City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you. I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence interpretation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. If you're on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Isidro, will you please restate this in Spanish?

Sí, buenas tardes. La reunión de hoy tiene interpretación simultánea en español. Para acceder al canal de interpretación, pueden ustedes hacer clic en el símbolo del globo terráqueo que tienen en la parte de abajo de su barra de Zoom. Si ustedes están en una tableta o en un teléfono móvil, Localicen los tres puntitos que suelen estar en la parte superior o inferior derecha de su pantalla de Zoom. Hagan un clic allí y de nuevo otro clic en interpretación para escoger el idioma Spanish o Español. No se olviden de hacer clic en Done o Listo cuando hayan terminado. Les aconsejamos que una vez estén en el canal de Español, pongan el audio principal en mudo o bajo para poder escuchar la reunión solamente en Español. Gracias. Back to you.

Welcome, everyone. The time is 2.01, and we can call this meeting to order. Madam City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Rogers? Present. Council Member McDonald? Here. Council Member Fleming? It's absent. Council Member Banuelos? Here. Council Member Alvarez.

Present.

Vice Mayor Okropke.

Here.

Mayor Stapp. Here. Let the record reflect all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Fleming.

Thank you. We'll move on to our closed session items. We have two today, items 3.1 and 3.2, both conferences with labor negotiators. Are there any members of the public that would like to make a comment on either of these items? Mr. DeWitt, go ahead.

My name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. Both of these items need to have a little bit deeper looking to them.

You might say, why?

Because we're gonna face even more difficult financial times ahead of us. So 3.2 is about the labor negotiators. Everybody here is gonna be negotiating what's on this list with other members of our city staff. I'm going to ask them to try to put in the language for a while towards california and sanctuary cities for the next two years at least so that includes us and we've got to have a game plan to be able to weather the financial storm with that in mind 3.1 i read a newspaper article saying that miss crocker has been the person who will perhaps become the next city attorney if that's the case i'm hoping that you'll ask her to stick you can stress that we need her to follow the stipulations of the city's agreed-upon task force recommendations. That was an expensive process over a decade ago that was instituted due, perhaps, to the fatal shooting of a teenage boy out in our area. a lot of issues down here in downtown there was some protest marches there was some issues here at the city hall over how to handle protesters it led to difficulties including one city council member getting censored it's the type of thing where these need to be remembered as to why we have an open government task force and we

Thank you, Dwayne. Are there any of the members of the public that would like to comment on the closed session items? Ms. Carman?

Thank you, it's already down to seven seconds. Janice Carman here, greetings to the board. as the interim manager, and sorry I haven't been here. I've been running for Congress, and it's been a very interesting job. I've learned a lot more than just sitting here at meetings, and many people have confessed a lot of things to me, so it's a very interesting time, and I live in Ricken Valley, and we have no representation since Diana was censured, and Terry Saunders, as far as

Janice, this is about the closed session items. What does this have to do with the two conferences with the labor negotiators? Janice, this sounds like a comment that would better wait until the item is not listed on the agenda, but that has nothing to do with this item. Janice, it sounds like your comment would be better placed with the public comment on non-agenda matters, but thank you for being here. Are there any other members of the public who would like to make comment? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and we'll recess in a closed session.

Are you sure? Yeah, I mean, I'm only doing like four slides. You guys are doing the majority of it. Yes, he's supposed to. Yeah, he's coming. Let me message him. Laurieann's going to, I think, were you going to message Gabe or do you want to adjust? Okay. You did? Okay. Run faster. Right. There's a, you got a hot mic.

Welcome back, everyone. The time is 3.02, and we will reconvene in open session. Madam City Clerk.

Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Rogers. Council Member McDonald.

Here.

Council Member Fleming is absent. Council Member Banuelos. Here. Council Member Alvarez.

Present.

Vice Mayor Okrupke.

Here.

Mayor Stapp. Here. Let the record reflect all Council Members are present with the exception of Council Member Fleming.

Thank you very much. All right, we will move on to our study session, item 4.1, our Santa Rosa Housing Strategy. And we've got the whole team here. Mr. Osborne, you wanna kick us off?

Absolutely, Mayor. Gabe Osborne, Director of Planning and Economic Development. I do apologize, I ran over. Let me just get a drink of water here. I'm not in the best shape in my older years. But before we jump into this item, I would like to extend a big happy birthday to Ms. Nicholson, who is to my right. This is a milestone birthday. I'm not going to say which one, but I do appreciate her commitment to the city, to the residents of Santa Rosa, and her craft for showing up on a monumental birthday. So happy birthday, Amy. And with that said, I'll move on to the presentation today. So the item before the council is a study session associated with the city's housing strategy. The support of housing within the city limits has been a council goal for a number of years. And in response to those council goals, there has been the adoption of a number of policies and procedures to support housing through the form of policy work, through the form of initiatives, through the form of incentives to help out with the financial challenge of housing. In addition, the state of California has moved forward with a number of legislation pieces to require the city to perform certain actions to support housing. So what we'll do today is show how all of those pieces work in harmony to essentially provide an overall housing strategy for the city of Santa Rosa. So the areas of feedback that we're looking for for the council today, obviously we're open to feedback on any of the information that's provided, but what we will talk about at the end of this presentation is two pieces of legislation that the state has put forward over the last few years that are optional. Much of the state legislation is a requirement, but we have two pieces that are optional that we're looking for guidance on the council as to whether staff should continue exploration and potential moving forward to council with options for adoption. So our housing strategy really focuses on a number of different areas that effectively act as the foundation for the strategy. The first and most critical is compliance with state law. What we have seen is the state of California has put forward requirements to pretty much all jurisdictions that require a plan to develop a certain number of units throughout the jurisdictional boundaries over the course of a defined period of time. That is referred to as our RHNA cycle. I will discuss that in more detail on a future slide. But that compliance is a really important element because local jurisdictions must follow the state legislation. The second piece which is equally as important is community needs. Much of what we hear from the community is the need to reduce the cost of housing that has rent and purchase components to it. Obviously much of the housing that we focus on to increase density is rent-based, but providing a path to home ownership is critically important. Many of us that have been fortunate enough to purchase property understand that that is probably the most valuable asset that we will have in our lifetime. So how are we providing an opportunity for folks to get through that barrier that ultimately results in generational wealth? The third component really is community growth and how it intersects with economic development. Housing is growth. So as we produce housing units, that has the ability to increase population. As we're discussing the potential recruitment of businesses into the City of Santa Rosa limits, one of the first questions I get is what is the population? The second question behind that is what do our housing trends look like over the next five years? So population is an incredibly important indicator to really increase economic development and to achieve our goals on that front. A specific component has been downtown and transit oriented housing development. Much of Santa Rosa's housing has occurred through the expansion of single family subdivisions over the course of many years. This is not unique to Santa Rosa. This happens in many jurisdictions. So as that expansion starts hitting up against boundaries, then there's a desire to go back to the core and look at more urban infill and to better understand how from an economic development strategy, housing can be increased in that core. I think the city sits in a fairly unique position in that area due to the number of city assets that potentially could be analyzed for a better use in the downtown core. So that's an important piece of the strategy. Just a quick roadmap on some of the items that the Council will see on the housing front in the remainder of this calendar year. We have today's study session, which is a general housing strategy. On June 16th of this year, we will be doing a second study session that focuses on downtown economic development strategies, with housing being a very specific piece to that and an important piece to that. And then our third item will be a study session on impact fee initiatives. There have been a number of temporary programs that the Council has adopted that reduce impact fees for housing developments, both in the downtown and for affordable housing units. We will bring forward a comprehensive conversation of joining those together in a singular strategy and understanding that the Council desires to extend those or to make any changes. When we look within our strategy, there are really four main pillars that are focus points or areas that we really include as foundational elements for how that successfully moves forward. The first is vision, and there are really two documents that make that up, and these documents I'll discuss in more specific terms in future slides, but what we're really looking at here are general plan and then associated specific plans. The general plan is really the north star for the city. It is the guiding document for what goes where. And that's very specific to commercial zoning, residential zoning, understand where residential units are built, and understand how it all ties together from an infrastructure standpoint. So that's a critical foundational document, but it sits at a very high level. It sets forward general policy. Specific plans take that information and look at a regional area and make the information more specific. So they'll look at development details, they will look at specific land use that can occur, and they can ultimately really help with CEQA streamlining when developments come through. So they're a specific piece to encouraging housing. The next really is framework. So that takes the vision and turns it into really an actionable document. Our main framework piece, and we'll talk a bit about our downtown strategy as we move forward in this bucket as well, but it really is the housing element. The housing element is going to take the specific numbers of units we need and turn that into an actionable plan. Once again, I have a bit more detail in future slides. Delivery is a really important component to this. It really deals with implementation tools, policies and resources. That talks about how we take a vision for housing and turn it into reality. And of course we also track outcomes. Really when we're focusing on production, which much of the housing strategy is, that's focusing on the number of units we're developing, but it's important to note that what we're trying to do is increase our housing stock. So that means preservation of existing housing in addition to new. So when diving into our vision, the general plan which the Council adopted recently is our plan out to 2050. This serves as a long-term blueprint for growth and preservation, and as I mentioned, it really focuses on generally what goes where. So the concept of zoning for residential, for commercial, and understanding all the parts and pieces that tie that together. When we form that into specific plans, that translates those policies into area-specific guidance. Probably our most popular specific plan is the Downtown Station Area Plan. That really looked at our downtown core. It looks at zoning in certain areas. It's encouraging densities. It's also encouraging flexibility. So it really understands what the needs are from a development standpoint, and it shows them in a plan. It also looks at infrastructure needed to support that. And I think the important piece here is when we talk about streamlining of permitting, specific plans are very important because they streamline the environmental review when the development is consistent with the specific plan. We also adopted our north station area plan a while ago, and there will be a future update to that. The North Station Plan looks at the area around the Northern Smart Station. That looks at the intersection of the mall, the adjacent residential units, how Santa Rosa Junior College intersects with that, and really much of the focus from the state is to increase density around transit stops. So we'll look at how we potentially can meet state requirements on that front and also reduce, or excuse me, increase residential density around the transit station. Our Roseland area specific plan was very critical to the Roseland annexation. A prime example is we adopt a specific plan that develops that land use prior to annexation so we understand really the guiding principles for that area once it's annexed into the city limits. That leads me into South Santa Rosa specific plan which is our current effort under development now to look at the southern portion of Santa Rosa Avenue to understand in the event of annexation what that plan would look like. So our framework, as I mentioned, the housing element focuses heavily on our regional housing needs allocation, or RHNA. RHNA is a process where the state determines in a certain geographic area the amount of housing units that are needed. Then within that area, the total housing units are then assigned to counties and jurisdictions. Each housing unit that's assigned has an affordability category to it. So that is our goal of housing units that we have to meet over a specific timeframe. And that re-encycle, which is an eight-year period, the city has to show how we potentially can produce those units in that eight-year period. So the housing element looks at available land, it looks at how those units will be distributed across that available land, and it looks at the policies and procedures that would promote that production. What's important to note is housing is generally produced by private entities through the private sector, so there are a number of economic factors that can affect whether housing goes through or not, but the responsibility of the city is to set forward that plan that shows it can be done. So, excuse me, another piece of the framework is our downtown city asset strategy. This has been a discussion in front of the council for a number of years going back into the past, and it really takes a look at the number of assets that the city has in the downtown, and due to those number of assets, how the city can potentially influence a positive growth in the downtown from an economic development benefit. And I think what's important to note when looking at a downtown asset strategy is the concepts of live, work, and play. They're very critical pillars, and typically for the cities that have successfully maneuvered into reimagining their downtown, they hit all three of those pillars. So for example, work is the businesses that employ people in the downtown. That drives daytime commerce. For those of us that work out of downtown, we frequent businesses before and after work. So it really supports really that lunchtime crowd and is very critical to those businesses that need that level of activity. The live is obviously a piece that really is housing centric. Obviously in a walkable community, someone lives and works downtown, but by providing housing units, you're driving that foot traffic, you're making it more attractive to businesses that may want to invest. There's options such as grocers that come into the mix because of housing units. So that's very critical because you're increasing the population in the downtown. The play is associated with activating the space. bringing people that do not live in the downtown core or work into the downtown core there. And those are either individuals from the city or from outside of the city. So it becomes a tourism piece. Focus of hotels and some of those other pieces such as events that support hotels become critical. So when we look at the downtown assets, it's really understanding, do they hit those three pillars? So when we're activating underutilized public land, how do we look at potentially supporting that with housing and mixed use development? That seems to be the most common. You're hitting the work, you're hitting the sales tax generation of the commercial, but you're also bringing the live into it. How can we also increase downtown vibrancy and walkability? That's creating an environment people wanna be in, driving people to that area. That all strengthens economic activity. As we redevelop, we're bringing property tax in, but a lot of this becomes a sales tax generation tactic. And that's what successful downtowns do. They're hitting it on all of the revenue streams. So when we look at this, it's really important to focus on those three pillars and understanding, are we activating the space to meet the three pillars? And ultimately, it's creating a more active and resilient downtown core. So when we look at the activation strategy, obviously the City Hall site becomes very critical to that piece. The City Hall site is well situated in the downtown core. It has eyes on a creek. It's close to a transit station. It's very close to the core center, which is now Courthouse Square. It also represents seven acres within that area, which is the largest single site in that downtown area. So any change in the downtown can be transformative, or excuse me, to the City Hall site can be transformative to the overall downtown. So once again, as we run it through the three pillars, what are some potential options and that's that's really an important piece and it gets into sort of the housing concepts the hotels the restaurants because it's attempting to look at how we can meet that demand and having such a sort of a diverse site from an acreage standpoint there is the potential of hitting those three so we do know this is a very detailed conversation we do know that the city hall site and housing in particular is very critical to the downtown so our goal is to have a more detailed conversation on june 16th with the council through a study session format to do a deeper dive into this concept So with that, I will hand the presentation over to Deputy Director Jessica Jones to talk about the delivery strategy.

Great, thank you, Gabe. So yeah, so as mentioned, over these next few slides, we're gonna be really talking about the city's delivery from a policy perspective on furthering our investment in our housing and development of housing within the city. So as the Council will recall, in 2018, you adopted a fee incentive program that was based on encouraging housing production and increased density in our downtown area. And it provided incentives from a capital facilities fee and park fee perspective based on building height. And there were also some additional incentives that were added in there for projects that included onsite affordability. That program was set to run through August of 2023. And then in 2022, prior to that expiration, the council provided an extension. So the program now runs through August of 2026. So that's obviously this year. So as mentioned earlier in the slides, we will be coming back to you at your first meeting in August with a recommendation for adding some additional time to that incentive program. And then in 2024, the Council adopted a resolution that provided an incentive for deed-restricted affordable units, and that was a three-year program, runs through January of 2028, and that provides reduced capital facilities fees down to zero for units that are providing affordability. And then also in 2024, the council, as part of the development fee services update, you adopted some fee reductions. Some of those reductions included a 50% reduction in building permit and engineering development services fees for projects that included 100% affordable housing, as well as housing in our downtown area.

Next slide.

So the Council, as you are well aware, have adopted numerous policies over the years related to increasing both housing options as well as streamlining our permitting processes. Some of those we've kind of identified here on this slide. Recently, the Council adopted a missing middle initiative that was adopted in 2025. We have not yet seen that come to fruition with any actual applications coming in, but we're very excited about that program. It provides for smaller, more affordable units that are in areas that are walkable. We also brought forward initiatives to implement our housing element, and those included options for tiny homes on wheels, as well as various by-right approvals, including for small residential developments. And as the Council knows, we bring forward every year regulations to adopt state housing regulations. So I'll be going into those in a little bit more in the next slide, but those do respond to new legislation that's really aimed at addressing the housing crisis. And then in 2018, a program that's been ongoing and has been relatively successful is the reduced review authority process for multifamily projects in our priority development areas. So those projects that would normally go before the design review and preservation board for design review are reduced down to the zoning administrator level. And that process provides for a more efficient process, more timely and less expensive for the applicants, but still provides that opportunity for public engagement. And so it's been a very successful process. So as I mentioned, state housing laws are something that we deal with every year. In the last 10 years, since about 2016, the number of state housing laws that have come out each year has increased dramatically. We've seen well over 100 new housing laws within that 10-year period. And again, they are designed to combat the housing crisis. So we do come forward each year with changes to our zoning code to implement those laws. Some of them can be done through checklists and administrative review processes internally, but many of them do come before the council. Some of those pieces of legislation require moving from more local oversight to state mandated production. It includes strict review times that we have to comply with, as well as that more ministerial process, which I'm gonna get into in our next slide. These changes have also brought along streamlining for the environmental review or secret review process, as well as reforms to density and zoning regulations. And those include various changes to accessory dwelling unit laws, as well as new laws like SB 9, which provide for small subdivisions and small urban development. So this chart outlines kind of the differences between the ministerial process and the discretionary review process. I'm just gonna highlight a couple of the key points here. So as you can see on this slide, both public hearings and community input are not required for ministerial projects. They are required for discretionary review. We typically, for discretionary projects, provide neighborhood meetings as well as the projects going through either a public meeting or a public hearing process. The ministerial projects are not required to go through that process, nor is there typically time to do that given the state mandated timelines that we have to comply with. So those projects on the ministerial side, we're really looking at checklists, really making sure that the projects meet the objective standards that are set forth in our various codes and our general plan to make sure that the project complies. If the project does comply, then it moves forward to the building permit process. And it's been something that has Generally worked well. We do get concerns from community members when projects show up, but we had a recent example of a project that went through a ministerial process that came in in February and was just issued building permits. So it really does speed up that review process that can oftentimes take a lot longer. The other piece of this is that through the ministerial process, there is a much lower cost, again, because we don't have the amount of staff time involved in the outreach piece, in preparing for meetings, writing all the technical reports that we have to bring forward to the decision makers. And so it's less of a cost, more timely for the applicants, and it's also a more predictable process for applicants. So delivery of our housing policies is typically handled by our advanced planning team, which is headed up by Amy Nicholson here. And we so we've got our in the planning division, we've got the advanced planning team, which does a long range policy review. And we have our development review team, which processes all of our new development applications. Prior to 2016, when I talked about, that's really when a lot of the housing laws started to really kick into effect. The advanced planning team included about two people. It was generally a supervising planner and a staff planner. And most of the policy work that was necessary to complete due council goals and deal with other state mandated things that were in at that time could be handled by those two planners. However, mentioned we've had an incredible increase in state mandated policy work that as well as as additional other policy work that have come up over the years that advanced planning team has increased to four planners so one supervising planner and three staff planners and even with that under the current amount of policy work which there's an attachment to your staff report that it identified some of the work that we're currently working on we do not have enough staff capacity to process those state mandated and council goal policies with the four planners that we have. So the way that we've been handling that recently is trying to work within the means that we have. Our development review team currently does not have as heavy a workload right now. Development is down a little bit. So we've been having some of those planners come over and work on some of the policy work. which has been very beneficial for the planners and it helps us get those policies out, but it really becomes a challenge when our development review kicks back in. So it's a challenge that we're continuing to work through. So now I'm going to hand it over to Director Bassinger to move on with the presentation.

Thank you, Jessica. So as Gabe initially touched on with our RHNA goals, one of the ways that the city and the Housing Authority, which supports your efforts, helps advance affordable housing units is through the administration of our federal funding as well as local resources that we compile on an annual basis to provide as loans to developers. So for the past three years, we've averaged about 3.5 million that's available to go out for new production as well as rehabilitation of existing affordable housing units. This funding allows the projects to then pursue tax credits, bonds, or funding that's available from the state. So our resources are generally the first in and are relatively small, and then they pursue the larger amounts that help the projects come to fruition at the state level. Some of the other tools that we use in housing and community services are affordability agreements through the density bonus and housing allocation ordinances. These allow developers to seek variances to zoning code in exchange for the dedication of affordable units. Those restrictions are for 55 years and are secured against the property. Similarly, when we provide loans to developments, we have 55-year regulatory agreements that ensure the long-term affordability of those units for those households. And then finally, the other tool that we use to help advance affordable housing projects and has certainly retracted in recent years are project-based vouchers. And this was HUD regulation that allowed a portion of our voucher pool to be dedicated to specific projects. So there's a cap on the percentage of vouchers that you can do that to. You can go up to 25%. We have reached that percentage. So we have a variety of project-based vouchers at developments throughout Santa Rosa, and that allows those residents to have a voucher tied to the project that they can reside in. Next slide, and I think Gabe's gonna jump in really quickly on this next slide.

Thank you, Megan. Certainly back on the delivery front to our downtown asset strategy, what the Council has seen in the past is really a significant effort to re-look at existing parking areas in the downtown. Once again, for a best and highest use. So that's taken the form of surplusing underutilized properties. What we've seen come out of that action is we're currently looking at a 300 mixed use development under an exclusive negotiation agreement on one of those. We have a redevelopment site out for RFP with a development partner for another. And we have a site completed the Surplus Lands Act and is ready for RFP this year. So this is really an example of how the city and the current and future councils have looked at avenues to basically increase the best and highest use on some of these sites downtown. So once again, this is an item that we'll dive into more detail on 16th, but we just wanted to provide a solid understanding of what this looked like because it's a critical piece to our delivery strategy when it comes to downtown redevelopment and our associated economic development strategy. And at this point, I'll move the next slide and hand it back to Director Bassinger.

All right, so with all that background, we wanna touch on some of the efforts that the city has achieved over the past nearly 10 years. And as you can see through this attached chart and the various colors, we've had a lot of housing units come to fruition. And certainly between 21 and 25, we've seen an extraordinary increase in the number of multifamily units that have been permitted and constructed within the city. I'd say we'd have pretty consistent construction in single family, which is the light blue kind of teal color throughout our reporting period. And then ADUs, which are noted in yellow, have steadily increased. And this goes back to the code changes that Jessica mentioned that we addressed back in 2018. Next slide, please. So next, I want to touch on our RHNA efforts. And we have a few following slides that provide a little bit more context for these, because the bar chart doesn't really explain the efforts the city has undertaken and how much we have achieved. So as you can see, we consistently have robust, moderate units that we're able to deliver. And again, these are the efforts of private developers constructing units. You'll certainly note between 21 and 23, we see a significant increase in our very low and low income units. This can be directly attributed to the influx in disaster recovery funding that came to the city, $38.5 million as a result of the 2017 fires. Those were coupled by federal tax credits that developers were also able to access, as well as an increase in affordable housing funding at the state level. So there were robust resources that were available in 2020 that allowed a lot of these projects to seek financing and then position themselves for construction. We are returning back to a more normalized affordable housing funding cycle. As I noted, we have about three and a half million available this current fiscal year for 26, 27, and that has been the case for the past couple of years. So we're gonna see our affordable housing production return back down to a lower level as a result of decreased resources. Next slide, please. So what I wanted to touch on, because again, the bar chart doesn't provide that much context, is just the number of projects that have been completed and brought to the community in affordable housing. So as you can see, in 2016, one project was completed. But as we move through the years, we see more and more projects that we were able to deliver for our residents. Certainly as we get to 21 is when we start to see things pick up. And then 22, just on this page alone, we have three projects that were able to deliver over 100 affordable housing units. So again, these are restricted for 55 years and have units set aside for various income categories. Next slide, please. 2023 is when we started to see a lot of the projects that were assisted through our disaster recovery funding, as well as those tax credits and other resources, such as State Homekey. That's where we see St. Vincent de Paul Commons. All of these projects reached completion and started to lease up. So significant progress was made in that time period. As we return to a more normalized cycle, we're seeing that kind of trend back down. But I would like to note, because we touched earlier in the presentation on surplus city land, South Park Commons was the former senior center site on Bennett Valley Road, thank you, that the city surplus to a developer. We were able to use housing authority resources, project-based vouchers, and we're able to bring this project to fruition relatively quickly. And with that, I believe I'm turning it over to Amy Nicholson. Oh, I'm sorry, one more slide. Some of the other tools that we use in Housing and Community Services and with the Housing Authority are funding for the rehabilitation of mobile homes. We currently have a process open where mobile home owners can seek funds to provide some life safety improvements to their mobile homes. We have received funding recently to restart our down payment assistance program. You may remember we kicked one of those off following the influx of the PG&E money, and we're able to assist a handful of residents in purchasing their first home. So we're excited to restart that in the coming months. The city also funds a fair housing contractor. It's Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California that provides assistance to tenants and landlords in addressing discrimination issues that they may be encountering. We also refer residents to legal aid to navigate through some of the issues that they may be having. And then finally, we administer the mobile home rent control program. And that provides rent caps on mobile home spaces in the city's mobile home parks. And we monitor those on an annual basis to make sure that the proposed rent increases are not exceeding 70% of CPI on an annual basis. So with that, I'm turning it over to Amy. Thank you.

Thank you and good afternoon, mayor and council members. So building on today's presentation, the next few slides will focus on two optional policy tools available for council consideration and direction. So as you've heard, the majority of the city's recent work related to state housing legislation has focused on implementing what is mandated. So that includes updates to our local regulations and processes, as well as implementing our housing element. The two optional policies that we'll be discussing today include Senate Bill 10 and Assembly Bill 1033. And both of these options would require staff capacity and policy and program development. So starting with Senate Bill 10, this legislation is essentially a zoning tool. What it does is it can allow cities to increase residential density on parcels to allow up to 10 units on a single parcel. This rezoning would be exempt from any environmental review, which would typically be required. And there are specific locations where this rezoning could be applied. So the areas include the one half mile radius around both of our smart stations and can also include what are identified as urban infill sites. So these are sites that have either previously been developed or that are substantially surrounded by development, which really opens up pretty large portions of the city as a part of this rezoning effort if directed by council. One note that I wanna highlight is any very high fire severity zones that have been identified by CAL FIRE could not be included as a part of this effort in addition to any open space or recreation lands that have been approved by the voters. So while properties that meet the criteria that is outlined on this slide could receive that increase in residential capacity, the number allowed per parcel and the exact locations would be at the discretion, again, of the City Council. So some benefits and considerations as it relates to Senate Bill 10, it would increase the allowed housing opportunities within the city, particularly in areas that already have access to infrastructure and utilities. This bill also provides a lot of flexibility, so there are no requirements for the types of housing that would need to be developed on these sites. It just relates to the number of units that could be allowed. So this could help to provide housing types to address a variety of the needs within the community. If the Council directed staff, this Program could be set up to be ministerial. So as Deputy Director Jones spoke about earlier, this creates a more streamlined and predictable process for housing developers to move projects forward. Some considerations for the council include the significant staff effort that would be associated with developing this program. This would include extensive site analysis and mapping across the city to determine what sites might be appropriate and what development standards would be applied. There would also be extensive community outreach necessary for this increase in residential density. And then of course, the development of the ordinance itself. There may also be community concerns as it relates to increasing residential density. So again, working through our community engagement, that may also broaden the amount of time and staff resources necessary to complete the effort. So turning to Assembly Bill 1033, this legislation is focused on ownership opportunities rather than new housing production. So AB 1033 allows for cities to establish a process to allow for a separate sale of an accessory dwelling unit from a primary dwelling unit, and this is done through a condominium-style ownership model. So the intent here is to provide additional lower cost home ownership opportunities by allowing a legal accessory dwelling unit to be sold independent from a primary unit. So potential benefits, one of which I already mentioned would just be a lower cost entry to home ownership based on the size of an ADU as well as likely a smaller lot size. This could also provide for a wealth building opportunity for any homeowners that currently have an accessory dwelling unit on their property. and would allow residents or property owners to leverage what's an already existing building instead of having to construct a new one. Some considerations with the implementation of this optional state bill include the administrative work required both on staff's end as well as a property owner to create a program and any updates to the city's regulations. Because of the condominium-style ownership model, there would be requirements for legal agreements for items like maintenance and access, but this work could be completed by additional staff capacity being allocated from our planning and economic development team. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Director Osborne.

Thank you, Ms. Nicholson. And just to close us out, so as a reminder, we're happy to receive any feedback regarding housing strategy from the Council. What staff is hoping for today is that we can get specific direction on the two policies Ms. Nicholson just described. And really what we're looking for is on our initial analysis, what we've identified is from a staffing capacity standpoint, that AB 1033 is a bit more streamlined and less intensive than SB 10. AB 1033 also has a number of examples from other communities that helps us out immensely. I can't say that it's necessarily a copy and paste from that strategy, but much of the heavy lifting has been done, and we've had jurisdictions such as San Jose that have adopted and actually have practiced doing so. So that actually streamlines much of that work. So if there's a desire to move forward, 1033 is fairly packaged and really has less decision-making process than we think we can explore and move forward with a potential adoption. So really what we're looking for is does the Council have an interest in staff prioritizing that as we move forward this year. SB 10, there's a number of various decision making processes in there to understand what it looks like and that is whether it is a ministerial or discretionary process and where it would potentially apply. So with that being the case, our recommendation would be to do another study session about SB 10 to allow us to further explore if that's the Council's direction and come back with those various options so the Council can understand the decision points, understand what a community engagement strategy would look like and further explore. So those are the two areas that we're focusing on, but as I mentioned, happy to take any feedback on additional housing strategies that the Council may be aware of that we haven't discussed. So with that, I would like to close out, and we are available for any questions the Council may have.

An excellent and thoughtful presentation from the planning team, as always. Thank you all. And happy birthday, Amy. Thank you for spending it with us. And Mr. Osborne, it was especially impressive to watch you recover after your obviously stressful journey here. I have to say I found that mesmerizing. In fact, I'm looking at Mr. Nutt here. As the city continues to look for ways to get our community to tune in to our city council meetings, perhaps it is not a bad idea to have our staff give highly technical presentations after performing strenuous work of some kind. This really did amp it up for me, so thank you for that. Let's bring it back to council for questions. Ms. McDonald.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you for the presentation. I do have a couple clarifying questions because of these two pieces of legislation that we're going through. Would either of the adoption of either AB 1033 and SB 10 help us achieve our RHNA numbers?

So AB 1033 does not increase density, and I think that's an important piece. So that allows ownership of a unit that is already allowed. So individuals can build units, and I think that's important from a neighborhood compatibility standpoint for the community to understand it does not increase density or unit types. It just allows ownership to change. So the easy answer is no, because there would be other paths. SB 10, yes. So that would be a pathway to increase density on certain lots that wouldn't necessarily have that right now. So in a situation where a developer elected to take advantage of that option, these are proposals where the state, as they go through this sort of exploratory exercise of understanding the various parts and pieces that can support housing, it's either mandatory or optional, but they're all focusing on increasing housing production and often focusing on increasing density. So SB 10 would have the option to help out with our arena totals.

Okay, great. And then I know there's some administrative duties that would come about for SB 10. Are those similar to the SB 35 administrative duties that we currently go through for those high density housing projects that seem to be exempt from some of the environmental impact and studies to streamline process? Do these two kind of go together or are they two completely separate things?

I think they could go together. They are two completely separate things in the sense that SB 35 is a process that the state set forward to require a ministerial review of an application. So as Deputy Director Jones mentioned, in a situation where a development meets certain objective design standards and the criteria under state law, we verify essentially through a checklist that they meet those requirements and they're able to move straight to building permit. SB 10, and this is really the reason why it needs a bit more exploration, is it leaves holes in that process. It doesn't specify how it should work. So that would really leave it up to the Council to determine when approving a development project under SB 10 whether the Council elects to move forward with more of a ministerial process or more of a traditional discretionary process. I would state that the ministerial process, for the reasons Ms. Jones mentioned, they're easier on staff. They obviously have more of a streamline or predictability aspect to developments. They're generally more appetizing for developers. The challenges they create in the community is they remove the public engagement process through the development review cycle.

So to kind of follow up on that, some of the concerns that I've heard around specifically I think SB 35 is that there isn't that engagement and where does that come into play on traffic studies and how that impacts a community when we add high density housing and they haven't gone through that process to listen to the feedback of hey, this putting 50 new units here or 100 new units here Is this creating quite a mess in this area? Do these pieces of legislation just say, you don't have to do them, we're gonna focus on the housing and worry about your traffic issues later, or do they require that those same studies are done like in regular development?

Thank you for the question, Councilmember. We have options with implementing Senate Bill 10. The rezoning itself, so what allows for the additional residential density is exempt from environmental review. And so that's oftentimes when we would see at least a high level review of traffic impacts and a variety of other environmental impacts. If the Council wants to keep it as a discretionary process, so it would still go through the typical public hearing process, but someone would have the ability to construct more units, that typical review could still occur. the public input, the review of traffic studies. But the real limitation when a process is ministerial is that you can only require what's very clear in the regulations. And so anything that does require some judgment is eliminated from being considered.

if that's helpful. As a way we couldn't deny it. So if it's not in that legislation and we find that this is gonna be a traffic nightmare, we couldn't deny it if it meet the qualifications of the legislation itself. Is that what I'm understanding?

Let's see, okay, so I'm gonna try and back up a little bit because this gets complicated very quickly.

I know, that's why I'm asking the question.

So first is the allowance of the additional units. And so normally you would look at the general plan or the specific plan for the land use that's allowed. So that would include the number of residential units you could have on a lot. And so those plans do that high level analysis to ensure that we have services and infrastructure and it looks at traffic and circulation. And then most projects come in and they're reviewed to ensure they're consistent with those documents and a traffic impact study may be required depending on details of the project. But at a high level, those have already been reviewed. What's different about Senate Bill 10 is that it actually allows for more units than what the general plan or our specific plans have analyzed. And because the rezoning is exempt from the environmental review process, That would have to happen as a part of the ordinance development because there is an interest in us understanding what impacts would be. That wouldn't be mandated by the legislation, but would certainly be important to understand. Or it could happen later on in the process, like you mentioned, they provide some type of traffic analysis and then that's reviewed by city staff and is available to members of the public.

And so just to go back, I'm jumping back and forth, so I appreciate you following me on this. On 1033, those are for existing ADUs to be sold, not for somebody to be able to buy a lot, do an SB9 split, and then sell the ADU? Or does that still meet the qualification of it?

So AB 1033 can apply in any circumstance where there's a legal ADU, but it does not allow any more accessory dwelling units than what is currently allowed now. So it really just provides an opportunity for someone to sell the accessory dwelling unit, but not to create any more than what are currently allowed.

Okay, don't we have a policy that allows for construction for ADUs in the city that we're actually trying to streamline that process and encourage folks? So if they're in the process right now of building an ADU or there's 30 people out there that plan to do that, meeting our current ordinance, would it then allow them the opportunity to sell those as well?

Yes.

Okay, so same goes. Like if I have a house and I decide in five years I'm doing an ADU, this allows that to happen. Why is there a homeowners association connection to that piece of legislation and who oversees that homeowners association?

Yeah, so it's interesting. The subdivision of land is governed by the Subdivision Map Act, which is a state requirement. So currently now, if someone does what is referred to as a lot split, and that lot split creates what is known as common interest land. So sometimes developments have land that is owned in common, uh sometimes they have shared driveways where it's on somebody's land but somebody else has rights on it that effectively the the state code is referred back to either a homeowners association or other means acceptable so with an adu which is likely built behind a single family dwelling there likely is a vehicular and pedestrian access need and likely is a shared driveway So typically how that's formed is that I would not envision that there would be the desire for one to create an association because there really isn't necessarily a common interest that needs to be covered. What happens is those normally take the form of joint maintenance agreements because the two property owners share a driveway and at some point the driveway needs to be repaved and then that recorded document addresses the shared ownership. So what the Subdivision Map Act does is steps in and says that anything that's shared, there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that the maintenance of that shared improvement is on the title and is covered in perpetuity.

That's very helpful, thank you. So I have one more question on if these are all like ministerial duties and checklists and somebody has a concern about it, what's the process for an appeal for a community member? So something's going in, they have concerns about it. If it's a checklist, it feels to me like they met the requirements and there's really not anything a community member can do. What would your feedback on that be?

So I'd say where it becomes challenging is when state law dictates the process, because essentially in certain circumstances, and I think SB 35 is a prime example, when we can make the findings, there isn't a defined appeal process under state law. If the council elects to form a ministerial process, and I'm happy to hear from my counterparts here if there's any additional feedback on this, that the council has the flexibility to really bake that in. And the reason I say that because there's a number of director level approval processes that my position has the authority to initiate where there is a defined appeal process for those under code that elevates to a board or commission or to the council. So where SB 10 leaves some of those gaps, the Council has the ability to program, essentially create a bit of a hybrid from what exists from SB 35 or some of those defined state processes where we've lost some authority to fill in the gaps in a way that balances out the community needs.

Thank you, that's it for my questions.

Thank you, Ms. Ben-Willis.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation. I just had a couple questions I think about AB 1033, because it sounded like, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you feel like it's pretty straightforward and that you could, for lack of a better word, easily implement it. But I did notice on slide 21 that it said both options, both SB 10 and 1033 AB require prioritization of resources. And there's a lot of talk about staff impacts. And so I'm just curious about that. I mean, it would be great, I know that doesn't necessarily add to our numbers, I'm talking about 1033, I'm going back and forth, sorry. But at the same time, it sounds like it, like I said, theoretically, easy to implement, but how would that affect staffing, given that, if I heard correctly, for example, one project started the process in February and just ended, so that was about four months, and I think, Some of the feedback that we get is always about, in general, permits in general taking too long, processes taking too long. And it's not your fault. I just mean that we're already dealing with a lot of workload. You all are. So I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.

Yes, happy to, and thank you for the question. And I think that really is always the challenge of, as we're brought forward with good ideas from a policy standpoint, how does it fit in the overall universe? I think what we're seeing right now is that on the entitlement side, because when we hear statements from the communities that permits take too long or the permitting process takes too long, it's important to dissect where that permit is and in what division it's occurring. Because much of what we're running into now is there's not as much activity moving through the planning side, which is more of the entitlement. And much of that has to do with the streamlining efforts that the state moved forward with. Most developers right now are trying to take advantage of those. They create more consistency in the process. So that actually creates capacity on the development review side. Now, the minute an application comes in, that capacity is gone. And that's the challenging universe we run into. We don't control the level of activity that we see because that's based on the community's needs. So what we typically do with these is we have to understand if it's on a list or not. And much of what Jessica and her team is focusing on is what is state mandated. And that has grown over the years. And a lot of the spreadsheets that we've provided showing the capacity, that's critical. But then Activities such as entertainment zones, South Santa Rosa specific plan to some extent, those have the ability to shift timelines. So usually what we do is once we know that it needs to be on the list, we go through the exploratory effort of figuring out what the need is, whether it can be done through professional services and consultants, because oftentimes that acts as a relief valve, but that takes budget for doing other things. So if the council does have a desire to move forward, then typically what we'll do is we'll analyze that as part of the process. So when we do have very much of a copy and paste, SB 10 will be a different animal because that'll give us the opportunity to come back and have a real conversation about priority and what would happen if we wanted to go down this road. With our proposal now of AB 1033 saying it can move forward, what I would envision is entertainment zones and some of those more not mandated processes that we have to go through may have an impact on the timeline. But very much of that is based on the ebb and flow of capacity that exists out of current development. And what we've tried to do to be more efficient with staff is to make sure we can have planners go back and forth between the two because private development work does have an ebb and a flow to it. It does go really, significant applications and more applications than the team can handle and then it slows a little bit. So what I would envision is that it gets into a maneuvering of the timelines for the non-state mandated as we move forward. But you're likely talking about moving out a few months here and there that I'm not seeing a lot of the work And we've had long conversations about this, because it started with it's a lot of work, and as we explore and we look at what's done, then we can have more of a reasonable timeline. But writing staff reports, bringing in front of the council, going to the planning commission, those are all steps that affect that. So we don't have a solid answer at this point on what that would look like because it has been dependent on a lot of factors, but I do appreciate the question and I know the team appreciates it. If we really thought it would affect capacity, we likely would have brought forward that we need to have a study session again to discuss prioritization setting. So we do think based on where other jurisdictions sit with this and our analysis that there is a lot of information that we can pull off of and it becomes more of the adoption process than the formation. There isn't an environmental component to this. So we think it is more streamlined. And I apologize for the long response, but I really appreciate the question, because it's an important aspect of what the team's dealing with right now.

Thank you. I think that's it for right now.

Thank you. Vice Mayor?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you so much for that presentation. Really appreciate it. To zoom out a little bit, regarding SB 10, what percentage of the stuff that is involved in SB 10 is the City of Santa Rosa already doing? Are we already taking efforts that SB 10 is trying to do in other municipalities and already doing them here on our own?

Thanks for the question, Vice Mayor.

We're not currently doing anything that's exactly like what SB 10 allows, but in the general spirit of increasing residential density, we are. And so it's not at that 10 units, a parcel level per se, because that actually equates to an extremely high density depending on lot size. But we are looking at increasing densities in the North Station. We recently updated our downtown station area specific plan. So that's, AND A SIMILAR THEME TO INCREASING DENSITY NEAR TRANSIT AS WELL AS JUST IN OUR URBAN INFILL SITES OR KIND OF CENTRAL TO THE CITY. WE WORKED ON MISSING MIDDLE HOUSING WHICH ALSO INCREASES RESIDENTIAL DENSITY. SO SIMILAR EFFORTS BUT NOT IDENTICAL.

OKAY. SO NOT IDENTICAL TWINS BUT LIKE FRATERNAL TWINS KIND OF A THING. And then as far as AB 1033, are there other municipalities that we've looked at? I know you've said that there are some packages that have implemented it, right? I'm not really concerned about the implementation. I'm more concerned about the results combined with the implementation of the efforts. So have we seen any of these areas that have implemented AB 1033 have significant results? Do we have any sort of information on that?

I wouldn't necessarily call them significant, and the team can correct me on this if I misspeak, but I believe San Jose was one of the first adopters, if not the first adopter, and they saw their first ADU go through not too long ago. So I think one of the challenges is anytime you subdivide, you're creating dedicated utilities for that additional unit, you're meeting specific requirements, so there's quite a few construction elements that may make it cost prohibitive. So I can't say that we've seen an example. I know Sebastopol was a more recent adopter. Obviously, there's not a test case there yet. But it does not seem as if San Jose opened the floodgates and saw a significant number of inquiries on this. And San Jose is obviously a much bigger jurisdiction.

OK. And then to kind of dovetail off of Council Member Banuelos' question, the line that really stuck out to me in the staff report was the capacity to implement non-mandated state housing initiatives is limited. That is extremely diplomatic. Congratulations. That is a very diplomatic statement to basically say that there, would I be accurate in saying that there's gonna have to be trade-offs? I mean, you had a longer answer, but I'm just trying to get down to the nitty gritty of it, is that we're gonna have to pick something else to slow down or put aside if we wanna implement that, is that correct?

Yes, I think it's a fair statement that there would have to be trade-offs. The team is really moving it full capacity at this point and most of the workloads on the various staff members are programmed. It's really an understanding of what those trade-offs are and whether they would significantly impact the projects that are not on the state mandated list. And that's where we go based on complexity that the impacts likely will be minor when we really figure that out based on the level of effort needed to move AB 1033 forward. But thank you for the question.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. And really, Ms. Benuelos and Mr. Okrupke, I think, went to the heart of what I was asking. Everyone's looking for the trade-off here between potentially pursuing either SB 10 or AB 1033 and keeping the momentum going and losing the momentum on other projects like the missing middle housing. One of the things that the presentation did very nicely is outline how much the City of Santa Rosa has done over the past 10 years. I mean, we weren't one of the first pro-housing cities in the state for nothing. And you can see the impact in the numbers. And conceptually, you've got complete buy-in from council, I think, if I'm reading my colleagues correctly, as well as from staff. We're all in alignment on wanting to loosen up and creating opportunities whenever we can. It is difficult to figure out where the real opportunity is, whether it is continuing to go to put all of our existing resources towards the initiatives we have underway or pursuing some of these other avenues. Am I intuiting correctly that there's more interest from staff at this moment for AB 1033 than there is for SB 10 for reasons of just the return on investment?

Yes, I agree, I think that that is a fair statement. As the director of the department, one of the challenging things for me is to address the, I don't have a path to home ownership in this community. And there's not too many things that we can do other than figure out ways to financially subsidize that. I think in a creative scenario where creating an adu putting a property line around that adu selling that off allows one to basically through an affordable by design concept potentially have a property that they can own at a lower amount that allows them to build equity for many of us that started off in the housing market in the community this was condominiums condominiums aren't produced at the same level of rate So although I don't necessarily see that this will produce a vast number of units, it does address a community problem statement, and there's not too many tools in the toolbox that will do that. So for that reason and that reason alone, we see value in it. Understanding at the end of the day ultimately how cost effective it is, how the lending industry responds to this. A lot of that is unknown, and whether it becomes feasible or not, we're not sure. But this is an area where we can put something forward. It's an optional tool that solves that problem, and for that reason and that reason alone, through an aggressive housing strategy, it makes sense, because it addresses that problem statement where most things are not able to do that.

It's a nice way of putting that. And again, I think we're all in agreement that getting those first steps on the housing ladder, particularly the first steps of ownership, is so critical. It would be nice to revive our condo market in some way. You also touched on it as well. There are a lot of uncertainties in the areas of insurance, in terms of financing, even in terms of utilities. um including in some you know unusual unusual circumstances like for example septic systems as opposed to being on on city wastewater um did i hear you correctly or did i hear you underline that those are really they're untested that there are a lot of uncertainties about what the how homeowners how how potential homeowners would make those areas work

Yes, I think that when it gets into utilities and access, those are standard issues that anyone subdividing land has to address. And usually what that results in is obviously if the property is on a septic system and you've created a unique parcel, typically that unique parcel cannot share those utilities. And if you're on city services, the same holds true, that oftentimes it's dedicated connections, water meters, PG&E service, So oftentimes in a subdivision is a substantial cost for doing the infrastructure needed to support that, even when the infrastructure is on a very small parcel. And that's what we've seen over the course of time. So what is really unique about this one is it allows, it's a different way to allow a subdivision that can already occur today to support the ADU. It doesn't reduce the cost of construction, those still exist. and many of the issues that pertain to those subdivisions likely still exist with ab-1033 it just creates an additional tool for this smaller unit to have its own parcel and to allow a separate legal ownership but yes it's not getting out of those utility issues because i believe anytime you create unique property ownership you create those issues with utility separation and having everything stand alone that's clarifying is the county pursuing either one of these they're exploring i'm sure do we know what direction the county is headed

We're not aware of what the county is doing relative to these two bills.

Is there any advantage to the city to wait until we have more information and to develop in tandem? Or are we separate enough where we can go in our own direction is just as efficient?

I believe one of the challenges, and it's oftentimes why some of these requirements for local jurisdictions don't apply to counties, is counties often struggle with density for obvious reasons. They're usually not public utilities for water and sewer in unincorporated areas. Certain areas there are, but the majority of county, they're not. It's very much focused on well and septic. those utilities naturally restrict development. So something like SB 10 is problematic many times just on that front that is difficult to develop in many of those county areas because of the utility availability. AB 1033, because the county has ordinances for accessory dwelling units, and as long as they have that, this is just an ownership over the top of it, obviously a well and septic issue can be problematic there. So we're happy to coordinate with the county to understand what they're doing, but I do see a difference between how cities and counties would adopt SB 10, where there might be a little more uniformity through AB 1033.

Thank you. All right, that ends my question. Nothing else from council? Ms. Rogers?

Quick question. So if developers, I know if someone already owns it, that they can sell the ADU if we go ahead with this. But developers, for instance, there's like City Ventures does ADUs on top of a home and then they sell the whole home. I know the homeowner can do it, but can the developer now split it if we go ahead with this? You understand what my question is?

Yes, that would be a possibility. So the reality is developer and existing homeowner construct an ADU. We often see through new subdivisions, residential subdivisions, the incorporation of ADUs. And I think you raise a really interesting point is that many in those denser areas, and we've seen in many developments, the ADU is really a second story to the single family or it's attached to the single family. So what the AB 1033 allows is what is referred to as airspace designations for lots. So when you own a piece of a structure above another, that is defined as an airspace and it's a legal property boundary. So it was commonly referred to as airspace condominiums. We've seen a lot of that type of development where people own a space in an apartment complex. And that may be one of the areas too where it becomes more enticing for developers to incorporate that because selling an ADU separately from the single family dwelling may be more profitable than selling them all together. so it may create an incentive to incorporate more ADUs in developments. But to answer your point, Councilmember, our initial pass has not seen an issue with that being incorporated in the current development project, which would involve a single family and an ADU.

All right, thank you all. We're gonna open it up to public comment. We're gonna go to two minutes for public comment. We've got both mics open and a number of you have signed up. We know this is a room full of people interested in the housing space, so thank you all for coming.

Let's start with Mr. DeWitt.

And then after Mr. DeWitt, we'll go to Adrian Covert and Paul Schwartz. If you could be waiting by one of the mics, let's use them both to be efficient. But if you can be waiting by your mic so we can keep this moving along. Duane, go ahead.

Thank you, sir. My name is Duane DeWitt, I'm from Roseland, also a member of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group formed 30 years ago because there's a dearth of affordable rental residential units. Still, one of the problems that this housing crisis is about is the way zoning has kept affordable rental residential housing units from actually being provided as well as they could be. So thanking the staff for the nice presentation, we would ask that you would focus in on SB 10 and also SB 4, which allows for the use of faith-based lands to be developed. There's a approach here that you can take without it being too onerous upon staff. An example is recently Burbank Avenue apartments were built on Burbank Avenue. They went through fast. and any of the complaints from the community were just steamrolled over. It's just like tough luck. The state says you gotta have affordable housing. You're getting affordable housing even if your community doesn't want it. An example is gonna be the one on Montgomery Drive there at the St. Eugene's site. So if you'll look at SB 10 and SB 4 as positive additions to what bureaucrats like to call the toolbox, you'll have your toolbox to get out there and start to get affordable residential rentals. And last but not least, look over at the AT&T building. We were told that they were gonna put affordable housing in there, and it's not been done yet, but they got all kinds of good incentives in the past. So you have to hold the developer's feet to the fire to make it happen. Thank you.

Thank you, Dwayne. Adrian, Paul, and then Stephanie. Adrian, go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Mayor and Council Members, for the opportunity to speak. My name's Adrian Covert, today representing Santa Rosa Yimby, a pro-housing association of Santa Rosa residents. Also a resident of the West End and a parent of a child at Santa Rosa City Schools. I know this is a housing strategy session, but really this is about so much more than just housing. It's about affordability. It's about the school closure crisis due to a lack of demographics and a lack of families starting here. It's about the city budget deficit as well. Because each of those challenges are downstream of the problem of having built too few homes relative to demand over the past several decades. I'm very excited that the city is entertaining adopting an SB 10 ordinance and an AB 1033 ordinance because these two ordinances would help expand home ownership opportunities, expand units availability, and expand the supply in a way that minimizes both new liabilities and also new impacts because these are infill type opportunities that we're talking about, which is exactly what we need to be talking about. And as the city prepares to go to voters to ask for a tax increase to help balance the city's budget deficit challenges, it's really important that the city be able to go to voters and say, everything we can to use every single free and low cost policy tool at our disposal to naturally increase the pie, increase revenues with more property tax receipts, more sales tax revenue and growing population. so on the prioritization effort i hear staff's challenges i would say sb10 is unique and that it's what can help us create more units more units more quickly it's a much more powerful tool 1033 is fantastic it creates ownership opportunities but sb10 is what will help create the units thank you thank you adrian paul stephanie and then john contreras paul go ahead good afternoon paul schwartz i'm a

commercial real estate broker here in Santa Rosa. And thank you for the opportunity to speak to the council and staff. I just wanna take a moment to mention that, and I think Adrienne did a good job of tying these together. A strong local economy is really dependent on adequate housing. And I've made this case recently here a few weeks ago. When teachers, nurses, first responders, service workers, young professionals can't afford to live here, businesses struggle to attract and retain employees, which limits our ability to grow and prosper and attract firms to this area or retain firms in Santa Rosa. Housing actually is the foundation of a healthy economy. It supports local businesses, strengthens our tax base, attracts investment, and helps us ensure that future generations can continue to live and work in Santa Rosa. And I think that it's very difficult given that to, in response to the Mayor's question to the staff about ROI, I think it's very difficult to quantify what the ROI is because there are both direct benefits, that come to the city and the city budget, but there are many, many other indirect results that come in an economic form that we may or may not be able to quantify or even track in terms of attracting companies, creating more jobs, things of that sort. So as Adrian said, the impact of SB 10 is probably more substantial if we look at it, and I'd encourage you to look at Yes, there are staff costs and implications, and I certainly respect Gabe's efforts to quantify all of those things for you, but I also think it's important to recognize that it might be a small price to pay to generate a far greater return on investment in the long run, or even in the short term. I don't know that we have the answer to that, but I think the result of adopting housing policies that support diversified housing is gonna only benefit

Thank you, Paul. We'll move on to Stephanie and then John and Ananda. Stephanie, go ahead.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council Members. You heard my name is Stephanie and I'm here tonight representing Generation Housing. I want to thank you, Council and staff for holding this study session and offer our gratitude for the thoughtfulness and the real long-term thinking that staff have brought to the housing strategy that was shared with you today. I have a few comments I just wanna share based on the presentation. On SB 10, to clarify that the types of housing that we're talking about are duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and courtyard apartments that fit right into the character of some of our most favorite neighborhoods in Santa Rosa. Allowing the separate sale of ADUs is really low hanging fruit. In Sonoma County, Sebastopol already did it. They are seeing an increase in the development of ADUs on planned projects. And that first ADU in San Jose that Director Osborne referenced sold for 30% less than the neighborhood comps. That's actually addressing affordability. And then addressing the mayor's question about the county, SB 10 is a program of their housing element and they also have AB 1033 on their work plan. Kind of zooming out a little bit, at the beginning of the staff presentation today, a chart was shared showing that permitting is returning to pre-fire rebuild efforts. It might feel like a return to normal, but it is a return to the development crash post-recession. As a community, we really got used to these low development numbers, but when we look at the wider history, we can see that we were significantly lower below other decades. I heard from some of you that you're concerned about the slowing of momentum. That chart shows that momentum is already slowed. So to counteract that, we really need to look at all of the tools available. There is not a single policy, I'm so sorry, bad news, that is going to solve the problem. But each tool that we continue to work on is going to chip away at the shortage that impacts every single member of this community. We would ask you today to give staff clear direction to bring back options for consideration and adoption on both of these policy presented today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Stephanie. John, Ananda, and then Nick Passarelli.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Mayor Stapp and distinguished council members. And thank you to the city team for a wonderful presentation. I'm John Contreras. I'm with the Providence Foundation for Memorial Hospital, Petaluma Valley, and Healdsburg Hospital. And I'm here to speak on behalf of the efforts of Generation Housing and these measures, or as we're calling them, bills to consider and I really want to encourage you all to look deeply in as you've already been doing to the wonderful ramifications that can impact our community in a positive way. I've been an educator for 30 years, 28 years here in Santa Rosa. And I saw over those years far too many families struggling and trying to have their children come back to the county and live here after their college years, which for many was impossible. So to hear these creative ways that you are considering to bring affordable housing to our community is a benefit, and it is encouraging to me. So on that note, thank you very much for this effort, for the encouragement for all of us here, and I ask you to please consider the oversight that's necessary to push this forward, make it happen, make it happen now, and we'll have a better community because of it. And also not forget that healthcare is extremely important to us all. So all this affordable housing connects not only to education and our schools, but to the healthcare that we all desperately need on a daily basis. So again, thank you all. And Mark, let's reconnect again.

Thank you, John. And thank you to all of our speakers for tying together the issues of education, healthcare, and housing costs. The point is well taken. Ananda, Nick, and then Rachel Jeffries.

Right, good afternoon, Mayor's staff, council members, city staff. I wanna start just by acknowledging the work this council has done in advancing housing policy over the last several years. It's clear that housing remains a top priority and we really appreciate your continued willingness to explore new tools and strategies to address this critical challenge. Housing remains one of the most significant challenges facing our economy, our workforce, and our community. The Chamber supports efforts that expand housing opportunities across all income levels and increase pathways to both rental housing and home ownership that reflect that needed variety. We appreciate the inclusion of options such as SB 10 and AB 1033 as part of today's discussion and support continuing to explore innovative approaches that can expand housing choice and create additional pathways to home ownership. We know that there's no single solution to our housing challenges, and addressing them will require a broad range of tools that support housing opportunities across all affordability levels, housing types, and stages of life, ensuring that Santa Rosa residents have options, whether they're seeking affordable rental housing, workforce housing, homeownership opportunities, or the ability to remain and grow within our community over time. As Council considers housing initiatives, we encourage continued focus on a few principles reflected in the Chamber's policy platform. First, continue improving certainty, transparency, and predictability to applicants navigating the development process. Second, continue expanding opportunities for ministerial and by-right approvals where appropriate. Third, continue looking for ways to reduce unnecessary time, cost, and complexity in housing development. And fourth, continue ensuring strong coordination across city departments so applicants experience a clear and efficient process. Finally, as you continue to navigate competing priorities and limited resources, we urge you to evaluate housing strategies based on measurable outcomes, increased housing production, expanded housing choice, improved affordability, and faster project delivery. We appreciate the partnership in this work and stand ready to continue to work with you. Thank you.

Thank you. Our thanks to the chamber. All right, Nick, Rachel, and then Paula Shaw.

Manager for Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County. In my role, I work directly with local families who are striving to achieve stable, affordable homeownership. I guide them through our application process, financial education classes, mortgage preparation, and ultimately the journey of becoming homeowners. Our families who have lived in Sonoma County for years never knew that in just a short time, homeownership would become unattainable. Many have given up entertaining the possibility of homeownership altogether, all the while dealing with unsustainable rents, overcrowded conditions, commuting long distances, or constantly worrying that one unexpected expense could force them out of the community they love. This is why I support SB 10 and SB 1033. SB 10 gives cities an important tool to thoughtfully create more housing opportunities in areas where families need access to jobs, schools, transportation, and services. SB 1033 is also important because it helps expand pathways to affordable home ownership. Home ownership is truly life changing. Children finally have a stable place to do homework and grow up. Parents gain the security of knowing they will not be forced With sudden rent increases or displacement, families are able to begin building modest financial stability and generational opportunity for the very first time. Please note that not every family needs a large single family home with a backyard, but all families desperately want stability, dignity, and long-term security that comes with owning a home of their own. Policies that support diverse housing types and attainable ownership opportunities will make that possible. At Habitat of Humanity for Sonoma County, we believe housing solutions must include both affordable rentals and permanent affordable home ownership opportunities. We are grateful to see the city continuing to explore strategies that address the full spectrum of housing needs. Thank you.

Nick, thank you. Rachel, Paula, and then Valerie. Rachel, the floor is yours.

Okay. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of City Council. My name is Rachel Jeffries and I serve as the Director of Community Engagement and Fund Development at Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County. Thank you for the opportunity to speak regarding Santa Rosa's housing strategy. 15 years ago, I came to Sonoma County to attend Sonoma State University. Like so many others, I fell in love with this community and decided I wanted to build my life here. Today, even with a college education and a stable career, home ownership still feels more like a distant dream than an achievable reality for me personally. And I know that I'm far from alone in that experience. Through my work with Habitat, I see firsthand how deeply the current housing climate impacts working families, young professionals, essential workers, seniors, and longtime residents throughout our community. People who contribute every day to the vitality of Santa Rosa are increasingly being priced out of home ownership, and in many cases, pushed out of the community that they love. That's why Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County supports thoughtful housing solutions like SB 10 and AB 1033, and why we support the Housing for Healthy Communities initiative. SB 10 gives cities more flexibility. If we want to address the housing crisis, we need to make better use of the land and processes we already have. AB 1033 is important because it creates new pathways to attainable home ownership. In communities like Santa Rosa, where single family homes are out of reach for many people, this can help create more realistic opportunities for first time and middle income home buyers. At Habitat, we believe solving the housing crisis requires a full spectrum of housing solutions. Housing is not a one size fits all, and our communities need a diversity of housing types that reflect the realities of the people who live and work here. We need housing policies that make room for all housing types, starter homes, condos, ADUs, affordable rentals, and permanently affordable homeownership opportunities like Habitat, because people at different stages of life have different housing needs, and they all deserve a place in Santa Rosa.

Thank you, Rachel, and thank you for the Sonoma State plug. Paula, and then Valerie. Thank you.

So that turned out to be a perfect segue to my little talk because I now represent senior housing. It's Santa Rosa Mobile Home Owners Association, but I came here 20 years ago as the VISTA volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. So I've been an advocate for housing, affordable housing for many years. And I know most of you may know already that this is probably the last bastion, mobile home living is probably the last bastion of affordable housing for many of us, seniors especially, but also just low income people. And it is unfortunately also a wonderful investment opportunity for very wealthy investors who are moving into the county and into the city now. Coddingtown Mobile Home Park was purchased by Harmony a couple of weeks ago and the residents are really nervous and they're facing rent increases and other kind of insidious increases to their rent bill. It's really scary and concerning and I just hope that all of you are aware and it sounds, I was ignorant when I came here about these particular bills, but it sounds like they're elemental in focusing on affordable housing.

Valerie.

Paula, thank you, and we are aware. Valerie, go ahead.

I'm Valerie Schlafke. I currently work for the County of Sonoma as a housing navigator or housing unsheltered folks. And previous to this, spent 35 years in affordable property management. I'm also a proud member of the Santa Rosa Mobile Owners Association as we continue to ask the council to consider and push for a senior overlay on our senior parks to protect them to remain senior housing. I also wanna thank the council for their thoughtful questions and the housing authority and the housing department for looking at all the creative ways we can provide housing in this county. Mobile home parks are a wonderful opportunity and that could be an idea in the future for not just seniors, but employees, young people trying to stay in this county that can't seem to afford to do that. And we really want to encourage the whole integration of education, healthcare, seniors. And I just wanna remind you, seniors are about 20% of our population in Sonoma County. We're one of the largest growing senior communities in the country, and we vote. And we care about our communities. It's a beautiful community we live in. But in order for us to have a healthy community, we have to take care of our most vulnerable people. Otherwise, we're gonna have another big Joe Rodada PR mess, and then everyone will be scrambling for money to address it. In the last five years, most of my clients are senior women, many of them starting to experience dementia and have nowhere to go. Thank you for your efforts.

Thank you, Valerie. Are there any other members of the public who would like to make comment on this item? Ms. Carmen, I see you moving towards the microphone. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor, Mayor and Council. I agree that there needs to be a diverse population in Santa Rosa, in all of Sonoma County, as a matter of fact. all of the state, as a matter of fact, but it all costs money. And I want to say that I was attending a housing authority, I believe it was, meeting, and they were building eight or 10 small homes. The homes were really tiny for the vets and they were 250,000 each. And the projection of the mortgage was 55 years. And that's why I'm speaking right now. 55 years is at least a generation and a half. And we don't wanna be dumping housing costs that somebody else enjoyed a long time ago. And by 20 years, they may not even be functional anymore. So I just want that to be in people's minds that this all costs money and we need to come up continuously with creative ways for money. And I think that Sonoma County has always had a real draw. Now, the previous draw was naturally our wine industry because everybody wanted to come here after we won the Paris Special Award. So people would come here, well then they've pulled away and there are cities in our area that still attract and I think that there needs to be a push not for the wine industry but for the intellectual industry that we have had accompany us on our journey here. There are many brilliant people in this area and these people have also brought money. and they are able to pass along the word. And I think we need to promote more as far as having international conferences come here. Thank you.

Thank you, Janice. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and bring it back to my colleagues for final comments and direction. Final thoughts and or direction of staff, Ms. McDonald.

Thank you, Mayor. So I'm comfortable with the implementation of AB 1033. I think that makes sense when you're looking at first time home owner opportunities. It also helps potentially the, the property owner if they need to sell something off because they are getting older or they can see a way of reducing their costs or property taxes and and that there's still some complexities to me around the shared space and I know that's going to take some development but from staff but It sounds like that was an area staff was comfortable with taking on because it's a little bit, it's a little cleaner legislation for you to follow. Anything that you can implement I think that's ministerial so that it doesn't require as much oversight, the checklist I think would be helpful to staff, but also to the process of the homeowner who's trying to do the lot split and get that taken care of. As for SB 10, I still have some questions on it. I have questions on how it relates to SB 35. Can they do an SB 10? SB 35, reducing oversight for studies that potentially need to be done is SB 10. I'd like to know the vicinity of where that would take place. It's saying downtown infill area. Would that include things only by Smart or is that included in our bus station as well as far as transportation? How that could potentially impact the seven acres of the city hall space that you were talking about for development? Would it be helpful to have that in place versus not being in place? So I think that one needs a little bit more feedback from staff or me just so that I'm comfortable knowing what we're taking on versus the state, you know, what state puts on us for us to do, like the SB 35. So because we have a little bit of, the ability to study it a little bit more so we understand the implications of it, and understanding what the other jurisdictions who have adopted it have had to go through, and if they've been able to learn from some of the legislation so that we can fill those holes appropriately for our city. I think that would be helpful, at least for me. Obviously, my colleagues may have a different opinion on that one, but just for my comfort level, that's why I'm out on SB 10.

Thank you, Ms. Banuelos.

Thank you, Mayor. I would agree with Council Member McDonald on Assembly Bill 1033 if you would be willing to bring back how that would work for you and in the best possible way in terms of staffing and prioritization and all of those things that we talked about. And also because I think it's a good approach. With respect to Senate Bill 10, I've kind of been going back and forth because of the ministerial process, but I also know I keep coming back to the fact that we need more housing. So with that in mind, and thinking about the fact that it will be, if I understand correctly, primarily infill development around transit, and I think that's all very positive for us and something that we need. I would love to see how that also would work for us, and how, if at all possible, I know it's more complex, but how it would, how it could be implemented or followed through, because I think it's something, I don't know if we adopt it, if we have to follow it to the letter. whatever options that you may all have in trying to implement something like this. I recognize that this is a lot, trying to implement both, but I also think that we need to find ways to continue to build more housing, particularly affordable housing, and different types of housing, which is what I'm interested in, more diverse forms of housing, because I think that's, we hear from our seniors, we hear from our young families, everybody has a different need. And so I think all of those things are important. So I think that's it for me. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Banuelos. Mr. Krupke, did you want to chime in?

Yeah, I think for me, I'm not opposed to SB10, a study session for SB10 or the implementation of AB1033. However, I am hesitant to do it at the behest of, sorry, not at the behest, but at the, what's the word I'm looking for, to do it at the behest to the detriment of some of the efforts that we put tens, hundreds of hours, towards months, years of doing already tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars like the South Santa Rosa Pacific Plan or entertainment zones or anything like that that we're already deep into and getting close to the finish line. I think a study session for SB 10 so we can answer some of the questions that my colleagues have would be great. I don't know if I would be, in favor of moving that forward after a study session and putting a significant amount of staff time towards it so that some of these efforts that we've already undertaken are slowed down or put to the side. We have a lot of efforts that we've discussed already for economic development. We're also going, I believe, in that work in progress. We're going after our pro-housing designation, the second round of our pro-housing designation, which helps us with funding. So the last thing I want to do is lose momentum on things that are already helping us do economic development and build housing just to look at other things that are helping us build more housing. It seems counterintuitive to me. But I also don't want to put it to the side and say an absolute no to it. So I think pursuing it, yes, but prioritizing it over things like I've already discussed is not something I'd be interested in.

Thank you. Ms. Rogers.

Thank you, Mayor. So AB 1033, I'm all for it. I think we should move forward with that. When we get to SB 10, due to capacity and then what Councilmember Okrupke said, I think it's very important for us to know that there are, we could do everything. and do it very poorly. The fact is we cannot do everything because we don't have the capacity to do it. SB 10 is something that I would like to look at in the future when we do see that we can do it and do it well. I'm all for duplexes and triplexes and home ownership like I always say and like you said is a way for generational And so having two children that are graduating next year from college, and unfortunately they can't afford to live anywhere else, but in my house, they will be coming back home. So I understand the importance of needing the housing and the home ownership, but we just don't have the capacity right now. So I would like to see that in the future. data unknown but right now i don't think that we can we can handle that unless another jurisdiction maybe does it and streamlines the process for us then that would be great thank you oh and happy birthday thank you mr alvarez thank you mayor i think we can all agree that this arose from

from the need of housing. And with all innovative ideas or strategies, the one thing that I would caution would be redundancy. And so really that's my only question is that we look at that and make sure we're not creating two processes or too many processes. And I think the question might have been answered that there is a possibility for us to adopt something hybrid, whether it was, I'm not suggesting this, but I think I heard this, site-specific or tailoring to whatever applicant or application is before us. But just the redundancy, I would hate to see multiple processes or one process create the different cycles and needs for different policy to satisfy the need.

Thank you. Well, for my part, I hope that all of the housing advocates that we have in the room right now, and I know we have many, are pleased with the impact of their work over the past many years, where you've got clear unanimity on council and among staff, and the only disagreement is on the logistics of how we best push forward housing in the city. So I'm simply going to echo the comments of my colleagues, which is that, yes, conceptually there's interest, certainly in AB 33, AB 1033, because it sounds like there's an efficient way forward. Also an AB 10 to the extent that this provides anything that our current missing middle housing project doesn't, but a very clear interest in not letting either of these get in the way of the extensive projects that we have underway. One thing that it's sometimes hard for community members to keep a handle on because you're not in the middle of it every day like staff or like council is how much is going on right now with economic development, with downtown planning and with housing strategy. If you tune in for our council meetings over the coming months, or if you have been tuning in, you're going to see regular significant updates in these areas. The city has a lot of pretty significant projects underway, some of which have already hit the public eye, some of which are coming, and they're all in this space. And so the last thing that, and you heard it from everybody on the dais here, the last thing we wanna do is get in the way of that. And we have complete faith in staff, in our city managers, and in our planning team to figure out how to manage those trade-offs from the different projects. So yes, by all means, at some point, let's talk about 1033, look at the precedents in other cities, figure out what can be valuable here. should that get in the way of some of the of the other significant projects you have underway no same same with sb10 is it is it interesting to the extent that it's helpful let's talk about it let's do a study session let's evaluate it but whether we're talking about getting the way of um strategies around the city hall site entertainment zones in the downtown other downtown development opportunities etc etc we don't want to throw it is not our intention on the day has to throw a wrench in the works we we want to give you give staff and our city managers the leeway to figure out the best way to manage those projects so uh does that that i don't i'm not sure that was specific direction but does that give you a sense of of council's interests

No, thank you, Mayor. That is specific direction and we can work with that. Just to ensure that we heard that correctly, what we will do is we will work on a potential adoption package for AB 1033 within the natural staff capacity that exists through the flow of projects without modifying the timeline of the existing projects, specifically those that are on the economic development front. We will do the same with SB 10, focusing on a study session, and during that study session, we will bring forward options and some history with SB 35. We will look at what it takes to incorporate SB 10 as worded. We will give the Council some options for add-ons, and we will have a very specific idea of timelines and impact that an adoption schedule will have. And we will do both that study session and the adoption package once again within the timelines of existing projects and not affecting those dates.

Colleagues, thumbs up? All right, you've read it correctly. Thank you all. There's some spectacular work coming out of the planning department in the city. I hope everyone pays attention. Thank you for all the work that you're doing. And thank you for all the community interest in this. Please keep leaning in. All right, we're gonna move on. Thank you again, planning team. We are gonna go on to item number six, our report on our closed sessions. And I can report that there were no actions to report from either of our closed session items today. And we will move on to one of the fun items for this evening, something that everybody on council enjoys, our two proclamations, beginning with item 7.1, our proclamation for Foster Care Awareness Month, May 2026. And Ms. McDonald, I'm gonna turn this one over to you.

Thank you, Mayor. It's my pleasure to read this proclamation tonight. Whereas every child deserves safety, dignity, and a sense of belonging, and whereas children and youth enter foster care due to circumstances beyond their control, often facing trauma, disruption, and uncertainty. And whereas foster parents, kinship caregivers, and reunifying families provide essential care, stability, and support during times of transition, And whereas community support and meeting basic needs with dignity, such as clothing, beds, car seats, hygiene items, and school supplies can ease transitions and allow caregivers to focus on connection and healing, And whereas, Our Village Closet, a Santa Rosa-based nonprofit founded by foster parents, provides no-cost essentials, comfort items, and connection to youth ages zero to 25 impacted by foster care. serving up to 300 youth and more than 150 caregivers each month through a welcoming Choice Center Resource Center. And whereas Foster Care Awareness Month is an opportunity to uplift these youth and families and to remind our community that everyone can play a role in supporting foster care. now therefore may it may be resolved that our mayor mark stapp of the city of santa rosa on behalf of the entire city council in recognition of our community do hereby proclaim may 2026 as a foster care awareness month in the city of santa rosa and encourage all residents to show up with compassion to support youth and families impacted by foster care and help build a community where every child feels seen, valued, and supported.

Thank you, Ms. McDonald. And we're gonna go to public comment and also take a photo, but first I'd like to turn it over to our city manager who has a few words to say.

Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to address this item on tonight's agenda because it's the first time that I've worked at a city and they actually proclaimed Foster Care Awareness Month. I wanted to speak this evening because I'm a former foster child, and I have found that in many instances people are shocked to hear that, and I feel that representation is really important. essential for folks to know that if you have been in foster care if you've been a foster child if you've been in the system there are paths for you to move forward in life there are assistance programs there's resources and I feel that you know speaking out about my experience as a former foster child helps to increase awareness and it helps to educate people about the impacts of being in foster care I was placed in foster care at two weeks old Both of my parents, one of my parents was a minor, she was 17, and she was in foster care herself, so I was second generation foster care, if you will. I had the fortune of being placed with a family right away, and then I was adopted by that family when I was five. However, throughout my life, my parents continued to be foster parents, and we had many kids come through our doors, and it was just an enlightening experience. Not many had had the fortune that I did to be placed with one family right from the beginning at two weeks old. Many had been in multiple homes. had suffered from homelessness, their families had struggled, and so it was an enlightening experience for me, even as a foster child, to be able to be there, be a sibling, and be a caring relative to all the kids that came through our home and our doors. And so I just wanted to also from the bottom of my heart thank Our Village Closet and all the different providers that work with children and families that are affected by foster care and to thank foster parents for doing the great work that they do because it's definitely needed and I have experienced that firsthand. And so thank you. Thank you, Mayor, for allowing me this opportunity this evening. It's not something that I speak on very often, but it's something that I realize is helpful to share because it does help to promote and increase awareness, and so thank you for that.

We're so glad you chose to speak, all of us here, and I'm sure everybody in the audience. Just so you don't feel, or just so you have a little bit of company, I'll add that my wife and I did get certified as a resource family several years ago, and we had a wonderful experience. So for anybody interested in this space, by all means, talk to the Village Closet, TLC, a number of other local providers. It really is wonderful work with amazing results.

Thank you, Lorianne.

All right, we're going to do a photo. Well, actually, no, we're going to do, we're going to have, who is, oh, it's Amanda. Amanda Kitchens. Would you like to say a few words? Whichever, up at the podium or down front. Thank you for coming out, Amanda.

Mayor and council members, thank you very much for recognizing May and proclaiming it as Foster Care Awareness Month. Again, my name's Amanda. I've been a foster and adoptive parent here in Sonoma County for the last 14 years with my husband. And it's that journey that led me to my role as co-founder and executive director at Art Village Closet. And I speak for everyone at Team OVC when I say it's truly an honor to accept this proclamation on behalf of all the children, the families, and the caregivers that we serve at Our Village Closet. Much like council member said, Foster care affects whole families. It affects entire families, right? It's a child whose world changes in an instant. It's a foster family who says yes to a placement and then is scrambling to find the things that they need. It's a brother and a sister who wonder if they're going to be split up this time or again. It's a grandparent stepping into a moment of crisis and needing support, maybe meeting those grandchildren for the very first time or finding out that they have grandchildren. And it's a reunifying parent that's doing the hard work to bring their children home and create stability. And so we get to step into that gap with them and we get to support them and provide essentials that really help create connections that stabilize the family and that strengthen the family. Being here today feels especially meaningful because it was five years ago today on June 2nd in 2021 that we were able to open our resource center. here in Santa Rosa, just down the street on Mendocino Avenue. And anyone who hasn't been there, I encourage you to come by, give tours, council members, mayor, vice mayor, we would love to give you guys a tour. And because we believe that everybody can step into foster care, that everybody can say yes to helping. And our Village Closet, not only do we support these youth and these families, but we give the community an opportunity to step in at a level of, washing clothes that go into our resource center or sanitizing toys or donating, creating a drive for diapers or things that we need, volunteering for an hour, volunteering at an event, donating funds. There's so many different ways that anyone and everyone can say yes to foster care. So again, on behalf of our Village Closet, everyone that we serve, we really do appreciate this recognition and this proclamation because together we can all show up and we can all create an environment that tells these youth and tells these family, we see you, we're here, we're a community that cares and we're here to support you. So again, thank you for your time and this proclamation and thank you for caring and hopefully we'll see you at the Resource Center soon.

Thank you, Amanda. And thanks again to our Village Closet. Now we'll open it up to public comment. Are there any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll right on to the photo. Amanda, if you could come down and any other members of your team, let's take a photo with council. Thank you again to our Village Closet. We will move on to item 7.2. We are not done with our proclamations for the evening. We are proud to do a proclamation again for Eritrean Independence Day. So glad that so many of you came out. And I'm gonna turn it over to Ms. Rogers.

Thank you, Mayor. Whereas Eritrea became independent on May 24, 1991, after a brutal 30 years of war and the mobilization of an impressive national liberation movement, and whereas Eritrea is a country that lies on the west coast of the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa, inhabited by a mosaic of diverse nine ethnic communities, and whereas Eritrea's capital city, Asmora, is Africa's secret modernist city recognized by the UN as the first world heritage site in Eritrea, and whereas Eritrea's natural resources include gold and global dominance in cycling and marathon runners, and whereas as of 2013, Eritrea, achieved all pre health millennium development goals. And whereas the Eritrea Community Center ECC of the Bay Area that was established in the late 19 eighties is one of the oldest Eritrean community centers in the United States. And whereas The ECC in Santa Rosa strives to help alleviate some of the problems faced by Eritreans in Northern California by helping them overcome many of the cultural, linguistic, and institutional barriers. And whereas the members of the Eritrean community have provided Santa Rosa with a unique cultural influence and have fundamentally enriched the character of our city, and or as the ECC in Santa Rosa is in collaboration with local government and organizations is actively engaged in helping community members. Now, therefore, may it be resolved that our mayor, and on behalf of the entire City Council, in recognition of our community, on the 35th anniversary of Eritrean Independence Day, hereby proclaim Sunday, May 24, 2026, Eritrean Independence Day.

Thank you, Ms. Rogers. And thank you, we're glad that so many members of the community came out. And I think we have a few speakers here, is that right? Sure, why don't you, if it's easier to come down the stairs. Ana, thank you very much. If we could set up the mic in front.

Thank you very much for doing that and support about Eritrea and learning about Eritrea.

Feel free to take a seat and speak right into the mic so everyone can hear.

The speaker is, today he get emergency. He can't do anything. And I will say thank you all the time. You are in my heart. And thank you very much. And see you next year. Thank you so much.

No, thank you for coming out. Is there anybody else who would like to say a few words? No? Well, let's see if we have any members of the public who wanna speak. We'll open it up to public comment. Are there members of the public here that would like to speak on the subject of Eritrean Independence Day? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and we'll write to the fun part. Why doesn't everybody come up and we'll do a little photo with council? Thank you again to all the members of our Eritrean community who came out today. We always enjoy doing this in council chambers. Seeing as how we are a few minutes after five o'clock, we're gonna shift around the agenda a little bit. We're gonna do our first public comment on non-agenda matters. So this is a chance for members of the public to speak on items that are not listed on the agenda. And then we'll go to our public hearing for the evening. So we'll open up public comment on non-agenda matters. Are there any members of the public here who would like to make comment on items not listed on the agenda? I see one, sir, grab the microphone right there. There you go.

Hello, my name is Diane Ballard and I live, Whoops, there we go. My first time speaking. I live on Glenbrook Drive in Santa Rosa, right behind the Westgate Park on Westbrook Drive. And my neighbors and I on Glenbrook Drive oppose this community garden that a group of older women wanna put together. They wanna put in a big shed, they wanna put in planter boxes. And my neighbors and I feel that We need the park to be for children, because they run, they play, they play soccer, and there's big events that happen there. My neighbors and I are, we're concerned about, we've had a little bit of a rat problem, and we know that Rats like certain type of compost. We're concerned about that. We don't want any type of garden on the north side, which backs to our homes on Glenbrook Drive. I... Just to let you know, down one block on Third Street and Stony Point Road, there's a church called the Presbyterian Church that has a community garden there, one block away. And I've attended these, a couple of the meetings that these older women are wanting to do, and the Presbyterian Church, their community garden, it's gone downhill. And if you drive by, you can see all the weeds and everything growing up, and I'm concerned that it's gonna affect this beautiful park. So that is my spiel. I encourage you guys not to go through with this. I am going to the Community Advisory Board meeting, file number 26037CAB,

Diane, thank you. Thank you for coming to make comment and good for you for going to the CAB meeting. And my apologies when you were in front of the podium that you were backlit with the open door and I couldn't really see who was speaking. So thank you. Thank you for making the time to come out tonight. So are there any other members of the public that would like to make comment on non-agenda matters? Mr. DeWitt?

Before we start, what's the time limit today?

It's two minutes, Dwayne.

Hello, my name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland, and just by chance, I've been to Westgate Park. I've been going there since they built it, because there were no parks over in Roseland when I was young, and we would ride over to that park. Leave that park alone. Let it be the spot where kids can play and do what they do. I've come to talk with you today about Roseland, about Roseland Creek. The transients that are living in the creek and nearby are creating a lot of problems. They've been doing this for years now, years and years, since you tore down the houses that would have allowed us a bit of oversight. Essentially, what needs to happen now, there needs to be mowing done. all that high grass, all drying out. They build fires down there. I was gonna build one of the, excuse me, I was gonna bring one of the bags from the charcoal briquettes that they use, plus one of the canisters from the butane that they use for the fires that they start in your city park that says no fires. So I didn't bring it because you never know how the people here might feel about coming in with something like that. Long story short, we've been asking for rocks also along Burbank Avenue and McMinn Avenue to keep the four-wheel drive vehicles from just driving up in there, which they do now. So I'm hoping that you folks, when you come out next month for the Park a Month Day at Southwest Community Park, some of you can come down, well in this case it's north, come north along Burbank Avenue to Roseland Creek, see the nice spot we got trying to do there. We're really working hard for it to be a Pomo Park and Preserve. It's a good spot. We can make good things happen if we work together on that. And I want to leave you with this also. We in Roseland appreciate all your efforts. We're here to say thanks in so many ways, but I'll be back also. Thank you.

Thank you, Dwayne. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak? I see one in the back. Please take the podium, the floor is yours.

Thank you, good afternoon. My name is Patrice Doyle. Thank you, council members, for your service to the city. I'd like to speak quickly about the Creekside neighborhood, and in particular, the roads in our neighborhood. And if you've not been through that part of the southeast corner of Santa Rosa, I encourage you to drive through. The people that live in that neighborhood either work from home, they are retirees, they are stay at home moms, dads, but the people that are coming through the neighborhood typically are cutting through over to Montgomery High School, the other schools cutting over to Bennett Valley Road, Highway 12, getting downtown. And so our roads are probably some of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. and yet they have been neglected. And so I continue to call the materials lab and speak to others in public works to figure out when our neighborhood will be prioritized, not just for filling potholes, but complete repavement in there. Those houses are late 50s, early 60s, and the people that are coming through are really the ones that are continuing to chew them up. It's not really the homeowners that live in there. So thank you for your consideration, and I hope you'll prioritize that topic. Thank you.

Thank you, Patrice. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak? Seeing none, we will close this iteration of public comment and we'll go on to our public hearing for the evening. This is item 16.1, our public hearing regarding the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan and 2025 Water Shortage Contingency Plan. Claire, thank you for being with us tonight.

okay good afternoon uh mayor stapp and members of the council i'm claire nordley i'm going to be talking today about our 2025 urban water management plan and our 2025 water shortage contingency plan the urban water management planning act requires that urban water retailers Basically anyone that has over 3,000 connections or supplies over 3,000 acre feet of water per year complete an urban water management plan. To put that in perspective, Santa Rosa has 54,000 connections and last year we supplied about 17,000 acre feet of water per year. So we're required to put together an urban water management plan and have for some time now. The plan basically assesses long-term water supply availability and reliability. The reason why we have to complete this, obviously we have to comply with state law, but it also helps us. It helps us understand what our future water supply is and our future water demand is. It also helps us maintain eligibility for grants. There's numerous grants within the state of California that require that you have an adopted urban water management plan on the books in order to apply for those grants. These plans are updated every five years and this next plan is due July 1st, 2026 for the 2025 plan. I should also say that what the plan is not is very flexible. There's a very prescribed and prescriptive way that this plan has to be developed and enacted. There are specific chapters that we have to complete. There are specific tables that we have to complete. There's not a lot of flexibility from the state on what goes into this plan. So you'll see here, there are 10 specific chapters that we must complete, and within those chapters, there are specific tables that we have to complete. And we'll really be highlighting today Chapters 6 through 10, which are sort of the meatier part of the plan. The most substantial part of this plan is the water demand. Water demand is projected from 2025 all the way out until 2050, and there's numerous factors that go into that projected demand, including growth projections, such as what our future climate is going to be like, the economy, future population projections, as well as employment. That also inherently includes housing type as well. We also look at past water use, and we also look at new planned developments that we know are coming within Santa Rosa. We also incorporate into those water demands water loss. We have to do an annual state-required water audit that helps us understand things like unbilled authorized usage, which would be including firefighting flows, for example, real water loss, which are leaks and breaks in our own water distribution system, and apparent loss. So all of that water loss is also incorporated into future demands. We also incorporate our urban recycled water demand into our demands. And then subtracted from the demand is passive water conservation savings. So this is the natural replacement of fixtures over time, such as toilets and faucets, shower heads, et cetera, that are of course getting more efficient over time. And so we want to incorporate those savings into the future demand. Here you can see the green line is our future projected demand, and the orange line is our future projected supply. You can see we're in a really good situation, which is not always the case. You can see out projected until 2050, we have sufficient supply to meet our projected demand. We're also required as part of the Urban Water Management Planning Act to complete a drought risk assessment. This is for the subsequent five years after the plan year. So for us, for all of California, it's 2026 through 2030. This is based on dry year potential supply. And as you can see here, our supply meets our demand, which again is really good news. If we go into a water shortage, we are projected to have sufficient supply to meet our demand. Also as part of our urban water management plan, we're required to develop a water shortage contingency plan. This is sort of our drought and water shortage document. It tells us how we can respond to water shortage scenarios, it talks about demand reduction strategies that we might employ, it talks about fees that we could implement, and it establishes protocols for triggering water shortages. We have eight stages within our water shortage plan. The percentage reduction is all the way, it starts at sort of a up to 10% voluntary reduction that we might ask our community-wide to participate in, all the way up to a stage eight, which would be an over 50% reduction that we would request from our customers in a most dire circumstance. To clarify what this slide says, this is no change from what was adopted by Council in 2020. There are two water shortage penalty options that the Council could enact. These would both require Council's express approval prior to the adoption. The first one is a water shortage fee. This fee really is... to support the utility financial health. It's a uniform fee amount that would be across all customer sectors. And of course there's alternatives to this. There's also delaying capital improvement projects or using reserve funds if we needed to. There's also an excess use penalty. This is a penalty on our customers to encourage conservation. It's entirely preventable by customers, and it's based on the customer's ability to meet their water allocation. So in later stages in drought, stages five through eight, we are providing water allocations to customers. If they stay within that water allocation, the excess use penalty is not placed upon their account. So here is the actual water shortage charge that could be enacted based on the stage of drought or the stage of water shortage and the reduction target. Again, this would require Council's express approval prior to enacting this. Here are some more details about the excess use penalty. Again, this is entirely avoidable by all customers and it does include a buffer. So there's a 1,999 gallon buffer prior to the penalty being enacted. And there is an appeals process as well for this penalty. So this table here shows what the actual structure is. So for example, in stage five, if a customer goes over their allotment by more than 2,000 gallons, they would be charged $5 per 1,000 gallons that they went over their allocation. Of course, we never wanna penalize people right away. We wanna offer progressive enforcement. First, we would, of course, alert a customer to a violation, offer technical assistance. We have a robust water use efficiency team that can offer technical assistance, leak detection. There's resources out there that we would offer. And then if needed, issue a warning, and then if needed, apply a penalty. And for those of you who were around in our previous droughts, you know the extensive amount of outreach that the Water Department does during a water shortage. Everything from water bill inserts, letters directly to our customers, postcards, social media ads, e-newsletters, you know, ad buys, presentations to all sorts of groups. attendance at local events, fairs and festivals, partnering with specific community groups, and direct outreach as well to specific groups, such as high water using customers, et cetera. So we would employ all of these tools prior to any kind of fee or penalty. The Urban Water Management Planning Act requires a specific amount of public input into this plan. So we did do a notice of plan preparation, which is a letter that's sent out to all of the surrounding cities and counties and water utilities. And that was sent out in January of 2026. We've also been to the Board of Public Utilities Water Conservation Subcommittee in February. We sent out public noticing to all 54,000 of our customers through a water bill insert in the billing period of March, which is not required by the plan, but we felt like it was important to ensure that our customers had the opportunity to review this plan and understand it. We also have posted the plan both online on a dedicated website, as well as in printed copies at two of our city offices. Again, not required, but we wanted to go that extra mile in offering our customers the ability to read and understand this plan prior to a public hearing. We also went to the Board of Public Utilities in May. And of course, now we're here in June. So we've had a pretty robust public noticing period. And as I said, there's a dedicated website that's been updated, you know, throughout the years, really since 2020 and beyond with the draft plan. Before I get to the recommendation, we did receive public comments on this item. Unfortunately, they were delivered yesterday, so they weren't able to be incorporated within the slides. But I did want to just address them, or a few of them, I think some of them were more about the affordability of housing and affordability of Santa Rosa, which is not really within the scope of the Urban Water Management Plan. As I said, the Urban Water Management Plan a pretty prescriptive report that has specific tables, specific sections, specific chapters that are required by the state, and we're not able to describe other kinds of issues that may be occurring in Santa Rosa that aren't related specifically to water supply and water demand in the future. The other kinds of comments that I think we received are more about housing type and maybe that single family residential homes use more water than other types of homes and therefore we should prioritize other types of housing. Again, this plan is not about housing, but I can say that housing type is already included within the demand projections. Inherent in the projections are water use for every kind of customer. So a single family residential unit is already, that water use is already included within the demand. So we already have justified that there is sufficient supply to meet that demand. So just wanted to touch on both of those sort of high level respond to those public comments that we received. So with that, I have a recommendation. Santa Rosa Water recommends that the Council hold a public hearing, which we are doing now, to receive comments on the draft plan, provide any direction that you may have on both the Urban Water Management Plan and the Water Shortage Contingency Plan, and then the adoption of these documents will be considered at the next City Council meeting on June 16th. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions as well as have the public hearing.

Claire, thank you. A few of us who serve on the water boards are biased, so we find these policy items fascinating. So thank you for bringing them forward. Thank you for all the work. A quick clarification for us on Council. Do you need direction on specific items, like the excessive use penalty or anything tonight?

No, there are no specific items that we need direction on. It's more for your discussion.

All right, thank you for that. So turning it over to council, any questions at this time? Not even Ms. Rogers. Then my only question will be, could you underline again what the point you made at the end, very diplomatically, which is a question that all of us get all the time. Do we have enough water to build more houses?

Yes.

There we go.

The projected, as you saw the projected supply includes new plan developments. So the new plan developments that we are aware of are already included in the estimated water use of those new plan developments that we're aware of are already included within the supply. If there were additional developments that were outside of the supply or outside of the demand that we've already projected, that would go through a water supply assessment process and would be brought back to Council as a public item to be reviewed and discussed at that time. But as of now, the answer is yes, short answer.

Thank you. And for those in the audience or online, what do they Google to get them to the place on the city website that has just volumes of information on that exact question? You can look at all the projections and charts that you want to see.

I would say the best website is here, the srcity.org slash UWMP, because that's where the Urban Water Management Plan is. And we've linked on that site several other documents and reports that may be helpful and interesting. We actually have an FAQ page that specifically goes into a long list of questions about housing and building during water shortages.

Thank you for that. All right, if there are no other questions from Council, then we will officially open the public hearing. Is there anyone in Council Chambers tonight who wishes to make comment during this public hearing? Now is your chance to opine on water policy for the City of Santa Rosa. Seeing none, we're gonna close public hearing and bring it back to Council for a motion and any final discussion or adoption. Maybe we'll ask for a, let's see, advice, additional discussion. Hold on a moment, let me see, make sure we got exactly what we need to do here. Is there any additional discussion from council? Still no from you, Ms. Rogers? Still no, all right, no, it's dinner time. All right, no final discussion from me either, other than just thank you for all the work. And we don't, there's no motion. I just wanna clarify with our attorney, there's nothing else that's needed?

I think that's correct, Mayor. Adoption will take place at the June 16th.

Perfect. So we're good to go for this evening. Anything else from council then?

Thank you for the wonderful presentation and thank you to the Water Department for all the work that you do to ensure that we have safe drinking water.

That is a nice way to end it. Claire, thank you and thanks to the whole team. All right, we will see you in a couple of weeks. And with that, we will hop back up to item 15.1, our report on Let's Talk Santa Rosa. Ms. Wood, is this one yours? Come on down. Is it you and Luke today? All right, well, we are all eager to have this discussion. Thank you for all of your work on this project.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Vice Mayor and members of the City Council. My name is Misty Wood. I'm the Communications and Intergovernmental Relations Officer. I'm here tonight with Luke Fazer in the City Manager's Office. He's an Administrative Analyst. And we are here tonight to present on the Let's Talk Santa Rosa Community Survey results. I'll start with some background information, pass it to Luke to discuss those survey results in more detail, and then the City Manager and I will conclude with our final thoughts. So let's start with some recent history. The City Council has identified fiscal sustainability and budgeting excellence as one of its strategic priorities, and has made some difficult financial choices in the recent years. Last fiscal year, Council made significant cuts to address a $15.2 million structural deficit, including 54 positions being eliminated. And in the upcoming fiscal year, the City is facing a $17.5 million structural deficit, The proposed two-year strategy before you that you're currently considering includes nearly $10 million in solutions and a one-time use of $7.6 million in reserves. Without additional revenue, the structural deficit is projected to increase, necessitating more significant cuts to core services, including public safety. Knowing the financial challenges that we face now and over the next several years, the city conducted an initial resident survey in January of 2026 to get a sense of service priorities from our residents. After receiving those results, we knew we wanted more robust community engagement and community feedback to help shape priorities in the budget planning process and long-term fiscal planning. And that's when we launched the Let's Talk Santa Rosa survey. So we'll start with the January survey. It was conducted with 423 people. While this is a statistically valid survey, it's a very small number of people compared to our population, and it was conducted with residents only. The top priorities identified were maintaining public safety services and maintaining streets and public services, I'm sorry, public spaces. The details of the priorities on the screen in the presentation may look familiar because we've discussed those at council before, and they were the basis for the Let's Talk Santa Rosa survey. I'd like to highlight the fact that more than 80% of respondents identified the priorities on the screen here as either extremely important or very important. And that brings us to the Let's Talk Santa Rosa survey that we recently launched and why we're here tonight. The Let's Talk Center was a survey that was launched to better understand community members' city service priorities. We conducted broad, inclusive, bilingual outreach in order to get as much input as possible on city service priorities from the community. The survey was heavily promoted in English and Spanish on social media, in our newsletter, on our website, via direct mail and email, in city facilities, at presentations at community groups, posters at the Santa Rosa Plaza Mall and the library, and city council conversations, as you were all well aware. We sent direct mail to about 58,000 households that included a QR code to participate digitally, and it also had a tear-off card so folks could return that if they were more comfortable with a hard copy. And that yielded really good results. Of the 600 or so hard copies that we received, the vast majority of those were those tear-off cards. So it turned out to be an effective way to reach our residents. The direct email was a letter from the city manager to community leaders with an offer to meet and solicit feedback and talk about the budget challenges we're currently facing. And we conducted additional direct follow-up with 62 groups and individuals with that same offer. We received over 2,000 responses. And I do have to say I'm pleased with the results, that we obtained as much feedback as we did. And I think that's reflective of not only our outreach efforts, but also indicative of the fact that this community really cares about what's going on. And at this point, I'd like to pass it over to Luke to get into the details of the survey results.

Thank you, Director Wood. Good evening, Council. My name is Luke Fazer with the City Manager's Office. And I'm going to try and maneuver to the screen here. All right, so as Director Wood mentioned, we received over 2,200 responses, which is a very strong result there. This survey is ongoing as of right now. It has not completed. So these results are as of May 26th. But right now, the analysis is pretty stable. So I don't see a large increase. increase or change in these results, unless there's a large influx coming in. But you can see here that about 70% of the respondents live in Santa Rosa. They do not own a business or work in Santa Rosa. And you can see in the distribution of zip code participation, it's fairly evenly distributed across the zip codes, except for in zip code 95407, where you see the lower participation rate at 7% there. These are the only two demographics that were collected during the survey, and that is for reasons that I will discuss later on here. Moving on, you can see that the residents were asked to rank these five priorities for services, maintaining 911, or excuse me, maintaining 911 emergency medical services and fire response services. I'm not gonna read them all. You all have good eyes. But they're shown here as a Likert scale of one to five, five being the highest and one being the lowest. This is an aggregate score of all of the responses overall. So you can see that maintaining 911 emergency medical and fire responses was the top choice overall. There's a tie for second place and then fourth and fifth place is very close as well there. I do want to mention that that these rankings are, again, the aggregate overall, and that if you look at specific clusters, being the residency status, living or working, or their zip code, those rankings do change a little bit, which I'll dive into a little bit further here. So we can see that about 40% of participants ranked 911 EMS Fire Services as their drop priority, while 60% of those respondents did not. So the low variance score that you see here shows that the rankings were generally close together, and we see that in those ties for second place, and then the close scores for fourth and fifth place. It also indicates that most participants ranked 911 EMS Fire close to the top choice. And we also see that there's the Kendall's coefficients of concordance, the Kendall's W. That is a score that is from zero to one and basically measures the agreeability of those people responding to the survey. Typically, any scores below .3 indicate that there's low agreeability across individuals. That's important to see because when you look at the results going forward, identifying a top choice was difficult, but the Likert score helps identify that winner when there's a lot of nuances with individual responses. So survey respondents were also given the opportunity to share what other priorities were important to them and submit improvement suggestions in an open-ended comment section. These comments were then used to analyze and interpret their results and systematically, excuse me, and then synthesize the results and apply them thematically. So you can see the framework that was used there for the qualitative analysis. There's only a few things I'll point out there. The experience domain, that's basically what aspects of the comment was used that was driving their comment. So was there a comment about the quality of service that they were experiencing? Was it technology or equipment in that service being provided? Is it staffing levels or knowledge base of the staff? Or is it the rules or rule making or procedures in that service? Another important thing to evaluate during this survey was the stance of those comments. So if you receive a comment that's negative, like a complaint or a barrier to service of some kind, you can have a negative comment, but you can overall support that service ultimately. So like my wife likes to say, criticism is love. So another point to point out there was the actionability framework. So that was an innovative approach to look at these comments and determine if there was a specific enough information in those comments to, in theory, assign someone for follow-up or to investigate further, or if the comment was contextually based or conditional. I could nerd out on the internal dashboard that was made, but I won't because I'm a nerd and not everyone is. All right, so the next few slides that I'm gonna show, they'll show you how these comments were used and interpreted to identify the key themes here. So public safety and transportation were mentioned in 35% of the comments, and maintenance was mentioned in 15% of those comments, which makes sense because of the framing of the survey was about those two topics. Homelessness and affordability are two topics when grouped together make the second most frequently mentioned topic. I group affordability with homelessness in this situation because over 50% of the comments tied to affordability were related to housing access. So those were grouped together there. So you can also see that bike lanes and multimodal transportation were highly polarized in the comments, 47% support and 40% oppose. I find that was interesting, so I highlighted it there. And also just to highlight that there's a mixture of comments and topics that made some of the qualitative analysis challenging, and I'll get to those in a second. You'll see a quote there at the bottom right there, making the city nice and inviting again would go a long way in attracting tourism and business. That quote there is, I think, indicative or exemplary of just kind of the overall theme that was found in this analysis. And then I wanted to share some of the community voices with the Council, because sometimes when you review data sets and large points of data, you forget that these are people in our community sharing their experiences and their needs. So I wanted to share some quotes that pulled out, and they kind of are illustrative of the overall themes here. Reading all the comments, you can see that people will often mention public safety as kind of this blanket comment, but when they mention specifics about public safety concerns, they often express a desire to feel safe walking in their neighborhoods or a park or downtown, and that's a feeling that's impacted by a myriad of things. Another key theme that you'll see there are participants expressing that all the options are priorities to them, and they found difficulty in making those ranking decisions. And that's kind of reinforced by that Kendall's W score that I mentioned earlier. And it also affects the high exclusionary of paper surveys that I'll get to in a moment here too. The last comment on here, the when you look good, you feel good, and when you feel good, you treat yourself and your community better, that is really at the core of what was identified through these comments. I said before that comment was illustrative. I think at the core, this one ties it all together. Moving on, so this slide is here to explain a few things, but mainly that the ranking of priorities doesn't always align with what the comments are saying. So maintaining EMS and fire services was ranked the top priority, while topics like public safety regarding crime or street conditions or homelessness, they were mentioned far more in the comments. And I know that there may be some public safety officials in the audience, so I'm just a messenger here for this next comment. But many of the responses question the allocation percentage of funds for public safety versus those for public works. And I mention that because it was important thematically. And reading these comments with thoughtfulness was crucial to understand the thought process and motivations of those people that participated. It made me think, why are these topics so prevalent in the commons? Are there service gaps or performance gaps that are driving some of these perceptions? When you look at the departmental data from annual reports, they suggest that police and fire services are stable and they're high performing. This data was from 2024 and I understand and recognize that There's trends from year to year that impact those, but the 2025 annual reports weren't available yet. And for the purposes of gauging public perception around some of these services, this was effective and sufficient. Now, data reported by the County of Sonoma shows that Santa Rosa has an overall decrease in persons experiencing homelessness over the past five years. You can see that here from 2022 to 2023, decreased by 30%. Some of that was due to one-time funding. I believe that was ARPA funding that was being utilized. And then there was a modest increase in 2024, but still lower than the levels in 2022. Then we also saw in 2025 a decrease by 16%, an overall 518-person reduction from 2022. So what does all this mean, right? So despite the progress of our very talented public safety officials and our fantastic Housing and Community Services Department, homelessness remains visible and highly visible in our community. And some of the comments tend to conflate public safety crime concerns with homelessness, which there is some intersection there, but they are systematically different. But it might help explain why these topics are so prevalent in the comments. Next I need to acknowledge that there are some limitations that the survey presents. The goal in this survey was to increase participation and get as many people as possible. So we purposely omitted data of demographics. By doing that, we also increased the risk that some viewpoints are magnified while others are suppressed. But we saw over 2,200 people respond, which is overall a win. Also, the online survey had required fields and formatting for how to rank priorities, while the paper survey lacked those guardrails, which led to approximately 12% of those paper surveys being excluded. That's not to say that they're not being evaluated or not being reviewed, it's just that they will need to go through a separate process, and including them in this analysis might have skewed the overall results. Additionally, there was the anonymous nature of the survey allowed people to submit both an online survey and a paper survey. There were steps to mitigate that, but it does potentially have the risk of elevating certain viewpoints. So this survey essentially asked two questions. What services do residents fear and which services affect their daily life, daily quality of life? And looking at the priority rankings alone cannot effectively answer both of those questions. Residents tend to prioritize services they fear losing, especially in economically stressful times, and even when those programs have been already institutionally protected. In this context of the survey, public safety likely functions as a symbolic and foundational service, one that residents prioritize because of its perceived role in protecting their overall quality of life. The city may not be experiencing a public safety performance gap, but maintaining current service levels, especially for EMS and fire, are critical to sustaining community confidence in those services. Now, quality of life is driven from the tangible and the visible conditions of the city and its services. So persistent concerns about road conditions, park maintenance, traffic behavior, housing affordability, and homelessness, those reflect issues residents encounter daily and they experience firsthand. Although these concerns do not always rank highest on budget prioritization surveys, the consistent feedback that was received indicates that they strongly influence community satisfaction and perceptions of safety. So the key takeaway is this, which should be no surprise to any members of this council. It's that if investments are concentrated in these highly ranked services, residents expect to see visible improvements in their daily life and their perceptions of safety and satisfaction. Otherwise, we risk an increase of frustration and distrust, even if those funding decisions are well-intentioned and transparent.

Thank you, Mr. Fazer. So to conclude, I'd just like to offer some final thoughts and observations from looking at the data with Mr. Fazer and also being in several community meetings. The survey shows that people's lived experiences shape their service priorities. So simply put, how people feel defines our priorities, which makes sense because we're all human. For me, one of the biggest takeaways from those results and from the feedback I heard during community meetings that Mr. Faser touched on as well is that everyone wants to feel safe. And that's no surprise. That's a very basic core human need that we all have. The challenge is that what safety means looks and feels different to everybody. So for some people, it's feeling safe driving your car down the street. For some people, it's feeling safe walking down the street. For some people, you feel like when you call 911, a police officer or a firefighter is going to show up. And oftentimes, it's all of the above. Additionally, it's clear to me that our community members have a thirst for accurate information. This, again, is not surprising. We live in a world of instant gratification and instant information with technology and our cell phones, so the public expectation is really high. So I will admit we are not always able to meet that high level of public expectation of instant gratification, but we do our best to release accurate and timely information to the public, making sure that it's vetted, making sure that it's true. And so I think it's worth repeating for the public tonight what we've said at these community meetings, which is Follow us on social media and sign up for our newsletter so you can hear information directly from the source, directly from the city. And then finally, this conversation isn't ending. We are still facing budget challenges and while you've heard some feedback throughout the budget process and you're receiving the full report tonight, we're gonna continue to engage with our community. We have additional presentations scheduled and we're gonna continue to inform our community when key budget decisions are made by this council. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to the city manager for her final thoughts before we wrap up the presentation.

Thank you, Misty, and thank you, Luke, for that great presentation and for dedicating so much time to the survey results, survey analysis, and the synthesis that you provided this evening. I wanted to share with the Council just the importance of these survey results as it relates to what do our residents, businesses, visitors, what do they all feel are the most important aspects of what we do in our roles as government officials. We wanted to know if the survey that was conducted in January was illustrative. Was it just a point in time? Was it smaller samples? We really wanted to get a more broad-based representation of the public, reporting to us what their priorities were as we worked through the budget deliberations. This has been a really meaningful and a very descriptive experience about how people perceive living in Santa Rosa. And so we wanted to make sure that you had that information and that it's timely because at our very next meeting, we'll be presenting the budget to you for next fiscal year. As you know, as your interim city manager, I'm recommending a two-year strategy. The first year starting July 1, we'll have some cuts in the budget and some solutions totaling about 10 million that solves about 10 of the $17.5 million problem. The remainder will be solved by reserves. And so that gets us through year one, but there is a summer of 2027 dynamic that we will be discussing with you when we meet again in two weeks. where we will describe to you what the impacts would be if we had to cut another seven and a half, and then, of course, expenses will grow. We're looking at about a $14 million shortfall, about 13.8 million for the next fiscal year. So while we've presented solutions for the budget July 1, we are very concerned about the potential cuts to all of these services that are so important to the public in year two if we don't have additional revenue i can share with you that i've looked under the hood i've gone through extensive analysis of the city's budgets bringing my experience as a cfo to bear and working very closely with our finance teams and we're truly at a crossroads And so we'll continue this conversation in two weeks. We'll present the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 to you, but it behooves us to have a conversation when we meet again on the 16th regarding the potential cuts to the services that most of the public feels are near and dear to what it takes to run an effective, safe city with a high quality of life next summer if we don't have additional revenue. And so I wanna thank the team for putting this together. I'd like to thank the Council for your support of this survey and actually the public because they're the basis for this information. And we've seen the stacks of mail come in into our office and it's been pretty considerable. And these are great survey results that basically affirm what we were thinking of in terms of our instincts, in terms of what's important to the public, and so we'll have more information for you in two weeks, but we wanted to let you know where we are thus far, but how important this conversation is moving forward past July 1 and some recommendations that we'll be making to you in two weeks about how we feel we can solve some of these problems between infrastructure and public safety and everything that the committee holds near and dear.

Thank you, Madam City Manager. With that, the Communications and Intergovernmental Relations Office recommends that the City Council receive the Let's Talk Santa Rosa report, and we are available for any questions that Council may have. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Wood, Mr. Frazier, and thank you for that framing, City Manager Farrell. This has been a high priority item for all of us on the dais, and so all of us have been looking forward to this conversation. Questions right now? Again, we've all been in the mix for a while on this item. Seeing no questions, I'll ask just one. Did you guys draw straws to determine who would explain Kendall's coefficient of concordance? I was very impressed with that, Mr. Frazier.

His data and his analytic skills are really impressive.

All right, I even heard a mention of the Likert score. You went deep into survey methodology.

I told you I was a nerd. I'm wearing Star Wars socks right now.

Thank you.

Thank you for the diligence. All right, we'll open this up to public comment. I'm hoping that a few of those in attendance today actually participated in the survey, or if not, there are still ways to participate online. Any members of the public wish to make comment on this item? All right, we'll close public comment and I'll bring it back, actually I'll bring it back to Ms. Banuelos for a motion and then any final discussion from our group.

Thank you, Mayor. Let's see, I move that we approve receipt of the report on the Let's Talk Santa Rosa Community Engagement Initiative. Second.

All right, we have a motion, we have a second. Any final discussion? Just, Ms. McDonald?

Just a couple quick comments. I really appreciated what you said, Luke, when you, when folks said, I didn't want to rank these one to five because they're all number one to me. So I think that's important because one slide kind of depicted by percentages and then another slide actually made them rank five to one. So those seem to be easier. Like, do you want 911 to be here quicker or do you want us to you know cut grass clearly that's an easy one to rank when you're looking at it but i think the percentages to me was really telling that the community ranks all of these things very important to us and the question i get is well if we only have five things that we want to prioritize how can we not do that in a budget of our size so i appreciated city managers comments and i look forward to hearing about potential solutions and since we have so much engagement from the public right now I'm hoping to see that equal engagement as we move forward on strategies to help us close this deficit so that we can not just offer basic services, but really the Santa Rosa that our community wants. So thank you for the survey. Really great job on how many responses you got. That's a significant amount. So I appreciate it and that you did it in two different ways as well. I know that's a lot of extra work for all of you, but I appreciate it.

Here, here, thank you for that. And I'll add also that in addition to the survey responses, the city team has been out talking to hundreds of groups and individuals across the city, and that's gonna continue for the next several months. So it's not just survey results, it is face-to-face communication where we're presenting a lot of data and making sure that everybody's up to speed with what the decisions we're making here at the city. Thank you very much to both of you for coordinating that. All right, we've got a motion and we had a second by, I believe it was Ms. Rogers, was that you? All right, Madam City Clerk, you can call the vote whenever you're ready.

Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Rogers?

Yes.

Council Member McDonald? Aye. Council Member Fleming is absent. Council Member Banuelos? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Okrupke?

Aye.

Mayor Stapp? Yes. That motion passes with six affirmative votes.

Thank you, and thank you both once again.

You're welcome.

All right, item 15.2 is continued. This is our report on the Independent Police Auditor Annual Report. This item is being continued to the June 16th, 2026 regular meeting. We'll move on to item 15.3, which is our report on our authorization to execute an amendment with CalPERS to begin the Fresh Start program for payoff of unfunded liability. And CFO Wagner, this is starting to seem a little bit like showboating on your part to make sure that council is aware of how much money you have saved the city with your ingenuity. But you can report otherwise.

Good evening, Mayor Stapp, members of the Council. Thank you for that, for my standard welcome up here to Council. We are very excited as a group to have not the first step, not the last step. There will be more CalPERS conversations to come, but this is a moment to recognize that this is not first or last step, but really a giant leap in the state of cities. pension stabilization uh efforts and we're i'm excited to talk about that here tonight i'm going to do a brief overview of really what has been a year's worth of action from our finance subcommittee along with this council to really make a big step in the city's pension funding i will briefly share that the reaction to this item was unexpected um very inspiring very encouraging and i think a lot of folks that that wanted to reach out to us and finance or through the city manager's office all had the same talking points of hey i know i'm the only person that's really really interested in this and that's not true it turns out everyone was really interested in this, and everyone was really interested to hear about how the City of Santa Rosa is taking an innovative approach towards what we're doing here. Tonight's action really is going to be that final step of taking that formal leap with CalPERS to move us into a fresh start program, and I'll be going through the next action as part of that. Tonight, this item brings forward a resolution for the city manager to execute the necessary documents with CalPERS to lock us into this Fresh Start program with them. As I've mentioned in the prior meetings, just like refinancing your house or refinancing a car, this does lock us into this program. That doesn't mean that there's not gonna be future opportunities to maybe make changes, but this is a formal action with CalPERS to change our contract and how we pay off of our unfunded liability. Future gains and losses are not gonna be ultimately affected by this action. Whatever is gonna happen in the future is gonna happen in the future. We're addressing what's happened up until this point. I'll briefly go over what we've been talking to as CalPERS Mountain forever. Congratulations, I will no longer be able to talk about it as CalPERS Mountain. This is going to be CalPERS Mesa or CalPERS Tunnel, which is really what we're creating. We're creating a flatter line that we're gonna be able to amortize these expenses along with our revenues in a better way. But this is what it looks like prior to that action. And our struggle is in that dotted red box and what it shows is that over the next through 2037 we will have an additional 52 million dollars worth of expenses on our current path that we are going to change tonight fortunately we're going to see a lot of benefits not only in the short term but from the long term of this strategy and we're going to talk about that in a moment As we've been looking at this over the last year, Council, along with staff, has really pushed these five, what I would say is our north star of five objectives towards what we wanted to accomplish in this strategy. We wanted more predictable budgeting that matches our growth revenue with our grosses and expenses. We wanna decrease the total amount paid. We are gonna end up paying less on our unfunded liability by doing this. The great thing also is we're gonna pay off our liability quicker. We're not just kicking down the can to make this problem go longer. We're gonna actually make the problem go away faster, six years faster at that. we're gonna maintain local control of local funds. That's something that we really like to do in the city manager's office along with the finance department. We like having some authority and some control for our council to be able to pivot if unexpected things happen and we know unexpected things happen. We're gonna provide the maximum amount of cost avoidance in this strategy over what I would term the short term, which is really the next five years. We presented these options to Council last time and we gave three. Council gave the direction to come back with an implementation of option one. That is what we are here to implement tonight. That marries what we call a fresh start, which is flattening out our payment with CalPERS, along with a ramp up of using one-time funds to kind of bring us along the path to get to that increased payment. The great news is that this strategy is gonna save us $28 million over the next five years, a total of $37 million. We get to maintain that local control like we talked about, get a much more predictable budgetary path. And like I mentioned, we're gonna pay off our unfunded liability six years earlier. So that CalPERS Mountain is turning into this pathway, which really is the dotted orange line of what we'll be doing. And what you'll notice is that we are saving, seeing those experience savings really over that first seven, eight years up on that chart. But again, the really great thing is it also falls off. So it's gonna fall off completely by 2043. What that means to our community and what it means to this agency is that we will have if all things go to plan, which I know it won't be perfect, but we anticipate it being pretty close, we will have addressed a $482 million liability. That is a substantial accomplishment and something that we can be proud of as a community and Council can be proud of too. So yes, Mayor, that is the victory lap for sure. Here are those numbers just on an overall getting into the weeds basis. I think what's gonna be critical about this is really communication going forward. This isn't gonna be something that we set and forget. This is gonna be part of our upcoming budget discussions here going forward. of how we're really maintaining this pathway that I talked about of pension stabilization. How are we doing? How does it compare to this, how we enacted it? I'm really enthused and optimistic that it's even possible we do better than this. I think that's very possible. So with that, I'll end with the recommendation in that the finance department recommends that city council adopt a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute an amendment to the city's contract with CalPERS to implement a fresh start re-amortization of the city's UAL. Additionally, staff recommends that council approve the concurrent strategic drawdown of 26 million in restricted pension funds to achieve budgetary stability and long-term cost avoidance. with that again like i mentioned this is the culmination of many hours of work from this council that i covered very very briefly but with that i'd welcome any questions on this program as we move forward thank you

Thank you, and the many hours of work came from you, Scott, and your team, and from our city manager. This was just fabulous work, and I'm glad that the Press Democrat covered it, and I'm glad you're getting calls from other cities across the state who are envious of the job that you did. We're certainly appreciative. Colleagues, questions on this item? Ms. McDonald?

Thank you CFO Wagner and I wanna commend you on bringing this really strategic smart plan forward for the city to be able to address a $482 million liability is quite significant but for me looking at our long-term deficit and infrastructure and some of the things that our community continues to tell us is a priority, I'd like to ask you, and I know we've spoken about this, and I think I even may have said it last time, but there is going to be a fall off at one point that'll be significant. However, as early as 2031, we start to see a drop, and so I'd like to ask if by Council policy, we can start to appropriate money, and this would be a staff recommendation of when the appropriate time is, because we do have some deficit at the deficit that we need to cover in the next several years. But where we would appropriate money and start by council policy, sort of like savings accounts, where we would focus on deferred maintenance, we would focus on the CalPERS issue so it doesn't ever build again, and when it influxes based on the rate that they set, if we have some money set aside like we had in the 115 trust, we could address those and we see some spikes that even happen on the chart through the FRESH program or CalFresh program. Is that what it's called? Whatever it is. You know what I'm talking about. And then the third thing would be for me to look at, let's see, I'm looking at what my three things were. It was CalPERS. infrastructure, and deferred maintenance. So three things that we know we're underfunding. We're underfunding our CIP, which is costing us more in the end. We're underfunding, and we have no fund set aside, I think, for deferred maintenance. So looking at that, and those are the things that really, I think, haven't addressed our deficit in the long term. So would there be a way, or do you have an idea of what you could bring back to Council so we can start on that process right now and get it in place?

Thank you for your question, Council Member McDonald. And it is very apropos because coming with budget adoption, certainly we'll be talking some more about our unfunded needs that are outside of pension, and especially with our deferred infrastructure streets, as Ms. Wood brought up earlier. These are the things that the Council, or excuse me, that the community is really coming to us with. The core of your question, though, I think is something that we've been talking about as staff from the beginning of this process. And it also has been part of, the last time I was here, I was here with Mike Myers from NHA, our financial advisor, and they've been particularly successful of trying to tie these types of actions with council policies. We intend to do that. So just as I mentioned that this is not a one-time action that will be coming back, what I've been discussing and even had some initial conversation with the interim city manager, Jason Nutt, is I think what will be helpful is come the next council goal setting to really, this council is in a unique, position as councils come, from my opinion, because you all have experienced now two different stages of the economy locally, two different stages of how the city's in a fiscal position. Very strong positions and now having to make very difficult conversations. This staff, along with Council, has a level of expertise now, fiscally, that I think that we should leverage. And I think the way that I would suggest leveraging that further is around our, when it comes to Council policies, really taking a hard look at our general fund reserve policy. and how does maybe that the pension stabilization path that we're putting forward, how do we make sure that future councils have the same policy understanding of how to make sure that that pathway doesn't start going in the wrong direction again? The reality is that when you do that thoughtfully and you do that strategically and with a methodology, agencies are successful. We have a track record now of being able to look through the state and say, hey, these are the policies that folks have done that worked. We're having an opportunity here now in Santa Rosa to do that, to enact a policy that's going to work. We are going to build off of that. That conversation, though, needs to be broadened a little bit on having a better understanding of our facility liabilities that we have out there. that are very large as well, and how do we start making policies that help the organization remain on this pathway, really of what I'm describing as reinvestment, right? How do we reinvest as a community and as an agency? Is that helpful?

That's very helpful, and that's sort of along the lines, you know, when you see a large drop off, that's a significant savings that year, but if by policy there was a formula and you're going to be the brain that actually figures out the formula, depending on what our savings is, it's sort of divided into those three different areas. So you might not be able to start it for a few more years, but once it triggers something, then that comes out and it helps us with that stabilization. And to me, that is a long-term impact that we can do as a Council that doesn't make anyone else have the ability or need to have the awareness on fiscal stabilization as this Council has had to do. So I know it's not always the sexiest topic, but I really like to, you know, make a long-term impact for the decisions that we make today. And this item that you're bringing forward not only addresses that really long-term impact, so I commend you and your staff and everybody who's been part of this, but for me, that other piece that Council can do is fix this long-term problem. And doing that by policy, to me, is the smartest way for us to do that to support future Councils and really our community. other than just commending you over and over for the work on this, that would only be my recommendation of something I'd like to see brought back when it's appropriate.

Thank you. Any other questions from council? Let's throw it open to the public. Are there any members of the public who would like to comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Let's bring it back. Ms. McDonald, let's do a motion and a second and then any final discussion on this item.

Somehow I exited out of my complete agenda, so I apologize for the moment's delay. I got it. I move adoption of the resolution of the Council of the City of Santa Rosa authorizing the city manager to execute an amendment to the CalPERS contract for a fresh start re-amortization and approving the drawdown of restriction pension funds and approval of strategic use of $26 million in restructured, is that what it, restricted pension funds to support budgetary stabilization and long-term pension cost avoidance. Second.

We have a motion and a second by Ms. Rogers. Is there any final discussion on this item that we know well and are extremely supportive of? Seeing none, Madam City Clerk, let's call the vote whenever you're ready.

Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming is absent. Council Member Banuelos. Yes. Council Member Alvarez.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Okrupke.

Aye.

Mayor Stapp.

Yes.

The motion passes with six affirmative votes.

Scott, thank you again. Fantastic work. All right, we have finished our reports. So we're gonna head back up to our previously scheduled programming. Ms. Huerta, thank you very much for your patience. We're gonna go back to item 8.1, our community empowerment plan.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council. I'm Ana Horta, Community Engagement Manager with the Communications and Intergovernmental Relations Office, and I will be presenting the Community Empowerment Plan update for the month of June. On June 6th, several city departments will join the Sonoma County Pride Parade and Festival, including Santa Rosa Police, Santa Rosa Fire, and City Bus. The parade will march through downtown, starting at 11 a.m., and the festival will be held at Old Courthouse Square from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit sonomacountypride.org. On June 6 and June 20, Santa Rosa Water is hosting a creek cleanup at the Prince Memorial Greenway. All ages are welcome to participate. Volunteers meet at Olive Park Footbridge near 1698 Hazel Street at 10 in the morning. To sign up, please visit srcity.org slash calendar. On June 13, Recreation and Parks will host its monthly Park a Month volunteer program at Doyle Community Park, 700 Doyle Park Drive from 9 in the morning to 12 p.m., Bring your friends and work together or come and meet new people while helping to keep our parks in great shape. Also on June 13th, Communications and Integral Relations Office, Planning, Active Transportation, and Santa Rosa Police Department will be tabling at the 50th Annual MLK Juneteenth Celebration that will be held at MLK Park 1671 Henley Street from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit sonomacountyjuneteenth.com. On June 18th, the Santa Rosa Police Department is hosting the last of its community traffic safety meetings. The meeting will be held at New Vintage Church, 3300 Sonoma Avenue from 5.30 to 7 p.m. These meetings are designed to provide community members with an opportunity to share traffic-related concerns directly with police staff, including issues such as speeding, roadway safety, and neighborhood traffic patterns. On June 20th, the Rural Cemetery Preservation Committee will host their monthly volunteer workday from nine in the morning to 12 noon. Projects include the cemetery beautification efforts, such as landscaping projects, painting, and various maintenance work. Finally, the Santa Rosa Police Department is accepting applications for the Youth Community Police Experience. The experience goes from July 13 through July 16, with the location to be determined. During the program, participants will enjoy hands-on learning, familiarizing themselves with Santa Rosa Police Department, its policies and practices. For questions about the program or the application process, please email srpdadmin at srcd.org or call 707-543-3550. And that concludes this month's Community Empowerment Plan update. Thank you.

Ms. Huerta, thank you very much. Questions? Ana, are you being too modest? Did you forget the Child in the Wild event where Sonoma County Water also tabled, where we had, I think, 600 students at Howarth Park, or 600 kids and their families?

Was that last week, I think, last weekend?

It was Saturday, yeah. You can add that to the list. Santa Rosa is everywhere.

Yes.

Ana is coordinating too many things. So another successful event though. There were about 600 kids and their families. It was a beautiful day in combination with the Sonoma Land Trust and Southeast Greenway volunteers.

So thanks to the city for being out there.

No other questions for me, but we'll open up to public comment. Are there any members of the public that would like to praise Ms. Horta and our community engagement team for all the work that they do locally? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Thank you very much. Thank you again for your patience, Ms. Huerta. Let's see, we'll go on to our item number nine, our city manager and city attorney's reports. Madam city manager, any reports this evening?

I just had three quick updates. So first, Calistoga, along the lines of the survey, the Let's Talk Santa Rosa survey and what's important to the community, the Calistoga Road Pavement Rehabilitation and Utility Improvements Project is moving forward from Montecito Boulevard to Highway 12. It's scheduled to begin on Monday, June 8th, so that's this upcoming Monday. It's a $12.7 million construction investment, which will improve multimodal roadway conditions, enhance safety for all users, and upgrade critical underground infrastructure along this important northeast Santa Rosa corridor. To keep the community informed, TPW, Transportation and Public Works, will host a virtual community meeting on Thursday, June 11th at 5.30 p.m., where staff will share the project details. Along the lines of additional infrastructure improvements, there'll be a new hawk signal at Fulton Road and Pioneer Creek Trail. So I'm pleased to report that this is the fourth high intensity activated crosswalk or hawk signal citywide. It's a mid-block safety enhancement that provides a controlled crossing for pedestrians and cyclists and is activated only when needed. It improves visibility and reduces conflicts with vehicular traffic along this busy corridor, and the project will enhance access to the trail and surrounding neighborhoods, and it supports the city's commitment to safe, connected transportation for all users. And last, Live at Juilliard. I'm pleased to announce that the lineup is now available. for this year's Live at Juilliard Concert Series as we celebrate the event's 31st year. Since 1994, Live at Juilliard has grown into a cornerstone of our cultural calendar, bringing together artists, audiences, and local vendors in a vibrant celebration of music, community, and creativity. This year's series features an exciting mix of musical styles from indie rock and soul to Latin pop, blues, Americana, Motown, and contemporary pop. But it's happening in July, so I'll be gone and I won't enjoy it. But I'll be watching and I'm sure I'll hear all about it. Performances will take place on the lawn at our beautiful Juilliard Park on Sundays from 5 to 7 p.m. beginning July 12th through August 16th. So please join us.

Thank you, City Manager Farrell. Madam City Attorney.

Thank you, Mayor. There is no report out of the City Attorney's Office tonight.

Thank you. Thank you both. Any public comment? Any members of the public wish to comment on either of those reports? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. We'll move on to Item 10, Statements of Abstention or Accusal by Council Members. So, excuse me, excuse me, Vice Mayor. I have a statement of abstention or recusal. I've got a statement of abstention rather, recusal, one of the two. Item 13.4 on consent, it's the wildland urban interfaced map issue. I had to recuse myself from the conversation a couple of weeks ago and there is an item on consent, item 13.4 that pertains to that. So I will not be leading the discussion with our consent items, although I will remain here at the dais. But that is why the Vice Mayor will be leading that conversation. All right, let's see, Mayor and Council Members' Reports. Are there any Council Members' Reports this evening?

Excuse me, Mayor. Yes. Is it item 13.14?

13.14, rather. Sorry, I spoke too quickly. Thank you, Madam City Clerk. Let's see, Mayor and Council Members' Reports. Ms. Rogers, you wanna kick us off?

Yes, mine is very quick. I just wanted to say that I was able to attend the Memorial Day at the Veterans Cemetery here in Santa Rosa. And although I put the mayor kind of on the spot, I want to say he did a great job at representing the city. So thank you very much, Mayor, for your words at the presentation.

Thank you for helping with that. That was a great event. And thank you for mentioning that, Ms. Benuelos.

Thank you, Mayor. I just have a quick one, well, kind of, from the Sonoma County Homeless Coalition, just reporting out from our last meeting. So county staff reported on a federal HR1, otherwise known as the Big Beautiful Bill, healthcare and CalFresh impacts. These include increased work requirements and eligibility redetermination, which will happen every six months versus annually, and narrowed eligibility for non-citizens. Based on the information shared from the presentation, the county estimates 9,000 to 25,000 residents will lose Medi-Cal, and 4,700 will lose CalFresh benefits. Implementation is pending federal guidance. Staff are developing potential mitigation strategies and have identified resource needs which will be presented to the Board of Supervisors during the June budget hearings. Resource modeling indicates 124 million is needed annually to absorb the impacts of HR1. And I know I've been mentioning it at our last few meetings as I come back from the Homeless Coalition that we're really concerned about the impacts and how it's going to affect our community and our entire state. So just... And we're hoping for the best, and the coalition is working on some solutions. For example, looking at nonprofits maybe working together, especially where they overlap, so that we can look at some ways to save money in order to do more with less, which we are all doing right now. So just wanted to share that with all of you. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Banuelos. Ms. McDonald?

Thank you, Mayor. I just have a few things. I wanted to say thank you to the Junior Commission on the Status of Women and Girls for asking me to be their keynote speaker at their graduation a few weeks ago. It was really amazing to me, these projects that these young women in our community are doing to address concerns for girls in our community. And so it was definitely a highlight of a weekend a few weeks ago. I also want to say thanks to the City Works Department for the Wednesday night market event that was a couple weeks ago that I was able to go down there and attend and saw so many kids playing on our equipment and so thank you to staff for setting up down there and making that event so big for our community to see all the work that we do for the city and finally i want to say um thanks for letting me attend the cool gun creek ribbon cutting project i believe that was spearheaded by stormwater and creeks department all the plants that they needed to do the refurbishment of that creek so that it is not a 20-year flood a hundred year flood zone free so thank you to them in the parks department for having everything cleaned up i was terrified i had heard there was thousands of snakes out there but thanks to the department for making sure that i didn't get to have that terror happen to me that day by seeing a snake so i just want to say thanks to everybody for having it all cleaned up out there so that i didn't have mass hysteria and and run away quickly So thanks to everybody for all that they do for the city, and that's a great project that we have done now.

Thank you, Ms. MacDonald. Vice Mayor.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Three quick things. Two weeks ago, a contingent from the city was accompanied by the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce to attend ICSE in Las Vegas, which is the largest, probably, economic development conference on the West Coast, but it's specifically designed around commercial real estate, commercial real estate brokers, excuse me, brokers, retailers, and cities, all trying to basically make relationships and provide connections. A lot of good has come out of that. I don't want to spoil anything, but if everything goes well, there will be some exciting announcements in the near future of some new businesses coming to Santa Rosa to do business. We were very well received, and it was very well received that we as a government were there trying to encourage businesses to come to our community because that is not the norm. Second, last week, the California Massage Therapist Council was in town for their annual conference. I was able to speak on the mayor's behalf. This is important because CMTC was one of the important organizations that helped craft one of the The most truest forms of local government, which was a grassroots citizen-led initiative adopted by council with work from planning staff, the nonprofit world, and public safety all together coming together to help close Alyssa Massad's businesses as well as get some some women out of human trafficking, which has been an immensely rewarding situation for all of us to be a part of something that important. And then finally, I just want to give a shout out. Andy's Donuts on the corner of Coffee and Piner was named one of the 100 best donut shops in the United States by DoorDash. I can attest to that. I had them Sunday. and yesterday and today, gotta have some leftovers. They're great, they continue on the tradition of what is the dominant donut scene that's in the great state of California and the heritage of the Cambodian family-owned donut shops. There's actually an entire documentary about it which is very fascinating about how it differs from the East Coast and how Dunkin' Donuts tried to come here in the 90s and failed miserably because we had our own great donuts here. I'll buy you guys some donuts, sure. All right. But yeah, I just want to shout out to Andy's Donuts and the family that runs it. It's a great thing to have on the map for the city of Santa Rosa.

Thank you. And I'll segue off that to another Santa Rosa award that we just won. It was announced at our Russian River Watershed Association board meeting last week. Two students from Maria Correa High School, let's see, it was not husband, Matt Hudson, rather, and Joshua Kim from Maria Carrillo won the countywide video contest. So congratulations to them. Congratulations to Maria Carrillo. The subject was, it's water conservation. It's an annual video contest, video creation contest. So glad to have that trophy here in Santa Rosa. And then also, let's see, one other. Oh, yes. Thanks to Assistant City Manager Nutt, Director Osborne, and then our Economic Development Director, Scott Adair. They joined me on a tour of Courthouse Square and our downtown with eight members of the Sonoma County Tourism Team, talking about the improvements in our downtown, the plans for our downtown, ways that we can... ways that we are attracting tourists here and want to do more in the future. It was a productive discussion with more meetings to follow, but in line with the conversation we heard from the dais tonight about how the city is doing everything it can to make itself attractive to visitors and to businesses. With that, we'll open it up to public comment on our mayor and council members' reports. Would any members of the public like to comment on anything they heard from any of us here at the dais? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. We will go on to our approval of minutes, item 12. We have three sets of minutes. Let's see, items 12.1 through 12.3 are May 5th and 6th, are May 12th and May 15th, 2026 minutes. Are there any edits to the minutes from my colleagues? Seeing none, any public comment on the minutes? Seeing none, we'll approve the minutes as submitted. And I will turn it over to Mr. Okrupke for consent.

All right, we will move over to item 13, consent items. I do believe there is a portion of it that does need to be read by the city clerk, is that correct? Or when you are ready.

Thank you. To meet Brown Act requirements prior to Council taking final action to establish or change the compensation of certain types of city executive positions, an oral summary of the recommended action must be made in the same meeting. On item 13.12, the proposed ordinance would establish the salary and compensation of the new interim city manager effective June 27th, 2026. The salary is the same as the former city manager's and the remaining key terms are consistent with executive staff's benefits. The following is a summary of the interim city manager's salary and compensation proposed in the ordinance. An annual salary of $341,428 with no merit or cost of living salary increases unless expressly approved by council. The same $500 per year wellness incentive paid in January for the calendar year provided to executive management employees in Unit 10. The same vacation leave, sick leave, administrative leave, and holidays provided to executive management employees in Unit 10. The same benefits provided to executive management employees in Unit 10 for health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance participation in CalPERS retirement program, 401 deferred compensation program, and a retiree health savings plan. The same $500 per month auto allowance for personal vehicle use for city business provided to executive management employees in unit 10. On item 13.13, the proposed ordinance would establish the salary and compensation of the new city attorney effective June 3rd, 2026. The key terms are the same as the previous city attorney's contract and or are consistent with executive staff's benefits. The following is a summary of the city attorney's salary and compensation proposed in the ordinance. an annual salary of $305,760 with future cost of living increases in salary in accordance with the cost of living increases provided to the other executive management employees not to exceed the annual California Consumer Price Index unless expressly approved by Council. At council's discretion, annual merit increases subject to the maximum salary range established for the city attorney classification. City contribution equal to 5.5% of the city attorney's salary into a 457 deferred compensation program, a $400 per month wellness benefit, a life insurance policy in the amount of 250,000 during the term of the agreement, The same vacation, sick leave, administrative leave, and holidays provided to executive management employees in Unit 10. The same benefits provided to executive management employees in Unit 10 for health, dental, vision, and disability insurance, participation in CalPERS retirement program, 401 deferred compensation program, and a retiree health savings plan. The same $500 per month auto allowance for personal vehicle use for city business provided to executive management employees in unit 10. Reimbursement for annual state bar dues, membership in up to two California Lawyer Association sessions, and attendance at reasonable continuing education programs.

All right, thank you very much. We will go to, unless anybody is looking to pull any of these items specifically, no, we will go to public comment on the consent calendar. If there's anybody, we have four people signed up right now. So the first will be Jennifer, then Don, followed by Patrice, and anybody else who would like to follow, please go ahead and line up behind the podiums. Oh, and it will be two minutes. Jennifer, when you're ready. Okay.

Members of the City Council, I am Jennifer McNeil. I'm a resident of the Creekside neighborhood. I'm here for the second reading of the WUI map. This will create a substantial economic hardship on the Creekside neighborhood. As I stated at the previous May 12th meeting, a large majority of these residents are senior citizens on fixed incomes. Young families in this neighborhood are also on tight budgets. The acting mayor at the May 12th meeting held himself out to have 20 years experience in the insurance industry. He assured council members and the public, including all the residents who attended the May 12th meeting who were affected by this WUI map, that the adoption of this WUI map would not cause an increase in the insurance premiums and or risk of cancellation. He stated there were bulletins on the insurance commissioner's website that WUI maps could not be used in underwriting insurance policies, meaning there was law in place that would protect you from cancellation or premium hikes because of the WUI map. This is flatly legally incorrect. There is no law to protect our residents from having premiums increased or policies canceled. To the contrary, insurance companies look at the state map by CAL FIRE and then when a local municipality like Santa Rosa adopts the WUI map, the insurance companies consider that to be more evidence that the area is a high fire risk because insurance companies assume municipalities have done their on-ground investigations to determine whether or not the state was correct. If a city overlays the WUI map with the state, the municipality is basically stating that it is a high fire risk area, thus leading to increased insurance premiums and or cancellations. Please stay this matter for 90 days and give us the same amount of time as you gave the fire chief at the May 12th meeting to present our case as to why the Creekside neighborhood should not be included in this WUI map. I will note that you guys spent a lot of time tonight talking about housing affordability. Proving this map is gonna drive people out of our neighborhood because they can't afford the insurance premiums and they can't afford a home hard in their homes. Thank you.

Thank you, next is Don followed by Patrice and then Susan.

Members of city council, I'm Don Nauman. For the administrative record, I hereby incorporate by reference our formal objection and intent to seek a writ of mandate served on the city attorney and clerk on May 28th and emailed directly council members yesterday. The May 12th first reading of the WUI map was corrupted by misstatement of law and fact. First, the city claimed it lacked discretion. That is false. under government code 51179, you have absolute discretion to modify this map. In fact, you've already exercised that discretion by removing 800 homes from Fountain Grove and Mountain Hawk. Second, the fire history presented to you was disingenuous. Catastrophic fires here are driven by the Diablo winds coming from Napa County burning tens of thousands of acres as they cross into Santa Rosa. This happened in 1964, 2017, 2020. There is no history of catastrophic fires at Matanzas Creek area. Chief Lowenthal's evidence of west wind driven fires was a two acre fire in Fountain Grove three years ago. This is ironic, you've excluded portions of Fountain Grove from the WUI map, yet you've used a two acre fire in Fountain Grove to include our neighborhood into the WUI map. Matanzas Creek contradiction. Chief Lowenthal claims Matanzas Creek is a severe fire risk, but when pressed on May 12th that this was the city's absolute duty to maintain that creek, he pivoted and said creeks actually act as a fire break and you don't want to do creek maintenance. He then cited a fire in Mountain Hawk where the creek worked as a fire break and protected homes. It cannot be both a fire break and a fire hazard. If it is a fire break, as we in Chief Lowenthal believe, it should be excluded from the fire map If it's a fire hazard, the city has an absolute duty to make it fire safe. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up is Patrice, followed by Susan.

Good evening, members of the City Council. I am Patrice Doyle, and also for the administrative record, I hereby incorporate by reference our formal objection and intent to seek a writ of mandate served to the city attorney and clerk on May 28th and emailed directly to each City Council member yesterday. The May 12th first reading of this WUI map was corrupted by misstatements of law and fact. At the May 12th meeting, Fire Chief Lowenthal went into great detail as to why a creek should be left in its natural state and that maintenance of creeks make them more of a fire hazard, as Mr. Nauman said. Chief Lowenthal also said that creeks usually act as a fire break, and in fact, several homes in Mountain Hawk have been spared in a prior fire because the creek did just that. It acted as a fire break, preventing the fire from advancing on their homes. We agree with the fire chief's position that creeks act as a fire break. We believe that Matanzas Creek would act as a fire break for anything east of it, including but not limited to the Creekside neighborhood and its surrounding streets. As such, the Creekside neighborhood should be removed from the proposed WUI map. However, if the city takes the position that Matanzas Creek is a high fire risk, then under the municipal code, the city has absolute dominion and control over Matanzas Creek. This means that the city's portion of the 95 million received from PG&E Fire Settlement, which was granted for fire remediation work, needs to be spent on Matanzas Creek. This does not mean clear cutting a creek. It means doing thoughtful, substantial tree work, limbing up trees, raising the canopy, removing dead trees, dead wood, and any other hazardous fire materials. So which is it? Are creeks fire breaks or not? It just can't be both. Finally, we're asking the city to stay this matter for 90 days so that we'll be allowed to have equal time as the fire chief to present our issues and concerns. Thank you.

Thank you, next is Susan.

Susan Lamont, District 2. I started coming to the City Council 30 years ago because there were things I was reading about that you were, obviously you're not the same people, but this has been going on for 30 years. There were things you were considering and none of it made sense. The city council wasn't using common sense. At the time, the first thing that brought me in was the proposal for a road for commuters to go through Fountain Grove with the promise that, oh no, no houses would ever be built there. And we came and we said, we know houses are gonna be built there. Oh no, they won't. Well, you know what happened then. We were then objecting to the houses and we were told, oh no, you won't see them because we aren't gonna let them cut down the trees. There are rules about the ridge line. And what do you know? They were allowed to cut down the trees. And since then, there have been fires Additionally, we brought the Patriot Act before the City Council and we said, this surveillance is going to result in greater surveillance. And Mayor Jane Bender said, oh no, no, you've filled the City Council, you've filled the chambers, but you're wrong, we know better. Those were her words. We now know that we are surveilled more than ever. So I'm asking you to use, I could go on, but I'm asking you to use common sense. You've heard the explanations already. I don't have to repeat them here. Common sense tells you that we do not live in an area that is a high fire risk and that areas that are a high fire risk have been downgraded. None of it makes sense. So I'm simply asking you, Use your common sense. I know you've got it. Please use it. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there anybody else in the room that would like to speak? Please make your way to a microphone.

I'm Gail Seymour, I'm a property owner in Bennett Valley. Earlier there was a presentation, I don't remember the topic title, but it said the priority in your city is that your constituents and residents really want accuracy. That's what's so important to them. And I feel, and many others in our neighborhood feel that the updated, proposed updated WUI map is not accurate. None of us in the neighborhood are against defensible space, fire hardening our houses. We all wanna do that. We've been in contact with the City Fire Department for a workshop on that. but we do feel that we've been unfairly singled out in our neighborhood and I would invite some of the council members to come and take a walk with us and look at the area that is proposed and see that's pretty arbitrary. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there anybody else in the room that would like to speak on this? Any of the consent items? Seeing none, we will close public comment. I'll note that item 13.9 is listed as being continued. So with that, that'll be reflected in the motion. So with that, I will turn it over to Council Member Alvarez for a motion.

Yes, I'd like to put forward a motion to adopt consent items 13.1 through 13.8 with 13.9 being continued and 13.10 through 13.18 with Mayor Stapp recused from item 13.4. 14. 14. Oh, and as stated prior, 13.9 being continued to the June 16th regular meeting and waive further reading of the text. Second.

I'll give that to Council Member Rogers on the second. So with that, we have a motion and a second. Is there any other discussion by anybody? Seeing none, we will go to the vote then.

Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming is absent. Council Member Banuelos. Yes. Council Member Alvarez.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Okropke. Aye. Mayor Stapp.

Yes.

The motion passes with... Six affirmative votes with Councilmember Fleming with regard to item 13.14. It passes with five affirmative votes with Councilmember Fleming absent and Mayor Stapp recused.

Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All right, we're coming down to the end. We're gonna move ahead to item 17, written communications, of which we have none. Item 18, public comment on non-agenda matters. This is the public's last chance to make comments on items not listed on the agenda. Are there any? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Thank you to all the community members from the Creekside area who came out, and we are officially adjourned.