on really like the other consultants points of view as well.

City Council Chambers, I just want i'd like the meeting to be as productive as we can make it yeah I think each side only has 45 minutes right and then they get to ask our consultants questions and I assume our consultants get to ask them questions if they want to.

It's not structured that way, but they can as part of their presentation. As far as the meeting agenda item right now about process of how the meeting went, I just want to remind everyone, it seems to be a reoccurring pattern. We have these rules and procedures that we've adopted, that we all agreed that are the rules that we're going to abide by. We're not supposed to interrupt unless the mayor stops that person who has the floor. The mayor controls who's talking on the floor. Several times tonight, there's back and forth. people are interrupting each other. That's against our rules. It also makes for a really contentious meeting. So I know I'm guilty of it with my colleagues at work. I've wanted to interrupt when I want to talk to someone, you know, say something, but you got to get the floor first through the mayor. That's just the process we've all agreed to.

Thank you for that reminder. Okay. Something just dropped off from the sky. Okay. I think we can adjourn the meeting then, right? Okay, at 11.05, we're adjourning.