City Council - Regular Meeting

All right. It is my honor to call to order this special meeting of the Santa Paula City Council for Wednesday, August 19th at 4.30 p.m. And Council Member Chavez, would you lead us in the flag salute?

Sure, please do. Put your right hand over your heart. Ready, begin.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Thank you. And Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Yes.

We need to change those signs around there. It says you're Leslie. I usually look at the signs when I call roll, so we don't want people thinking the wrong people. Here. Council Member Chavez. Here. Council Member Cornejo. Here. Vice Mayor Crosswhite. Here. And we have Council Member Ornelas absent at the time of roll call, and we will mark her what time she comes in. And also Mayor Juarez is out this evening as absent.

Thank you. At this time, members, we have a public comment for items appearing on this agenda. Are there any members of the public who want to speak on the growth item for the agenda?

Not on growth, but I saw 3A.

We'll be back at 530. Or at 530, we'll take... Oh, I thought those were at 432.

No, 3A is on the...

on the 5.30 agenda.

Okay, I'll go get some dinner then.

All right, we'll see you back at 5.30, unless you want to learn about city growth.

Oh yeah, that was my prior career, so maybe you'll hang around.

It's up to you. But we'll take the public comments on that item at 5.30. All right, so if there's no public comments for this item, then we will begin with the staff presentation. Mr. Mason, are you taking it away?

Yes, thank you, Vice Mayor and Council. So this really is a discussion, it's really intended to provide a community-wide look at how development, planning for capital improvements, and funding kind of interweaves together within the city planning process and provide an overview of that. This afternoon we have myself, Community and Economic Development Director. We have the Planning and Economic Development Manager, Tom Tarantino. Bob Woodward, our consulting city engineer, and our Parks and Rec director, Greg Barnes, and our police chief.

I forgot his name.

Don Aguilar. Sorry, Don. So to be able to answer any questions. What I would like, we've got a short amount of time. We'd like to kind of go through the presentation and save questions. I think a lot of the questions may get answered throughout that, but it'll be ensured that we have time to have some discussion. So really the elements that we want to talk about is the general plan 2040, which is a 20-year comprehensive plan for the city. New development. capital improvement program, infrastructure funding, and how economic development and service delivery play into that model. And really, the basic question is, how do we make sure that growth strengthens the community rather than simply adds demands to an existing system? It is not. I'll turn it on and off.

It might be because I opened up the zoom on the screen.

So the question is not whether Santa Paula will grow, but whether infrastructure and economic opportunity can keep pace with that growth. So we're really talking about planning for growth, funding that future, and sustaining that delivery. We have a lot of residential growth happening right now, Residents require the housing, but it also impacts roads, transportation, water, wastewater infrastructure, parks, police, and long-term maintenance. But it also provides opportunities through increased opportunities for retail based on rooftops and disposable income, and also job growth. And we'll talk about how all those things work together. And our goal is to work through those things intentionally to bring better quality of life and community vitality. So growth clearly is underway. Santa Paula is experiencing significant residential and commercial employment related growth across the city. And from a community-wide perspective, we want to look at this rather than just project by project. Because when we look at the general plan, when we look at the capital improvement program, when we look at funding, we're looking at a whole city and how it works together. So we really want to start off with the general plan because it's a long-term growth framework for the city. It's a statutory requirement that cities are required to do. And it also outlines all the different areas of city development. So when we look at our general plan elements, we've got land use, circulation and mobility, housing element, conservation and open space, noise, safety, economic development, downtown development, public services and utility elements. So those all are the lens that we look through as we plan for the city over a 20 year period. So the sunset for this general plan is 2040. The land use that we have as far as zoning and land use within the city outlines how these things need to be developed within the city and define our capital improvement plan and how we fund to make sure that we keep up with the development that we plan for. We're on pace with what the expectations are within our general plan. I think the only caveat to that is we're growing a little bit faster than we thought, but the land use that's being used is matching what our general plan planning was. So as I mentioned, it connects the projects to the capital improvement plan and how we make our budget decisions. Growth, I already mentioned this, is from a community-wide perspective. We want to make sure that we're looking at the whole city. This is really what I wanted to focus on just as we're talking about how the system works. In the middle of all of this, we're talking about the quality of life for our community and community vitality on all different levels, economically, financially, environmentally. But initially, we're in a large phase of residential growth right now. And that will help to bring on employment growth and retail commercial growth now keeping in mind those things will happen naturally but we're also working actively talking to developers to brokers and end users to bring in businesses and bring in retail that'll match we have a big shift in our demographic both in disposable income and in growth which is going to help stimulate those two things but with having employment growth and retail commercial growth also provides for revenue growth it provides funding through sales tax, property tax, and purchase of goods and services within the city that provide more service and infrastructure, and that cycle continues. And then the next fact is urban growth affects our operating services as well as capital infrastructure, public safety, emergency preparedness, fiscal sustainability, and opportunities for economic development. We recognize that as we have more rooftops, those rooftops require more services, and not just physical services, but also infrastructure services. We have multiple major development projects underway right now, residential, commercial, industrial. We're going to go through some of these growth areas in two ways. One, to look at what are the projects that are either happening or on the horizon, and then how does that look like from the standpoint of where the opportunities are for improvements to capital projects. A lot of those are stimulated by those developments. They have off-site requirements, of street, curb, gutter, sidewalk, water, sewer, storm drain is associated with those projects. So a lot of the development that we haven't had has created a little bit of an impasse for the city to grow in these areas. So this development's also helping stimulate that, both with the funding we're getting and with the investment that the private sector's putting into this. I'll turn it over to Tom to talk about some of these projects. Thank you, James.

Yeah, I've got an enviable task of walking everybody through all of the current development projects going on in town. This isn't a comprehensive list. We put this map together to sort of illustrate that in large part the major developments are located on the east and the west ends of town. There are, you'll see a smattering in the middle. Most of those are small residential, single family residential projects up on the hillside here. And then some smaller projects, just small commercial projects in the middle of town. But the big boys are on either end, the east or west end. We'll run through these quickly. I know you guys are relatively familiar with them, but for folks at home that may be watching this later on, we'll give sort of a brief insight. And we'll kind of work from the west and go clockwise around. So starting with the Santa Paula West Business Park, that's 54 acres that were annexed into the city. ready to go in terms of development. It just needs interested folks. So the specific plan is set up for limited commercial, for manufacturing, research and development, professional offices, that kind of thing. We are not focused on any kind of residential in that area, per the specific plan. Nearby, at the former Kmart site, is the Heritage Townhomes project. It is 213 units, affordable and market rate. That project is in a bit of transition. We're not quite sure where it's going to go from this point, but it is fully approved. But again, the developer is... Again, it's in transition. So moving on, and I forgot to mention that the pink parcels on this map are projects that are under construction or approved. The blue parcels on the map are projects that are proposed for development but have not yet been approved. But they are fairly far along in the process. The Topa Vista Villas project by Homes and Hope. It's 90 units, 100% affordable. It's right here. The three large parcels across from the Vons complex next to Teague Park on Harvard Boulevard. Again, moving on. clockwise. We've got the 1400 East Santa Paula Street, the associates and secretary parcels. We've got proposed residential for there. That's largely going to be a ministerial approval per state law. But that is 113 units affordable market rate. Next to that on the United Rentals site proposed is at 1450 East Santa Paula Street is 168 units. And that is 100% affordable project. Again, ministerial per state law. Moving into harvest, harvest EA1, phase 3, the large parcel here we call Santa Paula Creek, that's 489 units that are approved. Harvest east area phase 2 is the remainder of the foothill section of the project. That'll total out at 554 units. These are residential units, obviously. Harvest EA1 phase 2 independence, that's the parcels here at the bottom that we converted into 298 units with 6,800 square feet of retail. And then the potential Ventura County Health Care Agency site, I believe that's 26 acres in this area. Now, what ends up happening with that site based on the meeting earlier this week. We'll see. But it is envisioned for that medical, whatever medical ends up there, and then offices supporting that, some medical offices, some commercial, a hotel, and fast food. The Santa Paula East Shopping Center on Telegraph and Halleck right here was approved at the end of June. They have their CUP. They'll be coming back to the council for their map by the end of the year. That is a grocery and hardware anchored complex. It also features a smaller retail and fast food for a total of 88,000 square feet of commercial. Next to it, the Citrus Flats, Arrive Santa Paula Apartments Project that we've all watched come up off of the 126. That is 298 affordable and market rate units right here next to the shopping center. And then continuing back to the west, we have the Santa Maria Industrial Park that's 10 acres, and then the Bender and Todd Lane Industrial Building that we've watched come up off of the 126 as well, the big concrete building on the west end. So those are our current projects, and we do want to just remind everyone that there is an active projects interactive map on the city website where you can go and get all of these details and more at any time. The address is here on the bottom of the slide. You can go through and click on any of those projects, and it brings up... enhanced information about it. There's photos, plans, staff reports, pretty much everything that we have on those projects is on that site. So that's my section. Are we handing it off to Bob?

Well, good afternoon. Moving on to everyone's favorite public works projects, capital improvement projects. I won't spend a lot of time on the PMP. This gets a lot of attention, and we're really excited that things are moving quick this year. So we've mapped this out roughly over a three- to five-year period, and noting the funding that we've got available to continue to put gas in that engine, the Measure T funding, We'll sunset, I believe, in 2035, but we'll get a lot of work done before it sunsets. Transportation projects. We've highlighted some of our bikeway projects in green. We've got both the east and west sides of what we're calling our crosstown bikeway identified. We are at roughly 70% drawings on the bikeway segments. And we're essentially reviewing some of the detail and some of the costs currently and making some determinations on that as we look to move forward. There's a few layers of discussions on those regarding what we do for lighting and what we do for security on some of the more remote stretches of bike path. But essentially what we've laid out will roughly double our 1.9 miles of bikeways. We've also got our developer-driven improvements, which are our Santa Paula Street improvements, 12th Street improvements, as well as the Santa Paula Creek Bridge, which is currently under construction. There are other projects on Santa Paula Street. We just kind of made a general list. note regarding those are some of the perspective improvements along that stretch. There is some overlap between the proposed Santa Paula Street improvements from LLCB with our bikeway improvements along Santa Paula Street. Given that we're likely going to be seeing more of a fair share payment rather than actual improvements, it gives us some flexibility in how we kind of allocate those improvements and dollars. In terms of development impact fee funded projects, our roundabout project as well as our telegraph widening, are both noted there as well. State Route 150 obviously is a Caltrans-driven project that's kind of taken on a life of its own, moving slow. But fortunately, the slowness has allowed us to integrate our three intersections that we'll be doing, crosswalk improvements as part of our safety crosswalks, integrating those with the Caltrans project. We'll be bringing those back to you probably next month in terms of approval for the Caltrans co-op agreement and granite construction. A few others around town. We've got the Pet Cal Pipe road extension, which Bender will be doing. That's a developer project. a driven developer constructed improvement, so there's no cost to the city on that. In terms of some of our East Area 2 that Tom was referring to in terms of the hospital project, we've been seeing some secondary access issues to that Lemonwood industrial area. Fire departments brought it to our attention as well. We are projecting a ways out there, a bridge over the lower portion of Santa Paula Creek at Lemonwood, essentially an extension of Lemonwood that will connect Santa Clara and Lemonwood, provide a secondary access to that community. We're going to look to do a little bit of conceptual work, so at least we have a basis for estimating costs, and then ideally have something that we can go and start shopping for funding, probably federal funding on that. It's a skinnier stretch than the current Santa Paula Creek Bridge that's under construction, so we think we may be able to use even a precast bridge to span that, which would drastically improve speed as well as reduce cost. Examples of what we're doing currently, we've got a roundabout project as an example. We're at 70% plans that M&S, now BKF, is working on. We're working through some of the details, primarily of the driveway accesses to the respective commercial properties around it. And we'll likely be coming back to council for some direction on some of the landscape improvements, city monumentation, identifiers, that type of thing. We're going to have some internal discussions, likely with Greg Barnes and his parks staff, to look at some of those softer improvements, as well as look at some of the geometric improvements that we need to do for the roundabout. This is the designs funded by Diffies, who will likely be looking for some grant funding for actual construction, and maybe with some seed money in Measure T as well. Further down, telegraph widening. We're looking at widening the south side as well as the north side. The right-of-way that we have varies from 60 feet to 100 feet, so it's a bit variable. So we're looking at how we can get as much improvement as we can within the right-of-way we have without having to do drastic right-of-way acquisition. We know it's difficult and it's time-consuming. So that's currently what the effort is, is looking at what we can get done within our current right-of-way. But that's a typical section there of what we're looking at in terms of construction. Again, funded by DIF fees for design. The good news is because we have development coming in on the south side, a portion of that widening has already been constructed with the Santa Paula Shopping Center. We'll have more that will be constructed as well And that's the shopping center is the lower view there. So they'll be widening a good portion of that portion of Telegraph on the south side down to Halleck. There will be a small piece there just on the left-hand side that We'll have to figure out a way to make that continuous so that we have a continuously widened south side by the time the shopping center comes in. Citrus Flats already completed their widening, which is the northern portion there as well. So we have some help from the developers on this one in terms of actually constructed improvements, which really helps save the city some cost. Halleck 126 interchange currently under construction. The green portions are the improvements, the widened portions, additional turn lanes or lanes with more capacity in terms of some of the turn pockets. We're adding acceleration lanes on both the westbound and eastbound side. Those are the ones with the drop arrows on the lanes. So a bit more capacity. The intersection should function much better. And we also have more room for vehicle stacking there, especially with the left-hand eastbound 126 turning to northbound Halleck. They'll have quite a bit more capacity in those turnpockets. Water improvements, projects going on all over town, a good portion of them are developer-funded and built, including the East Area 1 improvements. The development team with LLCB is adding a 20-inch water main as we're crossing the bridge. over Santa Paula Creek. That will feed into the future crosstown pipeline. We've broken crosstown into two pieces, crosstown phase one, which is the current crosstown project that has plans and specs. We're working with EPA, who's providing the federal funding, to complete some of the federal environmental clearances. That'll help us to get that project out to bid. at least for the phase one, and then we'll look to get under design on phase two. Phase two will take us from Caltrans SR-150 to what's going to be the termination point at the west end of the bridge. So we'll have a way to tie together the 3 million gallon tank in East Area 1, the Gooding tank on the west side of town, as well as the central reservoir, which is up on the hill. The idea is once we tie those together, we can decommission the 120-year-old Redwood Central Reservoir and have a more modern and efficient system. Other water projects are kind of called out around town. We have some small improvements to some of our tank sites, access road improvements. Park Orchard is currently under construction. Water system replacement as well as some sewer improvements. Canyon Booster just got completed a little while ago, and the Case Tank access road is being planned for improvement. That was washed out actually in the 2023 floods. And with that, I will turn it over to Greg Mons or James.

The key point I kind of wanted to stress here is that there's a long-term cost of growth and service delivery. And residents expect, in fact, they move here for specific reasons, and they expect to have those services. So we consider the impacts of growth as the general plans put together, as the capital improvement plans put together to understand where the needs are. And a lot of things, just as a side note, are statutory requirements from the state. One of the things we've dealt with so much is residential. And as affordable residential and residentials built, there's a lot less restrictions. So we've had to make adjustments in a lot of what we've done. But Let's talk quickly on, I guess, police, public safety, and parks and rec. And if there's any questions, we can have our directors speak directly to that. But additional population and activity can clearly increase demand for police. Employment and commercial growth also does the same thing. And one of the reasons why economic development really matters, because we have a certain amount of revenue that can come in, but as we have that growth, There's always going to be a lag. As a city, as we have growth, we'll have residential growth. The commercial growth and job growth will always lag a little bit behind that. But that's our goal, to be able to help maintain that momentum. So as we have people move here, We're attracting more people both in tourism and in employment so that we don't have as much leakage. Leakage being defined as loss of revenue either in sales tax or in employment and keeping more of the funding here. And then same thing with parks and recreation. growth demands more needs for services and parks for our community. And one thing that we have provided within the development agreement with Harvest is a parks facilities plan where we have funding coming in to be able to help support both the operation of what we have as a park, but also expansion into the phase two of the park. And I guess a key message I wanted to really put out is we should not measure the success of our growth only by the number of units or square feet constructed. We've got a lot going on. It really comes back to the middle of that circle, which is what is our community vitality and the quality of life for our residents. We have a lot of physical things we do and a lot of policy things we do. But at the end of the day, everything we do is to serve the community and provide a better quality of life for what they have. I think that's it for now. We've got a lot of information in just a short time, so I just wanted to kind of hopefully keep it closer to 30,000 feet and give you time for your questions.

All right. Are there questions from council? Council Member Cornejo.

It's a 30,000 feet.

level question when you do your general general plan how often do you update it and how often are we required to do it excellent general plan is required to be done every 20 years we are 2040 is the end of this cycle we'll begin start beginning in the next 18 months on working on the journal plan again Within that general plan is a housing element which has an eight year cycle and that defines what our housing requirements are both in market rate and affordable for the community.

Thank you.

Other questions? Council Member Chavez.

Thank you. Thank you, Council, for supporting this coming to the agenda because I think it's important for our community to have this big picture of what's happening. There's obviously multiple layers of the onion, right? So your staff and your team did a great job on putting together the growth in terms of housing. Do we have any data or projections on job creation or industries that are coming here or facilities that are being built that we can project where we're going in terms of job creation?

We do have kind of anecdotal data. We haven't really put together a chart or anything, which I think would be really helpful to kind of look at a dashboard from that standpoint. Probably the biggest opportunity we have, which is also kind of our challenge, is that we've got over 200,000 square feet of industrial building space available right now, which in a county where industrial space is at a dearth, we're in a really good spot. It just needs to be marketed really well. I know all the brokers that represent all those buildings and we're in weekly conversations with different tenants. As far as specific areas, most of what we're seeing is more mechanical things, advanced manufacturing, Things related to the oil industry and agriculture. But I mean, opportunity on some of these buildings that we have, I would love to move into something that's maybe a little more advanced manufacturing and business services.

Even if it's just a projection between a low and a high of what that would look like, for instance, Bender Industrial Building. If there are six units and those are light manufacturing, what's the potential job creation that could be generated from that facility itself? The other part of this question is, in terms of these housing developments, it'd be helpful to know what that does to population growth. And so, for instance, you have 168 units, 113 units. I think it'd be great to have an average projection of what the population growth would look like with all this developed, yeah.

Could I piggyback on that? My count was about 2,300-ish units that are coming on. So what would be the average occupancy? I know they're different. They're big homes, there are apartments, there are condos. Roughly, what's the average occupancy for those?

About 2.75.

2.75, okay. So we're talking probably 7,000 increase in population then coming up pretty quickly, which is why we need to talk about infrastructure too, so yeah.

The one thing I will say, though, is with some of those units, it's one of the things that we're finding across the region is that people are spreading out. Because right now, it's families living with their parents, living with their grandparents. And I know of one family, for example, that just moved into the new development on Telegraph. And they finally, for the first time in their 30s, are moving out with their kids into their... first apartment. So there will be some people that come to live in those units, but there also will be people that spread out. So I wonder if there's maybe a formula. It might be interesting to find out if there's a formula to kind of figure out how much of it is people who are moving out, spreading out, as opposed to increasing the number of people.

I mean, just I think what we've seen as far as numbers in harvest has been in the 70% range, people coming from outside the region. What we're seeing in the multifamily is around 40% of the people from within this community. And I had mentioned to council before, but what we're doing with everything new that's coming on the market We're advertising and marketing it to the community before it gets out to the general public. So that we actually have an opportunity for a Santa Paula preference, exactly what Councilmember Crosswhite said. We have families that are doubled and tripled up, and it's an opportunity for people to move out.

I think also there's also the reverse of that. Because of affordability, you have more people living in a home than normally. Because of the cost of living, interest rates, the market, et cetera, et cetera. But I know in terms of the affordable units, there's a limit on who can live in those apartments. That's an easier way to formulate that. But I think we have to be a little creative on how we're going to come up with this projected number. Because if it ties into attracting you know retail for instance or new industries we want to be able to showcase that information and that's kind of what the point of all this was was how do we take all this data all this information package it up in a ribbon so that we can say this is what Santa Paula has to offer in terms of attracting businesses and industry knowing that we have housing knowing that we have real estate property that can be developed that's vacant for the most part that we can really kind of reshape and attract new businesses. Maybe people are paying more rent in Thousand Oaks and we can attract the business to come here to Santa Paula. So looking at all those options, the one thing that I think you mentioned at the start of the conversation was How do these all things interconnect, for instance? And this came about when you did a presentation regarding the new Citrus Flats, right? And they had a projected date of November, and they, ta-da, they're ready in June. So we started seeing activity, which more vehicles, traffic, the street hasn't been developed yet. How do we work across departments so that when these occupancies come into play, we're better prepared. And I'm just looking forward a little bit, and we see harvest, for instance, 554 units here, phase two, 489. But when is the occupancy of those going to happen? Because if the bridge is not here, then what is that going to do when there's only one exit, right? And the whole traffic, how do we put our heads together to mitigate that?

There's two pieces of that. One is, as I mentioned before, there'll always be a little bit of lag. Always. Generally, there'll be a little bit of lag just because developers are going to be responsible for many offsite improvements that will improve the areas around them. But the other thing is, specifically to harvest, there is a trigger of the number of houses that they're going to be allowed to build until that bridge goes in. So they're capped at another 250 units. So based on their current kind of speed of development and getting certificate of occupancies, we're right on track with that. And if that doesn't pan out, then they'll just have to stop until that happens. But we're looking at next spring for the bridge, and that lines up with where we are as far as projections.

And in terms of safety, for instance, the neighborhoods are increasing in population. How are we preparing to budget that? so that we can have sufficient officers on duty to deal with the increase of population.

If you flip back to that chart, as you see there, it's not until step four that the city starts to see the impacts of the growth. And the revenues that accompany it then support step five, which is delivery of more services, the hiring of more parks maintenance staff because you've just doubled your park space or you're doubling your trail space. Or you're building more roads or water infrastructure requiring more people. Obviously public safety when you're annexing another 250 acres, I think, or is it 550 acres? Whatever the harvest is, it's a lot, right? It's going to represent more than 20% of the rooftops of our entire community. And you can't not have police services and public safety services. But those kind of come at the tail end. And so we're kind of in that growth spurt, that growing pain that comes with seeing the homes realized, seeing the people starting to visit our restaurants, visit our shops, generate more sales tax, buy things on Amazon. And our revenues are increasing, our property tax values are increasing. at a higher pace than most of our cities around the region. And that will enable us, it will give us the tools, especially with Measure R and Measure T, to be able to offer those additional services that we talk about. Those are decisions the Council will be intimately involved with as you approach your next budget cycle and then the one after that. And it's a challenge because we still have limited resources and staffing levels, especially for police, are expensive. So there's always some of that balance. But that's really where the service levels will increase. When you went into this current budget, for example, we recognized we were going to be inheriting a lot more water infrastructure. in the two years we're in, not in five years from now. And so we asked the council to add water staff, and you've done that. We're coming to you, in fact, probably next month or no later than October with some reorganizing in the water department because it's growing so much. We also now need more management and supervision, not just boots on the ground. And so those are some of the growing pains that you go through. But as your strategic plan lays out, we're finishing up a draft. In fact, Amina will report that on tonight's agenda when she updates the strategic plan. We're finishing up a draft of a staffing plan. That was something the council asked for over a year ago. did the strategic plan so we anticipate bringing that to you before the end of the year so that it will be kind of a starting point for budget discussions next year because it'll help us it'll help to highlight where it is we need more resources spent which ultimately becomes a council decision

And I think we were talking about this previously in particular to a formula. I don't know where that formula came from regarding population versus how many officers, for instance. Can you share a little bit about that background?

That was in the 2030 general plan and that formula was 1.25 officers per capita or per 1,000 population. So that figure comes out to about 37 point whatever officers. And how many do we have now? We have about 28 now. Our full allocation allowance is 32. So we're off several officers for the current population.

And I would also just add that the sworn officer staffing level we've had has been pretty much stagnant for at least 20 years, maybe even closer to 30 years, the late 80s, 90s. Now, the community hasn't grown much until about three or four years ago. So that stagnation was understandable. But now with the growth that we're seeing, it's time to take a close look at that.

And then my last question, and I'll just end with this one. How do we get to prioritize certain things over others? For instance, since there's going to be more, the roundabout in particular I'm talking about, it's that whole corridor there, it's going to be a mess. If you're talking about retail, you're talking about new housing, One act said the bridge isn't done. Are there things that you think that we need to prioritize like that, that we need to figure out how to move funds or et cetera, et cetera?

I mean, I think the short answer is yes. I was flabbergasted, as Mr. Woodward knows, two years ago when I learned that there weren't plans for telegraph road widening. How is this even possible? How was this overlooked with the development agreement with LLCB to not have that be a core part? And I think it was because between the Halleck intersection and the bridge, everyone figured people were going to go those two directions and forgot that there was going to be another significant east and west corridor going down to Main Street, going down to our parks, and aligning with both Red Tail and the shopping center. so we're a little late to the game on that we are we'll have a final design to the council this year but we don't have all the funding in place so we can't go from having you approve a design to putting it out to bid until we line that funding up we have some pieces of it and as mr woodward noted you know we have measure our monies or measure team monies it may require us to say If the council says this is a higher priority than the third cycle of the PMP, let's push that off for six or 12 months because we need to shift that money over here. So those are some of the considerations that will need to be made with any time your budget is smaller than your needs.

You have to shift priority. And the sooner we know that, the better, right? So once those plans come in, then we will make a decision.

Which I think brings up a good question that Mr. Woodward can answer. When we get the final design for the roundabout, Telegraph Road and the bike trail, will it be accompanied by engineer estimates of cost?

We're already seeing some engineering estimates of cost. We have not gotten to that point on Telegraph. But we're beginning to see them with some of the other projects. Typically by the time we're at 70% we're seeing preliminary estimates, which is at least a good starting point to give us a sense of order of magnitude of what we need to be thinking about in terms of budgetary allocations. And I think that informs that conversation about how do we trade things off? What do we do first? How do we maximize? developer improvements, developer contributions to at least get to, even on Telegraph, some level of sanity sooner. Even if we can't quite get that full spectrum, all the bike lanes and everything that's maybe the ultimate, maybe there's a near term that we look at that eases some of the stress out there because the traffic backups are horrendous right now.

And will that be part of what's studied as sort of how we could phase it, or right now is it just the full design?

We are actually beginning a traffic study to look at, as we've gotten to a point in the telegraph widening design, we've realized that the full widening will require a right-of-way acquisition, which we know already is very time-consuming. So we're doing a traffic study to see if perhaps with the eastbound being very heavy and needing more storage, maybe we look at two eastbound lanes, a single westbound lane that will all fit well within the right of way we have and give us a little bit of relief in the near-term traffic conditions. but we need some technical studies to support that determination. So that's some of the fuel that we're looking to gather, and that's one of the reasons why that hasn't moved as fast as we'd like it to. The other piece is with the developer components. We don't want to blow past them. We want them to have a chance to make their improvements, so we're not having to do that. in advance of them. So a little bit of that is making sure they do their part in that as well.

And then for that project in particular, um, for the power line, for the power poles that will need to be moved, at what point does that get triggered and how does that Edison's responsibility? Is that our responsibility in that project? How does that work?

It's a city responsibility to request that of Edison. Edison will, under their franchise agreement, move the poles if we need them to be moved slightly north out of our way, if they are in our way. But they'll only move them so far. So if we need to acquire right-of-way or easement, they'll only move them so far. And if we say put them underground, obviously that's a different cost picture as well.

Thank you. Two questions on that. Did we not already participate in a program that would help put some of those cables or lines underground? I know that the telegraph was one option and that was the more favorable because it's going to be under construction for these projects versus doing 10th Street. So is that something that's already in the works or we're too late to the show?

So the last presentation that we made, the preference that we heard was that 10th Street would have the focus in terms of the undergrounding. One of the things that we're seeing as we're getting feedback from Edison as they're beginning to do their own cost estimating is of the three or four locations on 10th Street, they can afford to do maybe one of those with the money that we currently have.

so there may be there may be a place to come back to council and say maybe what is the best use of those limited funds so i think that would be where we would maybe look to come back yeah as i recall i think the direction was that that if 10th was the priority but if it wasn't workable or affordable the telegraph would be a logical one that now i'm remembering better how that discussion went my other question or asking for clarification is on the page where you're showing the 126 and all the work that's being done there. Can you describe better for public what is our responsibility and what is state responsibility for the work that's being done there?

So the improvements are entirely a developer funded improvement. It's a traffic impact mitigation that LLCB is completing for that intersection. So they are essentially a developer driven improvement within Caltrans right away. So Caltrans has oversight of it. They got to review it. They got to tell the developer's engineer specifics of how they could do things. But it will be a city improvement in Caltrans right away.

Okay, thank you. All right. We just have a couple of minutes left. Are there any other questions? Yes.

Just real quick, to make this even more powerful tool, could you enhance it by adding the estimated completion date so we have an idea where things are going to be falling in terms of their projections?

And you're talking on the actual development? Okay. I did want to say two things really quickly. One is that it's kind of stated within this last discussion, and that's what we deal with is in somewhat of an organic nature. We have external developers that come in. We don't know when they're going to come in, what they're going to ask for. And, you know, you've got Kmart on one side, which has been four and a half years, and then we have Redtail, who kicked it around in under 20 months. So it's interesting. The other thing I wanted to appreciate what you said, Councilmember. Chavez, that we have an opportunity here to provide information that will help market the city and grow. But probably the most powerful source, powerful group to get that information are our local residents because they're going to be our best marketers. If they can talk about the city and know the things that are happening here, they can help promote. And, you know, there's a lot of misinformation going around. Anyway, thank you.

All right. Well, thank you for all this information. There's a lot more conversations that we'll be having on this topic as things develop. And so the more that we can get information out about the projects and our progress on them, I think that'll be helpful for the public to see that we're some of these areas that are right now pain points that we're planning for them and talking about them. So thank you for this presentation. With that, I will close the special meeting and then we'll go from there.

Several years ago, the residents of the city passed Measure T, which was to promote public safety, roads and youth. Just recently, as you know, the residents also voted for Measure R. This will improve and increase the ability for