City Council - Regular Meeting

Here is a preview of our next city council meeting which will take place at city hall on April 7th, 2026 starting at 5:30 p.m. The meeting will begin with several presentations including several proclamations declaring April as month of the child, National ArabAmerican Heritage Month, Earth Month, and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Then the city manager will give a brief report on city programs, services, and projects. There are several routine matters on the consent agenda which the city council can approve all at once with a single vote. These include waving the reading of all resolutions and ordinances, approving the minutes of March 17th, 2026 city council meeting, establishing a city legislative action platform for 2026 and appointing the mayor, city manager, and city attorney as the primary liaison between the League of California Cities and the city of Slow. approving a project and awarding a construction contract to replace the roof at the 879 Mororrow Street where the city utilities department administration offices are located. Next, council will move on to business items, reviewing and accepting the city's general plan annual report, which tracks progress on housing safety, homelessness, growth, and other community priorities. holding a study session on the city's climate progress and how the city is addressing climate change. The council will give direction on the next climate action plan update, which will further shape how the community will address climate change, meet state greenhouse gas reduction targets, and plans for a

more sustainable, resilient future. You can view the council meetings remotely on channel 20, on the city's YouTube channel, and on the city's website via www.slowcity.org/aggendas. Attendees of city council or advisory body meetings are eligible to receive 1 hour of complimentary parking with restrictions. Visit the city's parking for public meetings web page for more details. We encourage your participation in person or prior to the meeting. Please review the cover of the meeting agenda for more ways to submit your comments. For more information and the full meeting agenda, visit www.slowcity.org/aggendas. Here is a preview of our next city council meeting which will take place at city hall on April 7th, 2026 starting at 5:30 p.m. The meeting will begin with several presentations including several proclamations declaring April as month of the child, National ArabAmerican Heritage Month, Earth Month, and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Then the city manager will give a brief report on city programs, services, and projects. There are several routine matters on the consent agenda which the city council can approve all at once with a single vote. These include waving the reading of all resolutions and ordinances, approving the minutes of March 17th, 2026 city council meeting, establishing a city legislative action platform for 2026 and appointing the mayor, city manager, and city attorney as the primary liaison between the League of California Cities and the city of Slo.

approving a project and awarding a construction contract to replace the roof at the 879 Mororrow Street where the city utilities department administration offices are located. Next, council will move on to business items, reviewing and accepting the city's general plan annual report, which tracks progress on housing safety, homelessness, growth, and other community priorities. holding a study session on the city's climate progress and how the city is addressing climate change. The council will give direction on the next climate action plan update, which will further shape how the community will address climate change, meet state greenhouse gas reduction targets, and plans for a more sustainable, resilient future. You can view the council meetings remotely on channel 20, on the city's YouTube channel, and on the city's website via www.slowcity.org/aggendas. Attendees of city council or advisory body meetings are eligible to receive 1 hour of complimentary parking with restrictions. Visit the city's parking for public meetings web page for more details. We encourage your participation in person or prior to the meeting. Please review the cover of the meeting agenda for more ways to submit your comments. For more information and the full meeting agenda, visit www.slowcity.org/aggendas. Here is a preview of our next city council meeting which will take place at city hall on April 7th, 2026 starting at 5:30 p.m. The meeting will begin with

several presentations including several proclamations declaring April as the month of the child, National ArabAmerican Heritage Month, Earth Month, and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Then the city manager will give a brief report on city programs, services, and projects. There are several routine matters on the consent agenda, which the city council can approve all at once with a single vote. These include waving the reading of all resolutions and ordinances, approving the minutes of March 17th, 2026 city council meeting, establishing a city legislative action platform for 2026, and appointing the mayor, city manager, and city attorney as the primary liaison between the League of California Cities and the city of Slow. approving a project and awarding a construction contract to replace the roof at the 879 Mororrow Street where the city utilities department administration offices are located. Next, council will move on to business items, reviewing and accepting the city's general plan annual report, which tracks progress on housing, safety, homelessness, growth, and other community priorities. holding a study session on the city's climate progress and how the city is addressing climate change. The council will give direction on the next climate action plan update, which will further shape how the community will address climate change, meet state greenhouse gas reduction targets, and plans for a more sustainable, resilient future. You can view the council meetings remotely on channel 20, on the city's YouTube channel, and on the city's website via www.slowcity.org/aggendas.

Attendees of city

recording in progress advisory body meetings are eligible to receive 1 hour of complimentary parking with Thank you.

Good. Yeah. Excuse Well, good evening everyone. I am Mayor Erica A. Stewart and I'm here to say that four of us are here in person. Uh Council Member Marks will not be with here with us today, but she'll be returning in two weeks. Don't you worry. Um we're going to start it off with the pledge of allegiance and council member Shoresman.

All right, city attorney, can you please give us a close session report?

Thank you, Madame Mayor. The council did meet in close session on two matters. One uh real property negotiations matters regarding uh property at 975 broad with uh negotiating parties as listed on the agenda on a motion by Mayor Stewart, seconded by uh council member Boswell 4 with council member Marks absent. Uh the council did authorize staff to enter into real property negotiations and provided direction on price and terms and there's no f further reportable action on that one. And then also on one matter of existing litigation Ruda atall versus city of St. Louis Abyspo. And on that matter, on the motion of council member Shoresman, seconded by Vice Mayor Francis, on a vote of 40, also with council member Marks absent, uh the council authorized the defense of the action and also authorized staff to retain uh attorney Kevin Seagull with the firm of Burke Williams Sorenson to act as outside counsel in defense of the city. And with that, no further reportable action. Thank you. Thank you so much. So today we get to start off with four proclamations. So all of us will be reading a proclamation, but I want to me make sure you know we're reading a little bit of abbreviated uh proclamations because we have so many. So please know that the full uh proclamation is on our website so you can read the whole thing and um it will also be up here on the um screen when we are reading our proclamation. After that, we'll have um each person come up and give their three minutes of public comment so that you can all learn a little bit about more about the um organization that we are giving a proclamation for. First off, we have the April as the month of the child and vice mayor will be sharing that and then

Shelby West, if you could raise your hand. Thank you so much, Shelby. Uh on behalf of the Slow County Early Care and Education Planning Council, we'll have you join us up front. month of the child and child abuse prevention month. Whereas the city of St. Louis Abyispo recognizes that every moment in a child's life is an opportunity for learning, discovery, and growth, and that the quality of these early experiences shapes a child's resilience, well-being, and success in school and throughout life. And whereas the city of San Los Abyispo joins community partners including the slow county ear and education planning council and local family serving organizations in working towards a future where all families can find and afford quality child care and where early childhood professionals are valued for the essential role they play in strengthening our community. And whereas April is recognized nationally as the month of the child and child abuse prevention month provides an opportunity to celebrate the wonder and promise of childhood while reaffirming our commitment to ensuring that every child grows up in a safe nurturing environment at home in child care at school and throughout the community. And now therefore I Emily Francis vice mayor of the city of St. Los Aispo on behalf of the entire city council here hereby proclaim April 2026 as month of the child and child abuse prevention month recognizing the importance of investing in children supporting families and working together to ensure that every child has the opportunity to grow, learn, and thrive. Do I have to press the button? Thanks. All right. Madame Mayor and esteemed council members. My name is Shelby West.

I'm here representing the San Los Aispo Early Care and Education Planning Council. The council in partnership with families and the community plans for and promotes accessible services of the highest quality for the care of all children and youth. I'm deeply honored to stand here before you today as we recognize April as month of the child, a time to celebrate, uplift, and commit ourselves to the well-being of the youngest members of our communities. First, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the city of St. Louis Abyispo for this meaningful recognition. This proclamation is not just an acknowledgement of the work that we do, but a call to action for all of us to ensure that every child has the opportunity to grow, thrive, and succeed. We also want to thank you for your focus and investment in the child care business expansion within the city of slow and we look forward to further supporting you in your work reviewing zoning regulations for consideration of how to streamline processes for child care centers in particular. Your support of child care over the years has helped to create a connected community for our children and families. It truly takes a village to raise children as I can attest with my own daughter here as she has benefited first from our city's early care system and now from our wonderful public schools as well. As we celebrate month of the child, let us be reminded that every child deserves love, support, and the chance to dream big. Let's continue our collaboration to break barriers, provide resources, and create a future where every child, regardless of background or circumstance, has the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Thank you for taking the time this month to pause and reflect on how we can impact our communities, children, and families in every decision that is made within these council chambers. I am wearing blue

today to honor my commitment to preventing child abuse. As April is also recognized as child abuse prevention month, blue is worn to show support for all of those agencies working together to promote programs and activities that create strong and thriving children and families. Thank you again for this incredible honor. I accept this proclamation for every educator, parent, mentor, and advocate who works tirelessly to uplift and support our children. When we invest in our children, we invest in a better tomorrow. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Next, we have Vice I'm sorry, Council Member Shoresman um declaring ArabAmerican Heritage Month and Sandra Suf on behalf of the Cultural Creations Collaborative will join us. No.

Okay. She can come up afterwards if she wants to. Okay. Uh, ArabAmerican Heritage Month, April 2026. Whereas ArabAmerican Heritage Month is nationally proclaimed in April to recognize the valuable contributions and achievements of ArabAmericans who have strengthened our nation, state, and our city. Whereas representing diverse nationalities, religions, and ethnicities from 22 Arabic speaking countries, ArabAmericans strengthen the community through their commitment to family, education, hard work, hospitality, and diversity while also playing a vital role in advancing social justice and human rights and enriching our society through their contributions to the democratic democratic and entrepreneurial spirit in St. Vispo. And whereas Arab Americans remain committed to supporting their loved ones in Palestine facing systemic violence by organizing and advocating for justice, human rights, humanitarian aid, and lasting peace in the region and world. Now, therefore, I, Michelle Shoresman, council member for the city of St. Labispo on behalf of the entire city council recognize April as ArabAmerican Heritage Month and the many contributions of our ArabAmerican community members.

Um hi. Okay. Um, good evening mayor and council members. My name is Sona Suf and I'm honored to be here with my community to accept the city's first proclamation ever recognizing April as ArabAmerican Heritage Month. Thank you for acknowledging the many contributions Arab Americans have made and the many ways we have for generations participated in and shaped life here in St. Louis Abyspo. Six years ago, my friend Halabaki and I were hiking St. Louis Mountain talking about life, community, what it means to be Lebanese, to be Arab living here in the city. She was new to slow and I shared that in over 20 years of living here, I had never seen ArabAmerican Heritage Month recognized nor events centered on our community be beyond a few at Calpali. She looked at me and said, "Well, then let's organize something." So in April of 2020 alongside Fahal Nakib we launched our first series of heritage month events. So we did story time at the library. We did a film screening a film screening a panel discussion and had tea in the park. Since then with the support of our community we have continued to create spaces for education connection and celebration each year. There's always a balance in this cultural work between educating and celebrating, between correcting harmful narratives and creating space to be seen fully. Too often in our society, Arab communities are portrayed in fragmented and dehumanizing ways through stereotypes that overlook our humanity and reduce us to numbers. What is rarely shown is our resilience, our creativity, our contributions, our deep love of family and community, and our joy. Ours is a culture rooted in hospitality and generosity.

To be welcomed into an Arab home is to be cared for in body, heart, and belly. You will never leave our house feeling hungry. We gather, we work, we play, fall in love, adore our children, laugh, cry, tell stories, and build community wherever we are. These are the everyday truths of who we are. And while many in our community carry the weight of injustice done to our people, from intolerance and discrimination to genocide and the destruction of our homelands, we are more than those tragedies. Here in St. and Louis Aispo. We are your neighbors, doctors, artists, students, entrepreneurs, and public servants, many of whom are in this room this evening. So, this proclamation matters because it helps us to be seen in our fullness as human beings who show up with care and commitment to our local community. And in that spirit, we invite you to join us for some events honoring ArabAmerican Heritage Month this month. This Thursday, we're doing verbatim theater at the community library. The mounty installation is in display at the second floor of the library. And we welcome you into our I'm cut off completely. Okay. Am I? We welcome to you into our spaces. And thank you so much for seeing us and creating space for us. Thank you so much. I wish there was like a cute chime for, you know, the proclamations versus the loud beeping. So, thanks for your patience with us. Um, and next we have um Council Member Mike Boswell will be declaring April as Earth Month to Laura Alers on behalf of the Slow Climate Coalition.

Thank you. Uh, Earth Month and honoring honoring uh slow Earthfest 2026. Whereas the city has established ambitious climate goals reflecting the community's commitment to meaningful climate leadership and long-term environmental stewardship. And whereas the slow climate coalition has helped bring together a broad network of local organizations including eoslow, the Santa Lucia chapter of the Sierra Club, Kalpali College Corps, and making slow to accelerate climate action, foster public engagement, and support implementation of solutions aligned with the city's climate goals. And whereas Slow Earthfest 2026 being celebrated on April 18th at Santa Rosa Park provides a meaningful opportunity for community members of San Louis Abyispo to celebrate environmental stewardship, highlight climate solutions, and inspire action in support of a sustainable future. Now therefore, I'm Mike Boswell, council member of the city of St. AISPO on behalf of the entire city council hereby proclaims April 2026 as Earth Month and recognizes and celebrates Slow Earthfest 2026 for its leadership in promoting environmental awareness, climate action, and community collaboration. Okay. On behalf of Slow Climate Coalition, thank you for this recognition of Earth Month and for lifting up Slow Earthfest 2026. This proclamation reflects something we see every day, that real climate progress happens locally and through

partnership. The city's climate action plan sets an ambitious and necessary vision and it's only possible because of the many organizations, volunteers, businesses, and residents working together to bring it to life. And you'll see many of those partners here tonight showing up in support of the CL city's climate action plan update and a continued commitment to this important work. Earthfest is one expression of that collaboration. It's a space where our community can connect, learn, and take action. Where climate solutions feel tangible, hopeful, and within reach. And in a moment when the national conversation can feel heavy, even discouraging. This matters because here in St. Lucabispo, we are reminded that local action still works, that community still works, and that a resilient future is something we are actively building together. We invite everyone to join us on April 18th at Santa Rosa Park and to engage in Earth Month in whatever way feels meaningful to you. Thank you board, council members, mayor for your leadership, your partnership, and your commitment to a healthy, resilient future for our community. And last but not least, we have the sexual assault awareness month proclamation. Uh many of us are wearing the teal ribbon in um recognition of uh sexual assault awareness month as for April and uh this has a special meaning

as I used to get to work with a lot of the safer um students and advocates at Kpali and really glad to be able to share with this proclamation. So whereas sexual assault awareness month calls attention to the fact that sexual assault is widespread and impacts every person in St. on those fispo Lumina Alliance continues to provide a safe environment to those affected by sexual assault with a 24-hour crisis line, advocacy, therapy, transitional and emergency housing, and prevention education with the help of dedicated volunteers and professionals. Luminina Alliance has had a dramatic increase of hotline calls by more than 30% over the past year and recognizes that more than 45% of women have experienced sexual violence in the United States which accounts for 63,000 women in St. Louis Abyispo County. So now therefore I Erica A. Stewart mayor of the city of St. Obispo on behalf of the entire city council in recognition of the important work done by do by domestic violence programs do hereby proclaim the month of April to be the sexual assault awareness month. Maggie, I'll meet you up front. Thank you, Mayor Stewart and the city council members for this proclamation. My name is Maggie Torres and I am on the board of directors for Luminina Alliance. For over 45 years, Luminina Alliance has been a steadfast source of support for survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. Our mission is to empower those impacted through innovative advocacy, healing, and prevention programs. We provide a

24-hour crisis and information line, advocacy and encompment, legal referrals, emergency shelters, transitional housing, self-sufficiency services, individual and group therapy, and a comprehensive prevention program. April is sexual aware assault awareness month. A time dedicated to uniting communities in the fight to end sexual violence. First launched in 2001, this month has grown into a powerful movement of advocacy, collaboration, and education. More than 20 years later, it remains a vital opportunity to raise awareness about the impacts of sexual violence both locally and nationwide while working toward a safer, more just future. This year, we are shining a light on the resilience of survivors and the often overlooked realities of sexual violence in our community. While anyone can experience sexual assault, some groups, including undocumented individuals, transgender people, and those living with disabilities, face unique barriers to safety and support. This April, we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that every survivor is seen, heard, and empowered. Together, we are illuminating pathways to a future where all survivors have the resources and support they need to heal. Please remember, if you or anyone is exp anyone you know is experiencing sexual or intimate partner violence and needs help, please call 805-5458888 to speak to one of our confidential advocates. In closing, we are so grateful for this proclamation and your ongoing support. On behalf of Al Luminina Allianc's board of directors, staff, and volunteers, we thank you all for taking action this month to create a safe, thriving, and equitable community. Thank you. Well, thank you so much to everyone who came out for these proclamations and

also for the rest of the um attendees for the meeting just to be able to experience uh these amazing things. uh come next meeting, not next week, next meeting, we also have uh four proclamations which not is not normally the thing, but I just want you to know also if we if you do wish to put in a proclamation, we do have a place for ceremonial documents and that is online. So, you can always request a proclamation um for something that you are interested in. And with that, we'll move on to the consent agenda. Uh no, I'm just kidding. We're going to move on to the public comment for items that are not on the agenda, but I'm going to give just a few minutes for people if they wish to head out that they're not like feeling trapped. So, go for it. Enjoy. Take a picture of the city hall. Whatever you would like to do.

Mayor, mayor, city manager. Go for it. City.

Thank you. All right, we're going to go ahead and get back to this. Sorry about that. So, city managers report is next, uh, which I'm very excited about because we always have so much going on that's not even on the agenda, um, that our city manager gets to share. So, thank you very much. I'll pass it over to you.

Thank you. We do have just a few slides this evening. So, uh, we're hitting some highlights. First up, we want to make sure folks are aware that, uh, our business license renewal season is kicking off. I'm sure what everyone's waiting for. Hopefully, they are. Um, for all of our business community, um, you've hopefully received some kind of outreach to from us. Um, we've gone through a a process here where we first let everybody know that we're kicking off the renewal process and we want to start that by seeking verification that everyone's contact information is correct so that if you've got an email address or your physical address has changed, if you're no longer operating any longer, we really want to hear from you. Otherwise, we will keep reaching out uh and assume you're still operating and could be potentially uh increasing fines over time if we don't hear from you. So, first we want to make sure that we have the right contact information. Um, we send that information out to we currently have 8,110 businesses registered in our city and so that's a lot of outreach. We've heard back from about 900 operators to date. Um, just to remind everybody what the process entails. Um, we kicked off uh the renewal process formally in early May. So, you're able to get online or come in person or or uh provide that renewal by mail beginning at the beginning of May. Uh and we look to get those renewals by the end of July. Uh and so that folks can avoid um any fines that might occur after that point. So, please keep an eye out for that. Any business operators in our community, um let us know where you're at. Make sure your contact information is correct and then look to renew your business license. It is $44.58 per business. So, we want to make sure people are aware that is the going rate of our business licenses at this point in time. If you have any questions whatsoever, please reach out to our

finance staff um via email at bts slowcity.org or by phone at 7817143. or you can come to the counter downstairs at city hall uh Monday through Friday 8:00 a.m. to 400 p.m. answer any questions or get your your business license renewed or pay in person. Um those are always options. So we want to make sure everyone's aware and please reach out with any questions. Going along on the business theme, we wanted to give some highlights of a number of new businesses that have opened or relocated inside the city in the last six months or so. Over the past six months, six new dining destinations have opened uh across St. Louis Abyspo, seven new retail additions, and two new additional employers who have been listed up on the screen there. We want to make sure folks are aware these are new people to town, new businesses to town. We're really grateful that they've chosen to locate here in San Los Aispo. Um excited to have them here and providing services and support to our community. um amazing food, drink, and good places to um shop. So, please check those out. And we're we're really happy to to again uh welcome our new businesses. Next up, our community development department is going to be shifting their uh counter hours and we want to make sure everybody is aware of that. We're really looking to simplify the process. We can't tell you how many times folks come in between the county and the city. we are located very close to each other and we share a name uh to some degree and so we often get folks coming in uh when they are trying to lo go visit the county and vice versa. So we are trying to simplify by having the same counter hours and what that means is you can come to our counters at 9:19 Palm Monday through Thursday 9:00 am to 12 pm and get your questions answered at the counter uh on those days of the week. If you come outside of those times, you can

still uh make an appointment to come back later in the afternoon. Uh and this way it makes sure that um people can have that access for more detailed questions. Those uh afternoon appointments again will still be available, but we want to make sure folks are aware. Monday, April 13th, we will be get beginning these new counter hours at community development. And then finally, we just want to highlight agenda items that are coming up on our next meeting so folks are aware. Um on our consent items, really want to highlight we are looking toward awarding a contract to uh for our transit operators. So we do have a transit system here in St. Louis Abyispo and we contract out the actual drivers and maintenance of our of our buses and so we went through a competitive process recently to uh look at all of our options in terms of our service provider. So, we will be bringing that contract forward for potential award at our next meeting on April 21st. And then our business items we want to highlight, we will be talking about everyone's favorite topic, our sewer lateral program. Um, this time recommending some changes to the program that we want to make sure everyone is aware of as well. Um, we've been thinking and talking about this quite a lot, I think, um, and are ready to recommend some changes that would discontinue our formal offset program and instead impose a mandatory uh, repair on sale for those laterals that were deemed to be in failed or poor condition. So, that is a change to our current rules and regulations. Um, we're open to more conversation. If we're not quite ready to kind of move forward on that date, that is okay. But we will be ready to have an ordinance um introduced at that time if council and the community are ready to move forward. Um, of course, it takes two readings for an ordinance. So, we would be back one more

time before it goes into effect. Uh, on that same theme, we will also be talking about our water and sewer rates, but not the rates themselves. We're going to be discussing the structure. So the way that our rates are set up, um how it is that we calculate them, are we putting tiers in the right places and things like that. So that's our study session item. We will be coming back next year with our actual uh proposed rates for adoption for the next um financial plan essentially. So we still have a lot of time there too. So that's it from me for our city manager report.

Thank you so much. Any questions? All right. Well, moving forward now to public comment for items that are not on the agenda. Um, and so these are um you have time to write or sorry, you have time to share with us anything you have outside of the consent or outside of the public um agenda. Those items, you'll come back and share your public comment at those times. Um, city clerk, do we have anyone for public comment? Yes, we have six. I believe I'm going to call the first three if you'll please line up and be ready to speak when the person in front of you is done. Sean Harris, Ben Liippard, Jackie Lo.

Great. Thank you. And I just want to remind people that if you are in support of what the speaker is saying, please give us this. If you are not in support, please give us this. Um, but I know we just got done clapping for proclamation, so I wanted to make sure that wasn't uh confusing. Sean, up to you.

All right. Thanks. Good evening. I'll make this quick. We've got three minutes. Um, I was recently accosted, detained, and interrogated by federal agents employed by ICE on a dark street in St. Louis, uh, December 29th. Uh, and I can only surmise that the brazen nature in which they did so as a result of the decadesl long bipartisan and now normalized assault on civil liberties through judicial judicial appointments and legislative empowerment of the federal agencies doing so. As a registered Republican, Army veteran, and native Californian, a conservative argument against the defense spending and spending on the aforementioned internal security agencies must be presented. This is not to argue against defense spending uh but to do so without subjecting the American taxpayer taxpayer uh whose birthright and patrimony is a strong social safety net to lives of squalor, downward mobility, and hopelessness. One, national debt is a greater threat to security than foreign adversaries. Two, our country could be broke and threatened if spending on defense is not reigned in to close budget deficits. The Pentagon's uh continuous inability to pass a full audit is evidence of mismanagement. Defense contractors have acquired what uh former President Eisenhower said called unwarranted influence. Uh spending prioritizes corporate profits over actual strategic needs uh such as continuing to fund vulnerable programs like social security, Medicare, and creating a national health care service. uh the US should stop sub subsidizing the defense of wealthy allies who free ride and instead uh f focus exclusively on homeland defense and more importantly again social spending. Uh as we march off to another pointless war I would like to remind all Americans of Republican President Eisenhower's words um uh what is called his cross of iron speech in 1953. I quote, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and who are not clothed. U this world in arms is not spending money alone. It spends it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern

heavy bomber is this a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. Uh it is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000. It has two fine fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 mi of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense is under the cloud of threatening war. Is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Uh I'd like to uh just close with uh this that our current president and I'm a Republican is proposing a one and a half one.5 trillion dollar defense budget. Uh Pete Hagath and the Department of War is requesting another 200 billion. Uh we run a continuous deficit and we sell treasury notes and we're about to go broke. Uh foreign central banks are no longer buying our treasury notes. We run a Ponzi scheme and if we don't fix this uh we may have a economic collapse. I'd also like to encourage any young people not to join the military until our national government gets its prior priorities in uh in order. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. Uh, hello, Mayor Stewart, uh, council members, members of staff, and the public. My name is Ben Liippard. I'm a slow resident and a father. Uh, I'm really excited to talk today, both because we're discussing climate action, which I care a lot about, uh, but I actually also get to talk about something tangible, and that's state legislation concerning, uh, Diablo Canyon mitigation funds. extending the funds to the county and cities in slow and you know a couple dozen other organizations. Uh this funding was left out of SB846 when operations at the plant were extended in 2022 and uh it has an outside outsized impact on our local school district as I've mentioned before. Um when discussing this issue, I think it's important to understand the scope of the money being discussed when it comes to um community funds related to DCP operations. uh particularly because um as part of this advocacy some of the parents have been told we're kind of asking for a handout. So I want to show everybody the amounts of money proportionately we're talking about here. So this is uh in general terms a pie chart showing the money that was uh allocated distributed um as part of SB846 which extended operations. I'm not going to get into each individual one of these. I'm happy to with anybody that's interested. Um I want everybody to just understand this is all rateayer money. This is money from rateayers that goes to P Gen either uh for employees or for management fees and other again detailed things. This is all rateayer money. Um this doesn't include the 1.4 billion that they got as a loan. Um now when I talk about this issue, people assume that I don't think P Gen is deserving of this money. Um, and I've been told I'm trying to bully PG Gen, which is funny to me and being unfair to the corporation, but really I just want people to understand the policy

decisions that were made in 2022 and how they didn't include our local community. This is what was left out for our local community. Okay, this is the amount we're talking about. So, in the future here, there's going to be people, I'm sure, going to talk about our handout going to talk about how much is going to affect rateayers. Again, this is where it fits. we could not fit this into this huge pie in 2022. Now we have legislation putting that in. This is consistent with your legislative the letter you wrote a couple months ago with your legislative um uh plan that I wasn't here to talk about that I think is great as well. And most importantly, it means that the community that was left out when it came to SP846 now is put back in. Uh I would ask for more if I could and I will and the thing I want to point out and I've been saying this to the county is that PG& has interests that often overlap with the citizens of this community but they don't overlap completely. There are just times when the citizens and this is one of those times our interests don't necessarily overlap with PG& that doesn't mean you can't support it and the community can't support these things. Uh thank you very much.

Thank you. after Jackie, Steve Barish, Leslie Halls, and Casey Matthews. Good evening. Uh, my name is Jackie Lowe. I've been a resident in this city for four years, owning a home uh for three of those. This council has been aware of a month-long matter that directly impacted my home and the inequitable treatment we experienced as residents in this community. A month ago, my partner and I put into put our concerns in writing and we explained that it felt like a council member had targeted us because she did not like our truck being parked in front of our home. We pointed out that a complaint came in on a Saturday, a work order was prepared by Monday morning. Inaccurate measurements were used to justify removing the space and the curb was painted red without notice, outreach, or any conversation with us first. We also explained that the public records showed the space actually complied with the laws and standards being cited to justify removing it. That did not provide or produce a meaningful response. In fact, there was silence until today's media attention. And that matters because the public records show this did not begin as a neutral safety review. Council member Marks identified our truck, our license plate, and our address, and asked that the curb in front of our home be painted red and then extended. Staff internally treated it as a request from council member Marks, and a work order was generated and approved the same morning. This is not equal treatment. It's important to state on the record that explanations keep shifting. First, it was the hydrant, then the crosswalk, then traffic entering the neighborhood, then sight distance, and now the city says the original measurements were overly conservative and that there is enough room to restore an 8-ft parking space in front of my home. When government action is taken quickly against a specific

resident, and the justification changes over time, that raises serious concerns about abuse of position, special privilege, and inequitable response from staff. It also reflects a waste of public resources. Staff time was spent processing a council member-driven complaint, preparing a work order, painting out a lawful parking space, issuing enforcement, revisiting the site, and now reversing the whole thing. Those are public resources and they were used on a problem the city is now effectively admitting should not have been handled this way in the first place. And this did not happen in a vacuum. Council member Mark drives by other visible parking violations before she reaches her own house and those were not reported. But our truck in front of our home was singled out and this is why it feels targeted and retaliatory. So, what is warranted now is not just restoring the parking space, which I appreciate the email that was sent today, but what is warranted is an internal review of how this happened, why it moved as fast as it did, what role special access played, and how the city's narrative changed so many times along the way. This council should want to know how a matter that was framed one way in internal records, another way in later explanations, and yet another way after media attention resulted in action against the resident. Thank you. Good evening, members, council, staff. My name is Lesie Halls. I live in the Lagona Lake area. I'm here tonight to talk about the uh constraints on our city budget and the finances. I have suggested at various forums a couple of ideas that might work well. But basically looking back when Heidi Harmon was mayor, we saw a lot more people hired and our budget ballooned considerably. Um I think we have to look at maybe a way the federal government tried to do things about 40 years ago.

They uh have a system called the government service and 13579 all the way up to the very top department heads. They did an average of what that number was and the only way to lower it and lower the costs was either to eliminate some of those top end or of course add more peeons at the bottom. We have kind of a similar situation here. A lot of these positions were added while uh Mayor Harmon was mayor and as a result our budget ballooned and we are head over heels in debt to Kalpers. I think we owe Kalpers close to $200 million right now in city employee retirements. That's an awful lot of money for a city of 50,000 people. And the only way we can do that is not just by cutting positions, but consolidating things. And here is an idea I had that makes this reasonable. Take a look at some of these positions and offer these people a golden handshake to be taken within, say, two years or at most three years so they can look for getting another job. They're not going to be just fired on the spot. Many of these people have families with kids in school. It takes a while to relocate when you have a family and you're looking for a somewhat specialized job. Give them an opportunity to lead and pay them to do so. We can promote someone who's already here or if the position can be combined that would save money by doing this and hopefully moving some of the older people. I consider myself one, so I'm not, you know, making bad things about him, but this might also open up opportunities for younger people to be able to work. And it's hard for young kids, especially Gen Z, to find any kind of a job. We got to start somewhere. And I think that this would be beneficial to the employee who would have a chance to look for another job, but still be here and then be given a a handshake and some money to leave. And it would also be beneficial for young people looking for another job. And we could also consolidate some of these positions. At a meeting I went to about two months ago, we were talking about what happened

to some folks and they said, "Well, they'll just be assigned to another department." Well, that doesn't solve the problem. You know, you don't just move guys around. You know, uh you got to finally let go. And I know it's hard to fire people in the upper echelons because you see them a lot. They develop personal relationships with people and I understand that. That's what happens in the private sector. But it isn't about personalities. It's about money. And if we're going to save this city from bankruptcy, we need to do something about this overwhelming Kalpers debt. That's all I got to say. Thank you. Thank you.

Greetings, U council members and mayor. Uh my name is Jerry Gibson. I I'm an educator and I've lived in St. Abyispo for eight years uh in the county for over 30 years. My topic today is public safety and my observations and living here and and seeing it firsthand. Few facts first. According to Capslo, there are 100 beds for the homeless on Praau Street. Public records in 2024 indicated that we had 512 registered homeless people. Today, we probably have somewhere between 512 and 600 homeless people. Obviously, the math doesn't work with only 100 beds available. So, where are the 500 people uh not, you know, in the homeless shelter living? Well, we see them. We see them in tents. We see them in encampments. We see them sometimes on sidewalks all over St. Louis Abyispo. You can't ignore it. It's there. The vast majority of these folks are not engaged with the ability to seek employment, find an apartment, find in a room, find a room because they fall into one of three categories unfortunately such as drug addiction, such as alcoholism and mental illness or a combination of all three. So we have a problem and we have a problem if uh the uh laws are not enforced equally among all the residents and non-residents that come into St. and Los Abyispo such as disturbing the peace, trespassing, vagrancy, loitering, public intoxication. Examples of this unfortunately can see be seen at shopping centers in St. Louis Aiscoco where families with children are witnessing various types of unsafe behaviors. On Praau Street, I don't live very far away. Uh we see many people sleeping on the sidewalks, many people living in really horrible conditions on the sidewalks. And one of my neighbors told me he sees neighbors one he sees people on uh uh Praau Street uh homeless

people crossing the 101. That's just unimaginable. Unimaginable at night crossing the 101. It's horrible. Uh this really comes down to an understanding the true nature of the problem. By the way, I am in favor. I'll put it right out. I'm in favor of helping the homeless help themselves. When people come to slow, the process involves just like for me and many of you, you know, finding a job and finding a place to live and engaging in a positive way with our community. Okay. Um, but we have a population here of about half half a thousand people that either do not have a job, skill, or simply not able to work because of an addiction or mental illness. Solution. What do we do? The city of St. Louis Abyispo needs to enforce first and foremost we need to enforce the laws for everyone. Two, I believe we need to help the 500 to 600 help homeless people. It is inhumane to allow our brothers and sisters to live on the streets and not help them. What we could do mandatory substance abuse rehab centers and therapeutic centers for the mentally ill.

Thank you.

Our final speaker is Steve Barish. Good evening, members of the council. Um, I've studied the city a long time. I've lived here 36 years, and I think sometimes you've got to lay it on the line. I think we have a communication problem with between public works, the city biologist, and the maintenance staff. Uh I was very concerned about a property the city owns and is supposed to maintain at 4616 Dana Street. The grass is about four or five ft high. There are tree limbs that have fallen. They've been on the ground for approximately 3 to four months. My workmen had to move them out of the driveway so that we could get trucks to turn around without going into the easement. And I was told to solve this problem, I had to file an online complaint, which I did. Um, I was told that the public works people have driven by it several times and acknowledge there's a problem. Um, I got to tell you, there's ways to solve problems that are far less complex than the city is using right now. There's a lot of fingerpointing going on. The city really needs to learn to live by example. Uh, if there is a neighborhood wellness complaint, it's filed online. It's followed up with memos. It's followed up with at least four phone calls. Nothing has gotten done in three and a half months. Um, there may have to be an internal review of the cybernetic patterns within the city, how people communicate, lines of authority, and

who's responsible for getting things actually done. So, I hope you take my comments in a positive way. I hope you do a study on how things get cleaned up. Um, this is not the way a city like St. Louis should be managed and run on a daily basis. If there's any questions, you have my phone number, you have my email. There are at least five contacts with uh public works, the city's biologist, etc., etc. Still, nothing has gotten done. So, I've asked my workmen to move the branches, but we're not going to cut the grass. We're not going to try to do what the city has been required to do due to the title reports. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And that's the last speaker. Yes.

Okay. Well, thank you for all the comments. I know that the chief went out to chat with the individual about the homelessness um concerns he has. Uh hopefully we can um provide some more information because I know we have quite a bit of uh policies and programs that he was sharing about that we could hopefully help with. Um, also just wanted to share that uh regarding SB931, we have actually sent out an advocacy letter um and myself and the vice mayor and city manager will be headed up to Sacramento April 22nd through 25th to or through 24th to talk to our different elected leaders in Sacramento about many things that are happening uh that affect the city of St. Louis Bispo and Diablo is definitely one of them. Um, anything that u, city manager you would like to add to any of the public commenters comments? Uh, certainly I mean there's a few instances of specific issues that our staff has been working on and so we will continue evaluating and responding um, as we need to. Um, and so really with that, unless there's any other questions from you all that I might be able to answer that any other members of our team can, I think I think we're in a pretty pretty good path um on those specific cases that folks talked about.

Great. Thank you very much. Uh, one of the challenges with uh public comment, it's things that are not on the agenda. So, we don't go deeply into the items. Um, but we will definitely be taking these back. So, next we have consent agenda. These are items that are considered routine or non-controversial by staff. Um so at this point, um if there's anything that our our team would like pulled as far as our council would like pulled, I personally would like to take a 6C, the 2026 legislative action platform and have that discussed separately. Anything else? Seeing none, um, for the consent agenda, do we have any public comment for items not succeed?

No, we do not. Okay. Is there a motion for all items not succeed? Council member Shoresman, I'll move approval of the consent agenda minus 6. Thank you. Vice Mayor Francis, I will second. Great. Can we have roll call? Council member Shoresman. Yes. Vice Mayor Francis? Yes. Yes. Council member Boswell. Yes. Mayor Stewart.

Yes. And the motion passes 40. And with that, um, thank you. Um, Natalie Harnett has joined us here to answer, uh, or help guide and answer any questions. Um, one of the things first I want to say is thank you so much to the subcommittee, uh, Vice Mayor and City Council member Boswell for sitting down and going through the detail. We've all done this at different times and it's a lot of work, a lot of detail, but it helps us with our advocacy to Sacramento, to DC, to anywhere else about issues that we know that the city genuinely uh on a general basis cares about. Uh, one thing that um, brought me pause in the, uh, legislative platform is I'm always trying to figure out how do we build more housing and there are some safety concerns that I've seen at a statewide level around the single stair um, uh, single stair apartment buildings. So, I was curious to hear from you both uh where that was coming from and why we would in theory support that.

Yeah, this was uh basically driven by a pro-ousing agenda. A lot of pro-ousing um organizations and legislators have been advancing the idea of single staircase reform. Um, and so we saw that as consistent with our pro housing agenda. That's the basic logic for it. Um, did you have the our fire department or anyone come in and share them some of the concerns with the uh single stair reform during your meeting or any other conversations about that? No, we did not

because uh I have seen quite a bit u from the state level where there's some concern about people getting out of their homes. if you have fire coming up this the only staircase there is and people trying to get out of the only staircase. So, just wanted to um hear from either our chief or um our interim chief or from Natalie if you've um been looking into that research as well.

Maybe Madame Mayor while our interim fire chief comes up to provide more information. We did have a chance to look at this in a little bit more detail and published a staff agenda correspondence earlier today with a recommended addition to the language. Um the our legislative platform last year included a provision that discussed a a study that was referenced in AB835 related to single staircase um uh single exit single stairway apartment buildings as part of the building code updates. Um that study was completed and so uh that's what we've added into the referred to additional language. Um the study was completed by the state fire marshal and it did have some conclusions in it that raised some concerns about the the approach or the concept I suppose after doing some research into this issue. So, uh, with that, we provided some proposed language that would essentially say if there's a way for, um, the provisions to be lined up that would both address, uh, the desire to facilitate additional housing through a single staircase, um, building code revision while also addressing concerns uh, in that state fire marshall report. that would be kind of threading that needle well uh addressing really both of those um potential issues and concerns. Um and so that's what we've put together and submitted as part of the agenda correspondence, but certainly here to help with the the dialogue uh and conversation. It's an issue that um is pretty contested I think in a lot of parts of the country as well as in our state. Um, you've seen jurisdictions like Culver City move forward with adopting their own regulations that are

different from the statewide regulations in an effort to try to increase housing, but with a lot of concern, I think, and um heartburn from folks in our uh fire uh suppression um work in communities around the state. And so there's a lot of I think still dialogue happening. Um there are jurisdictions so beyond Culver City, Seattle allows for them and clearly uh more historic parts of our country where some of their staircase improvements are very different from what we're talking about here. But here the discussion is really around new development and that balance of how do we both facilitate housing and address our fire safety concerns. So certainly uh our fire chief can speak more eloquently about the specific concerns as well as um perhaps a little bit more about that state fire marshall report.

Hi Randy Harrison, interm fire chief. Uh yes, the uh state fire marshall's office just released a report the first week of March and that uh it's fairly comprehensive. that looks at a lot of different dynamics in play um and does recommend going up to four stories for that single staircase, which is a a growth um basically right now it's adopted to three stories. Um but they do um pretty much unanimously across all organizations from um fire chiefs, building officials um really hesitate to go above four stories because it does change firefighting operations. Um operations above four stories are a lot more dynamic. we are trying to get additional equipment up which then when you're trying to get evacuees down the same staircase it really does present a conflict and and slows. Um that study also um carried out some time trials. So it went from approximately two-minute evacuation to over six just trying to get the the same people down the same stairwell. And then um as you go further up um elderly people that perhaps you know wouldn't normally take the staircase they'd be using an elevator when the elevators um either during an earthquake or a fire are not available then they actually find that over you know three to four stories they do have to take breaks and so that starts to really congest wells. So there it's a dynamic issue. Uh we do support the state fire marshal study with it. um if you haven't had a chance to review that, I I do feel it's a good study and I don't know if that was out at the time that the the group really did its analysis.

Great. Thank you so much. Uh Council Member Schwarzman. Yeah, if I'm going to change topics a little bit, so if there's further questions on this particular one, I'd let them go first just for continuity. Thank you. No, I just I appreciate you uh sharing a little bit more. I knew I had heard some uh rumblings at the state uh level and just wanted to make sure that we were staying consistent with safety as well as pro housing. So, thank you very much. Do you want to add to that? Yes, vice mayor. Yeah, thank you, mayor. I just wanted to kind of wrap up that discussion and make sure you're comfortable with us landing with the recommendations of that uh state fire marshall uh report. Yeah, with the updated language that works for me. Great. Thank you.

Fantastic. Okay. So, my question is about public safety 2, but in a little different a little different area. Um, I think it's on page 66 of the packet. It's public safety item number nine. And the item states policies and legislation. I think it's support policies and legislation that allow for increased enforcement ability for on and off streetet parking with an emphasis on allowing automated parking control devices. um for example, parking space sensors, parking camera structing structure cameras, automated citations, etc. And just reading that reminded me, uh I know we've had conversations here about our inability to do things like speed enforcement with cameras, too. And I know it's not necessarily related to parking, but I wondered and if that was something that we wanted to kind of add to a um to an item somewhere to see if that is something that we would want to advocate for because I know I've seen it in other countries and other jurisdictions as well, maybe not the state level here because I think there are reasons that we can't do it in the state of California, but um just wanted to throw that out there and ask if that was something that was considered or you guys talked about in the ad hoc committee at And I'm just going to add with that because that was actually um my question was around the same issue but a little bit different in the realm of do we wanted to add anything to whether it's the brand name of Flock or other cameras that are taking data that we don't necessarily want it to go in the way that it's um being utilized uh at a higher level. Do we want to add in any sort of like additional notes of if there's ways to not have that data go somewhere inappropriate? That would be great,

Vice Mayor.

So, oh, um, so I guess I guess the question goes to the the original question, maybe not the flock part, but the original question maybe goes to the police chief of if that's something that's worth even putting in a statement somewhere uh, in terms of using cameras for speeding or other infractions. for sure. Uh Rick Scott, Police Chief. Uh thank you, Vice Mayor, for the question. What I will say is um the um right now it's it's only a pilot program. I think there's five cities in the state that have been granted a pilot for speed enforcement cameras. And I think the pilot was something like 5 years uh long. I'm surely messing these numbers up. Uh sorry, I wasn't prepared for that question specifically. Um but yes, so there is a pilot right now for a couple of years and then after the pilot process and it's studied, they'll decide the state will decide if they can open that up to other cities across um our state. So I I certainly think if you're asking if if language could be added to explore that as those options become available from the state, I certainly think that would be in line with our traffic safety goals.

Thank you. I don't know if you had a question to add on there related to the other Okay. I don't know if the mayor has another question while he's standing here or I think um you've shared with us before as far as flock and and how the data we don't have a whole lot of um control after the data leaves our parsing. I don't know there was a better word for that. Um and I understand that it's somewhat confidential but yet somewhat can also be figured out by some of the larger uh data companies. So can you share with us a little bit about the flock um contact information and how safe that is for our community?

Yes. What I can say right now, we've had the opportunity to study the issue. This has been a a uh issue with that particular company across the the country. Uh we've had an opportunity to examine our settings specifically and have absolute confidence that our data is not being shared. Obviously, with SB54 and some of the other uh pieces of legislation, we're not allowed to share certain types of data outside the state of California and certainly not with regard to any type of immigration. uh we're very limited on any uh federal partners we would consider even sharing with and certainly not anything focused on immigration. Um so right now we're working very closely, we only have two flock cameras that are still active in our city. We're working very closely with their camera to with their company to ensure that our settings remain uh safe for our data and that it's not being trans um transported outside of our custody.

Great. Thank you so much, Vice Mayor Francis.

Yeah, thank you very much. um very much hoping to have a conversation about data privacy and think maybe there's some language that we can work together to to put in there if we can get consensus on that front. Uh I don't mean to speak for council member Boswell, but I know that he has uh mentioned uh having an interest in trying to advocate specifically for uh being able to monitor speeds in school zones and uh work on some legislation on that front. So I'll let him speak to that but would um very much like to and it's kind of in partnership with this conversation too but like to have a discussion. You know uh speed is a particular uh problem in our city and um we had another tragic death on on Broad Street and we really uh need to do everything we can to uh get that under control. So, I'll let Council Member Boswell speak to his his advocacy here

and after Council Member Boswell, I'll probably ask the chief to come back up and share how enforcement is working currently and how any sort of help that he would like from our legislative advocacy. Council member Boswell.

Yeah. So, we did we did include an automated speed enforcement uh item. and it's on page um 69 which is actually page 23 of the platform itself and it's number 21 um and I believe we had it in our previous platform and the thing we did add was clarification on especially in school zones and really what we're kind of trying to advocate for is the legislature to move quicker on expanding the current pilot program to either allow additional cities in or to simply open it up to all cities potentially. So, thank you for that clarification because that was my next question. Chief,

thank you, Madam Mayor, for the opportunity to speak further on our traffic safety goals and we would certainly appreciate any advocacy, especially on speed related enforcement. Uh, with our city in particular, our enforcement efforts are certainly governed by our staffing. We do have dedicated traffic units. We would certainly like to see more in the future. Uh but also all of our officers are traffic officers. So when they're not on calls, they also do traffic enforcement. Uh I think one of the most effective areas all you know aside from automated uh technologies is continuing to advocate for more grants. We use a lot of traffic safety grants because if you don't have the staffing, the grant funds allow us to add that temporary staffing typically under overtime, but it's good because we can focus on a particular problem whether it's distracted driving or speed or DUI enforcement. So that the grants coming from the state are very very welcome uh for our community.

So when we have um just for example, you know, on your way to the high school, on your way to Sunshimer, there's often extra officers on Johnson at different times. Um does that normal procedure then or is that from kind of these grant funds, extra funding?

Uh it's both. And so obviously during the times for drop off and pick up, we want to be highly visible around most of our schools when we can. Not only is it the speeding motorists, but it's also folks that are on skateboards and bicycles to ensure that they're they're uh commuting safely as well. Um but yes, so we we do uh try to get around to the district, you know, or different areas when we can around the schools, but when we are on those grants, they are focused specifically on particular driving behaviors that are are twice as impactful when you couple that with uh young riders or around a school where uh inattention can be um tragic. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you.

Well, with that, I feel comfortable to move forward. Um, personally, um, any other questions before I move to public comment? Any public comment? Oh, just kidding. Sorry, Vice Mayor. Just wanted to make sure you didn't want to uh add language around data data privacy or discuss that at this point. We could um public comment. Yeah, I figured we'd do that for public comment. Thank you. Any public comment? There's none.

Okay, great. Now's the time. Um, yeah. I I felt like as we get to I think it was page 66. Sorry. Yes. So, as far as page 66, number nine on the plate on the ledge action platform page 20. Um, do we want to add something here or do you want to add an additional 9 a whatever number 10 to make this a full 14? Uh, Council Member Shoresman.

Um, so I guess my answer to that question depends on are you talking about the data privacy issue or the speed enforcement with cameras because I actually feel like once um related to speed enforcement with cameras once uh council member Boswell and the vice mayor pointed out the item number 21 on page 69 that covers what I just had missed. It's a long document and they all start to run together after a while and I hadn't remembered that item. So I I feel like um in looking at that and reading through it, it it covers um the advocacy that I was looking for.

Okay. So I'm looking for the um the cameras and the data staying within our community. Um it seems as though right now it is, which is wonderful, but I do think that since this is alleged platform, continuing to have advocacy around data privacy is important. Um, so I would love to see that added on. Vice Mayor, so perhaps some language around uh support uh policies that ensure that uh municipalities retain full autonomy over their uh data collection. Perfect along those lines. That'd be number 14. Yep. Sounds good to me. Any concerns with that? Any concerns that? Okay. Staff seems to be okay. Where would that go?

Number 14. Yeah, we're in public safety, right? Okay. Oh, no. We're in public works. I apologize. So, no, sorry. Keep going. 32. I I agree with that language. I'm not going to comment on where it's go under public safety and go from there. Can figure out where would be best either. Public safety. It seems like probably public safety rather than transportation, which is where I was looking. That's fine with me. Okay. Uh Natalie, do you have any specific location that would be best in within the platform? Um we can do it. You want to get

you press the button I would recommend under public safety. So that would be number 32. Perfect. That sounds good to me. All right. So, with that, do you mind if I go ahead? I would just love to check in with Chief Scott one more time to make sure that that language is uh specific and or broad enough to uh get at what you would hope from any legislation that emerged.

Yes. Uh thank you, Vice Mayor. I I think if I heard you correctly, um advocating for policies on data protections and security essentially. I might expand that a little bit to um policies and uh something along the lines of um legislation or or laws specifically uh because I do think this legislative session we're going to get some additional laws that govern LPR usage as well as the exchange of that information. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Shoresman. just gonna throw this out for as an idea, but I wonder uh are we just concerned about uh data privacy in the public safety setting or should this go somewhere more in a different section that's a little more general? I'm okay with it being in general. The only reason I was thinking public safety is because we've talked about speed enforcement. We've also talked about license plate uh review the um uh software. We've received a lot of emails through the years on that. And so I just thought between the license plate recognition and um the speed it seemed like it was falling under there. But it doesn't have to stay under just public safety for me. Private data is important in all different realms.

Yeah. And and I I guess the only other section that maybe it might go in is under finance and governance. Um so I'm happy with it in public safety if that's where it makes the most sense. I just wondered if we were just talking about public safety data and it seems like we're being a little more general, but um either way is fine with me.

Yeah, I hear you. I think um Natalie, I'll ask you if it if it becomes a private data issue that we are and I'll say to city attorney as well um a private data issue that goes out of public safety and we have it within public safety, but it seems to make sense in our overall legislative concerns and our overall major city goals and priorities. Uh would we be then bringing that topic back to the council for a letter or could that would it be better to be under governance administration so that we don't have to come all the way back for a letter because that's the whole point of the platform.

I think it makes the most sense to have it in public safety even if it's not a public safety issue because it's the safety of people's privacy and data. So um we could use it broadly across anything. Doesn't need to be on specifically public safety matters. Great. Thank you. I just want to make sure. All right. I see nodding of concern or head nodding and recognition. And with that then, um, Council Member Shoresman.

Yeah. There were a couple other issues in the agenda correspondence besides the staircase language that, um, that I wanted to bring up. Uh, staff has recommended. There's an item number two that was under uh DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion plank number 14 that just had some like a phrase added to advocate for Medicare and other health insurance program reform to try try to make that uh plank a little bit more general and not just apply to Medicare. And so I'd like to see if you all are um agreeable to adding that that plank. And then the other one that I was interested in was the U proposed language around ebikes. Uh I know there's a lot of activity happening at the state level and a lot of it is really good and well-meaning and there are going to be instances where I'm concerned that regulation of ebikes might um come at cross purposes with our climate action goals. And so I want us to really look at those u measures closely when they come. And I I think that the language that staff has recommended is um it contains some good trigger points to um make sure that we look at those issues closely when they come to to to a potential uh letterw writing opportunity.

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Um as far as I'm concerned, I agree with both of those comments. I'd be comfortable with both um being added the expan expansion of the Medicare and then increasing the careful wording for the ebikes as well. Uh vice mayor and council member Boswell. Vice Mayor. Yeah, I'm happy to support all of those additions as uh presented by staff. Thank you, Council Member Boswell. Yes, I support as well. Great. Do we have a motion? Vice Mayor, I move to approve the 2026 legislative agenda agenda.

Thank you. I'll be happy to second it. Can we have roll call? Oh, Council Member Shoresman. Um, go ahead. I just want to make sure the motion and a second includes all the recommended language that we've talked about. Okay, good point. And thank you. Yes, I agree. Vice Mayor Francis, yes. Mayor Stewart, yes. Council member Boswell, yes. Council member Shoresman, yes.

And the motion passes 40. Thank you so much. All right, consent agenda. We are done with that. So, next we have the general plan report. Um, so we'll go ahead and move into the general plan report and then after that we'll go into a break. So, um, with that, I'm not sure who's coming up.

I'll go ahead and kick it off. uh Timmy Tuy, director of community development. Um this is an annual report that is submitted to the state every year, but it's a really great opportunity for city staff to share with the council and the community all of the work that's been going on on all of the policies and programs in the general plan. I encourage everyone to check this document out. It's really interesting and kind of exciting to see all the work that goes on in the year to further the goals in our general plan. Um, it also includes information about meeting our housing goals, which I know is really important and interesting to a lot of people. Um, David and Ethan will present very high level information from this report. Um, and this is Ethan's first time at city council. So, Ethan is on our housing team and has been a wonderful asset and planner on that team and did so much work to pull all this information together. So, I just want to thank all of the city staff, the city council for your support as we continue to further the goals in the general plan and um the planning staff for pulling all of this information together. Um so, with that, I'll hand it over to David and Ethan.

Okay. Thank you very much. Good evening, Mayor Stewart and council members. Again, my name is Ethan Estrada and I am an assistant planner from the community development department. Uh together with my colleague David Amini, senior planner for the housing division, we will be presenting the 2025 general plan annual report. Staff's recommendation tonight is for your council to receive and file the 2025 general plan annual report. The city of St. Louis Abyispo's general plan consists of eight elements covering a range of topics such as land use, housing, conservation, and open space and more. Overall, the general plan is a comprehensive statement of the city's goals, and it guides the use and protection of various resources to achieve them. California government code section 65400 and the city's land use element require an annual report be made on the status of the general plan. This report provides an opportunity for the city to review the results of its efforts in implementing the general plan and its programs. With that, let's go over some highlights from the report. Looking at planning and building activity, in 2025, a total of 222 planning applications were received. This includes use permits, development reviews, subdivisions, and more. A total of 525 building permits were issued to the public, which included permits for a net total of 192 residential units, accounting for demolitions that occurred. The 192 units consisted of 83 single family units, 104 ADUs, and 11 multif family units. All right, now moving on to our residential growth. So, the general plan provides that the city's housing supply shall grow no faster than 1% per year on average uh based on the estimated population growth that's outlined in table three of our land use element. um we exempt affordable housing units, new units within the downtown core and ADUs

uh from the growth management regulations. So in 2025 uh when we excluded all those exempt units, we added 174 uh units to our city's housing stock uh that makes for a total of 23,292 units which are subject to the growth management policy. And so when we account for this addition, cities maintain an average annual growth rate of exactly 1%. The general plan also requires city to evaluate increases in non-residential floor area over a period of five years. Um, should the net growth rate exceed 5%, the council should shall consider implementing limits on new net non-residential floor area. Um, so for 2025, we added 176 just over 176,000 square ft of net new non-residential floor area. Uh, this placed the annual growth rate for 2025 at 1.47% 47% and the 5-year net growth rate at 3.15%. And this increase is primarily due to the Marriott uh Spring Hill Suites Residence in Hotel project in the St. Louis Ranch area and that consisted of over 120,000 square ft of floor area. So, moving on to our reena progress, our six cycle housing element period began in January 2019 and our housing element was adopted by council in November 2020 and certified by HCD in September 2021. Um and so our allocation uh that was given by the state uh provided 3,354 housing units to plan for during this period. And so in 2025, the city permitted 53 new units that count towards the city's quantified objective. Uh which includes the income level categories that are remaining. Uh the only categories that we have remaining are our affordable categories, extremely low, very low, low, moderate. Um we've already met our above moderate allocation. So, as of 2025, we have 1,229 units left. So, the city is positioned to add more below market rate units to count towards that arena allocation in our coming

years. Uh there's a total of 357 units in the development process. The majority of these projects are either under construction now or they're going to begin construction soon. Moving on to uh homelessness statistics. In 2025, the city responded to 104 encampment fires, 941 medical incidents in involving people experiencing homelessness. Additionally, 47 tons of trash was removed and city staff posted, conducted outreach, and cleaned up, 247 illegal encampments. We continue to support our partnerships uh with organizations like CAPSLow, awarding over $400,000 to the organizations for various programs such as operations of the 40 Prao Homeless Services Center. uh also the 40 proto safe parking program, a hotel and motel patra program, the warming and cooling centers as well as our new community safe parking pilot program. There was additional financial support from the city to nonprofit organizations through our human services grant. Uh the city received funding requests um summing up just over 419,000. That's 269,000 more than what was available. and our city's community action team and mobile crisis unit housed within our police and fire departments continue to respond to homelessness related issues and engage with individuals who are in need of services as well as facilitating reunions with family members when possible. Uh city staff also continued to oversee the development of numerous uh area and specific plans starting off with our Margarita area specific plan. Uh the remaining projects include the Praau business park at 301 Praau and then a mixeduse project at 365 Praau which is set to provide uh 222 residential units and that's in the entitlement and review process. Moving on to our orchid area specific plan. Um the Enclave at Regetti Jones mixeduse projects and then the four live work town homes in the Pratt property are under construction and then Bulock Ranch is awaiting um where the city's awaiting a final building permits in the middle from the Bulock Ranch portion. Moving on to our airport area. So we

have a mix of different projects that are at different stages of development review. We've got several large mixeduse projects under review as well as the um slow airport hotel. In 2025, the city council approved amendments to the airport area specific plan uh to specifically allow mixeduse development in the CS and M zones with a minor conditional use permit where appropriate. Um moving on to our Aval Ranch area, uh single family residences in phases 1 through three still under construction. Um and then the remaining units of phases three through five are awaiting building permit submitt for review. um development in our Froom Ranch area. It was on hold throughout 2025. However, we recently received an application to initiate a specific plan amendment. Um and city council consideration of this application is expected to take place uh sometime this year. Uh moving on to the St. Louis Ranch specific plan area. Uh the majority of our developments were completed in 2025, including the hotel project that I mentioned, also Slow Ranch Farms. Um and then in 2024, council authorizes submitt of a general and specific plan amendments for what we call lot 7 um which contained 11 acres of initially commercially zoned land um allowing the development of residential units 276 on that property. Um we haven't received applications for that portion yet. Looking at our water supply availability from the city's four water sources equal 10,246 acre feet uh which meets the projected primary water supply need of 7,496 acre feet. Uh additional information is available in the city's annual water supply and demand assessment. Looking at transportation and circulation in accordance with the circulation element of the general plan 2025 saw a lot of activity uh in all aspects of transportation and circulation. Uh some highlights include the city's first vision zero action plan uh which establishes priorities in areas of engineering, enforcement, and education to improve traffic safety citywide. The plan was released in draft

form for public review in 2025 and is expected to be finalized uh early this year. Additionally, the 2024 paving project was completed in 2025 uh featuring numerous improvements made along Grand Avenue, Johnson Avenue, and numerous neighborhood streets. Looking at slow transit, uh some 2025 highlights include the addition of six new electric buses to the city's fleet, uh which placed the city ahead of the state's zero emission mandates. Uh staff also reported nearly 660,000 passenger trips in 2025, which is a 17% increase uh from the previous fiscal year. Uh the city also saw the adoption of the short-range transit plan update in 2025. This plan recommends a host of service fair and program changes for the next five years uh to meet the community's transportation needs. Looking at safety services, the fire department responded to 7,344 incidents in 2025. Outside of these standard responses, the urban search and rescue team continued its operations, responding to 13 technical rescues and medical emergencies in open space areas. Additionally, the mobile crisis unit also continued their operations, responding to 143 calls for service and engaging in 2,234 field contacts. Uh in March 2025, the state released updated fire hazard severity zone maps. Uh greatly increasing the number of parcels in the city subject to a fire hazard severity zone. Uh following the maps, the 2025 wildland urban interface code was also released uh for adoption and implementation by cities to begin in 2026. A study session was held uh to discuss these updates and the maps, WOOI code and new fire code uh were adopted. The police department completed its second year of its 5-year strategic plan which included a departmentwide staffing study, implementation of data-driven policing tools and more. The police department's community action team continued operating in 2025 as well uh engaging with 798 individuals and issuing 164 treatment referrals to mental health and substance abuse services.

Looking at conservation and open space, the general plan provides for open space protection uh that applies to sensitive lands within the city's urban reserve as well as land in the St. Louis Abyispo Greenbell area uh to be protected for its biological, agricultural, aesthetic, and watershed protection value. City staff continued to implement these programs through a variety of efforts including the opening of the of the Regetti Hill open space and invasive species control along the Froom, Profumo, and St. Louis Abyispo creeks. Looking at parks and recreation in alignment with the parks and recreation element of the general plan, staff continued to provide programs and services in 2025 with a focus on youth senior and family programming. This included continuation of the recreational youth and adult sports program. Uh park and recreation activities also included open space maintenance uh such as the opening of the new Laguna Lake dog park featuring 3 acres of fenced play areas uh providing separate spaces for large and small dogs along with agility structures for their enjoyment. Additionally, in 2025, the multi park system for the Orchid area specific plan was approved for construction, including funding uh authorization for the first three of five phases. So, in conclusion, this report has shown that the city continues to make substantial progress in implementing programs outlined in the general plan. Additionally, the data and various reports provided by staff indicate that the city has been successful in continuing to promote and achieve development and economic growth, community safety and well-being, climate adaptation, and more. That concludes our presentation. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I I agree with uh Director Tu kicked this off is that this presentation is a great way to kind of take a look at what's been happening in our community. So, thank you for this really great presentation. Um any questions for my colleagues? Vice Mayor?

Yeah, just a couple of quick ones here. Uh apologies for not asking this in advance. Um but I was thinking about it as you were talking here. So excited to see that 17% increase in transit ridership. That's awesome. Um and I can't help but think back. I remember precoid we is this right that we were had the second highest ridership in the state per capita. Um and so there's kind of been this quest to get back to to that previous number. And I was wondering where we compare if anybody has that data how close we are to getting back. And if we don't have it tonight, no worries. um since I'm sort of springing this on you, but uh maybe we can bring back that number at a future meeting.

There we go. Hold on.

Were your ears burning in the other room? Thank you for coming. Test. There you go. Uh Alex Fuches, mobility services business manager. I oversee Slow Transit on behalf of the city. Um you were asking about reership per capita. I don't have that off the top. No, just how we compare to maybe precoid numbers. Are we almost?

So, if we continue on this wrership uh growth trend, we should be back to precoid normals around 980,000 is the number in my head from fiscal year 2018 2019 in about two years. Um but we could see that accelerated as we implement some of the sharing transit plan recommendations. Um, but we will also be looking at performance metrics, not just whole numbers, but writers per operating um, cost per hour and mile, which uh, help indicate how well we're doing performance-wise. Um, not just whole numbers. I

I think that's worthy of recognition. You've done an incredible job getting us back and um, you know, we've seen these numbers every year going up and up. So, really appreciate all your hard work on that front. Thank you. Thank you. And uh thank you for everything you've done and thank you to all of our writers.

Absolutely. Um and then another big broad question for you all around housing. Have to ask. I know we ask every single year, but uh we have these kind of uh elusive low and very lowincome units that um you know, we're chipping away at and I actually feel incredibly optimistic looking at the list of projects that are about to um come through here in the next year. But, you know, are there other levers that we can or should be pulling to get at specifically, you know, we're we're building that market rate housing. How do we get those low and very lowincome units?

I think if you were to ask some of our affordable housing partners, they'd probably say funding. So, continuing to look for and investigate new funding sources that might come from the state or, you know, other sources. Um there's a lot of funding too that ties in with different infrastructure and transportation improvements like our affordable housing sustainable communities grant. Um you know really the state hasn't we haven't seen anything new come up in a couple of years. Um so I think that's really the main picture. Also, what we're seeing too is a lot of um you know, density bonus type projects that are going in in infill areas of the city. And I think that's a really um not as well-known tool, but where we continue to provide those low um those low-inccome, very low, and moderate units as part of larger projects. Those are really important because they're integrated into a larger development into the city. So, you wouldn't even know that that's there. Um but I think that's another um continuing to incentivize those projects. And I think through our plan review process, we've really incentivized um a lot faster entitlements for those specific types of projects.

Awesome. Thank you so much for answering that question. I know it's a big unwieldy problem and you all have worked really hard to chip away at those numbers. So appreciate all your work on that front. Absolutely. Council member Shoresman.

Yes. Uh first of all, I just want to thank you all for answering some of my questions and agenda correspondence. I appreciate that. And I was sort of hoping with my question about the below market rate units that we have sort of in the pipeline that maybe more of them weren't counted in our number that we still needed to get to, but it seems like there are some that have not been counted yet. So hopefully uh we'll keep chipping away at that. As you said, uh Vice Mayor, that that 500 number is the one that's most daunting, the extremely low and the and the very low. Um but uh so off topic from housing just for a second um well in housing in a different way really. I I saw reference to uh with relation to the highf fire severity zone maps, the detailed home assessment um program and I was wondering uh I know the fire chief is still here in the back of the room if I I thought that that was a program that was still in the making and not quite here yet and I just want to clarify if I read that correctly or if that's something that's happening already and if it is happening how do people access that he's coming to save you.

Hi, Randy Harrison, inter chief. Yes, it's still in the making. Uh we do expect it to uh our interns just came on board two weeks ago. They started doing some training with that and we do anticipate in the next month that we'll have our website up and people can uh log on to the website and put their address in and we'll have that crew go out and do a voluntary assessment of their property. Excellent. So, I know you hate to probably put a date on it, but like estimated are we talking ready in two months, three months, four months? No, probably in the next three to four weeks. Three to four weeks. Okay. Excellent. They're quick learners. Excellent. That's great to hear. I've had people ask me about it, so that's great to hear. Thank you.

Thank you. Uh, and then I I wanted to give um the police chief maybe an opportunity to give a little bit more detail about the SNAP and noise complaint numbers that I know we've had some questions about in uh from the community. So, I wanted to see if you could kind of explain the number of noise complaints, uh, DAXs, which we know are dist disturbance advisement cards and such.

Yes. Uh, thank you, council member, for the, uh, question. One thing I'll add, we did find a mistake in the in the plan. We had, uh, I think our party registrations listed at 4,000. It was actually 400 and I think 53. and want to make make that note for the correction. Uh we've had that changed online, but also the staff report in front of you is just going to contain that current error. Um what I will say, I'm happy to answer any questions on our SNAP activity. As you know, that's our student uh essentially our student officer program that focuses exclusively on noise and other types of livability issues in the community. But if you had any questions on the data specifically, I'm happy to uh answer those questions. Maybe you can clarify like what is a noise complaint and how does it get logged in the 570 noise complaints?

Yes. So, anything that's a disturbance to any of our community members will technically come in as a noise complaint. Uh often we'll we'll send an officer out or a SNAP officer to go out and evaluate the complaint. If the noise is emanating beyond 50 ft of the property line, uh that's technically uh subject to a violation andor a DAC which is a disturbance advisory card. After a property location has received a DACK, the next contact that is a valid noise violation generally will be a citation at that point. So a DAC is an official warning putting them on record. If you have another violation, that will be uh considered an infraction with the citation. So the citations and the complaints are generally they're logged if when an officer or a SNAP officer goes out to the location and hears the noise themselves. Um that's when a citation or a DAC or a complaint is logged

as opposed to like there I'm sure there are some times where an officer goes out and maybe a neighbor has heard something. been loud and then by the time you get there the disturbance has subsided enough to where you can't see that or tell that something's been happening.

That's correct. Uh generally about a third to about a half of our complaints result in some type of enforcement action. Either a DAC, a verbal warning or a citation. That's generally what happens with most of our noise complaints. For the rest of those, they're uh unable to determine a violation or we couldn't find the originating source of the complaint. You know, sometimes they'll hear something down the street. we get there and it's it's gone or it was a passing vehicle or something like that. So that does happen from from uh quite often. Okay. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Um one last question sort of piggybacking on the vice mayor's question about uh how do we get more of those BMR below market rate units especially in those low areas. Yes. funding. Our nonprofit housing providers would appreciate as many opportunities to get funding as we can. Um, but I guess are there other levers that we could pull for um other developments where um we can get you maybe I don't know. I I I don't know what the what the ideas are. So, I guess that's why I'm asking, are there other ways uh through the development process that we could encourage builders to include more of those units in their uh developments?

So, I kind of mentioned a little bit about density bonus projects. So, we do see a lot of projects where, you know, we do have an inclusionary housing policy and requirement. However, the majority of projects that come before us typically um circumvent that through using the state density bonus law to provide additional um affordable units. I think also to you know part of the process when it comes to some of our larger tracks as they start to develop in our expansion areas is um that's really the opportunity um where we have the ability to negotiate providing units maybe in that are slightly in excess of what the inclusionary requirement would be or the density bonus requirements would be. That's really the key opportunity that we have to um provide these inclusionary units in part of our larger scale track developments and then in our infill projects too. Um there is still that opportunity.

I know we also have the flexible density program in the downtown core and the last time I checked that hasn't really yielded as many uh units as we had hoped. Is that still the case? Yeah, I think you know there are a lot of different challenges when it comes to our downtown, but the small lot sizes and just the types of construction that are necessary um may make some of those larger mixeduse projects a little bit less feasible than infill projects in vacant lots or other underutilized areas of the city. Um so we haven't seen a lot of interest or traction in that at least at this time.

Okay. uh still something that's turning around in my mind, you know, how can we how can we get infill to be a little bit more dense and maybe to include more BMR units? Maybe it's a pie in the sky dream, but just something I'm still thinking about. So, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I wish I wish there was a magic uh crystal ball that would really help us figure out something else. Um, with that, I don't see any other questions. So, do we have any public comment? No, we do not.

Wow. Okay. Um, sorry. Just sometimes like the really large things that we're working on and then there's no public comment. Surprises me. Um, well, I just want to say thank you very much for this report. Thank you for uh the agenda correspondence because it covered some of my additional questions. And I um the one thing that kind of sticks in my mind early on, can you put up the PowerPoint? I think it was like the second slide. It had when each um element had been updated. Thank you. So, as we're obviously doing a quick look back to 2025, I also look at all of these and kind of foresee 2027's conversations around the things that we need to update. Um, I I find it wild. We have a lot of conversations about noise and we haven't updated this since 1996. So I see uh on my crystal ball, Chief uh Chief Scott might be in these conversations in the near future. Um I think also as we talk in in the end of May about our uh study session around uh code violations and conversations, this is the kind of thing that ties back together with it is what's our plan, what does it say, and what kind of changes do we need to make. So yeah, keeps me in that conversation constantly. So thank you so much with that. Um, I will pass it on. This is a receive and file item. Council member Boswell.

Yeah. Uh, thanks. I just wanted to thank staff for the, uh, very thorough reports, great reading, and like I said, it's an great chance to catch up on Oh, yeah. Look at all the cool stuff we've done. Um, one thing you went over very quickly, which I always think we should, uh, acknowledge. I get a lot of questions on it, is how well we continue to do on on our water supply system. Uh, the investments and the long-term planning we've done on water supply. When you look at the report, the section in here, you continue to see not only uh are we performing quite well, um but our reserves and our uh safe yield continue to really be better than almost we could hope for. We're in such a good position relative to water in a state that is immensely challenged with water. So, I want to uh thank uh particularly the utility staff uh for their continued hard work on ensuring we have a safe and reliable water system. Thanks.

Thank you. Lots of years of investment and very challenging meetings. Uh with that, Council Member Shoresman.

Yeah, thank you again for the report and just uh one thing that I wanted to make sure to just talk about just for a second. Uh we talked about it this morning in agenda review and again it was kind of brushed over at the beginning. Um it's an important element, but um we haven't hit our well we we have only hit our 1% growth. um limit or goal, however you want to look at it, once in the past many years uh last year and uh 2024 and it seemed like a big deal that we reached that and now we're seeing sort of a decrease again in the number of units being built and I I we had a conversation this morning about how that originated as part of a a requirement in our general plan that we have these limits and reflected a a different policy stance uh more generally across the state than we have now that we really needed to limit growth and as long as we can provide for the provide for the growth with utilities, water, um services that uh that we shouldn't grow beyond that. And I think we're at a different place now where we can we can handle a little bit above 1% here and there and and it's okay and we're not going to um strive to make that a limit. At least that's not my perspective. And so just wanted to kind of point that out and um I I don't believe it's been sort of the stance of the policy that that that would be a limit either, at least not this council. So um thanks for the great report and appreciate it.

Thank you. So with that note, we'll receive and file and then we will take a 10-minute break. See you all back just before 7:30. Nice to see you. Oh no. No,

North Yeah, We're excited. I wish I could tell you tomorrow. How are you?

I don't know who If it gets really bad, I'll grab I would say so bad. She's not

How are you? curious.

Thank you.

You don't know Introduction. I saw that jumping jack. Sure.

Yeah. I think we just didn't know Okay.

Yes. Reisioning exercise. And so more than happy. What's your schedule?

Something start thinkers. Well, welcome back. Thank you so much for the little break. We are back for our finalish item. It is the study session for the community climate action plan progress report and 2021 sorry just kidding 2027 sorry about that plan update study session. And with us we have uh Chris Reid and Luchia Pullman ready to go. So sorry, Deputy City Manager Greg Herman.

So close. I promise I'll be quick. Uh just want to kick it off really briefly for the council and a big thank you uh to Chris Luchia and Bob and the rest of the staff that we have from um throughout the city to support this item. This is a citywide effort and it's an important uh moment this evening. Uh we're happy to be here to talk about our progress both on where we've been and also where we're headed with it with with respect to our climate action plan. Through council's direction uh previously it's clear that we've established oursel as a leader and that leadership really matters. Since 2020, we've secured approximately $56 million in outside funding that has gone to local climate projects within our community. That leadership has also opened up doors to regional and statewide networks, giving us access to cutting edge research and best practices to help us work smarter and more effectively. All of that's important because our climate action plan is not just a standalone document and climate action is not a standalone goal. Uh it is a lens for us to look at all of the work that we do at the city and there is a lot more work to do. uh for more on what that might look like in the future and how we've done so far. I'm happy to turn it over to Chris and Luchia for the presentation.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Herman. And good evening, council and madame mayor. I'm Chris Reed, sustainability manager, and tonight I'm joined by Luchia Baseman, our sustainability and natural resources analyst, as well as staff from essentially all of departments in our city that will be available to answer questions as they come up. Tonight we'll be covering two closely related topics. Our 2026 climate action progress report and our 2027 climate action plan update. And the progress report really serves as the context for the in the background for the sort of scoping conversation we're going to have around the 27 cap update. To that end, staff's recommendation is to one receive and file the 2026 climate action plan progress report. Two, provide strategic direction on the 2027 climate action plan update. And three, direct staff to join the local government climate alliance to advocate for pre-approved positions via the city's adopted legislative action platform. Later in this presentation, we will also present the council with a list of strategic questions and that will occur later in this presentation. So, we'll start with some background information. The city's climate action work implements a wide range of general plan policies, objectives, and programs. Climate action is contemplated in the conservation and open space element of the general plan, which directs the city to minimize undesirable climate changes. And the climate action plan is explicitly referenced in the land use and circulation element of the general plan, which directs the city to maintain and implement its climate action plan. Now, these policies don't just occur in a vacuum, but rather they reflect the level of priority that our community has historically placed on resource conservation, sustainability, and climate action. Council adopted the

city's first climate action plan in 2014 and in 2020 adopted one of the most ambitious plans in the nation with a goal of carbon neutrality by 2035. Council reaffirmed this goal when it adopted the 2023 to 27 climate action plan work program and climate action has been a major city goal since 2017. The climate action plan puts the community on a trajectory towards its goal of carbon neutrality by 2035. At the highest level, it does this by pursuing a clean and renewable electricity system, reducing energy use where possible by doing things like walking, biking, busing, building really efficient homes and buildings, and then for all the things that still need to use energy, plugging those into our clean electricity system. The other thing we do is keep organic waste out of the landfill. And this general approach aligns with how the state of California also approaches carbon neutrality. And the sectors covered by this approach, electricity, natural gas, auto transportation, and organic waste are the minimum required sectors as dictated by state protocol. When council adopted the 2023 to 27 work program, they provided direction to continue focusing narrowly and deeply on these four required sectors and staff has prepared the materials in the agenda packet tonight reflecting that direction. There will be an opportunity uh later though should council want to affirm that direction or provide different direction to do so. The climate action plan itself organizes the work described on the previous slide into six pillars and some administrative actions. Lead by example addresses emissions from the operation of the city organization. Clean energy systems looks at emissions from the electricity grid. Green buildings considers emissions from energy used in buildings and facilities.

Connected community addresses emissions from transportation. Circular economy looks at emissions from landfilled organic waste. And natural solutions accounts for the emission sequestration benefits we get from the trees we plant and the ways that we proactively manage our open space, among other things. The administrative actions dictate how we do the work, including supporting community organizations, engaging in legislative advocacy, providing progress reports like the one we're providing tonight, and regularly updating the climate action plan. The climate action plan directs staff to update the plan every four years, just ahead of that year's particular uh sorry, that particular year's financial plan process. The CAP update timeline also directs staff to come to council with a progress report in the year before the climate action plan update occurs. Tonight's study session makes good on that commitment. So that takes us through some of the background and now we'll move forward into the actual progress report itself. The progress report is informed by technical research, comparative analysis, and stakeholder outreach. We reviewed state technical reports, academic research, 15 contemporary California climate action plans. We interviewed staff from other climate leadership cities and counties and conducted stakeholder outreach, including community forums, workshops, and direct presentations to organizations. And Luchia will share more information about our outreach later in the presentation. After completing all that technical and stakeholder work with support from the city's green team, we developed the progress report. The progress report includes an updated greenhouse gas emissions inventory and forecast snapshot, progress updates for all six climate action plan pillars, summary findings from our research, and a detailed implementation matrix for every action in the 2023 to 27 climate action plan work program.

The progress report contains extensive detail on the implementation of every climate action plan action. Uh the slide that I'm going to walk through here summarizes the inventory and forecast findings from the agenda report and the appendix uh at a relatively high level and we're going to compare where we are now to where we expected to be when the climate action plan was adopted in 2020. Um it's necessarily at a high level given the time we have. We'd love to spend four hours with you but we'll spend the time we have. Um but we will be happy to go into more detail on any of the sectors or any particular action should council have questions and we're prepared to do so. So we'll start with the 2020based forecast. So this is what we thought greenhouse gas emissions would look like in 2035 across our four core sectors. Electricity, natural gas, organic waste, and transportation. And the green dotted line distinguishes distinguishes regional from local transportational transportation with regional accounting for roughly one-third of total emissions. And so this blue set of squares represents a noa action forecast. So, if we didn't do a 2020 climate action plan, this is where we thought our emissions would be as a community. The 2020 climate action plan reductions are shown here in yellow, and they show what we expect to achieve through our climate action plan actions and then ongoing actions achieved by the state and federal government, among others. We anticipated eliminating nearly all electricity emissions and most organic waste emissions by 2035. And we expected to cut roughly in half our natural gas emissions. and have about 1/3 of our transportation emissions remaining. Now, together this represents an approximately 70% reduction from baseline. And just to be clear, that shortfall of 30% from true zero greenhouse gas emissions was known at the time. And the climate action plan explicitly acknowledges this and says something the effect that new innovations and tailwinds would be necessary to close that gap further. So

we knew there was a gap when we adopted it and ultimately council felt that the value of that ambitious goal was worth the uncertainty associated with it. So the next thing we're going to show is just our updated forecast based on all the information we've learned over the last uh five years. And these blue dash lines represent the emissions reductions we would expect to achieve from our 2020 climate action plan if we weren't to make any updates moving forward. We still expect to experience or achieve significant reductions in electricity and organic waste. But we do anticipate falling shorter in the natural gas sector and in the transportation sector. Uh in natural gas, this is a result of uh a number of things. One just affirmation that building retrofits are really hard and electrification is a challenging uh project, but also changes in state regulation that have affected the price of electricity, for example, or the value of solar. And then really large federal programs we had anticipated to support this work uh disappeared over the last couple years. In transportation, the emissions are expected to uh remain sort of higher than anticipated largely in the regional VMT space and this is largely because of the rural n rural nature of our community uh as well as some higher thanex expected regional economic growth forecasts. And so the bar here at the bottom is just a reminder. We always knew we had a 30% reduction. Our updated forecast shows us getting to about a 50% reduction. And there's really two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, this 50% reduction since baseline is still a tremendous accomplishment. Um, but at the same time, it falls short of this council and this community's goals related to emissions reductions. And that gap, those shortcomings really are the target we need to aim at as we update our climate action plan. The city's 2035 carbon neutrality goal is a local policy preference and that sits inside California's evolving

greenhouse gas emissions legal framework. The city's climate action efforts are now informed by two statewide greenhouse gas emissions targets that have been adopted or clarified since the adoption of the 2020 climate action plan. So the first is SB32 that sets a 2030 goal to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels. In our analysis finds that with implementation of the existing climate action plan, we are on track to achieve that goal. AB1279 which was adopted after we adopted our climate action plan sets a 2045 regulatory goal of achieving net zero emissions says as soon as possible and no later than 2045. And our analysis shows that the implementation of the current climate action plan puts the city on track for an approximately 75% reduction by 2045, which is about 10% short of that AB1279 mandated target. So this takes us to the key findings of the progress report and the first is just that city leadership and investments have produced measurable results. They invite outside resources and demonstrate the effectiveness of sustained local commitment. And I think it's just worth elevating what Mr. Herman said earlier that tens of millions of dollars coming to our community as a result of this leadership position. Um, and that's not to uh that doesn't even account for all the sort of uh benefits we've had from the networks we've joined. So, our leadership position has allowed us to be parts of these networks of staff across California that provide real value to us and expand our ability to do our work serving our community. Second, we are facing headwinds that are stronger than we could have anticipated at the time and that's really challenging our ability to achieve our goals. Uh third, it's been affirmed yet again that natural gas and existing buildings and regional trips are challenging and are really the main challenges to achieving our goals. And finally, persistent local innovation and

creativity will be required to continue making progress. Thank you, Chris.

And thank you, Chris. And hello madame mayor and city council. So now that we have a solid understanding of the policy background for local climate action and recent progress to date, we will begin the second part of our presentation about the fourthcoming 2027 cap update, which is the main focus of our study session questions this evening. As a reminder, the release of the 2026 progress report is intentionally timed to precede the next CAP update. Planning for the 2027 CAP will begin promptly after tonight's study session, and we will be brought back to council for consideration adoption in the first quarter of 2027 to inform council's discussion and strategic guidance. This evening, staff led a robust outreach process to gather feedback from community members and leaders about their desires for the 2027 climate action plan and the future for local climate action more broadly. And this outreach informed the progress report and daylighted ideas about where to go next. Outreach included hosting four thematic roundts with over 50 participants, two public workshops with over 30 attendees, and presentations to local boards. Across these outreach events, stakeholders provided feedback on what parts of the cap should be set aside, what is working as intended, what needs to be improved or expanded, and if any new ideas should be included in the next cap. The major themes we heard from stakeholders included an affirmation of the city's current approach to local climate action and carbon neutrality and continued support for the overwhelming majority of actions that are in the cap. two, that having uh the value of an

aspirational 2035 target has provided a lot of uh financial and other incredibly valuable resources for the city um and that it should be retained going forward. and three, that many stakeholders, nonprofit leaders, and regional agency staff were really enthusiastic about collaborating with the city on hosting outreach events for the 2027 CAP update. And more recently, as expressed in agenda correspondence on this item, there's some emerging stakeholder feedback. And those themes include more closely integrating the city's climate and housing work and using climate as an organizing principle for some of the city's planning efforts, as well as a renewed focus on strategic administrative actions like internal processes to increase impact, including keeping an eye towards how our regional agencies can help us reach our goals. And so this slide shows a summarized high-level digest, the topline takeaways from all that we heard during our stakeholder outreach. And it also includes some of the topics that were uh identified during the technical research and comparative analysis part of this process. And given where we are in the 2027 CAP update process, these ideas are illustrative of the topics stakeholders want to explore further in the planning process. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Um, and more will certainly emerge throughout the year as we update the cap. Um, but as you can see, uh, in the left column of this chart, we have the longest list. its essential ongoing actions and these are cap actions that have already been adopted by council incorporated into major city goal work programs and are in active implementation. It's affirming to hear community support

for so much of the work that council prioritized in the 2023 to 27 cap work program. Uh but there was also some areas where community stakeholders identified opportunities to expand existing efforts or explore new ideas and that's on the right hand side of this chart. It's important to note that these new and improved ideas are intentionally focused on areas where the city is falling behind on reducing emissions which are transportation and specifically emissions from regional trips as well as getting natural gas out of our existing building stock. Chris and I will dive into those areas more in the following slides. So, one area where we identified opportunities for improvement and expanded effort was in the transportation sector. This includes mobility innovations that support one or no car households and can reduce single occupancy vehicle trips such as bike share, car share, and microtransit. These mobility innovations rely on public private partnerships and are vulnerable to shifting market conditions. Efforts to advance these offerings locally are ongoing and stakeholders in technical research affirmed that bike share, car share, and microtransit are important actions for making progress on our transportation emissions. Additionally, as the greenhouse gas inventory snapshot identified significant remaining emissions from regional trips, looking forward, there is an opportunity to expand efforts on regional lowcarbon mobility solutions, including regional transit. While the city does not administer these programs, we have representation on the regional boards that do and have opportunities to use that representation to shape future decisions related to regional mobility and transit. Another area is proactive legislative

action. And this is a space where we don't have to wait. Uh we're actually asking for strategic direction tonight from council to join the local government climate alliance in order to expand the city's ongoing efforts to engage in regulatory and legislative advocacy on climate issues. staff anticipates that participation in the Local Government Climate Alliance, LGCA, uh could impact legislation in ways that makes the city's building and transportation work more affordable and feasible for the community and is one way to increase the city's leverage in statewide decisions that materially impact our ability to take local climate action. LGCA uses a strength and numbers approach to shape climate specific state legislation efficiently and impactfully. Currently, um there are 14 California cities and counties that are members of LGCA representing about 5% of the state's population and the entity is currently fiscally hosted by the city of Santa Barbara. One key feature of LGCA is that it uses consensus based decisionmaking. That means that if LGCA were to propose a position on a bill that falls outside of the city's ledge action platform, which you all adopted tonight, um the city would cast a no vote and the broader LGCA organization would not take a formal position on that bill. And with that, I'll turn it back to Chris.

Great. Thanks. And so on to actions to improve, expand, or retry in the existing building space. And the two actions we highlighted in the council agenda report have benefited from two study sessions with this council over the last couple years. So hopefully there's not a lot of uh new information here, but some new things have happened since we last spoke with council. So I want to highlight those and and describe how those might be carried forward into a future climate action plan. So, when it comes to uh actions related to retrofitting large buildings, we now have a much better idea of which of our buildings are above 25,000 and 50,000 square feet. And that allows us to begin working with existing resources to begin connecting those building owners with publicly available commercial retrofit incentives and rebates. And so, that's something that we'll just do as part of our uh climate action plan imple implementation. Now, um, but we do recommend further analysis and potential potential inclusion of a large building retrofit action in the 2027 climate action plan update that focuses on assessing the impact that those voluntary retrofits are having and if needed to reach the city's goals, identifying and securing grant funding to potentially develop mandatory disclosure or retrofit requirements for single family homes. staff have been able to bring the statewide home energy score program to St. Louis Abyispo and we already have seven assessors signed up for the program training and we're still looking for a couple more. Uh they'll be trained in May and then that program will be live and a certified independent assessor will be available to provide community members with assessments of the energy performance of their home along with recommendations for improvements. Uh, similar to the previous action, a potential action in the 2027 climate action plan could direct staff to assess the effectiveness of that voluntary disclosure program. Uh, and if those results are insufficient to achieve the city's goal to evaluate the potential costs and

benefits of a mandatory disclosure or retrofit program. One of the recurring themes in our outreach was just a short shortage of transformative new ideas. is we thought maybe we'd ask people what the next big thing is or what the silver bullet was and and really uh there's not a lot of big new ideas that we've come across yet. Uh I think that really affirms the keep going and and retry some of the actions um findings that we've made. Um but that said, we did hear a couple of new ideas and we think they're worth continuing to explore. Uh we will note that these are genuinely new ideas though and as such there's a lot of uncertainty associated with them. Uh these aren't things we are saying we can do tomorrow but we are saying we should look into them further. Uh both of the new actions in the agenda report would address emissions related to buildings. The first would be an action to evaluate a city-led bulk purchasing and direct installation program for improvements like solar battery storage and heat pump HVAC and water heater systems. The other is to support safe plug-in solar and battery energy energy storage systems. And this action in particular would benefit the approximately 60% of slow households that are renters or mobile home occupants. And we could go even further to create renter specific programs that include not just access to plug-in solar and batteries, but also other zero emissions renter friendly tech like over the window heat pump systems and plug-in induction cooktops. And while we're on the topic of new ideas, we've had extensive feedback this week about the importance of housing and climate action. and staff has several recommendations for how that could be integrated into the climate action plan update, including enhanced collaboration between the office of sustainability and CDD and answering some key research questions related to the topic and in collaborating on the housing element

update in coming years and happy to talk more about that if there's questions.

Awesome. So now that we've provided a highle overview of some of the new and improved actions that emerged through the planning process, this slide provides an early estimate of how those actions, if included and implemented through the 2027 cap, would impact future emissions for the city of San Losispo. You can see that the new and improved actions in orange here would bend the curve downward, reducing the remaining emissions forecasted in 2035 and beyond. And these emissions reductions estimates would be fully vetted as part of the upcoming cap update process, but are presented here to provide an early look at their potential impact. Uh based on tonight's strategic guidance, staff would identify the cap actions and tasks that are required to reach council's local greenhouse gas reduction goals as well as state goals. But in terms of oper operationalizing these prospective 2027 cap actions, specific budget allocations will be determined as part of the financial planning process as typical with all planning efforts across the city. and the 2027 cap will be presented to council in early 2027 to inform the deliberative process that will create the 27-29 financial plan. Staff will continue to pursue external funding to the maximum amount feasible to fund the climate action plan, but any specific actions that might rely on the city's financial investment to move forward will require additional council deliberation and approval. And our goal as always is to put forward a practical plan that can be implemented and leverages external funding wherever possible. Uh one of the primary work efforts in developing the 2027 CAP is going to be engaging in additional community outreach. Uh while staff will host the

traditional public workshops and surveys, we're going to be focusing on hosting or participating in events that have a community service component or that provide valuable information about resources and programs that support individual climate actions. Some examples of our planned outreach events include organizing a tree planting in open space that ends with a CAP feedback session, collaborating with community cultural gatherings such as building a better slows lecture series, or partnering with a local resource provider to get the word out about incentives and rebates that makes sustainable living more affordable. Now to schedule and next steps. After the conclusion of tonight's study session, staff will conduct community outreach, technical research, and further evaluate the potential CAP actions uh guided by council. This coming December, staff plan to publish a public review draft of the 2027 CAP. And in about a year from now, staff plans to present the 2020 cap to city council for approval. Okay, that takes us through the high-level overview of the timing, potential content, and outreach plan for the forthcoming CAP update and brings us to key questions staff has for council moving forward. Our first question for city council is which of these potential actions should be further evaluated as part of the 2027 climate action plan update? We've listed the new and improved actions described previously in the presentation below. Uh the question for council's reference and staff recommends further evaluation of all seven items included and requests that council flag any actions that they believe should not be further evaluated uh as well as any new ideas not listed here that council would like to explore as part of the update process. Our

second question focuses on the city's carbon neutrality goal. Staff is seeking council direction on whether it wants to retain its local 2035 target in addition to the AB 1279 goal it is required to adopt by the state. Under this question are a few options including retaining the 2035 carbon neutrality goals and aspirational target or if not whether council might like staff to include recommendations for what as soon as possible might mean in practice and lastly whether council wants to retain its existing narrow and deep approach that Chris described earlier to covered greenhouse gas emission sectors. And our third question for tonight is focused on community engagement and whether council has any further direction or feedback on the proposed approach for the 2027 CAP update. That takes us to the end of staff's report. Thank you for receiving our presentation and we are now open for council questions. Thank you so much. even though I sat through a 221 meeting, it's still um so much information that I'm like still processing it all. Um this is a great amount of work. So, thank you both for sharing this. And I also appreciate how you shared that, you know, pretty much every department is in the room because that's what it takes. Um, so going back to the home energy score, um, have you already engaged, uh, the realtors, property managers, um, slow tenants union, people who would be directly working with that uh, energy score?

Thanks for that that question. And so we've uh met with one uh uh gave a presentation at one realy office. We were invited and we'll be presenting on the 15th at the I'm blanking on the name. I believe it's the women's council of realtors presentation at the Madonna in and then we are planning on meeting with additional groups as you described. Right now, we're really focused on um asking those folks to connect with their inspectors or other folks that might be in the home prior to a sale uh to see if they'd like to become certified. So, if anyone would like to be certified, my contact information is in the staff staff report. But ultimately, um we'll transition into uh then connecting with the realy community at large and uh providing access and information about how they can have their clients access that information. Perfect. Thank you. I know that during the uh green business process it was a bit cumbersome. So just wondering that you know however we can kind of help streamline things makes it always a little bit better. Um and then one other question I'll pass it on. So when you talk about the new ideas and the bulk items, I mean it's similar to back in the day with lowflow toilets, right? They just we got to the point it's just time for everyone to have these items. So let's get a discount and help help people get the access. Okay, great. Thanks, Council Member Shoresman.

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for the presentation. Thanks for kicking off the questions. Uh, you had something in your report. I think it was the ongoing actions list where it talked about enforcing SB 1383 and organic waste is one of the areas in your chart that we've done pretty darn well, gotten pretty close to meeting our goals. So, I'm wondering uh if you can elaborate a little bit more on what enforcing 1383 might look like.

Yeah, great question. And the 1383 like you know the projected emissions reductions in 2035 really depend on ongoing SP 1383 enforcement through that time and uh folks sort of having the associated behavior change with it. But certainly a specific implementation I think would be best answered by staff from that department. Thank you. And yes, I'm asking this question strategically because I'm our representative on the IWMA, so I want to know how I can support this.

Yeah, thank you, Council Member Shoresman. Uh Michelle Paris, I'm the solid waste and recycling coordinator for the city, current interim manager. Um so currently we have um been using an education first approach um to outreach with SP 1383 and we've been successful with that. So future enforcement would just be um currently working with our waste hauler with IWMA to identify maybe any gaps. Um we do see some gaps with uh multif family with high contamination with the high turnover. Um so we are currently working next fiscal year we'll be launching a new um recycling program targeted at th that those communities. So yeah

there are certainly folks that um I'll just be honest about it that have not been able to get over sort of the ick factor of uh putting their organic waste in in their bin. Um, do we have any tactical ways of So, we see a big battling problem on calls during the summer during the heat because that's when it gets stinky, icky, and the flies. So, our recommendation is to freeze

um, and primarily really during those hot season is to you can even use like an old sandwich bag um, put your food scraps in the freezer and put them out on the day of service. And that is a game changer for a lot of people. I've actually had someone stop me in the grocery store and said, "You told me to put the food scraps in the freezer and it's been a game changer." So, that really is the best recommendation.

That is a very tactical tip. I appreciate that. Okay. So, um that's that's my question on the on the solid waste issue. Um, you alluded to and I know we've had some agenda correspondents from the community or not agenda correspondents, some community correspondents about how can we how can we better integrate our climate action plan with our general plan and some of the elements that especially are coming up for um re-evaluation and and update the housing element, the land use and circulation element. How can we sort of operationalize and collaborate uh those documents al together?

Yeah, did I not say the housing element? I said I thought I said the housing element. So yeah, housing land use and circulation in particular.

Great. Thank you. And the climate action plan itself as an implementation action uh in the land use element of the general plan, right? seeks to reduce the emissions associated with buildout of the general plan as currently adopted and there's actually some really good parallels that have already occurred and actually housing is one of them right in our current climate action plan we commit to supporting CDD and implementing their um housing element over time. Uh active transportation is another really good example. The climate action plan elevates the importance of active transportation in achieving our climate goals and then operationally we collaborate with mobility services to provide extra capacity to help out for projects or programs that could benefit from that capacity and then we all sort of win because we reduce emissions. We have more active transportation programming. Um but the climate action plan itself doesn't say here's where the bike lanes go. Um here's how many bike lanes we should have. Here's the operating procedures. it defers to the active transportation plan which is then developed and then projects from that plan are um you know put in the budget and they're built and operated over time and really see a simil a parallel with that in the housing element where as we update our climate action plan we can certainly articulate more clearly the close nexus between housing and climate action. We can convene community experts and and staff to identify key research questions and answer those request uh answer those research questions and then we can collaborate with housing and community development on including some of those innovative ideas in the housing element and then providing that capacity to implement it over time.

Excellent. Thank you for that clarification. There was one one last question I have. There was a chart uh in the in the report. It is on page 29 of um 29 of the progress report. It's a back to solid waste again. It's solid waste emissions inventory and forecast. And most of your forecast tables it looked like in the plan get to a point where you know we are current day and then they show a dotted line generally going in a straight line whichever direction the the line was solid was pointing. In that one, I notice uh the total emissions line, the dotted part of the line kind of starts to curve a little bit and I was wondering what is causing that sort of change in your forecast.

So, the yellow line in that figure and um would it be helpful to bring it up on the screen? If you have it, that would be great. I'm sure it would help everybody else. I'm looking at it, but

uh yeah. So in the lower left here, the yellow line indicates the annual landfilled the tonnage of landfilled solid waste. And so the solid lines represent actuals and the dotted line represents forecast. So it sort of takes the decreasing amounts of solid waste but then mitigates the steepness of that line because of population growth through 2045. The orange or the sort of burnt red there represents the greenhouse gas emiss emissions associated with it and it reflects the decreasing percentage of that waste that is organic. So as we keep more and more organic waste out of the landfill, we will see a lower sort of the ratio of emissions per landfilled ton should also decrease but not in a straight line forever. So there's some sort of curving that happens in outears there.

Okay. Thank you so much for clarifying that. Thank you, city manager. Did you want to add to that?

Thank you. I was going back to our discussion of the your green waste bins and uh we did negotiate an ability to have uh your bin kind of swapped out. So I at le I believe it's once a year. I'm frantically trying to confirm that. Oh, okay. See, we have some users, which is great. Um, I know some folks have even gotten services to come kind of clean their bins out when they get to that ripe stage, but you can, and it was important when we renegotiated our contract with St. Louis Garbage that we made sure that they would be willing to come out and swap it out. So, I wanted to make sure folks were aware that's another option, too, which hopefully will encourage people to continue using your your green waist bin and look at the things that you can put in there because it is a lot more than you might think originally like, you know, animal related meats and things like that that you might not think. So, just want to make sure folks are aware of that. There is really good information on their website um and our website about what is allowed in the green bin as well. Also, if anybody's concerned about making sure you're doing that right. So, just thought I'd plug that. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. And greasy pizza boxes. Yes, it's very exciting.

That's right. The little guy in the middle. Um, thank you so much for your presentation, for taking all the time with us and 221s and all of that. um you'd mentioned some of the struggles and I think everybody's pretty aware of uh dried drying up um federal and state funds and some of the challenges that presents and we got some interesting commentary from uh the climate coalition's correspondence around uh looking for additional funding mechanisms and spending some of our time and energy and uh staff power on that front and just kind of curious um what kind of capacity we have to spend time exploring those those options. They mentioned that uh many communities are moving towards an entrepreneurial approach and um I'm not really familiar with what that looks like and kind of curious if uh we have familiarity with that at this point or if that's something that we need to spend some time exploring. when we developed the progress report and and looked into the potential actions moving forward. Uh this wasn't something that was on our radar. Um so certainly happy to receive the letter and you know council's direction do more research and understand what the options in front of us are and to bring that back as part of the plan update with a recommendation or a a followup that's not feasible here. certainly seems worth a conversation at this stage just to kind of see what what that would mean. Um, and then coming back to a question that was just uh asked by council member Shoresman, you know, we've been really focused on creating a super walkable bikable community, really kind of focusing on infill housing uh better transportation and bike infrastructure. But I'm kind of curious about if we have data or how easy it would be to get data on what percentage of our local and

regional uh trips are jobreated kind of you know I if we focus on that angle obviously that's going to take care of some percentage of our VMTs but curious if we have an understanding of how much of that uh we could tackle through a better uh housing jobs balance in the community and I know that's not a question you answer today, but just curious if that's some data that we can get.

I'd be curious if uh Luke Schwarz has that information and and as he's coming up, one thing I will note and when we received the question about jobs housing balance and we were putting that answer together in the agenda correspondents and we look back at previous answers on that and we thought really critically about what that metric represents and how complicated and nuanced it is given the regional nature of our uh regional job center. then also all the employers that are just outside of city limits. And so it seems really complicated, but when you know I mentioned earlier that we'd want to identify some key research questions and put our best brains together to figure it out. That's exactly the kind of question that we had in mind.

Awesome. I loved that chart. It was super helpful. But just kind of curious about like percentage of EMTs too if we could have that at that. Thanks Luke Schwarz, transportation manager in our public works department. Um we do have that data. I don't have it in front of me. Um, we build our travel demand model that we use to forecast traffic for city transportation and land use projects. It's refined based on statewide household travel data and other big data sources that are now available. So, we could pull a percentage of the trips in and out of the city based on trip types. So, whether those are homebased work or other types of trips uh and could probably produce a VMT summary of those trips by type as well if that's something that the council would find interesting.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. obviously don't want to put more on your plate right now, but just as we're looking towards um how we're going to navigate next steps here, it would be really useful data. Sure. Be happy to pro it with our friends and see the best time to share it with you all. Thanks.

Thank you. Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. I know that uh we had a recent addition of a park and ride in our county and I think that as we see those options so that people can actually stop and then utilize bike or um bus more often. I think that gives people an option and it also encourages carpool in that way. But um just carpool to come and park here didn't doesn't give the same feel. So um thank you very much council member Shoresman. Yeah, just one last question that just came to mind is I was thinking about the sort of bulk purchasing idea for certain types of uh improvements, home improvements. You know, we'll talk about this probably a little bit more. Um but you know the concept of bike share and car share and micromobility that you have uh is one of the things that you want to know from us if you should reexplore. Um you know the the price of ebikes for example has just gone down so so drastically. uh and there were there were incentives um from 3CE and some other organizations uh at the state level about um ebike in um incentives for purchase and I'm just wondering you know just thinking outside the box right here on the dis if something like that um some kind of bulk purchase or some sort of incentive program might I have questions about bike share um I'll talk about them a little more in deliberations. I always have, but just the functionality of that versus just putting more bikes in people's hands, especially of our residents, to help them incentivize reducing even one or two trips a week from a car trip to a bike trip. So, just throwing that out there into the ether for consideration as you look at um things for planning the 2027 plan.

Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, with that we'll move to public comment and then we'll get back to our comments. Okay. Uh we have 10 speakers. The first three, Mary Gardner, June MacGyver, and Spencer Brown.

Hi. Um, instead of complaining during my public comment time, I am here to say good job and thank you. Um, I'm Mary Gardner and I'm speaking as a member of the slow chamber of commerce board of directors. Um, the board supports the goals and efforts of the climate action plan as an important part of maintaining a healthy business community and I appreciate the priority that's being put on these issues. Um, I'd like to add that traffic is a very real and growing quality of life issue, especially for the many of us who commute in from outline communities. Uh, more housing and slow is an is essential for addressing this issue. Also, real change can come as a result of the proposed self-help sales tax that I feel is in partnership with the climate action plan. um it would fund transportation programs throughout the county and it's important part of a successful climate action plan. So, thank you for all the work um that you're doing and for keeping San Los Bispo a vibrant place to live and work. Thank you so much.

Good evening, mayor and council members. My name is June Mcyver. I'm here as the immediate past chair of the board of the chamber of commerce and the senior policy adviser at the slow climate coalition. Right there is one of the reasons I love St. Louis Bispo that there is a nexus between these two organizations that might be adversarial in a different community and that both of these organizations work well with the city um in advancing our goals. And as I said before in this very room, one of the reasons that I am proud to call St. Bispo home is the city's inspirational leadership uh in climate action. As exciting as Victor Glover's uh trip around the moon undoubtedly is, uh this rock is all we have. Um while we cannot ignore our daily challenges, there's no more important issue than the health and future of our planet. This has long been recognized by your predecessor city councils and their and your leadership in this area is truly inspirational. While the 2026 climate action plan progress reports make it clear that there is a significant gap between where we are and carbon neutrality by 2035, we cannot back down on that goal. Audacious goals create urgency and engender creative solutions. We need to double down on that goal. I have great confidence in the city's green team and all of our community partners and the community at large to be innovative and to continue and increase the city's role as a leader in climate action. There are some specific areas that I think bear special consideration. Integrate housing and climate strategy. Climate and housing cannot be treated as separate efforts. Align the climate action plan with the housing element and land use and circulation element to cohesively reduce commute distances and vehicle miles traveled. Address regional transportation. The biggest barrier to meeting climate goals is regional

transportation emissions driven largely by workforce housing being located outside the city or at least I assume it is but I guess you'll find the data. Um more housing near jobs is essential as as is a regional approach to public transportation. take a leadership a regional leadership role. In addition focusing on In addition focusing on regional transportation solutions, the city of Slow needs to take an active role in bringing the rest of the county along on our climate journey. There is no such thing as a climate island. Take a leadership role in shaping state policy. The city of Slo is in a great position to lead on state climate policy. We are undoubtedly a role model but we can take that further and I would urge you to join the local government climate alliance. Lastly, support local clean energy generation. Um ensure that we are lo producing the energy needed to make meet our electrification. Uh and as you would not be surprised, I would urge you to support offshore wind uh development. Thank you so much for all your leadership.

Thank you. After Spencer is Melanie Mills, Leah Brooks, and then Rachel Whan.

Good evening, Mayor Stewart and Council Spencer Brandt on behalf of Central Coast Community Energy. I'm really just here to thank the city of St. Louis Abyispo and your incredible staff who have worked really hard to be at the cutting edge of climate leadership in our region. So, for that, thank you. Um, I'd also like to share something that I mentioned frequently when I'm before you, which is that 3CE provides uh rebates that are available not just for residential commercial customers, but also to our member agencies. And the city of St. Louis Bispo has really done a great job of utilizing those over $500,000 that we've been able to contribute towards electric vehicle fleet um installation of EV chargers reach code development and last year um was the first time for us as 3CE that we were able to actually have our energy programs budget for rebates whether it's member agencies residential or commercial fully subscribed. So, it is a a challenge, but it's a good problem to have because it means that our communities are really moving towards electrification. And the city of St. Louis Abyispo um is definitely uh among those in terms of um high utilization, particularly when it comes to the electrify your ride program. Along with that comes a higher demand for electric vehicle chargers. And so, um, we're certainly happy to see that as one of the continuing items within the climate action plan that's proposed. I will also share that possibly most significantly, in 2025, we delivered enough clean energy to power 352,000 homes and businesses as the default energy provider for St. Louis Abyispo residents. And we're really proud of that because those are real energy projects that are in the ground. This February, the Sunzia wind energy project

came online and began delivering power to Central Coast residents. That is the largest wind energy project in all of North America and we're so glad that we have a piece of that delivering energy for the Central Coast. Lastly, I will share that um we would be happy to connect our energy programs team with your staff and as it relates to um ebikes or any um particularly I think what would be useful for us is to see data as it relates to ebike trips replacing these regional um commute trips. Um and I will also um say one more thing which is that we have approval to join the local government client climate alliance as an associate member and we'll be really excited to help empower the work that our local communities are doing on that front from an advocacy perspective. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Hold on one second. Nope. There you go.

Okay. My name's Melanie Mills and I'm the board president of Blo County. Our organization supports the city's ongoing prioritization of sustainability in the climate action plan and is grateful for the work done by council and staff to date. Looking forward, Bikeslo County is resetting. We have a new interim director, new board members, and dedicated staff who continue to deliver strong education, service, and safe routes to school programs while preparing to re-engage on city issues. We understand how much transportation contributes to pollution and support continued expansion of safe, comfortable infrastructure that helps more people choose bikes for everyday trips. While mode shift goals haven't yet been met made met, excuse me, the remaining gaps do represent opportunities for meaningful progress. Bike Slow County is also ready to support staff with outside the box thinking on programs and projects that address regional trips. We commend the green team and council for their leadership and look forward to continued collaboration. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, council. I'm Leah Brooks representing your active transportation committee. Protected bike lanes, bike ped signals, road diets, intersection safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, connectivity like the pathway between Ramona and Foothill. Thank you for supporting our recommendations to implement the active transportation plan. There are more projects to come, including the South Hyera Street Complete Streets Project, Foothill Boulevard, and Broad Street. Thank you for your leadership in slowing traffic and a and increasing active transportation trips. Some of these decisions are are really tough. So, we really thank you.

Thank you. After Rachel is Garrett Olsen, Eric Bam, Megan Susa. Good evening, Mayor Stewart and council members. I'm Rachel Whan, the director of governmental affairs for the St. Louis Abyspo Chamber of Commerce. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the climate action plan update tonight. And I first want to thank staff for their amazing work on this and the council for your leadership. We appreciate the city's honest assessment of where progress has been made and where challenges remain. It's clear that transportation emissions continue to be the biggest barrier to meeting our climate goals. And that reality requires a shift in how we approach solutions. This is not just a transportation issue. It's fundamentally a housing and land use issue. When our workforce cannot live near their jobs, we are effectively designing longer commutes into our system. That means more vehicle miles traveled, higher emissions, and increasing pressure on our transportation network. If we are serious about reducing emissions, we have to address that root cause and create a clear path forward that connects climate goals with how we plan for housing and growth. We encourage the city to integrate the climate action plan with the housing element and the land use and circulation element. Doing so allows us to plan more cohesively, ensuring our policies are working together to reduce emissions, support housing production, and strengthen our local economy. We also encourage the city to thoughtfully consider how success is defined. Measuring greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita or per service population basis provides a more accurate reflection of St. Louis Abyspo's impact particularly as we

continue to grow. It recognizes that enabling people to live and work here rather than relocating to higher carbon regions results in a greater overall reduction in emissions. Demonstrating that we can reduce our carbon footprint while accommodating economic and population growth positions our city as a true leader in climate action. Finally, we support continued investment in local clean energy generation to ensure we can meet the increasing demand that comes with electrification. At the chamber, we see this as an opportunity to align our climate goals with a more sustainable, economically resilient, and livable community. Thank you for your time and leadership on this issue.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Garrett Olsen, the CEO of the Slow Chamber of Commerce and a local resident who walked here tonight and who truly enjoys seeing members of this council bike home after these meetings every Tuesday night. Uh, your chamber celebrates the progress reflected in tonight's staff report. Staff's finding that by 2035, the city will essentially cut greenhouse gases in half, a genuine testament to the council's courage in 2020 when it was adopted. And at the time it seemed like an almost unimaginable goal. We applaud that. I'm here tonight to share our perspective that this is a significant inflection point for our community to go further in in pursuit of the root causes of the most challenging uh issues in our climate action. The two intertwined issues of housing and transportation. While transportation related emissions is the single biggest climate challenge, it is not primarily a transportation issue in itself. It is a consequence of our housing issue. Staff has acknowledged that the climate action uh climate action on regional transportation requires attention and big ideas. In addition to Rachel's comments from our board position, we offer some of those big ideas for you tonight. First, align city policy, resources, fees, service, and culture with the vital metric of putting more housing where more people live and work. Anchoring our housing activities in our bold climate goals and eliminate impediments to building in a manner and space that supports our climate goals. Second, assist with the passage of the self-help halfcent sales tax effort, which will unlock millions of dollars in state and federal funding, thus allowing the city to be even more creative in creating a and designing a local mobility plan that aligns our desired

climate goals. But transportation infrastructure without h housing reform is a half measure and a half success. We can build all the multimodal solutions in the world, and we should, but people have to live close enough to them to take advantage of their utility. The updated climate action must treat infill housing density not as an a land use abstraction, but as a frontline climate strategy. When we place more homes in the urban core, near jobs, near transit, near the services the city already funds, filling in and building up, we reduce vehicle miles traveled at scale, resist urban sprawl, and make best use of existing city resources. Win win. St. Louis Abyispo has a well-earned reputation as a climate leader. your ch your chamber is here tonight asking you to boldly take on the hard uh issues that remain and we look forward to being partners and standing with you and rolling up our sleeves during this effort. Thank you.

Thank you,

honorable mayor and council. Uh my name is Eric VM. I'm speaking this evening on behalf of the Soul Climate Coalition. First, we want to acknowledge the extraordinary work reflected in this progress report. Over 57 million in external funding, a 20% reduction in community emissions, citywide organics recycling, one-third of the active transportation network built. This is what sustained local leadership looks like, and we're grateful for it. We submitted a written comment letter with our full perspective, including our strong support for reaffirming the 2035 carbon neutrality goal. But I want to use my time tonight to focus on four areas where we believe the city can strengthen its position going into the 2027 CAP update. First, research new models for leading on and funding climate action. The federal funding landscape has fundamentally shifted and arbor sustainable energy utility, bulk purchasing programs, plug-in solar. Exciting models are emerging around the country. We urge council to direct staff to do deep research into where the leadership is happening and bring back a portfolio of approaches for council's consideration. Uh and to speak to the comment around entrepreneurship. Uh our role in community choice energy and central coast community energy is example of the city's entrepreneurship and how that has and will continue to pay uh a high return on investment for our community there. and we're we're confident there's there's numerous other opportunities for entrepreneurship in our community. Uh second, optimize the organization for what's ahead. The challenge in this progress report, building performance standards, transit innovation, regional coordination are growing in complexity. We encourage council to direct executive staff to to conduct an honest review of whether the city's organizational structure, staffing, and resource allocation are

positioned to deliver on climate and resilience priorities and to bring recommendations back. Third, strengthen regional board leadership. The progress report is clear. Regional transportation, electricity affordability, and waste diversion are shaped at bodies like RTA, 3CE, Slowco Cog, and IWMA. The city already brings credibility to these tables. The opportunities to build on what on that with a more deliberate and resource strategy for shaping regional policy. The climate coalition would be a willing partner in that work. And then fourth, take an active role in shaping state policy. the CPU rate decisions, interconnection delays, changes to solar compensation. These state level actions are directly undermining local progress. The local government climate alliance is an innovative lowcost tool to address this. We strongly support joining LGCA and we urge council to empower staff with the backing and freedom to shape the state policies that that will determine local climate work succeeds. Thank you for your leadership and for listening.

Thank you. After Megan, our final two speakers are Laura Alers and Barry Rans.

Good evening, Mayor Stewart and city council members. I'm Megan Souza, a city of slow resident and slow business owner and member of the chamber board of directors. And firstly, I want to say how cool it is and how proud I am to live in a city that has long been a leader in environmental stewardship and climate action. That leadership matters and it's just so cool that our community values that. Um, so we have talked already about regional transportation and the problem of people who work in slow not being able to live in slow and I just wanted to share my personal experience of this as an employer. Um, so in my business we aim to hire locally. We have a goal of 100% slow county um and 50% city of slow residents um among our staff. It's part of our community benefit agreement with the city and every year we submit a community benefit report on how on our progress toward that goal and I'm working on that report right now due at the end of the month and I have to say we're every year we have a harder and harder time reaching those goals the goal of 50% uh city of slow residents in particular and uh that's because um several a lot of our staff who where City of Slow residents at the time of hire have since moved. Their lives evolved. They got married, they had a kid, or they just wanted more stability to their life. And so living renting a room in a shared house with a bunch of roommates, or living in unconventional converted spaces like garages or sheds, or even a walk-in closet like one of our employees used to live in becomes just unreasonable. and so they move to North

County or South County or Santa Maria and commute and cause more cars on the road, more congestion, more emissions. So, I just want to add my voice to the other folks um requesting that you really consider adding more work for force housing as part of the climate action plan. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Good evening again. Um, Laura Alers, but I'm actually here right now on behalf of Rita Cas who went home to deal with babies. Um, but I wanted to just share a few comments from her. Uh, Rita wants to say a big thank you from diversity coalition. The city of slow has been a great partner in energy equity projects. The sustainability office has gone above and beyond to make sure that community members at most risk are prioritized during the energy transition to cleaner and more efficient technology. We and this is divers diversity coalition look forward to continuing supporting the climate action plan. Diversity Coalition requests the city continues prioritizing equitable investments, partnering with community- based organizations and other local partners. Thank you so much from Diversity Coalition and Rita Kaser.

Thank you.

After Barry Rans, our final speaker is Don Marusa. Good evening, uh, madame mayor and city council members. Uh, Barry Rans, I'm member of the slow climate coalition, also safety director for the, uh, St. Louis Bispo Bicycle Club. And, uh, the the staff asked you to look at about seven different proposals uh, and to consider, you know, which ones do you want do you want to go forward on? And the first two I want to really highly recommend that that you uh uh tell staff to go with these two two and those are uh listed number one and two they're related to transportation reevaluation of mobility innovations related to bike share car share and micro transit and number two enhanced support for regional transit and EV charging infrastructure um on the uh microobility ility bike share. Um, you know, we've been talking about bike share for so long and and I noticed that uh the only really the only reason that it's not not going on is because uh the city council does or the city does not want have any skin in the game. Um there's it's the the uh um making it uh how does it say it's financially infeasible to do it on its own. Uh but how much money do you spend uh subsidizing transit? Uh can't you put some skin in the game for for bike share and get that going? And the other thing um microobility uh electric bikes are great for getting people to work to school um short commutes and that sort of thing, but they've got a bad w

recently. There are some accidents in town. Um, Council Member Shoresman, you mentioned earlier in the evening about we got to be careful when we regulate electric bikes, make sure we're not countering the climate action benefits that that they have. So, let's be careful about regulating electric bikes. And let's design our roadways, our bike paths, and everything to accommodate electric bikes that go fast, but let's make it safe for them. Um and then the last thing I wanted to say is uh um about charging infrastructure. Really happy that the new garage has 40ome places, but 50 cents per kilowatt that's that's more than Tesla charges and it's uh you know like it's um Tesla is five times as fast and you have to pay parking on top of that. Um Tesla doesn't charge you for parking. um reconsider how much you're charging there for EV charging in the in the new parking structure. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madame Mayor and Council members. I'm Don Marusa and I work at the front lines of climate in in the community as a volunteer with the slow climate coalition, the slow citizens climate education program, Eoslow and through our Rotary Club with our planted forward program, Rotary Sanosis deosao, we're planting a 100 trees a year for 10 years and we're committed to do that through 2035 to deliver a thousand trees out of the 10,000 that you're hoping to have. So, we've got skin in the game. And one of the things that I've learned uh through that and one of the things that we do with that tree planting program is we do exactly what you're proposing as one of your recommendations. At every one of those plantings, we describe how it's a part of the city's uh climate action plan, what difference the planting a tree makes, how the three tons of CO2 uh taken down and converted into living carbon in the soil makes a difference for our breathing and for our lives together. So, we're very delighted to be an active partner with you on those things. As author of the book, Solve Climate Change Now, Do What You Love for a Healthy Planet, we have the solutions. So, we know what to do. It's how to get people to do them. And so, I want to talk about a couple of things and speak to the specific um questions that your staff posed to you for your discussion purposes. So, first item, uh this is your question number two. what to do about the goal. Stick with the goal. You know, uh, President Kennedy, eight years before the end of the decade in the 60s said, "We're going to be on the moon." He didn't know how to get there, but he held to that goal. And you're nine years away from 2035. Don't give up now because you don't know the specific path to get there. The second thing is uh in that regard, this is your question number one, what to do and what not to

do. Shift from thinking about what is the path and feeling like you have to have the path all figured out. It's sort of like, you know, if you're going to go from Los Angeles to New York, you can't wait for all the lights to turn green. You have to start going and figuring out, you know, how you're going to get there. So, you know, so you shift from seeking a path and defining a path to defining a process to find a path. looking for new elements, new partners, new strategies to go about doing it. And we can get there together because your question number three was how to engage the public. And this is where we really have a great resource. You know, work together creatively with the public and organizations like the slow uh climate coalition here and the slow chamber and many others uh to accomplish what you couldn't even imagine. Now, here's a very simple example. Uh we're working on a pillar here in the community of green food systems. Those green food systems could have a a simple way of capturing money from uh people that go for dinner and contributing that to regenerative agriculture that would enable you to get credits for the greenhouse gases that would be uh recovered from those uh regenerative agriculture efforts.

Thank you so much. Best wishes. Thank you. Final. Okay, thank you. Wow, a lot of great public comment. Thank you so much everyone who stuck it out. I know a lot of you got here early and uh thank you for that. Um there's so much information that was commented on, shared. Before we get into deliberations, just wanted to ask Luchia and Chris if you wanted to add anything um based on anything that was said. They're pondering right now. some processing time.

Madam Mayor, I took I took notes anticipating that question and uh there was a lot of uh broad information and I I think generally the presentation touched on a number of the items and I think uh heard community answers some of the questions and so I don't have anything additional to add. I I do want to go back to um something that was mentioned around the only thing that's stopping us from bike share is money and I remember these conversations from bike share when it first came along and yes money was definitely a big part of it. Two was our own staff capacity and three was quite honestly our less than ADA sidewalks in being an old town. So, I know there's a lot more to discuss on this conversation around bike share. Um, but I just want to kind of highlight that that was what I remember and I just want to make sure if I missed anything on that.

Sure. So, we can jump into the bike share conversation now if that's Let's just do that. So, okay. I have lots of thoughts about that, but I'll come back.

So, in 2024, council approved the release of an RFP for a no cost to the city bike share program that was sort of pilot in nature. Um we had understood that there were several vendors that were interested in bidding in that kind of program. One example was the B cycles um company who was a subsidiary of TRE that operated in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. And so there were uh operational considerations that aligned with previous council direction. As part of that process, we came to the active transportation committee and then to council for release at least that RFP and ultimately that uh B cycles in particular was acquired mid procurement process and they had to pull out because of their own financial situation and so we ended up with non-responsive bids and I think we reported back to council that uh we're going to continue to monitor the situation uh but that sort of uh procurement was a failed process. We have since then understood that there is at least one more large vendor that is interested in operating at no cost in the city. So we're doing right now is just understanding internally what sort of staffing and operational considerations would go into that. What's different today than three years ago or however long ago that was two years ago. um doing some internal due diligence and should there be a there there would um plan on coming back to advisory body to evaluate that and uh you ultimately if that looks good bringing it back to you all for consideration but there's a long way between today and that

absolutely um and I know that as we talk about partners that's one of the other aspects is um you know if we're point A we still need a point B to be able to get back to and that other property may or may not be ours in point So, thinking about what that looks like as well. Um, lots lots more to talk about on that, but Council Member Shoresman.

Um, yeah, thank you for that question because it's my recollection. And I I remember that process, that RFP process, and it was my understanding at the sort of the end of that process, at least at that point in time, there would, as you said, there were no no cost to the city options. Anything that we were to invest in would have to be a financial investment from the city. And it would have been significant and again would have required um pretty solid partnership with another organization. Let's be specific. Kalpali to kind of make it really functional. Um, and we would need to have a certain number of locations to kind of make it effective really. You can't have bike share with only two ports where the bikes can be picked up and dropped off. That's not really functional for people. So again, I think there's there's a lot of complications with making something like that. So I'm seeing head nods. So I I was remembering that process correctly. Um, another thing that one of the commenters brought up is our transit system. And um, and I think I just saw Alex walk out. Um, so maybe he's listening again and he hears me. But um, I was wondering if we could get a little bit of a fresher maybe when he comes back of how our transit system is funded because I'm not I think it's mostly federal funding and fairs, but I wanted to clarify that. So can you or I don't know who wants to answer that question.

I see Maline coming up and I will say from being on the RTA board, yes, it is the majority of it is um we have the certain amount of writership uh ratio but it is with federal funding that is not increasing right now.

Yes. Hello Maline Cassenta, assistant director of public works and I will try and do my best but yes the mayor is correct. It is majority federally funded. Um and so we are working towards um getting more of that federally funded program for this upcoming year. Um but of course as we can see that that may move and change we are tracking that um appropriately as things shift. And to piggyback on that, as things shift maybe from the federal level, is that another reason why there would be interest in the self-help sales tax? Because that might be in addition to making improvements to infrastructure like roads and actual sidewalks and paving and all that kind of important stuff. Uh it could also benefit regional transit if that was something that the county chose to spend some of the revenue on.

Yes, correct. we could use that funding towards transit and transportation. Thank you. Yeah, I think those are my outstanding questions from the um from the comments. I don't know if others have more. Uh Council Member Boswell, I just have deliberation, so I'll hold off if there other questions. Are there other questions? We good?

Okay, great. Thank you. Um all right, where to start? Uh first place to start is um as a number of folks have mentioned we should celebrate our progress. Um our our climate action plan has been very successful. Um even though we are showing a potential shortfall on our hope for goals by 2035 at this point. Um I think the progress that we've made is is quite incredible and uh certainly positions us as a as a leader in California and even internationally in doing this kind of work. And it just shows that uh when we develop a good plan, we put real resources towards it. We build community partnerships uh that we can make progress on this issue. It's often characterized as well, what can we do, right? It's a global problem. It's huge. It's unsolvable. Um but I think we're proving that wrong. Um second, I want to thank uh thank staff. Um uh I don't know who all knows but climate action plan is what I do professionally uh in my work as a professor at Kalpali and so I spend a lot of my days talking to folks uh in this field and uh trying to stay up to date on on what's going on and I want to acknowledge our staff Chris and Luchia and Bob. Um everybody knows them around this state. Uh we really do have the best team. we have the experts and I was jokingly gonna say I'm gonna say nothing else except Chris and Luchia and Bob get to work. Um because I know you can deliver for us in this next round of this update, but of course I have more to say.

Yeah. Um so thank you again and I look forward to the work that you're going to deliver on this plan. Um I also want to thank the partners in the room. I I just even the testimony tonight, the groups that came and uh spoke tonight really are some of our key partners um in this work and there of course many others who aren't in the room tonight. Um but really that's the only way to get this done is through building partnerships. It really was the whole idea around the slow climate coalition. It's called the coalition or not instead of a a club or I don't know what else you'd call it, but it's called a coalition because it was built on the idea of recognizing that if we can get broad involvement from the community, um we can be successful. And I think again that's proving true. Um a few kind of uh I want to speak to kind of a few kind of key principles and I'm going to talk to a number of specific issues particularly those raised by staff. Um, and some of these have been mentioned in variety of ways already. Um, I do really think we, you know, we've t we've talked before about the the challenge in St. Louis Bispos. We're very ambitious. Uh, we have lots of plans and programs and we have a real challenge always in front of us of doing them all. So, I do think uh we should really be thinking about the opportunity for this cap update to help us align and accelerate implementation of our many supportive plans. some of which didn't exist when we did our last update. Uh so some are new but some existed prior to that. Um and there are many but in particular there's things like our active transportation r plan our short-range transit plan um our general plan but really especially our housing element u with our housing goals and our safety element uh climate adaptation and safety element. And again there are others um and I really see this as an opportunity. I I think one of the things that a CAP can really do for you is help making help make not only sort of help

accelerate implementation of those plans, but really make sure those plans are working well together and not at cross purposes. And so I I think that's something we should we should pay attention to. Is our housing element working well with our short-range transit plan, for example? That came up as a item of discussion. Um uh a second and important principle I want to uh mention is you know sort of really recognizing that as good a job as we are doing in the city of San Louis Abyispo I'm not going to say that it doesn't matter because it absolutely does matter but you know if every city we need every city in California every city in the United States every city in the world doing what we're doing Um it we can't do there is we cannot do it alone. We will not solve this problem alone. The city of San Bispo's global climate climate emissions are a fraction of global emissions. Um but of course we also can't throw our hands up and say we're not going to do it because if everybody has that attitude then we get nowhere. So we have to do our part but I think we need to be much more assertive in asking that others do their part. And I know this came up in some public comment um as well. Um the um um I'll call out names a little bit. Um in this county uh the county and our fellow cities in this county have not updated their climate action plans in over a decade. Um in some cases even more than maybe 15 years I think. Uh can't remember when the county's plan I'm sure Chris Reed remembers when the county's plan was adopted. uh they're all effectively out of date and we need to I feel like we need to ask them to do more and to work with us to do more. We're and we stand ready to help them uh think about how they can do that. Um and so again the notion of partnership and extending that partnership beyond just

um our city but um into our community and into our region and I know we've got some ideas about how to do that. Um uh we need Silk Car and RTA uh to continue to work with us and to think about how we can continue to do more. Um and then we especially need Kalpali um as well. Although it's always weird because Kpali is not officially part of our city. They're outside of the city boundaries. Uh but for all practical purposes, they are part of our city. Uh they're immediately adjacent to it. Um and you know one thing that's always bothered me is that whereas the city of slow we have a very aggressive active transportation plan um Kpali doesn't have an active transportation plan and we know that a considerable portion of of both existing pedestrian and bicycle trips but potential um lie with Calpali faculty such as myself and staff and students and so um I think uh through our planning activities ities, we as elected officials can do more to um ask more of our um of the other folks within our our county and within our region. But I think we can also look within this climate action plan to be maybe a little more explicit at identifying where we need help and cooperation in achieving our goals from those other entities and what that help and assistance looks like. So I would encourage us to continue uh to do that kind of work. Um let's see a couple other um and then uh the final uh thing I'll mention as well. Well, it's really kind of related to this, but you know, we have a lead by example plan for um for the city operations and the idea is that we as a city government entity, we do what we need to do um and

we demonstrate that um to the community. Um I think we ought to uh continue to look for opportunities to tell our story uh beyond the city and beyond the county. again um uh we're doing a lot of great things. We've had a lot of great success and I think we have a moral obligation to spread that word and try to ask the rest of the global community uh to come along with us uh to the extent we can. Um I did want to mention uh I did want to talk just a little bit about a few of the specific uh staff questions. So staff asked us a number of issue about a number of issues uh whether we would support those. I went through your list. I didn't see anything that I would not want you to do. I I know you're going to need to be a little strategic too and what you can and cannot do, but I didn't see anything I would take off the list. And so I'm fine to say yes, move forward with continue to explore the things um uh that you've uh proposed. Um and I'll speak to the carbon goal in just a minute. uh because I know that's a very particular question. Um on these on the some of the specific issues, you know, our real challenges are around transportation and the existing built environment. Uh I just want to um continue to reiterate support for doing as much as we can on regional transit uh expansion, but also innovation. Um thinking about other other possible ways to think about solutions to our regional transportation problem. Um uh second is on housing. Um you know housing policy is climate policy. Something I say all the time. Uh increasingly we're hearing about that. Uh it's been spoken about tonight a little bit. Uh you know we import uh a noticeable portion portion of our workforce um every day. We heard some

stories about that. Um many of these uh folks that we import in our workforce are in service industry or often lower paying jobs and they're having to make hard decisions. Uh not everybody wants to live in slow. That's totally fine. Some people want to live at the beach. I appreciate that idea. Um but there are many folks and I've talked to many who would prefer to live in slow um and who cannot make that choice or who did live in slow but as we heard through changing life situations cannot uh afford to effectively stay in San Louis Abyspo. um those folks, we need to offer them an option and in doing so, not only do we address our housing challenge and a whole set of social equity issues. Um but it also works to address our regional transportation problem and reduce our emissions. Um I think a re we need a recommmitment to our mode share goals uh that we have in our uh general plan and our active transportation uh plan. Um and then on building retrofits, uh you know, it's pointed out that so much of our existing built environment is serving renters, uh over 60%. Um recently I was at a conference where they talked about this idea they called directto renter benefits. And the idea was thinking about how we could uh u finance and incentivize the adoption of technologies that renters could essentially take directly with them. And we heard some of the examples like the plug-in solar although we need state action there and uh uh portable window heat pumps which are pretty much ready there basically is a ripe technology but there are some uh issues uh we need some additional progress on that um and then let's see um uh one small suggestion I think um and Chris I'm I'm sure you'll be familiar with this and the way the state reports their emissions reduction I think it's

important that we tell the story in our climate action plan that we have been growing our population, building housing, and growing our economy in this city at the same time that we have reduced emissions. This is not a competition. A lot of times environmental issues have been framed as a competition between economic development and the environment. But the state of California has demonstrated and has data uh the state has data on this showing that we have effectively decoupled um you know the state uh economic productivity from its use of energy and its climate emissions and we've done that here locally as well and I think we need to make sure we tell that story that economic growth and development um can occur and can occur I think in a better way ultimately while we also improve our environment and reduce our emissions. Uh finally on our carbon goal, I want to encourage us to continue to maintain our 2035 carbon neutral goal. Yes, it is aspirational. Uh and it is true that we do not have all of the answers for how we will get um to that goal. Um but we know that a big impediment to um our ability to to reach that goal has been some recent changes both at the state um and federally. And it's certainly my hope that in a th8 days our federal headwinds will go away. Um but um I think that we need to remain hopeful and optimistic and positive and strive to reach that goal. If we don't get there, it's okay. Uh I think it's important for that to be said. Um but there's no I don't see any downside in trying to set high ambition and seeing if we can get there. So, I'll be supporting us maintaining the 2035 goal. Thank you everyone.

Thank you so much. Uh, Council Member Shoresman, Council Member Boswell, I'm not sure there's much left to say. I'm just teasing. Questions?

No, you cut you you covered a lot of ground there. So, I'll I'll just try to hit the highlights uh a little bit to just put a little bit more emphasis on some of the things that I think are the most important. First of all, thank you. Uh, Council Member Boswell did an outstanding job of recognizing the work of our team. Um, what our team has not said out loud today is that we actually have an awardwinning climate action plan. So, not only do we think we're doing a great job, but other people think we're doing a great job, too, enough to give us uh to give our team an award for their work. So, I just wanted to make sure I pointed that out. uh just to hit on the things that I think are the most important to continue to look forward to in our 2027 uh cap update. And I'll just get straight to it. I agree with Council Member Boswell on maintaining the goal of carbon neutrality by 2035 for all the reasons that he already said. I won't go into to repeating them. I think it's just really important that we keep that goal and and we need to keep going that direction that qu as quickly as we have just to even get to the 2045 goal. As we said, we're not really even with all the great work we've done, we're not on track to hit that 2045 goal the way the state is wanting everybody to. And I can't imagine how others who are doing less than we have are even going to be close to reaching that goal. So, I'm I'm glad we're ahead of the game as much as we can be on that. I love some of the innovative approaches and hope that there's room for more exploration of those uh as we go forward in the 2027 planning process. Yes to the LGCA. Uh yes to the energy assessor program. Yes to city-led bulk purchasing and plug-in solar if those are really real options. Especially as council member

Boswell mentioned, anything that we can do to help our very large renting population. Uh I feel like they really have been left out so far in the process of rebates and home energy analysis. And I know the city has done some important work with mobile home residents and that has been great, but it's at a very small scale. So I think there's an opportunity for maybe our rental population is is the next lowhanging fruit of, you know, home energy efficiency. And I would love to see us try to support that group a little bit more. Uh I'll echo his sentiments about greater and greater alignment over time between our climate action plan and our general plan elements especially the housing element. We've heard a lot of advocacy from the chamber on that issue. And I think the more we update I mean all these things don't all these updates don't happen at the same time, right? We we update our climate action plan and then we update our housing element and then we update our loose and then we update something else and then we update our climate action plan. So over time hopefully they can um become force m multipliers for each other in a way and and build uh build upon our our goals and become more and more aligned over time. I also love the idea we are uh we are policy analysts to a certain extent on this council and I love the idea of slicing and dicing the data in different ways. uh the the suggestion that we've gotten from the chamber and uh from council member Boswell about measuring our carbon footprint in maybe a per capita way. I think the the data that you produced in the agenda correspondence was super fascinating just to see how we stack up in that jobs housing imbalance compared to some of our neighboring cities. fascinating and hopefully there's something useful that

we can do um with that data especially for making regional ar arguments with our partners to uh to to help bring others along with us on this journey and I think I've covered most of it and I I guess I'll just close with another plug and appreciate the comments that we got from the audience about um finding the nexus between climate action and our local sales tax measure. Obviously, that uh source of funding that we have been missing out on for a very long time will help us hopefully improve on some of those regional transportation issues as well as improving our our roads and and uh I was going to bring up bike share. That's the other thing that I was going to mention. I think of all of the things all the strategies that you all have brought forward and that maybe we should look into and I've mentioned this in the past is that I think without really safe roads uh and bikeways and pedestrian access that people feel safe using a a bike share is a secondary tool. if we don't have the infrastructure to support it, I think a a a bike share isn't going to have as big of an impact as as just improving the um improving the infrastructure itself. So, in terms of where we're going to spend our money and our energy, not to say that I'm against because I'm not against bike share at all. I just think that we have we have bigger priorities that um that if we work on those first, then bike share will be more effective later. So, I will end it there.

I think it's yes and, but I'll wait. Vice Mayor.

Yeah. Uh, kudos to my colleagues for all of their outstanding comments so far. I've agreed with everything that you've had to say and appreciate the thoughtfulness behind it. You know, I desperately needed some good news and some hope. And I'm just so grateful to our, as we've mentioned, incredible staff and to our community for coming out for this and for being supportive over the last six years of tackling and actually making incredible progress on this front. So, I'm just going to say let's stay the course and uh also, of course, keep alert for opportunities and innovations as they emerge. But I think we're we're headed in the right direction. I'm really uh grateful for where we are right now. Um, you know, I think there was a one of our correspondents, you know, called this a moral imperative and I couldn't agree more. Uh, I also really appreciated the comment from Dawn earlier about the Kennedy story. You know, sometimes we've just got to set a goal and then figure out later how to make it happen. I always appreciate that anecdote. I I also really want to thank Council Member Boswell for his comments about the importance of regional and global partnerships. Obviously, you know, focus on where we have the most uh power here. The imperative of getting more urgent movement from our neighbors uh supportive of the plan calling out where we can uh better collaborate and support those partners and looking for for ways for, you know, you and for us to be more active in that realm. Uh coming to the list of the seven items, I'm supportive of all seven items, especially any program that assists renters in utilizing solar battery heat pump technology. Um I think that is as council member Shoresman called out maybe our next lowhanging fruit and uh I know there's a huge demand for it from our community members. Also supportive of uh joining the LGCA. Did I get the acronym? Yes.

All right, great. Uh also absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yes, more infill housing. Uh would love the idea of more explicit integration of our in of our housing element, active transportation, short range transit plans and loose among all the rest of them. Make all of them melded together with our climate plans. Uh we've got awesome opportunity coming up with our updates of uh several of those. So looking forward to continuing this conversation. Also really looking forward to our chamber and development partners helping us figure out how to get progress utilizing some of our programs that are already in place like flexible density provide feedback on what programs would unlock more housing in our downtown core and of course coming back to uh the comments from uh Miss Susa earlier making sure that that housing is safe and stable for our community as well. Um really interested in following up on what new approaches to funding would mean. I know the climate coalition had some ideas there. So, you know, we're already of course working with them, but continuing to explore, you know, how do we deal with the changing face of uh federal funding? And uh hopefully that's short term, but uh if not, what what does our future look like? How are we going to fund all these projects? and very much supportive of an idea mentioned by council member Shoresman earlier around the uh exploring at least the idea of bulk ebike purchases or incentives. You know, I was a long-term skeptic of ebikes as an old school biker who thought it needed to be all manual power, but man, my life has been changed by my 3CE subsidized ebike. Uh I can wear high heels and get to work. It's a total game changer. So, um, if we can do anything to unlock that for more people, I put like a thousand miles a year on that thing. So, it would be great to have more people in the community be able to do that. Um, I will leave it there for now and pass it on to the mayor.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for all that's already been said. Um, it's hard to go last sometimes, but I I have uh just a few things. So, as as said already, we can't we can't thank you enough. Truly, this is hard work and I know you're constantly dealing with uh complicated, difficult things. Uh trying to figure out if innovation is working or not. Uh trying to figure out how do we help people not fall through the cracks. I know that uh we've had a lot of conversations about that. And um the easy uh I guess not really easy but easy things for me to say yes to is I think whenever we bring people together and try to advocate together many uh many people together makes a much better concentrated effort. So of course LGCA I say yes to that. Um I wouldn't say easy that it's going to be easy to get to 2035 but it's easy for me to say yes let's keep on with that goal. I will say with that goal, if and when there is a point in time where you as staff do not see that possible, I depend on you to tell me that. Um, so I just want you to know that because I'm going to keep going, but there's this point where if you are looking at us like, I can't do this. Stop telling us to do something we can't do. Please let us know. With that said, not just today, we have a lot of partners in the room and I'm just going to say yes, we need you. Thank you. And we will be calling on you and there's more partners we need. Um there are things that I look at that I am constantly looking at the I guess the what's the worst that can happen, right? How do we get people I don't mean severe fatal collisions. I'm saying, how do we get people to make these modal shifts? And um I'm going to be a little flip and I'm

but I do mean this seriously. Um people don't want to get on a bike for medical reasons, for difficult physical reasons, for don't want to mess up my hair reasons, don't want to mess up my don't want to come in the outfit reasons. We have these reasons in our community that we need to help people get over. So whatever that looks like, I think that's where we really probably can use our partners. I think there's an aspect of a what else could we do? I think there's a bus and bike concierge aspect that we're kind of missing to get people that could maybe consider um changing their mode of transportation for a day or two because honestly it's a little overwhelming to look at the bus schedule and try to figure out how you're really going to get from point A to point B. It's it's complicated. It's difficult. how am I going to do it? How am I going to get all of the stuff on my bike that I need for all my errands and all the rest of the things? So, I think just um something that can be done, not necessarily from the city itself, but maybe through partners. Um how do we kind of manage that anticipatory fear that people have? How do we get people over that bridge? And um I think we did that with 3CE with energy. Um and I think we have more to go. There's still more fear out there about renewable energy, but we're showing people how that works. We're showing people the uh Sunzio. We're showing people the solar and what we're doing. And yes, there needs to be change in laws, but that plug-in solar and battery energy, can you imagine the change that could give for renters? I mean, that is huge. As a renter, there's just so little you can do to your house without worrying about your deposit being taken or having to pay even more than your deposit, for example. So that's just a fabulous concept. Um the other part I feel like we had an uptake for a while with car share and then it didn't. Um and I think that was a huge security blanket in a

sense. Yeah, I can take my bike cuz worst case if I have to get out there I can jump on a a a car share. So Zip Car, there's like three of them on campus. I'm being a little facicious but there's not many. There's not enough for the students as is. There sure is not enough for faculty and staff. So, you know, Zip Car may not be it. Maybe it's something other brands, but this is for not just Cowpali, but all over the city. Wherever you're going to um walk or ride um and then all of a sudden you have to run an errand out to Costco or whatever it might be. Close to impossible. Your kid needs to go to the doctor. All of a sudden, you have to pick up your kid because they fell. Like, there's these reasons that come up that are real. And so, how do we help people in those moments? Um, I think the other thing is I was um surprised when I did my bike and sorry my RTA ride. Um, so cool to watch how the bike thing comes down, the bike rack comes down, you can put your bike on. That's so awesome. So you can do this this combination between bike and bike and bus. However, ebikes are pretty heavy and can't handle all the ebikes. So, uh, as we think about this and we can get more people on ebikes and doing modal shifts, how do we help with that? And, uh, what's the quantity max? What does that look like? And this is where I think that bike share could come really in handy is you can get on the bus, you don't have to bring your bike because then when you get to that bus stop, i.e. the city hall, um, you can just jump on that bike share and go that last bit. um maybe not the last mile but the last half mile, the last whatever that's just a little bit too much to walk or take all your stuff. Um the other thing I'd say going back to buses um there have been people who have shared that they can't they can bring a couple grocery bags full but they can't bring like your whole entire week's worth of groceries onto the bus even. So thinking about there are these things that stop people from doing these modal shifts and how can we help with that? um seems wild

because when we think about any of the large uh uh cities, you just can use the what do you call it? It's like a rack with wheels. Anyway, I mean there's opportunity and it shouldn't be this difficult. So why we can't bring groceries in any sort of large amount onto a bus locally seems wild. Um of course, yes, housing near jobs. Um, that sounds great to say, but we have not managed to figure out any sort of puzzle on workforce housing, missing middle housing, whatever the magic word that we want to use that is unofficial. We have a problem there. We have a problem without real real partners and uh we have a problem without real additional funding. So, we can say we want that. Sure, we do. Of course. And how does that happen? Um we you know I I love that CDD community development department does uh developer roundts and I'm almost feeling like we need that roundt between uh the community and staff or policy makers and staff because I feel like we still again have that anticipatory fear that bridge that's missing which is we're a proousousing city why can't we get some of these things to yes and so I feel like there's a both and when it comes to developers and our own city and what is what does that look like? Um, as far as EV charging, you know, continue that. Yes, please. Um, more and more that we can. One of the things we talked about early on for me on the council was we looked at all these different opportunities, Rivian and Charge Point and D, but the more that we got different ones, the more complicated it was and it wasn't really working smoothly. So, with that, it seems as though we have a limitation. And if you have few people, they're going to have whatever rates they feel. So without more competition, what do we do with that? Um I just came back from a 4-hour trip and looking at where we could stop. Um it was different in

different places and there was anywhere from 34 cents to 55 cents a kilowatt. So what makes it that number? Is that something that we are getting into? It sounds like that's kind of not the city's place, but if there's a way that we could know more of that information and make that work, that would be great. Um, and I love the idea of bulk. I I think I already said that. Sorry if I repeated. Um, I'm going to go back to what Councilman Boswell said. I shared it with our 221s. I'm all about telling our story. um the more that we can help people picture in their minds not just what we've done which is great and we should be we should be shouting for the rooftops on some of these things. Thank you council member Shoresman about this is not just we're just saying we're doing a good job like literally the nation has I've been trying to figure out like how do we get more people to understand like the awards that some of the city um departments have um achieved are not just in this little little tiny world. This is like huge. Um, but that being said, also when we first started the climate action plan, it was okay, how do you picture? What does it look like? If everything worked perfectly, picture yourself in 2030. Picture yourself in 2035. What does that look like? And I think the more that we can help people picture it, then it becomes easier to do because all they can picture is what doesn't work and how to how the barriers. So, if we can just help people picture getting over those barriers, that would be amazing. Um so lastly I want to go back to that workforce comment around um another partner that we need to have at the table is the K through 12 um the labor trade skills trade having people picture what it means to be in different types of jobs um that may or may not include higher education not

trying to stop higher education but we've talked about a second grader does not think about what is a radiology technologists do. Like there's just not a that's not like a you're like think think about a firefighter, think about a first responder, think about a teacher. Like we have these images, right? So how do we help more people picture different things? Can they picture, wow, I could be one day working at a EV charging station? No, that's just not something that comes out and is like an obvious uh picture. So how do we help get some more of um the workforce jobs as opportunities in front of people? And what is that? When we when coding boot camps became a thing, it was like you could do this in a short period of time and have a like decent paying job. We have this ability with the climate action plan to do the same thing. So um that's just the other partner that I think let's make sure we have the workforce partners at the table and the education table u partners at the table to get them to that work job. Work job good English that career path. Uh, thank you for um listening to all of that. I don't see any more on the screen. No more comments. So, I think we've answered all your questions and probably more than you wanted. Um, thank you so much for your patience with us. Anything else we're missing? Madam mayor, so can we just walk through the questions to make sure we have Okay, so the first question around the seven items, it sounds like continue evaluating them. Heard some of the uh considerations around bike share both uh concerns and opportunities. And so we'll we'll hold that as we we evaluate that further. But otherwise can um continue to evaluate these and if we hit a roadblock, they may not appear in the climate action plan, we can share why. Um but perhaps if they're successful, they will be. One of the questions I had is there were a number of items that

community members brought up during their testimony that shared this could be something you could look at. This could be something you could look at and uh council referenced a couple of those and I just want to uh check in. Was there any items that community shared that in particular you would not want us to explore further as we evaluate? I know it's hard to recall everything, but I'm trying to think through. I want to make sure that as we catalog those there's nothing in there that felt like an obvious red flag. Council Shoresman, repeat just a few highlights to jog our memories, but otherwise I would say probably Yeah, they're probably all good. But

yeah, and and uh not necessarily asking like if they're all uh viable today, but there's anything wants to look into in particular. I'm thinking through so like we have clear feedback on the housing and climate nexus. So that's clear. uh with the climate coalition letter, we had some clear feedback on uh evaluating like uh funding or entrepreneurial opportunities and so that sounds like supportive of evaluating that. There was also some discussion in there um around sort of like the organizational approach to climate and both internally and with our regional partners and confirming that's something to continue to evaluate. Um and then uh in particular I was interested in Mr. Marusa's comments around the just like the way that we even like think through uh the green lights from here to New York. And I'm not sure what that looks like in practice, but just as we're developing the sort of strategic planning framework, just confirming that like the way that we have it now is likely how it will look into the future, but there might be some flexibility in what that looks like.

I I think the entire climate action plan has been that it has been we want to get to 2035 and be carbon neutral. Do we have to reook at how we are measuring? Do we have to look at different I mean we weren't even thinking of plug plug-in solar before, right? So we're we don't have all the green lights, but I think that's exactly what you're doing. Great. And on question one, is there any other Okay. On question two, a clear direction to retain the 2035 target. And I want to confirm here that we want to retain the current approach of focusing narrowly on energy transportation and landfill solid waste.

It's fine with that shoresman. I I guess I was actually wrote this down like what would broad and shallow look like? you know, like um how do we not go narrow and deep and continue down the path in the areas that we're going to? I'm not sure what the opposite or an alternative would look like.

So, some of our peer cities have considered things related to uh emissions related from consumption of food or goods have looked at emissions related to like airfare for example. So, air travel of our community members as they go to the regional airport and then travel. Is that something we want to account for and have strategies around? Ultimately, we don't recommend that. We think it's important to stay focused, but just wanted to make like that's a critical technical task for us that's important to have clarity on now as we move through the year.

I guess I'll say then it seems to tackle the things that we have the most control over. And even as we've pointed out today, the transportation housing imbalance is a statewide problem and a regional problem, but at least we can kind of wrap our arms around that maybe. I mean, I'll leave it to you and your planning process over the next 6 months or so as you work on the plan. That seems at least a little bit more approachable, but I wouldn't even know where to begin with things like airfare and Yeah. Council Boswell.

Yeah, it um there's a lot of climate action plans out there where the city has identified 100 plus things they're going to do, which is ridiculous. They're not going to do a hundred things. And so their climate action plan really becomes, you know, uh um well, what it doesn't become is an actionable document. And I think that um and our first climate action plan, the very first one the city had was a little bit like that. It was a little bit of a laundry list of policy ideas. And I think um I think it was a smart decision. I know some of you were here then, a smart decision to shift to a little bit more of a strategic approach, not try to tackle every single issue. I always remember the story when the UK decided to quantify the emissions from asthma inhalers. Not a joke. Um and it's like is that a good use of somebody's time uh in terms of you know overall emissions profile? Probably not. And so I assumed that the narrow and deep was reflecting this idea that we are not going to try to solve every emissions problem in this community and instead we're going to look at where can we have big impact and where can we uh you know make sure that we are going deep on the item like we're really trying to make a difference in that item and I would continue to support that approach rather than kitchen sink.

I do have one question with that. Um I don't know that we are the people to do it, but talking about landfill and I kind of go back to our warf and I think about the um methane gas that's released. Um are we looking into any sort of sequestration or or capturing of that gas? For the Levi example plan, we quantified the emissions associated with uh you know some occasional fugitive emissions from methane there and then also the combustion of the methane on site for on-site power and we provided that as anformational item. I think that's linked in the agenda report actually. And so, uh, we we do look at that. And one of the the only downside to going narrow and and deep in in our in my opinion is that you do miss out on some of those good stories and some of the really great work that people are doing. And in particular, uh, the folks at the warf have really mitigated the environmental impacts of that critical city service in a way that's that's really compelling. And I think our recommendation would be to continue to tell that story in the lead by example planning framework.

Thank you for that reminder. And as we with 1383, I guess I'm wondering if we'll have a bigger opportunity as we have more of the food um waste kind of separated and um organic waste separated and maybe we'll have more ability for that as well. Thanks.

So that I think provides answers to the key questions that give us clarity on how we'll move forward through the planning process. So unless there's anything else, I think we'll say thank you for that. Thank you so much for a great study session. We really appreciate all of your work and a great report. And with that, we have one uh small easy thing left to do, which is liaison reports and communications. Vice Mayor,

yeah, happy to jump in. I have a abbreviated list. Was lucky enough to get to celebrate a little spring break with my family with the slow coastal break that just happened. So, um I did though have an opportunity to join the slow no volunteer appreciation um parties and uh that was really lovely to get to meet all of the nurses and physicians and volunteers that make that um service work. So, that was fantastic. Uh, and then two items that I attended with, I believe, everyone here, which was the Regetti Ranch groundbreaking, which yes, finally. And Midhagera wrap party. Another major celebration. Kind of one of those um items that flies under the radar a little bit. I don't think people are quite as excited about the Midhera bypass, but man, it's going it's going to be really a gamecher, I hope, um, as far as, uh, mitigating some of the flood waters that we saw in 2022. And what an awesome celebration. So, I'll pass it on.

Thank you, Council Member Shoresman.

Uh, yes. Thank you for touching on the ribbon cutings. And then like right before our last meeting, I think was the um was the uh parking structure ribbon cutting. So, we've had like lots and lots of things to celebrate lately, which has been fun. Uh also got a chance to go to the community academy for public safety night. Uh, always a good uh, experience and love the engaged community members asking lots of good questions of our public safety uh, chiefs and uh, the Lal Loma Adobe had an open house this past weekend on Sunday. They have done so much work on that building and they have just uncovered some fascinating history. Uh they still have a ton of work to do. Uh but they have uncovered a lot and they've put floors in the building now. Um and they are they are off the grid, but they have a little bit of electricity in the building so that they can see what they're doing in some of those dark old rooms. Um so it's it's pretty fascinating. I would encourage you to try to get an opportunity to go look at that. And then yesterday, I think it was, yeah, yesterday I spoke to some students at Qua about the single vote um process. So had a group of about seven or eight students that uh had lots of great questions and their faculty adviser who had some great questions as well and they are hoping to get involved and help out with some of our voter registration activities. So I connected them with staff to do that as well. So lots of fun. Nice. Uh, Council Member Boswell.

Um, thank you. Yeah. Uh, um, let's see. What is today? Uh, last Friday I was able to, um, attend the Slow Climate Coalition's uh, strategic planning retreat. They had an all day retreat to put together their strategic plan. They're almost a little bit on parallel paths with this. Um, so that's great. Uh on April 1st, I attended the water resources advisory committee. I'm actually the alternate, but council member Marks uh wasn't here, so I attended in herstead. Um on let's see, I think we got to go back. March 19th is in play, right? March 19th was LAFCO, uh but there was no city items on it. And also on March 19th was the CAPSLow board of directors meeting. I don't have anything to report out from that. Um, also attended the Minhagara rap party and the Grey Ranch groundbreaking, which just felt so good to do. Um, and then the last thing I just want to congratulate Calpali alum Victor Glover for flying around the moon, showing us what's possible. I believe they're on day seven and on their way home. So, I wish them all safe journey. Thank you.

Thank you. Well said. I uh loved his Easter message. Um, so let's see. I know trying to think about the last two weeks. So on the 24th um went to tour the Echo um shelter in the Tascadero and their new um future homes. So uh that will be expanding their capacity which is really cool. And why am I talking about a Tascadero? It's because it's a regional issue and we are all working on you know Capslo or Haslow I'm sorry Capslo or Echo or Five Cities Homeless. we are all working on this together and trying to help um people who are unhoused to be able to find access to services and housing. I'm also looking forward to uh working on um furnishing the welcome home village tiny home with council member Shoresman and maybe a few others. I'll have a little signup genius to go out uh if people wish to um add to the home to make it uh feel homey, whether it's towels or cleaning supplies or pantry supplies, etc. Um, also I went to the Midstate Fair annual awards um last Friday and it was '8s themed because this next year is 80s theme because it's the 80th anniversary of the Midstate Fair and I I have to say it one the awards were fun and it was great to see everything but we were actually on the CMC um as a nominated for an award of all of the fairs of all of the counties throughout the US. Like that's pretty cool. We didn't win, but um the other people who were in the same category, they have like 1.2 million attendees, 1.7 million attendees, and we have in the 300,000s. So, the fact that we were in that, again, our community does some amazing things. Um can't stop talking about transportation because I was at the slow COG board meeting on April 1st. Um, one

thing to remember that, uh, I know it's not surprising, but 2028 is the Olympics in Los Angeles. So, we are continuing to work on getting that extra train. Uh, that's a big deal. Also, there will be a um, CTC will have uh, host a town hall with commissioners on September 17th through 18th. I know it feels like far away, but um, I'm pretty sure staff will be attending that in some way, shape, or form. And then we celebrated um the Avala Beach Drive roundabout from March 17th. That was a 21 $21 million project. So again, these are big projects that we're working on. Um we are going to see some pedestrian bike pedestrian and bike education popups throughout our county, not so much our city, but our county. Um and then we have some great uh activities happening for bike month. Uh, Slow Clog will of course host their normal um, uh, bike month breakfast. We also had a helpful um, conversation around the senior go project. I'm sorry, senior go program. That contract has been extended to July 1st, this uh, of 27. So that helps our seniors get access to medical appointments, grocery visits, social activities, and so much more. That was something we weren't sure if we were going to be able to extend for another year. So, that's really big deal. Um, and then on the 22nd, I just want to encourage anyone that cares at all about uh transportation, there is a slow cog workshop at 9:30 in the morning on April 22nd. So, if you'd like to go, it'll be the octagon barn. Um, and I hope you think about that. Lastly, um, there's the transportation efficiency analysis, the T. So, if you want the T, uh, look at how transportation can support housing and jobs. This is literally what we're talking about. So, as far as the um economic analysis, they'll be bringing that back on June 2nd. And so, that's at Slowcog. I know June 2nd we'll be talking about, I'm

sorry, June 3rd, we'll be talking about uh budget on June 2nd here. But I think as we're talking about how funding is going to come to us, this is really uh one of the big parts of that. So, that's enough about transportation. Thank you so much, Deputy City Manager Herman. Up to you. Thank you, Mayor and Council members. My apologies for not raising this earlier, but we were actually looking for council direction as it relates to the local government climate uh alliance and that is because that's the standard approach that cities use to sort of affirm their membership in that organization and because they're going to be taking positions on behalf of the city. It's best for us to be able to have a vote on that if possible.

Okay. I was like, we all said yes, we're good to go. I will make the motion for us to join the local government climate alliance. There is a second. Uh, Council Member Schwarzman. I'll second it. Great. Any public comment? No. All right. Can we have roll call? Mayor Stewart, yes. Council member Shoresman, yes. Council member Boswell, yes. Vice Mayor Francis, yes.

And the vote passes for zero. Thank you so much for that. Uh, and with that, we will say good night and uh, see you all on Friday for our next ribbon cutting. and then we'll see you back uh I believe on April 21st here in the chambers at 5:30. Have a good night.