Art in Public Places Committee (Through Sept 2021) - Regular Meeting

Right. On.

Thank you. Hi, good evening, everyone. It's just after 5.30 on Wednesday, July 22nd. I'd like to call to order the Community Advisory Board. Can you please explain how public comment will be heard at today's meeting?

I would do so. So thank you, Chair Rodriguez. Welcome, board members, panel members, members of the public. Thank you for joining us today in person and via Zoom. This meeting is being recorded. As a reminder to all present, please set your cell phones so as not to disturb others. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to providing a safe and inclusive environment, free from disruption, and we will not tolerate hateful speech or actions. Everyone is expected to participate respectfully, or if necessary, the meeting will end immediately. We provided a hard copy of the agenda. They're out there on the table in the front. Please feel free to use one to follow along. After an agenda item has been presented, the chair will ask for members for their comments or questions. And then immediately following their discussion, the chair will open the item for public comment. If you are attending in person and wish to comment, you will be called on when the agenda item is open for public comment. At that point, let me indicate, you can raise your hand if you like, that you would like to comment. And I will call on you one by one until we get you up and ready to make a public comment. You'll be asked if you wish to state your name for the record. Each public comment is limited to three minutes, and the courtesy timer, which I have right here, you can see it, will appear right here. It's right there. If you do not have a comment, but you wish to ask questions relevant to the jurisdiction of this board, there are also forms located at the entrance of the conference room. Please complete the form and leave it with me after the meeting, and the staff liaison will address your questions appropriately prior to the next scheduled meeting. Our meeting format is integrated to allow members of the public who are using Zoom to view and listen to the meeting. Any email comments that were received by the deadline will have been included and uploaded into the agenda prior to the start of today's meeting. Emails received are not read into the record.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. Do we have any CAD members who have notified you of remote participation under the just clause provision?

Chair Rodriguez, we have no board members who have notified me of necessity for remote participation. Thank you. Can I have a roll call, please? Okay. We'll do a roll call for attendance. Member Mondale? Present. Member Knowles? Present. Member Dalton? Present. Vice Chair Freitas? Here. And Chair Rodriguez? Present. Let the record show that all members are present except for Member Diaz, who is absent this evening.

Thank you very much. We now move into public comment. I have four states at this time. Any person's major matters not listed on the agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the board. Each speaker will be allowed three minutes. So we'll... Get ready for that.

Okay.

All right. I did see Dwayne pop up and raise his hand first. It looks like we have two.

I'm going to stand over here so these folks can all see me. I don't like to talk behind anyone's back.

Hold on real quick, Dwayne.

Let me get... We're now going to take public comments for item four. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. I have a timer right here. And if you wish to make a comment on this item, of course, you could raise your hand. I'll move down the room this way until I get everybody that wants to make a public comment. So, Dwayne, you can state your name for the record if you so choose.

We started on the left. All right. My name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. And I've come tonight because for over 30 years, I've been coming to various meetings such as the Community Action Team, which is now evolved, if you will, into what we call the Community Advisory Board. And over the years, I've noticed that they've started to give away some monies and that the monies have basically been attractive to some larger, more organized groups. The original idea was that we would be helping small neighborhood situations where people who were especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods would get an opportunity to perhaps have a little capacity building. They call it social capital. And it would be a way to be helpful to these communities that were trying to participate in the public policy decision-making process. Well, I've noticed for a number of years now, lots of money has been going to really well-off neighborhoods. And it's kind of saddening to those of us from the wrong side of the tracks over in those disadvantaged neighborhoods where we're not seeing how do you get that stuff? How do you make these things work for Roseland?

And I should clarify for folks where Roseland is. A lot of you may not know.

It's to the north of Hearn Avenue. Hearn Avenue runs parallel to Highway 12, which is 1.2 miles to the north of it. All right. So it's real basic. And that Hearn Avenue boundary, Roseland. Everything in the south of Hearn Avenue is Bellevue. And that's the way it's always been. And there's school districts with those boundaries. I didn't make them up. I'm just a guy that grew up in Roseland and was told, hey, that's how it is. So I come here to speak with you today because I specifically want you to begin to rein in how you give out the money. and do not give money to large organizations such as junior college groups, such as library groups. These guys got capital. They're not broke, all right? And it should be the kind of thing where schools and libraries, governmental organized groups should work within their own budget. They've already got some dollars over there. This money that you use for what you call community improvement grants should go to neighbors in areas that need some help, all right? So as my time lines down here, I'll tell you that I've been asking for rocks, basic rocks, but I found out I have to be very careful because I volunteer on a board for the city of Santa Rosa, so I have to be at arm's length. In no way, shape, or form am I asking for any money to come to anything that I'm involved in. We just know we need some rocks over on Burbank Avenue to keep the traffic up out of what we call Roseland Neighborhood in a place we'd like to call Pomo Park and Preserve. Keep that in your minds, folks, all right? We do land acknowledgments now. We talk about the Pomo land, Pomo Park and Roseland. I can't stay for all the festivities. Good luck to all of you, okay?

I'm here because last month, the agenda for the community garden that wants to go into the Westgate Park, I'm opposed to it, along with my neighbors.

That's back the park on Glenbrook Drive, the north side. And we feel that changing the character and flavor of the park would have a negative effect if a community garden went in. We don't want a big shed and fencing around. You know, the park is made for kids playing soccer, having fun. And we don't want a fence with a shed. And we just feel it would not being what we, you know, bought our homes for. I've been there since 1962. My family, I'm in the family home. My father helped plant trees there. I volunteered for the new park equipment that was put in. But this community garden flyer that went around, the neighbors weren't notified. So they didn't know to attend. I just happened to see a flyer on the street post like one day. I have questions. If this garden, which we don't want, goes in, the park has recycled water. Who would pay for the water to be regular water to go to this garden? Who will pay the monthly bills for the city of Santa Rosa? Who would pay for the garbage, landfill garbage cans? Will there be liability insurance for the folks that, I guess, are going to participate or want to? Community gardens require maintenance and a lifetime of weeding, watering, and commitment. Significant time. Most people get bored with physical labor, and when it's hot out, do you think they're really going to go to this community garden to keep it going? We have large front yards, backyards. We feel on Glenbrook Drive, these people should be putting their energy into their front yard to make our property values go up, not in the parks. I mean, I'm 67 years old and I have to say I'm not as young as when I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And doing manual labor with the women that were at this meeting, would they be able to sustain this garden going on? Who do we complain to if this thing goes through, problems occur? Who will be able to use this garden?

People driving by in their cars going, ooh, I want some vegetables.

There's one block away, there's a Presbyterian church on Stony Point and 3rd that welcome participation in their garden there. Thank you. Good luck. Don't do the guard.

Other other public comments during this public comment section. Sure, you guys appears is known for the public comments. Right.

Thank you very much. That was that was item number five, which is approval of the minutes. We've had the draft minutes from our June 3rd meeting. Are there any changes or suggestions from our board?

Only as to item 7.7, it indicates that Board Member Hamzahi was a yes vote, but I believe he was absent.

Thank you. 7.7. Okay, and which Board Member?

Board Member Hamzahi.

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

And we can prove as noted. Yeah, that's great. Thank you very much. Approve is noted. We need a public comment on the minutes.

We're not taking public comments on on the minutes. Item five. Maybe I can make a public comment on this. Chair Ruggis appears to have no public comments for the Senate. Great, thank you.

Then they're approved as noted. Thank you. All right, agenda item six, which is our community improvement grant recipient reports. There are none for this meeting. Okay, so we'll move on, which is to item seven, which is our scheduled items and our presentation from Chief Crevian on the presentation of block safety. So welcome, Chief.

Great, thanks so much for having me here tonight.

And as we're getting that up, we'll just start off. Tonight, like the intent is, I'm so glad that we have such a good community presence on this because why honestly this isn't designed to be like us versus the community. Like I want to make this an educational night for me. Like as chief, like I'm in a rock and a hard place. Like how do we protect public safety in our city? How do we address like rising crime in our community? We can go through some of the stats about last year, we had 184 shootings in the city of Santa Rosa. We had 12 homicides, nine of those involved a firearm, and each one of those have extra complexities. When we look at some of the police staffing, we have less police officers today than we did in the 1990s. So at some point, it's like you have to start being able to use technology as a force multiplier but we can't build technology that our community is a trust and that we don't have that. So that's what tonight I want to be about. I'm going to give, this is designed to be a very basic presentation tonight, kind of talking about some of the biggest talking points, but I want to hear from our cab. There's our representative community from our public. I'm going to be taking some notes on some of the questions and comments, and we're going to talk about a bigger community presentation that we have involved for September that I would love to see all of you there and in really spreading the word. And as we really work, to build a program that has the trust in our community. As chief, my pledge is to hear some of the questions, some of the concerns, and see what reasonable modifications that we can make. And it's all going to be about some compromises, about how do we deal with public safety, how we deal with the greater needs across the city of Santa Rosa, but addressing all of the concerns that we have. So we'll start just by going to the first slide. And for me, my name is John Gregan. I've been a police officer for just over 27 years. I've been our chief of police for the last four years and working through. And we'll talk about kind of the history of how our program got started with it. And we'll go through some of the different cameras. So if we go to the next slide. We talked about what we really have. And I, and first of all, I guess, fundamentally is this understanding what the license plate reader is. There's different vendors out there, actually for years, they've had different versions of Vigilant was one that was big before Block. And the reality is community members understanding that there for years has been like through Vigilant where taxi cabs, tow truck, like different cars just drive around cities, capture the data and they sell those to private places and government agencies, others could just buy those. That still happens today across America. where there's a market in there. And it goes under the fundamental principle. You see sometimes like some misinformation on this of people say like, it's a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. It's actually one of the more basic law enforcement things that you have no expectation of privacy in a public place. So kind of that foundation is if someone, when we all leave the meeting tonight, if someone stands right out there on First Street and just records every single one of us with their video camera, records as we get into our car, like gets and gets our driver's license, and then goes home and puts it on social media and says, I'm creating a website for all the traffic on First Street, it's not a violation of the law. Because the Supreme Court of the United States says, if you're in an area that's open to the public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you're in your back home or your backyard, if you're in your home, if you're in a private residence, you certainly have an expectation of privacy. But if you walk into Montgomery Village today, you're going to walk by dozens of surveillance cameras and you can't object to that because you put yourself in that public place. The same thing goes for a street. So for like Courthouse Square, there've been dozens of surveillance cameras at Courthouse Square for my whole career here. Those exist because you don't have an expectation of privacy at Courthouse Square, but we can't put any city camera that would go in your backyard or go in your private business because you do have an expectation of privacy. That's one of the fundamental things. And we have people even like they call like first amendment auditors, you know, come into the, lobby of the police department and try to stir people up and record in the lobby and just saying, I have a right to record here. And we say, we train our staff. Yes, they have a right. They can have a sandwich and sit in our lobby all day long with a camera and record anyone who comes in and out, including the police officers. So that's one important thing is just to understanding that. But just because it's legal in the United States doesn't mean that we can have tighter restrictions here in our community that we say that may not meet our expectations, but it does lose a little credibility when we say it's a violation of the fourth amendment, when like we can Google that pretty easily and see that it's one of the most basic understandings of case law that under, you can look under Katz versus the United States and others, people bring up like, oh, the Carpenter case or the Jones case, those are both distinctly different. Carpenter is talking about cell phone data, So it's not a direct correlation to ALPR. Jones is talking about physically placing a GPS on a vehicle because we have that. We can get a court order and we can put a GPS on someone's car who's wanted in a serious case and we do that. Those are all cases that we have the ability to do, but those are both very distinctly different laws. Those are the main ones I bring up because I hear I get a lot of emails on this topic. And those are the ones that kind of people bring up. So we'll set some of those foundational principles, but we'll go through some of our policies and look what we have here. Another big question that I get is we have so many city budget issues right now. How in God's creation are we spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ALPR? Fair question. Last year, we cut 15 positions from the police department. If I had the choice over the ALPR or those officers, I would keep the officers. But what I can tell you today is not one dollar of general fund from the city of Santa Rosa has been used on our ALPR system. So that's another one that gets. We have two buckets that we were able to do in January of of 2024, we got our first contract. And that was through a grant from the state of California for organized retail theft. So it was just over, I took some notes here, it was just over $421,000. And that paid not only for 34 ALPR cameras, But it also paid for that, that we have to have like a valuation of like the effectiveness of those ALPR cameras. So they had a private like university who's doing like PhD grads that are doing a part of it. So that at the end of this three-year contract, we're actually gonna get that report and we'll share that with the community. And it's gonna be an examination of, How really effective are these? And did we use these grant dollars to the best use? And that one was specifically focused on organized retail theft. So they were put around different areas where we see Maine, like example, Lululemon, the last four weeks has been hit four times, each time ranging from $5,000 to $16,000 worth of merchandise. The Lululemon leggings are a little excessively expensive. So it adds it up a little bit. But those are ones that we have to deal with. And that happens at Dick's Sporting Good, REI, across the city. So those were focused on that organized retail theft lens that came. But again, all from that fund. Then secondly, we came back later the year in December of that year, 2024. And we got a federal earmark for $897,000. And it was designed toward reducing violence in our city. As we saw, we actually set that year in 2022, we had set the record for the most homicides in the history of Santa Rosa with 12 homicides. Compared to some larger cities, 12 is not astronomical. I've lived here in this community since I was 13. That's a lot for Santa Rosa. We don't have 12 homicides in our city. So it's something that we were really working toward combating. How do we, with our dipped in officers and staffing, how do we use that? So again, the federal earmark paid for that. That was 99 cameras that it brought with that. So that gave us actually a total of 133 automated license plate readers in Santa Rosa. Now, some who are really attuned will say, wait a minute, your transparency website says 129. So there's a discrepancy of four. We have 133 that are under our contract. Still to this day, four haven't been properly installed. They were going through some issues with the intersections. They have all these different complexities, but those are actually supposed to be installed in that contract. coming week so it's 133 total that we have under contract for the city of santa rosa that we have under two separate like bifurcated three-year grants so those will both be up in 2027. so that's where we're going to have more of a robust conversation in our community because we're in a contract they're already paid for at this point um so ultimately council makes they're they're the leaders who make the decisions in here but in all likelihood, we'll finish out our contracts with the 2027. Then we're gonna have to have some real community conversations about what does the future look like in 2027? We're gonna have this report back from our independent study. We're gonna be able to talk about not just anecdotally stats that I can give out as a chief, but more empirical data. What is it really looking like? And we'll come together and say, is this a contract that we want to support? The other idea is, all right, maybe it's just flock. Flock has gotten a lot of grief of not being the most trustworthy company over the years and worries about sharing with ICE, worries about out-of-state agencies using the data nefariously. Those are all questions that we can talk about. And we look at, is the idea to do another vendor that there are, like I talked about, Vigilant is one, Axon, who is like all these cameras that I'm wearing and other things are Axon. They have an ALPR platform. So that might be something that we say with our community. Is there more trust in another system other than flock? Or some, I think the answer may be, oh, no, under no circumstances do I want an ALPR camera in my community. That may be one of the responses that... We get the other one that I get a lot of community concerns, which is is not factually correct is that we never went to Council. There was never any public consideration. There was sometimes people say there was never a vote on it. We don't vote on on city operations, but it should go to council and it did go to council on multiple occasions and we could talk about some of the dates we started by going what we call the public safety subcommittee it's kind of similar to this but we meet with three council members and they represent we presented it to the public safety subcommittee of the three council members got support but talked about some of the guardrails that we want to put in place And eventually went to the full council on two occasions for both those contracts, went to council, were there for a public comment on those. In 2024, I think there just wasn't quite as much national attention on this topic and it didn't get out there, but it went through the public process just like anything else did. We also did a series of community meetings. I, when I stepped into the role as chief in 2022, we built a new five-year strategic plan for the police department and we did a bigger community meeting. We actually had probably over 85 people come out, which was a lot for a city meeting. We did it at our utilities field office. And we talked about putting in one of our pillars is like technology, not ALPR, but as a whole. And we got a lot of feedback and we talked about the, and that was one of the ways that we sought, um, I also did another community meeting, another kind of, you could say, controversial topic of drone as first responders. And that's another thing where a drone is physically can fly and do aerial surveillance as it's called and respond to the call before an officer does. So for us, it averages us just over six minutes for a police officer to get to an emergency call. Six minutes is actually a rather long time if you're calling saying, I'm getting assaulted, attacked, getting shot at. So the drone can respond in under two minutes to any location in the city of Santa Rosa, provide that aerial intelligence, let the officers know if someone's fleeing. So we did another meeting. There was certainly some privacy concerns over the drone as first responder. And we had again about 80 to 90 people came and we talked about technology, what are some of the concerns we actually live stream that one we had a couple thousand people join us online. So that was another way i'm not sure how many were from our community or from other areas that were interested so. Really working. We present it. I have what we call as a chief's community advisory board, and we're actually going to be opening that up for applications in this month. So I encourage people. I love people. I don't want just people who all who love the cops. I want people who are going to give me the critical feedback to make us a better organization. So watch for that. That's going to be coming out for opening applications. And we actually bifurcate that and have our city manager independently pick. So there's no problem. like even thought that like maybe I'm trying to keep different voices off of that. So we apply, quite honestly, we've taken everyone who's applied. So if you apply, because we don't get a huge turnout, there's 21 members who are on there. Once a month, we meet at the police department and we've discussed ALPR with them twice, where we presented to them the Jonas first responder, We presented to them. We have our independent police auditor meets directly with them. Here's their concerns. They can ask any questions. So that's another opportunity. So that's another avenue we've done. I presented to several business groups as well. I met with a group from ACLU. They had some concerns over the program. So I met with them. We discussed the surveillance ordinance idea. Jim Duffy is passionate on this topic, if anyone works with him. And so he's talked to me directly. I met with an attorney from the ACLU. I've met with the Clean Committee, if you're familiar with them, for some law enforcement oversight. I've met with our independent police auditor. We have OIR group. We've discussed this topic many times. So there has been a lot of layers of community engagement. I think, quite honestly, it's one of the things, like with many things in law, society we live in, there just wasn't a whole lot of awareness or care about it until recently when we see some changes federally, when we see some perhaps lack of trust in local law enforcement, even more so at the federal level, that really brought more attention. So quite honestly, I see it's an opportunity for us to say, all right, we started this program in 2024. It wasn't so much of a concern. We're hearing things. How do we continue to build a program that I, that I, my talk today is going to be like, I believe it has safety benefits for the city, but like, how do we build something working together as a community address some of the concerns I would love to hear from community members on what are cities that are doing it right. And, and maybe have made some things and, and, You've seen sort of the surveillance ordinance. You've seen cities move away from that. Both San Diego and San Francisco started surveillance ordinance actually pulled back from them and said they weren't being effective for their communities. Another one, I mean, we all know like the city of Berkeley is known to have pretty liberal views on their things. Berkeley just kind of like split the baby that they were trying to expand their program. They were trying to add a Jonas first responder program. I know their chief and I talked to her. about it, and Berkeley ended up saying, we're not gonna expand it, but we're gonna leave your existing program in place. And that just went to their council about six weeks ago. San Francisco, another community that has really diverse thoughts in their community about public safety, they're building one of the bigger systems here in California with drone as first responders as well. with an extremely robust ALPR program. So we're seeing how some cities are doing it and Oakland, and Oakland's another one that I spoke to the former chief about that one. And that was one where Oakland, I mean, the crime is at a much higher level, but you had organizations like the NAACP of Oakland coming out as a loud supporter of ALPRs there and talking about what they see, the impacts it's having for public safety in the Oakland community. I've had conversations with RNAACP, Kirsten and I talk on a regular basis. They're certainly not at a point to come out and support the LPR program. And I've met with her through the clean as well to kind of get those inputs. But I cover that mainly to when I hear the talking points of, this has never been discussed in this community. This never went to city council. And just to kind of factually say, that's not correct. And we've been going on the city council things. You can see at least the two council members that went and the public safety subcommittee than the two open public community meetings that we did. And that doesn't count just the conversations like side meetings where I go to coffee with Clean or NAACP. So just wanna make sure that people don't legitimately think like the city of Santa Rosa or certainly the police department was trying to like mysteriously like sneak this through. But now's an opportunity why we're here at CAB and why we're gonna talk about the theme of today that I wanna be is on September 17th, it's a Thursday, at our utilities field office. We have space for up to 300 people there. That we're going to host and we're going to be doing some social media ads. We'll do some radio stuff to make sure people really have awareness. But you guys can be also help multiply that with us that we'll have on September 17th at 6 p.m. to 730. We're going to have a community meeting. And in that one, I'm going to have a much more in-depth presentation. Like I said, today's is the basic talking points and we're going to talk and we'll have visual slides of showing you exactly what's captured and we'll have examples of our policy. I have my policies here today if people have specific questions, but that one's going to be more robust and we want to have, and I want to use today's community feedback from our cab. about how do we make that presentation meet the needs of our community? What are the main community concerns that we have? And we'll go through a couple more of these. But I really wanted to just really reiterate of hearing your concerns, working to address that. So I covered some of the things with how we started this program, what we have. The other ones that I think is really important to understand is the, some of the things. So another one that I hear a lot about is facial recognition. So if you know much about flock, like flock is actually designed to not take a picture of the driver. So that's very strategic. And that's one thing, I mean, flock may not get all the credit, Flock actually pushes back on law enforcement to say, no, we will only put our cameras and I've seen them do it before. And I myself am not like checking flock cameras. That's not my role anymore. But when I talk to the officers, when I talk to our real time crime center, they've talked about even our team of them saying, no, the cameras have to be pointed in this direction. We can't have it in this lane. It could capture a face. So the cameras are designed to capture actually just the rear of the vehicles. I will say authentically, there are times if a car were to go the wrong side of a road, that it could capture the front plate. But the way they're geared, and I was actually in the real-time crime center today saying, show me some more of these pictures, because I want to be able to honestly answer all these questions for you. And they were showing me how even when it does capture the front of the car, it's capturing just the front bumper and the hood, because that's the way the cameras are strategically angled. So there it is. You will see some cameras across. And they talked about they don't feel like in the city of Santa Rosa. they did say they've seen cameras across the bay area where some are not properly placed and it could be higher so i'm not going to say never does a face get captured what i can tell you is flock does not have like facial recognition technology and by policy the santa rosa police department does so we in state law we could we could put facial recognition on any of those surveillance cameras but we don't so we've chosen to not have facial recognition so there's no camera in the city of santa rosa that's operated by the police department and there's none actually any private ones that i'm aware of that have facial recognition in the city of santa rosa but i can authentically say that our cameras don't and that flock does not so that's another one that comes up quite a bit another one you hear sometimes about flock at one point tried to have a connection like to the ring cameras that ended up falling through but there's no connect that that collaboration never actually occurred And there's no connection like the private surveillance cameras are connecting in any way. Block is its standalone system that operates just with our 133 cameras that are under our contract here in Santa Rosa. Not in private areas, so you're only going to see them on main roads. It's very open. They have the website DFLOP. You can go. It's also a public record. So those are things you can see where the cameras are in Santa Rosa. They're no secret, and they're not trying to hide them. You can drive down the road and see them, and you're going to see they're all in public areas that are only capturing public roads. roadways. They're not capturing sidewalks or certainly never capturing like pointed toward a residence or areas. We don't have any like in parks. Like I've seen some like YouTube videos of surveillance cameras in parks. We don't have any of that in Santa Rosa. Every single one of our cameras are on a roadway capturing license plates that we have here. Another one that comes up is connection to reproductive health centers. And like, could that be used? Obviously in California, we're all very supportive of everyone having their choice, but the concern is, hey, not every other state has the same values as we have here in the Santa Rosa. Could they be accessing? And that's another topic we'll talk about. So our department policy and California state law doesn't allow us to share any of this data outside the state of California. So specifically never with any federal agency. So of course, not with ICE that we would never share anything, but not with the FBI, with DEA, ACF, any of those that our agencies cannot by state law share with them. Now the default and people will say, well, there's been examples across the country where that has happened. So one thing that's really important is that's the California law. So it doesn't help to say that Texas shares with us because Texas does a lot of crazy things that we don't do here in the state of California. Let's be real on that. Tennessee, I see ones from a Tennessee. Now, they have actually even had some agencies in California, though, who have improperly shared. So So that I agree with. Most of those issues, when you really start like going down into a little bit better issue, were quite honestly in competency on the agency, that the agency didn't have their properly setting. So one that I was just reading actually a report on last week is Mountain View. If you're closely following this topic, the city of Mountain View, the chief came out and said, our cameras inherently shared with ICE, it shouldn't happen. It wasn't with ICE, I believe it was with FBI. When you actually, this is where though, we gotta go more than just the headline and more than the TikTok video. we have to start going, what really happened? So in Mountain View, I got a report from their agency. It's actually a publicly available report that you can find online. There are 30 cameras that they had in the city of Mountain View. One of the cameras did not have it toggled on that you could do it. So one camera was sharing, it's a public document that you can get from the city of Sunnyvale, actually did it when they were examining theirs. That one though was quite honestly an error on the Mountain View Police Department. That was something that shouldn't have been done. And one thing that changes, that was pre-2024. And 2024, like so before we got our contracts, Block actually changed it where it no longer even gives the agencies the ability. So that was a user error. Our agencies, what I can say is there's never been a record of a Santa Rosa ALPR camera sharing with the feds, sharing with an out-of-state agency. And I would implore anyone to find any data that says we have. We don't. We do a monthly audit of our program. where our officers, where we go in and we audit each one of our police officers and everyone will have their chance to give their things and correct me any facts that you don't like with it. We'll go through and we do a monthly audit of our ALPR cameras. And that's another concern. Like I live here in Santa Rosa, I have family, I have daughters, I'm married. My vehicles, personal vehicles get captured by flock cameras every day when I go home to work, when I'm driving around, going to the grocery store. So there's a concern saying, well, why to me when I'm just driving around Santa Rosa, do you have the right to know where I'm going? So that's a fair question. One thing that our policy restricts, and this isn't state law, it's a Santa Rosa policy, is we have to have a legitimate law enforcement investigation. So we would call it a right to know and a need to know that you need to be able to be. So you can't say- i want to see where my teenage daughter is going after so an officer can't check like family members check their spouse check their girlfriend whatever it may be you have to have a law enforcement need so for you being here at this meeting today there's no law enforcement need to check your plate so no Santa Rosa officer by policy would be able to pull up any plate that's leaving this meeting today because it has nothing to do with a law enforcement need now if we respond to a shooting today and they say a gold Toyota Corolla with a license plate that ends in one, two, three, that's a legitimate law enforcement need. So what the officer has to do is they have to put in, we have two different cases numbers that we track. One's what we call it the crime report, when you actually take a report and you have to put in that case number. And that comes back to a full police report The other is an incident report. So every call, last year we had 179,000 calls called into the 911 dispatch center. Each one of those generates an incident number. And that incident number talks about who called, what was reported, the time, the date. The officer puts notes in there if they don't have to take the report. So they have to put one of those two things, a crime report or an incident number, documenting the legitimate law enforcement needs. So it has to be associated with one of those. We have one of our command staff members who goes in once a month and audits and goes, goes through all of our flock and is saying like, is the officer have a legitimate law enforcement need? There are a thousand percent been misuses across the state or the nation. Even here in California, we have never had one for our Santa Rosa officer that we found misusing it. I literally go to our briefings and talk regularly to our officers saying, this is incredible tool. If you misuse it, we will lose it and talk to them about that. And my promise to you is, if a Santa Rosa officer misuses it and violates our policies, we will hold them accountable i guarantee you that and it's something that i think will help us lose trust with our community so those are some of the things that we're going to do but really again setting expectations it has to be tied to a law enforcement need the others is you have some agencies that retain flock data up to five years that have been keeping it from day one the santa rosa police department has chosen to be much more conservative with our retention as retained it for 30 days so after 30 days it purges from our system our officers no longer have access to that data so 31 days it's gone by our contract with flock it also purges from the flock system at 30 days so those are two things another thing that's in our contract is that our contract is publicly available or is that The data belongs to us. Flock doesn't own our data. We have the right to it. Flock doesn't have the ability by our policy, of course, but also with Flock. Flock or us don't have the ability to share it with private vendors, outside companies to sell that data. They don't have the access to access our data. There's an audit log for them as well, if there ever is anyone trying to access our data from Flock. Those are some of the transparency things. So I just really want to drive home the point No expectation of privacy in a public place. The information is erased at 30 days. Flock does not have the ability to share our data, sell our data. Those are some of the questions that come up regularly that I want to go over. The other one then is looking at two things and people who are versed in this is the Senate bill 34 and the 34 is the one that specifically talks about ALPR data as a statewide law. And that talks about some of the things that we're in compliance with that you can't just secretly add flock cameras. They do have to go before a public meeting. city council like ours did. So those are important. It also talks about like what you can retain. There's not a retention. There was a statewide effort to retain it to the 30, but actually it didn't get public support. So we're more conservative than what the law is. And that's my plan is to stay at the 30 days. That was my agreement when I was talking to community members and council that I don't see that changing. Senate Bill 54 is another one we've had a lot of conversations. And that one more specifically talks about not sharing with any federal agencies or ICE agents over things. So those are two different parameters. They have a little bit of overlap because 34 talks about not sharing with federal agencies as well. 54, then we have a Santa Rosa department policy and a city policy about not sharing with ICE or sharing those information. So That's another one that comes up, the third party I address. Another one you see, there's some cool YouTube videos about the great state of Tennessee and others where someone was able to hack into the flock cameras, like the surveillance cameras. I watched some of those and he's watching and he's able to even manipulate that. Again, that one goes back to negligence of agencies. We're negligent, they didn't have their settings upset correct. And a lot of agencies like Flock really started in 2017 and really exploded as a company from kind of nothing to, and as with any corporation, there were a lot of learning curves, a lot of mistakes made. And I think Flock has learned a lot from those things. And I think they're still learning as an organization. And I'm not going to sit here today and say they're a perfect company by any means. I don't work for Flock and have no association for them other than they happen to be our vendor at this time. But mistakes were made. I think they've made a lot of corrections, like the Mountain View is a perfect example. But now statewide, you don't have the ability to ever have it not toggled and not shared with beds. It just automatically does that for all California agencies. Another is the multi-factor authentication. There's talks about, so for our officers, they can access it, but it has to go to a two-pronged multi-factor so no one can get in. We've never had any type of hacking or advancements into the Santa Rosa ones. And the last one that I talk about, too, is this addressing with the community. They really talk about like, hey, really, is it having an effectiveness? We have a long list and we'll go into more details when we do the community meeting on the 17th about what it's doing to transform the public safety. And we just have to talk about when you're the victim, when one of your family members are a victim of a crime and there's no chance. And so a perfect example is actually just in the paper this week of a young lady who was straight up executed on Piner Road about eight weeks ago in the city of Santa Rosa. She's at the Jack in the Box in Piner, she's walking her dog after just getting something, someone was waiting in the parking lot destined to kill her, walks up to her, shoots her multiple times, shoots her dead. She drops dead right there in the parking lot, walks up over a dispute they were having over finances and cars and all these issues. We have witnesses, he had a hood pulled over his face, very limited information. We got a limited vehicle description that we were able to get from some witnesses. They have no idea who the person is, the witnesses. Our victim is unfortunately deceased, has no way to provide a statement. That's a homicide that could have very easily gone unsolved, but we're able to use the vehicle description we had, the time of day it is, and be able to identify that vehicle, be able to identify and find that vehicle moving in Santa Rosa the next day, pull that person over who still had the loaded firearm that was used in the homicide in his car, had the gloves that he was wearing, had the same shoes that he was distinctly wearing and the clothes, and were able to make, without the flock cameras, that homicide wouldn't have been solved. And that's where we just have to have those conversations of what is the balance here? What are we gonna do with privacy versus being able to save? And I can rattle off dozens of cases with shootings and other ones. We had another one last year where an unfortunate one on Hearn Avenue where a homeless subject was walking on Hearn Avenue later into the evening. Someone come by, hits him with a car and kills him right there. There's no witnesses to the collision. We just have a deceased individual laying in the middle of Hearn Avenue. They were able to pull up the flock camera and see a vehicle leaving that area at the time, go do follow up at the house and the front windshield is smashed into the car and there's blood evidence all over the vehicle. And someone had hit that individual, panicked, drove home, hid the car in their garage. That would have been a case that we would have never had closure for that family of someone who literally was disrespectfully left in the middle of Hearn Avenue deceased. Like those are incidents, shooting after shooting. We had a kidnapping that came from a local residence. We've had some property crimes that maybe don't get as much attention, but bank robberies has used in a huge role with the organized retail theft. We can go into greater detail on those, but those are the things that we have to be able to ask is like, what's the balance that we want to have for our community? The other thing is for the safety and protection of my team when they're responding to these calls that our officers are getting the data and we're able to know then If a car is fleeing the scene, it'll come up in an ALPR system, and our dispatchers will be able to say, this is the license plate. That vehicle was stolen out of whatever, San Francisco or Oakland, and it's here in Santa Rosa. That vehicle was used in a shooting in San Rafael earlier today. So it provides our team with more and more data that we're able to have to be able to safely police in our community. Those are some of the basics that I wanted to cover today about what is the length of our contracts that we have until 2027, the 133 cameras, the work that we did do to go to council and to go to our community members, some of the parameters. We have our policies and they're available online. We have three different policies that are relevant to this topic. We have one just on ALPR. So you can go and our policy is on there and it lays out our ALPR program. We have another one that talks about like public surveillance cameras. So it has a nexus to those. And then the third one is our real-time crime center. So the real-time crime center It's more of a room that we have that you can, and it brings up like the flock cameras. I mean, they go to the officer's computers and they go to the dispatch as well. But when we have significant events or it pops up and they can be able to kind of provide in real time information to officers who are responding to those calls. All three of those have a policies. So you guys can look at exactly what's in there. Love to hear feedback if there's areas that you think our policies are deficient and then improvements that we can be able to make. and really wanted us to be able to hear what are other concerns, what are areas that you think maybe there's misinformation that's coming from law enforcement, misinformation that you think is coming from me. But what I really pledge for the community is we got to go more than the TikTok video on some of these things. We got to like dive into some of the things with whatever the topic may be in society, it's easy to kind of inflame things with not a whole lot of information. So, but it's same for me to not have the confirmation bias that's law enforcement, just assume that all things aren't correct and not be able to hear like constructive feedback if there's areas that we need to improve. Another thing that's important you'll see sometimes is flock cameras misidentified a vehicle. Like, okay, that's true. Our policy and our training is we don't pull over a car because there's a flock. The flock just gives you a presumptive, you should look at this. It's the officer's responsibility before they make a traffic stop, before they do anything to view that license plate, and then make sure that it is exactly the car they're following. So that's human error if you pull over a car that came up in the park. That's not a flock error. Of course technology is going to have things. But under no circumstances should a Santa Rosa police officer pull over a car just because it gave a preemptive hit that might be a stolen vehicle or a wanted vehicle. they have to be able to take time to say, does that match the actual license plate that I'm visually seeing in front of me? Does the color make model of that vehicle? That's an important part that we build into our training. That's another area for our team that every single one of our officers before they can have access to their flock account, they have to go through a training. They have to make sure they have these basic understandings. We're going over our policies. So when a new police officer comes out of the academy, they don't have access to this. It's not until we've trained them, making sure that they're proficient in this information. So that's the high level overview that I want to provide. I'd love to hear from our cab members of specific questions or areas. And then with the lens of how can we build this and prepare this community meeting to be as informative and educational as possible? And how, as Chief, can I come back and look at what are ways that I can build our policies? And our city council members are very committed to this. I've had lots of conversations with our council members about them wanting to make sure that we're meeting the needs of our community on this really important community topic. I'll turn it back over to our cab.

Thank you very much, Chief. lots of great information. And I know probably when I was reading along on the presentation, so I'll get a lot of those points, but I'll definitely bring it back to the board for any questions and comments or the chief before we open it up to public comment. I'm going to start now. I'll come back to the board. I'm glad you mentioned training for the officers on the flock. Can you share a little bit more either about how long they go through that? And if there's a follow-up training as features change on the flock camera, a little bit more about the training for the officers. I'm curious about that.

It's kind of multifaceted. The initial training, they sit down for a block with our training and sit down and going through learning. And then they're going through all of our policies. But for us, we have what we call advanced officer training. So for every eight weeks, officers go through a 10-hour training day. On top of there's state-mandated training that they're going to do. crisis intervention training and all these other trainings. But we do that every eight weeks at 10. And we're incorporating these principles, whether it be there. We also, every day. So when officers start their shift, the first 30 minutes of their shift, we have like briefing training. So the supervisor with them, the mid-level managers are coming in there. So those are regularly incorporated into those. And we get updates from Flock as well. Flock sends videos. Flock is trying to grow as a company, trying to be able to hear some of the areas where mistakes have been made, making sure. And you've seen quite honestly, especially in the last 12 months, quite a bit of changes from flock so that's kind of the initial training by our supervisors but what i'll say is this continual training through the advanced officer training blocks and through our briefing trainings thank you

Thank you for being here. Appreciate the time. You definitely answered, you know, a bunch of questions that I had. And, you know, I mean, I think there's probably an ongoing discussion that's probably never going to have, you know, full resolution. You did mention if an officer had intentionally misused flock that like kind of would be handled. But can you elaborate on whether that would result in them being fired or if there's any sort of like criminal charges? I mean, I don't really know what the extent of that would be.

Yeah, it wouldn't be criminal. So California, the law is like we have, like if you access, like if you run someone's criminal record or run their driver's license, that is a misdemeanor to do that. It's not for accessing ALPR data. It would be a clear violation of our policies. For us, we look at everything and go under the progressive discipline model. So what is this officer's past? What is their misconduct? How large with this? Was this a one-time thing? Was this a pattern and practice with their behavior? So it could lead up to termination, but each case is very unique. So we'd have to look at kind of totality of the circumstances, but what we will promise is it's going to be documented. It's going to be held. They're going to be disciplined and it could lead up to termination, but I can't sit here and say that every time, if you were to misuse it, that would be an automatic termination. Okay.

Thank you. Yeah. So then I think kind of the broader question is like, obviously there's policies in place to protect people's privacies and everything you've said sounds great, but how, how do we assure that that's being followed one by like Santa Rosa, but by flock in general, right? Cause if they're collecting all this data, even if you have a policy or contract in place, I mean, they still could break it. And we would be then like feeding this information to other agencies, even though we have a policy in place that, you know, that's not supposed to happen. So I'm kind of curious, like it's kind of a two part question. One, I know you mentioned that like internally gets audited every month, which was great to hear. Is there any way, like how would you audit flocks? access, use of that information, and then what would it take to cancel the contract with Flock, excuse me, ahead of time, or maybe the like general surveillance in general?

the, so that'll be something that we'll build out when we do the community meeting about how do we audit flock? That's a great question. And how are those things? I know those procedures are in place, but that's something that we'll build out and make sure we're able to provide some examples about how we're doing that because it is hard to trust necessarily a private for-profit business that's outside of government. Those trusts, those questions are there, but we see that quite frankly and And hundreds of different examples that you see in our community of all different ways that data is getting captured and being used across our community. Flock just happens to have public attention right now. But that's one. As far as the contract, I mean, that's ultimately a council decision. We're going to just like we have we have thousands of contracts across the city of Santa Rosa. This the flock contracts have been paid for already with. So this isn't a financial thing for the city. The city would have to say we're going to basically. give Flock the rest of their money and we're gonna take these cameras off the city of Santa Rosa. That'll be something that we would have robust community conversation, because there's many community members who are seeing some of the impacts of the public safety. We're certainly seeing it from business community members who are seeing it with the bottom dollar of their businesses with the organized retail theft and how often they're getting. That'll be a much broader community conversation, but council always has the ability to be able to do it. Quite honestly, as chief, I would have concerns with canceling the Flock contract. My goal is what I would say is I want to find ways to see what are areas that we can work to make improvements, whether it be through our policies, whether it be through our trainings, whether it be with our contract with Flock, whether it be is Flock the future vendor for us. I'm not necessarily tied that it has to be Flock, but I do think the technology as a whole is a powerful tool if used transparently, used safely, and used to meet our community expectations.

One more question. You kind of mentioned like if a car was stolen in Oakland and then it was like a plate was captured here in Santa Rosa, obviously, like the officer would kind of have access to that information. But can you talk generally about how Santa Rosa or just like city or community cities in California share information with each other? Because it seems like. if one was tampered with, maybe they would have access to information from other cities as well and it would inspire a lot of control?

That's a great question. So we have an ability and we're actually tightening up our ability now that for any agency that we share with, they're going to have to sign an MOU with us about talking about our guidelines. And if they don't want to share the MOU, they don't get our information. So it can only be to a California local law enforcement. So meaning police department or sheriff's department. no feds, no other outside. There's other things talking about recently about Nick Rick, the fusion center, other things we don't share with Nick Rick, the fusion center and others we don't tell. So it'd be just those agencies sign an MOU, but the flock system doesn't let you share someone else's data. So if I pull up Oakland's data, I can view an Oakland, so I can run a plate like one of our plates and say, did it pop up in Oakland? But I can't share an Oakland hit and say, oh, I'm going to share that with Centerfell or with Petaluma. It doesn't give the ability. So Oakland, we do have an operating agreement with Oakland. So an Oakland officer could look to see if a vehicle they're looking for was ever accessed in Santa Rosa. But they couldn't then do like a third party share and say, OK, I'm going to take Santa Rosa's and share it with this agency or share it nefariously with a federal agency. So that's how that works. And there's also an auditing system in that, that it tells me on this date, this time, officer X access this plate, and this is their reason that they use. So that audit is there as well. And at any time, if we saw misuse by an agency, we could cut it off. And there was a Southern California agency that for whatever reason was defying the state law and saying, no, we will share outside the state of California. And so we ensured that they were not on our list that we're sharing, and we're not sharing with that agency. And if I ever hear of any agency that's not meeting expectations, and as a whole across the state of California, chiefs are not going to allow that to happen, certainly not sheriffs either. So as a whole, we're not seeing that. But if community members hear of an agency that they don't think that are meeting our expectations, then let me know. We actually have on our transparency page, we have a transparency page that lists every agency we are sharing with. So it's open right now that you could see. So if you see an agency on there that's not meeting our needs, let me know about it. We'll do our research and confirm that and make sure that we're not. Thank you.

Hi, Chief. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate the presentation. My question, you guys just went on a really nice public tour where you were looking for community feedback for traffic and safety priorities. Thank you for doing that. One of the concerns that I had was the amount of people who are regularly running red lights. Is the flock camera system used in capture of red light runners or is it not? Is it not?

That's another question that comes up. It doesn't. So it won't capture your speed, your red light. Those are separate and distinct systems. So it only captures by design the rear of the vehicle. So it should get like the rear trunk. And I'll have it to communicate like some pictures of that. And like, so say it's like a blue Honda Accord. It's going to have the trunk. You'll see Honda Accord. You have the rear license plate. That's all you get. But the only data that's captured is date, time, and location. And then the data of that rear of the vehicle. Those are what we're doing out of that.

And I'm assuming just as far as aesthetics, these are the white cameras that are on top of the... No, those are actually traffic cameras.

The flock cameras are black. Those white ones, people think, I mean, there's a lot of conspiracies here. I think those are all recording. Those are actually, instead of years ago, it would trip like when you'd pull up in the line. Those are just motion cameras that attract like when the light turns red and green. Okay. So, yeah. And those aren't through the police department. Those are through transportation. Those are literally like... I've never seen a white cloud camera. All the ones that I've seen are black. And most have like the, because it's easier to not connect them into electricity and deal with extra, they'll have the little small like solar pads with them. So you see some who are attached to red lights or others that are just poles on the side of road. They're kind of like throughout the system, but they're usually black.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Chief. Appreciate your time. I appreciate you being here. And I appreciate all the outreach that you've been doing. I think that it's a great idea that the community meeting is going to happen based on the number of people that are here in this room um despite the outreach it seems like people feel uninformed people feel like they did not have their voices heard and uh i think that's incumbent on the city moving forward to find a way that we are making sure that people are informed about what's going on. I mean, as you mentioned, it was a different time when this was, um, brought into existence, but the fact that, you know, this many people feel like they didn't know and it is, uh, it's a feeling of your privacy being invaded, even though, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court says out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. But when you're being captured and that is being stored, that is a little different. And as far as I know, the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on anything like that yet. So while being out in the public does give the police department's license to do this, at least for right now, I do think that we are setting ourselves up for potentially problems in the legal realm as well should a case come before the Supreme Court that considers the storing of somebody's data just because they were out in public at one point in time. Does that mean that the government gets to hold on to that. So that's one of my concerns and something that I think we should think about moving forward. My other is human error. And as you mentioned, there's been issues with this before and we can't guarantee that there will never be human error issues before. There's human error in everything. Anytime there's a human involved, there's human error. So I am concerned that I mean, and maybe there is something in place that the flock and whoever else is involved in this meets somewhat regularly to talk about things that they've noticed in the system or changes that have been made or how we prevent human error. But this is a serious situation where human error can lead to someone being detained unjustly or lead to someone having their information shared with a different agency or flock shares it or whatever happens. And that's a serious concern and another thing that I really want to focus on. And finally, that I think crime prevention is very important. I think that we are... I all want to live in a safe society and we want to be able to go to stores and not have them be part of, you know, mass organized theft. But with the drones, especially drones, And I think that we also need to make sure that we're balancing that with helping victims because sending out a drone to assess the situation may help with the law enforcement side of things, but the drone can't help the victim. So even though the drone can get there in two minutes, it's not going to be able to do anything other than help law enforcement, which I'm not saying is a bad thing. I think it's a good thing, but I want to make sure we're balancing that. All that being said, I do want to know more about how the system works. Like when... when an officer wants to investigate a crime and they have say a partial plate and description, how do they, what is their, what are they searching? Are they trying to just type in the license plate? Are they going, do they get a whole, you know, 10 minute period or they can search a certain intersection and see every car that's driven by kind of like, how does that,

You have to put in parameters. So it makes it easier if you have the license plate or a partial license plate, but you can put in descriptions of like, I gave the example of a black Honda Accord with one, two, three, or even one in the, and so you can put in like different parameters and say this date and time and be able to narrow it down in those things. But only like I said, when it's tied to a law enforcement investigation, but it can be more broad than that. So you can put, so I gave the example of the, the, traffic collision on Heard Avenue. And we don't have a vehicle description of that. So they didn't have any license plate. And so they're able to put vehicles that were on Heard Avenue during this time and be able to find one that matched that, that got some of the information they were to go to that house. So it does have broader characteristics in that. This has to be tied to a law enforcement need. And it's going to be giving each one of those the license plate. That's you're not going to get the driver. You're going to get the rear of that vehicle, that vehicle who's passing through that intersection at that time. A photo of that vehicle.

Is there any way that the system can be used just to look at a certain amount of time in one location to try and identify a vehicle that may be of interest?

So could you say in this one hour, tell me every vehicle who passed through College and Mendo? Yeah, you could. That's all that I have. Yeah. And I think it's about on the drone is first responder a little bit off topic, but I brought it up in here. It does have some impact to the victim because one, it has two way communication. So if there's someone getting stabbed in Jacob Park and the drone gets there and it's having two way communication with the drone operator, there's an operator which one of those can have communication can be hovering over saying police are on the way. And then where it has the most importance is when the suspect is running to their car and getting in a car and fleeing. The drone is following. The drone can go up to 60 miles an hour and follow a car. So it's helping now direct and be able to bring justice to that victim who shot, stabbed, assaulted, whatever may be happening. So it does have some impact I would push back on being able to help victims, but certainly some other privacy concerns with that one. And that's one that we're not proposing. We had just community feedback on that. That was one that we had applied for a grant. We didn't get the grant. So there is no drone as first responder program, but we will continue to have robust conversation if a grant were to become available and And I know even the ties in, those are independent flock, but we'll still have some, I'm sure, some community conversations.

Yeah, I think that's, like I said, I appreciate the law enforcement aspect of it and that there is help to victims that is part of that. But my goal is just to make that front and center, as much as we want to bring this person to justice, we also want to make sure it works.

Where I've seen it the most successful to drone as first responder, and Palm Springs has, they have a really big drone as first responder program, is where you see, we get called so many times, especially with our youth who aren't understanding the magnitude. And we've seen it, I mean, right here in Sonoma County with youth being shot with airsoft guns and others. that you see youth who are carrying a gun. We actually had one just this weekend, actually, where said like, okay, there's a guy with a gun and he has no shirt on with a gun in his waistband standing there by Santa Rosa Marketplace with thousands of people going by. So officers get called with a man with a gun. It looks like a gun that's in there. They're pointing their guns or taking the custody. It's an airsoft gun. So the drone as first responder is one that you can use in that where it comes up and it flies in before an officer gets there, before an officer gets to the decision, should I shoot, should I not shoot? And the drone can be able to zero in that, have a better understanding, is that a real gun, and even communicate with individuals. So there's lots of times with our youth, they've been able to defuse potential officer-involved shootings by using that technology. So those are some of the benefits that we're seeing. But like I said, that's a topic that we'll dive into deeper another day. Thank you.

Yeah, no, I'll keep it brief because I really do want to give everyone who's shown up the time to raise their questions and concerns. I will just sort of acknowledge everything that's been said so far, as well as acknowledge like this is by far the best meeting that we've had since I've been here. It's the most, this issue is the most, the most sort of vibrant discourse I've heard just as a Santa Rosa in the four years I've lived here. And I think it does speak fundamentally to a lack of trust that everyone is feeling in our institutions, in our government, in their fealty to private corporations to run public service sectors. That's not independent of Santa Rosa, that's a nationwide thing, perhaps a global thing. And this just feels like this is a microcosm of an intersection of so many aspects of our society that are really being held up and scrutinized right now. So I have a lot of empathy for you, Chief, for having to kind of be the barometer of that in many ways, but so are we. And I think there is a troubled history in this country of technology and policing and measures being taken in the name of public safety that we now know, or even in time knew, were not being done above board. And so I think a lot of that suspicion, skepticism comes from that history. And I appreciate that you have sensitivity to that, but that's a lot of what I've been hearing. And yeah, so I think that you being here is really important. I think to Doug's point, I don't expect everyone to be super familiar with this technology. It's opaque. It takes a lot of time to learn about it. It's hard to show up at these things. And I think when something is going to be this, and it is just inherently an invasive technology, regardless of whether it uh observes the fourth fourth amendment protocols or not it's invasive um and so i think learning about it is a process and uh we just need to do everything we can to facilitate and encourage that process so i'll stop grandstanding for now but i appreciate you acknowledging that and um yeah i just want to let people have that this is

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful comments and feedback. And with that, we'll move to public comment. Steve, if you can go two minutes so we can make sure we get through as many as possible, I think that'll help as well.

We're now taking public comments on item 7.1. And if you'll just raise your hand, I'll call upon you. Timer's all the way over here. I don't know if you can see it, but you'll hear it when it goes off.

While we go, I'm going to go and that way we can kind of work our way through the room. That works.

You can state your name for the record if you choose. My name is Denise Cooey.

Also, can I request for the people watching remotely that I noticed that the picture they're going to get, if you want to be present for people who are watching remotely, maybe over here in front of these doors. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Quick question. I noticed you referring to one type of flock camera reading a license plate, but they make several. So are we really only going to go with one? And do we have future plans to use more of what they offer?

There's two different versions in Santa Rosa. They have the regular traditional and they have the other ones that are surveillance camera on the roadway that are also ALPR. Those are the two that are in the city of Santa Rosa that we have.

Do you know the model names?

The Condor is the one I believe that has the surveillance camera. I don't remember the actual one or the other one. One takes just the license. The other one is a surveillance camera, so it captures actually, and it also takes an ALPR. Those are the two that we have. There might be other ones that are in the flock family, but they don't exist in Santa Rosa.

I'll start with you, then I'll move on.

You can state your name for the record if you choose. You have two minutes.

I'm Nick Brandt. I'm a citizen of Santa Rosa. I know some of you, and I'm not speaking in any relation to the city of Santa Rosa. I, for the most part, trust that Santa Rosa Police Department is not abusing their access to FLOC, and I don't doubt that FLOC helps Santa Rosa Police do these things. It seems that SRPD policies and audits and contracts with FLOC are well set up. What I don't trust is Flock, the company. They're pushing mass surveillance technology on endless jurisdictions and community-led campaigns to stop this technology, or perhaps one of the last organizing issues right now. We had maybe data centers on ICE. Oh, but ICE might use Flock, and widespread usage of Flock means widespread need for data centers that process the video feeds and share data. That's interesting and not even my point. Average people pretty much expect that Facebook or Google is collecting their data and selling it for ads and has built up a sophisticated profile of exactly what ads are most likely to be successful. However, people can opt out of using Instagram, Facebook, Google. They can decide not to carry a phone, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, when I walk down a public street, I expect maybe a business owner or homeowner to capture me on their camera and be able to hand over that footage to the police in case of an investigation. What I do not expect is for my face to be detected, logged in a database, likely tracked in correspondence with everywhere else I've been, seen and for the live or probably archived video to be viewable by anyone Flock corporate deems important enough. Flock probably doesn't do all of this yet, but it's manufacturing the consent to do so in the future by making mass surveillance ubiquitous every day, just another camera on a pole. Flock is a large corporation that makes money on data. Ooh, I have 30 seconds. Point is, they're run by profits. Their model is data. I don't really trust them because they're a giant corporation, and I think that's a pretty common view. And I know you guys don't have any formal decision-making authority on this, but this feels kind of 1984-like, and I'm like, maybe we should look into it more. And I would suggest maybe looking at ACLU's Get the Flock Out campaign and more unions reporting on Flock just to get some more information. Yeah, and if we truly want to prevent crime and import lives, we need to support, not surveil, people is my take. Thank you.

Thank you.

You can state your name for the record if you choose. My name is Sonya Taylor. I have not paid a lot of attention to this issue, which is surprising because I'm involved in a lot of things. I'm old enough to remember having privacy. I have 15 questions. And then I've got three pages. I read all of the policies and I have three pages of questions. It's very difficult to get answers. Filing PRAs, you have to have the correct language to request the kinds of things. And so being able to ask, I mean, obviously I'm not going to ask 15 questions here, although I will say that I believe you've answered five of them. Now, I'd like to confirm that, so thank you. And I am one that believes that Santa Rosa Police Department is not the problem. I'm not deeply concerned about you all, unless you give me reason to be concerned. I'm concerned about flock and privacy. I drive a car with no computer. My cell phone is on only when I feel like I still have a landline. Being surveilled is creepy. The two things I wanted to ask you about or mention to you is, San Francisco had an issue very recently where Western States Information Network was accessing their data for Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, I believe. And 34 other locations in California were apparently involved. And I don't know whether we were or not, but that's one of the things I would like to know. And the other thing is human error is the biggest problem. Well, actually flock's biggest problem or the companies who are similar to flock but um san francisco also had the dubious distinction of having two years of live streaming of their drone footage and we do have an expectation of privacy in our homes and you watch some of that drone footage and People didn't have much expectation. So thank you for being here. I'd like to figure out a way to ask the questions and get answers other than a public forum.

Hi, Cameron member. Cameron Miller, also a member of Santa Rosa City Public. It's just a few things, but my main concern is, while it is maybe being used properly here, it's just part of an expanding infrastructure of AI surveillance. You know, with all these things, they keep them mostly legal, but they keep pushing and pushing the boundaries of what they're willing to do. And it's still an AI surveillance company. They're backed by venture capital. Their main goal is profits and amassing as much information as they can about us. That's really concerning. And, yeah, it's just we're dealing with a federal government and AI, like, sorry, I'm spacing out for words, but our federal government is constantly pushing what civil liberties they choose to stomp on. You know, it just, I'm not confident in allowing AI companies to be surveying us. That's really it. Yeah. So that's all I got to say.

Thank you very much. It's a quick sector.

And you can state your name for the record if you choose.

Hi, my name is Sophia Maloney-Norton. I am a concerned community member and leader with North Bay Organizing Project's Civil Liberties Task Force. I care deeply about the safety and well-being of every single person residing here in Sonoma County. I have been closely following the ever-increasing news surrounding Flock Safety over the past year. Flock Safety has proven itself to be an incredibly untrustworthy and harmful company with a business model that is in direct violation of one of the core constitutional principles of this country, privacy. Democracy Now! recently interviewed Chad Marlow, who is the Senior Policy Counsel at the ACLU, where he focuses on privacy, surveillance, and technology issues. He described many of the issues with Flock Safety, a company that is only around 10 years old, but has already extended into over 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states. Marlowe states that Flock Safety was backed by a venture capitalist who invested in a company that basically trades privacy for profit. And so in order to increase the value of their company, they need to take more people's data and bathe their privacy more and share it more broadly. Our personal information, our data, is their product. And the only thing they care about is the profit it makes them. Unlike the SRPD, who have a law enforcement code of ethics, flock safety is not beholden to protect us, the people its technology continuously monitors. Despite flock safety's supposed assurances and protections against sharing with federal government agencies, an investigation from 404 Media last year found more than 4,000 searches that may have been conducted on behalf or behalf of or in partnership with ICE. There is no way to 100% guarantee that our data is secure because we have repeatedly seen that this happens without local law enforcement agencies realizing what had been occurring. Using flock safety's ALPRs directly puts our community at risk of undue harm. In just the last couple of weeks, ICE has killed three members of various communities in the United States who are only trying to contribute to society. Our entire community deserves reassurances that our lives are worth more than continuing these risky contracts with an unethical company. Thank you.

Agreeing with everything that has been said so far. A lot of the other concerns so far that's been brought up has a lot been about Flock itself and the company. But I also want to say I'm not comfortable with the surveillance itself, let alone set aside. If you've tried to get a different company in general, the ALPRs itself, I do not agree with. You mentioned before that there is a state... expectation of privacy whenever you are out in public. And I think there is a difference between having someone film you on your phone or walking by some sort of storefront and having that wherever you drive across the city, you are having your data being stored in this database that you have gone from place to place that you can be followed wherever you are in the city. I understand there is a way where you have to look up based off of whatever the law enforcement needs. It doesn't matter because it's making it be like, oh, you're having to gather this evidence on where I'm going in case I do a crime. And that is assuming that I, in the past 30 days, have done something wrong. And thus you need to look me up in the database. That is not a reasonable expectation of privacy. As thus then affects the amendment. Because you mentioned something about how this flock system is completely different than having like your trackers that you can put underneath the car. I don't see how it's different. I don't see how having to get a warrant to put a tracker underneath the car to follow it around the city is any different than having having, being able to like, like getting the ability to look up in the system where they are going, you should also have to have a warrant to do that. It is the same thing tracking.

Yes.

And can you state your name if you wish?

My name is Stephanie. In May of this year, I submitted a public records request to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, Reef Walk, and they were able to respond within two weeks and they've shared their network data logs with me. SRPD, unfortunately, it's been 51 days and they have not responded to my request. In fact, they've been very difficult to deal with. Okay, so... I can see just, I'm going to take a sample time period from January 1st to February 1st in 2025. I can see that there are 5,062 log entries made by SRPD. Each one represents between 1 and 6,317 network searches. Having done some quick math, I've calculated the SRPD just based on that sample is running approximately 2 million searches per month. There is a 93% accuracy rate, according to Flock. That's 140,000 misreads of Santa Rosa plates every month if we're just using that as a sample. The scale of that surveillance represents more than just over-policing. That represents an utter disregard for our right to privacy. If you're looking in my car, I expect you to have a warrant. Getting back to the audit logs, these officers are supposed to be entering in a reason each time they access data. Oftentimes, these are numerical codes, as the chief has mentioned. But other times, they are words. And some of these words include crime. Criminal case, sometimes they include a place like Pittsburgh. The word test was used as a reason to conduct 1,250 network searches over three non-consecutive days by SRPD officers. That violates SRPD's own policies. I also see on the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, and by the way, I'm viewing SRPD logs through the lens of the data that they shared with the Sheriff's Office, okay? I see NICRIC on Sonoma County Sheriff's Office data logs. I see Nick Rick. That's a federal agency.

I'll end with that. Please.

Please state your name for the record, if you choose. Nick Thayer, Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights. Is Chief Cregan allowed to answer questions right now?

We're kind of pinch on time, so it's more public comment. But I mean, if it's- I'll leave it to the chief's discretion.

You said that there's one staff member at SRPD doing your monthly audits. Is that correct? Is there one single staff member doing those audits?

It's a team. There's one who's assigned to our overall real-time crime center as the manager, but it's more than just one person doing the audits.

Okay. Well, I had another question, but I'll pose the question to the public then. Is... Is surveillance like ALPRs, whether it's flock or not, part of the vision that we have for our communities to be safe in the future? Or are ALPRs an unnecessary, or not unnecessary, an unfortunate detour that we are making right now? In other words, do we see these as being inherent to safe communities in the future?

Thank you.

At the end of this, I'm taking notes and I'll give some general responses.

Thank you, Chief. Okay, just one moment.

You can state your name for the record if you choose. Yeah, Brendan Connors. I'm a Santa Rosa resident. Chief, thank you for your detailed presentation. I think I can echo everyone here when I say that my My problem is not with necessarily the Santa Rosa Police Department's use of flock. It's with the company itself. To that point, I know there are private companies in Santa Rosa who have installed flock in their parking lots. I can think of the Home Depot and Friedman Brothers as examples. Do you know if those companies have similar contracts with the same kind of limitations that SRPD has created with SRPD, or is Flock able to harvest more data from those companies? And my second question would be, I know you gave some examples of homicide and vehicular manslaughter. I'd be curious, and this is going to be a subjective question, what you think is the most sort of non-severe or innocuous case that your department has used FLOC to investigate or solve. Thank you.

Anybody else like to make a public comment on this item?

We're waiting for your response. Hi. President of Santa Rosa. I do not trust all those with access to the system, nor the design of the system itself. Of course, there will be regards to what the funding for these grants that have been granted to all of these cities. Of course, there will be money For mass surveillance, there is always money for war and police. And if the money is made available, that does not make the decision for us. We need to make the decision for ourselves if we want to be watched everywhere we go in public.

Thank you. Let me just reset the timer.

All right. You can say your name if you choose.

My name is Jenny Gilpin. I'm a Santa Rosa resident. I'm also here with NBOP Civil Liberties Task Force. I'm a member of the DSA. And echoing what's already been said, I don't take issue with Chief Cregan or our local law enforcement officers. I don't take issue with cameras being used. I have nanny cameras so I can make sure my animals aren't tearing up my furniture. Private business owner, that's fine. But Flock is funded by a data harvesting company, which makes catching car thieves a sexy marketing gimmick for harvesting our data. From Flock's website, they quietly have been making changes to their terms and conditions. This happened back in February. They changed their terms and conditions to grant Flock an irrevocable perpetual license to use and retain captured customer data. And when that happened in February, I would hope that the city leaders that we've put our trust in for our lives would be thinking, how can I protect my citizens from the abuses of this $8 billion company that wants to harvest our data? We've been going around and talking to our neighbors about this issue. And oftentimes we talk to people who are in their 70s. And they're like, great, they'll catch the taggers and the car thieves. And I am down for that too. But what I would want to know is what it's like to be a 12-year-old. We already know that our young people don't dance anymore. They don't socialize anymore because of the harms done by data harvesting social media companies. And this is the next invasive iteration of that. And it's here harming us now.

You can state your name if you choose.

My name is Candace Ledlow. I'm a resident of Santa Rosa. And I know everything that's been said. And, you know, in Minnesota, people were followed home. People were followed by ICE agents to their own homes. That was using flock data. I don't trust any AI company. I don't trust any big, big tech company. In fact, I think they are the danger to our democracy and they're killing us on the streets. I have faith currently in our police department. However, one bad apple can take us all the way down, just one. And also hacking is quite the thing. So you can hack into this stuff, right? And the people that have developed these things, they're completely evil. I mean, they are behind the killing. They have put millions and billions of dollars into a traitor at the White House. And that person is trying to kill us, every one of us. You know, I'm not high on that list right this minute, but I will be. And the rest of us will be. Because guess what? We're not giving them money. That's all I have. We need to do something about this. I am deeply, deeply concerned about our privacy and our well-being as citizens of Santa Rosa, the County of Sonoma, California. I could skip the rest.

Thank you.

And you can state your name and features.

My name is Jamie Eggers. I live in Santa Rosa. of course, echo what a lot of people have said here about not trusting the big tech companies. But I do just also want to say that as much as Chief Cregan, you seem like a nice guy, as an institution, I don't really trust the police either. And I think that the public has a lot of good reasons for that. you know, they've broken our trust a lot of times and told us things that turned out to not be true. And so as much as I see that there's policies in place to prevent, you know, misuse and all of this, I don't know that I can trust it. And I've heard of situations where cops will look up information on their romantic partners or exes to stalk them and things like that. And so I think about, you know, situations like that, obviously you're saying, you know, there's public safety implications or ways that that stalk helps you. And I kind of just look at it as, but there's also a trade-off. Like if we can solve a shoplifting incident, but then a woman is stalked by her partner, like is that a good trade-off? I don't know. Or if somebody is picked up by ICE, but like, you know, we solved a vehicle crime. Like for me, that's like not really a valuable trade-off. And so I just want to Just say that, like, as much as I wish I could trust the police at all times, like, it's not just flock for me. Like, I am concerned that the police would have access to some of this information. So, thank you.

I know, Mayor Steff, you just walked in. We're walking down for public comment. Do you have a public comment? I do not. Thank you. Do you have a public comment?

Please, thank you. And then you can state your name. Say cheers. I'm a person. I don't know if Santa Rosa for 52 years. I just think it would be nice. I mean, in an overall conversation that we stop referring to these things as ALPRs. I mean, I think we all know that they're not just capturing a license plate. And I think to have full transparency, we should refer to them as surveillance cameras, which is what they are. And also I'd like to point out, I think as other people are trying to make a point that, you know, it is, interesting and legal for someone to photograph you in one place. When 133 cameras are tracking you virtually everywhere you go, it's sort of a dragnet or stalking. You know, if someone were to, you know, if me and my fellow soccer moms had 133 of us tracking someone around the city, we would be arrested. We would be stopped by the cops. I trust the Santa Rosa PD. I'm a soccer mom. I'm a den leader, Cub Scouts. I'm anti-crime. But I think it's important to look at the trade-offs. We're looking at mainly retail theft grants that are supporting this. And we have a huge trade-off of data collection of our habits, the places that we go to worship, our health care that we might get, where we take our kids and when. And I don't think that's a healthy trade-off for a community. I'd happily put our money to more police officers and outreach. And also when we talk about devices, we have the Condor, you know, you weren't exactly sure what models you had. A lot of these things, I'm in technology myself, these things are like one firmware upgrade away from doing more and more than what we agreed to. And we know that Flock, we know the guy, the CEO, he said, people who ask questions about this are anti-Flock, they're terrorists. I mean, he's not here to help us. And I don't trust that he's gonna be transparent with what he's doing with the firmware upgrades. We're just one tiny, tiny, tiny firmware upgrade away from something that's really unpalatable, dangerous.

OK, so my name is Janelle Payne. Oh, OK. Yep, resident of Santa Rosa and did not come prepared to speak tonight. But thank you for the presentation. I've got some questions. So my first one is, are we auditing our outside agency searches like we audit SRPD searches? Second is, can outside agencies download and store the data that they collect from our agency indefinitely? Third is, have flock cameras contributed to crime prevention in Santa Rosa? And what metrics are we tracking in order to measure the answer to that question? How are those metrics being measured? And then LAPD famously, I don't know famously, but they just canceled their contract with Flock over their major concerns about data ownership and content sharing and using publicly available data to train their AI systems. And so I want to know, is Santa Rosa using kind of a standard Flock contract? Have we done an analysis about how our contract is similar to or different from what LAPD was using? How do we know that FLOC isn't taking the data and keeping it? I know you've said that we own it, but how do we know? And have we confirmed that we shouldn't be sharing LAPD's concerns? And then also regarding the cameras tracking our facial recognition or just the license plates or whatever, the point that my friend Elizabeth just made as well is that when we are being tracked as we are by 133 cameras across Santa Rosa, you're tracking our movement over time, that Dragnet piece. And so you are deducing our identity from our patterns, right? Where I'm dropping my kids off and picking them up and taking them to school and going to work and going to the doctor and everything else I'm doing in my day, you can very easily deduce my identity, my personally identifiable information from my patterns as I drive around. And I don't know, that ain't right. Thank you. Thank you.

Yes.

And do we have further comments?

I just want to say something real quick. I'm here to support our organization. Thank you for our organization and we just don't agree with the flood cameras, I just want them up.

All right, one second. All right, you can state your name if you choose.

My name is Elia, I work with the non with the North Bay Organizing Project. I'm here because I'm concerned about the cameras that are in Santa Rosa. I been living here for more than, 14 years. I migrated from Mexico. And my concern is that I know you guys aren't sharing information with ICE or anything of that source. But my concern right now is that you said that the cameras are basically following us, listening to our conversations 24-7. And I feel like that's concerning. We should be having privacy and there shouldn't be someone else listening to our conversation because I believe it's private. And also my concern is that it does facial recognition. So in a way, it kind of concerns me because it identifies us as black and white or people of color. And that's my concern, like, What if I get detained by ICE agent because of my skin color or my family members get detained and I really don't know where they are? So I'm really concerned for my migrant communities, my migrant community, since I'm an immigrant and that's my concern. right now, my Hispanic people right now.

Thank you.

My name is Diana Kingsbury. I'm with the North Bay Organizing Project. I believe we all have a right to freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to move through our communities without fear of being targeted or persecuted based on our political activities. As a community organizer and a loved one of many who have joined local protests, frankly, I'm scared for us and our community. Laws change. So what counts as a law enforcement need is a genuine question that I have, because what is legal today may be illegal tomorrow. And I don't want to be paranoid. But when I see a police car in the parking lot of my workplace, I don't want to fear that they're essentially in cahoots with ICE. It seems that a lot right now depends on SRPD officers not aligning with the federal government's stance. Our president ruled that organizing people around economic grievances is terrorism, and I don't want to be persecuted for so-called terrorist acts that would be completely legal and encouraged in a truly democratic society. But if we look at the Prairieland case, where someone was sentenced to 30 years in prison simply for moving a box of zines that supported the immigrant community against ISIS attacks, it's clear that things are going in a really bad direction. Do we trust Flock with our data? No. I worry about them using my data for biomapping. And I have a loved one who keeps talking about, is this that part of history where we have to leave the country because things have gotten so bad? And it makes me feel deflated and a little bit hopeless, honestly, when I see our local governments doing things that feed into these increasingly authoritarian pressures. But it does make me feel hopeful when I see that so many others are standing up to say no, that we reject tools that strengthen fascism in our community because we all deserve freedom from mass surveillance. Thank you.

Anyone else would like to make a public comment that didn't in the first round? Okay.

All right.

Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone.

Yes, we have no public comment for this item.

Thank you. I will. I know Chief Cregan said he was taking notes. I'll leave it to his discretion whether any final closing comments before I definitely plug the community meeting in September.

Yeah, absolutely. And just thanks so much for the really heartfelt and honest concerns. And I want you to know, like, This is a day of education for me. I want to authentically hear. My style as chief is to not shy away from difficult conversations, to hear the community. The same, a large group I know, the North Bay Organizing Project, has been loud on this topic. Happy to sit down and have a private meeting. I've actually met twice over equally divisive topics like SROs. an investigation of an outside shooting that we had where I've sat down with representatives from the North. I'm happy to sit down and coffee or a place of your choosing and have conversations. We can dive deeper and to be able to examine the policies, fear of concerns and talk about things. And you can educate me on things that many have done a lot of research on this topic and can educate us. And we'll work together on the topic. The biggest thing is understanding it's easy to talk. I mean, those are troubling stories that we saw in Minnesota and that we've seen in Texas and Tennessee. California though is unique and not that we don't make mistakes, but California has led the way. Minnesota doesn't have Senate Bill 34 or Senate Bill 54. Minnesota doesn't have some of the leaders that we have here in Santa Rosa with our city council that are put on robust policies. We don't have some of those things. The Santa Rosa Police Department, We have 249 employees at the Santa Rosa Police Department. They're human beings. They make mistakes sometimes. I've made mistakes as chief. But I want to also at the same time say we really work to be different than what maybe you see across the country. Even here, we love to be leaders here in Sonoma County. We lead, I always tell people, by four things. We focus on hiring the right people, really like slowing down, doing methodical interviews, backgrounds and hiring the right people that don't come with troubled paths. Regularly, I reject lateral officers coming from other agencies that apply for us that don't meet our expectations, that are working currently as a police officers at other communities and we reject them. Second is training. We really focus on once we hire you, we're going to put the training and the resources to make sure whether it be LPRs, whether it be stops that you're making in the community, you do the right thing. Third is supervision. We really focus on having great supervisors who are out there in the fields, who are managing these incidents. And fourth is accountability. If you mess up as a Santa Rosa police officer and we see that, we're able to document that, we're going to hold you accountable. We have our independent police auditor that has the most unfettered access of any agency here in Sonoma County of being able to access our citizen complaints, be part of the interviews with our officers to be able to be watching the same body worn camera footage that I have. No other agency has that. We do that. That was a conscious decision by us to be able to do those things. And so we're working to lead the way. And I think too, another question that came up is like, hey, it's similar to a GPS, but I can see the overall argument. The biggest distinction is a GPS gives you the more granular level. A GPS can tell you what house you're parked in front of, you're in the driveway or in the street, how long you were there. I understand the 133 and someone mentioned that 133 locations. We also have to put that in perspective. We have 42 square miles across the city of Santa Rosa with thousands of traffic miles that we have without the city. The 133 gives actually pretty robust data, but it actually is very broad. So you can't say where a person lives because of their 133 intersections, like on college. And here there's some right here on Santa Rosa Avenue, on Sonoma Avenue, on Farmers. Each one of those has a... But it's giving you so you can say every day that person travels down farmers, but it's not giving so much that personal data to say, oh, they live at one, two, three Main Street. You're not going to be able to get that data. They're traditionally not in residential neighborhoods. They're out. The only one that I can think of right now is Badger Road. I consider that a residential neighborhood that has. But to my knowledge, there's no other ones. But you guys can educate me if you hear of other ones that we have. but let's continue to work together. I think this has really given me a lot more framework for some of the concerns about like our FLOC contract, about how we audit FLOCs, how we're auditing other agencies. Those are things that I'll spell out in greater detail when we do the community meeting. And that's going to be another opportunity that, like I said, our presentation will be more in depth. We can have a FLOC representative there if people think that helps to have someone from FLOC. I don't I could go either way, quite honestly. But I would love to hear from the community. If that's something that the community wants to see, I can have block representatives there. We can have a copy of the contract. You can ask. Let me know what. And then we'll have that opportunity. And kind of what I'm envisioning, I'll work with Misty and the team. And we're going to come up with an idea that we're going to be writing, like whether it be going back and forth, whether we break out in small breakouts like we've done before to kind of gather concerns. Or we're putting up there on some whiteboards or the things about, hey, these are all the concerns. Our city council members are going to be participating, going to be getting that data. And we're really going to come together like really a robust database of what are the concerns? What are the areas? What are things that I'm trying to do a better job just on the education? Because some things are just factually not correct that we see in the community of concerns. Some things are legitimate. And so how we get there. But again, let just the invitation is if anyone wants to meet you guys want to talk about it whether you're part of the north bay organizing or any other community group but if not come to our community meeting and i'll be there i'm going to have a team i'll bring the team who's doing the audits i'll bring some of our real-time crime center so they'll be there because quite honestly like i'm not looking at the flat campus like that's not as the chief of police i i actually don't even have the account to be going in there i see i go into the real-time crime center and my officers are accessing that So they'll be there and they'll be able to talk more and I'll have some of the real world examples and we can talk about some of the camera locations in our city. Any questions that you guys have about that and we'll dive into it. So that's in summary, just want to say I'm here to talk. This has been super educational and really encourage people to come on September 17th, 6 p.m. at the utility field office. It's 35 Stony Point Drive. So right across from like Finley there, there's the safe parking program from the city. It's in that same parking lot. So it's a public, it's through the water department, the building, but it's open to our city.

Okay. Ironically, that's Constitution Day. Thank you. September 17th. As a history teacher, I have to teach a constitutional lesson that day.

One better way to celebrate. Well, I welcome everyone to stay. We're going to have a presentation on transportation, but I understand everyone's here for one topic. Come back anytime. Thank you. i was thinking thank you steve and then with that yeah thank you we've got the video going if there's anybody watching live i was like he's got him that way yeah And with that, if we're ready, we'll move on to item 7.2. Tarina Hu oversees the white cameras.

I don't oversee them, but they are in my department. Thank you. All right.

Okay. You have my presentation. We'll see you in September.

I don't know if I've actually met any of you. I'm sorry if I haven't. I don't remember. But my name is Torina Wilson. I'm the city's transportation planner. My job is bike lanes, sidewalks, getting grants to be able to do those projects, development review, pretty much anything transportation related that doesn't have to do with city bus. I have a presentation for you today about the Greenway Connectivity Study. The reason I'm here is to explain to you the project and we are in a phase of public engagement right now. So I'm just letting you know and advertising the survey. We can go to the next slide here. Since it's behind me, I also have it on my screen here. So just for your benefit, just in case you or anyone listening doesn't know, the city has a project called the Southeast Greenway Project. That is the former Caltrans right of way that's to the east of the terminus of Highway 12 at Farmers. If you're going east on Highway 12 and you are going to turn left or right on Farmers and you look ahead, there's a big grassy field. That is a two mile long property that Caltrans planned to be an extension of Highway 12. The city, though, has rallied and we now own that property. And so we know that it's going to be a park. We are under contract with a landscape design firm. We're about to do a big master planning process. The only thing we know for sure is that there will be a multi-use path throughout all of it. So you'll be able to walk and bike all the way over to Howard, Spring Lake, Annadel. And then, so that's showing on the right-hand side of the screen. On the left-hand side of the screen, also in red, are other locations where we have multi-use paths. So we have Joe Redota Trail, Prince Memorial Greenway, Santa Rosa Creek Trail. In the middle, I, as a city staff person, know that once that Southeast Greenway project is done on the right-hand side, I have no plan of how to get people back and forth. So next slide. I'm working on a project to connect them. So that's my issue to be solved, is making sure that when we put in that wonderful generational project, that it just doesn't dump you into nowhere right south of Montgomery High School. Um, and I mean the ultimate goal there, right. Is that there's a full east west connection for walking and biking across the city, which will be fabulous. We'll go next slide. Um, so city staff got together, uh, my department and we came up with several alternatives of how this could happen. We like all of these alternatives, but we didn't feel like for a generational project like this, we could just make that executive decision. So we did actually get a grant from the federal government. It's just technical assistance. So it's not a monetary grant, but they're helping us with things like graphics and just telling the story and having the survey open so that we can get feedback. So these are the three alternatives. I'm going to do a very high level overview of them. The one thing I wanna highlight about all of these alternatives is that they are doable. So when we got together and we came up with all of the alternatives, we threw pie in the sky and we were like, okay, what are all of the options? And then we came back to reality and we said, okay, which ones could we actually complete? Because we don't want another 30 year project that's not gonna get done because the Southeast Greenway is legit, right? So we wanna support that. So the first alternative, the one that is on the top, it's in orange. That one, I'm going to go west to east on all of these. So on the west hand side where Prince Memorial Greenway comes out at City Hall, which is where we are, you would go down Sonoma Avenue all the way. You would go through Montgomery Village and you would turn south at Haman. All of the portion on Sonoma Avenue, we know we have enough right of way to do a parking protected bike lane. So if you're riding a bike, you'd be fully separated from vehicles. Um, the Haman portion and then the portion where it meets with Hoenn to get to where the Southeast greenway will be. Some of those locations, we have enough right away to have vehicles separated from, or sorry, bicycles separated from vehicles in some we don't. So in the cases where we don't, there would be pretty significant traffic calming. So the vehicles are moving as slow as possible and it actually is comfortable. Second alternative, number two, that's the blue one. It would look exactly the same on Sonoma Avenue, except instead of going all the way over to Montgomery Village, you would go south at Doyle Park.

You would meander through the park.

We don't allow cars in there right now, so it's a very peaceful environment, very shaded. And then you would go east through the park. You would hook up with Hohen Avenue. Same situation there, where in some cases, we have enough right-of-way to separate bicycles. In a couple locations, we don't. So that would be meaningful traffic calming. Alternative number three on the bottom, that's the yellow one. That one, instead of going on Sonoma, you would continue south on Santa Rosa Avenue. And then you would turn on to Charles. That's right in front of Juilliard Park. And then you would be on residential streets the entire way. Because of residential parking and right-of-way restrictions, the entirety of that option would be neighborhood greenway so that would be the traffic calming kind of tactics that we use a couple things to note anywhere that there is a intersection so at farmers or if it's alternative three and you're kind of jockeying around different residential streets there will be treatments at the intersections as well so we would do bike phases like we have on the signal over here we would do roll bouts if it's not signalized we will put those flashing beacons, a crosswalk, things like that. So there would be consideration for that. The only other caveat that I have here is alternative three on the bottom. You'll notice you'll come out of Vallejo and when you meet farmers, you actually move north. We would not put bikes and pedestrians just on farmers. There would be a raised bike lane there. I do get that comment like, oh my gosh, no, you wouldn't. Ah, I don't want to have you. So we would have a raised bike lane there. We have enough right away that we can extend the curb. Let me, I'm gonna have you actually skip several slides and go to this one. I don't have numbers, but Sonoma Avenue parking protected bike lane. There you go. These graphics that I'm having, Steve, skip, they are in the survey. So you'll have access to them when you take the survey. This is just a visual simulation of what we think Sonoma Avenue would look like. So you'll notice on the far right-hand side, there's a sidewalk. Then there would be a bike lane immediately there. Then there would be some sort of buffer and then parking. So you would notice that parked cars would be a buffer between people who are walking and biking and the moving vehicles. This tactic also is really wonderful for reducing speeds of vehicles that are driving. If something's closer to them, you feel a little bit more constrained, you drive slower. Next slide. This is a visualization of what it could look like in Doyle Park. We could improve the speed bumps that are in there. They're a little intense. We would do some widening of the path so that it's actually a multi-use path. Right now, it's about six feet wide. It wouldn't fit if someone has a stroller and you have a bike. You could do landscaping. We would definitely need signage so that we can direct people, right? This is a full east-west connection across town. You need to have some great signage. Next slide. And then this one shows just one possibility of what a neighborhood greenway could look like. There's dozens of treatments that we could put in, and there's so much research on how frequently. Is it every 200 feet, every 500 feet? And what combination of each of these treatments actually gets you at the goal that you want, which is it vehicles are moving slower collisions would be non existent ideally. And so this is just one of those options, you know so speed bump here there's signage. kind of in the middle of this image there's a big landscaped area, this is a tactic where. we can remove a couple parking spaces, mainly for sight distance, but it's also really helpful at crosswalks. You'll notice that the program for that crosswalk is farther into the street. That means that the distance that a pedestrian is in the street to cross is a lot less, right? You narrow or you shorten the crossing distance. So we'll go to the last slide and I'll let you know what outreach we've done and what we have going on right now. We've done... Several focus groups. I sat down with Montgomery High School students, the Southeast Greenway campaign. I'm going to go to the Friends of the Prince Memorial Greenway. We did a focus group with Latino service providers. There's a couple I'm not thinking of. We've done five or six pop-up events. I also did a community ride on Um, July 12th, it was the blast. It was like 35 people who came and I didn't even do an RSVP. I was like maybe 10 people crazy. And then they just kept coming. I was like, I don't know how we're all there, but okay. So we did, it was great. It was a great time. Um, I do have a community workshop on the 29th, which I believe is next Wednesday. Um, and it's actually in this room, uh, and there will be a free childcare, free snacks. I will have a way more, I don't know if way more detailed is the way to say that, but. I will have a bigger presentation. I have big boards, and I can answer folks' questions. So I'm partly here to tell you about that. Please let your friends and your family know, your constituents. I also have a survey, and that is the number one thing I need from you. So if you are at all interested in providing input on this project, please take the survey. You can obviously give me feedback here right now, and I would take that. The survey is where I need the actual feedback to live, however. Um, so please do the survey. It is written in a way where it kind of walks you through each of the alternatives. I also worded a couple of the questions in a way where I'm trying and asking things like, okay, if we did a treatment like this, would you then consider riding your bike to the park? So I try to get you to think a little bit more, um, especially for people who just don't consider walking and biking as a option for transportation for certain trips. I want to just try to like invoke that. Um, thought. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I need. I don't think so. I think it's a survey and the community workshop, and then I can answer any questions or Oh, no joke.

How long is the survey open for?

Great question. I did. So it was going to be the end of this month. But I want to have some focus groups with some schools and I need to wait until August. So right now, my tentative date is August 15th.

Plenty of time to share it around.

Friends, family, enemies. I don't care.

What's your response rate to date?

We just passed 600. Isn't that crazy? I forgot to say we sent 10,000 mailers. So we drew a big circle around the alternatives. And so any property owner or business owner in that circle got one. I know since I'm saying 10,000 mailers and we just passed 600 responses, that's crazy. This is great news. So I'm feeling good about it.

Yeah, a couple of questions or just comments. Can you do one and two?

None of them are at the exclusion of another. The main thing is I need to know what the preferred alternative is because I need to know which one to do first so I can time it with the multi-use path of the Southeast Greenway.

Have you done a cost analysis of the different alternatives?

We have, yes.

Can you share that information?

So I don't have the exact dollar number because three minutes later, it's different. Alternative number three, the yellow one, is the least expensive, mainly because we have so much flexibility with what types of treatments and how frequently they get put in on a neighborhood greenway. Number one, actually, surprisingly, is... middle of the pack, mainly because we just recently repaved. So it's mostly just a straining project for us. Alternative number two, it's my suspicion that that one's the most expensive. The reason for that is because we will need to repay the Hoenn. I don't know if you've been on Hoenn, but it is not comfortable in a car. And when we did the community bike ride, we all rendezvoused at Doyle Park and I was like, okay, guys, we're about to go on hoeing i know it's bad but you don't need to tell me no and then we're writing down and some people who just hadn't written it before they're like like they were they could not believe it was like um so anyway we do have to repay poland um it would not be uh good in conscience to put people on bikes there. So most expensive one.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Sorry, just one more. This is, I don't know if it's silly, but are there, just because it goes by Montgomery Village, I'm curious if there's like sponsorship opportunities or if there can be funds contributed from local businesses since you're literally taking people to where they sell stuff, and maybe that'll increase business for them. Maybe you could try to drum up some monies from them. I know one. It's called Flock.

I'll take money from anybody.

You have billions, dude.

I will say the owners of Montgomery Village have been really helpful. I don't know if you've seen it, but we, on Sonoma, between Farmers and Hama, and we just had a project where we did a whole roadbed rehabilitation, because that's a big transit area for us. And we did, the project's not 100% complete, although it's striped and it's open. We will have, we have protected bike lanes, we put in the city's first modular bus boarding islands, which means that to maintain the protected bike lanes, the bikes actually now have a platform to go up on and it's the same platform that people load onto the bus. So anyway, that project's already in. And as part of that project, our director of transportation and public works worked with the owners of Montgomery Village, and they're putting in a couple crosswalk murals. So they're actually really interested in partnering with us. So it's a really great idea. And I could definitely float, see what happens.

Cool. Thank you.

Yeah.

I filled out the survey today. I remember why I was on that. community bike ride as well.

Oh my gosh, thank you.

And I've been in touch with the Montgomery Village developers about re-landscaping the trees they took out, which they, good news is they did. Did they put in native plants though? No, they put in crape myrtles again. Did they put in, did they put in yarrow? Yes, that's fantastic. Is it our native yarrow? No. So I guess my question is, a couple questions, and I'm totally, you know, these guys are sick of me beating this drum, but I'm going to do it. Alternative one sounds like it's cool. I have a kid. I would love, you know, the protected bike lane. Awesome.

Sure.

That sounds appetizing, but does not seem appetizing. It's just like pavement during the summer. Yeah. With no tree canopy. So number two seems awesome. My question is, I think this came up when we presented this, maybe like a hundred years ago, I want to say, with Dan and

Active transportation plan. Yeah.

At the time, I think I asked like what discretion you all have or budget resources to improve tree canopy along these routes. So I'd be curious in that. I'd also be curious, like in some of the uh what do you call them the neighborhood uh greenways uh it seemed like there was some like you know uh pop art little like landscaping uh things which i think also could be cool to you know both beautify and uh biodiversify these areas i'm wondering what the discretion there is as well and how if that happens do we decide what types of species and plants go in sure And if they're not going to be native to our region, why not? Who's making those decisions?

Yeah, that's a long question. It is. But I can answer it. So we at the city, so I'm a city planner by trade. I don't just do historically, transportation. So I'm all about, you know, addressing the urban heat island effect and getting housing and all this stuff. So ideally, yes, all of our protected bike lanes, it would be wonderful if instead of the green bollards, we had a permanent landscaped area, beautifully maintained. Our problem for the most part is staffing. So we don't have the maintenance staff really even to maintain the parks that we have and the roads that we have. So when we propose on public right of way landscaping right now, that's a hot topic. In some cases we can do some more like ornamental shorter natives really helpful because then a lot of those like drought tolerant native plants don't need as much maintenance. it still can sometimes be a hard sell for some of our maintenance crews. One thing in the survey, I think it's towards the end, I have a question where it's like, what kind of treatments are you interested in seeing? And one of the questions does say things like shade tree, general landscaping, benches, lighting, things like that. if in the survey it's like an exorbitant amount of people say landscaping, then I know as the person who might need to go get a grant for an improvement on Sonoma Avenue, hey, people are really interested in urban greening. And I can specifically target a grant where that is more possible. That's just for installation. I would then need to convince my maintenance crews to then trim all of those things and maintain and water. So- Um, assuming if a plant needs water, the who decides usually any landscaping on public right of way is part of projects that our capital projects team manages. So I don't manage that. I'm not a hundred percent sure where the policy is, but I have seen that the city has some sort of like urban tree planting something or other. But I don't know who came up with that.

Yeah, the list is, I may say so, like, woefully outdated. And there is a more comprehensive, like, non-tree, like, shrub, you know, which is decent and, like, does have a lot of her native species, which would just, you know, inherently perform better here.

Yeah.

and we can talk about it later. I'm not really not trying to co-opt this part of the meeting, but I appreciate you being here because these are questions that keep coming up. And I know that in some of the community groups I'm a part of, like people are interested in this stuff. This is such an exciting program and everyone's really excited about it. And I'm like, can we, let's just get that 10%. That's going to make a difference there. Um, and maybe just getting creative with where the funding's coming from perhaps. Um, but, um, I just know, and having worked with the Parks Department on some habitat gardens around town, that this maintenance issue often comes up. I'm painfully aware that we don't have the staff to maintain all of our parks, which is why community groups have been able to fill some of those gaps. And I think as part of that, what I've been really banging a drum for is broadening our idea of what it means for something to be maintained. And that means that You know, when you look to a lot of our local biodiversity and a lot of our local flora, it's not always going to be in bloom all the time. That's by design, you know? And so I just, I think those conversations are kind of slowly happening, but I would love if that advocacy could continue to happen so that we don't, we can continue to get good things because we don't imagine like the worst case scenario, which is like kind of subjective to begin with, right? It's like, well, what if it doesn't look good all the time? It's not supposed to. Yeah.

What's a weed to one person is a massively great pollinator plant. Exactly. And it's beautiful.

And it's beautiful. We just need to change our minds.

Parks and maybe capital projects. That's a huge surprise.

And my last question, and then I will stop, is would you be down to do a focus group with our local chapter of the Native Plant Society?

Yeah, anybody who wants to do a focus group. Do I have my email on this slide? I don't. We can send that. Great. Yeah. Send me an email.

Okay, cool.

Yeah. And then I can set that up. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, of course.

Remember, Knowles is happy to water anything you guys want. He will take it on.

I should show up to that meeting with a plant, but I also would be scared that I would get the wrong plant. A little risky. A lot of plants that are not used right now. Well, it's probably true. It's 500 more.

My daughter loves watering stuff. That's great.

Save water. Save water.

Do we have any data on what is the safest option? Because that is my, that is what I would like to see. Whatever is safest for bikers and pedestrians.

Yes. That can be a little bit of a loaded question. So the most safe in terms of cars are not hitting bicycles and pedestrians is you keep bicycles and pedestrians completely separate. So for the most part, especially where we have a complete sidewalk network, pedestrians are already removed. For bicycles, that would mean you are completely separating them. It's a multi-use path or it's protected. So it's the green bollards or it's the parking protected bike lanes, things like that. That is the type of treatment that we would have to do on something that is on our high injury network, which Sonoma Avenue is. So that is the only treatment that I would feel comfortable saying that is the safe option. Nothing is foolproof, but that is the safest. However, that's not to say that a neighborhood greenway is inherently not safe if you do it correctly. So if you put enough treatments and the, you know, a good combination of them and enough distance apart from one another. So you can't just put one speed bump on a three-mile corridor and expect that to solve all of your problems. We do not have an example of a neighborhood greenway in the city that I would personally point to to say that it does what I want it to. Other jurisdictions have really figured that out. If you do it right, and we have a lot of examples that we can look at for how to do it right, that location, vehicles would be moving so slowly that if there were, for some reason, a collision between a vehicle and a pedestrian or a bicycle, the vehicle will be moving so slowly or slow enough that the likelihood that it's a serious injury would be very low. Um, so it's all about kinetic energy and how fast and heavy a car is when it hits whatever it's hitting. Yeah.

Do the green ballards have any sort of like concrete or like a metal pole or anything inside? Or is it just like a... It looks like a plastic inflatable thing that can just get picked up.

If you walk up to one, you can look inside of it. It's empty inside. They are drilled into the pavement. They are designed to be hit a lot and still come back up. So before we went and picked that one, we set up a couple different options in our maintenance yard, and we told our guys to go run them over. Oh, my gosh. It was like their favorite assignment they've ever gotten. And then we told them we were like, whichever one, because they don't want to have to go and replace them all the time. So whichever one you liked the most, like, let's go for it. And that was the one that reigned supreme. The main goal of them. So we would love to have everything be a total concrete permanent. Like if a car hits it, there's no way you would go over it. Those are also really difficult because there's very few concrete barriers that that you can guarantee a car would not hit it in a certain way that like a chunk of concrete would come up and become a projectile.

Or it'd have to be like four foot tall or something for it not to just be able to drive over. Exactly, yeah.

And so there'd be like K-rails everywhere in the city, which also is aesthetically not pleasing. Not that the green bollards are fabulous. Um, but so, um, the main point of the green bollards is a car could clip one. So maybe, you know, somebody's texting and they clip one, but that's better than nothing being there because otherwise it's, they're clipping a bicycle that's right there. So they, there's a awareness. Um, I know they're not perfect. I wish I had a better solution.

Flying bikes.

I'm like, we just need drones to just take people. But then, you know, we just heard about drones. Maybe we don't do drones. I don't know.

What do we do?

Any other questions or comments from the board?

Great job.

Thank you.

Yeah, you guys are doing a great job.

Thank you. Help counsel, please.

We're now taking public comments on item 7.2. Would anyone like to make a public comment? And it appears we have no public comments for this item.

Great.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for being here. We look forward to that. We'll do the survey and push out and share as we can in our districts.

I'm going to see one, two, three, four. I'm going to see five more. Oh, you already took one. Four more surveys. I'll be watching.

And we will move on to item 7.3, which is the presentation of our Community Improvement Grant update, guidelines and applications and reporting from Plano.

Good evening, Community Advisory Board. I'm Donna, Community Engagement Manager. And after hearing some of your comments and also gathering some feedback from Community Improvement Grant applicants, I decided to take another look at the application and the guidance and try to streamline the process, make it as clear as possible, as consistent as possible. The city attorney and I met to look at the legal aspect and make sure everything is good. So the first thing we, if you look at your packet, the first thing we did is separate The guidelines from the application. Currently, when you go on the website, the application there has two documents. So we just separated the two documents. I think it will be more clear for people. Then in the guidance, if you look at the community improvement grant application guidelines, I highlighted the areas that have been changed. One of the things that we have seen a lot of questions and concerns was about contractor fees. And after much discussion, we decided to make contractor fees or human time as a non-eligible fee. So community members can apply expenses to supplies, equipment rentals, permit insurance fees, all of those things. But it was a little, one of the things that wasn't allowed was salaries and wages. And we had some applicants that were using part of the funds to pay a contract with fees. So that looked, even though they were on profit, And they are not staffed. It's an agency that is not staffed. But still, it looked confusing. So we decided to just make contracted fees as a non-eligible thing. The other thing that we included here in terms of the matching funds is that if the city is waiving the fee permits or facility rentals, that cannot be used as matching fund. And we have seen some of that because the city is already waiving those fees. They shouldn't be used towards the matching funds. Then if we go to the page four, permission and approvals, made it very clear that projects will not be considered unless they have the required permits and approvals. I know we have approved contingency projects that were going through like the Art in Public Place Committee and things like that, or like parks. But in this way, it's straightforward. We know that they're coming to us with everything that they need to have. And that also that that department is aware of that application. So they're not blindsided and they're like, oh, okay, let's say a community garden is being proposed or a mural is being proposed. So they are aware of that subject and we are all on the same page. Then the next, that was for the guidelines. And then for the application, the application is going to be a fillable PDF, which is going to make it a lot easier for people. Then on the fields that they have to put amounts, if they put the requesting $2,500 and they put matching funds, $1,500 is going to give them an error. So they're going to know automatically that they have to be matched. Whatever amount is requesting, it has to be matched. We decided to have, instead of having the questions, we just have, OK, this is what we need to know. Here is the box for you to answer this question. So it's also easier for you and us to find the answer to everything. OK, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is meeting the criteria or not. These boxes are expandable. So it's not like it's just going to be a limited space. For the disclosure, we added a box for disclosure of other city funding as well. We have had applicants that have applied for other grants that the city offers. And even though that doesn't stop them from applying to the community improvement grant, we want to know. Since our funds are limited, we want to know. And if we have like, I don't know, 15 applications, then maybe that application will not receive priority. Okay. We added more language in terms of requested funds and matching funds and total cost. So hopefully this will make it clear. There are confusions. People don't often understand what are we asking for. Again, more language about in page four, the total request grant amount cannot be more than $2,000. Just making sure people understand that. Page five, also more information about matching funds. And then an explanation of how the funds will be used. Because sometimes it's really vague and it's unclear. Okay, well, you're requesting, I don't know, flyers. But how are they going to be used? How is the money going to be used? And that is it for the application. The other thing we decided to do is a report application, a report form would be also a fillable PDF. And it follows the similar format than the application because that's what we want to see. We want to see the results of what they have asked us for. So that one again has the boxes, similar questions. One thing in the budget that we change both in the application and the report is that we have requested funds, matching funds and total. So it's very clear for people to see that. And it would also give them an error if they're putting amounts that are not correct. And that's all. I hope these improvements help bring clarity and consistency, and I'm open to any questions.

Thank you for your work on this. I will first say I love how the boxes are broken up for the responses, so we're not kind of reading through each application. That's a huge improvement. Thank you for that. That I'll leave it up to the board for comments and questions on the new application format.

I mean, I think it looks amazing. Yeah. I think it's going to be a lot more clear and we're not going to have to spend as much time trying to, you know, decipher what they were talking about and what they are going to use the funds for. Cause that's obviously been the major issue of why people have been either denied or told to come back is just for clarification. So thank you.

Just as a note, we should probably stop here. It's like so well laid out and like we're asking for so many subsets of information. I think any longer would become like, yeah, it's getting into like federal grant level NIH applications. Yeah, I think it looks great.

Thank you very much, Anand.

Well done. So is this new application starting this fiscal year? Is this up and live? Ready to go?

It's not up and live. I wanted to present it to you before uploading. And if you have any comments, if you have any changes.

Anything else before we open it up for public comment?

Thank you. Then with that, we'll open it up for public comment. We're not taking public comment on item 7.3.

And it appears that we have no public comment for the site. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you, Anna, for your work on this. And I look forward to reading all the new grants in the new format. All right. And with that, we are moving on to item 7.4, which is? Speaking of community improvement grants, the application for the community improvement grant for the Bentz Harper South Park Day and Night Festival. Anna.

Hi. Good evening. You know if I stood for? The University Board reviews and approves the 2026 Community Improvement Grant applications. The Board should award the grants to the applicants whose projects best meet the criteria. For the July-August 2026, we have two grants that have been submitted. The FCM Engage is requesting $2,500 to support the 2026 Harpers South Park. Day and Night Festival, which is a free community event that connects families with essential health, wellness, and community resources. The festival provides free food, entertainment, and family movie prices, vaccinations, reading glasses, and resources. Building on the success of the last year event, which offered on-site vaccination and vision services, EFCM Engage plans to continue these services and expand access by hopefully adding dental care. The festival promotes health, education, and community engagement while increasing awareness of available services and programs. Recommendation, it is recommended by the communications and the governmental relations department that the community advisory board by motion determine the dispersion of the community improvement grant for the July, August, 2026 period.

Thank you very much. And with that, I'll bring it to the board for discussion and questions and comments. I will make a comment that we are in a new fiscal year. Our funding has been reinstated, refreshed, replenished.

Yeah, the new fiscal year, it's like a reset essentially. And so the cab gets that amount every fiscal year. So you're at the beginning of a full pot of money. Yes.

So...

So just with that caveat, this is where we start now chipping away at that bucket. So with two applications this evening, welcome to open the discussion on the Vince Harper Community Improvement Grant.

I have first question? Yeah. Yeah. So the grantee or the grant applicant identifies themselves as writing for an organization that has an acronym but not a name. E-Z-E-M. Can you help me find it?

Yes.

Did you identify what that means?

I don't know. That's what they put in their logo. E-Z-E-M, engaged.

Yeah, that.

And we have had a presentation. Is that awkward?

Oh, I believe that's a vet miners project. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Okay.

So it's a vet miners and like 501 C three.

That I don't know, but she's done it for several years. They've done it for several years. Yeah. Probably under cap on can probably as a fiscal, as a fiscal sponsor, possibly I'm not representing them. So that's okay. Yeah.

That's helpful. Okay. Yeah. That was confusing to me. Okay. Okay. And then I have a quick question. I haven't been in a couple of years. I used to work at CAP with Vince, and I know during those days it was quite strong and it was a beautiful, beautiful event. I'm wondering, is it well attended? Is it supported by the community who is being invited? Are people attending this event? Because, I mean, in the picture, which is basically the only... I'm going to have to go off of it, unless we have a past report from last year's grant?

Yes, we do. And Yvette has come and presented her report two times last year. She has received the grant in 2021, 2025, and reapplied again. We have table, the city has table in 2024 and 2025. It was really... It was really well attended. Those are events that, yes, the community really enjoys.

Great. I love it. That's all I need to hear.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments or questions from the board on this?

Sorry, if it wasn't well attended, you wouldn't support it.

Actually, it would be a consideration, yes. Sorry, so you said they got funding from CAB in 2025 and 2024? Yes. Okay. Since it is the beginning of a new fiscal year, I feel like we should make, and I know this is probably me just like being a pain in the butt about this, but make a decision on whether that's going to affect how we vote moving forward, right?

Well, I don't think we should make policy on it. I mean, each one is individual. Yeah. Based on its merits. Yeah. We discuss one each individually. Yeah. So...

I think it should definitely factor into the conversation and decision making, but I don't know that there necessarily needs to be like a strict policy on that as long as we consider it for every...

It's just a different, like the weight of the consideration changes as we get towards the end of the fiscal year, if we start running low on money and then it becomes... And I know that's just, we don't know how it's going to go. And so it's, you know, it's hard to speculate. I just wanted... throw that out there because I have to always throw that out there. Because I feel like it's part of the decision making process. I just want us to be making decisions with the same rubric.

Cool. Have we consistently rejected applicants who previously were awarded within the calendar year?

We have done that in the past. One time.

Because the funds were really, there were a lot of applications and we were short. months. So yeah, we've said our presidents.

And we put that out there.

We say that it's not guaranteed.

Yeah. Cool. Sweet.

And with that, I will open it up to public comment for the one community improvement grant for the Vince Harper community grant. Yes.

I'm needing this, but so you get money each year for the fiscal year. How much money do you get? Like

the whole year to spend through the board uh please yes 35 000. yeah thank you but can i can i just address the phrasing of that yes we're not actually really spending it we're filling grant applications correct yes so it's more like we're handing it out to support

I totally get it. Perfect.

Because if we were spending, there would be a disco ball in there.

We're all city residents.

And last year was the first year that we spent all the money. Am I remembering that correctly?

We didn't. No, we had some money left.

So what's the coffers this year then?

It should be around $39,000. Let's go.

That's right. We had some issues last year.

Any other public comment? Go for the public comments from this item. I bring it back to the board for a motion.

I motion to grant the full $2,500 application request. Second.

Second. Member Mondale. Second. Member Mondale.

What? All right. Well, we'll now take a roll call vote. for the full amount for KFCM Engage, $2,500. And we're going to start with our mover, Vice Chair Frates. Aye. And then our second, Member Mondale.

Aye.

Member Knowles. Aye. Member Dalton. Aye. And Chair Rodriguez.

Yes.

Let's reflect that that passes with five ayes, with Member Diaz-Bienaps.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Or with that, we'll move on to item.

Maybe it was a clarification needed. No, I'm just like, I just know we've been like strenuous about that kind of like, have they applied before kind of criteria? And it does just predispose the timing of this, which is kind of outside of everyone's control. Like when you happen, like if you apply when we get renewed funds, it's like we're a lot more judicious, not judicious.

Yeah, that was a conversation.

Yeah, no, I know. I'm just trying to be...

We're moving on to item 7.5, which is our second community grant this evening for the new Roseland Regional Library mosaic sculpture.

The Sonoma County Library Foundation is requesting $2,500 to support community engagement activities for the new Roseland Regional Library mosaic sculpture project. The mosaic will serve as a welcoming visual landmark that reflects the culture, heritage, and identity of the Roseland community. A central component of the project is community participation, with opportunities for residents to help shape the artwork through public workshops, artists' meets and greets, design feedback sessions, and the unveiling project.

The project aims to incorporate local voices

lead experiences into the final design while fostering community connection, ownership, and creative engagement. Recommendation, it is recommended by the Communications and Intergovernmental Relations Department that the Community Advisory Board, by motion, determine the dispersion of this community improvement grant for the July-August 2026 period.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And I know we do have a representative who has patiently waited this evening for one of our follow-up questions. If the board prefers to have discussion, we'll hear from the representative. If you promise you don't vote for it, I won't speak.

My name is Pat Cuda, and I'm a member of the board of the Sonoma County Library Foundation. We are not the Sonoma County Foundation. We are not the JC. We are a very small group. of passionate fundraisers supporting the library. And this project, just so you understand, the city was responsible for building the library. The library is responsible for filling it up with books, computers... and all of that. And that is the role that the foundation has taken on. So these 10 people have been working very diligently to raise $3.6 million, which we've never raised as a foundation before. Like 65,000 was our top. We're very close. We've got about 400,000 to go. But you probably know the ground has been broken and we've got walls going up. And we have a community engagement committee. We have two commissioners and volunteers rooted in the Roseland community that are working very closely with the community. And we want, as part of filling the library, is making it a beautiful, welcoming place that reflects that community. And we have a vision and a budget for a lovely large mosaic. We have an RFP out. There's a timeline, I believe in the proposal and we've gotten 61 applications. We hope very much to have a local person, but we want to process where the community designs it and it reflects the community. And we very much are asking for this funds to help us get the word out. We want to send out over 5,000, uh, uh, We want to have posters up and down the community. We're working with schools and organizations to have multicultural bilingual workshops so people can actually feel like this is their library and that they own. And if you've been to the branch that we have, the temporary branch, it's very much a buzzing place. And we are very excited about that. almost tripling the size and so grateful for the city for allocating this funding. So I'm here to answer any questions. So.

Great. Thank you. And with that, I'll bring it to the board for any questions or comments, since we have someone here representing the grant application.

Sorry, Anna isn't here. She's on one of our committees.

It's okay. She'll probably have to recuse herself. So probably would. Yeah. A quick question. Just sort of the timing and duration for the outreach for the community engagement. If you can share a little bit about the timing for that.

Well, we hope to have the contract, the design phase in October. And so we'll have... Workshops before that, working with the contractor, and then we'll be implementing it for probably the project will be done in summer, next summer, a year from now. The city just pushed the deadline back on us because of expected rain or something. So we're very much beholden to their timeline. But we have already done community engagement efforts, and we will continue to do those. This will just spread our reach. We're going to be at the Bayer Farm. We're at Cinco de Mayo. We're going to be at the Bayer Farm Fiesta, Harvest Fiesta in September. You know, we're just working with community partners. But this will allow us to kind of really saturate the neighborhood with their awareness. Because right now, you drive on Hearn, you really can't. There's something going on, but the signage is so bad. We really want to be able to get out there and involve the community. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm just curious, like, briefly, what does it look like? I love the idea that it's a community input into, like, the art making design itself, but then there's also, like, a lead artist who's sort of selected by the committee. Is that right?

What's the... Yeah, there's a committee right now looking at applications. There was, I guess it was like a letter of intent. There were 61 of those, and they're, the community committee is honing it down to three or four, and I think in September that recommendation will go to the library commission, they'll decide. And then the process of community engagement will greatly accelerate. So October is I think when we're going to be, and school will be back. So we want to work closely with the schools and the projects in the community.

And so like the lead artists, part of their application process or criteria for that is like how they're planning to engage.

Yes. Yeah. I'm not on the review committee, so I don't know all the details for that. Just trying to raise the money.

Any other questions?

I love the library.

Any other public comment?

I like it.

I think it's ironic that Duane was just here. We should give money to people that have budgets already, but it's in Roseland, so once again, it's going to be happier.

No other public comment?

No other problem. Okay.

With that, I bring you back to the board for a motion.

I would love to motion.

Yeah, I can.

No, because I'm so in support. Yes. I'd love to motion to vote on approving the grant for this organization.

Wonderful. Is there a second? Thank you. We'll now take a roll call vote.

One of the... for the full amount for the for the library and we'll start with the mover it was member dalton yes and second there's member knolls yes hi vice chair fredis hi and chair rodriguez yes reflect that that passes with five eyes with number ds being

I just want to make, I would like to love to have any involvement in any activities that the cab is doing. I'd love to meet with staff. piggyback with you or you can be aware of what we're doing because I think that would be a lovely collaboration. I can follow up with you.

Do you have days when people come on site and see the development that's happening or is there any time where it's safe for people?

We're at the mercy of the city and we have just been granted starting October to have hard hat tours. The first tour is going to be with the tribe which is donated to the city three and a half million dollars we wouldn't have this library without and then we have two community leader laurels on community leader hard hats but um if you can lean on the city we can do more we're hoping to have more but it's you know their hard hat they're it's a building site and uh so yes i think it would be a very appropriate for the cab to request a hardhat tour and we would love to Thank you. And I'd like to get your card.

Thank you for being sent.

Thank you. I know you guys are packing up, but we're not done. No way. We're not done. I didn't hear a gavel.

Okay.

Item number eight, which is our announcements and issues of concern to city residents. We're all on top of it so quick. Anything you would like to report out or chat about?

I mean, not super specific, but I just, you know, while we were having this entire flock discussion, thought that it would be relevant for all of us to report this specifically back to our city council member and let them know that, like, this has been the most engaged meeting we've had so far and that there's a lot of concern or whatever your perspective is. I think we should talk to them and let them know. Great, great. Yeah.

I know Mark was here for a minute. It was nice. And I asked him to please look at the tape of the meeting. Yeah.

Yeah. It was good. I mean.

Yeah. And to that, you know, reminder when September, when the workshop comes around, really encourage us to, you know, sharing that.

Yeah.

The hot tub.

Yeah. Yeah. Anything else?

I'm just tracking that development that it's being planned for the fortune acre property next to St. Eugene's. on Montgomery and the, you know, and this neighborhood that's balancing its identity versus, you know, $12 million in year one to the city in tax revenue. So it's a really interesting, an interesting thing to be following. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, one thing. I wish it was better news, but I was... formed by a member of the Prince Memorial Friends of Prince Memorial Greenway which is one of these kind of community groups that have undertaken the you know stewardship of Prince Memorial Greenway that PG&E has left their mark on our city canopy once again in the name of public safety full of redwood trees were cut down right around the kind of power station there with uh You know, no, no notice. Clearly, someone at the city approved it. But this, you know, maybe doesn't rise to the fervor of flock. But I do know a lot of people independent, even my own personal feelings about this. are sort of really incensed by sort of the PG&E's overreach in sort of like these cosmetic fire mitigation tactics. I think we need to continue to view our tree canopy, especially Redwoods, as like community assets. They're not owned by a private corporation that skimps on public safety. And when something like that happens and the community group that has put sweat equity into that area doesn't even know about it and then shows up, you know, like to see my people I know, like, you know, like brought to tears by that is like, I really empathize with it. And it's like, it's, it's, it's, uh, enraging. And, uh, you know, we've been beating that drum for a while, like where we can. And, um, I don't know, but it's, uh, yeah, super, super disappointing that it keeps happening in the name of, in the name of public safety, when you're removing like, you know, uh, are you know one of our best uh climate drawdowns for the natural climate drawdowns like this very anti-science it's very anti-community and it keeps happening and uh yeah it's very frustrating people are it's not you know people are frustrated by it yeah i mean that one hadn't even come back my radar so yeah look looks great hmm

I'll share over on the east side, Calistoga Road construction has started and is moving upwards. It's going smoothly for, I mean, it's a really big street, so there's plenty for like lanes and everything. It's sturdy, it's bumpy, but traffic seems to be moving. I've got some friends that live on Calistoga. So far, no major issues, just heavy construction. I think the main concern will be once school starts up at Moray Creole and Sequoia, how far along that construction will be. So I'd encourage everyone to sign up for updates on that project when school starts, yeah.

All right, anything else?

No? All right, anything?

All right, we're taking public comments on item eight. We have no public comments on that side.

Item nine, staff updates. Good evening, community advisory board. We have a lot of things happening. I'm going to try to go quickly, and I will be sending you an email with this information as well. The Transportation and Public Works Department, as you heard Lorena, is asking our community to help shape the future of Santa Rosa's Trail Network by participating in the Greenway Connectivity Study in-person workshop on July 29th. It's gonna be right here, 637 First Street from 6 to 7.30 p.m. Also on July 29th, the Planning Division is hosting a virtual community meeting to obtain community feedback with the draft alternative For the South Santa Rosa specific plan, the meeting will be held via Zoom from 5.30 to 6.30. For details about the meeting, please visit src.org. On August 5th, the Santa Rosa Police Department is hosting National Night Out from 4 to 7.30 p.m. at Dick's Sporting Goods parking lot. This is a fun, family-friendly event that features booths from local organizations and public safety organizations, food and drinks, and fun activities for kids. National Light Out is an annual community building campaign that promotes police community partnership and neighborhood camaraderie. From August 14th through August 31st, the city of Santa Rosa, in partnership with local businesses community, will host the Rose Street Activation on the eastern side of Rose Street. This vibrant activation will feature art installations, live music, lunchtime food trucks, and family-friendly activities designed to bring people together and enhance the downtown experience. On September 12, the Vince Harper 17th South Park Day and Night Festival will be happening at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, 1671 Henley Street from 2 to 5.30 PM. On September 17, like as you heard the chief, the Santa Rosa Police Department is going to be hosting the Flow Automated License Plate Reader Community Meeting. to hear from the community. The meeting will be held at the Utility Field Operations Building 35 Stony Point from 6 to 8 p.m. On September 21st, the City of Santa Rosa will be presenting the 2026 Merit Awards to honor this year's outstanding volunteers. The ceremony starts at 7 p.m. at the Philly Community Center. As you have heard me say multiple times, we have Park and Month volunteer cleanups that takes place on the second Saturday of each month from 9 in the morning to 12 noon. To learn more about it, you can visit srcity.org slash parkandmonth. Santa Rosa Water hosts by mostly volunteer creek cleanups at the first and third Saturday of each month. They meet at Prince Memorial Greenway by the Olive Park footbridge. And to sign up for it, you can go to srcity.org slash calendar. Also, downtown Santa Rosa offers a variety of events and activities throughout the year. For the latest information, visit Sydney of Santa Rosa's event calendar at srcity.org slash calendar. The Santa Rosa City Council and the Community Advisory Board will be hosting a series of district-based community meetings from late August through September. These meetings will provide residents with the opportunity to connect directly with city leaders, to learn about local initiatives, share feedback, and discuss issues that matter most to their neighbors. Additional details will be announced soon. And finally, I would like to let you know that we have updated the Community Improvement Grant website. Right now, we have uploaded all the videos with the highlights for the different projects that have been completed, the videos that I have shared at the meeting. You can go to the website, grab those videos, and share them on your social network. That's it. Thank you.

Oh, and Misty has something. Yeah, I just have a couple things. I know it's late. I'll keep it brief. Number one, you may have heard about a film that's happening in downtown Santa Rosa tomorrow night. It's getting a lot of buzz on the media side of things and on the social media side of things. So it's downtown tomorrow evening. It'll take. less than five hours, just under five hours. The reason it's getting a lot of traction is because it's depicting ICE agents in an immigration enforcement activity. And so we did public noticing in English and in Spanish far beyond what we normally would do for a permit. Usually CERO isn't involved in noticing at all for these types of things because it's fairly routine. Given the sensitive nature of this one, we decided to go ahead and reach out to community groups and post it on social. And then, of course, that... got the attention of the media as well. So just in case you hear anything, that's the plan. Filmmaking is a protected activity under the First Amendment. So the city can't regulate the content of the film. So what we can regulate are the kind of the operations of it. So the logistics of road closures, restrooms, trash disposal, kind of all of those operational impacts so that there could be a successful event that also has minimal impact to the community. And, you know, kind of on the positive side of things, we like filmmaking in Santa Rosa. We have an SR film initiative. It's great for the economy. It's great for the arts. So it's a good thing that people are choosing to film here because it brings life to the city. And we've got decades and decades of filmmaking that's been done here as well. But because there's a buzz, I thought you guys would want to know. And then also for your awareness, on the 28th, which is on Tuesday, the City Council will be considering whether or not to place a ballot measure on the November ballot. To reauthorize a sales tax at a one cent rate. And so they had their study session almost two weeks ago. The decision will be made by council on the 28th. So if you were interested or you want to participate or just be aware of it and share the news. That's a big deal for, you know, kind of determining a lot of the outcome of the study from particularly from a staffing perspective. There's been a lot of interest on this one as well. And then finally, I just wanted to, on your comment about the trees coming down. So the city actually didn't, we didn't approve it. We can't, we don't have any jurisdiction over it. Yeah. State, state law. I'm not, I'm not, like, I just want to, you know, you had kind of mentioned that and I just want to make it clear when PG&E comes in, they have state law that they are leveraging. That's the authority that they have to, for vegetation removal, for the safety stuff.

You shouldn't call it vegetation removal. And I appreciate it. And it makes it even like a tougher pill to swallow, to be honest. Yeah, I figured, I figured.

I just, I know, I know that, you know, this, this board is well informed. So I thought you might want to hear. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That's everything I have, unless you have any questions for me or for Anna.

I'll just say we have a vacancy from seven. Number seven. Number seven. The odds ever being your favorite. If you know anyone, please, we would love to have a full board.

Would you elucidate for us where District 7 boundaries are?

It is... It's like...

I don't know her. It's like south of... It's like

Okay.

It's like south of Drolstein?

Bellevue.

Probably Bellevue.

Yeah. To the west. So it's like southwest San Jose. Got it.

South and west. Got it. Okay, cool.

Any public comments on staff updates?

Public comments for item nine?

I know we've heard a lot today. We've shared a lot of our first meeting. Any future agenda items you want staff to follow up on in the meantime before we meet again?

No, but I appreciate that we raised the flock issue and it was, we did this. It really was a vibrant moment I've had on CAP. That's awesome stuff. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Great discussion this year. And then with that, last call. When's the next meeting?

September 23rd. The next CAP meeting? Yeah. September 23rd. All right.

And with that, we will adjourn. And I will see you in September, everyone.