City Council - Regular Meeting

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 that you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Losha, will you please restate this in Spanish?

Absolutely. Para poder acceder al canal de interpretación, en un momento van a ver en la parte de abajo de su pantalla en Zoom el símbolo del globo terráqueo. Por favor, hagan clic ahí y bajo Language Interpretation o Interpretación de Idioma, elija Spanish o Español. Thank you. All right, the time is 2.01 and we'll call this meeting to order. Madam City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member MacDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Benuelos. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Thank you. From afar, Vice Mayor Okropke. Here. Mayor Stapp.

Here.

Let the record show that all Council Members are here with the exception of Council Member Fleming.

Excellent, all right, we have no closed session items today. So we're gonna go right on to item 4.1, our study session on downtown, our downtown economic development strategy. I must confess, I was hoping for a bit more of a crowd. This item deserves to have a packed council chamber. So thank you for being here today. And all of us on the dais are looking forward to the presentation. Ms. Scott.

Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. I'm Jill Scott, I'm the city's Real Estate Manager, and I'm here today with the whole team. Gabe Osborne, our Planning and Economic Development Director, Scott Wagner, our Chief Financial Officer, and Scott Adair, who's our Chief Economic Development Officer. And we are very excited to be here today to talk to you about the Downtown Economic Development Strategy and how this strategy really supports Santa Rosa's long-term prosperity. So let's roadmap our conversation today, because it's a bit of a long presentation. We have a lot of information to bring to council and to the community today. So we're going to start with Director Osborne, who's going to go over where we are today, our strategies that we have in place, our policies, and the progress that we've made towards those. Then he's going to turn it back over to me, and I'm going to talk about our challenges that we're facing in the city, our infrastructure, our deferred maintenance, and the costs that we have along with that. Then we're gonna turn it over to our Chief Economic Development Officer, Scott Adair, to talk about the opportunity that we're gonna talk about today, the exciting opportunity to bring housing, jobs, and revenue back into this city. And then we're gonna come back to me.

In fairness, we do have housing, jobs, and revenue in the city now.

We do. We're going to just have more of them. More. More housing jobs and revenue. And then we're going to bring it back to me for the approach. How do we get there? What do we do? What's our approach? And then our chief financial officer is going to talk to us about the financing of it, the fiscal impact of the whole program, and then back to council for feedback and some decisions. So we're excited to get started. So we all know the five council goals that our city council has put into place to bring Santa Rosa into prosperity and for us to get better over time. Those are fiscal sustainability and budgeting, infrastructure investment, economic development, community health and safety, and housing and homelessness. Why we bring this up today is because there's a lot of us here in the audience and at this table that have been with Santa Rosa for a very long time, and it's not very often in our careers that we get the opportunity to bring one single strategy forward to council that meets or exceeds every single council goal for this community, and that's what this strategy is, and that's why, as staff, we're very excited to bring it forward. So I'm gonna turn it over now to Director Osborne to talk about policies and the economics of downtowns.

Thank you, Ms. Scott, and good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the Council. As Ms. Scott mentioned, an important strategy in really developing an overall comprehensive plan is a vision, and that vision is often memorialized in goals. They're broad categories that give direction to staff. The evolution of those goals takes the place of policies that get into more defined strategies and actually implementation steps. So we'll take an opportunity here in the next few slides to talk about the policies that the city has been putting in place to support economic development, to support housing in the community, and to specifically support that in the downtown. And it's really important how all those come together from an economic development strategy standpoint. One of the most important documents that a city can adopt from a long range planning is a general plan. The general plan sets the framework and the blueprint for the city's growth, determines where certain growth and use types should occur, it controls land use, and then it also controls infrastructure that's put in place to support that land use. The city adopted the current general plan in June of 2025, and that extends a vision out to 2050. An important document that works in conjunction with a general plan is a specific plan. What that takes is the fairly broad direction that exists in a general plan. That turns it into a more evolved strategy for a specific geographic area. And one of our most successful specific plans has been our downtown area station specific plan. That encompasses 720 acres that are in the downtown of the General Railroad Square area. It focuses on an urban core centered around Courthouse Square and much of the focus on Courthouse Square has been really in the middle of that and seeing how development can commence outside of that. It focuses on pedestrian-friendly mixed-use development, residential densities and height, as well as job creation. An important piece is it has removed barriers and created consistency in permitting processes, and it has resulted in almost 800 housing units that are either approved, constructed, or under review in the downtown station area. In addition, the city adopted an economic development strat plan. It's really important to understand that economic development and land use really work hand in hand. Understanding how land is used to ensure that there is a return on investment and economic value is really critical to the overall planning process. So one of the main pillars in our economic development strat plan is economic vibrancy and resiliency. And within that plan, there is also a goal to bolster downtown housing, commercial and retail business. That further expands on that goal to set forward a specific action. And much of what the conversation today will surround around is this action, which is expand downtown asset strategy, activating city owned property for economic development purposes to include housing and housing supportive amenities with an emphasis on sustainable and walkable neighborhoods. So in addition to our economic development strategic plan, we had a discussion with council earlier in this month through a study session to talk about our housing strategy. Our housing strategy really ties together all of these plans. Another critical document is the city's housing element, which focuses on how the city can meet regional needs for housing within a certain timeframe. An important concept to embrace through the housing element is multifamily housing or denser housing. And the reason being is most communities in California have grown significantly outward. And as they run into challenges with environmental restrictions or urban growth boundaries, there becomes more of a desire to do urban infill to meet those housing goals. Really critical document to support the city's housing strategy. Next slide, please. So Mr. Adair and I really deal with this point quite often, and why does economic development matter? And oftentimes, what is economic development? Economic development is really the engine that keeps cities moving forward. When cities are in a growth state, cities are usually doing that growth through housing, jobs become critical, revenue generation becomes critical because governments provide services to the community members that rely on that revenue. So economic development isn't necessarily the engine in that vehicle moving forward to supply the overall needs of a community. I often refer to it as the fuel that goes into the engine. Economic development relies heavily on private investment. And in most communities, growth occurs through private investment. What the city's role is often in policies and procedures and figuring out a way to make catalytic moves that actually encourage economic development, which is a really important point from a land use decision. So when we look at economic development through a downtown activation lens, and we'll have a few more slides that talk about the importance of downtowns to communities, that really becomes more of the economic center. So the point of basically creating really live, work, play aspects in a downtown where you're driving housing, you're driving more mixed use, commercial, you're actually increasing property taxes per acre, you're generating sales tax, and people live, work, and play in the same environment, that creates an ecosystem that really feeds itself. It also can create an attraction to tourism. So creating walkable communities and activating spaces through events drives individuals from outside of the community that then increase sales tax dollars. Transit occupancy tax can occur through hotels, so tourism is a really important piece to the downtown. Overall economic growth is really important. So as a city grows, the burden of the government to maintain those services grows along with that city. So understanding how the revenue is coming in along with that, how are we creating jobs, how are we creating really these livable communities where people are spending money in the community, you're driving sales tax, you're really maximizing those revenue measures. That's a really important point, and oftentimes with many jurisdictions that are fighting structural deficits, it's because the revenue is slowing and is not keeping up with the growth and the costs associated with that maintenance. Housing and mixed use, and we'll give a few examples in the slide about some successful reimagining of downtowns in other jurisdictions, and they almost always focus on housing and mixed use. urban infill, high density housing with some other component of commercial. And it becomes very much a wash and repeat if that whole story and that development concept is successful. That brings in other amenities such as hotels, it creates that retail space, and as I mentioned in the downtown, it creates that environment that is really needed to feed itself. Also a critical component to this, which I think the city has achieved, is public recreation space. Is you have to create a platform that it can be programmed with vents and creates a desirable location for people to be outside. Fiscal stability is an incredibly important point here. And really diversifying in economic development strategies is critical. There have been a number of communities in the past that have focused on one segment of the economy to really prop up the city. I believe Detroit is probably one of your better examples of that and how it rallied around the auto industry. As that falls off, the community falls off along with that. So diversifying, hitting all the buckets is critical because it can sustain some of the downturns in some of those industries. So as you focus on retail, tourism, understanding the unique dynamics of individuals spending money to ensure they're spending money in the community, it makes sure that you're limiting the risks, that you're not really throwing all of your eggs in one basket, for lack of a better term. And this creates long-term economic value. Obviously, job creation is a big piece to that. Next slide, please. So when we look at the downtown ecosystem, this dovetails a bit into the discussion about policy, because in many situations, cities will turn policy into actionable items, which can take the form of the policies, but it also gets into how dollars are invested. So really, we've put a lot of effort into figuring out how we can re-manage the downtown, how we can see more density, and how we can see more job activity and retail activity in the downtown. That's taken place through permit and fee incentives, creating transparency to the development community through permitting process, consistent turnaround times, and reducing permitting costs is critical, and a number of measures have been put in place to support that. We also recently adopted enhanced infrastructure financing district. So an EIFD will take tax increment, property tax increment that is generated out of the boundary, and it funnels that back into projects that further support economic development. So investing those property tax dollars into beautification, Activation or projects that can be a catalyst that actually result in other projects is really the purpose of the EIFD So that's actually a strategy where you're investing funds in the development of a specific area The city is also in a unique situation in the downtown that the city controls property and buildings and looking at those property and buildings Which is really the theme of the conversation today to better understand if they are achieving their best or highest use and whether a redevelopment can be a ripple effect in the economic environment of the downtown, and I'll talk a little bit about what a ripple effect is in later slides. It's also important to take care of public space. Public space becomes something that attracts people to an area. It's a vibrancy, it's something people want to be in. Reunification of Courthouse Square has occurred, and as the events have come in, we've seen quite a bit of activity that goes along with those. We formed community benefit districts that, both in the Railroad Square and the downtown area, that further work on beautifying those spaces. It's all part of that collaborative approach to make sure that we're making the areas as inviting as possible. And events are really a critical piece to that, and a lot of jurisdictions are embracing events. You can bring a lot of people into the area for events. Multiple day events can result in hotel stays. So how can we really support those in the areas? We've had a conversation in the past with the council, and we will be moving forward with bringing a formal action from the council later on in this year, but that's associated with entertainment zones. This is a tool in the toolbox that is a creative way that allows people to spend money in a business through the purchase of alcoholic beverages and move those alcoholic beverages into the placemaking or the exterior spaces where you're creating the activity. So will it encourage more investment in the downtown? We don't know at this point, but this is another example of really peeling back the onion and doing everything we can to encourage private investment in the downtown core. Next slide, please. So really the value of downtown is it's hard to, oftentimes it's qualitative, but it also can be quantitative. Cities that have a downtown, it becomes their identity. Cities that do not have a downtown, they attempt to create one, to create their identity. And it really is so important to the branding of a city because downtowns historically have been the economic engine. As cities have developed over the course of many years, it often centers around a downtown, which is an economic center. More modern planning and growth has economic centers in other areas, but the more traditional has been around the core and build out around it. And when that occurs and the core gets neglected for whatever reason through planning or through the investment of private dollars, jurisdictions all focus back on centering in the downtown. And that is because it creates a brand for the city. For the folks that live in Santa Rosa, they recognize Santa Rosa based on its downtown. It gets brought into the conversation quite often. When individuals visit a city, you often visit the downtown. And understanding the downtown needs to have a modern feel to it, it needs to retain the historic value of previous buildings, sort of a very dynamic need that the community sees in downtown. But when they're done successfully, they are an investment magnet. and we've seen that in many jurisdictions, that it has a high return on the investment when it's done correctly, and as projects pencil out and they show a positive return, it encourages a significant amount of future investment. It also is a focus for tourism, as I mentioned before. Cities can market and rally around a downtown, especially in the critical situation or the important situation we are where we have a square, we have 4th Street that we're trying to reactivate in a lot of ways from a redevelopment standpoint, but we have an event platform and we have a really good foundation to work off of. And we're seeing more activity in the downtown. Then I think the important point is it just creates a sense of place. And it is that amenity that even if you live in Santa Rosa, it's your Friday night, it's your Saturday night, it's where you want to go with your children on a Sunday morning, it becomes the destination in the city. Next slide, please. So really the aspect of a redevelopment ripple effect functions very similar to throwing an object in the body of water. That creates a ripple, the ripple extends past that impact point. In the economic development arena, as you invest in a specific parcel, that parcel generates in a positive economic experience revenue. And that revenue is typically seen through property taxes or it could be generated through sales tax. The concept of a ripple effect is does it trigger additional private investment outside that perimeter? And then how far does that ripple go? And a lot of jurisdictions, as they have come back and centered on their downtown, have seen significant ripple effects. That as that model starts working and it shows a positive return, that encourages more private investment and you really start seeing a redevelopment pattern where you go back to one to two story buildings in your downtown core, you end up with six to eight to greater, and that starts working its way out. So in simple terms, a small investment potentially can have a much larger return if it is the catalyst that is basically bringing more private investment into an area. Next slide, please. So I think it's really important to point out, the team loves this quote from Fred Ken. Fred Ken is the founder of Project for Public Places, which is a nonprofit that assists community with unlocking power of public spaces to build community, spark civil and social life, and expand economic opportunity. So this nonprofit has been operating since 1975, has assisted over 3,500 communities. And it's really to reevaluate space in a better way for a public use and economic development purposes. And it really is every decision about land is a decision about the community's future. And really when we make decisions about land, and it doesn't mean that this is chiseled in stone, because oftentimes there's opportunities when you make a land use decision and then that land use decision actually materializes in physical structures, there's often a time in which the jurisdiction must live with those physical structures. But then you get to a critical point where it can be revisited. But this revisiting often is thinking about what the community needs 30 to 40 years from now. So it's really focusing on understanding what the future looks like and trying to make decisions now for those members of the community that will all be sitting in our seats 30 years from now. Next slide, please. So the ripple effect as it applies to downtown, very much when you're looking at a downtown where you have upward momentum, the amount of property tax per acre is critical. So typically the footprint is small, but the property tax, because the valuation goes up as you develop up, can be great. So really you're looking at more of a tax-based growth. So it's investing in property that's more of the immediate return. The whole concept doing more of the mixed use development is really looking at the concept of an 18 hour downtown. So that really is the live work play. This is the mechanism that is feeding off itself. So when you have housing, do you have a grocer that supplies the housing? Do you have restaurants that support the housing plus outside services? Are you creating really the tourism amenities that bring people into that to stay in that area for an 18 hour? And then really downtown activation falls into that as well. And obviously that's the hotel and retail, but I think in this particular case, when we look at activation, most jurisdictions will take a look at underutilized sites. So as we have sites in the downtown that aren't achieving their best and highest use, how can those sites potentially be the catalyst that then creates the ripple? They will provide immediate returns with a redevelopment, but are they the catalyst that then kicks off other components in the downtown? And the next few slides have a few examples of other jurisdictions that have gone through this journey. The stats are listed and summarized based on those. I'll go into those in a bit more detail in the next few slides. Next slide, please. So just a few examples of redevelopments of jurisdictions. Emeryville is a really interesting test case and has been studied quite often. Emeryville, prior to 1960, and actually through the 1960s, was very industrial, had quite a few polluted brownfield sites, and really made a decision through the 60s and 70s and very heavily in the 1990s that it would redevelop. And Emeryville is a smaller jurisdiction, but Emeryville put 95% of its available property in a redevelopment agency. And it invested a significant amount of dollars in economic development. And just to give you an idea, once again, a smaller jurisdiction, this is through 1990 to 2001, which when redevelopment agencies were running strong, Emeryville invested 160 million on economic development. And just to put some perspective to that, that is $2 out of every five spent on public services. So it really doubled down on economic development. That resulted in their general fund growing by 63%. And for a period of time, the redevelopment agency was generating the highest tax increment or tax growth per person anywhere in the Bay Area. And what they've seen is 95% of those parcels have redeveloped. And it's redeveloped in a concept of six to eight stories, a mixed use of commercial, providing those services, very much that multi-use concept. And now one of the projects that's highlighted here, the Emeryville Public Market, is now redeveloping some of that redevelopment, and it's significant. It's looking at 700 residential units, 180,000 square feet of retail, 120,000 square feet of office. So they're really actively trying to bring in jobs, to bring in businesses, to focus on the retail with a housing component intermixed in all of that. And this really shows a solid test case and now since redevelopment has moved on, they're looking at other revenue measures such as transfer taxes to figure out how they can continually fund that. But they have created an organism that is driving private investment dollars there and it is successfully working out well for the city because they're able to retain services and then their revenue is significant. Next slide please. So I think Lancaster is another example. This is interesting. Lancaster went through the process of actually putting a five lane highway on a road diet. They necked that down to two active lanes and created essentially a public plaza space in the middle of the road that they then activate through events. It creates a very unique environment. And at the time, they had similar sort of use in the adjacent commercial where you had businesses but you had vacancies. And after they had this project go and they programmed this project correctly, they saw a significant uptake in some of that economic growth. That resulted in their downtown and 119% in tax revenue. The private investment that was attracted, and I think this is part of that ripple effect, was anticipated to be, or was actual of 130 million. They saw 273 million in total economic growth and then obviously it had additional benefits of the pedestrianization corridor and reducing vehicle strikes and making pedestrians safer. So I think this is really an example similar to Courthouse Square where you can invest in an infrastructure project and for Lancaster that infrastructure project was the catalyst that kept driving additional development in the area. Next slide please. Another example is Glendale. Glendale is a similar population of Santa Rosa. In their downtown over an eight block core, there was a significant redevelopment and that redevelopment really changed their downtown. This was done through private investment with the city facilitating that. But once again, it focused on some of the main components that are successful. is a retail component, residential, and this actually included a park and a public space. So they're addressing really live, work, play. And this was so wildly popular that it actually brought in similar to some of the actions that we're seeing in Montgomery Village. I think that is also a ripple effect that when you get certain uses, it becomes attractive to other retailers and other uses that see you can actually make money in that market. And it was a catalyst that really changed the whole theme of their downtown. So these are just some examples, we wanted to provide real examples of cities, some really pertain to the situation we're in, some are more redevelopment related, but they really focus on making economic development decisions to reimagine a downtown, and I think they represent success stories. Next slide, please. So with that, I will hand the presentation back to Ms. Scott, who will talk about strategic investment models.

So to talk a little bit more about what Director Osborne was talking about is the reinvestment model and how it happens in the city. So using a core pillar of our city's economic development strategy on underutilized land and city property and what we can do with it. How it works is, activate underutilized land so we take a piece of city land that we own that has aging infrastructure that has costs related to it we eliminate the maintenance cost we capture that unrealized value through tax revenue and we transfer all the risk and the liability that we now that we have on this aging infrastructure to a qualified development partner who can rehabilitate the site in turn that site enables private investment. We bring in a trusted development partner who knows how to develop and to bring investment into the city. They bring housing, commercial space, high density development, a little more than we have now, and it's a strong private investment and an infusion of capital into the city. In turn, that drives economic activity. You see more jobs, more vitality, and a stronger local economy. In turn, that generates all the fiscal dividends, so it unlocks that revenue engine on that piece of property that has been sitting either vacant or with underutilized land, bringing in more revenue to the city to be able to infuse into the community.

Next slide.

So, Director Osborne talked about all the other cities that are doing this, and there's many more that have done different projects and different things, it's been proven elsewhere. We've seen it happen, we've seen cities really do excellent things with it. We've seen them bring in more housing, more jobs, more revenue. But it is happening in Santa Rosa now. We are doing it and we have been successful with it. What we wanna talk about today is really the catalytic opportunity that we have coming forward.

Next slide, please.

So let's talk a little bit about what we're doing first and what we have done. This was sort of our flagship of development and it's a well loved by the community, I think by council and definitely by staff. We took, and this is really was, we worked with the housing department to do this, but this was really their baby. We took the old senior center site, we had moved our senior center to the Pearson wing and The old city center site had become a blight to the community. It was terrible. It looked terrible. It had had a fire. The roof was caving in. It really was horrible. We didn't know what to do with the building. We were just gonna take it down. What housing did was put out an RFP for a qualified development partner and we were lucky enough to have Freebird Development come in and redevelop the site, and they did an excellent job. Now there exists a 61-unit affordable residential community and a beautiful structure and building that is an amazing complex. Every time I drive by it, it makes me smile. Next slide, please. The White House site, here's another catalyst site. This is one of our major catalyst sites in the downtown. It was, we call it the White House site because it used to be, years and years ago, the White House department store, and it's now a very underutilized surface parking site. Council has had the foresight to be able to look at this and say, we don't need this for downtown use or for core use. Let's look for a development partner. So we put it out on an RFP. We found a qualified development partner in LH Housing. It's now in negotiations and their development proposes a three unit residential development. So just for some emphasis on this, the total estimated downtown spending that a development like this could bring into our downtown is almost $5 million annually infusing into our downtown, into our businesses, and into our core. Next slide, please. Let's talk about our pipeline a little bit. We have a good redevelopment pipeline of which we're hoping to add to. The old senior center site, which is completed with a great development. We have the White House site, which is in an active exclusive negotiation agreement. Right now we have a downtown core site, Garage 5, that is out for RFP, looking for a qualified development partner to redevelop. And then we additionally have parking lot 11, which is completed through the surplus plus lands act and could go out for RFP later this year. Next slide, please. So now we get to kind of the crux of what we think we can do economic development-wise and the prosperity that we wanna bring to the city. Housing, jobs, and revenue is what we've talked about over and over again, building an even stronger, vibrant future for multi-generations to come. And the site we wanna talk about today in our minds is really the catalytic site for the city. Next slide, please. And it is the site we're sitting on today, the City Hall site. So the City Hall site consists of 100 Santa Rosa Avenue, where we're sitting today, along with the three properties across First Street, which are 90 Santa Rosa Avenue, 631 First Street, and 655 First Street. This site... This site consists of very aging infrastructure right now. It has years and years and years of deferred maintenance. Can you move to the next slide, please? What I'm gonna talk about now is really an infrastructure crisis, and I can't emphasize this enough right now. We're at a critical risk point with this facility, the City Hall facility, the facilities next door, and the public safety building on Sonoma Avenue. All of those are at critical points. So there's aging infrastructure, aging terminal infrastructure. We have HVAC, electrical, plumbing, they're all past their useful life. There's undefined exposure that we don't know. We've done years of facility assessments and testing on this. The exposure we're not aware of that we know likely exists is ADA compliance, seismic safety, asbestos remediation, It's undefined exposure. There's an operational cost to this. So not just the dollars and the aging infrastructure, but our services, the locations are fragmented here. So I don't know how many times council or staff Anybody that spends any time here has been walking around the campus and run across a member of the business community or the public and they've said, can you help me? Where do I find this service? How do I get here? Oh, you have to go to room three. Oh, you need to go to room six. Oh, please go across the street to room, over to 90 Santa Rosa Avenue, I'll walk you over there. It's disjointed, the locations are disjointed, and we've tried for years with these facilities to make it better for the community, but have been unable to do that just because of the way the structures are set up. And the biggest thing is that we are sitting on seven acres, seven acres in our downtown core of prime, This is prime real estate that is used up right now with aging facilities and 350 civic employees. Now, it's very important, as I think we all agree, that those 350 employees stay in our downtown because those are important for our businesses. But if we were able to move those 350 employees and unlock this economic engine, and that's what this prime property is, is an economic engine, think of what we could bring to the downtown. So what I've talked about with our critical challenges today is really the status quo, what we call the status quo, which we know after years and years of doing the same thing is not sustainable. Next slide, please. I love the title of this slide because it really explains what it is. We've learned over the years as a city that the cost of doing nothing is extremely high, and that's where it's gotten to us where we are today. So the City Hall campus buildings, let's talk about those, and I mean this and across the street, the three buildings across the street, I'm not talking about public safety building at this moment. Right now, just to prevent system failure, just to keep these buildings going so that we can serve the public, we need to invest $48 million into terminal infrastructure. Along with that, in excess of that, we know we have at least another 50 million plus in the next five to eight years for unavoidable life cycle replacements and escalating liability. And the longer that we take to put that money into it and to do these, the more expensive it gets. And then when I talked about our indefinite exposure or unknown risk, we don't know what those are until we get into it. So that $100 million price tag could be substantially more. Next slide, please. So let's talk, I want to talk a little bit about the cost of delay, which we've kind of gone over. So a traditional rebuild spiral, we are not the only ones by far in this spiral. Many cities are, and many cities, which I'll talk about in a few slides, have or are in the process of changing this. So in 2020, actually I can say over many years that I've been here, we have tried multiple times unsuccessfully to either rebuild or move to unlock this economic engine. We've known that this is an engine and that we want to do it, but we haven't been able to fiscally do it in a feasible way like we're bringing to you today. So in 2020, just to rebuild, after a very long study, just to rebuild just City Hall alone on property that we already own, It was $64 million. Today, that same, because we've waited, this is 2026, that same one building is $82 million. The real danger that we have is the 100 million plus in these aging terminal facilities. So every year we delay, the cost rises, the cost rises, and we lose the opportunity that we can on this economic engine. Next slide, please. Why action matters? We have old, old buildings with lots of issues. As I said, every year the cost rises, emergency fixes replace smart investment. We're getting to the point where neighborhoods could have to wait for things. If we have to put that much money into these buildings to continue service, Streets, parks, lighting, for example, could all have to wait because of that, because we have to keep these buildings in service. Opportunity slips, homes, jobs, new revenues stay on hold, and we still have the disjointed locations that we're dealing with. We would like to better serve the community. Next slide, please. This is just a little bit. We talked about the confusing journey with our disjointed locations, and this slide just tries to show the frustration we hear from business members and the community of trying to find services at this location. So this just shows a little journey that if you'd like to get a business license, you need to go across the street. If you then want a TI or a building permit, you need to go across the other end of the street to room three. then you wanna visit the business services center, you need to go over to room six, and if you wanna see a council meeting, you come over this way. It's disjointed, it's confusing, and we hear it often, and we'd like to do better for the community. Next slide, please. So here's the good news, there's a better way forward. There's a strategic investment for lasting impact for tomorrow. Housing jobs revenue, private, capital, public gain, we can create one city hub where there's one place where all of the community can go to get every service they need. If they want to get a parking permit, if they wanna get a TI permit, a building permit, talk to their housing specialist, it's all in one area. We can end, this spiral that us and other cities have found ourselves in. Next slide, please. And now I'm gonna turn it over to Chief Economic Development Officer Scott Adair to talk about revenue generation and the transformational economic impact.

Thank you, Jill. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members and City Manager. My name is Scott Adair. I'm the Chief Economic Development Officer for the City of Santa Rosa. For our part, the Economic Development Division, to assist the real estate and finance teams in this endeavor, put together a fiscal model and analysis on what the financial outcomes could be for a redevelopment of the Downtown City Hall site. I've prepared some notes with me today. I'll be reading from some of those notes and sharing some metrics with regards to the methodology and the outcomes of this analysis. The analysis that we completed for modeling what development could look like on the city hall site aligns directly with city council's adopted economic development strategic plan, as was shared previously by our planning economic development director, Gabe Osborne. The Strategic Plan for Economic Development, which was adopted by City Council in April 2024, lays out goals to bolster downtown housing, support commercial and retail businesses, increase revenue to the business community and to the city, and support a thriving economy by promoting and creating innovative infrastructure in our community. One of the key findings from the benchmarking that the economic development team completed as part of our analysis was a discovery that public investment has been proven in other markets to serve as a catalyst driver for community prosperity. Strategic investment in public assets, as you'll see and have seen through the examples that were given today as part of the presentation, can and has in other markets stimulated growth in private development, has supported housing and job creation, has increased economic activity in communities, and has generated new revenue streams for jurisdictions. As you'll see in this slide, these revenues can then be reinvested back into the community in the form of services, new infrastructure, quality of life improvements for Santa Rosans, and creating a positive cycle of growth and value for our community and our residents. And while the numbers on the following slides themselves are important, I do want to stress that this is some of the quantitative data only. There's qualitative benefits and other outcomes from a public investment on the City Hall site, which could create potentially multi-generational benefits for the community. which would extend beyond any single project and could produce long-term economic, fiscal, and community-driven outcomes for Santa Rosans. And I apologize, I'm managing both the slides and my presentation, so thank you. Let's talk a little bit about the revenue engine. And before we get into the revenue engine and really discuss what this site could become, I want to share that the Economic Development Division, as we modeled what potential development could look like for the City Hall site, We took into consideration a fundamental tenant of real estate and community planning and real estate development within communities. And that is the fundamental concept, if you will, of highest and best use. And we looked to what other communities in mid-rise urban downtown environments with demographics and other key performance indicators from an econometric point of view had similarities to Santa Rosa, and we looked at what developments in those communities looked like, and we came up with the following model. And the following model lends itself to the maximum of public utility that can be driven at the site. When I say utility, I'm talking from an economic development perspective. This model, as you can see here, and we used allowable downtown densities and conservative floor area ratio assumptions for this model, represents a mixed use development scenario, which is a classic or prototypical example of vertical integration in a downtown, and itself is a prototypical development in what other mid-rise downtown developments look like in environments which are similar to Santa Rosa. The total gross developed area under this model is made up of hotel, apartment, condo, retail, office, and civic space. You'll note too that this model assumes only 3.75 acres of the total acreage site being developed, which leaves plenty of room for green space. and or frankly, additional development, which would only further enhance the physical outcomes of the model. So let's get into some numbers. And I wanna talk a little bit about the methodology that was used. So we benchmarked after other developments that are occurring in other communities, real developments. And we looked at what a prototypical mixed use high utility vertical integration model could be for the city hall site. And we came up with the model which was on the previous slides. From that model, we were able to derive certain fiscal outputs. And I'm gonna just talk a little bit about the multipliers and the methodology used as we put this model together. so that you understand where these numbers came from. So the economic development team, we rooted our assumptions in industry benchmarks and public information from a number of different sources, including the Sonoma County Auditor Controller's Office, the California State Controller's Office, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the Urban Land Institute, the Lincoln Land Institute, the National Multifamily Housing Council, building owners and managers association the california department of tax and fee administration the california department of finance the u.s census bureau the u.s bureau of economic analysis the california office of the small business advocate california office of economic development or gobiz and the california economic development department And using data available from all of those sources, we modeled multipliers off of basic assumptions for apartment values per unit, condominium values per unit, hotel values per unit, office value per square foot, retail value per square foot. We looked at what average construction costs and buildable allowances as far as our densities would allow for number of hotel rooms, hotel meeting space, number of apartment units, condominium units, total maximum opportunity for civic space. We looked at average occupancy rates for hotels, average daily rates for hotels, average guests per occupied room, average annual room nights in the region sold per room. We looked at what industry multipliers were for average occupancy rates for condominiums at full sale and also at apartment communities at full lease up. We looked at total residents per occupied unit averages. We also looked at what all of the... Estimated labor force participation rates were for construction projects of this magnitude, and I've only covered maybe a fourth of all of the variables and inputs that we used in our model.

Mr. Adair, just one question. For the members of the public that are going to do a deep dive into this and may not have been able to memorize that list, I'm assuming this is going to be very much available to the public when they look into the methodology?

This more extensive analysis which supports the three slides that are shown here is available. It's a staff report and we can make it available for anyone who's interested.

Wonderful, thank you.

And I only go through that exhaustive list so that the public and council fully understands the amount of analysis and review that went into the numbers which are on the top of the screen here. As we modeled out what potential projected revenue impacts could be from a project for a multi-use, multi-development, vertical integration project could look like at the City Hall site, we ended up with revenues in the neighborhood of $8.4 million to $9.3 million in new annual spending activity within the downtown. and an additional 1.6 to 1.8 million in direct annual recurring revenue to the city. That figure over 30 years assuming conservative stabilization and escalation rates equates to about $60 million in new public revenues over a 30 year period. These revenue sources are multiple. We included in our analysis a review of property tax on the physical land development and improvements themselves, sales tax, use tax, transient occupancy tax, also looked at the business improvement area revenues which would be generated out of a potential development such as this one. Our review also included ancillary revenues such as permit and licensing fees, parking revenues, et cetera. It's important to note that these are not one-time revenues either. These revenues would occur year after year and could be reinvested into public services, infrastructure, parks, public safety, and other initiatives of the city. I should also note as well that this analysis was intentionally conservative. When we found variables and inputs and multipliers to use for our analysis, and if there was a margin or a spread, we used the bottom one so that we could come with a conservative analysis. Economists typically like to under-promise and over-deliver. If you were to look at even a slightly more moderate, not aggressive, just a slightly more moderate or mainstream analysis using these same outputs, it's very likely that a developer could actually generate or development of this site could generate north of two or 2.5 million in new annual rent up revenues, recurring revenues for the city, and that the 30 day value could be closer to the 85, $90 million for the city over a 30 year period. I also want to just end with, on this slide, there are other economic benefits aside from just the direct revenues that could come to the city in terms of new tax revenue for a project. such as the one that we modeled for this analysis. As you can see on this slide, that there would be both induced and direct jobs, permanent jobs as a result of at least this model, 350 plus new permanent jobs. The construction jobs alone would be over 700 jobs during the construction period. This would equate to over $40 million in wages annually, and that spend from those wages equates to approximately $9 million in new annual economic activity in the downtown. I should also state that there are qualitative benefits to a project such of this nature within our downtown. Beyond direct revenues, the qualitative value of redevelopment of the city hall site could include the creation of new housing opportunities, increased downtown vitality, expanded employment opportunities, enhanced support for local businesses, greater pedestrian activity, increased tourism and visitor spending, improved public spaces and placemaking, new perceptions of safety through the increased activity and activation of downtown spaces, the attraction of additional private investment as this being a catalyst, expansion of the city's economic tax base, improved utilization of an existing strategic public asset, support for downtown revitalization goals as laid out in the economic development strategic plan, and ultimately creating a more robust and strong urban core. So with that, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present on this analysis and to walk us through the remainder of the presentation. I would like to turn it over to my colleague, Cities Real Estate Manager, Jill Scott. Thank you.

Thank you, Scott, appreciate it. So here we are at the turning point. How are we gonna unlock this value? What's the path forward and what's the strategic analysis? Next slide, please. The approach is pretty simple and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's called the property exchange. It's a smart strategy, it's for a stronger community and a lasting impact. It's a very carefully structured system that puts the right uses on the right property. So right now I think we can all agree that this is probably not the best use for this seven acres of prime downtown development, but we do need a safe and modernized building that we're able to serve the community with in a better way. It's a deliberate process. This is years and years of city work and asset planning all come together to shape this opportunity. It's mutually valuable. The city and a private partner each get the site that fits their mission. So our mission is to serve the public in the best way that we can in a safe and structured environment. A developer's mission is to redevelop land and unlock that economic opportunity. It's risk calibrated. Of all of the different ways we've looked at over many, many years and studied on how we can remove the civic element from this prime real estate, this opportunity has brought all of the puzzle pieces together. There's always one that's been missing or it's been fiscally infeasible at the time. This opportunity and this property exchange brings every puzzle piece together at this prime opportunity. Next slide, please. So let's just talk about the mechanics of how it works. It's exactly what it sounds like. We trade the piece of City Hall property, we exchange it for a building. It is exactly what it sounds like, the property exchange. The hard part of a property exchange is you must find a trusted developer to redevelop a site who also owns a building that fits the city needs and is large enough for the city needs to be able to exchange these properties. So what it does for the city is it eliminates the risk, the aging infrastructure, the $100 million liability, the ongoing maintenance, and the escalating cost cycle, that spiral I was talking about that we and other cities have found themselves in. The city receives the asset. We receive a new building for the downtown where we can create a one-stop service hub to better serve the community. We get economic growth catalysts, unlocking this economic engine that we're sitting on, and we get reduced operating costs with no large capital outlay and long-term economic and housing growth. Next slide, please. How does this create value for the community? It's another way to looking at it. Today's campus, aging infrastructure, deferred maintenance, rising costs. We get a new city hall building, a one-stop service hub for the community, lower operating costs, much better service delivery. What does the community get? A redeveloped site. They get more housing, more jobs, a stronger tax base on a former Civic Center site. One transaction with two positive outcomes, but as we've talked about, here's the redevelopment ripple effect. We get these two positive outcomes which have all of these ripples of economic growth, not only for us, but for multi-generations to come. Next slide, please. A lot of people talk about the creek property. So in case anyone in the community is not aware, on this property at 100 Santa Rosa Avenue, very near to where we sit, just a little south to where we sit, are two undergrounded culverted creeks, Santa Rosa Creek and Matanzas Creek. They've been culverted for, I don't know, probably a lifetime, many years. Staff would suggest or highly recommend that the city keep this property, the 1.5 acres of the seven acre site. keeping that property preserves the opportunity for the future. It preserves, it keeps the creek corridor in public hands. It preserves our right for future trail connectivity. And the big one, the environmental flexibility. We know that we have some challenges we may have some challenges with flood management options. And this supports either future creek restoration or expansion and allows the city to still be able to do that along with the Sonoma County Water Agency and keep that in public hands to be able to bring that to the community. Next slide, please. So here's the last piece of the puzzle, our favorite thing to talk about, the California Surplus Lands Act. This is the last piece of the puzzle, the state law that brings us all together at this time that we haven't always had the ability to do. So there is an exemption for property changes for agency use just for this purpose in the Surplus Lands Act. So we are allowed as a government agency for our agency use to take our current civic site, Council may declare it exempt surplus, then we can exchange it with a qualified development partner for an office space where we get a new service hub facility for the community and for staff, and the community gets this redeveloped former civic site. Now this is, like I said, the last piece of the puzzle that has all come together to make this feasible at this time. Next slide, please. So just to reiterate everything we've talked today, taking public assets and turning them into public value, this is the theme of the whole conversation today, taking a civic site, redevelopment for community benefit and for economic growth. Next slide, please. These are a couple of different cities that are doing the same thing, well, not exactly the same thing we are, but all in a way that we're doing it. This is San Pablo, and they're all cities that are similar-ish to size to ours. They have taken and transferred or rebuilt their, City Hall and taken that former site and redeveloped it into a mixed use development site with housing, retail and new investment and had wonderful results for their community. Next slide, please. Burlingame doing the same thing, really just a little bit ahead of us, started in really a little bit before 2025. And Burlingame is doing something a little more similar to us. They bought a new building or they bought a existing building and they're redeveloping their site and it's about to open sometime at the end of this year. Next slide, please. And then we have Laguna Niguel. Theirs wasn't their city hall site, but it was a civic site with a lot of surface parking. They took that site and really built a whole new urban center, a whole new downtown. It's pretty amazing. It's planned to open at the end of this year, and we're excited to see what happens, but it has 275 multifamily apartments, 158,000 retail, restaurant, medical, and creative office spaces, 16,000 square feet of a new public library. They're expecting to create a lot of vibrancy and a whole new walkable downtown on underutilized public land. Next slide, please. On this slide, we wanted to go over the overview of options. So we've talked about a lot, and this has been a long presentation, so let's just break it down into three options. Three pass forward, each lead to a different location. Option one is maintaining the status quo. We know this is fiscally infeasible for us. Keep operating these buildings, put a lot of money into them, get no community development of any kind, and not unlocking this economic engine. It's an option, but it's not really an option moving forward. Option two is we could build a new city hall. That would give us the better service quality to the public, which would be great, but it has a very high cost, a longer timeline, and a significant interruption. Not to mention that the cost is really, again, financially infeasible for us as a city. And then option three is we could, Council could decide to pursue a property exchange. We would then unlock the economic engine of this seven acres of prime downtown real estate, create this revenue engine, and have a one-stop service hub for the community. Next slide, please. This goes through very quickly each status, each one that we have to look at today. The status quo, $100 million plus investment, no improved continued deficiencies, no improved services to the public, very high financial risk of approximately $6 million annually from the general fund to do this for that $100 million. Next slide, please. Second opportunity, we could build a new city hall. It again gives us the improved service delivery, but it has little to no economic impact. The fiscal risk is extremely high. Capital cost we think is about $82 million and rising every day. The annual cost of that, $5 million annually from the general fund. Next slide, please. Then we have the property exchange. We exchange our property for another building. We think the capital cost of taking an existing office structure and creating this one-stop hub for the community is about a one-time capital cost of 17 to 21 million. and approximately one million or less a year. It creates the central service hub. It unlocks all of this property and puts it into private hands for redevelopment with a trusted redevelopment partner. And it brings in revenue, vitality, all of the things we've talked about throughout to this city. The fiscal risk, which our CFO will talk about in just a few minutes, is extremely low. Next slide, please. And the community gets this. It's a redevelopment site. New housing, open space, jobs and taxes, modern civic hub, downtown vibrancy. Next slide, please. Here's the three options I'm gonna go through really quickly, just side by side, then I'm gonna turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer to talk a little bit more about the fiscal side of this. So we have the three pass. We've talked about the status quo, $100 million, $6 million a year, no economic growth, still sitting on the City Hall site. Number two, build a new City Hall, $82 million capital cost, $5 million a year from the general fund, minimal growth, no economic activity. We have the property exchange for redevelopment, a one-time capital cost of 17 to 20 million, about $1 million a year from the general fund, but we get new revenue of 1.69 to 1.8 million a year. That is, as our chief economic development officer talked about, a very conservative estimate of what can come in This is multi-generational estimates. This can go on and on and on through not just our lifetimes, but our children's lifetimes. Downtown spending infusion of eight to $9 million for our businesses in the downtown to support them, job creation, and wage generation. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Scott Wagner, our Chief Financial Officer.

Thank you, Jill. My comments will be brief today on this item, but I do want to say that today's presentation very much fits into the themes and presentations that finance has been bringing to Council for the past couple of years. This is a way for the City to address a major liability that has developed over decades, again, similar to some other areas that we've been working through together. Additionally, growing the economic vibrancy of Santa Rosa. Importantly, this also fits into the concept of reinvesting in a better Santa Rosa. Really financially, this is very simple. The options in front of us are very different. We can make a minimal investment in that better reinvestment in Santa Rosa that will cost less. or we can pay more to maintain the status quo as Jill described. That difference there ultimately either will add or reduce our burden to our structural deficit that we'll be talking about later on today in our public hearing. At its core, this is an issue again that has developed over decades that the city financially has not been able to address. Frankly, that was due to strategy. A shining tower of glass Taj Mahal brand new city hall was never a viable option for the city. Staff has brought forward an option that is innovative, it's different, and can create meaningful financial impact to our city and rises all boats with our tides. Jill did a great job of talking through the numbers, but again, when we're looking at this property exchange option of around a million dollars worth of potential debt service versus staying where we are to put a Band-Aid on our facility of $5 million, I would much rather prefer as the CFO to recommend a $1 million option. Neither are free, but our current facility is not free. I want to add that as we've gone through prior facility reviews and come up with these very large liabilities, sometimes those can be looked at as a paper problem, a paper number. Those are no longer a paper problem. Staff is going to need to come back to Council with a request for real funding to address this facility if we are remaining here. That initial number is going to be $48 million worth of funding. This is, again, to Jill's point, to keep our facility open and operating to the public, which the public deserves. We look forward to any financial other discussions around this issue, but again, Jill laid it out very nicely. This is just a simple, with so many easy analogies here. Do we want to invest money into a car with 400,000 miles on it that is 50 years old? Every member of the public and we all understand those are not good investments. The council and the city has been making very good financial decisions over the past couple of years. This is an additional opportunity for us to reinvest in that better version of Santa Rosa.

So just really quickly, I'll go through next steps and then we'll turn it over to Council for all your comments and next steps. So fiscal year budget is coming up. In the capital portion, staff would recommend creating a capital facilities reserve of one-time funds to move this forward. Next step would be to discussion of property exchange sites that we considered, that we've looked at. Third step is a potential property exchange proposal could be brought to Council sometime in summer or fall. And then in the future, we would need to come back to Council for a citywide facility and asset management plan update. Next slide, please. And we'd like to leave you with this last one of our staff's favorite quotes, which is the best way to predict the future is to create it. And with that, we're here to answer any questions. Thank you very much.

A poetic conclusion, thank you all. We knew this was gonna be an excellent presentation. It is rare that we have decisions come to Council that are so clearly historic, where the city is gonna go down one path versus another and people are gonna remember it. So I'm looking forward to the questions that we have from Council today. Which of my colleagues would like to begin? Mr. Okrepke, you wanna kick us off?

Sure, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Real quick, Just looking at these numbers, the 48 to $100 million for option one and the $82 million for option two. I'm not the CFO, but I have looked at the budget a time or two and we don't have that money anywhere, do we?

We don't, and I think that's what's placed the city into these, again, what I would describe as decades of inaction. Because when you try to address a really large number that you can't address, typically what can happen is inaction. You just say, well, we've got no money to put into it, we will do nothing. That game only goes on for so long with facilities. It's the same thing, again, I'll keep bringing up the car example. You don't change your oil long enough you can pretend that you don't have that expense, and then you blow your engine. We are at the blown engine part of this history of this campus. And when that engine blows, now you have real expenses. And that's, again, when I brought up, we need to start coming back to Council now to address some of these plumbing, electrical issues, many, many issues that could bring up. These are now going forward going to be real expenses. So option one and option two, to your point, Vice Mayor, I would advise as being, they're not possible. We do not have that funding. That's not an option for us. Now what is an option would be option three towards a smaller amount versus an ongoing maintenance issue on our campus. That is, again, as I brought up, a rising tide that will help our structural deficit, frankly, on the short term, medium term, and very much on the long term once the economic vibrancy really starts running.

Thank you. Ms. Scott, you talked about a development agreement a couple of times. For the layman, can you describe how that works with a property exchange?

So in a property exchange, it's not the same as what we've seen on, say, White House side or when we did the Senior Center. In those instances, we do a disposition and development agreement. In those times, we really lay out what the city wants to see or the community wants to see in that development, and we hold that. Their feet to the fire on that It's a very long process and a property exchange that can't happen. There can be a development agreement, which is a very different form of agreement that a development agreement can be something that lays out a possible project. But once that exchange happens, the city loses control, no longer has control of the property. That's why it's very important to put it in the hands of a trusted developer partner that we know will think about the needs of the community when doing this because the city does not control what that development is. Does that answer your question?

It does, thank you very much. And then when we're talking about consolidation, I understand the efficiencies for businesses and residents for this campus, but should there be a property exchange and we move into a to a larger building. I think what I'm trying to get at is that this is a deceptively small campus in terms of office space. So if you could talk about that for a second and then talk to, would there be any further efficiencies for the general public with a consolidation and how that would benefit the city from outside just this campus?

I'd be happy to. This campus looks like it's really large, to your point. We have a lot of basement or underground space that's not usable. If you want to talk in commercial real estate language for a leasable space or usable space, we have We do not have enough usable space. There's a lot of space in here that we just can't. Right now, we've outgrown everything. We have an entire building, which we call the old West America Bank site across the street, that is completely unusable and can't be... people cannot be in that building. So it may look like we have, it may look like we have something like 90,000 square feet over here when we really have about 40,000 square feet of usable space and 350 employees. What was the second? I'm sorry, I forgot the second half of your question.

The second part would be if we were to move into something that was say 50, 70, 80,000 square feet, whatever it might be, what other efficiencies could come from that in terms of consolidation, not just for the general public, but from a city standpoint, how could that affect us positively?

It could be amazing for a city, from a staff point of just city uses, like we can get a lot of departments together. Right now, it's not just a major thing is serving the public, but our departments are disjointed. We could bring staff together to work proactively together. We could have a more modern, efficient use. We can bring a lot more employees in. then we are able to consolidate here. So there are a multitude of efficiencies that we can bring.

Thank you. And my last question is, in the property exchange model, how do we avoid further long-term liabilities like we have here? Is there a way that we could, you know, so we don't move, how do we not move into something that has further ongoing expenses down the line that we maybe incur?

in a new building. A property exchange does work in the same way as a purchase and sale agreement in the matter that there'll be a portion of time that we would enter into an inspection period where we're going to inspect the property that's chosen by Council if you decide to move forward and make sure that we are moving into a building that is in great shape. Again, what's gonna be very important, to your point, so that we don't get into a situation where we have deferred maintenance is we're gonna put together a facilities plan that makes sense. And we're gonna ask, come to Council and ask you to fund a plan year over year where facilities can actually maintain the structure to that standard so we don't find ourselves in the situation that we are now.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Ms. Banuelos? Ms. McDonald.

Thank you so much for this presentation. This has been a tough one for me, and I know I've been super clear about it where I'm like, can you tell me if we invest this, what's the economic output from that? So I appreciate all of you taking time to help even my brain digest, which is a big topic in economics, and then be able to go back to our community with some sound bites of how it works just on slide 48, why we have to do something what it means to our general fund and what it means to the longevity and sustainability of the City of Santa Rosa. So I have so much gratitude right now for the work that went into this. I love the data that you gave to us, Mr. Adair, with knowing that everybody has weighed in on this. I really appreciate that it's been data-driven and so it can come back to Council in a way that we can really stand behind what I believe the Council's gonna decide to do today if I'm a gambling woman, which I am. So a couple of things for clarification, if I may. Have we talked about, and this is not to deter what the plan is right now, but have we talked about not having all the employees in the downtown area I've seen that happen where they'll say, maybe this is a building outside of the downtown area that's cheaper or a little bit less for us to maintain. Can you give me just a little bit of why it's so important to be downtown besides just City Hall?

keeping these 350 employees downtown is really vital to the businesses downtown. So, and Director Osborne, if you wanna weigh in on this, I'd love to hear what you have to say, but we've heard from businesses over and over again that are actually like, oh, the city is today, the city is off today or closed today, we'll close our restaurant today. It's very vital to keep those 350 employees in the downtown.

Could you go to lunch, or what's the goal of that, just ease of actually coming to get a permit and actually going through the steps for a business?

I think it factors into a few things that get into human behavior, which is very convenience-driven. That oftentimes, if you have employees in your downtown, those employees are spending dollars based on the services that exist in the downtown from a convenience standpoint. So having over 300 employees in the downtown does support businesses that provide lunch. It does support businesses that provide dinner. It supports businesses that provide goods that, from a convenience standpoint, employees are doing on their breaks. So one of the big issues that occurred in the downtown is when the banks started reducing the number of employees that they physically had in the building, and then they started leaving the downtown. that created a significant impact to the businesses that really fed off of the employees that circulated in that area. So ensuring that those tax dollars are created through the day, jobs do that.

Okay, thank you so much for that. That's helpful as well. On slide 38, you talked about an exempt surplus space. Does that mean tax exempt when we do the exchange so they are able to not pay the tax if we're exchanging?

No, the word exempt, and I apologize if that was confusing, the word exempt is exempt surplus. So it's just in relation to the actual act, the Surplus Lands Act. So there's two ways to surplus property. It's either exempt or not exempt. Usually it's buildable or not buildable. But in this case, with an exchange, The state allows you to call it exempt surplus. It has nothing to do with taxes at all. And saying that it's exempt surplus means that you do not have to go out through the entire surplus lands act process. You get to just exchange, which is a big piece of this puzzle.

Thank you, that's very helpful. Scott, could you tell me if we have to have a bond or anything to be able to pay for the new property? I understand there could be potential costs associated with retrofitting that to fit a staff.

Yeah, thank you for your question, Council Member McDonald. I don't want to get too ahead of the financing specifics, but I'll say broadly. Our broad goal would likely be to finance the exchange with available reserves of the city. We are going to have a conversation later at budget adoption that maybe lays out the mechanics of what could potentially fit that option. It will additionally again, these conversations are all connected. And so the themes that we've been bringing forward as part of the budget conversation of ensuring that we're maintaining a two year window of Council maintaining its policy around reserves is maintained, right? It needs to hit every aspect of that. But to your question, yes, I think it would be very predictable that financing the building to match a useful life of us moving into it with our payments would be very advantageous to us on an ongoing budgeting basis. So really a full moving in the furniture, fixtures, tenant improvements to get the place all souped up for us when we're ready to move in, that's that roughly what we're estimating around a million dollars of ongoing would end up providing for us. And we would do so, the city, through the financing mechanisms that we already take advantage of, COPs, leasing financings that we use, for example, on Courthouse Square. So not a unique way to approach it. We've done this before. It would just be applying it towards a city facility.

Thank you. I'm glad you addressed the ongoing maintenance that has been neglected on all of our infrastructure. And I wouldn't just suggest it's the buildings we own downtown, just in general. I know the last time we talked about the policy of the CalPERS and when that starts to fall off, being able to bring policy back for deferred maintenance specifically. So I'm happy to hear that there's a plan that's coming to us regarding this exchange and what will happen when we move to a new building so that we don't have the exact same thing happen in 50 years to that council. So that would be one of my cautionary things is getting that fiscal analysis of how much the new building would be to maintain and then appropriating money and as we move forward, on any type of exchanges or what we're gonna do in the city that we're also looking at that. I just have a couple more questions here, because you've been so great about answering a lot of them as we move through the slides. One thing that I know we continue to do is add people and outdoor space and facilities, but we don't often account for that in our general fund budgeting. So I think of public safety specifically. So if we're infusing the downtown with more people, we're infusing it with more things for us to take care of, and we're getting income of about $2 million a year, how do we plan to offset that if we have to bolster our services to serve people? Can you tell me how that works economically?

Thank you for that question. I think what's core in the conversations that we've been having around that specific concept is that the best growth that can happen in the city from a financial perspective is downtown. Frankly, we have more of an investment around public safety. We have more tools in our toolbox to provide services to the community here versus our neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are more spread out. There's more streets. There's more infrastructure within those areas. There is absolutely a... a simpler financial model for more dense development downtown. And I think, again, this plays into some things that have been building downtown, whether that's the EIFD. To me, I see this as the catalyst, potentially the catalyst project that these other policies and decisions have been kind of waiting for. It's a chicken or the egg conversation. I'm not sure which is the chicken or which is the egg, but one of them is one of them. So yes, I think there's an opportunity there.

Thank you, and do we have anything when we do a property exchange where we make sure that there's some language on when they break ground? I know once you give it over, it's kind of at the discretion of the developer on what they want to develop, but is there anything that you can add that requires it to be done in a short amount of time?

Well, we don't, as you said, we don't have the opportunity in this kind of agreement to be able to say it's gonna be done in a long time. That, again, is why we need a trusted development partner to push that forward. If we do do, if Council does decide to do an actual development agreement with the developer that's chosen, that development agreement will only last for so many years, so they will be incentivized to do that development within that time span.

That's helpful. Thank you so much for answering my questions. I appreciate the presentation today.

Thank you. Ms. Rogers.

Thank you, Mayor. I had a quick question about the economic development and having staff downtown, which I think is very important, but which I've also heard from retailers and restaurants downtown is that when staff aren't here or when things are closed, that there are not as many people down here. So I know that that is one portion of it, but how do we tackle the second portion? Would that be through the housing? to ensure that there is constant, because I mean, it sounds great to have an 18 hour downtown from someone that gets off work and wants to go downtown to do things, and sometimes, unfortunately, it's dead.

Yeah, thank you, Council Member, for that question. I think, and similar to what Mr. Wagner mentioned, much of this is the chicken or the egg and the concept of what has to happen first to be the catalyst for the next. And I think a lot of the discussion was either businesses or housing produces the foot traffic that the businesses benefit from. But in some situations, the housing becomes more attractive when the businesses are there because they're creating that environment and the services. So really it's been an investment and I think that's why multi-use is really so critical because multi-use development tries to bring in all the components and it tries to create that ecosystem within a singular development. But really the strategy in the past has been to push the housing units because in addition to the workforce, which has changed over the years with remote work, not everybody's in the office at the same time and many of the businesses that focused on the day services have felt that. So as the residential comes in, does that support more of a night service? And I think many of what happens as you modernize a downtown, the business practices change along with that to meet the demands. So really what we have focused on is it becomes a foot traffic issue. And those pieces that develop the foot traffic both on the commercial and the residential side are really critical to the businesses because they're their customers. but the spending practices of those customers are dynamic and the downtown businesses will have to expand their business model to account for what the more modern look of the downtown looks like in the future. But I think it's really just increasing that foot traffic because it has fallen off over the years and it can happen in a few different ways.

And we also look at low income housing a lot around the city. So when you look at the type of housing that you would like to promote, I'll say downtown, just economics, I would think people that are low income could possibly spend less money on housing. going out to a restaurant or going out to the bar or whatever. So how are we trying to balance having both low income, very low income housing within our core and also having people that can help with the economic drivers? I hope I'm asking the question correctly.

Yes, you are, and I think it's a very difficult problem to solve. So there obviously is a housing for all concept that we have to maintain in equitable balance in our housing delivery to the community. And fortunately, when people get stressed, much of our money goes into housing, or things that do not generate sales tax. So it gets into a discussion about discretionary spending. And many of the downtown communities that have really sort of revitalized have done so around market rate housing. And the reason being is because it brings that discretionary income into the equation. I do think that there is a creative inclusionary model where you can look at different income levels That 80% AMI in our community is very difficult to hit. A lot of us are really sitting at that level, but that also does not mean that 80% AMI is not enjoying the amenities that exist in downtown. So I think it really is balancing the diversity, but there is really an important component from an economic development standpoint of discretionary spending and how that discretionary spending stays within the downtown ecosystem.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. This is very, very exciting, even to just have the conversation.

Indeed. Other questions from colleagues? Who's following?

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate how thoughtful you have all been and creative about solving a problem that just absolutely has to be solved. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a better solution out there than this. My questions are just around how we're gonna maintain as much public control over as much of the future development and by that being really smart about the developers that we choose to work with. and then just the future of housing and affordable housing in our downtown. I wanna balance the fact that we have a lot of affordable housing proportionally in our downtown, the value that having affordable housing brings to our downtown in terms of workforce, but the real cost to the future of our enhanced infrastructure finance district by continuing to cite affordable housing in the downtown and to discourage future affordable housing that would have welfare exemptions in the specific boundaries of the EIFD at this point in time while we're working on capitalizing it in the short run.

Thank you. Just an historical question for me, a bit of additional context. And you've all highlighted it very nicely. But can you talk again about how long this decision, this issue has been percolating? So for the public, this is emerging suddenly onto the scene. But even for me, a relatively new council member, this was being sort of talked about on council three years ago as we knew we had a problem emerging, we were looking for opportunities. You gave an example in one of the slides about how this was looked at back in 2020. I suspect it goes back many years before that. For the public, can you give a sense of the progression of this issue and why it's coming to a head right now?

Sure, I'd be happy to. So I'll give you a few examples. I've been with the city for 25 years. When I first started, they were talking about this. They knew that the buildings were old then and that we needed to move. Another interesting example, I was just talking to Director Burke today, who started in 2003 and said that, The first few months that she was here in 2003, everyone told her, don't get too comfortable. We're going to move soon. We need to get off this property. That was in 2003. So I thought that was a funny story. We have, myself, over the last 10 years, have worked on trying to find multiple different solutions. We've spent so much staff time and effort trying to figure out how to do this. And as I alluded to in the picture, there has never been one that has been fiscally feasible that we could find. And at this moment, all the puzzle pieces have come together. And so we have an opportunity right now that we haven't had in the last 20 years.

Thank you for that. And so the catalyst are one, there's an opportunity, and those opportunities don't always emerge. And there's a real need. And I do appreciate the scare tactics. Believe me, we heard it here on the dais. But I'm thinking about the skeptics in our community who are gonna look at those slides, they're gonna say, oh, those are big numbers. Where did those numbers come from? Scott Wagner, are you really gonna drop a $48 million request on council's desk here in the coming months? Can we get a little bit more granular, a little bit more concrete, and if we decide to stay in our historic brutalist chambers here, what are the bills that are coming due? Can you break those down? You mentioned HVAC, we know that's an issue. We've got some ADA stuff. All of us have tripped on the steps walking into council chambers. Give us some examples of the bills that really are coming due in the next 12 to 18 months.

So just to preface those numbers, those came from facility assessment reports. So those are all verified numbers. The scary portion of it is that there are those unverified risks that we don't have numbers for that could take that $48 million number and multiply it substantially. So what we would need to see in the next few months within a year, I would say. And facilities would probably say, no, Joe, you need to do this in the next few months. We need to change out HVAC systems. In order to do that, we need to remove asbestos. In order to do that, we need to move out all of the employees and put them into lease space. while we do the work you can't have staff here while you're doing this then we need to upgrade electrical systems we have some very very serious plumbing issues and i mean with sewer systems that are very dangerous that we need to update as soon as possible there are a multitude of different things once we start opening up the building and doing those things we have ADA concerns, we have lead concerns, we have seismic upgrades that need to happen. It goes on and on and on, and those are not even including lifecycle costs that I was talking about in the next five to eight years.

I'd like to add, it's true that we as staff would not be coming back for a $48 million request, but the specifics there are very important, is that what we will be coming back with if we decide to stay is a financing of that $48 million that then locks the city into this campus potentially. So it would really double down on the city remaining within this facility and would cause, again, to not have the greater issue addressed. It's a Band-Aid. To Ms. Scott's points, we're talking about the basic functions of this campus. We're talking electrical, plumbing. Those are things that the public expect to exist in their city hall when they come to conduct their business here. we have a responsibility to provide those things. That's why, again, when we mentioned that these numbers that have been on paper and facility reports, they have to be real going forward because it's not hard to Google City of Santa Rosa City Hall and see that we have shut down City Hall. OVER THE PAST COUPLE YEARS BECAUSE THE FACILITY NEEDED TO BE CLOSED THIS IS NOT THEORETICAL ANYMORE THAT CAN WAS KICKED FOR DECADES AND THIS IS THE CURRENT GROUP THAT UNFORTUNATELY THEY CAN LANDED ON.

AND THOSE THOSE SEVEN FIGURE REQUESTS WHICH ARE COMING IN THE NEAR TERM ARE THOSE ARE THOSE CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM DOLLARS ARE THOSE GENERAL FUND DOLLARS.

100% general fund dollars, which then would 100% impact our ability to provide public safety services addressing our streets. It would have an immediate impact to the services that the city provides to the public.

All right, so we'd be forced to make capital improvements to this facility, and that would displace money that we're spending on public safety, parks, other key public services. That's the choice before council?

That's correct, Mayor.

All right, I'm gonna keep my community skeptic hat on for a moment. Our colleagues over at the county, they thought about doing a program like this in the very recent past where they thought about moving some of their employees to a new facility with some of the same logic. How does our strategy differ?

With all due respect to the county, and I do have respect for them, this is a property exchange which is very different. Additionally, this is fiscally what I would call a very fiscally reasonable and responsible way to do this. So any price that we would pay or developer that we would come into an agreement with, the city would be very responsible in the costs of how they could do this. So what we're looking at at $1 million a year is a very small number comparatively to what the county does need to do. Now, the county does have a lot more employees than the city, and I don't want to say anything negative about what they're trying to do at all, but ours is definitely a very fiscally responsible way to go.

That's clear. And do I recall correctly that part of the county's strategy was to move several hundred employees out of Santa Rosa up to the site further north, and this was going to have an economic impact on our city, as opposed to our plan, which, and I'm glad Council Member McDonald highlighted this, we're keeping everybody downtown. We're doubling down on downtown Santa Rosa.

Correct, yes, we want to keep those 350 employees in the downtown and then add additional people through housing and commercial and multi-use.

Wonderful. All right. Well, this is sounding like the facilities version, a little bit like the facilities version of our pension reduction strategy, where all of a sudden there was an opportunity, an opportunity emerged, and the city has jumped on it in a way that's going to save us tens of millions of dollars, actually, and become an economic development driver. Am I understanding that correctly, Mr. Wagner?

I very much agree. This fits into the theme of what we've been talking about over the past couple years of large fiscal liabilities that have developed in the city over decades that this group is particularly dedicated to being creative and coming up with real solutions for to actionize them and bring them forward to Council for action. I very much agree. But between $100 million City Hall liability $482 million pension liability, if we can set the city on a path to have a plan to addressing these, which I believe we will, that creates a better Santa Rosa, a reinvested Santa Rosa, as I talked about, a better version of us fiscally, financially going forward.

Thank you, and when Mr. Wagner says this group, what he means is the senior leadership team that we have here, starting with our city manager, all the way through the rest of staff, who in recent, just in the last few months, have come up with some incredibly creative and quick solutions that will be remembered in the city for the amount of money that they save and the economic development that they catalyze. We can't thank you enough. I think that's the end of my questions. Anything else from my colleagues?

Mayor, I'd like to just offer two additional perspectives, if I may. Please, city manager. So one is, I really am just so proud of this team as they were going through the presentation. I was just so thrilled and excited for them because I know this is something that is really important to the staff, but it's also so important to the community, to our business sector. I see that Ananda's here from the Chamber. I think this is so transformative that It's an honor and privilege to be here today to just witness the conversation because it really could set Santa Rosa on a whole new different path. I've had the privilege in my career to actually work on a new city hall for a city, and it was for the city of Long Beach. In fact, if you go to Long Beach, you'll see there's this city hall, there's the port headquarters, and my name is actually on the plaque for the Port of Long Beach new headquarters because I had... the unique opportunity to be sitting on the Harbour Commission when we made the decision to do that. It was a new construction, it wasn't a property exchange, but we were able to do a new construction in Long Beach because there was a port that generated $2 billion of revenue every single year. And so the city had the port as a partner, they could consolidate port headquarters that was far away and get rid of the, aged, deteriorating city hall structure that was not seismically appropriate, much like I'm sure our buildings are here. And so the new construction made sense in that situation because of an economic engine that is very unique. And here in Santa Rosa, the minute that I heard about this opportunity, for me, it was an absolute no-brainer with my CFO background. There's no way that a new construction could be financially feasible. The status quo cannot continue. We are at that terminal. point of the the asset life of the buildings that our employees are actually you know working out of and that the public is coming to every single day this is a pivotal point and we can no longer just continue the status quo there would have to be a budget recommendation on how to band-aid this situation and you'd be locking it in for 30 years it just makes absolutely no sense sense from a financial standpoint and so i just wanted to put my stamp of approval on it yet again i'm bringing it forward with the team but it's just really a no-brainer and then to the point on the housing i would i would urge us not to look at any housing opportunities at this site to be either or market or affordable housing. From my experience, when cities invest in their downtown to this degree and you create a whole new economic engine with the vitality that can be provided with, even in some cases, market rate housing. For one, we have an inclusionary housing ordinance that's fantastic, so we know we'll have affordable units, but the multiplier effect and the property tax that's generated allows for a lot more affordable housing development as well. I saw that even in places like Huntington Beach where the inclusionary housing ordinance ended up having, there's I think 5,000 affordable housing units in Huntington Beach, you would never know it. It's all within, it's an inclusionary, truly inclusionary housing where it's being developed But there was a spillover effect of what was happening in the downtown area, in the redevelopment areas, with the waterfront Hilton, the waterfront Hyatt, if you've ever been there, to that coastal city. But it all came from just the explosion of housing that developed because of all of the redevelopment that was happening, and the property tax revenue every year exceeded our expectations. And when your property tax is generating that level of a pickup above your standard, then you have the money to invest in affordable housing. So it's not an either or, it all has to be thought out very carefully. You can do both, but it starts with, for one, not sitting on prime real estate, that we have for a public use that's so dispersed and so spread out. I couldn't find my way to the interview to become the interim city manager without desperately calling Dominique. And I parked in garage nine. I didn't know where I was going. I went to the courthouse. They were like, we don't know why you're here. And so this is just not efficient for the public. It's a great opportunity. I'm very much in support of this. And as someone who's worked on different projects with city halls and housing, and in my new role, I'll be working on affordable housing as well. So I have a strong commitment to it. It's not something that I don't believe in. I'll be dedicating the next phase of my career to this. This is a fantastic proposal, and I'm really proud of what the team has done, and hopefully you'll have confidence in this path forward.

Thank you, City Manager. Given your background and what you're going off to do, your imprimatur or your sign-off on this project, that means a lot. Let the record show, including for our press Democrat, that we have not one, but two CFOs who have vetted this project and signed off. Thank you both. With that, let's open it up to public comment. We have a few folks signed up already. Mr. DeWitt, would you like to kick us off? Excellent. All right, we'll warm that up for you. And for those looking to make public comment, if we could use both podiums to keep this moving, and we're gonna have two minutes per public comment today.

I understand, we'll figure this out.

All right, looky there, looky there.

All right, hello, my name is Duane DeWitt, I'm from Roseland. I brought you an example from almost 30 years ago, in which at that time, the business editor of the Press Democrat was pointing out that 20 years before that, big mistakes were being made here in Santa Rosa regarding our city planning. It's interesting to hear what you've all been talking about for years and pointing out now that we know in the public that the status quo has been doing nothing and that there basically has been a dearth of investment in our public assets. And now we're at the point where because of the deferred maintenance over all these decades, you just wanna tear it down. It's a sad state of affairs because this building is only 61 years old. It's younger than me. I've been here throughout this whole situation, and this is actually, if you'll look at it in a different manner, we don't have a trusted developer to go to to work with. The picture that I saw was of the AT&T building. right across the street over here, I would suggest that you lease from the federal building and the state building, which have numerous vacancies right now. Why don't you just put a million dollars a year into leasing and let somebody else take care of the stuff that you don't take care of? That's what this all boils down to. Deferred maintenance hasn't been taken care of and it will never be taken care of because your status quo is doing nothing. What I'd really like to point out, and this is really important, there's a term for all of this and you can look it up in any American English language dictionary. It's a textbook definition of a boondoggle. People coming forward saying, oh, we gotta do this with the public's asset and that'll make it better. That's what Ernest Hahn said to us 50 years ago as they tore down our downtown and put the Third Street to pressure.

Thank you, Duane. We'll move on to Mr. Lopez and then Ms. Sweet. Welcome, Omar.

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Omar Lopez. I'm the policy coordinator at Generation Housing. We're here today to express our support for these efforts. Specifically, we support option three, which is the property exchange with the preservation of the creek. As staff stated, seven acres in the heart of downtown Santa Rosa sitting underutilized is a missed opportunity, not just for housing, but also for jobs and for the tax base that funds the services our community depends on. The status quo isn't productive. It's an annual drain with an immediate $100 million price tag and maybe more. Public investment anchors to growth and gentle density will help activate it. And just this week, Katahdi showed the North Bay have sustained focused investment in housing and economic development can produce a budget surplus while the rest of the region struggles. That's what long-term thinking buys you. The city and city leadership have shown their willingness to engage in this long-term thinking, which we saw in last week's conversation of SB 10 and AB 1033. These state policies can incentivize housing development on existing parcels closer to existing amenities and they're especially relevant around downtown where gentle density and new ownership opportunities can connect more people to a thriving core. Santa Rosa has the land, the policy direction, and the moment. We urge you to move forward with option three, and at the same time, we urge you to continue the AB 1033 and SB 10 conversation and how it can tie into this work. Like the presentation states, standing still isn't free. Every year we wait, the community pays more and gets less. And by the way, I was born in 2003, so this conversation has been going on my entire life. Just a fun fact.

That's a good conclusion, Omar. Thank you very much. Ananda, you're up.

Mayor, staff, council members, my name's Ananda Sweet, CEO of the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber of Commerce. First, thank you for the thoughtful consideration of city expenses and fiscal stability in this conversation today. And thank you for leaning into economic development opportunities downtown. We know that a strong, vibrant downtown serves at the heart of our economic, right, the economic heart of our community. Strategic investments downtown that increase foot traffic, activate public spaces, and attract investment result in an economic multiplier effect that supports long-term economic vitality and city fiscal stability. Public-private partnerships and tools that encourage private investment downtown have a strong track record of creating meaningful impact by combining public vision with private resources for strategic investment. We appreciate your strong desire to keep city staff downtown, and we urge your ongoing support of efforts to activate downtown as the economic engine of our community. Thank you.

Thank you, Ananda, and the Center as a Metro Chamber. Ms. Close.

Thank you. Hi, Jen Close, ED of Generation Housing. I just wanted to add a little something to Omar's great and official Generation Housing comment. But we're really in support of this in option three. And I understand Mr. DeWitt's skepticism because as you all noted, we've been talking about this for Omar's entire life. And so that seems natural, but what I see up here is a lot of excitement right now from staff. I feel the energy is palpable. I see it here at the council and I see you all wanting to be doers. and you get to be doers. And so I wanna congratulate you for that mindset, for taking a growth approach to this, and say that we are here to support you any way we can. I of course wanna echo and repeat our urging to also pursue other housing solutions at the same time that can actually bolster and feed into this downtown focus. And the other thing, and I actually was prompted to stand up here unplanned because of the city manager's reference of the city of Long Beach where I was just this fall. And if you haven't been to that city hall and that city center, it's absolutely extraordinary. But what's also extraordinary about Long Beach is that it's the best urban schools in the country. the best urban schools in the country and that those things exist together because of long range planning that were cooperative and were intersectional and understood that they need to have strong schools to feel the strong workforce and that that's gonna, to create a stronger economy, and that that cycle is gonna repeat itself. And so the other thing is that I just want to say that just kind of like we've done anytime post-disaster, and maybe we could call this an economic disaster, is that we really think, all of us, and work cooperatively with our other community partners, with the schools, with the workforce developers, making sure we're gonna have the construction workforce we need to make your exciting vision happen, all of that. So in any case, I'm excited. I grew up here and we talked about Courthouse Square my entire life.

Thank you, Jen, and thank you for the tie-in to education. Good segue. Are there other members of the public who would like to comment on this item?

Yes.

Janice, you have the floor.

Yes, thank you, Mark, Mayor. I really appreciate the presentation today. I sat in on the beginning of what looked like the opening last week at the design review. And I think that there's a lot of details that are coming into focus and it's looking good. But it is a lot of money. I'm gonna say top of my head, I'd like to see this unfold in like three projects that happened and had incentivized deadlines for how to do it. The other thing is that when you were talking about it, there weren't a lot of things that were coming to my mind that we need it still. And I started talking here about AI about two years ago, a year and nine months ago, and now I realize that I have somebody sitting here that could talk all about it. But AI is really finally hitting. And we did finally have a really good presentation, conversation, I think it was in October last year, maybe it was August, from our top person at the city, and that was at the finance committee meeting. It was probably the 31st of September, 30th of September, something like that. But the other thing is I was president of the county when the assessor property treasurer was pushing the EFID and he was doing that because he felt that Santa Rosa would offer the county money. So there's not enough time to do all of this, but I hope that it's not made a decision today. I hope it comes back with AI and the building, if you're trying to turn it for the building at the community, I mean county, that building is really in bad shape. And my husband worked for 17 years in the beginning of the time.

Thank you, Janice. Fred.

Good afternoon, members of the city council and staff. This was a pretty good sales job. And one of the things I've learned as a shopper is don't buy the first car on the lot. And I also really don't like pressure sales. So I think that it would be good to not just go for a vote on this today. I'm thinking about 1960s urban renewal and the promise of urban revitalization and the displacement and the segregation that came about as a result of urban renewal. And the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats and trickles down, that didn't ever pan out. what panned out is that people end up on the other side of the tracks in unincorporated areas. And what I see coming here is a kind of further segregation of market rate housing, the economic vitality of those guys spending, and then all the housing getting forced onto Santa Rosa Avenue. And so I think as you recall in the South Santa Rosa specific plan that the city council did, direct staff to pay more attention to the displacement and gentrification issues as a result of that economic development plan as well. And so I think that would be called for here as well. The downtown area has just as many disadvantaged communities as Santa Rosa Avenue. You're the city fathers and mothers and the city residents are your family. And so you need to take care of everybody here. And the people who are on the lower end of the spectrum just keep losing out. That rising tide does not lift all boats. So I would suggest that you leverage this sale with the city had a blueprint already for a hotel, condos, et cetera. Make a blueprint that will have a better spread of all different types of income mixed in there. And also that... that running out of time here, but I would suggest that you really do leverage it as best you can and don't take a bad deal.

Thank you, Mr. Auerbach. Mr. Schwartz.

Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to take a moment. I'm Paul Schwartz. I'm a commercial real estate broker here in Santa Rosa, also a member of the Generation Housing Advisory Board. I'd just like to comment that I think in a conversation with Jill recently, she used the term game changer for this proposal, and I truly see it that way. I compliment the staff on that. creating what could be an absolute game changer for downtown Santa Rosa and Santa Rosa as a whole. I think the economic impetus for other investments in Santa Rosa would be greatly improved and streamlined and fast-tracked, I'll say, by virtue of a project of this magnitude. I think the economic benefits are both direct and indirect, and I think it's absolutely the best thing that could happen in the downtown area, not just for City Hall, but for the entire community. And I compliment the staff again on the work that's been done, and encourage you to support it wholeheartedly. Thank you.

Paul, thank you very much. Are there other members of the public that would like to comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and bring it back to Council for final comments. Ms. Fleming.

Yeah, I just wanted to take a moment to sort of synthesize a little bit of what I've heard today from the public comment that came out. It's always so wonderful to hear these different perspectives. You know, Fred said something about a high pressure sale, and I just want to say that This is not the first time the council has been introduced to this idea. This is not the second time that we've considered this. In fact, in the entire eight years that I've been on council, I've heard versions of this. And so I just wanna take a moment to say that this has not been a fast, or rushed process, that this has been something that our professional staff, our teams of people have been working on for decades in order to bring us something that makes sense. And so the way that I'll be giving my direction is to encourage us to go with option three, It may seem like a high pressure sale. It's honestly our only good option. And sometimes that happens where we have to make a decision that happens to be a good decision and it happens to be the only decision, but that doesn't make it a bad decision. In this case, it's actually a pretty good choice and it's a clear one for me. So thank you for your hard work. I'm supporting option three.

Thank you, Ms. Banuelos.

Thank you, Mayor.

First of all, I want to thank you all for such a thorough presentation. And I just want to say I also support option three. To me, it's the only thing that makes sense. And as city manager said, it's a no brainer. And I don't feel pressured in any way either. I think I think we know what, we have a real good idea of the condition of our buildings and we're not alone in this. This is happening across Santa Rosa and across the county and so I think this is an opportunity to take control of our situation here at the city and it would be a shame if we didn't. I just wanted to say that I'm most interested just in general, of course, economic development and job creation. And those are the things that drive me to say we need to make this change and also to make sure that the residents that come to see us are safe as well as our employees. We want them to be safe as well. So I just wanna thank you for this. I think it's long, obviously way long overdue, since 2003, Omar. since you were born and probably longer than that. And so, yeah, I want to support this completely and I'm really anxious for the next steps. So thank you.

Thank you. Ms. McDonald.

Yeah, thanks again for the presentation. I love challenging the status quo. I always use that, Dr. Phil, how's this working for us? It's just not. That's why we've been continuing to kick that can down the road. And then I like to say some of our roads are dirt roads with a bunch of potholes in them. And this building is the... that exactly. So, you know, the city's been faced with a lot in the last decade. If you look at the tragic wildfires and the emergency issues we've had across the city, it's easy to see why deferred maintenance wasn't the top of our list in the last decade. So, you know, it's fun to be able to play Monday morning quarterback. They shoulda, woulda, coulda. We can wanna hang the sins of the fathers on poor decisions, but Really, we have an opportunity right now to be not only transformative to the downtown Santa Rosa, to be able to create this space and an economic driver for the city, but it is a good choice. No one will strong arm me into making a decision based on being last minute. I'm pretty clear about that. I don't mind voting no if I don't believe in something. The research that went into this, the data-driven research that you brought forward to Council is actually, I think, a reflection of how thoughtful we've been over the years and what we wanted to see before we were able to make a really solid decision and having the ability to do the property exchange. Everything just seemed to line up right now. So absolutely, I'm gonna be supporting option three. I leave it to our professional staff to find out the best way to not only create those economic drivers in our downtown area, but to create opportunities for retail and housing for people that need it. Thank you again for this presentation today I feel like I'm much more well-versed in how this the economy is going to be driven by these developments and so well done.

Thank you Thank you. We'll go to Miss Rogers

Thank you, Mayor. So I definitely support option three. I can't say it enough. This is very exciting. Thank you for all of your work that you've put in to this process. And it has been a long time coming. I think that for the public, it may seem as if we're doing things very, very quickly. But the infrastructure that we have here at City Hall. I know I can't speak for everyone, but it has kept me up at night knowing some of the things that are going on here and some of the things our staff have to deal with. In addition, I'm very excited about having a hub to make it our, what we, to make sure that the public can access the services that we have more efficiently and they don't have to go to multiple places. So this is very exciting. I look forward to seeing what you have to bring, continue to bringing things to council for us to look at and approve. And just thank you for having the approach to look at everything because we could look at it very siloed, but it's not. It's all interconnected. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Alvarez. Thank you, Mayor. For myself, it really comes down to that I'm very thankful that we're not facing litigation, we're not facing lawsuits from our staff and employees of the city of Santa Rosa, and that the stars align themselves where we have an opportunity before us that we can take advantage of, and not only improve the services for our city, but also the workforce, the borough. But going back to our community, you're absolutely right. How many times have we been stopped outside trying to find the permitting window, trying to find the city managers, the clerks? And it all starts of the way that we are providing services for our community. That's ultimately what each one of us are here doing. So to be able to improve that, improve the customer service, I think that's what ultimately people are going to be most appreciative of, even if they don't know what's happening behind the scenes. Now, going back so many years of this conversation, this can being kicked down the road, it's time. And I'm definitely honored to be part of the team, the city that took the initiative to theoretically grab the horn by its horns. Erase everything I just said. You want to try that again? No, I do not want to try again, actually. Happy birthday. I appreciate it. But nonetheless, though, it's time. It's time. And I'm glad I'm part of that team that's making it happen. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thanks, yeah, just, I don't think I need to, I think you already have your direction, but I agree with the direction of my colleagues. Option three is not only the best, but the only option. But I do, usually we say like, hey, can we pull back and look at a greater view of things? What I'd like to do is like zoom in, because these are some big numbers and some big issues. And Ms. Scott, I think you told me this story, is when our air conditioner breaks, And I know first word problem, air conditioner breaks, right? But in order to fix it, we can't go to Home Depot or order a part. Our team has to go online to like eBay or some other secondary marketplace to find dated parts that they don't make anymore so that they can have them delivered and fixed because we can't replace the air conditioner in whole because then you get into the asbestos and all of the other issues that you've raised already and it's this Pandora's box. So it's not just this greater issue of over the next X amount of years it's gonna cost Y amount of money, it's on a day to day basis our teams are running into issues because of the condition of our facilities. And so I just want to kind of zoom in on that and just how difficult it is for our teams on a regular basis. But I really appreciate the presentation, all of the work that went into it, the laundry list of resources that you've used to verify those numbers is exceptional. And so thank you so much.

Thank you. And likewise, I will not repeat all of the points my colleagues made, all of which I agree with. Option three is obviously the only choice we have here. What I would like to highlight is the big swings that staff are taking, how you are coming to council with things that really move the needle in a big way. I mean, we're not playing small ball anymore. And as a testament to you, as a testament to Ms. Farrell and the leadership that she has brought here in her six months here, where the environment that has been created for our staff to feel comfortable coming to council with ideas like this and forcing us outside our comfort zone, you know, nudging us to take bigger swings. That's the real long-term value to the city, above and beyond potentially a new city hall and some economic development. Please keep doing that. This is just wonderful to be a part of this. And that concludes my remarks. Anything else from your end? Do you have the direction that you need? All right, this was fantastic. Thank you. But the fun's not over, folks. We're gonna move on. We'll let our team vacate the dais, and then we're gonna move on quickly to, we had no report, we had no closed session. Oh, I guess we had a study session. Do we need to report? Madam City Manager? Report on a study session? I don't think we do, do we? All right, we can move right along. Let's move on to our proclamation for the evening. Item 7.1, our proclamation in honor of LGBTQ Plus Pride Month. And for that, I'm gonna turn to Ms. Rogers.

Thank you, Mayor. Whereas the city of Santa Rosa recognizes the month of June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning LGBTQ Plus Pride Month, June is recognized nationally as LGBTQ Plus Pride Month. a time to honor the history struggles and achievements of the LGBTQ plus community. And whereas the city of Santa Rosa will continue to advocate for LGBTQ plus rights against defiance and hardship. Through practice and continuation of alliance and advocacy, safety and security will increase for LGBTQ plus individuals in Santa Rosa. By promoting safety and security, LGBTQ plus individuals will trust that the city of Santa Rosa cares for their protection and place in community. And whereas Santa Rosa is proud to be a diverse, welcoming, and inclusive community that values the dignity and worth of every individual regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. And whereas LGBTQ plus individuals have made invaluable contributions to the cultural, civic, economic, and social fabric of the beautiful city of Santa Rosa, And whereas the City of Santa Rosa commits to fostering a city where everyone is free to live authentically, love openly, and thrive without fear. Now, therefore, be it resolved that our Mayor, Mark Stapp, on behalf of the entire City Council, do hereby proclaim June 2026 as LGBTQ Plus Pride Month in Santa Rosa and encourage all residents to honor this observance of authenticity and love. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Rogers. And do we have Joy here to say a few remarks? Oh, please, yeah, head to the nearest podium.

Hello everyone, my name is Joy Bessonen and I'm the youth advocate for LGBTQ Connection Sonoma. Thank you Mayor Stapp and the Santa Rosa City Council for this proclamation that declares June as Pride Month here in Santa Rosa. It is an honor to be accepting this proclamation for the second year in a row on behalf of my team who contribute immensely and wholeheartedly to our mission of serving the diverse LGBTQIA plus community in Sonoma County. As a queer individual and a Santa Rosa native, it is my honor to be accepting this proclamation on behalf of the LGBTQIA plus community here in Santa Rosa. This proclamation means more than words can say. It reflects a commitment to equality, respect, and safety in this city. This proclamation is appraisal for the vibrant and beautiful queer community of Santa Rosa with a rich history that deserves to be protected, embraced, and conserved, not just for Pride Month, but for all year round. Through every intersection of identity, queer, trans, black, and indigenous people of color have contributed abundantly to transformative justice in our community and beyond. We must amplify their voices, represent them, and provide inclusive spaces for them to thrive. the recent political climate and current administration have been detrimental to our local LGBTQIA plus communities and LGBTQIA plus communities at large. In times like these, recognition for the LGBTQIA plus community is so important and highly valued. When we can come together and be proud of ourselves and each other, it is nothing to be taken for granted. When our humanity and visibility is faced with scrutiny and vitriol, moments when we can come together and celebrate our achievements is our own form of resistance. We must keep feeling joy and appreciating the little and big steps we make toward a better future ahead. Thank you all and happy Pride Month.

Joy, thank you very much. And we're going to want to do a photo here in just a minute with you and anybody who came with you. But first, are there any members of the public who would like to comment on this proclamation? Ms. Rogers.

So I just wanted to take the opportunity to say being a mother of someone that is transgender, my daughter has dreamed of moving away and owning a lot of land. That has always been her dream. But with the current climate right now, as much as I would love for her to stay in California forever, um i'm getting my my wish but not the way that i would like to get my wish my daughter does not feel safe to leave california and so i'm happy that there is a place although it's very restrictive for her right now i'm happy there is a place that she can be and feel safe and feel at home and even within our our family. There has been some behaviors or attitudes, I would say, that I'm not very proud of from some of her family members.

And so this hits home for me because I just want my baby, the person that I brought home from the hospital, to always feel loved. So thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this. But it's not about preference. It's not about any of that. It's about everyone is a person and we all deserve to be here. We all deserve to be loved. And so regardless of who my child lays down with or who she decides she wants to be a part of or whatever she wants to be, That's okay with me because I love her because she is her. I don't love her for a pronoun and so I just wish more people would see that and people that we're all people and we all deserve to be here and we all deserve to be loved and have compassion and empathy. So that would be all, thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Rogers.

Are there other members of the public who'd like to comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. And Joy, why don't you come on down? If there's anybody with you, please bring them. Let's take a photo. Joy, thank you again. Thank you. All right, let's move on to item nine, 9.1, or item nine, actually, our city manager and city attorney's reports. Madam city manager, any report this evening?

No report this evening, Mayor. I just wanted to, since it's my last City Council meeting, I just wanted to thank all of you for what has been an incredible six months. I've just had the most exhilarating and fun time here despite the $17.5 million challenge. and all of the other challenges that I had to address while I was here. And this is just a huge testament to how amazing this city is. It's left an imprint on my heart. When I came, I thought I would do this and then quickly retire. I needed to pay one more, the two quarters of tuition. And so I really thought, okay, I could do six months and learn the community and do my work and move. I didn't expect to get entangled in a good way in terms of my heart and my soul and really feeling a sense of community and a warmth here that I've really been thankful for. And it was from everybody, the community, the employees, and obviously all of you. I've mentioned to some of the employees how in my career I've always gotten two out of the three. Either a city will have great community, great employees, but sometimes the city council is constantly infighting and they don't get along and that makes it difficult for staff. Or the council gets along beautifully and the employees too, but the community really struggles with whether we're being transparent and there's a tough relationship in terms of building trust with the community. and different permutations and combinations, and this is really the first time in my career where I feel like all three were really strong, that there was, there's always trust that needs to be built with the community, but the community here is respectful, and they're engaged, and they want what's best. You as a Council have wanted what's best for the community, and the employees have been really dedicated and very creative, and so I just wanna thank you for the opportunity. I know you'll be in great hands with soon to be interim city manager, Jason Nutt. But I just wanted to thank you for your dedication to this community. I've experienced it firsthand. The courage that you show to make bold decisions is not common. The ethics that you've shown and that I've experienced, the integrity and the character that you bring to the work is extraordinary and it's also not always the case and the care that you've shown for the employees has been wonderful and giving me the latitude and the freedom to lead in a way that was authentic for me and that i felt was productive and really enabled for us to be as creative as we felt like we could be and you gave us the grace to do that and encourage that along the way. And I'm really thankful for that because this was so meaningful for me that it made me decide not to retire and then go back to my home community and take on a role that has some really significant challenges. So I don't know if I'll be blaming you all for that in a few months. when I can't fix the homelessness problem in the greater Los Angeles County area through this public financing agency. But thank you for filling my cup and for healing that part of me that felt like local government was broken. And it just meant so much to me to have the opportunity to get to know you all so much better and to work together to serve this incredible community. So thank you.

Madam City Attorney, if you'll give us a moment, we'll come to you. But we want to linger on our city manager for just a second. Thank you for those words, Lorianne. And I'll speak on behalf of Council to start, and then Council can weigh in afterwards. When we invited you here, it was with a pretty narrow portfolio. We knew we had some budget challenges. We wanted some expertise in the area, and your background was tailor-made. And you could have come here and focused on that very narrow niche, worked with Scott Wagner on the budget and called it a day. You could have phoned in the rest, and you didn't. In the six months that you were here, you left a legacy. You made an impression here across the board, and that starts with internal culture, that moves on to things like the discussion that we just had, where very long-term strategic thinking for the city in terms of our infrastructure. You made a difference across all city departments. The leadership team could not speak more highly of you. We, I think I speak for the group, had just an amazing time working with you, and you've shown us how to be better council members and things that the city can do differently and better. and we couldn't thank you enough. I'm gonna stop there and let my colleagues speak, and then we do have a little gift. We're not gonna let you walk out of here without a memento from Santa Rosa, but first, which of my colleagues would like to say a few words? Ms. Rogers, you wanna hold onto the mic?

Give a crack at it. So for me, when Markeisha left, City Manager Smith, I was like, I am not like, I'm not getting close, I'm not working with anyone else, they just come and leave, I'm not doing that. But just to see how you worked with staff, how you worked with us, that you were innovative, even though you were only here for a short amount of time, just how you wanted to propel Santa Rosa and leave a legacy. Like who leaves a legacy after six months? Like that doesn't really happen. And I don't think that we were prepared enough for that as the mayor said. Grateful and thankful for everything that you've done. And for me, thank you for when I didn't understand something, you were able to just slow it down for me a little bit and teach me and let me know how it works. Because we don't know how it works on the city manager side, we know how it works on the elected side. So, no matter where you go, even if you may not like us in six months from now, because you decided to sign up for something else, I know that they will be very blessed with all that you have to offer. And I'm just grateful that you were able to come here for the time that you were. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Mr. Alvarez.

Thank you for the kind words regarding Santa Rosa. They're truly appreciated, but I know that we are in a better path because of your efforts. And I definitely wanna thank you for the long term. energy that you might not be here in the six months, but yet your energy will still be here. And I do appreciate that of you, that you made that commitment, that you gave that of yourself to the future of Santa Rosa. And the rest goes without saying. And we will have crabs once again, sooner or later, even if I have to catch them over in San Diego and take them to L.A. So you can see them.

Yep, thank you for bringing your immense talent and fresh eyes to our city. I think you achieved more in six months than many have in decades just because of the quality of your character and just the sharpness of your creative spirit and your heart. And so just a really sincere big thank you. I think it's also important for the council, for me, for us and the community to hear how much is right about this town. you know, when you're working on problems for years after years to decades, right? It's easy to get down on a place and think, you know, oh, this place is broken, it's unfixable. But really, when you get that outside perspective, I love talking to people who've just moved to Santa Rosa and they're like, oh, I came from this place to that place. This place is great. The air is clean. The people are so kind. We have so much going for us. And sometimes an outsider reflecting that back to us, somebody who's become an insider, is really just so special. And then finally, I just want to say, For folks who aren't aware of what La Casa is, La Casa is something that as a member of the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority, I look up to. This is the only entity, it's the only, there's four regional housing finance authorities in the state of California, and this is the only one that has been capitalized. And our city manager is going to go on to be their first CFO. And this is a huge BFD. And I cannot wait to hear the tales of how it works. And I hope we stay in touch. And I just wish you and them just the very best luck. I can't think of a better opportunity for someone as talented as yourself.

Thank you. Ms. Banuelos.

Thank you, Mayor.

Oh my gosh. I echo what's already been said. It has been a pleasure really working with you, Lorianne, and I jokingly told you one day that my boss is named Lorianne, and the interim city manager is named Lorianne, and at times I had to like, really, is my boss or is it the city manager? So I thought, when does that ever happen? Because your names are so unique. I have really felt really how easy it is to work with you and I really appreciate that. And in the short time that you've been here, I think the thing that you've taught me the most is really thinking about long term and thinking about the future and the decisions that we're making now and how they're gonna affect those who come way after us, long after we're gone, and the way that you have helped us with our budget, with what we discussed earlier today, with economic development and changing buildings and all of that. You have done so much for us, with us, and also the staff, the way that I can see how easy it is for them to relate to you. I don't know if we'll ever get that lucky again. I feel the same way that my colleagues have said, you know, when you came, we didn't know what to expect. And we just wanted to get through this next six months and continue to function somehow. And it's actually, it's been a huge gift. And so I just want to thank you.

Ms. McDonald.

Yeah, I wanna say thank you so much, Lorianne. You came at a time that I think you were so needed as a trusted voice of your financial background, but what I saw from your leadership, from my perspective, not only of how you influenced me, but you really trusted our professional staff to bring forward very innovative, creative ideas, the CalPERS, the real estate and development. Because of your vast experience, you were able to bring them to council prepared and ready for those questions, but also giving them that latitude to bring it forward finally. So I feel like you've allowed a lot of our staff that opportunity to be seen and bring this forward and get it across the line. Sometimes I've seen where interims come in and they like it because they can come in and they can get things kind of going and then they're out of there. They don't worry about if anyone likes them that much because they're only here for a short amount of time. But that was actually not your strategy at all and not how you work. It's not who you are. You came in, you built a team in a very quick amount of time. You worked with our incoming interim city manager Jason that just beautifully I think to get him prepared and not that you weren't before Jason but really working together as a team and working with our CFO and so I appreciate it so much and for me at the time that you came in it felt chaotic to say the least for where I was at and I appreciate you've help me to have the faith back in government, working with our team, and so thank you. We appreciate you so much. We're gonna miss you, but we're excited to see what you do. So bring those other good ideas back when you're ready, and we'll keep growing as Santa Rosa continues to flourish, so thanks again.

Thank you. Mr. Okrupke.

Yeah, I think some of my colleagues have pretty much said almost everything there is to say. You know, interim city managers can, as Council Member McDonald just said, can come in and make some hard decisions and be the bad guy and get out, or they can just be a caretaker and be like, I'm not going to upset the boat, right? As long as it's still afloat when I leave, that's my job and I'm out of here. You hired someone new. As someone else said, that's not your character. I think you showed your character by wanting to take on challenges and being kind of innovative and challenging staff of how to do things. And I think, you know, in any organization, whether it be public, private, whatever, with leadership, you can go to, you know, rank and file and your average employee and say, hey, what do you think of the leader? And you'll get a... You know, it's it's not it's not atypical to hear like, well, don't get me wrong, I really respect them. But or you hear a they're good. But I've also seen this. I've never heard that about your interactions with staff. So either everybody in the city is a great liar or you really are that good. so i just want to say thank you for that and and you push staff you support staff you push us you support us i really do appreciate that and i appreciate your time here it was also really cool to see someone new to the area and as we you know when you live somewhere like the vineyards and alcatraz and all this other stuff we see it and it's kind of like oh yeah that's also there but like seeing it through someone's eyes that you know oh you guys do this oh you have that that's so cool like yeah it is cool like yeah I really, you know, it kind of refreshed it. I'm glad we talked about economic development today, especially downtown, because I think Elko Key is going to get a revenue hit when you move on. You should have been charged rent the amount of times you spent there. So hopefully you will come back and visit us, and we can all get together and go to Elko Key, and it'll be great to see you again. So please don't be a stranger. Thank you so much.

All right. Well, as our city undergoes its time of self-reflection right now, I think it's worth sort of thinking about where our recent city managers have moved on to. So Lorianne's heading out to be CEO of La Casa, one of the biggest and most consequential organizations in the state. Our previous city manager moved on to become city manager of Sacramento. That should give it says something about a city when their leaders move on to positions like that. That should give us confidence, too, that we're a place that can train and build leaders for other parts of the state. And with that, we don't want you to forget about Santa Rosa, the place that you help so much. So we have two small things. One, of course, because you're a foodie and because it's Sonoma. A little bit of wine from a winery called Matanzas Creek, right outside the city limits. So when you drink it, think of Arturar. All right, a little bit of a memory. And then the second gift, you don't have to open it now, but it is a local artist who makes bowls from wood recovered from the fires. So charred wood, it's the story of making something beautiful from a tragedy. And so please think of Santa Rosa when you look at it. And I should not, I did not mean to imply that Santa Rosa was ever a tragedy. That was poorly phrased. I hope the minutes will be adjusted. Just think of Santa Rosa, that's what I was trying to convey. All right, but it is a tragedy that our city attorney has to follow that. Autumn, we're gonna go right from that to talking about settlements and active litigation. I'm sorry for that lead in.

Thank you, Mayor. You really set me up there. Very, very hard to follow that heartfelt farewell to Lorianne, and I will miss her as well. I will miss her sense of humor. So best of luck, Lorianne, and I hope that we do keep in touch. But with that, I do have a litigation report for... There were two settlements previously approved by Council in closed session that were finalized in May. The first, Pearson v. City of Santa Rosa. And that settlement and release executed on March 31st, 2026, in the amount of $3,680,000 paid on behalf of the city and release all claims. Payment was issued on May 6th, 2026 with 1 million paid directly by the city and 2,680,000 paid by the city's risk pool. The second settlement to report is with the former city attorney Teresa Stricker. The city entered into a settlement agreement and release of claims with former city attorney Teresa Stricker with a settlement amount of $145,000. This is not a separation agreement, but rather former city attorney Teresa Stricker submitted her resignation in May 2026, announcing her last day with the city would be June 2nd, 2026. By entering into the agreement, former city attorney Teresa Stricker waived all potential claims about her employment. I'm moving on to ongoing litigation. We have an active caseload right now of 27 litigation matters with trial dates assigned to approximately 30% of the trial court level matters. And we have a further five cases currently on appeal following rulings in favor of the city at the trial court level. And Mayor, that concludes the litigation report for tonight. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam City Attorney. Thanks for picking that one up off the rough transition. We'll open up the public comment, either on active settlements and litigation or how wonderful Lorianne is. Mr. Hilber, I see you have the mic. Would you like to kick us off?

Okay, yeah, Michael Hilber. We're gonna expect to see a very substantial payout in that shooting of that unarmed homeless guy over by St. Rose Church. So that's very, very unfortunate. Shouldn't have happened. I imagine that's active litigation at this point, or maybe not yet. And secondly, this $3.68 million settlement, that's really appalling because the city of Santa Rosa had zero liability or blame in that case. That was a case of a small child in a crosswalk on Owen Avenue getting run down while in a crosswalk by a reckless and attentive driver. And it doesn't add up that the city is taking responsibility and paying 3.68 million for that because that was 100% the fault of the driver. Ran down a child in a crosswalk. Thank you, Michael.

Mr. DeWitt.

Yes, sir. Thank you kindly. I wanted to say, oh, first, I'm Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. I asked the city manager to stay. Typically, many of the things I ask for down here don't happen, but hey, I understand it. She moved on to a different spot. The city manager just before her was a really nice city manager also. I'd wanted her to stay, but didn't know she was leaving. I've known every city manager since Mintern, 61 years ago. The whole thing about having a city manager for the future, I hope you folks are looking for somebody young, somebody who might be female, because they appear to be a little bit more compassionate than all those white guys I met along the way, all right? So I'm putting it out there. I want you to hire a woman of color perhaps, sooner than later, and keep them. When you put it into the contract, you say, hey, you don't get a pension unless you stay 10 years. We gotta make sure we get these people to stay around, all right? And that they're here for the long haul so that the community can actually feel invested in the position of the city manager working with us. Did you know that the city manager back in the day, he came to the opening of the Boys and Girls Club back in the 60s. You'd see the city manager at different things and it was happening. That's a really important thing for the community feel the trust that the administrative officer for the organization is paying attention to the taxpayers and the families and the people. And get that next one, as soon as they get here, tell them we wanna have a meal over in Roseland. We wanna have a community meeting over in Roseland. It's not all about presenting the police officers to us and all this other stuff. No, we want the new city manager to come and talk with us and hang out and feel like part of the community. Thank you kindly. Good luck to you, Ms. Farrell.

Thank you, Duane. Are there other members of the public that would like to comment on either report? Seeing none, we'll close public comment on this item. We'll move on to item 10, statements of abstention or recusal by council. Any statements of abstention or recusal this evening? Ms. McDonald.

Thank you, Mayor. I have a couple of different items under the budget that I'll be recusing from tonight due to a personal relationship.

Thank you. We will then move on to Mayor and Council Members' reports. Are there any reports this evening? Mr. Alvarez.

First, I want to thank the Healing Grace Foundation for the work that they do in the community. I was fortunate enough to be with them at the Palms Inn doing a barbecue. where nearly 100 hamburgers, hot dogs were served to the residents. They're doing great work and I'm gonna order, she's not here, but also I wanna thank the CAB for helping with the grant to make that happen for the Healing Grace. So CAB applications, money doing good work in the community. Secondly, I'd like to ask the support of my colleagues to produce an ordinance to address unpermitted food vendors with the lens on environmental impact. And I'd like to make the motion to put that on the agenda.

Second. Could you clarify the ordinance of it, Mr. Alvarez?

Yes, sir, it's to produce or create an ordinance to address unpermitted food vendors, pretty much street vending in the city of Santa Rosa within its city limits, with a focus on environmental impact, specifically grease being But nonetheless, though, it's a motion that I would like to put on the future calendar.

Understood. So we have a motion, we have a second. So that would come back at the next meeting, is that correct, Madam City Clerk, for a vote?

Yes.

Or when we agendize it, rather?

Yes, so it'll come back at the next meeting for Council to determine if it should be brought forward for a future agenda item.

Yes, please. Perfect. All right, thank you both. Do you have what you need, Madam City Clerk, a motion? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Alvarez. Ms. Rogers, let's stay with you.

Thank you. So quickly, just wanted to give a shout out to the Rotary and thank them for honoring our Police Officers and Firefighter of the Year at the luncheon that they have annually. I was accompanied by a couple of my colleagues, Council Member McDonald, Mayor Stapp, I think that was it. So it was a good time in Cal Cities. I attended the Cal Cities Policy Committee June 4th and 5th for governance, transparency and labor relations policy and public safety. We spoke about wildfire mitigation, fire insurance, and the city liability, there was a presentation on city liability and I found it very interesting speaking about how people feel like they're suing our police officers or they're suing our fire, but in reality, there's a big chunk of that money that comes from the general fund that can be doing a lot within the community. So when people are getting these great big settlements, people are like, yeah, we stuck it to the police, but really we're sticking it to the municipality in which they are a part of. So that was a pretty wide discussion and there was a lot of feedback. On that, I was able to attend the Pride Parade with our own Mayor Stapp. That was fun. He was decorated, to say the least.

Not everything needs to be presented to the public.

Oh, okay, sorry about that. And then the 56th Annual Sonoma County Juneteenth Festival, and I know some of my colleagues were there prior to me getting there. So thank you for representing. That was a lot of fun and had a lot of yummy food, and I look forward to seeing it next year, which it will not be at MLK Park because that will be under construction. So that is great. I wanted to give a quick shout out to Santa Rosa Fire Department Squad 2 for, as many of you know, I'm an avid gym person. Rat is not a good term. I'm a goer. I love the gym. So I was at the gym this morning, and we had a 75-year-old who fell off the treadmill. And squad two came. And prior to squad two getting there, there was a nurse there. who is married to one of our fire station eight employees who was helping the lady who fell off the treadmill. So it was a big family affair this morning at the gym, but squad two came in. We didn't have to bring the big apparatus, so that was nice, but just to see them in the community and working, and I looked from a distance, but it's really great to see our staff out in the community doing what they do and doing it so well. And I hope Ms. Janice is okay, because she did need to be transported to the hospital. Happy birthday to Council Member Alvarez. I'm happy you were born. I thank your mama for that. So happy birthday to Council. And my dad too. your mama and happy birthday to council member alvarez and i know it was already said but city manager farrell i really do want to thank you and wish you the best in all your endeavors you have truly left your mark on santa rosa and i'm thankful that you came so thank you very much that concludes my remarks thank you thank you miss mcdonald

Thank you, Mayor. Yes, I was able to attend the Rotary Luncheon, so thank you to Santa Rosa Rotary for putting that event on, and just congratulations to Officer John Crispin, as well as Firefighter Nathan Dilley for their awards that they received that day. I wanted to give them both a shout-out. It was well-deserved. My understanding is that Firefighter Nathan Dilley could have been in a movie, like rescued somebody from a burning vehicle, and so I just wanna know that they're, we have a lot of everyday heroes working for the city of santa rosa but these two were called out this year so congratulations to them i also went to the fire pinning ceremony for their promotions as well as some new recruits that are coming to the city of santa rosa and just want to say thanks for being willing to work for us and welcome to the team and um last but not least i want to just do a quick i missed the park a month event on saturday i try to go each month um but I was at the World Cup, so I didn't get to this one. Don't feel sorry for me, I know. But I wanna say thank you. In April was the Volunteer of Month event that they host at one of the parks where all the volunteers from our parks are consistently helping, and there's people that work at our rural cemetery, and the ladies at Duterte Park, and there's, folks that work at the Prince Memorial Greenway, as well as Southeast Greenway. These are volunteers across the city that help keep those parks going day to day. And I just wanna say thank you to all of them. I had an email sent to me from Carol Quant, who is the chair of our Parks and Rec Board, just reminding me and thanking me for attending that event. But I just wanna say thank you to her and everybody else who helps in those open spaces we all love.

Thank you. Mr. Kripke.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just a couple quick things. We had, last Monday, we had Economic Development Subcommittee meeting, which was a pretty hearty agenda with some very important topics. Amongst them, it was an update on, and direction given on plans for the California Welcome Center on Railroad Square. There was also a discussion on tourism and its trends, thanks to Dr. Eiler from some university, I can't recall. And also there was a discussion on the Ruth Asawa panels and how we're gonna go forward with those and direction given on that. And then finally a large discussion on Roseland and how the city and staff would like to protect the cultural and heritage and vibrancy of that neighborhood going forward. So some really important topics that were discussed in a very robust meeting, but important nonetheless.

Thank you. Just a few quick items for me. At the last Cinema Clean Power board meeting, I guess a week ago, more discussion of how to push geothermal exploration forward. Speaking of how the county punches above its weight in a lot of ways, we have the geysers up there, the world's largest geothermal field, and we want to double the amount of power that puts out, and Cinema Clean Power is doing a lot of advocacy to make that easier. We also had a Santa Rosa Plain Groundwater Sustainability Agency meeting. It was mostly administrative, but we did approve a budget for this coming year. And then, as has been mentioned, leaving the committees aside, we had two large events. We had Country Summer and the Pride Parade here in Santa Rosa. I know that the county technically gets to claim the fairgrounds, but everybody knows it's really Santa Rosa. 15,000 people there, including our new joint command center with SRPD and the center was afire. It was a pleasure to get to sneak back there and see how that works. Thank you for keeping everyone safe this weekend. And again, you had the pride parade with a few thousand people and you had the country summer. Everybody was in town. And then the Juneteenth event, as Ms. Rogers mentioned, that was well attended with double the number of vendors from past years. So that was outstanding. And I will conclude with not a meeting update, but a grant update. After a year plus, really two years plus, of advocating for the feds to finally cut our check for our buses, And as we approach the deadline here in September, they finally said, fine, we will give you your $9.9 million that we agreed to back in 2024, which allows the city to buy 10 buses, nine, thank you, Mr. Hennessey, nine new buses for the city, so we're not having to lease them from Golden Gate Express any longer, from the Golden Gate Bridge District. So that was a big win. $9.9 million for the city. Lots of advocacy from our lobbyists and behind the scenes. So a bit of good news. Mr. Hennessy, thank you to you and your team for pushing that forward for so long. I will conclude my report and let's open it up to public comment. Mr. Hilber, I see you at the mic.

Michael Hilbert, I just want to simply put an objection on the record to this unpermitted food vendor nonsense. Food vending, it's an all or nothing deal. You're either permitted by the health department, the county health department, permitted and collecting sales tax, or you're not permitted, you should be subject to being shut down. There are no partial permits for operating unpermitted. We recently heard about a taco stand that just popped up in the parking lot the Raleigh Shopping Center at Guerneville Road and Fulton. Just, you know, without asking the property owner or any of the businesses, just set up shop in the parking lot, no permit from the health department or nothing, you know. I would suggest, you know, look at enforcement and shut down the unpermitted vendors.

Thank you, Michael. Mr. DeWitt?

Definitely wanted to make a comment based on what Mr. Alvarez has put forward and Ms. Rogers also. There are a number of unpermitted food vendors operating in various parks. the one on Southwest Park on Hearn Avenue, one of the vendors actually hangs their wares from the sign that says no vending in the park. Why don't you change the policy and make it so you can vend in any park throughout the city so that people can pursue an income. At the same time, you can get a revenue stream. For years, I've heard the city always plead poverty saying they can't take care of what they need to do, especially at the parks. So if you got a revenue stream from the vendors, that could help with the upkeep of the parks. On any given night now at Southwest Community Park, there could be as many as five. not just one or two, but five separate vendors setting up with barbecues, with a lot of stuff, a lot of equipment. Every night one rolls in and they got their thing going with the whole clientele that starts coming at six in the evening and they stay till after 11. So if you could make some revenue from this, that would really help the parks. And then one other thing, keep in mind, it's not just the grease. Asthma, the kids in Roseland have the highest rate of asthma in the county and the barbecues, are essentially adding to that problem. We have some cars from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District now riding through doing air quality tests. We need to link in with them, find ways to get funding to help those vendors find ways to avoid that toxic pollution that comes off of the barbecues. They could have hoods on there, thank you.

Thank you, Duane. Are there any other members of the public who would like to comment? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and we will move on to item 11.2. We've got a couple of appointments to make. We'll start with 11.2.1, our appointments to fill upcoming vacancies on the Sonoma County Library Commission. Ms. Fleming has stepped away. Vice Mayor, would you mind jumping in?

Sure. I'll make a motion to appoint Sarah Lagos as the city county representative and Josh Hemsahee as the city's representative on the Sonoma County Library Commission.

Second. We have a motion and a second by Mr. Alvarez. We'll go to public comment. Are there any members of the public who would like to comment on this item? Seeing none, any discussion from council? Then Madam City Clerk, whenever you're ready, we can call the vote.

They're moving like lightning tonight, one moment. Council Member Rogers? Council Member MacDonald? Yes. Council Member Fleming? Yes. Council Member Banuelos? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Aye. Vice Mayor Okropki?

Aye.

Mayor Stapp?

Yes.

Let the record show this passes with six affirmative votes.

thank you and one more appointment to make we'll do item 11.3.1 our appointment to the renewal enterprise district housing fund board of directors uh and for this i am going to uh announce and request that the council approve our current appointee um a familiar face to all of us mr mr guine who used to who ran housing here at the city for a number of years also sits on the burbank housing board and it is uh it's hard to think of a more qualified person for this position Thank you for your service. I'd request board approval, a motion and approval for Mr. Gwine to continue to serve. So moved. Second. We have a motion and then we have a second by Ms. McDonald. Let's do public comment. Mr. DeWitt, you have the floor.

member of the Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group. And I've known Mr. Goyne during those years, and I am glad that he's here and involved in things. I hadn't seen him since he left the city. I was hoping that along with this reappointment, you folks could explain better to the public what the red is doing. A lot of folks don't know about how it got set up and what it does. And there's a lot of money involved. So it would be really interesting if you could just take a moment to say, hey, this is what the red does and how the money gets going. I'm sure that there's good things happening over there, but you never really read about it in the news or hear much about it. Last I heard there was like, I think it was 10 or $11 million there at one point. So if you could give us some news to use, Good luck to you, Mr. Goyne. You have a wonderful time at that.

Thank you, Mr. DeWitt. We're not gonna do that presentation here, but we do have RED come in annually, and you can also visit their website to get all the details. Are there other members of the public who'd like to comment? Seeing none, we have a motion and we have a second. Unless there's any further discussion? Seeing no further discussion, Madam City Clerk, why don't we call the vote?

Thank you. Council Member Rogers? Aye. Council Member MacDonald? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Aye. Council Member Banuelos? Yes. Council Member Alvarez?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Okropke?

Aye.

Mayor Stepp?

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you. We will move on to consent. We have items 13.1 through 13.21 this evening. Are there any questions on any of the items? Does anyone wish to poll any of these items? Seeing none, we'll go to public comment. Are there any members of the public that wish to comment on the consent calendar? Mr. DeWitt, kick us off.

All right, sir. Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. Item 13.6, $2.5 million to do a master plan for a park. This is really a lot of money, folks. And the thing is, you need to have a better public participation approach. Authentic community engagement needs to happen on these types of parks. Usually what happens is staff controls it. They say, we checked off a box, we had a meeting and away we go. Also, what's really important is you're gonna have this North Santa Rosa Station Area Plan Specific Plan Update, you're getting some more funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and it's going to be for planning, public engagement support, and environmental review. I've been to a number of meetings of the MTC in the past, and I've actually tried to make comment on their public engagement policies. Their current one is up right now if you wanna chime in and talk with them about it. I've been doing it for over 20 years and I point out that basically they don't really engage the public. Okay, especially the bus riders. I'm a bus rider from the way back. Remember when Golden Gate Transit got started here in Santa Rosa over 50 years ago? And riding the buses and having community engagement in the planning for the buses is really important. So I'm hoping that you folks will point out on this that you want some authentic community engagement, not just ticking off the boxes. And then last but not least, you folks have been giving the money for the homeless stuff. We got a homeless emergency and you're doing a local housing allocation program plan. We've had a housing allocation plan for decades. We need to get more housing, obviously. Closer into the town, that was pointed out today in the earlier study session. So more housing downtown, build it up, taller, more people. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Hilbert, before we go to you, one point of clarification for Mr. Hennessey. Item 13.6, that's, well, actually, it's actually worth having you come down to the mic for this one, if I'm thinking correctly. Sorry to make you stretch your legs. But just from my recollection, that is actually all public involvement, is it not? That's a Sonoma Land Trust grant and the Southeast Greenway volunteers coming together to make a project that the city would not have been able to accomplish otherwise and move forward.

Yeah, so of that... The scope and fee that we solicited for, we specifically included in that request for proposals that 30% of the effort be explicitly for public engagement and outreach and receiving feedback. We received 12 proposals for that. Most of the firms hit that number and exceeded it. Of the $2.3 million, $750,000 is from an MTC grant. Almost a million dollars is from generous donations funded through the Sonoma Land Trust and the remainder is Measure M funds that have been sitting in that account for some time. So we'll be proceeding with that starting next month upon the authorization of this contract.

fact that you could do that off the cuff dan that's impressive i made some of that up i'm sure just but just just to underline we the city the city has not promoted this enough the fact that we had sonoma land trust and our volunteers come in delivering significant significant amounts of money to push forward the project that they are in large part responsible for because they fought for for 14 years and now they're assisting with the planning yeah that's we need to promote that

We have a cooperative agreement with both the Land Trust and the Southeast Greenway Campaign. They'll be involved, they're trusted partners throughout this process. They have been involved in every step of the way from developing the request for proposals to helping doing the funding plan to interviewing consulting teams. They're completely on board and we're excited to go. People will be sick of hearing about this this time next year.

Dan, thanks for letting me put you on the spot. So that's such a great story. All right, Mr. Hilber, over to you.

OK, thank you. 13.16 and 17, I object to both of those. There are no legitimate metrics on these things. They're phony. 13.17 is just a liberal's hand now, money. It's illegitimate. $13,000, $16,000, that's a million dollars to keep that, say, parking lots, section of the parking lot open. That's $85,000 a month. That's ridiculous to just be paying that to just watch a parking lot, and there's not that many people there. I'm just sorry that your friend Jack Tibbetts is not still here because, you know, I bet he's the type, he'd love to get his hands on that money. He liked... while he was here to have the government give him money, regardless of whether it was spent responsibly or not. He was always there to be on the receiving end. But anyway, did you read that he came out of the closet with a red-headed maggot? I found that as funny as hell, right?

Thank you, Michael. Are there any other members of the public who'd like to comment?

Seeing none, we'll close public comment, and I'll turn it over to Mr. Okrupke for a motion. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I will move items 13.1 through 13.21, noting amended resolution on item 13.18, which was provided by staff today and published prior to the start of the meeting.

Second.

We have a motion and a second. Madam City Clerk, you can call the vote whenever you're ready.

To confirm, that was second by Councilmember MacDonald. Thank you.

Correct.

Council Member Rogers? Aye. Council Member MacDonald? Aye. Council Member Fleming? Aye. Council Member Banuelos? Yes. Council Member Alvarez?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Krupke? Aye. Mayor Stapp?

Yes.

Let the record show this passes unanimously.

Thank you. All right, folks, we've been at it for three hours, so we are gonna take a 10-minute break. We'll come back very shortly after the quarter hour. Yes, sir. All right. Welcome back, everyone. The time is, what is it? It's 519. We will reconvene in open session. Madam City Clerk, would you please call the roll?

Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Rogers. Council Member MacDonald. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Banuelos. Council Member Alvarez. Vice Mayor Okrepke.

Here.

Mayor Stapp. Here. Let the record show, all council members are present, with the exception of Council Member Banuelos.

Wonderful, we're gonna do our first public comment on non-agenda matters before going into the public hearing. So item 14, first, this is your chance to comment on items not listed on the agenda. Fred, you have the floor.

Good afternoon, Fred Ahlebach. I had a comment about, I received a piece of mail about Santa Rosa's budget issues and the survey that went out that resulted in the five priorities. And I noticed that the survey said there were about 2,000 responses and out of the number of people in the city, I calculated that was about 1.2% of the city responded to the survey. So I hope that the city is not basing its priorities on that low level of survey response. And one of the things that I've been thinking is that the council and staff should be able to look at the demographic facts of Santa Rosa and see the median household income, education, et cetera, and determine what the greatest needs are. And so I would think that in addition to potholes, police, and fire, that addressing the city's level of disadvantaged communities, which is about 40% of the population, should be a top priority. And so, just in my way of thinking, you shouldn't need to have a survey tell you what to do when you can see those facts plain as day. So that's just a thought I had for your consideration.

Thank you, Fred. We're gonna go to Dwayne DeWitt, and then after that, Michael Hilber and Cameron Miller, and if we could use both lecterns, that would be helpful. Dwayne.

Go right ahead.

All righty. Hello, I bring you to the Wayback Machine once again. Duane DeWitt from Roseland. So this was written 30 full, well, basically 30 years ago. And at the time, the gentleman writing it was pointing out about the... planning mistakes of the last 20 years. And he was talking about downtown Santa Rosa. So today I was surprised that you guys have already been working behind the scenes for years to get rid of what we call City Hall and do something different. But what he pointed out is that downtown Santa Rosa is fractionalized. That was 30 years ago. He was pointing out that there was a dilemma of having people, not enough foot traffic to the storefronts, and that there basically was not enough people in the downtown area. That's 30 full years ago, all right? So this isn't me saying this when I come to you. This is basically that person at that time, Brad Bollinger was known as Mr. Business in downtown Santa Rosa. So he was saying these things, all right? So you're talking about trying to make some positive things happen. One of them, you're looking at the United Soccer League and you're gonna bring those guys in here and they're gonna basically get some stuff going here and it's gonna be helpful to us, we hear. But what's happening is you're not involving the public in a lot of these discussions until after the fact. Like to find out today that the deal's already done. You showed us a picture of a building that the city used to own. right there on Santa Rosa Avenue that's now where you're gonna trade our city hall to. And that man got that building because there was a financial incentive involved with the promise there would be housing put into the AT&T building. And now we're gonna have to pay to get it. It's not fair.

Thank you, Duane. Michael, Cameron, and Sarau. Michael.

Southwest San Rosa is gang-infested, and it's got a tremendous amount of this Norte X4 vile graffiti. And somehow, people seem to accept this as just normal. It shouldn't be the case. In some instances, you also see the blue from the other team, right over top of the red. That fatal stabbing at Montgomery High, you know what that was? You can read the complaint for the civil lawsuit. It was a Norteno punk who went into a classroom to physically assault a Sereno. And he got a knife in his abdomen for his trouble. And the stupid school district paid out $6.8 million as if they were both victims. That really tells you the extent to which the gang presence is appalling. And I'll add in something else on a personal note. A week and a half ago, I was physically assaulted by a tattoo-covered Mexican guy. while trying to ride my bike home from the store. And I'm pretty sure it had a racial component to it. It's the same sort of thing you expect to encounter in a hell hole like Stockton or something like that. So from my perspective, that's the reality of what Santa Rosa is today. Thank you. Thanks, Michael.

Cameron, Sarah, and then Camille. Cameron.

Hi, I'm Cameron with North Bay Organizing Project and just here to talk about the ongoing contract that the city has with flock safety and those types of security cameras. My main concern, I was at the past meeting where you discussed noncompliance with ICE. And there have just been so many cases where even cities with noncompliance ordinances, ICE has been able to get around that. And there have been data breaches with flock safety. And they can still use those cameras to track people. And that's really concerning and just makes that interesting. non-compliance not feel as real or I just don't trust it as much. And just in general, I'm very concerned with the idea of our surveillance and security being managed by AI and outsourced. That just feels very wrong with me. And there's been data leaks and so many problems with it already. It doesn't take much imagination to picture just how bad it could get. I've all read books and seen movies where you can imagine what that looks like. And I just don't want that to happen here. Thank you.

Thank you, Cameron. Sarah, Camille, and then Jenny. Sarah.

I am a resident of District 1 Alvarez, and I'm here to also touch on my concerns with flock safety. I outright feel like it is a very easy way to fall into abuse of power. It is on 24-7. It is ran by AI in a third party. There has been numerous, like Cameron has said, numerous issues come up. with it misreading O's and zeros and pulling over the wrong people because it's AI and it's not being double checked. So yeah, those are my biggest concerns as far as being a citizen that is in an area where flock is, like there's a lot of fucking flock cameras in my neighborhood and it's stressful and it feels like, I need to be super paranoid and super concerned, and I can't really exist without eyes on me. And it's kind of like, am I already guilty, even though I haven't been doing anything wrong? So, yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Sarah. Camille, Jenny, and then Noah. We can. You can also lower the podium a bit if you wish.

Oh, I would love that. Thank you, Owen. Thank you. My name is Camille, and I'm a constituent of Santa Rosa's District 6. I'm also part of this group through North Bay Organizing Project, dedicated to defending our community's civil liberties. And I am deeply concerned about flock and the lack of local regulation around what is essentially surveillance technology. especially as I'm learning something new about every week about flock in California, just inhaling footage of our routines and whereabouts and putting us at risk to frequent data exposure incidences, whether they're accidental or intentional. Santa Rosa right now shares data with Oakland and San Francisco, which are two cities facing class action lawsuits right now over flock regarding data sharing practices and tracking drivers movements. It's also known in California where SB 34 and SB 54 prohibits law enforcement from sharing license plate data with federal agencies or sharing resources to aid immigration enforcement. It's known that police are casually violating that and searching for flocks, searching flocks databases on behalf of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. And that concerns me because even if we trust our own police department, how do we know that none of the cities that we're sharing data with aren't granting favors like that. And these contracts are covered by hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. And I'm not sure where that cost shifts when the grants end. And if not already, I would like to know if you can define for us the point where our current data sharing with all the flocks, you know, subtly updated terms and agreements would officially cross the line so that we don't have, you know, location-specific dossiers on all of us. So our eyes are on you, the City Council, to show us how you plan to navigate that when our tax dollars and data is on the line.

Thank you, Camille. Jenny, Noah, and then Joy.

Good evening, City Council. My name is Jenny Gilpin, and I'm a constituent of District 2 here in Sonoma County. I'm also an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I've showed up today to urge you guys to reevaluate our contract and our partnership with Flock Surveillance, and it's because Flock is an untrustworthy company. When Flock pitches its technologies to city like ours, they promise complete local control over who sees our data, but their actual track record tells a completely different story. Just a few months ago in February, 2026, Mountain View discovered that federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE and CBP, had been secretly accessing their local surveillance data for months. They did this without permission or knowledge of the Mountain View Police Department. The Mountain View Police Chief completely lost confidence in Flock as a vendor and immediately ordered all of their cameras turned off. But this wasn't isolated, it wasn't just a software glitch. At the same time an official audit was done in Ventura County down south, it revealed that Flock had inadvertently shared their local surveillance data with out-of-state and federal agencies over 364,000 times. Again, this occurred entirely without the department's knowledge or approval, violating California state laws designed to protect citizens' privacy. Flock has demonstrated a blatant disregard for regulatory and legal boundaries. They're facing sweeping class action lawsuits right here in California for creating what attorneys call an illegal, unconstitutional mass surveillance dragnet. In Ohio and in Illinois, when the city has canceled the contract and told them to get rid of their cameras, they turn them back on and continue installing them. We are dealing with a hyper-aggressive, venture-backed surveillance company that repeatedly treats local policy restrictions as mere suggestions, and I urge the Council to reconsider the FLOC contract this fall.

Thank you, Jenny. Noah, Joy, and Sophia.

I'm Noah Lewin, I'm a District Five resident and also part of the Civil Liberties Task Force through North Bay Organizing Project. And I wanna share some similar concerns I have, like my task force members, as well as concerns people who we have spoken to during canvassing efforts have voiced about regarding security and funding. So I wanted to bring up some questions also about the budget and funding. Right now the city gets $423,000 annually through a 36 month grant contract to fund flock cameras. But I wonder how this money is going to be, how we're gonna get this money the grant runs out and if it would come from other services that the city provides because although certain services might not be marketed like to prevent crime or solve crime like how FLOC is, these much needed services do prevent crime and promote community wellbeing and safety. Another concern is the lawsuits in cities like San Francisco and San Jose pertaining to government employees outside of the city jurisdiction accessing flock data from within the city. And as of February 2026, the terms and conditions of flock no longer have any language prohibiting the sale of customer data. And while they claim the cities with flock cameras have legal ownership over the data, flock has, to quote from the terms and condition, the exclusive right to determine and control the method, timing, format, and medium of the sharing of data. And while city leaders may promise that they won't use data unlawfully and unethically, they cannot promise that the company itself will do the same. Thank you.

Thank you, Noah. Joy, and then Sophia.

Can you hear me all right? My name is Joy Ayodele. I'm a lifelong Santa Rosa resident and constituent of District 2. I'm also a community organizer with the North Bay Organizing Project. For the last year, I've been working with a dedicated group of community members looking to defend their civil liberties and fill the gaps in this work locally. The main issue that we've been following is regarding the company flock safety, and more specifically, their automatic license plate readers. We've recently started going door to door to talk with our neighbors about concerns with local surveillance. Despite the Santa Rosa Police Department operating over 120 flock cameras, community members seem to know very little about this equipment, if they're aware of its presence at all. This is particularly concerning because it lets us know that our local community was not involved in this process of adopting the technology, which has actually proven to do a lot of harm. Flock Safety made a public statement earlier this year assuring California customers that they had turned off the function for out-of-state sharing altogether. However, a number of California cities have found data breaches through their audits that confirm their flock camera data was accessed by federal and out-of-state agencies. This is a clear and direct violation of California Senate Bill 34. In recent months, FLOC has also made a number of changes to their terms and conditions portions of their contract. Most notably, these changes include the addition of a perpetual license, which gives FLOC the right to keep ALPR data indefinitely, even if the city were to terminate its relationship with FLOC today, as well as increased protections against FLOC's liability for misconduct, which would shift costs for data breaches from the company to Santa Rosa taxpayers. The lack of data security and increasingly long trail of misconduct on Flock's part, as well as their quiet contractual changes that clearly prioritize their profit and protection over actual community safety, have made it clear to me that we cannot trust the Flock Company or any of its equipment. I do, however, want to put my trust in you, our elected representatives, to be open to having conversations with community and do what's in the best interest of all of your constituents. I hope that we can move towards a more community-centered and informed approach to safety, rather than relying on an outsourced system that is putting our community and its data at risk. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Joy. Sophia.

Hello, my name is Sophia Norton. I'm a lifelong resident of Sonoma County. I am also a leader of the North Bay Organizing Project. I feel that it is extremely necessary to examine the overall cost of law enforcement surveillance technologies like flock safety ALPRs on our community, and not just the financial cost of the equipment of which Santa Rosa is spending roughly 400,000 annually on its contracts with flock safety. an expense that is currently covered by federal and state grant money, but I'm assuming the cost will shift to the city of Santa Rosa once this money runs out. not to mention the very real possibility of concerns surrounding liability. In a recent update to Flock Safety's contractual terms and conditions, Flock has put extensive protections in place against liability for willful misconduct or gross negligence. This essentially means that liability is shifted from the company to the taxpayers, even if the error was Flock's doing. This is not a matter of if, but when. San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose are all in active class action lawsuits regarding flock violations. I am very concerned about the human cost of these invasive and unreliable AI mass surveillance technologies. It is well documented that the data that flock collects our personal information has been shared to federal agencies like Homeland Security and ICE, despite supposed protections like California Senate Bill 34. Policy makers who care about racial justice, immigrants rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, privacy and free speech and civil rights must pay attention to how surveillance may affect different members of their community. These technologies are putting our community, our neighbors at unnecessary risk of harm. The harm far outweighs any supposed benefits of these technologies, thank you.

Thank you, Sophia. Are there any other members of the public who would like to speak on this item? Seeing none, we will close public comment and we will move on to our public hearing for the evening, item 16. Mr. Wagner, it is a busy day for you, welcome back. And I should note that this is our public hearing on the adoption of the City of Santa Rosa fiscal year 2026-2027 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. Thank you both for being here.

Thank you, Mayor Stapp and members of the Council. I'm Scott Wagner, Chief Financial Officer. Along with me here today is Veronica Connor, the city's budget manager. We are very pleased to be presenting this proposed budget. And with that, I will hand off to our interim city manager, Farrell, for her opening comments.

Thank you, Scott. First, I wanted to thank staff for putting this budget together. This was a team effort and the culmination of several months of work and analysis on the part of myself, obviously our CFO, our budget manager, Veronica Connor, and the incredible staff in the finance department, but also all of the executive team members that we have and their department budget liaisons. We've had a series of meetings regarding our proposed budget recommendations. understanding and acknowledging that we had a significant financial deficit, and you wanted long-term and intelligent solutions. And so we had a study session in April, and then we also followed up with our May 5th and 6th study sessions. This is the fourth time that we've been before you to discuss budget options for next year. As we've discussed previously, this is a two-year strategy, so you'll hear again this evening the highlights of year one, but you'll get a little bit more in-depth information on the potential impacts to city services in year two, which would be July 1 of 2027, if we don't have additional revenue coming into the city. I'll share that as someone who's a former finance professional, we have a fantastic team that's dedicated to the city's financial sustainability, as are you. I think this is a really solid proposal that we've put together. It continues core services without dramatic draconian impacts to services. However, more still needs to be done. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to our team here to go into the details. And we'll handle questions at the end. Thank you. Scott, back to you.

Thank you, City Manager Farrell. So I'll begin our presentation today with a brief overview of what will be included. We'll start with our calendar along with any proposed changes since our budget study session. As City Manager Farrell mentioned, we are asking our department heads to come down and give a more robust discussion around year two. In our budget study session, I gave an overview of most of our department's impacts, but today we're giving them an opportunity to come down give some additional information to council and get any feedback needed on year two. We will additionally be ending today's presentation with an overview of the capital improvement program for the city for fiscal year 26-27. We'll start with our budget timeline and thankfully for me, and we're at the end of this timeline for the current year, What I will always add in these conversations is that budget is a very long process. That does not start in May with our budget study session. It really is an eight month process. And we will stress that budget making is a little bit of math, a lot of collaboration, and a lot of communication, and a lot of work from a lot more employees that are just here today. The reality is that of our 1,200 member staff, we consider all of them to be budget experts because they're the ones activating our budgets into service for the community. So as with any budget-making process over the past five weeks, there has been some minor changes. I will state from the beginning that this proposed budget today very much falls directly into line with the direction Council gave at our study session to return with the City Manager's proposed and not make any substantive changes. But some updating that has happened that we will point out is that there was a $64,000 increase within our housing agency to better reflect a more updated number from HUD that we got for allocations. not groundbreaking stuff there on a second matter as we've looked at our measure h which is our fire special tax that lives outside of our general fund through our analysis we believe at this time that the fund can sustain an additional fire captain to its budget that fire captain uh chief westrup will be able to discuss a little bit more later but it is to serve a function of a training captain a 40-hour captain within the fire department to bring additional resources there We've additionally increased appropriations in prior council approved projects from our ARPA special revenue funds of $703,000. This is very much an action of accounting to meet federal spending requirements. We are not changing appropriations on a what should happen within the projects that council already approved. We are not proposing any change to our ARPA projects. We are up against a kind of an audit requirement versus a federal requirement on how do we make our budget match what the federal folks wanna see. And the way that we've come to a solution is that that fund has interest revenue that we can appropriate that will act as a gap for a period of time until we're able to release all project funds from the projects. Big picture short, at the end of the day, this is a $703,000 increase that gets offset with a decrease the very next year. It's a net zero. This is really a function of governmental accounting. We are gonna have a conversation later based on today's presentation along with council feedback as part of the budget study session around the general funds reserve policy. As what was mentioned earlier, we wanna keep taking big swings here at the city. Part of those big swings that come forward will be addressing the general funds reserve policy that hasn't been updated in 20 years. But this, we have an opportunity tonight with tonight's adoption to set aside some funds and assign them through our reserves to a capital need that we all see coming at this point. The last thing that I'll note is that of the city's labor contracts, we currently have one bargaining unit that is out of contract as of July 1st. And that is our fire management group. That is a smaller group that is not all of our firefighters. Those would be battalion chiefs or division chiefs and some of our fire prevention folks. that go out of contract on 7-1. We have included a holder here of $200,000 into the budget that we've increased for the proposed contract that would be ratified at council in July. As we've been discussing, the city has been moving forward with a two-year budget strategy. I will highlight that that does not mean that Council is adopting a two-year budget tonight, but what we are moving forward is a two-year strategy. Through year one, we've been able to come up with a multi-pronged approach to deal with a deficit that initially was $17.5 million. We've done things through strategic use of reserves and adjusting staffing as grant fundings expired, along with decreasing our position control by positions that are currently vacant. We've also used some innovative financing that council has been able to review, including a re-look at our pension strategy and adoption of a way that the city can pay off our pension liabilities quicker and pay less. Ultimately though, the city still remains in a structural deficit that will require year two at this point to have a $9.8 million deficit. Our year one strategy will give us some time to address how we are going to tackle that year two deficit, but we will talk about that more at length in a moment. With that, unlike the budget study session where I was a bit of a one man band, I am gonna lean a little bit more on Veronica and hand off revenues to her.

Thank you, Scott. So taking a look at our citywide budget, we're going to go through a number of financial slides that we have seen in April and in May. So I'm not going to belabor these very much, but move through pretty quickly, but point out some of the major changes. This slide shows our citywide revenue, including all entities, all funds, all departments, broken out by fund groups. The only change on this slide since May is in that housing authority line item. It's increased by $64,000 in accordance with our updated HUD allocations. from the federal government.

Next slide, please.

And on the expenditure side, again, we're looking at citywide expenditures for our proposed budget for next year. This includes all funds, all departments, all entities. General fund is at the top. This is, of course, our largest source of spending in the general fund. I'm sorry, spending in the city's budget. And the changes that we see from May include our special revenue line item. This is where we see an increase from that fire captain added to our Measure H fund. as well as the increased capital projects appropriations for the ARPA spending that was discussed on a previous slide. And we are also seeing a small increase in the housing authority for those updated HUD allocations. And this is just a visual showing all of our expenditures by fund citywide. The general fund is our largest source of operations, followed by our enterprise funds. And so moving on to our general fund budget overview, narrowing down on just that top line of those previous slides. In May, we came to council and we proposed a budget that ended in a $7.6 million deficit. So due to some kind of late in the game changes and settlements of that Unit 9 labor contract. An additional $200,000 worth of costs will be added on to this deficit. This happened, the timing was problematic. We could not incorporate this into our public hearing notice or our budget document that is attached to this Council item, but we are including it here. We will address it verbally and where it affects our slides. So ultimately, the budget that we are proposing today will actually have a deficit of $7.8 million and require $7.8 million use of reserves. So we highlight this here just to show that it is a change from the May study session, and it hasn't quite been feathered through all of our slides, but we will highlight it where need be. So our general fund revenue overview also has not changed since May. The main points here is that our property tax, we are projecting it to grow by $2.3 million next year. This continues to be a very reliable and steady source of income for the city. And our sales tax, we project to grow at about 1.5% or $1.1 million. We have been able to correct our sales tax budget. It has been far too high in previous years. We are now seeing it at a level where we expect our actual revenue to hit the budget amounts. And our forecast for future years are not large, but they are an increase in the right direction. And this is what we are kind of seeing settled to be our quote unquote new normal coming out of the COVID years and the years of uncertainty that we will continue to see positive growth in sales tax, but just a small positive growth. And our financial table for general fund revenues broken up by categories shows a total of just shy of $225 million worth of revenue. This has not changed since May, property tax and sales tax being our largest two categories. We're projecting all other categories to grow with the exception of permits, fines, and charges. This represents some of our building permits We've been seeing a different trend in planning and economic development where we're seeing some smaller dollar value permits come through the door, not as much large projects. Volume has remained high, but the dollar value decreasing a bit. So we are projecting a slight decrease, and this is one we will be watching closely. And again, a visual of the previous slide just showing that property taxes and sales taxes are more than half of our general fund revenues. This makes up more than half of our ability to run our general fund programs.

As we look and we think about the general fund's mix of revenue, it's important to understand that Santa Rosa is uniquely dependent on sales tax for an agency of our size and complexity in the services we provide. Santa Rosa is a true full-service city. We provide our own fire, we provide our own police department, along with many other functions here within our general fund. At the end of the day, when we talk about property tax, for every dollar that a Santa Rosa homeowner pays in property taxes, the city retains 11.7% of that. So just under 12 cents goes to the city, with city schools receiving 55% and in the county coming in second. The way that you will normally hear me describe this is that the city comes last in that allocation of property taxes. The same can be true of sales tax. For every dime that someone in the city of Santa Rosa is transacting to pay for sales tax, we receive 1.75 cents. So under two cents is what we receive. So I will add that often, sometimes I look at that and I say, well, our sales tax is 1.75% of what we actually get to keep. The state comes first with a six cents of that 10, of that dime, and then along comes the county receiving two and a quarter cents for each dime. And I should add, as I forgot one of my talking points here, going back to property tax, It's really important to understand that the city of Santa Rosa receiving 12% is very low. We should expect an agency of our complexity and size to be much closer to 16%. And the reason for that is Prop 13 is essentially that our property tax percentage has been locked in since the early 70s. We can go to neighboring agencies that are very, very close, but I will not name them, and they receive 20%. So even within our own county, there is a disparity between how local government gets funded. And the reality of our situation is that that forces us to be far more dependent on our sales tax than the typical agency.

General fund transfers in are another source of resources we have to run our general fund operations. This hasn't changed since May. The item to highlight here is that we are going to see $5.6 million come in from our pension fund. This is part of that fresh start strategy to reduce the burden of pension costs on the city that Council recently approved. Next slide, please. So moving on to a discussion of the general fund expenditures, I'll hand this back to CFO Wagner.

Thank you, Veronica. So from the big picture perspective on city expenditures, this current budget does not align with any major increases that are not outside of our contractually obligated increases that we're seeing. So for that, we have a $4.9 million already agreed upon contract with our labor units, including that. We've additionally brought forward a $1 million increase to police departments over time and a $2.5 million increase to the fire departments over time budget. I want to highlight that these are not increases in the amount of overtime we are expecting these departments to experience. What this is to do is to align the budget with what we are realizing within the department's actuals. Both of these departments run 24-7 operations with mandated staffing levels. So it is not aligned currently with what we are experiencing in total overtime costs with what our budget is. We are seeing overages within our current year for both of these departments. These are to get us back on track in representing our budget towards what we're seeing in operations. We had overall a $1 million increase in contractual expenses within our professional services that included $550,000 for election costs. 26-27 will be an election year, and we see a blip and an increase during those election years that then goes down in the next years. Overall, we see a $700,000 increase in vehicles. This is offset against a $1 million decrease in the change of our large apparatus financing that we're doing at the city. We have brought forward a policy and a direction to council that we are decreasing the amount that we're paying into fire apparatus replacement to better align costs with the useful life of equipment. We're gonna be utilizing lease financing in the future for these pieces of equipment, while at the same time not pushing off their replacement schedules, not decreasing the total amount of units, but just doing a little bit better job of matching the expenses to when we use the actual apparatus. We're seeing a $500,000 increase towards IT. This is really just following in line of increase in costs of our staffing within the IT department to provide the services they provide, along with the software licenses that increase year over year. From a big picture perspective, as Veronica mentioned earlier, we have an increase in revenue around 4.5% versus a 6.5% increase in expenditures. The city is still within a structural deficit. For our major decreases, we've brought forward almost $10 million worth of general fund solutions as part of this year. We have $4.9 million worth of savings from our departments, eliminating vacancies being held within the departments. Additionally, we have $3.8 million worth of savings from the city's pension stabilization pathway that we've put forward. Our Fresh Start program, we're gonna be realizing $3.8 million worth of savings in year one, but the better news is it'll be $28 million over the next five years and $37 million over the life of the program. We're additionally seeing a property tax, a property insurance decrease to just align with our required reserves with our JPAs. This budget really reflects many strategies that the city considered to address its structural deficit and to be creative in moving forward with ways that would impact the community the least. And we considered many different things. As we've mentioned prior, we are eliminating vacant positions. Ultimately, a vacant position is not providing service to the community in that moment while it is vacant. And we have gone through the exercise within our departments to really go through and eliminate those positions. We're moving forward with our major apparatus lease change, where again, we're not kicking the can on our equipment and putting us in a bad position on maintenance with them. We're just fixing those costs to align them better to when we're using them. We are going to use reserves on a one-year basis of $7.8 million. The city currently has a healthy reserve and we'll be talking about reserves a little bit more later, but this strategy ultimately uses that amount of reserves to avoid a draconian level of cuts within this year one. Year two strategy is going to be more challenging when it comes to the use of reserves. Our pension strategy, saving strategy, I think we've talked about enough at this point, but we're very happy that that has moved forward and Council has adopted it. We are flex programming for expiring grants. We currently have positions held within the fire department where either federal or county funding has gone away. We describe these as flex funding programs where when the funding goes away, we have to adjust the program. This current proposed budget does adjust those programs to decrease those staff members accordingly. We, of our 12 firefighter positions that are included within these grants, We are not laying off any of them. We have landing spots for them within available positions within either the Measure H Fund or the General Fund, so fortunately we will not be losing any current members of staff.

We've moved forward with department consolidation.

So last year, Recreation and Parks was absorbed into Transit and Public Works along with Housing and Community Services. As part of this budget, the CERO Department will be incorporated into the City Manager's Department to have a better alignment of functionality between those two groups that work so closely together. We are aligning of budget to actual spending. This is how we talked about our OT being in disalignment with what we are experiencing through the actuals within the funds. We've also moved forward with enhanced cost recoveries. We have really drilled down on our departments to ensure that we are maximizing our cost recoveries within our chargeable areas, whether that's fees for recreation, or planning, those are all things, or credit card recovery fees, where we are modernizing the city's approach towards credit card fees. And like many agencies, we are now going to be offering the public an option to either pay with an ACH or pay with a credit card fee with a convenience amount. That is not an across the board change across the city. We will not be charging a convenience fee for a lap swim or a parking meter. It is going to be very directed towards some of the larger areas, whether that's planning permits, or frankly, some of those customers are very used to paying with a cheque or another means outside of a credit card. We are also doing a minor reduction towards capital support, which will really be funded through existing CIP funding. This is just a better alignment of CIP programming being in the CIP fund, instead of the general fund. Overall, as I've mentioned, we've developed almost $10 million worth of solutions that we are very proud of for the ingenuity and the outside of the box thinking and really drilling down where we can accomplish these savings I will mention that we will have a more robust conversation around year two. And while these are all very exciting and positive things, many of these are wells that we can only visit once. Once you redo the pension policy at the city, we can't go back and get another savings in this amount. And we've considered these savings into our future budget predictions. And with that, I will hand it back over to Veronica to go through expenditures.

So our proposed budget for fiscal year 26-27 general fund expenditures total $231.1 million on this slide. That will actually be $231.3 when we add in the $200,000 from our management contract MOUs that have been settled recently and that will affect our salaries line item. The large variance here as we've pointed out in May is our overtime has increased by over 50% as our CFO Wagner touched on on previous slides. This is merely to align our budget with what is actually happening in operations and to right size the budget for the operations of the city. And this visual is a reminder that salaries and benefits make up more than three quarters of the general fund. We are a service heavy city with public safety, with administration, with planning and permitting. We definitely invest our resources in people in order to service our city. And this financial table also has had no change since the May study session, and we will need to increase that fire line item by $200,000 to account for the MOU changes. Our general fund expenditures, Throughout the whole general fund here is broken out by department, and we can see that most departments have had small increases. We've tried to keep costs flat where possible. There's a big swing between recreation and TPW. This is just due to department reorganizations. That's gonna take a couple years for those to even out. And I will note that in our fire department, despite the increase in overtime and the significant reduction in staffing that CFO Wagner spoke about, we don't see a decrease in the department here. And that's because we are flexing those staffing with our grant funding. The positions we are eliminating were funded by grant funds or from outside funding sources in recent years. So rather than seeing a substantial decrease year over year, Benefit that's having is preventing this line item from increasing by several million dollars more. And this pie chart is just a visual of the previous table, and it shows that here at Santa Rosa we spend the majority of our general fund resources on public safety, 64.5%. And one additional use of general fund resources are transfers out. These are uses of resources that we don't categorize as salary, benefits, services and supplies. They instead go to other sources and they are used primarily for homeless services, capital projects, parking enforcement, Bennett Valley Golf Course, debt service and other areas. And our final proposed general fund budget still maintains our baseline requirements for our public safety and prevention tax. So we like to lay this out here to show that we are still adhering to that maintenance of effort that's required.

As we look at the city's long-range financial forecasts, what you'll note is that the city still remains in a structural deficit, even after two years of very large cuts to the general fund. We still have a snowball that is rolling downhill with larger numbers. These numbers, though, are much better than where we started this conversation a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, or really two years ago, the 26-27 fully burdened deficit was over $30 million. Actually, excuse me, it was over $40 million. We've made a lot of progress. I don't want anyone to think that the efforts and the hard decisions that have been made have not made a difference, because they very, very much have. We're just in a position where, on an expenditure basis, it's going to be very, very difficult to keep cutting. We're gonna talk about that more a little bit later when we look at the overall staffing dynamic of the city. But when I look at this chart, the numbers that really pop out is 3031 still being at a $22.4 million deficit. Part of that and the big jump between 2030 and 2031 is the Measure Q sales tax falling off. That sunsets in March of 2031, and that is $24 million worth of revenue for the city. That's something the city will need to address. But ultimately, when we look at this chart and we think about the history of the past couple of years, we've made some meaningful improvements to revenue, whether that be business license tax or TOT. We've made very difficult cuts. The city has tightened its belt. It's sharpened its pencil. It's done all of these things. This is the math that we're left with. There has been periods at the city due to, frankly, things that we could not control, whether that's a global pandemic or other things that we here at the city didn't know were coming, where your forecast can end up being a little bit off. The reality is for the past four years, Veronica and her team have done remarkable job projecting these deficits and they've been very accurate. We do expect this to be the reality of the city and not it go in a much better or worse way. Our projections are based off of trying to hit the target versus projecting in for a recession or projecting in for good things happening or bad things happening. We are trying to hit the target. What's important to note there is that if there is any greater macroeconomic happenings that would affect us negatively would make these numbers much, much worse.

With that, we'll move on to a discussion around general fund reserves.

This is our standard general fund reserve spend down chart. I mention every single time I show this, this chart lives one year in the future. So when folks ask how come the years don't exactly line up, it's because of those pesky governmental accounting standards that myself and the finance team just love to do, but that's why that happens. The big picture here is that the reductions and the solutions that have come forward with staff have ensured that the adopted budget will remain above Council's mandated reserve policy of 15 to 17%. We project ourselves to have around a $62 million reserve at the end of this coming budget year. That is above our policy. Furthermore, as we've been discussing since the beginning of the city's financial issue, we wanted to have always a two-year approach towards ensuring that we are remaining above Council's mandated policy. This proposed budget does that. We are still about $5 million over where that two-year target number is. Furthermore, I will add that the other critical number on here, though, as you see, it goes down to $14 million in 2030. That will be here sooner than we realize. These years are flying by. why do we have a general fund reserve and that is very simple at the city of santa rosa it's to maintain operations during macro economic crises whether that's the great recession or those things or future economic crises which which will happen we don't know when and for natural disasters The City of Santa Rosa has been uniquely tested that way and that we know through the Great Recession and through the fires in 2017 that we needed our 15 to 17% to account for those things. As we've mentioned in per council's feedback from the study session, we recognize that our reserve policy should be revisited. That is part of our plan within the finance department and city manager's office over the next year is to come back to the long-term financial planning and audit subcommittee to have a robust conversation around the reserve policy. But really when we look at our reserve policy, it's not what I would call modernized. Agencies normally will include things like IT infrastructure or pension funding or facilities funding within their reserve policy. That's something that we need to look at best practices and what's been successful for other agencies and come back with it. Council's already made a tremendous step with pension funding. Really, the next follow-up to that is to make sure that future councils and the city are in a place to maintain those successes. The prior item tonight talked about the city's emergent facilities needs. And what staff is proposing we do this evening is to assign $4.5 million of general fund reserves to address facility conditions as of the end of this current fiscal year. Now, I wanna define what an assignment of reserves is and what an assignment of reserves is not. An assignment of reserves is a way to show on the city's financial statement that of the city's reserves, that council knows that there's about a four and a half million dollar need that's coming, but they have not appropriated it yet. This is a way of segmenting your savings of the city towards saying, I know there's something coming, but I haven't given direction to staff to be able to spend. Staff, the city cannot spend an assigned amount that will have to come back to council. This is just a way of taking a step towards modernizing our reserves and saying that we have a bigger conversation around our reserves to happen, but we know it's missing this one component and we're gonna address a portion of that as of the end of the fiscal year. That is really to critically stabilize either repairs or a proposed strategy to address the City Hall campus with what is a can that we can no longer kick down the road. And with that, I will kick it back over to Veronica to talk about overall staffing changes of the proposed budget.

So back in May, we listed proposed staffing changes line by line. We're not going to do that again. We're just gonna look at it from a summary view. But I will point out some of the major changes we see on this table. The next two slides show proposed staffing changes for all funds. This is not just the general fund. This includes funds citywide. And most of these big swings are the result of department consolidations and reorganizations. We see the community and intergovernmental relations office going into city manager. We see parking leaving finance. That's the reduction of 28 FTEs. Recreation and parks was dissolved and recreation became its own standalone department. And on the next slide, we will see TPW increasing due to parks. We do see, sorry, previous slide, sorry. On this slide, we see fire has a reduction of 19 FTEs, and that is the majority from those grant-funded positions that has been expiring, and so we see a major reduction in the fire department, as well as a couple vacancies in HCS.

Next slide.

Thank you. So overall we are proposing a reduction of 27.0 full-time equivalents across the city 26 of those are in the general fund and there is a net 1.0 reduction in other funds of the 26.0 positions in the general fund three of them are filled and the remainder are vacant So with the proposed reduction of those 26.0 general fund positions, that would bring the general fund staffing down to 707 FTEs. This is just a couple people above recession-era historic lows. We have truly reduced everywhere there is to reduce, and we've seen a 20% cut from our pre-recession highs of staffing in the general fund. And we are bringing ourselves down to the absolute minimum

in the name of trying to close this budget deficit thank you veronica and um before we get into the year two conversation where we'll be asking our department heads to come on down and give some greater context towards the impacts of what we're looking at as part of our year two strategy i would welcome any councils from the questions from the council on the first part of our presentation thank you thank you both looking to counsel any questions at this point

Ms. McDonald.

Thank you. Thanks for the break. And I appreciate the opportunity to ask a couple clarifying questions just as we move along so I can make sure I'm understanding what we're adopting today. So can you remind me on slide 20, you talk about an increase to animal control. I know that's an item coming later in the agenda. My, if memory serves, we already had a very large increase from animal control last year, if that's correct. Does anyone have those numbers? I can't seem to find them, but it felt to me to be a pretty large increase and I see another half a million dollars that are going to that. that service so i just think it's important for the community to know these are kind of uncontrollables that come forward and uh you don't remember if we had any last year

Yeah, thank you for your question, Council Member McDonald. Let me share a few things. Yes, this is a contractual requirement of the city that's based off of the animal control being experienced within the city. I will say that this is an item going forward that the finance department and city manager's office will be coordinating on to ensure that there is proper understanding of really what's coming from them is really I think my focus at the moment in that having that proper understanding of going forward. I would need to revisit the last year's expense. I don't believe it was to this level. I will also clarify that there's an additional item coming tonight that is based off of fee recovery for them. that's going to address specific fee increases related to animal control that frankly has also been included that fee increase in this number that we're seeing today.

Thank you, that's exactly what my follow-up question was, is to find out if that helps to offset this budget and if it's actually been plugged in. Could you tell me, on slide 17, the breakdown of the dollar and the dime again? If Santa Rosa was to go out for an increase to sales tax, say, does that portion come straight to Santa Rosa or does it get broken down again?

Yes, thank you. So, for example, if the city were to renew its current sales tax measure of a half cent and move it to a full cent, that would bring in an additional $23.5 million for the city. That would go directly to the city of Santa Rosa. that would not fall into the same allocation that we're seeing here where some of it would go to the state, some of it would go to the county. This is deeply important because the services that we're seeing the community ask for are frankly our services. What we're noticing is that they're asking for public safety and they're asking for streets and those are frankly the services that we provide versus the important services provided by the county and the state.

And I think going into your next part of your budget, we addressed some of that as well about potential issues if something like that wasn't being considered or on the table. Can you tell me by margin how close we were to the target of hitting our budget this last year? If it was within 3%, 5%, where were we at on that?

Thank you. We're not quite done yet. I will say though, of the past three years, we've been within 2%. I think both two or three of the last year, I will say that I think my gut, don't hold me to it. Well, you can, that's my job. is we'll be probably even within 1% this year. That's how tight we're gonna be. What's happened and we had a discussion amongst the executive team is that when we remove more spending that wasn't happening, your budgets become much, much tighter because there isn't the contract that you didn't end up using, or there isn't the vacancy, we've cut our vacancies. That's gonna make budget tracking much more important for the city going forward. It's always been important, but we'll need to be more focused on it and also bringing that to the long-term financial planning and audit subcommittee to make sure council's aware of how we're doing, but we are gonna come in so, so close this year. I think on the revenue side, it takes a little longer for us to get an idea of where we are, because that comes in in arrears, but we're pretty close on revenue. We're having, like last year, we're having a positive year with investments. That's to be expected, but razor thin is the answer.

Thank you for redoing the portfolio so that we can, you know, get those gains. That was a smart move a while ago from your team as well. How many vacant positions do we still have in the city of Santa Rosa when we're looking at such low numbers that we have for staffing? Do you have any idea of the top? Do we have 20 positions left? Do we have 50?

I'm looking for my phone a friend for a perfect number, so I don't have the perfect number, but here's how I consider it from my perspective. The amount of vacancies that we currently have within the city is below the amount we expect to have. So we are far more filled as an agency than we've been in the recent history, but also more filled than we would expect. Because we've cut our vacancies.

That's why I'm asking, because sometimes, yes, the numbers at the end of the year when we haven't been able to fill the positions, we can see a gain. But when we start to narrow how many vacant positions we're at, I think that's important for the target and the community to know as well. It's not like we have a windfall. We just weren't able to find the bodies to fill those positions yet.

It's a very important question, so thank you for asking it. And I would also just, I'll just be very direct in saying that especially during COVID, where we had a really large vacancy, more than we would expect, and then all of a sudden, more than we would expect revenue, neither of those things are true right now when we look at our actuals. So there is a change of a, to your great point, we will not be up here later going, oh, it turns out things ended up being better than we thought. That's just, we're too far along the year. That's not gonna happen.

That's really helpful for, I think, us to know from decision-making basis. Do you have any data on slide 32 talking about staffing levels that show for a city our size where we should be even by department on how much staff? And I think it's important, not because we're trying to say, oh, we don't have enough staff in these things, but for the community to know, And for even myself, you know, should we have this many police, this many firefighters based on a state or national average? Do we have that data someplace, probably somewhere in HR or within our departments? But even looking at our staffing levels, TPW, PED, I think that's important for us to know as Council, like this is how low we are on our staffing per community member levels.

Yeah, I'm gonna welcome the department heads to include that as part of their talking points around year two. I think it's very important. I think each of us understands how our own staffing has changed here over time. I can tell you from the finance, I'll speak to finance since I'm here right now. The finance staff is down 25%. over a very short period of, over a period of time, and that's across my department and for like-for-like positions. So we've already cut the finance department by a quarter. I'm gonna let the rest of the department heads give their numbers, but yeah, we can include that as part of the coming presentation.

I know there's been significant cuts to every single department. It's not that as much, but it's also knowing how we're performing compared to other agencies. And when you look at the designation of money after Prop 13, because I think we were still rural when we actually were designated that, to me it's around that conversation of we're not getting our fair share, so it's hard for us to staff appropriately to serve our community. And so that would take an act of legislation unless the county can make that decision to just give us more money, which we do. As far as slide 35 goes, are we hitting 15 or 17% in reserves? Do you have that number?

We are over 17%, so we are over, and I'll give that, I can do that math real quickly and exactly where we're at, but it's not just about where we're, reserves are funny because you really need to keep a focus on that spend down slide. And to us, again, it's not just a matter of where you are on a current percentage, it's how quickly does it go away, right? It's great to have a lot of money in your savings account, but it's not if you're really taking a lot out each month. And that's our current situation is we have a solid two years of remaining above our policy. And then after that, we precipitously fall.

Thank you for that. And I think that has, that's all my questions up till now. Thank you so much for the presentation thus far.

Thank you. Any other questions, Vice Mayor?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think it's always good for, Average Joes like myself who don't know complicated financial issues to get examples. So when we talk about our share of property tax and you see a giant building go in downtown that is millions of dollars or whatever, can you give us an example of how that size, what it dwindles down to and what our share actually is?

Yeah, thank you for your question. And these are the questions that we very frequently get as staff and that the community or even our employees will say, hey, there is a brand new $50 million building being built in downtown Santa Rosa, and that is going to be a boon for the city through property taxes. So to put that in perspective, I'll cut out all the fancy math to get me there. But that $50 million building that gets built built in downtown Santa Rosa equals $66,000 a year in property taxes to the city. Excuse me, $60,000 a year to the city, right? It's that 12, about 12% number. I wanna share that because it's just important when I think folks, the average Joe asks, well, where'd the money go? Again, it comes back to that property tax dollar. Most of it went to the schools. before us, most of it went to agencies before we get our just 11.7% cut. I do wanna though temper my comments in saying that as a finance person, growth is critical. and just because you're not seeing that huge boon from property taxes doesn't mean we're not experiencing positive economics from growth it certainly is true the power of your example though is really to show that and this has literally happened to me where it's the city is getting a million dollars for that building a year where did it go and i go now the city is getting like

20 grand that that's what we're getting so they understand that there's not just where does the money go it doesn't come to us that in that way so to use your example the the property tax share is a literal distribution like easy math or simple math of you get x percentage of of this whereas the economic infusion is more conceptual in nature and harder to actually characterize is that correct that's perfectly said thank you yes thank you

Thank you, any other questions? All right, back to the presentation.

So we'll begin our year two discussion. And really, I think history is so important of the past couple years for the community to understand that this council, along with staff, has made some very, very difficult decisions around the city's budget that have ultimately landed to where we are here today. In 25-26, there was over $15 million worth of budget cuts, along with 54 employees reduced in the general fund. 26, 27, we're moving forward with $9.5 million worth of budget cuts and 25 FTEs within the general fund, making almost 80 employee cut to our general fund. General fund staffing is now 20% below its all-time high, while at the same time, the city's population has an increased 12%, but also the demands on the city or the services that we need to provide are more. This is a different city than it was 20 years ago. and the services that the city needs has increased. We currently have a, as I mentioned earlier, Measure Q expires in 2030-31, which is gonna be an additional $23.5 million worth of revenue coming off of the books. It's really important to hear a message that the city's committed to transparency to the public and the council on the potential impacts of what's gonna be happening here in year two and beyond to our public safety departments, including police and fire, our parks, and our public works departments, without a commitment towards an enhancement

of our revenue.

Our next year's budget currently projects at a $9.8 million deficit, and it's expected to grow to $22.5 million. As such, our city manager directed our department staff to come up with a plan within year two to address that deficit. As council has mentioned and directed staff before, ultimately, reserves are a short-term fix. They give you a little bit of time to come up with a plan, Unfortunately, though, our plan going forward is staggering on what's going to be required from the city. And honestly, we'll put forward a model of public service delivery that the city has never tried before. It's a much, much lower level than what the community and we should expect as staff. Part of the important thing to understand about our budget though is that facilities conversation that we've been having is that there are missing components of our budget is how I would describe them as CFO. Deferred maintenance on city infrastructure is growing each year. And when I say city infrastructure, I mean all city infrastructure, whether that's streets, facilities, overpasses, bridges, you name it. But unfortunately, within our operating budget, there has not been capacity to address these growing liabilities within the city. per our you know when we look at those reductions citywide and how we would reach a number if if we just went out and we just reduced our budget based off of reducing employees it's going to be very challenging but the reality of the composition of our budget which veronica spoke about earlier is that our budget is made up of people. It's made up of employees. Over 76% of our budget is people. Frankly, the remainder of it is a lot of areas of cost that are non-discretional. That first year budget, so for 27, 28, we're gonna be talking about an additional cut of 42 employees. This would be 11 employees through the police department, eight employees through the fire department. These are already areas that the city has taken some pretty big cuts to, along with all the other departments. But what is additionally concerning is when we look at the structural basis of our deficit, the ongoing long-term fix is a look at cutting 92 employees. I'm going to be asking our department heads to come down a little bit later to kind of talk about what that looks like for our departments going forward. But from that graph perspective, again, of looking at the history of the city and the uncharted territory we'll be entering, it'll be an overall decrease of FTEs of the general fund by 25% of all time highs. And as I mentioned earlier, the population has gone up, the needs of our city have gone up, the demand on our services have gone up, and there just needs to be a realization and a reality towards we provide our services with people and we have 25% less people to provide them. With that, I'll be asking our chiefs to come down and present the public safety impacts of our year two discussion. With that, I'll pass it off to Chief Cregan to present the Year 2 Public Safety Impacts for Police Department.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council. I'm John Cregan, our Chief of Police. And we'll quickly go over those. And CFO Wagner already set the stage that if we don't see some revenue-generating measures built within the city, the Police Department specifically is going to be seeing 11 more police officer positions cut from our budget. I want to set the stage, though, for our... City Council and certainly for our community last year we reduced the police department's budget by 3.2 million dollars that was 15 positions nines foreign police officers six civilians and the kind of put that in perspective like our historical staffing that we've seen over the city in 2006 with our highest staffing for the police department We had 190 sworn police officers. Today we have 175, so 15 less police officers than we did in 2006. Our civilian teams took even a greater hit. We had 91 civilians in 2006. Today we have 74, so 17 less civilians. So that's 32 less staff members at the police department today than we did in 2006. Even a more shocking number when I talk into our community is in 1999, we had 183 police officers here in the city of Santa Rosa. So 184, sorry. So we have eight less police officers than we did in 1999 in our city. Our city has grown by almost 40,000 people in population since 1999. So dramatically less services, the city is growing, getting more complex. And I put that just to put the understanding of taking us to 11 more police officers being reduced. I was looking at the numbers this week and that'll be taking us to the levels that we saw in 1994. And you have to just make sure that we understand the gravity of what we're doing here for the City of Santa Rosa and then really for the impacts. And that's where I want our communities to understand the impacts. Where I would first start doing, I've been trying to strategize with my command staff team, where would these cuts come from if we take another 11 positions? And what I would have to do is look at our specialty teams with our gang team, narcotics, traffic, our downtown enforcement team, and our set team. And the question came up from council earlier about where do we compare in staffing? We actually did a staffing study in 2022. So just four years ago, we did a staffing study right as I was stepping into the role of chief. And it said, the staffing study said that we should have 95 officers assigned to patrol. We're actually doing shift sign up coming up in two weeks. We're signing up 77. So 77 when the staffing study said 95 in patrol because we've seen such dramatic reductions. So I can't take them from patrol anymore. They're already below standards. So they'll have to come from these specialty teams. But understanding the impacts for our gang crimes team, we had a lapse from 2019 to the end of 2023. with our gang crimes team. In the year 2023, we had 12 homicides in the city of Santa Rosa, actually in year 2022, 12 homicides, and seven of those 12 were gang-related homicides. So you saw the majority of our homicides were gang-related crimes that are impacting youth in our community, families in our community, Since we've brought back the gang crimes team, we haven't actually had a gang homicide that's occurred in the city of Santa Rosa. And what we really focused on is the four prongs with that, of prevention, intervention, education, and enforcement, and it's had a dramatic impact. We saw that just recently on Cinco de Mayo, that within hours, we had a shooting right there at the festival. Literally within hours, our dedicated gang crimes team were able to review evidence and be able to identify the offenders in that use, use some of our technology that we have in our city and have them in custody. Those are the things you lose when you don't have a dedicated team for gangs. You don't have someone who's bringing justice to those seven families who lost a loved one due to gang violence in our community. You don't see incidents that were so jarring to have on our Cinco de Mayo festival of have those shootings. You lose those. We have officers who will go document the incident, but we're certainly not going to have the resources Same with traffic. Last year, we had nine fatal collisions in the city of Santa Rosa, 689 injury collisions in the city of Santa Rosa. Those all have an impact on our community. So having the dedicated resources for traffic enforcement, our downtown enforcement team, and we hear regularly from our community about the impacts of our downtown enforcement team. Last year, just for the year 2025, our police department tracked... 10,598 homeless-related incidents where call officers went to those calls. Quite frankly, we're missing several thousand. That's when an officer actually went in the system and tracked it as a homeless-related incident. So somewhere close to 15,000 of our calls were related with our homeless community. Our SET Team, we brought that in 2021. Our SET Team, since they've been formed in 2021, has taken over 250 firearms off the streets of Santa Rosa, just the four members of the SET Team. 250 firearms, those including automatic weapons, Uzis, tech nines that they've gotten off of our, so we just have to understand you won't have, those guns are now gonna be in those community. Those guns are gonna be used in our community. Our community is gonna feel the impacts. Certainly what we'll see is some of our response time. Now officers will be doing more investigations in the field because they won't be able to call out a specialty team to assist with them. So you're gonna see the response to violent crimes and to all calls in the city of Santa Rosa start to increase. Also, I ask the question on every chief's interview that I do for every police officer employee. They do a final interview with me and I ask them about why Santa Rosa and every office, every department is hiring right now. What's drawing you to Santa Rosa? And two things come up every single time. The first one is the specialty teams that you have, the more opportunities and you guys really focus on reducing crime in the community and utilize these specialty teams. And the second is the morale of our department, that people feel supported in this organization. But those things are both so closely linked to having these opportunities. The officers see fulfillment in their career to be a gang crime detective, to be a traffic investigator, to be a violent crimes team member. So having these also has the impact of recruitment of additional officers in a very competitive world of hiring police officers right now. And then also for the retention of our staff of keeping good officers here that we invest in, that we're sending the training, that we're getting their experience. So I just wanna really just talk about the ripple effect of retention, recruitment, the safety of our community, the ability when you call 911, they'd have an officer respond there very quickly. We can do the next slide. The next one, I've already talked about some of these things about responding to the time and what it's gonna take. Patrol officers are incredible resources in the department, but what they're designed by nature is to be like the first responder, to stabilize the incident, to get the basic information on more complex incidents, such as shootings, homicides, sexual assaults then they call in like these special teams that have the more enhanced training they're more prepared to prepare for court and to make sure we're successful in the prosecution so what you're going to see now is patrol officers who are spending more time which is making them not available to go the emergency calls but also you're going to see a decrease in the ability to do thorough investigations in these cases. That's going to lead to more increased violence in our community because we're not bringing resolution to some of these violence incidents. You're going to start seeing more visible blight across the city without the downtown enforcement team. It wasn't that long ago before we expanded the downtown enforcement team that we saw encampments. We've had encampments up to 200 encampments on Old Stony Point, off of Bennett Valley Road, above Home Depot. All those were in the excess of hundreds of encampments. That team has been able to really help we're also been really looking at these positions across our city and looking like what can we do to increase or decrease the crime that's occurring across our community and something that's really important to me and i believe it's so important to our community is the community engagement of having officers who have the time to go out and engage our community whether it be walking downtown or through shopping centers our parks across our community, our formal events that we have, like Taco with a Cop and National Night Out, and the list goes on and on. When you don't even have enough officers to go to the 911 calls, you're not investing in Taco with a Cop neighborhoods in Apple Valley because we don't have the ability nor the staffing to be able to have those type of events. So I just really want to stress the ripple effect that you're going to see across with the safety, with the response. And quite honestly, it comes down to the safety of our staff of being able to, when they're, whether they're being salted, whether we're seeing some of the incidents across our city, that when they call for emergency backup, that we see that arrive in a timely basis. And those are some of the things I just want to be able to educate for our community about what we're facing. And it really puts on us some of the urgency to come together as a city and a community on some of our revenue generating ideas that we have for the future.

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, Mayor. Scott Westrop, Fire Chief, City of Santa Rosa. So sort of along the same vein, I'm just going to talk about illustratively what we are looking at as a fire department if the projected budget reductions are actually enacted. And just to kind of start the conversation for Council and the community, When we look at our core service as a fire department, our core service is 10 fire engines, which are the smaller fire engines that you see on the streets every day, two ladder trucks, which are the longer articulating ladder trucks with two drivers, and one battalion chief. And we look at that as our core service because that's the staffing that we've had since 2007 between the General Fund and Measure O or PSAP. So I'm going to come back to those numbers. So that 10-2 and 1 Battalion Chief number, I'm going to come back to. But that's how we've been operating since 07. We've been fortunate enough to, and we're proud of the fact that we've gone out and found alternative funding sources to enhance our service. The first is with Measure H, which CFO Wagner referenced earlier. With Measure H, which is a countywide fire service sales tax measure, we've been able to put an additional engine company in service, an additional battalion chief in service, two additional vegetation management inspectors, And as CFO Wagner talked about earlier, we were able to add a specialty captain, which would be a 40-hour position that will help transform this new engine into a heavy rescue and become part of a countywide regional heavy rescue program. So it'll be a very specific position that helps build out an entirely new program. We have also had an enhancement, the fortunate, Ability to enhance service recently with the two safer squads, which we've talked about I'm a bit ad nauseum here that will be going away as of June 30th They were based on a FEMA grant The FEMA funding has run out and those squads will be going out of service as of June 30th So some of the enhancements that we have are going to stay measure H lives in and of itself It's its own little I call its own little fire department and the the safer squads are going away and So talking about the impacts, and we'll get to, in the next slide it'll talk about specific numbers. But for the fire department, and I can honestly say for the entire city, we've trimmed all the fat. We've trimmed bone off bone at this point. And for the fire department, we've done everything we can to maintain the level of service this community deserves and expects. But with the numbers that we're facing in the upcoming years without additional revenue, we will have to look at service impact to the community. So sort of like the city, we're a little bit higher on our salaries and benefits. We're about 78 to 79% salaries and benefits. We've managed to go through and we have lost personnel throughout the last two years, most of them unfilled, some were filled, some were grant-funded positions, but we're trying to maintain that core service. But we're really to the point now where if this comes to fruition, we're gonna be faced with very, very difficult operational decisions. The easiest one to talk about, and I mean easy from a standpoint of being able to comprehend it is, we are looking at at least one fire station closure immediately in 2027, July 1st, 2027. going into the future in that 2030-2031 plan with the $5.8 million reduction, we're looking at an additional engine company and a truck company at the same time. So potentially if this was to play out as finances laid it out for you all so well, there's a potential to lose two engines and a truck company in the next three or four years. What does that mean? It's pretty clear there's gonna be an impact to call response times, particularly EMS, which is about 70% of what we do, and it will impact our core fire suppression readiness. Just to give sort of a basis of background here, our city council goals for response time is we're to respond to 911 emergency response incidents within five minutes, 90% of the time. Prior to the enhancements that we have added in, we were around 59% at our lowest. With the squads and with Engine 9, we've gotten that up to about 65, 67%. So we're really seeing an increase in our response time capability. So that will go down, obviously, pretty significantly if we lose 9% of our response force in one engine, 18% in two engines, and then half of our truck companies. It's going to go down significantly. It will impact the reduction of wildfire prevention and wildfire response capabilities. Not only will this be impacted on a day-to-day basis where we cross-staff our wildland engines, so if engine six gets dispatched to a wildland columnist Calistoga grade, they cross-staff a wildland engine. That capability will be reduced as well. And also if we're looking at sort of the larger scale events, whether it's up staffing for a red flag or being able to call personnel back for a major incident such as the tubs or the glass fire, that capability is gonna go down significantly as well. There'll also be a reduction in special operations capability, such as technical rescues, whether it's trench rescue, high angle rescue, water rescue, whatever the case may be. The main reason is those are a core truck company operation. They are specializing in those rescue capabilities, but they're supported by engine companies. It takes a lot of people to perform a rescue, so all of those capabilities will go down while at the same time we're trying to grow a regional program. The resources, if this all plays out the way that it's been laid out in front of you, we will be below 2007 response capabilities numbers when PSAP or Measure O went into place. So it will reduce us even with Measure H down below the numbers that we saw in 2007. We've seen a 66% increase in call volume during that time. And as everybody's talked about, we're using sort of the same numbers here, a 12% increase in population. Obviously, our threat matrix has changed. It's ever evolving, not just the wildland problem, but you look at the traffic problems, the earthquake problems, all the things that we see as a threat on the board, they're always evolving and changing. And so things have changed drastically, but we have remained pretty much status quo. Next slide, please, Scott. So the other thing, and Chief Cregan touched on this too, it'll impact the recruitment and retention of quality employees. When he was talking about what he asks why Santa Rosa, I get the same answers. It was actually kind of shocking. It's the opportunities that we have in our special response units, our special operations teams, our ingenuity, and the way we do things here, but it's also we're seeing... It's the spirit of Santa Rosa, it is the family of Santa Rosa and the team of Santa Rosa that makes people wanna come here. Two big things that we saw is we saw coming out of the Tufts and Glass Fire, people wanted to come here because they saw what Santa Rosa was. They saw how the team operated, they saw how the fire department operated, how we all supported each other and how the community responded. They wanted to be a part of that. We've also seen a handful of employees come to us with our recruitment and diversity strategic plan because they wanna be part of that in growing the future of the organization. those opportunities will also be diminished if this happens. So one of the things I want to emphasize, and the slide says this is illustrative, is we're dedicated to doing everything we can to reduce the impact on the community, and especially in the emergency response capacity, but there will be negative implications from this. There will be operational impacts because of this. We will work with our team. We will work with the city manager's office, the CFO, our labor group to find ways to reach these numbers, but they are going to be painful and they will have very negative impacts on the organization. So what's laid out for us, which you saw in previous slides, is in 2027, it's a reduction of eight FTE, totaling $2.5 million. And very simple math is that's an engine company. It's nine people and $3.2 million to run an engine company. So it's very simple math that we are going to have to eliminate one of our 10 engine companies that are on the streets in the general fund right now. In 2030, with a reduction of 18 FTE and the equivalent of $5.8 million, that's an additional engine company for at least half the year, and a truck company. And a truck company is about $4.9 million a year to run. add those up, it's gonna be a truck company and an engine company for six months. So as I've repeated myself several times now, that is what we're facing is the reduction of one and a half engine companies and a truck company should we not find additional revenue streams. To Council Member McDonald's question, one of the things where we're at right now as an organization puts us pretty close to our goals in our 2016 strategic plan. And you've got to think about how the world has changed since 2016. So we're still short. We should have a Station 12 now. We don't have that. And in our new strategic plan and deployment analysis, it calls for additional companies and really the more pervasive use of the squads. But we'd prefer to have an engine company on the street. So that's sort of the answer to your question. As of July 1st of 2026, with this budget adoption, our general fund personnel count will be the same that it was in 2007. So yes, we have additional personnel through other funding streams, but that's gonna bring us back to 2007. The point is, and I think you've heard and we've shown that the department has not grown commensurate with the community, has not grown commensurate with our risk matrix, and at this point we're fighting to maintain the service levels that we have right now. But this is a threat to bring us back down to pre-recession numbers and to not be able to maintain what we have right now. So that's how vital it is to us. We need to grow, but we're trying to maintain. And without additional revenue, we'll be dropping below those maintenance levels.

thank you chief cregan chief westrup uh with that i'll i'll welcome director osborne along with director basinger to go through recreation and then planning and economic development oh mr wagner uh there's we we may have questions here in the day as specific to public safety uh do you mind if we do questions now or do you want to hold until the end of course mayor if that's your direction absolutely why don't we do department specific uh sorry gentlemen to bring you back down mr krepke

Yeah, so I'll wait for Chief Westrop to make his way back down. Sorry, that was my request. I just didn't want to do the rotating chairs, ask questions while they're there and not have to have them come back down. But one specific question is, we'll start with Chief Westrop and then go to both of you is, the greater impact this has on the greater community. So Chief Westrop, can you tell us a little bit about why our fully staffed trucks are unique within the area and what they can do? And then also for the both of you with these reductions, what does that mean for the greater Sonoma County with mutual aid calls?

Thank you for the question, Vice Mayor. So I'll actually start with our engine companies, because they're sort of unique to Sonoma County. Measure H has helped get most engine companies in Sonoma County up to three-person staffing. In bigger cities in San Francisco or in the LA County area, you'll see four-person engine companies. But we've always had that 3-0 staffing, which is vitally important for structure fires or medical aids or vegetation fires, whatever the case may be. Our truck companies are very unique because they're the only fully staffed, trained truck companies between San Francisco and the state line north of us. So we're very fortunate to have the two ladder trucks with trained personnel who are able to go out and train others on truck company operations, but they handle things, you know, we get a lot of questions of why'd you cut a hole in my roof? During a structure fire. Well, there's a very specific scientific reason behind that it saves lives It saves property and it costs a little bit of plywood and sheathing So they're very specific at that. They're very specific on rescue vehicle extrication Sort of the well, we sort of joke that there are 62 foot rolling toolbox They can kind of do anything and get it anywhere so but really the unique capability of them is that they're the only ones that are available between San Francisco and the northern part of our border and so as far as the mutual aid question goes there will be certainly impacts to mutual aid both at the you know the strike team level with do we have the personnel to send out strike team safely and still protect our community are we going to be able to send mutual aid engines out as part of as part of the California Mutual Aid Plan or not. There's gonna be a point in all of this where we're gonna have to start figuring out what we're gonna say no to. And for the fire department, I know the police department as well, I don't mean to speak for the chief, but we don't typically say no. We go on people's worst day and we solve whatever that problem is. And so the help that we got in 2017 and 2020, we've been trying to pay back and we'll never be able to pay that back, but we try to send as much equipment out as we can to help other communities. And that capability will be reduced based on these reductions, these proposed reductions in personnel. We're very fortunate to have what we have in both all of our personnel, the ladders, the engines, everything. We try to help. I mean, the truck companies can go out on mutual aid. We've been down to Petaluma several times and other communities that don't have staff ladder trucks and help them with large-scale incidents. But that capability we reduced as well. So I appreciate the question. I hope I answered it fairly articulately.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. And it's such a great question about the mutual aid. And you see it, two parts, here locally. And some of the mutual aid that is really visible to our community is some of the things we've seen with our sideshows. And we saw sideshows were out of control four or five years ago. And we came together as a region of here in Sonoma County and with our Marin County teams as well about having a mutual aid response to the sideshows and each of us sending Santa Rosa led the way with that protocol and certainly leads the way with the most personnel. But you see also with the wildfires and for the wildfire evacuation, it's so staff heavy in those first hours of getting people and knocking on doors and warning people and saving lives. We've repeatedly responded to Lake County, to Napa County, to those areas, but all the way to the Oregon border in far northern California that we've seen teams of officers, not only for the evacuations, but in the days after that when we're having whole neighborhoods that are evacuated, and you certainly see people who exploit victims in those cases and start looting homes, and they need the help. And we've seen how overwhelming, especially some of our northern California agencies, who have even less staffing than us. So it's important, and just like Chief Westrop said, our mantra is we don't say no to a fellow law enforcement agency who's calling for help. We've seen that firsthand here in Sonoma County, and it all depends upon each agency being able to help each other in their time of need. But it's sometimes when we don't even have the staffing to go to 911 calls in Santa Rosa, it becomes more difficult to send to our neighboring jurisdictions. And that's where we really want to come together. And Santa Rosa at all levels, at every single one of our departments in our community, saw the resources pour in to help us in our time of need. And that's something that always weighs heavy on us to make sure that we return our favor to those same agencies and be there for those communities because we know the significant impacts of it.

Would it be fair to say that if there was a serious incident of some kind in Windsor, we would be able to get more, as today, we would be able to get more resources to Windsor faster than probably the Sheriff's Department because of how they're spread out so much?

And we certainly respond to allied agencies across Sonoma County to help in their time of need, especially some of the smaller agencies that don't have necessarily the resources with our SWAT team, with our HACHA's negotiation team. And we work side by side with our Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, and they give us that same support. So we're able to help respond to those emergency calls for assistance, whether it be a deputy or an allied police officer who's calling for assistance. And that is the real-world impacts of us sending those resources there where literally seconds matter, and we may be the swiftest response time to those cities.

Any other questions? You can sure do your comment, Ms. Rogers.

Thank you. So I was just going to say, I think we do have some high numbers, especially when we talk about public safety, whether that's police or fire. But I think the beauty in, I think those numbers can be higher. is what I'm trying to say. I think having the police out with tacos with the cop allows people to ask questions, allows to educate the public, and I also think that having our fire staff out and educating people on what they can do to mitigate risk around their house, what that looks like, things that may not cost a lot of money for them, I think is very important. So... Then we get to the response times, and just me this morning when the 75-year-old fell off the treadmill and hit her head, and she's bleeding from her head and her nose, I'm like, ooh, how long is this going to take, right? In my inner counsel voice, I'm like, how long is this going to take for them to respond? I know it may not seem like a long time, and there are situations where people... are harmed more severely than she was, but watching her, it's like, how long is it gonna be before they get here? So I just wanna say that I think that it's very admirable for what you both have been able to do. And I know looking at the numbers looking forward does not, look great, but the fact that we do have staff that wanna come here. I love coming to the pinnings. I love seeing the people getting sworn in. There's something very wonderful about that, and I do wanna preserve that. And then I have the question of what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Because in order to finance public safety, which is general fund, I need to get money in and I need the other departments to work. So I think that is a big dilemma that I, sitting up here that I'm looking at is like, so what comes first? I need my economic development because they make money so that I can have the public safety so we can have the response. So these are just some thoughts that I'm having that I wanted to share with you because I think that you're doing a great job. I just don't, in my brain, I can't put one department over another because for me, we're all needed and we all work as a big family in a unit. So that makes it pretty difficult when we're sitting up here. But I do appreciate the exec staff and your ability to sit down and try to figure some of this out before you bring it to us. But thank you both for the work that you do to keep us all safe.

Thank you. Any other questions? All right, well, I think it's worth highlighting again, as it is on the slide itself, that what we're talking about here, these are for illustration purposes only of the kinds of discussions we'll be having next year if we do not come up with additional revenues. Obviously, this is gonna be a community conversation. This is a community conversation and the community will have a choice about what it wants to do with respect to providing the city additional revenues or making some of these painful cuts. So thank you for providing some examples. We'll be having this conversation again in the future. Mr. Wagner, back to you. We're gonna do it at the end. No, it won't be department specific, Dwayne. Your guess is as good as mine. We're going department by department. Mr. Wagner.

Thank you, Mayor. With saying thank you to Chief Cregan, Chief Westrop. With that, I'll welcome Director Osborne down to talk about planning and economic development and Director Basinger to kick us off with recreation.

Good evening, Mayor, staff, and members of Council. I'm Megan Bassinger, Director of Housing and Community Services, which includes the Recreation Division. So I want to start off with reminding you, recreation provides programs, facilities, and services that keeps the community engaged and active. And so as we were looking at the potential budget cuts in the upcoming year, we focused on what we want to retain and what is valuable to our community. So you'll notice the list does not include the senior center. We did not touch or are not looking to touch the city's two aquatic facilities, which are relied on by our high school swim teams, our organized aquatics groups. So those were some of the programs that we looked to keep whole, making sure that the community still had the Findlay Community Center to gather through rentals, programs that are offered there. And so through that lens, we looked at what programs would we possibly need to cut in the upcoming year. and that's where we went to adult sports, which are popular, but when you're looking at it through an engagement and activity lens, that's something we could look to shed. Our Tiny Tots program, this is something that can be offered by private organizations or other community groups. Our Park Ambassador program, which facilitates picnic rentals and events in the parks these are individuals that provide a high level of customer service and then our youth sports which is another area which is also served by outside groups and organizations so while these are all important to the community wanting to focus on what what is the core to keeping santa rosa active and engaged and making sure that we are able to serve those groups that don't have other outlets to address their interests and needs and just to touch on staffing in the upcoming fiscal year the recreation division will have 34.55 full-time employees this is a 20 reduction from the 2015 level in 2015 recreation staff and that's isolating our parks maintenance group there were 43 employees at that point in time so as we're continuing to look at reductions we're looking at how we can continue to staff and operate the programs and services that we offer and do that as well as we can. We have a high reliance on temporary employees. This summer, we have over 400 temporary employees that are working in our programs and services. And so those 34.55 staff help oversee over 400 temporary individuals that are serving our community.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the Council, Gabe Osborne, Director of Planning and Economic Development. And similar to Director Bassinger, I'd like to just take a brief moment and set the stage on how PED operates and the decision-making processes we go through when general fund support is reduced. PED has 106 unique service categories. Of those 106, 42 are state-mandated. And for example, one service category would be planning review, excuse me, building review. It could be planning review. It could be how we manage planning commissions. So there are general overarching buckets that have individual services inside of those. Of the 106, 49 are required by local regulation. That leaves 15 specific service categories that are discretionary on our end. Of the total service categories, we generally receive about 50% cost recovery through fees. And that's usually in a healthy development environment where applications are moving forward. Development services, which is just permitting, is closer to a 70% cost recovery. So as we go through our decision-making process, because fees are collected, the department has an obligation to provide those services based on the fees. It usually focuses on areas that do not generate fee revenue and areas that are not mandated by state law. because local regulations can change. Those are opportunities for process improvement. So that really necks it down. What the department has done is instituted quite a few efficiencies over the years. We've reduced our professional services, which is our lifeline from the general fund to ensure permitting timelines stay consistent. There's not much left. Really what we're boiling this down to is staffing. or what you see before, non-fee generated services and programs. And that really gets into economic development support, various programs in the economic development team are not fee generated, and very much when you're working in a regulated environment under state law, that and that universe becomes a nice to have. So that really becomes our focus area. various customer service channels where we really try to do whatever we can to educate the public, they become in jeopardy, and really we're not meeting the community's expectations in those areas. Long-range planning functions, prime example is entertainment zones, those that are not regulated by state law, those become optional, it becomes difficult to move those forward in an expedited timeline. One of the programs that we've desperately been trying to hold onto is how we can support the community through events from an economic development standpoint. Live at Juilliard is a prime example. We've been running that program for, this will be our 31st year. We are now down to the point where it's difficult to operate that. And it's a small amount, but that small amount allows us to send those revenues back, or excuse me, those expenditures back to the state-mandated programs. I think a really good example for how PED has operated over the last few years shows itself in our building permit review section. Many times when you hear concerns from the community about permitting, it is associated with building permit reviews. We currently have five full-time employees doing plan review with our chief building official covering the overflow out of that. Those are the same levels that existed in the downturn in the economy in 08-09. In 08 or 09, we're processing approximately 5,000 building permits in a year. It would go a little higher, a little lower. We are now 7,000 to 9,000 permits a year. I generally have between 70 to 100 in a peak active applications on a permit reviewer's plate that is much higher than industry standard. Industry standard is typically 30 or 40. So now when we have fee revenue come in, it is important to note that the general fund is our lifeline to maintain stability in that section. When we have vacancies, these are general fund supported positions. The general fund lends dollars to Planning and Economic Development to support plan review services, and then the fee revenue is reimbursed to the general fund. So in situations when positions are vacant, those same positions are eligible to be frozen because of their general fund positions. So in 2000, towards the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, we had significant increases on our plan review. And that was due to the fact that we had two vacancies. We had newer employees coming in that do not have the same institutional knowledge of many of the employees that had been there for 20 years. So really our wrenching hours are not as productive. And when we have community desire that wants to see building plan review for simple things or even complex things go in really a two to four week turnaround time, we were running up to 13 weeks. And that's really what happens as we play this out. We still try to manage the fee generated services, but we end up with really wild swings of cost recovery mechanism, or excuse me, cost reduction mechanisms are needed in that plan review section. So that is really sort of a microcosm of how PED operates. We're very much focused on the state level support, managing the fee revenue, but we are really down to where we have to potentially reduce services for what's not state mandated because we're down to cutting positions. Code enforcement is really a prime example in this. Code enforcement in a lot of jurisdictions starts with substandard housing. It focuses on nuisance complaints. We have had the luxury in Santa Rosa of having a code enforcement team that basically enforces everything in the municipal code. So as we reduce staff there, that should be a reduction of services to maintain the level of quality. And that is an area where generally code enforcement experiences around 10% cost recovery So those are really challenging avenues to navigate this all boils down to really staff retention and interaction issues You know, I've been in development for quite some time. It can be a fairly chaotic environment You do not ratchet back requests whether we receive a hundred permits or a thousand permits We try to maintain the same consistency. It can be a very stressful environment for staff so as budgets get a bit more impacted, it creates challenges with staff as positions can't be filled, it increases that workload. And what we have seen is the level of expertise that exists in the Development Review Committee is really not what it was 20 years ago. It is much harder to bring in qualified engineers or qualified design professionals that can assist with that process. So you're actually competing with a smaller pool of candidates. And that's really what we've seen. The team has been amazing at doing what they can to make processes more efficient. And I will always say that is a big part of this. There are always areas for efficiencies. There's always areas to be better. And we've been trying to get to that. But really, if we look at the total dollar amounts we're talking about in a potential year two cut, That would be approximately four positions to PED at 2027. And then if you're looking at that 817K, that would be roughly those staffing amounts. And then running that out to 2023, looking at 1.9 million, you're looking at nine FTEs. So that would be a significant reduction. But in addition to some of the minor things such as community promotions, we are really dealing with looking at potential significant reductions in staff if those reductions need to materialize. It's important to note that that hasn't been thought out. There are not names behind those FTEs at this point. This is really just an exercise that we go through, but really just wanted to highlight that based on previous cuts that have been made, it is getting down to FTEs are really the only option to reduce expenditures.

Thank you, Director Osborne. Mayor, would you like to take questions for this group as well?

Sure. Any questions from Council? No questions for this group. Thank you both very much.

Thank you both. I will move on to what we call our central services and cover just very, very briefly that so far we've had a discussion around our operating departments, but also the city has many what we call central services, whether that's finance, IT, HR. And the exposure there for the city really is what I've mentioned before of taking on risks that the city shouldn't and being less efficient to be able to support our operating departments. At the end of the day, police, fire, public works, they all need HR to be able to fill their positions. There's likely gonna be a period where it's gonna be harder for us to fill those quickly and adequately. When I look at my AP team, it's gonna be very hard to cut AP staff. They receive work, they don't create it. It's gonna mean potential delayed payments to our vendors. It could very likely mean delayed audits. These are risks that the city just shouldn't take. It's exposure that the city just shouldn't take. But it's going to come with a harder conversation around these are frankly some areas where the city cut first. And speaking to Council Member Rogers' comment earlier, this is something we often talk about is, are we providing a full service city? A full service city is not just police or public works or fire, it's everything. It's all the things that our community relies on us for, whether that's recreation or economic development. They are good investments for our community that we're faced with that stark reality with. With that, I will turn it over to Director Hennessey to talk about the impacts to public works.

Thank you, Scott. Back in May, we talked a lot about the maintenance aspects of our department and what those workers do, but we talked about them in big round numbers and I wanted to highlight just how fine those groups are in terms of their numbers with respect to what those men and women are actually doing. So up on the screen you see for the parks maintenance team, I had mentioned before there were 23 parks maintenance workers to council member mcdonald's point earlier in 2008 that number was 57 with the growth of parks if we were still at that same staffing level we would be at 92 maintenance workers and we are currently at 23. So just a bit of perspective in terms of the expectations of community members from what it was 20 years ago to what it is now, yeah, it is less. We are providing less of a service than we used to. But you see they're currently split up into seven teams, four teams across the different quadrants of the city doing basic maintenance of parks. We have a team dedicated to downtown public and open spaces, a team for sports fields, and a team for landscaping. Typically, what has happened is that as we've reduced maintenance workers, we've just kind of shaved off a little bit here and there and just made every function a little bit worse. We're to the point now where that doesn't work anymore, that these teams are so small in numbers that an entire team needs to go. So what I've shown on the slide here is that I don't really see a way that any of those other teams are removed from service. So it would be the landscaping, right? And so that's your roadside landscaping and different spaces where we're responsible for that type of work. It would just be kind of operationally irresponsible to take some of those threes and make them twos and ask two people to take care of 24 parks. That's not really a situation that we can be in. I already feel bad enough about the pressure that we're putting on staff to do some of those things. Slide, please. With respect to our streets, people, again, I mentioned this in May, I think they think that we're going to be surprised when they tell us that their street's in poor condition. We know. We check every street at least every two years. And through our CIP discussions, we've come up with a plan to address that in a much more consistent and functional way. It is still not to the level that we need to. We have, in past budget cycles, reduced the support for street maintenance of the general fund, which is just filling potholes in some very minor street maintenance, by half. We are restoring a portion of that this year. But there is no general fund support for broad repaving of city streets. That is all left. to the discretionary funding through our capital funds that the director of transportation public works brings to you every year and gets your blessing that is all up to individual decisions as to how that money gets spent these also excuse me the general fund also supports our electrical teams for street lighting and traffic signals so another you know safety functions for the community and how they move about and putting additional stress on those teams also. For the streets maintenance teams in particular, again, just dividing them up into what those 35 maintenance workers are doing, they're split across nine different teams across those eight functions up there. But again, we can't slice one or two maintenance workers off of those teams anymore. So there are functions that are going to have to go. So these are how they're split. They have additional tasks that we do annually, including the creek maintenance. cleaning, we support weed abatement and any storm response. Some of those things though, pavement markings, street signs, sidewalk patching, storm drain cleaning, those are not optional. Those are critical infrastructure, safety type of operational improvements that we make. we know from the community conversation that they're not gonna tolerate any less from us with respect to pavement maintenance, potholes, things like that. So we're to debris removal and graffiti removal. If you ask me, I wouldn't think those things are optional, but presented with this list, those are the optional tasks that we're doing. And so those are your eight FTEs. And I highlight here the maintenance functions because that is where the general fund supports the Transportation and Public Works Department. We have 280 employees, A whole bunch of them are supported by our transit fund. A whole bunch of them are supported by capital improvement funds. A whole bunch of them are supported through the fleet maintenance program, which has its own cost recovery. So there are a vast majority of transportation and public works employees that when questions come about the general fund, it makes no sense to even discuss their position, whether their service is comparing these, because it's just not apples to apples with respect to their different funding sources. If you go to the next slide, though, there are potential fixes for that. We can, for some of these functions, redirect CIP funds. That comes with different consequences. For instance, on the parks side of the house, the Measure M split that the council indicated five or six years ago was done in a different time with a different set of financial realities. And frankly, I think it's time that we revisit that to providing half of that Measure M funds to capital improvements that we're unable to maintain functionally down the road, we should be thinking about some of that CIP funding from Measure M shifting toward the maintenance side of the house. The gas taxes that we program every year for pavement maintenance projects and other transportation safety projects could go to help support some of those street maintenance tasks. Some of it already does. Our street maintenance teams is reliant on CIP funds as part of their budgeting every year. and we intentionally pick projects that we know that they can help us with, we could increase that number. The consequences are fewer park improvements, but better maintained parks, fewer streets paved, fewer safety improvements installed, but maintaining those critical infrastructure functions from the streets maintenance teams. And then from the discussion earlier today with respect to the facilities maintenance, we don't have a discretionary funding source with which to program anything there. So those improvements need to come from the general fund.

i'll uh transition in again looking at our budget from a whole one of the very large gaps that we have is specific to streets maintenance and and when it comes to neighborhood streets we have basically a huge hole within our budget that we're not funding furthermore we do not have an anticipated revenue source at this time to address them Well, we've asked Director Hennessy to do those, help us understand our streets network a little bit better, and have really comes back to the conversation that we've been having of council of how do we build back Santa Rosa into a better version of Santa Rosa? I think what's key that we're gonna be key to part of that discussion is really addressing our neighborhood streets. This is where our community lives that they have to see on a day-to-day basis that we have a hole in our budget. They step out onto it from their front door onto their street. So we've asked Director Hennessy to provide some better context around that issue.

Yeah, so the map you see on the screen is the Pavement Condition Index for every public street in Santa Rosa. Green is good, just like you might think it is. Yellow is okay. Orange is what's called poor, which means it's bordering on you know, needing to be completely redone, and then red means we've lost a street. Those needs to be rebuilt. And you can see throughout here that there are pockets of neighborhoods where we've focused intentionally. You see, I mean, I think in particular, you see the Coffee Park and Fountain Grove neighborhoods where everything has just been repaved. Those are showing up as green. You see most of our collectors and arterials showing up as green and yellow. And if you'll hit the button one more time, Scott, we'll remove all of those collectors and arterials from the streets. from the map so this is what's left with respect to the residential streets over almost 60 percent of our streets are those residential neighborhood streets um and if you one more time if we remove all of the good very good or good and fair streets and just leave the very poor it is a significant number of streets, but it is less than 10%, but that you see these huge pockets of streets that have just been ignored. And to the person that lives on that street, it's the most important street in the city. To us as Transportation and Public Works employees who are helping 180,000 people move around every day, those streets are never going to rise to the priority list knowing that we've gotta keep the green and yellow arterials and collectors good. You think we get phone calls now about how bad the street condition is. until we let the most important streets in the city in terms of movement and access slip. So construction costs a few years out from now to basically turn all of those reds to greens is roughly $42 million. There are a couple of different ways to do that, but at the end of that process, we would move that overall city PCI from 60 to 70, which is where MTC has suggested that the region should be, every jurisdiction in the region. This would allow us to do that. And part of the reason we can't move that number past the 59, 60, 61 numbers, we've got so many zero to 25s that are just sitting there and never changing. we would need to really get to the bottom of the list in terms of the pavement quality to make a dent in that.

So I'll add towards Dan's comments around this is an area that we don't have funding for, but we need to. This is just a hole. And the reality is Santa Rosa needs to move forward with the way that many agencies have tried to start addressing this in really a more modern approach. We ultimately, we need to go out for a bond to do this. And we need to ultimately to get that bond, we need to have an additional revenue source come into the city. But the difference can be really powerful as Director Hennessy is talking us through being able to move our overall street index from low 60 to 70. But really critically, again, it's setting us up for a path where we can address something that is not currently being addressed, and we do not have a path to do so. The numbers, as Dan talked about, break down to roughly $60 million. That's an additional $3 to $4 million a year worth of debt service, an overall $7 million increase to maintain them. And again, as I mentioned earlier, this is again that path of rebuilding and reinvesting in Santa Rosa better. Ultimately, these processes of tough times for our budget give us an opportunity to recalibrate and bring back areas that frankly haven't been funded in decades that have to be. With that, I'll welcome any questions for Dan.

Questions from Council? Ms. MacDonald.

Thank you for the presentation. I know you mentioned some of the measures that we're looking at for distribution. Is there, like bonds and school bonds, is there a way that you can appropriate some of that money for staffing, like there's a percentage that you can use for admin? Do we currently do that on our measures, or is that only allowed for bonds?

Yeah, that typically is going to be part of a bond project. So that's going to be part of your principle. Ultimately, that's going to go for paying the staff costs to develop the project. So the good news about that is, again, if we can move forward with a strategy and proposal to the community to bring additional revenue and point it to a direction where they are telling us that they desperately needs attention, which not only they are telling us that, we agree. that can be a powerful way for us really to bring additional stability to our general fund and address this critical city infrastructure need.

Yeah, I think we talked about it maybe in the last presentation or a couple of presentations ago around the potential of doing a bond to help with our street and roads. Because at this point, I don't think there is a possibility for us to get caught up. What are the rates right now? Is it a good time to go out for a bond or where are we at as an entity for that?

Yeah, rates are around 4.5% and is that good or bad? I don't know that, but typically we can be strategic in how we set rates and giving us an opportunity to refinance in the future if rates go down. But what is an absolute fact is regardless of an interest rate on the bond, our growth of construction costs far outpaces that. This is again a spiraling snowball down the hill where to your point, Council Member, we're not gonna be able to catch up unless there is an infusion of capital into this. This cannot be something that we cash fund. Every year, let's squirrel away a little bit of extra money into it. It needs a dramatic impact of principle to give Director Hennessy the funds he needs to make an impact on these streets.

So to that end, I guess I'm looking at what's the increase percentage-wise each year to trying to repair these versus what we would pay in an interest rate on a bond. So are we seeing it'll be 10% more next year or 15% more the next year versus paying 4.9% on a bond that we would have to pay back?

Yeah, I think the increase in construction costs has historically outpaced the general increase in inflation. So if that helps set the stage, construction gets more expensive at a rate faster than everything else gets more expensive.

That's what I'm looking for. just so we can understand from a community perspective. While we're getting into debt, we're actually getting into deeper debt by not addressing this infrastructure need across the city and it becomes a safety issue. I appreciate you pointing out also the potholes, the roadside landscaping, those are the things where I think at a level where we're just trying to get by for safety, it's not even beautification we're looking at at this point, is that correct?

That's a fair assessment, yeah.

Thank you. And that was, I think, it for my questions around CIP. Thanks.

Thank you. Any other questions from Council? Ms. Banuelos.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you for the presentation.

I just had two quick questions for Director Hennessey. You talked a little bit about Measure M, and I just wondered if you could elaborate a little bit, talking about utilizing it in a different way in the future.

Yeah, right now it's split such that the Measure M funds the city gets, it's 50% towards capital projects, 40% towards maintenance, and 10% towards recreation. That is from a council policy shortly after Measure M was passed and that comes to us in the budget every year as, okay, now allocate these funds to projects or however you wanna do it. My recommendation is that we revisit that 50-40-10 split because it's putting us in a position where we are building more parks than we can maintain.

I didn't realize that, okay. I know everyone wants more parks, that's the thing.

And yeah, it's great, and we are executing that to the detriment of three, four, six, 10 years down the road when we're gonna need to really focus on maintaining those new places that we're building.

That's true, that's true, especially with fewer staff. And also, just a question about thinking about a bond. This is the first I've heard talk about a bond specifically for streets, right? That's what you're thinking CFO Wagner? Were you thinking about that like in 2028 or did you have any ideas about that?

Thank you for your question, Council Member Baden-Wald. And let me provide a little bit more details on how we're thinking about this. Really, again, this bonding would fall into the established practices of the city in that we need some general fund revenue versus a school bond, which is for a specific purpose. The way we're going to be able to accomplish ultimately getting this done is through additional general fund revenue. It's going to be from revenue enhancement. and that would then give us the ability to go out bond against our streets to be able to bring that capital improvement program forward that's generally the structure that agencies are starting to do that is was beyond uncommon even 10 15 years ago but again it comes back to we as santa rosa need to start moving forward and being at the front of these modernizations of how we fund infrastructure versus trying to do things the old fashioned way of squirreling away funds, or we'll never get over that hill. Thank you. I didn't address your timing question. I would really stress that if we see the additional revenue develop, that this needs to move forward immediately. that this should be part of those conversations with the community as far as how the additional revenue the city is going to be actualizing it and it's staff record staff's recommendation that it would come immediately this is a conversation that i'm already having with our bond council with already our financial advisor this is not something that would be a 2030 maybe we'll get to it this would be a go get it done and we would thank you mr mcdonald

Just as a follow-up on the bond conversation, and I know we're looking into those types of things, can you tell me when we invest in the city on CIP and infrastructure, what that does to our economic growth? Because my understanding is when you invest in infrastructure, if you're looking at just what we've done across the United States, Hoover Dam, those types of things in the past, we can see a large amount of stimulation economic stimulation happening locally. Can you tell us maybe when they build the bridge or when they do the hub, how that affects us?

Yeah, similar to what Director Osborne mentioned a few minutes ago, a lot of the work we do facilitates all of the stuff that people actually want to be doing, right? So when we allow them to move around comfortably and in the mode that they want to, they're able to connect to places that they want to go. And by making those connections easier, safer, more convenient, we're incentivizing people to move around the community. Even some of the things like freight operations, getting deliveries to and from businesses to the public safety departments who are trying to facilitate their movement to and from their different city facilities to wherever they're called. Those are things that we're thinking about and trying to make sure that No one's moving around just to move. They're moving to go somewhere because they want to do something. And we're trying to make sure that as many people are able to connect to those places as they can.

Thank you.

Thank you both. And just a point of clarification, I'll state more explicitly what Mr. Wagner was putting diplomatically. There is no bond without a significant additional revenue stream, just so we're clear. We're gonna talk about this later with the ballot tax measure, but without that, we're not talking bonds. No additional questions from Council? We'll wait for... Any follow-up, Mr. Wagner, Mr. Hennessy?

No, thank you. We'll continue on the presentation, and I'll cover, these are points that I've now covered, I think, a few times within the presentation, but what we're trying to do here is show a missing gap within our funding of the city, and again, $7 million of the residential streets that Director Hennessy just talked about, $4.5 million really of ongoing annual for city facilities, and also $2 million technology gap that we have at the city. It's never... popular to fund software or licenses or et cetera, but the reality is those are the tools that a lot of our employees need to do their jobs. A great bit of information that came out of our review with finance subcommittees that the city has no HRIS program. That is astonishing for a size of organization of ours at our complexity. We're missing a lot of those programs. We're gonna need to rebuild those back. Moving on, I've covered Measure Q now a couple times. It expires in 2031. That's an additional $23.5 million coming off of revenue. If that did not exist today, we would be looking at a $31 million deficit today. Those are big, big numbers. With that, unless there's questions, and I believe they were already covered, I'm gonna kick it back to Director Hennessy to cover again some of the big movement that the community can expect to see over the next year with CIP, really so that they have that understanding of what's in the pipe.

And this next section is almost exactly the same as you saw in May, so I'm gonna skip through very quickly. More than half of our capital improvement funding is from the Water Department to support water, sewer, and regional improvements. The other departments have allocated their funds as was explained in May. And so, CFO Wagner, I'm gonna ask you to go to, I think, slide 78. Yep, thank you. So two things I wanna highlight before we turn it back to you. One is that the changes that we've made in terms of our capital improvement program are gonna pay off quickly starting this summer. One is that the Oakmont pavement maintenance project is out to bid right now despite the fact that those funds wouldn't be available until July 1st, right? So we're getting that through a design build process starting that that program earlier one of the things that's frustrating about um capital delivery in in the city and in the state of california frankly is that our construction season doesn't line up with our fiscal year right funds become available july 1st and our construction season ends halloween or the week or two after it makes it very hard to spend that money quickly But by prepping projects in advance, we're now able to see some of those dollars be delivered earlier. So with this project, there will be work in Oakmont that happens this fall. This is such a big project that is going to continue through next year. But we are going to hit the entire Oakmont neighborhood with pavement maintenance treatments. And you'll go to the next one, last one. Similar story for the project on the left with Bennett Valley. We have actually already selected a contractor for this. We have done the prep work, we have bid this out. This work will start in July with your approval of the budget and be done. Work that would typically start next March, we're gonna start this July and have done before school starts. And this is all part of that preparation in advance of the fiscal year and understanding that we're timing projects to spend the dollars as quickly as possible. Through a typical process, we would get the dollars to do the planning and design on July 1st. We would do that design. We would bid it in March. It would happen in 2027. We spent a little bit of money in the winter and the spring to get this project ready. It's ready. We've got a contractor on board the project will come to fruition this summer instead. It's a little thing, but it's delivering that improvement to those neighbors nine, 10 months faster, which has a real benefit to them, but it also is a benefit to us in that we get to lock in the good costs of construction that we have right now and good bids that we're getting and just get these projects out the door much more quickly. So with that, that's a very quick summary of the CIP update for 26, 27.

Thank you, Director Hennessy.

Mr. Hennessy, Mr. Wagner, let me pause on that for a second. Very quickly, Dan, and I know you were thankfully trying to be succinct, could you take a cue from Mr. Wagner and showcase your successes over the past couple of years in terms of the projects that have gone out last year, this year, with the story I think being that yes, we have these budget challenges that we're facing, but the city's building. So we got our general fund issues, but on the CIP side, we're putting out hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of work, and you and your team have found a way, even with a smaller staff, to do some really amazing work in the city, and the city's gonna see orange cones out there for years to come, regardless of what happens on the general fund side. And thank you for letting me tease you, Mr. Wagner. We know your successes.

Well, thank you for the question. Yeah, we have done a lot, but it is the result of many years of work and frankly, some bigger projects that took a lot of time. That cycle is just happening to come to fruition all at the same time. So big projects that are underway right now, we have the Hearn Community Hub. If you haven't been out there recently, there's now a frame of a library. The foundation is poured for the fire station and everything will be ready spring and summer of 2027 for both of those buildings to open. We broke ground a couple months ago on the bicycle pedestrian over crossing a long awaited that will be open and available to the public towards the end of twenty twenty seven. So we have done some significant water infrastructure another phase of the. lot of trunk project significant upgrades coming to the Laguna treatment plant. We've got I think we did four or five different street paving projects this year or will be coming still later this year. We've got a couple of new traffic signals one being built right now another coming we've got additional sidewalks and curb ramps coming throughout the city.

Yeah, it's everywhere total dollar value from the past couple years, including what's coming.

In the last, things that have been contracted in the last 12 months, easily $100 million. And I didn't even mention the parks projects that we've recently completed, the South Davis Park, Cook School Park, Dutch Floor Park, the Findlay Aquatic Center, the Kiwanis Springs Community Garden is under construction, construction at Howarth Park and Galvin Park, the Tennis and Pickleball Court areas, and more coming. There's another four or five parks projects that will be ready in the next 12 months too.

Perfect, and we don't need to belabor this now, but it's important for the city to remember that we've got these big success stories on the side in terms of the money that we're putting into the community, the projects that we're finishing, on the finance side, the tens of millions that we're saving with some of the projects that Mr. Wagner is putting forward. There really is a creative, successful narrative that's developing, and we're trying to figure out how to keep that going as we deal with our general fund issues. So thank you for letting me put you again on the spot this evening. Mr. Wagner, back to you.

Thank you, Director Hennessy. And so in conclusion, I'll provide some context around this year two conversation that we just had in that city manager's office, along with finance, we're very pleased to bring forward this two year strategy that ultimately in year one developed almost $10 million worth of solutions and ultimately used $7.8 million worth of reserves to frankly avoid some of those very difficult cuts that our department has just presented. However, going forward to maintain public safety and our goals here as a city, the city's gonna need to look to acquire additional revenue. With previous reductions, the city has reduced over $25 million from its budget and almost 80 employees from the general fund. I know that this is a two-year strategy so that we are calling this year two, but let's be realistic. This is year four that we are talking about of this strategy. the city has tightened its belt the city has sharpened its pencil the city has been creative it's taken a three-legged stool approach towards cuts revenue and enhanced economic vibrancy to the city to try to solve our economic crisis unfortunately where that's landed us really is with that year two conversation that was just had by our departments From my perspective and from the city manager's office perspective, the cuts that were just described by our departments are not something that we can recommend in good faith without also having a much needed conversation around enhanced revenue opportunities at the city and what would need to happen to not only prevent those level of cuts, but to reinvest in Santa Rosa and to create a better city, which we've been talking about today, to make us that full service city that we can look at ourselves in good faith and say, we are a full service city. We are making the proper investments and we are mitigating the proper risks so that Santa Rosa can continue to see its successes that it's been having even facing these very difficult financial situation to keep the momentum going within our community. With that, the recommendation for this budget adoption and public hearing by the city manager and the finance department recommends that council approves by five resolutions to adopt the fiscal year 26, 27 operations and maintenance budget and capital improvement program budget. by resolution, amend the Public Safety and Prevention Tax and Use Tax Implementation Plan for Fiscal Year 26-27 for all budgeted programs, and assign up to $4.5 million in critical facility reserves to address facility needs as of June 30, 2026. And with that, we will welcome the Mayor to open for the public hearing. Any questions or further comments from Council as we move forward?

Thank you again, Mr. Wagner. Before we open the public hearing, any final questions of staff? Looking at my colleagues? Nope, I think we've answered all those. Thank you very much. All right, let's officially open the public hearing. Are there any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item? If there are, please make your way to a podium. Mr. DeWitt, I see that you have your name. That's fine, Duane. We'll go with this podium here, and then Duane, you're next.

Again, thank you council members for staying late with us and allowing us to continue to share our concerns. And I look forward to working with you in the future to help navigate these really difficult times. Again, my name is Jenny Gilpin. I live in district two and I want our community policing funded and I want our fire departments funded. I want Santa Rosa to be a safe place. Flock cameras will not keep us safe. They will not save the city money. 25 years ago, another surveillance company named Axon heavily marketed tasers to police departments across the nation. It's gonna be the magic solution, no more police shootings. Everybody will be safer. The research 10 years in was increased police shootings and increased officers harmed. There is no research that shows that Flock will make us a safer city. In addition, we've gotten this big federal grant, this $900,000 that moves so many cameras. We're around 150 cameras now in a short, short amount of time. They've installed all these cameras. Could you please confirm again how this relates to the budget discussion? The budget discussion is that the flock cameras will put us in a position where we'll lay off police officers and then we'll be a subscription model. We'll be left holding the bag and reliant on AI surveillance instead of actually having physical police officers show up when we need their help. I want to avoid this. I want to avoid the liability that it will open up for the city in future financial issues. And I really hope to reach out to you and to work together to find solutions using technology to keep our city safe. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. DeWitt.

In order to cut costs, ask for a wage freeze. Nowhere here did I hear that tonight. You got people making $300,000 a year. Couple of years, they're a millionaire. This whole thing is kind of convoluted. Rather than cutting staff, just say, hey, we're broke. Our carrying capacity is overwhelmed. We cannot take care of what we already promised, so we can't pay more each and every year, giving these people more and more money. Just say we're not gonna cut positions, we're just gonna have a wage freeze. And then four and a half million dollars to spend on the property that you're gonna trade out. Don't do that. You've already agreed that you're gonna trade this property over across the street a property that used to belong to the city. And a man is gonna basically run a game on us. And so great, you've already made that decision. You're gonna make this property trade. Don't spend four and a half million dollars to upgrade anything here. Tell that person who's gonna make out like a bandit, he actually has to put forward money to the city. because that's a valuable corner. Actually, housing was promised there in the past when that person got that lot. It was an incentive deal and he didn't abide by it. So that's not a trustworthy developer that you're gonna work with. But what you should do is actually make that person pay the piper. You should actually get more money back Don't spend that four and a half million. And like here, a fire captain gets $383,000. That's a ton of money, folks. Over here in the maintenance section for the parks, those maintenance workers could be covered. You could take care of a lot of people there just by reconfiguring where your money goes. You have a very top-heavy administration in this city, and you don't take care of the roads. You don't take care of the parks. You basically plead poverty to us every year for decades and then say, oh, well, we're going to work it out. No, as a matter of fact, ask for that $4.5 million from that guy across the street.

Thanks, Dwayne. Mr. Hilber.

Thank you. Just briefly, on the subject of... Roller compacted concrete is indeed the preferred way you should be going. It's cost effective, it's competitive with asphalt, and most importantly, it's longer lasting, 40 to 50 years, and doesn't develop the potholes. The keys are not that it's the absolute smoothest when you put it down. That's a minor issue. It's really the resistance to cracking because as soon as you have a road that starts cracking, that's when your maintenance costs go up. So roller compacted concrete is very strong because of the low water content of the concrete. And that significantly increases the strength of a concrete. The less water you have, the stronger the concrete is. So if it's not the smoothest, you know, don't get so upset about it. And, you know, it is less expensive than poured concrete by a long shot, and it's much more durable than asphalt. So yes, indeed, roller compacted concrete is the way to go. And one suggestion is that you definitely want to run over one of those diamond cutting, the things that cut the rain grooves and the freeways, run over with a diamond cutter to cut the rain grooves and that smooths the surface so there'd be less complaints about it. But it is the best way to resurface the main arteries.

Thank you, Michael. Are there any other members of the public who'd like to speak? Seeing none, we will close the public hearing. I'm gonna bring it back for a motion and any final discussion. Mr. Alvarez, would you mind putting a motion on the floor?

Of course, Mayor. There's actually two motions. Will we be voting on them separately or together?

That's a good question. We do need to vote on them separately because we have a recusal.

Yes, and actually I did identify that there needs to be a third motion that needs to be put on the floor in addition to the two that you see. The first one is for the TPW items that Council Member MacDonald needs to recuse from. Then Council Member MacDonald can return to the dais for the remaining motions to be heard. The third motion that I hadn't indicated, Council Member Alvarez, is the final bullet that was on Scott Chief Financial Officer Wagner's final slide about the appropriation of funds. And so I just wanna make sure that we have that action taken.

Very well, looking for that third item now.

I can craft some language for you while you put the other motions on the floor too.

And if I can clarify for City Clerk, for that additional assignment of reserves, the direction that staff needs is just a direction from the Council, thumbs up. That's all I need from the accounting standards to move forward with that action. So if you want to split that into a separate just direction to us, that's all that's needed.

In this instance, I defer to Chief Assistant City Attorney Luna to confirm the best path forward.

Yes, thank you, both Clerk and CFO Wagner. I think that let's do the first motion since Council Member McDonald is out of the room. Bring her back, go to the second motion, and then I think that Chief Financial Officer Wagner is correct. All he needs is a thumbs up as to the assignment of the additional funds.

Perfect. Thank you, Ms. Luna. All right, let's make the initial motion.

Very well. I'd like to present the first motion, which is to adopt resolutions for Transportation and Public Works Department budget and full-time equivalent staffing changes to Transportation and Public Works as presented by staff.

We have a motion and we have a second by Ms. Rogers. Is there any final discussion on this item? Seeing none, Madam City Clerk, we can call a vote on this item.

Thank you. Council Member Rogers. Council Member MacDonald has recused. Council Member Fleming. Yes. Council Member Banuelos. Yes. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Okropke.

Aye.

Mayor Stapp.

Yes.

Let the record show that these resolutions were adopted with six affirmative votes and Council Member MacDonald recusing.

Excellent. All right, we can invite Ms. MacDonald back in. Here she comes, welcome back. All right, Mr. Alvarez, we can put a second motion on the floor.

Yes, sir. Second motion presented is to adopt the remaining resolutions on the primary budget, full-time equivalent staffing changes, stormwater assessment, and public safety and prevention implementation plan as presented by staff.

Second.

We have a motion and a second by Ms. McDonald. Any final discussion on this item? Seeing none, we can call the vote. Madam City Clerk.

Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member McDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Yes. Council Member Banuelos. Yes. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Krepke. Aye. Mayor Stapp.

Yes.

Let the record show these resolutions passed with seven affirmative votes.

Thank you. And if I'm understanding correctly, we can do a quick affirmation here that council approves of the proposed handling of the 4.5 million in the reserves. Is that accurate? Correct, Mayor. All right. We'll just do a thumbs up. There we go. The rare thumbs up vote from the dais. That gives you what you need though? yes thank you all right well my only thoughts at the conclusion of this are again just spectacular work again it's been four years of work for your team scott thank you so much we've been through this discussion on on the dais multiple times and so our questions have gotten gotten pretty refined uh what was useful for us and i think for the public as well was to have those examples of what could come next year if we do not find additional revenues. The kinds of difficult conversations that we'll be having, for me at least, that was very helpful to put into context the kinds of decisions that the city is considering. So thanks to you and to all the department heads who are putting that together, that adds materially to our conversation and underlines the need for us to find additional revenues during the course of this year. Any other thoughts from my colleagues? Seeing none, Mr. Wagner, thank you very much. We'll move on to our next item. All right, and our next item is our first report for the evening, item 15.1, our report on the independent police auditor annual report. This item was continued from the June 2nd, 2026 regular meeting. I think we have our city manager and then representatives from our OIR group. Madam City Manager, do you want to kick it off?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Good evening. This item before you tonight is an accept or receive only presentation from our independent police auditor providing an annual report of the Santa Rosa Police Department. Just as a reminder, OIR is an independent group. They conduct an analysis of the operations of the Santa Rosa Police Department. Back in 2021, the city entered into a contract with OIR Group to serve as the independent auditor for us. And the report directly to the city manager review internal investigations, they conduct audits of policies, practices and records and conduct community outreach. And so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Stephen Connolly of OIR Group to present his annual report. Thank you.

Thank you, City Manager Farrell, and good evening, Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members. Stephen Connolly from the Office of Independent Review Group, here on behalf of my colleagues and in my capacity, or our capacity, I should say, as independent police auditor for your city. One of the things that occurred to me as I was watching the meeting earlier is that this is an annual presentation that we make, and all of the faces on the dais this year are familiar to me. So I know that you have experience with this model. And with our work and what I'd like to do in the next few minutes is just provide you an overview of our annual report, which is a kind of a cornerstone of the model that Santa Rosa has devised for oversight of its police department. And then I certainly welcome any questions that you folks have. So just very briefly, as I hope most of you will remember or from any members of the public who are watching, OIR Group actually operates out of Southern California. We have been involved on a full-time basis in the civilian oversight of law enforcement since 2001, and we work with a number of different jurisdictions. throughout the state of California but in several other states as well and a lot of times that exposure to a range of agencies gives us some opportunity to kind of learn best practices and see what's working well and what's not working well and hopefully share some of the positive ideas with the police agencies that we work with and I think that has been our experience here. So I have I have three or four colleagues who work with me on the Santa Rosa project, but I'm probably the primary point of contact as the independent police auditor here, and I certainly welcome any of your questions or contacts throughout the year, although it's very good to see you in person as well. So I wanna talk a little bit about what the model is as established by your council a few years ago. The independent police auditor model is actually a distinctive one in terms of the work that we do. And it's one of the ones that I very much appreciate because I feel like there really is an opportunity to have an impact on these important internal matters before they are resolved. So the model is based on a real-time active monitoring of all misconduct investigations at all phases. And that is really the meat and potatoes of the work that we do with the city. Obviously, we present this report once a year, and I'll talk a little bit more about the reporting process and the purposes behind it. That's kind of one week out of the year and the other 51 really are based on regular contacts with the department as we work our way through the different complaint and misconduct cases that come along. And the model has been set up in such a way that we have direct access from my home computer. We've worked it out with the tech folks here. They're very patient with me and I have direct access to the database that SRPD uses to track these internal matters and I can look at the status of investigations. I can look at body-worn camera recordings. I have the ability to kind of move around as I'm interested in. And the department has made all of that transparent to the independent police auditor office. So beyond the discipline cases, and I'll talk a little bit more about the discipline cases in just a moment, there are other facets to the model. The critical incident review is one of the things that the city requested that we focus on. And since I was here last June reporting to you, the department, as you well know, had its first two officer-involved shooting cases during the first two of our tenure. So obviously those were major events for the department, major events for the community, and we had the opportunity to be engaged very quickly in terms of notification and kind of tracking the way the department was responding internally while some of the other external investigations were ongoing into those very important matters. So one of the other features that we have is the opportunity to kind of move around a little bit, take a step back from individual cases and look at the department more from more of a systems perspective and make recommendations for policy and procedure changes, and that's a feature of the annual report every year. There are seven recommendations in this year's report, and what usually happens is, in terms of accountability, is that the department Reports back to the public safety committee at some point in the fall usually and talks about each of the seven recommendations or ten recommendations or whatever it happens to be and Engages with them response to them talks about what it is done What is plan to do or or if it if it doesn't think it will work? It's sort of accountable to your counsel as to as to why it doesn't think it will work so and that kind of feedback loop I think is important. So when it comes to oversight and people's, I think that the average person's conceptions of what oversight should hopefully accomplish in a community. The two words that come up over and over again in the places that we work are one is transparency and two is accountability. So the transparency comes in two ways. One is that the window that the department gives an independent outsider into its processes that are otherwise confidential and not accessible to an outside person. And then the second is public reporting process. So hopefully gonna hit the highlights and keep the presentation moving, but I certainly do encourage folks who are interested to look at the public report that is available on the city's website. It goes into detail into all the concepts that we're touching on at least a little bit here and provide some specifics. And then in the back, there is actually a case status chart that breaks down what happened in all 55 of the misconduct investigations that my office worked through with the department in calendar year 2025. Talking a little bit about the discipline process and how it works, as I mentioned before, there are regular interactions with SRPD regarding the status of cases. I have regular contact with the sergeant who is in charge of the personnel investigations unit. and he keeps me apprised of new cases as they're coming in and then significant developments in ongoing cases. One of the major features of this that we don't do anywhere else, and we work in a lot of different places, and I think this is again a sign of the robust nature of the Santa Rosa model. We have the opportunity to sit in on officer interviews when they are being investigated for potential violations of policy, potential misconduct. I have the opportunity to sit in on those interviews and ask questions and really have a front row seat to make sure that the investigation is appropriately thorough, that the evidence is being gathered to the best of the department's ability. And then we also get to consult with the department on the outcomes. I wanna emphasize that point at least briefly. Importantly, I think that it bears mentioning that the department maintains, the department and the city manager's office effectively maintains control over these processes. I don't have the power to make the chief do anything. It's ultimately gonna be up to the chief and to the city to resolve these cases in the way that they see fit. But I absolutely have the opportunity to weigh in at every step of the way and also the opportunity to report out. If I had a serious concern about the way that the department was handling a particular case, if I had a strong disagreement with an outcome, then I would have the option to turn to the city manager's office to report out publicly, at least to some extent. And those are all ways that the oversight has been given the opportunity to really be influential and to make a difference here in terms of how the discipline process works. And I'm pleased to be able to say that the department ever since we really started working with them a few years ago, the department absolutely holds up its end of the bargain in terms of providing us with all the information that we need, reaching out to us and making sure that we are informed and also engaging with us at all the different steps, putting up with our questions, um taking our suggestions for for maybe enhancing an investigation or going back and revisiting a particular point they have been very very collaborative in that respect and we're pleased to say we we never have had to go to the city manager or to the city council or to the press democrat and say you know this is a broken system and we're very concerned The department really does do a fine job and we're able to, again, see that from a front row perspective and also make a contribution to it by bringing our experience and our outside perspective and kind of stand in the shoes of members of the public at times to give the department maybe a new or additional way of looking at things. In terms of 2025, there were 55 new allegations of misconduct that were processed by the department. These were kind of divided up into two groups. Many of them were complaints from members of the public, which every police agency is obligated under state law to intake complaints and investigate and then provide notification to that person on the back end as to the outcome of the cases. But several of the cases this year, as in other years, were generated by the department as well. So in terms of, again, to the extent people are skeptical about the ability of a police agency to hold its own people accountable and to police itself, It's important to note that not only does the public complaint process get taken seriously and handled, and I think is in an effective way, but the department, without the public having any awareness of this as an issue at all, the department generates, department's leadership, managers, supervisors generate a number of cases each year. when concerns come to their attention about potential violations of policy, potential officer misconduct. So those internally generated cases are also a means by which the department makes sure that its officers are meeting expectations and living up to department standards and also public standards. And again, in terms of just a couple of trends to keep in mind, one of the things, as I said before, we've been doing this for a long time. And one of the real evolutions that we have seen is that the investigative process is more efficient than it's ever been. A lot of that has to do with the advent of body-worn camera technology and the sort of definitive nature of that evidence. So we review all the body-worn camera for these cases, and I think that's a big part of the department's process in investigating and evaluating these incidents. And it's also, it really adds to the confidence level with which decisions get made about what exactly happened out there and what should the appropriate outcomes be. And again, the case status chart that's in the public, as an appendix in the public report, it really does give some insight into the kinds of things that are brought to the public's, or excuse me, brought to the department's attention by the public. and the kinds of things that the department is generating internally, what the outcome of those cases were, how many of them were sustained, how many of them were found considered to be unfounded or not sustained and why, and talks a little bit about our role, our contributions to the process along the way. And I'm pleased to say that our profile in the city, I think, has slowly risen over the years. And we get contacts several times a year, telephone calls and emails from people who are upset with this police department or have questions about the process. And we have the opportunity to engage with them to facilitate if they wanna make a complaint and just to provide them with another resource so that they know that their issues are being taken seriously. In terms of the kinds of contributions that we make, they really are at every stage of the investigation from the framing of allegations at the outset, making sure they're appropriately thorough, making sure that the outcomes as far as how the evidence is assessed is reasonable. And I think our agreement percentage with the department is actually really, really high. And even in those cases where we don't see it exactly the same way, I can certainly see the reasonableness of the department's perspective. And we feel like the decisions are legitimate ones, even if they're not necessarily exactly the ones that we would make. And finally, and this has been one of the things that we have really, really tried to emphasize in our whole time here, and I think the department has embraced might be too strong of a word, but they are definitely better, more responsive than they have ever been in terms of one of our key ideas, which is to say, Look at the bottom line issue of whether policy was violated, whether this complaint should be sustained, but don't stop there. Use it as an opportunity to look at the performance more generally and, hey, even if this wasn't a policy violation, if there's a way that the communication by the officer could have been better or the whole contact could have been handled more effectively, then take the time to follow up with the officer. Use it as an opportunity to improve performance and make things better going forward. And again, not just stop with the primary question of whether the allegation is sustained or not. There were some significant cases this year as there are every year. One of the interesting things externally is we obviously look at each case individually, but then I have the opportunity because of this cycle to kind of step back and look for trends I wouldn't say there are any, because the sample sizes of any trends are so small that I think a statistician would really question how much weight to give to any of it. But I have noticed in past years, for example, two or three years ago, a high percentage of the complaints came from unhoused individuals or advocates for unhoused individuals who were complaining about enforcement activity. felt like they weren't being treated respectfully or properly or that their property had been mishandled by the department. That has gone way down. I think I may have had one or two out of the 55 that we reviewed in 2025. But one of the things that was striking to me about this year's batch of cases was that a number of the complaints were not by people who had been arrested or had been given a ticket and were mad about how the police had treated them. They were actually by people who called the police for help, victims of crime, people who brought things to the department's attention. and felt disappointed for one reason or another about the quality of the investigation or the follow through that the department had done. And I think that could be a function of a few different things. Again, making sure each individual case is adjudicated and investigated appropriately, but also stepping back and saying, There's an unusually high number of these. Is it suggestive of anything that's going on? And I've talked to the chief about that. It's maybe inexperience in the workforce or just people who are kind of overextended or whatever the case may be. But I think looking at that and encouraging The investigative follow-through and the customer service and trying to reduce those complaints in 2026, I think is a worthwhile goal and something to focus on. In terms of major incidents, I want to turn our attention to that for just a moment. That, again, is a component of the original scope of work. It's one of the areas where I feel like we've had the biggest systemic impact on the department since we started working here the department really did not have a very well structured comprehensive approach to reviewing significant incidents, force incidents, officer-involved shootings, major injury cases, canine bites, things that are obviously significant to the community. There are potential high liability cases, and there are significant uses of police authority And we really encourage the department to build a process so that one of these things happens. It really is taking a full-fledged look at it, certainly with officer accountability being a piece of it, but really to look at it and say, let's look at this entire thing from beginning to end and all the different aspects of it. And apart from the issue of whether somebody violated policy or not, or there's a specific individual performance, Could we have done this differently? How was the supervision? How was the communication? How was the support? All kinds of different things that can potentially be worth scrutinizing and adjusting, and the department has put together a new process that I think does an excellent job of pursuing those questions in a much more thorough and comprehensive way than it ever has before. And there were 10 separate incidents that were identified by the department in 2025 as being worthy of this much more elaborate process. And it's been gratifying to see them implement it and come up with a lot of good insights and work product on the back end of it. In terms of other force cases, the department's training unit is something that we have really focused a lot of attention on. It is a small cadre of people, but I think they do an incredibly important job for the department in terms of they're experts, and they're really a resource as much as anything else. The goal is to look at these things and find ways to help officers use force more effectively, deescalate more effectively when possible, make sure that their equipment is well-suited to whatever tasks there are, whatever challenges they're faced with. Officer safety is a big priority, but also the recognition that the use of force is a big deal to the public. and it needs to be done in careful, efficient ways and with the least impact possible and with all the legal justifications that are necessary. So I think that training unit has been a very, very helpful resource in terms of looking at individual cases, working with officers in a constructive performance improvement sort of way, and coming up, I think the chief really makes use of them and provides them with a lot of different opportunities to contribute. And this idea of holistic review that we were talking about before with the misconduct case is certainly applicable to the use of force review process as well. And again, the use of force may have been justified or in policy, but are there any insights that we can pick up from looking at the way the whole thing was handled and any ways that we should be adjusting officer performance or making suggestions going forward? One last thing that I wanna focus on is a relatively new thing that the department has begun to sort of formally track, and that is pointed firearm cases. So as I said before, I've been doing this for a long time, and a lot of older law enforcement types would tell you, pointing a weapon at somebody used to not be considered as as big a deal if you will or as as uh significant a thing as it has become and there is a recognition now that this this is a big deal if you've ever had a weapon pointed at you you don't think that it's something casual and just part of an officer's normal response to things so the department now expect has an expectation that officers are going to report Every time that they're in a situation where they point a firearm at someone and it's gonna be reported, provide a written explanation of why, that's gonna be looked at by a supervisor and the whole thing is going to be assessed as to whether this was legitimate, did this meet department expectations. And I was very struck by the effectiveness of it. I think it was something that within a couple of years everybody kind of got it, if you will. And the supervisors were really doing a good job of thoroughly reviewing these things and coming up with insights and not just checking the box and moving on, but really taking the process seriously. And I think it's a function of the fact that the department's leadership leaned into it. and said, hey, we have this expectation. That gets pushed down to the supervisors. That gets pushed down to the officers. And it's just a reminder that a lot of the things that we have talked about, if you just emphasize it and prioritize it, I think a lot of times your department is going to respond. And this was, I think, a very encouraging example for me. As I said, we have seven recommendations in this year's report, and they are more process-oriented than anything else. I'm happy to speak to any of the individual ones that you'd like to talk about, but I will certainly look forward to the department's response in September or October or whenever that Public Safety Committee meeting comes along, because that, to me, is an opportunity to see Is this stuff sinking in and have they made adjustments on the ground that hopefully are gonna be reflected in the 2026 report and the overall evaluation of performance? So thank you for your patience. I know you've had a long day today and any questions that you have, I'm very happy to answer.

This was an important presentation and new and critical work. So thank you for taking the time to be with us tonight. I'm gonna turn to my counsel to see if there are any questions at this time. We'll start with Ms. Banuelos.

Thank you, Mayor. Great to see you, Mr. Connolly. So first, I just want to start off by saying how strongly I believe in the independent auditor process. And I know we sat down when I first got elected, and I really appreciated that because this particular issue is really important to me personally, but also for the community. I did have a couple of questions. I wanted to ask about the major incident review board. So I see that the people that sit on it are department execs and subject matter experts, which is great. And I just wondered now, is your organization a part of that process or are these the only folks that sit on it?

um what what is that exactly how does that exactly work so we do not sit on the in on the actual presentations but we have the opportunity we certainly they get flagged for us as they are putting together and we'll have the opportunity to review the presentation um usually it's a powerpoint and on body worn camera and there's a whole basis for the deliberation that the department makes And certainly on the outcome end, as far as the department's deliberations, we'll have an opportunity to participate. But that meeting itself is really basically an open exchange of ideas where they are just kind of walking through the whole thing in a self-critical way and then kind of getting to the bottom line of outcomes.

All right, that's good to know. And then I wonder, I saw on, I think it was on page 20, you talk about the use of force and maybe moving toward a more holistic assessment and looking at the totality of the incident. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So the use of force, anytime an officer uses force, the department, the officer's obligated to report it to a supervisor, and there's a formal process for looking at any injuries for the subject are going to be photographed, the subject's going to get interviewed, and somebody's going to evaluate that to say, was the force that was used reasonable and justified, you know, legally and in terms of department policy? But a lot of times, and overwhelmingly, The answer to that question is yes. And that's not just in terms of the how it comes out. It's the reality of it. I mean, we will evaluate these things ourselves. And we very rarely differ from the department in terms of the evaluation of whether the force itself was was justified. That said, there are oftentimes a lot of moving parts to an encounter that precede the use of force or that follow the use of force, and sometimes those are opportunities to say, hey, these two officers didn't work very well together with each other, and they didn't control the subject as effectively as they could have, or this person really seemed unsure about how to handcuff somebody and the subject... all of a sudden started resisting and a different officer with a more efficient approach, we wouldn't have ever gotten to that point, or the communication is poor, or the officer is commenting after the fact in ways that don't reflect entirely well in the department. All of those things, in our view, should be in play. And again, not in terms of punishing people or being mad or saying that the force was out of policy, but looking at it and saying, what have we got here? And again, ideally, making future performance better.

Thank you. And so it's kind of following that, in your recommendation number five, where you say the SRPD should refine the major incident review protocol to ensure that identified actions items are assigned, completed, and documented prior to the closure of the case file. So I wanted to ask you about that. Is there a feeling that things are, Not followed through completely.

So the short answer is yes, but I'll give you a longer answer too. I don't necessarily mean that in a super critical way. A lot of it is just a function of the process being so new and they're kind of making it up as they go along and figure it's like a living laboratory where they're making adjustments. And my point is, you have some very good ideas that you're identifying and some action items that different people might be responsible for. And I'm not saying the follow through isn't happening. I'm saying if you really want to put the icing on the cake and ensure that the follow through is happening, let's document it, let's capture it, let's put that in the case file so that we know that this level of attention has been given and followed through on and it can be closed out in a more satisfying way.

Right, and I'm just in the interest of time, because I know it's getting late, I just want to ask you one more thing, and maybe I can talk to you later offline. Sure. And I just want to say, I also was very impressed that you or your organization are involved in the interview process, because I think that's... I want to attribute that to our chief. I know he wants to do the right thing and I really appreciate that and that's something that I know the county really battles with and I know you know that. So I really appreciate the fact that we are doing that. So lastly, I just wanted to ask about the regional training facility. I know that you heard all about our budget all night. We don't have much money. But I'm curious about that because I think training is so, so important. And it's just a recommendation and I just thought if you could talk about that for about a minute.

So I would say to you that I agree with you 100%. Training is critically important and that's why I am so enthusiastic about the commitments the department has made to its training unit. I think that to put it very, very simply, i have the luxury of being able to to think things are are wonderful and should be pursued without having to worry about the implications and the cost benefit and well what do we have to take away if we're going to make this happen so i think the department has put some thoughtful work into what a regional training center might look like but i absolutely recognize how that we're far you know in in a lot of different ways from from shovel turning to the most important money funding sorts of questions. It's a long way away from happening. I just don't want the department to give up on the idea because I think it's a great idea and they should keep leaning into the work that they've done.

Great. Ms. McDonald.

Thank you. Maybe, Chief, you might need to answer this for me. How many calls do we respond to each year as a police department?

That is definitely a Chief Cregan question.

I thought maybe it was.

Yes, and that's a good question. I was just actually looking at some of the data today. So last year in 2025, we had 179,000, just over 179,000 calls that came into our 911 dispatch center. Our officers responded to just over 111,000 calls. So we went out in the field, 111,000 calls. What I think is really good, it kind of paints the picture. So 111,000 calls we responded to made just over 6,600 arrests that we made out of those 11. But our uses of force were 185. So when you look at that, out of 111,000 calls, we went to 0.17. So not 1.7, 0.17. So not even a quarter of 1% of our our calls for service resulted in a use of force. And out of our arrest, it was 2.8% out of the 6,600 arrests. Out of those, the vast majority of them were low-level uses of force, of what we call control holds, a leg sweep takedown. A leg sweep takedown is where you're taking someone down the ground just to control them. The vast majority of these were low-level force. But even those, 185 out of 111,000 calls, 6,600 arrests, Really proud of the work that they do. Our policy is every use of force is required by policy to verbally call a supervisor as soon as you can safely do it, to document that use of force in a police report. Every single one of our officers are wearing a body worn camera. Every single one of our MARC cars has three cameras. The supervisor is to respond to the scene, to assess the situation on any significant use of force. They talk to the suspect, too, independently, the supervisor does, to assess was this a proper use of force. We do an independent review. Our lieutenant, the mid-level manager, does a secondary review. And then our independent police auditors. There's so many layers. And then the major incident review board, I second what our police auditor said. I think it's been one of the most, like, robust and meaningful recommendations and this came directly from our independent police auditor bring it to us if this is something we would love to see you do really embrace i attend every single one of those with my command staff with our training team and we also invite in a representative from our city attorney's office who reviews this and and And we're dissecting those and make meaningful changes. And what I see in my 27 years in law enforcement, law enforcement as a whole is reluctant at times for self-critiquing and making. So what we're trying to do is we're changing that culture of the Santa Rosa Police Department. We go in there with that lens. What could we have done better from the supervisor perspective? What could we have done better? Are there any policy violations? Are there any training? Are there any equipment? And we dissect those just like you would do going to a baseball coach or a football coach and we dissect how could we have handled we handled every avenue of this call better, and then we make those recommendations, we make some changes, we sit down with the officer who was involved, we sit down with the supervisors involved and say, let's get better as an organization. Sometimes we also say that was absolutely outstanding work and you did great work on this case and we reward and acknowledge the officers and supervisors, but then again, What sets us apart from any agency in the regency is our police auditors at our side step by step on those and so really just proud of the work that the men and women of the police department are doing every day.

Thank you for that and for actually pontificating some of the other parts of what I would have followed up with, and I appreciate, one, that you could do this off the cuff is amazing to me, but that you're able to really dissect down. Of the 55 different incidents, if I read the report correctly, only 17 were sustained.

Yes, that's correct. And that's not unusual, actually, in terms of a percentage. And interestingly enough, it tends to be a higher percentage of the internally generated cases that are sustained as opposed to the public complaints.

Yeah, it feels like our own police department are detectives on each other when they're researching this and looking at every single incident. I really wanna commend SRPD. I said it a lot, that they're an exemplary, outstanding police department, and I know you've had a lot of recognition, not just in the state, but I wanna say thank you to them. There's not any department that I know of that does a day, Today, minute by minute, professional development look 360 constantly. They're videotaped, they're watched, and then they have to look at everything they do every minute to make sure that they're delivering the highest amount of professionalism to our community And so I think that should be commended that we do this, we work with a great auditor to make sure that we're still delivering this year after year. And so please take back to the entire team just how proud of them I am and how each time this comes forward and I see what a low number of incidents we have and even the sustained ones, not to say that they're not important to look at everything, But I appreciate that and the statistic amount of how many we respond to every year is incredible to me. So great job SRPD.

Thank you, Ms. Rogers.

Thank you. I wanted to say I love the pointed firearm protocol. I think that that is great because that can be very traumatic for people, especially people that are not Point blank, it's pretty traumatic, even if you are around guns, if you have a firearm pointed at you. For the 55 cases, I read through them and I don't think many of them or if any of them had anything to do with this, but I was speaking to some of the detectives And just hearing about the delay in them getting to some of the cases due to staffing. If we have not, which it doesn't look like we have been getting many of those complaints, I can see that they will be coming because the caseloads are getting larger and our ability to get to some of them, like the sexual assault cases and things like that, they have to prioritize. I can foresee a problem with that in the future. And I don't know how to solve it. I'm just saying I can see a problem. And I think that those people would feel defeated as much time and energy emotionally as it takes to come forward with something like that than to have your case sit on a shelf, and I don't know where it sits, Chief, but for a long time and then have someone call six months later and reopen that wound to try to look into that investigation. So with that, I think probably to thank the department, both civilian and sworn, I know that they're all human, you're all human, and no one is perfect, but the fact that you're willing to learn from the mistakes to examine them and to find protocols and ways so that they do not happen again, because the goal is to protect and serve our community and our public, and I think you guys are doing a great job, so thank you very much.

Thank you, any other questions? We'll open up to the public. Are there any members of the public who wish to speak on this item?

Yeah, me.

Mr. Hilber.

That shooting of that unarmed homeless guy near St. Rose Church laid bare a major failing of leadership. and I expect the review of that to bring that to light. What happened there was that the police were called simply because this guy was sleeping on the sidewalk in such a way as to block a driveway. That's all, obstructing a driveway. It was not a wellness check or any other nonsense. So anyway, the officer got out there. He was already up. He had moved. He was no longer blocking the driveway. There was no crime at that point. There was nothing to do at that point. Yet the officer felt compelled to detain him and get his ID and run a, you know, warrants check and all background check and all that nonsense. That is uncalled for. Leadership would suggest to an officer that when you're in that situation, you respond to nothing, let it go. And now instead you're gonna have a mess here where you're gonna be paying out a large amount of money for some unarmed mentally handicapped fellow getting a bullet in him.

Are there any other members of the public who'd like to speak? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. I will bring it back to the dais. Any final comments before we go to a motion?

Oh, of course there is no, just we'll accept the report.

Any final comments? Just my thanks. Mr. Connolly, Chief Cregan, what impresses me about this review every year is the thoroughness of it. So, I mean, reading through the 55 cases was instructive. It was fascinating to see the depth that you go through in your review, the constant interactions, the transparency. It does make all of us on the dais here proud that this is the process we have here. So thank you very much for your assistance in creating that culture. And Chief Cregan, your leadership in fostering it within SRPD. With that, I'll turn to, let's see, Ms. McDonald, just to accept the report.

I don't think there's a formal motion that we need to make. It's just the acceptance of the report. So I accept.

There we go. Thank you. And thank you very much for those kind words and for your questions and engagement. And to your point, Council Member Banuelis, I certainly welcome, if there's ever a particular incident or a constituent who's raising something and you would like to bounce some ideas off of somebody else, I'm always happy to interact with the Council. So thank you, and it's good to see everybody.

Thank you again. All right, we'll move on to our final report of the evening. Item 15.2, our report on approving and adopting the Sonoma County Animal Services revised fees. Mr. Frazier, Mr. Whipple, and Ms. Renee, thank you very much for your patience. It's been a long evening.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Are you ready to talk about some cats and puppies?

Always. Always, good.

Welcome. My name is Luke Fazer. I'm the Administrative Analyst for the City Manager's Office. I'm joined tonight by Director Brian Whipple and Community Relations Supervisor Michelle Rene from Sonoma County Animal Services. They will be providing the proposed fee adjustments for the upcoming fiscal year. As you'll see here in more detail, these changes reflect careful balancing of rising service delivery costs while maintaining a strong commitment to affordability and access to those services for our residents. I think it's also important to emphasize that this proposal is not simply about increasing the fees. It reflects in a thoughtful approach that prioritizes keeping critical services like adoptions, licensing, and preventative care accessible for which support better outcomes for both animals and our community. Before I pass the mic over to our guests here, I also want to address Council Member McDonald's questions earlier about the increase in the contracts year over year. Briefly, there has been a increase about 20% for the last two years. The first one from fiscal year 24 to 25, I believe that was because of hiring needs to do proactive service calls to ensure a community and consistency of care for our community. And then for the most recent fiscal year, 25-26, those were increased costs due to operational costs for pharmaceuticals, veterinary care, and other concerns like that. I also think it's important to recognize the high level of service this community is receiving through our partnership with Sonoma County Animal Services. Recent Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury Review found that Sonoma County residents, specifically Santa Rosa residents, are receiving animal services that achieve or often exceed the industry standards. This report also acknowledged that the steady progress that SCAS has made over time to implement best practices, sorry, noting that these advancements reflect strong oversight and sustained investment in quality animal care services. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to our partners who will walk you through the proposed fee structure and details behind these adjustments.

Good evening. Maybe I gotta get closer, how's that? Can you hear me now? All right, good evening. Yeah, so what we're here to discuss is our fee schedule. Each year we review our fees and look at increases or decreases that could potentially happen. Everything that we do has a fee attached to it. So we have to look at that in a big sense of the population that we're serving because we also don't wanna make our fees so high that people can't get their animals back. We don't wanna hang on to people's animals, we want them in their homes. So that's why we try and make the fees reasonable as we possibly can, but even on an adoption fee, we're not gonna make money. We are just trying to get these animals into homes and get them out of the system and provide a better life. Most of our fees, we did have a number of increases this year, but overall our increases are $1 to $2 for the most part. We're not increasing anything large by any sense. We have so many things that we do with the community. I touched on it a little bit already, but the education, the spay-neuter services, the overall public safety aspect to what we do as well. It's something that we're out there and we're doing every single day. A couple of things that we have done recently is we did add body-worn cameras for our officers in the field, which has been a great piece for us as well as any police department that's out there. It definitely has helped us in a lot of different instances and created a much safer environment for our officers. And it's great for training for our new folks that come through because they're going to see things they probably have never seen before. We've got a new security system for our facility. We've made it more accessible for private cremations for folks when their pets are deceased. That wasn't something that we offered previously. So that is something that the entire county has access to, which is a service that can be expensive, but we're doing it as a pass-through to make sure that, again, it's just a service so that they can get their pets' remains cremated in a good way. As Luke pointed out, the Granger Report did state that we were making good progress and we were providing great services. Currently, we've added a couple of different jurisdictions now. We took on Windsor recently and Healdsburg since the last time that I was at the council, which I think was about three years ago when we came in for our last fee increase that we brought. So that's where we're at right now in terms of the fee side. And then some of the things that we do for the city of Santa Rosa. We've really bumped up our proactive patrols in the parks. We have had a lot of complaints and a lot of questions and a lot of problems in a number of the parks. There was people that were being bitten, joggers that wouldn't go to the parks any longer, families that wouldn't frequent the playgrounds. So with those, we did bring a bigger presence to these parks, and I know that the council probably received some complaints at one point or another, but that is also part of that accountability that is out there, and that's something that in any enforcement section you're gonna have to do, and nobody likes accountability when it comes to them. And animals are a big, big piece to our society, especially in this county and especially in the city. They're important members of our families and we wanna make sure that everybody is safe and everybody can enjoy what's out there that's being offered. You know, our spay-neuter program is another great piece that has access. These fees also go to being able to provide free spay-neuter to city residents as well. So that's some of the different pieces and that is the biggest struggle that I think we're seeing in the animal welfare field right now is spay and neuter access, the shortage of veterinarians and veterinary technicians. So it really is a challenge for folks to do the right thing, especially in this economic climate. We've done some people and pets vaccination clinics where people could come in, get themselves vaccinated for the flu or COVID or whatever it might have been, and also bring your pet to get rabies vaccines and their yearly vaccines as well and microchips. And it was one health idea, which is great, where we want to continue these on as much as possible. And so far, we've partnered with the Humane Society. In each of the clinics that we did, we went through three just to get it off the ground. Each of those clinics served just about 100 people at each clinic. And that's getting both types of animals vaccinated. Next slide. Some of the other things that we do is we do manage some of our surrenders, but not to the extent, and that is really the only incoming animals that we can manage. If you are looking to surrender your pet, we ask you to get on our list, but we also provide you with resources, whether it's food or it could be training tips. We have a contract with a group called Free Dog Trainers, so if you're having behavior issues, we can help you work through some of those issues as well. We've really gone up a level with licensing. Licensing is a hard sell, and not a lot of people see the benefits from licensing your pet, but it really is, it's for rabies control, which is basically 99.9% fatal. So you wanna be careful of those types of things, and this is the way for us to be able to manage some of that. and then uh you know we respond to a lot of wildlife calls as well um there's quite a few owls we assisted the the city um tpw folks getting some quail out of a storm drain in oakmont so there's there's a lot of different things that happen out there And then obviously we're always planning, always training for any natural disasters and emergencies that come up. And that's where our main focus, when those do happen, we're gonna be ready and we have groups of folks that are part of that team to respond. And here's some numbers just real quick on calls for service, and you can kinda see what we're getting into. And it's across the board, and these are essentially the numbers for what we actually bill the city for. These are the calls for service that we're gonna use to invoice and say, because our contract is based on calls for service and numbers of animals coming into the facility. so the the more the more the population the more people and the more animals we're going to be busier you know and and one thing that i think gets lost sometimes is the animal services isn't just for pet owners it's for anybody that calls in that having has having an issue with an animal you don't have to own a pet to get our get our help and i think sometimes that does get lost on the overall we're not just there for pet owners we're there for anybody that needs us And as Luke mentioned too, a lot of the proactive cases that we do, we're out there because having that presence really does help squash some of the issues. When people see our truck, they're gonna put their dog on a leash. That's just kind of the way that it works and it's helpful. It does create a much safer environment for people out there. Here are some of our fees for boarding, some of the ones that do affect the city. And as you can see, they're going up. A lot of them went up a few dollars at most just because, again, we don't wanna overcharge folks. And then our licensing and other fees that are involved. These are all, again, small increases in the overall for what the work has done. and just some of our intake types and how those animals came to us. You know, quarantines are a big one. Strays obviously are one of those ones that we see the most of. And you know, those confiscate ones are ones that are involved in either an animal cruelty case or say somebody was arrested or had to go to the hospital and we're intervening to help take care of that animal while they're in a different place. And here's our license fees. These are, again, the license fees. We did a fee study a few years ago, and because we went with DocuPet, that is a web-based licensing system, and made it much easier, we didn't put as much staff time into licensing an animal. So with that, we had to decrease our fees. And then the last time I was here, I did come in and we decreased the fee by, it was around 10 or $15 at that time, which was a huge decrease, which didn't help us in the long run in terms of our revenue coming in, but it helps the community and really gets them on track. So just over time, there's different things that are gonna affect the cost of doing that type of service, and everything is going up in cost. Rabies vaccines, just the everyday cost of feed, the cost of water, and we use a lot of water at our facility for cleaning and keeping things going. Dangerous dogs, these are some of the ones that are, You probably get to hear a lot about these. These are your dog bite cases, and we take these to the city attorney's office for moving that forward through the system to get a designation. Most of these dogs, it could be a one-time thing. We hope it is a one-time thing or a never thing. But these costs do reflect the work that goes into it. So you can voluntarily designate an animal or you can take it to court. And going to court is a lot more work involved and a lot more people involved. So that is why there's a much higher cost for that. And these are some of the different registrations that we have for our animals that have been designated. I'm trying to make it quick for the late hour.

We appreciate that. That was the perfect speed. And every presentation that comes before us should have these exact pictures. That should be a city ordinance. All right, bring it to council for questions. Ms. Rogers.

Thank you. So I think one of the things that is confusing about me, for me is that you charge fees, Where do those fees go if we're paying?

And that does go back into the overall services. So we don't charge for every single call that we go on. Overall, we see it was around 5,200 calls just for the City of Santa Rosa, and we're charging at 2,300, somewhere around there. A lot of the calls we're going to aren't something, because again, contracts based on calls for service and for, or certain calls for service and for incoming animals. So with the increase in population and that kind of thing, there's more animals coming to the facility as well. And that cost of care goes up. Another side of that is every animal that is running loose that's injured, we have to get treated by a veterinarian, by state mandate. So every one of those animals that go to say pet care on Mendocino Ave, there's a cost associated with that. So that's part of where that money goes is to help cover some of those costs.

So the owner doesn't pay any of those fees or you don't charge us when the owner pays the fees?

That's the tricky part is getting people to pay the vet bill for that type of work. The struggle we have is because people can't afford just everyday things and we don't wanna keep animals from their owners. So we do try to work with folks on payment plans and different things of that nature. And then actually at the end of the year when we do a true up with the invoice,

and that's where the the fees collected the licensing revenue was all accounted for at the end of the year i'll just jump in a little bit too to help out um so this the fees that uh we are the the licenses fees um and those sorts of fees those are used to offset the the contract that is between us and sonoma county animal services Their operational costs are highly subsidized by the county and by Santa Rosa, and those fees don't cover all the costs of those services. So even though, I don't have the exact number of the fees here, but even though it may cost $30 to get a vaccination, it may cost more than that to actually provide that service. So that's why you're seeing a differential in the cost of our contract versus the revenue that we collect to offset that contract. I hope that answers that question.

It does, but Luke, I probably would do better by seeing it Not today, I know, but if you can get that to me, I just probably would do better by seeing it, because I don't really get it completely.

Absolutely.

Thank you. And then also... I did get some feedback, since you're here, very recently actually, I think it was last week, that someone had to go to one of our constituents' homes in Santa Rosa and that they were not very nice. So just wanted to give you that feedback because you're here that I know that people work with animals and some people like animals and don't like humans and I totally get it. They're a lot cuter, but we still need to be nice to the humans, even if we're like to work with the animals. Slide 11, it talked about the outcomes and the intakes. With the birds, I see that the outcomes was smaller. The total outcomes was smaller than the intakes. But when we go to like the cats, how can it be more? Do they have babies when they were there or?

Yes, we get a lot of cats that come in pregnant and we'll give birth while they're at the facility. So, you know, any illiterate kittens could be six or eight kittens at a time.

Okay, and then how many animals do you put down?

You know, our live release rate, I don't have the number in front of me, but our live release rate usually hovers between 85% and 88%, which I don't like to use this analogy, but the no-kill movement puts it at a 90%. And we're a municipal shelter that accepts every animal that comes to the door, whether it's aggressive, injured, super nice, or whatever shape it's in. We're going to take that animal in. We don't get to pick and choose what comes to us. So there are gonna, and for euthanasia, the only animals we do euthanize are animals with severe behavior issues, you know, biting and mainly biting and things of that nature that could cause a public safety risk, or if there's a medical issue that we can't treat. So those are really the only animals that we're going down the euthanasia road with.

Okay, thank you. You can always count on me to ask the uncomfortable questions. Thank you.

I'm always happy to talk about that.

Thank you, any other questions? We'll open up to the public. Are there any members of the public who wish to comment on this item? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. And again, do we need a motion on this report item? We do. So we will, who am I looking for for the motion here? Is this Ms. Manuelos? Perfect.

Okay, I move to adopt a resolution as presented by staff.

A motion and a second. Do we need to take a vote?

We do, Mayor. Are we ready?

Go ahead.

Council Member Rogers. Aye. Council Member MacDonald. Aye. Council Member Fleming. Aye. Council Member Banuelos. Yes. Council Member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Okrupke. Aye. Mayor Stapp.

Yes.

Let the record show this passes with six affirmative votes and Council Member Fleming absent.

Luke, Michelle, and Brian, thank you for taking the time. Obviously, we didn't have as many questions because of how long it's been, but we've all read the papers in recent months. We've seen what's happened in Petaluma, in Healdsburg, in Windsor. Thank you for coming to their aid. We know the value of the work that you do, so thank you for coming here for this report and talking to us a little bit more about, again, the good service that you're providing.

Thank you. Appreciate that. And I extend an invitation to the entire council. Anytime you want to come to the facility for a tour, just let me know. We can arrange that and we'd be happy to show you around. And we can for sure send you home with a kitten or a puppy or whatever you want to take.

Thank you for that. All right, we will move on with final thanks. We'll move on to our final item of the evening, which is our second public comment on non-agenda matters. Are there any members of the public who wish to make comment on items not listed on the agenda who have not already spoken? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and we are officially adjourned. Thank you, everyone.