City Council - Special Meeting

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good evening I should say good morning I am welcoming you to a special meeting here on August 12th 2026 at 9 o 4 and I believe that we can simplify this process so we're gonna go straight to the item and we're rotating or switching the sequence as shown on the agenda we're going to now 2.2 and it's the consider and possibly take action to approve an unconditional commitment letter to Laura Alderman responding to her Brown Act and ADA violation claims set forth in her letter of July 16th, 2026. And at this point, I'd like to ask for the presentation.

Point of order, sir. Each council meeting, aren't you supposed to open up for public comment?

On items not appearing on the agenda. I see.

Thank you.

Yes. You'll absolutely have your opportunity. Okay. Please.

Good morning, Mayor and Council Members. This item responds to a July 16th cease and desist letter alleging violations of the Brown Act and the ADA arising from our July 15th council meetings. I want to be clear at the outset. The city's position is that it did not violate the Brown Act. The two special closed session meetings were properly noticed on July the 9th. well in excess of the Brown Act's 24-hour notice requirement for a special meeting. And the public was provided an opportunity to comment before the council went into closed session. At their regular meeting, no member of the public was denied the opportunity to provide general public comment or to comment on an agenda item requiring council consideration or action. The separate ADA issue relates to Ms. Alderman's request to make her comments live via Zoom. At this time, the city does not provide live public comment over zoom and does not yet have an adopted policy establishing zoom participation as an ADA accommodation. The city did offer Ms. Alderman alternative ways to participate. She was offered the option to either submit her comments in writing or provide an audio recording that could be played for the council at the meeting. We also offered her the ability to exceed the normal public time limit of two minutes in order to accommodate her. This was not a situation in which the city simply denied her an opportunity to participate. We offered alternative accommodations intended to ensure her comments could be presented to the council. In the coming months, staff will be bringing forward a formal ADA accommodation policy so there is clear and consistent process for handling requests of this kind. Finally, approval of the unconditional commitment letter is not admission that the city violated either law under the Brown Act The commitment cannot be construed or used as evidence that a violation occurred. Staff recommends approval because it resolves the Brown Act cease and desist process and avoids unnecessary litigation over the challenge past actions. And I'm here to answer any questions if you have them.

Any questions from the dais to staff? I will then open it up to the public, and please come forward. You do have a generous three minutes, if you don't mind identifying if you're okay with that. Thank you, sir. Please.

This isn't my first rodeo, but I appreciate it. And I want to appreciate the audio systems working today. The last meeting I came to that Ms. Alderman had complained about, it wasn't working, so I appreciate it very much. I know these technical difficulties do happen. I'm a former city councilman in the People's Republic of Cotati. I spoke to you once before, a month or two ago, and first of all, about speaking at that other meeting, I was a little terrified and disappointed of the crocodile tears that I exhibited at this meeting, not from the DS, obviously, but I want to come back at a later time and speak to you about this and bring you up to speed on the horror of what I went through in my town. But that's another subject for today. I have to stay on point. The issue that Mrs. Alderman is talking about, Ms. Alderman also emailed you all, I believe, a link to the federal lawsuit I have filed before against the city of Cotati. And when I was elected... At the time, the city council had been trying to run me off the city council ever since in 2008. And they used code enforcement this last time to try to remove me from town and run me off my property and so forth. And I'll come back and speak to you about this if you have not already read my lawsuit. Regarding this cease and desist letter, this is very important for the city of Sonoma because you don't have time to wait on this. This is a violation right now. And I've been a longtime advocate of not only the homeless, but for the disabled. And every person, every shut-in, every disabled person who can't make it to this meeting, every parent with children at home, people taking care of their elderly parents who cannot be here, part of this political process, who love your town, love you, want to participate but can't right now because of the situation we find ourselves in. Either didn't prepare yourself well enough for what was coming, or you know we're coming to the party late but mrs alderman's a cease and assist letter is very on point and you got to take it very seriously rights are being violated here please take it very seriously we got to move forward in the spirit of cooperation and and love for one another and open these meetings up the spirit uh of being able to watchdog your City Council bring your grievances to the City Council for everyone so I want to applaud you and and pray for you that you handle this this matter diligently and professionally so that we can move forward thank you thank you is there anyone else yes I'll take the second of two public people please

yes first off i'd like to say calling this meeting at nine in the morning is ridiculous i have to come all the way over from dixon and hitting traffic and everything else makes it very difficult as you can see you had no other participation from anybody else in in the town which kind of adds to my point that and the point that mr barrett's just made that these are not conducive to holding these meetings Now I got here in time to listen to the lady talk about why these are not violations of the Brown Act. You made the statement that the law says that you're exempt because you're a small town. That's state law. We're talking federal law here, ADA. That's why it's in the Brown Act. You have to provide accommodations. But the thing is that you need to do it for your citizens. I would have been able to comment online about this from my home and wouldn't have made an hour and 15-minute trip to get over here fighting traffic. I think that, as we said, there's a large problem here not providing Zoom, especially for your own citizens, but for people that have to travel or if I see something on your agenda from afar and I want to comment on it, you know, do I have to make a two-hour trip, a three-hour trip? to do that and people that are you know elsewhere have this problem i think it would be much better oh the other thing is you have already if you're one of your council people is absent from a meeting and wants to come in on zoom then you're willing to provide it i just don't get that how can you provide it for a councilman but you won't provide it for your own citizens it just doesn't make sense if you can do it then obviously you're not worried about the exemption for being a small town this does not make any logical sense just provide the zoom and everything goes away and the fact of the matter is i'm 78 years old i am sure that I can come up with some disability at my age to make me have standing in this. And unlike Ms. Alderman, I do have the names of at least eight ADA attorneys, four of them in Sacramento, four of them in San Francisco. And if she doesn't sue you, I can guarantee you right now, I will litigate if this doesn't get taken care of. Thank you.

Thank you. right and no other public comments I'll close the public comment and bring it back to the dais for discussion and possible motion I move that we accept the letter as written I second further discussion question for our interim city manager based upon workload what do you think is a realistic expectation in which the draft may be brought back to us that's a good question staff are working on it now I expect we can bring it forward in September very good thank you so if there is no other further comment roll call please councilmember Ferraris yes councilmember ding yes council member gurney yes vice mayor low aye mayor wellander yes thank you the motion carries unanimously thank you gentlemen thank you folks very much okay now we are looking to our second item which is uh an opportunity to uh have a conversation apparently with a group of students from UC Berkeley. All you Stanford fans just have to put up with it, that's okay. And at this point, they're gonna come and enter and have an opportunity to introduce ourselves to the group.

Good morning.

Good morning. It's not like church.

Church is starting to back. The members that are late are forced to sit up front.

Why can't all of our council meetings have this kind of interest?

I hope we have second choice.

Oh, seriously? this is Thank you. Over here.

oh look the whole front row lucky girl

front row lucky wherever you want okay yeah let's do it

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for your very cooperative and organized entry into our chamber. We welcome you on that. we are going to items now 2.1 which is our interaction with this rowdy group and i'm going to start by giving our interim city manager an opportunity to give a little bit of context good morning again mayor and council members and welcome to all of our students in the audience i just wanted to make sure everybody's aware that we are still in a formal public meeting in this very moment and we are being recorded on zoom so

We're going to, in context of this visit, we are going to have the council members introduce themselves, talk a little bit about their role in the city council. Then we will close the public meeting, which will give us the opportunity with only one or two council members present to be compliant with the Brown Act. And then we can continue with our meeting in a less formal capacity. SO I'M GOING TO TURN IT OVER TO YOUR PROFESSOR TO OPEN THINGS UP AND THEN WE'LL COME BACK TO THE MAYOR AND COUNCIL.

THANK YOU, CHRISTINE. THANK YOU, CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS. MY NAME IS DAVID SHARON. I AM THE FACULTY MEMBER WHO'S ORGANIZED THIS TRIP FOR THE STUDENTS, AND WE ARE DELIGHTED TO BE WITH YOU HERE THIS MORNING. I would like to just commence by introducing some of the classmates, some of the class members from the group. So Kakali, if I can ask you to stand and just say hello. Who are you? And can you describe the classmates, your classmates, just briefly to everyone?

Yeah.

Pardon me, sir. You need to come up to the mic.

Nice to meet you. My classmates are spectacular. They're incredibly kind, humble, but wildly ambitious, and they really embody this idea of confidence without attitude, and they care. So if you look in the first row, you have Christine, who is just a firecracker and just incredibly capable. Lisa, who spent a ton of time in City Council. You have a couple Navy SEALs here and West Point graduates. So they're incredible. A little bit about myself. I am a Washington native now via Boston originally, but fell in love with the West Coast and just enjoying Sonoma. Yeah, looking forward to learning more.

Thank you so much for calling. And if I can ask Jess to come up also and just describe a little bit about the program that you're in with the Executive MBA program. Yeah, what is an executive MBA?

Well, an executive MBA program is a program where we're pretty far, I would say, probably like 10, 15 years into our career, and we've decided that we need to come back because we are always students, and we want to meet more people who are like-minded. We are... Sorry. You didn't prep me, so it was great.

Who are you?

Who am I? I am Jess Samir. I live in Palo Alto, but I come from Houston, Texas. I came out to the Bay Area because it's just a magical place, and I'm learning more about the different areas of California, so it's my first time in Sonoma as well. I work in oncology clinical trials, and thank you so much.

Awesome. Thank you, Jess. And real briefly before I ask you all to introduce yourselves to the students, the class that we're teaching here in Sonoma is a week-long, what we call immersion. It is bringing the students to a place so that they can understand more about the culture, the circumstances of the city that we're in, and they all do projects related to, in this case, Sonoma County. And so of the 71 students here, we have 15 projects that they are exploring and trying to understand what the issues are and then addressing that with some sort of innovation to take care of the problem that exists. Thank you very much for allowing us to introduce ourselves. May I ask you all to give us a little bit about your background?

And we can do that welcomely. And we'll start from my right, and jump over me, and then go to my left.

Go Bears. I had to do it. I'm a graduate of UC Berkeley. I got an honors degree in psychology. I won't tell you the year, but there was only one Pete's on the corner on Vine Street. I'm consistently in a depressed mood over football and Strawberry Canyon. And other than that, I've lived in Sonoma almost 40 years. I started out here as a high school mathematics teacher and went on to be the union president of the Valley of the Moon Teachers Association, went on for a career in union organizing with the California Teachers Association, rising to be their governmental relations political manager, and then went on to do some consulting work. When COVID hit, I decided that I'm working from home and I might as well help my city. I know a lot about policy and politics, obviously, and ran for the city council. and this will be my sixth year with a special election, and I focus a lot on the issues that affect working people. That's my background. Thank you so much for being here.

Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to Sonoma. My name is John Gurney, and I am on the City Council since 2022. I came to Sonoma in 1993 as police chief and spent 12 years with the police department. And in my final year, we contracted with the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office for police services. And so in my last year of policing, I went to work for the sheriff and facilitate that transition. And prior to that, I spent 17 years in Pacifica and rising to the rank of captain, which allowed me to come up here as police chief. I left law enforcement in 2005 and went to work for Bank of America in the city for two years and then to an oil company for ten years, came back and ran the local nonprofit community center for four years. And I moved into town and I always thought that I would probably look at city council. If I lived in the city limits, I was out just right outside of town with a small vineyard property. And so in 2022, I moved into town. It was election season. I ran, got elected. And so I'm completing my fourth year. And I have filed my appropriate papers to run again for a second term. And I'm pleased to say that I'm running unopposed. if it's even a run. master's degree in public administration from Golden Gate University. And kind of like what you all are doing, it was a very work related kind of program. And I can't help but to think that it actually helped me get promoted and move my career forward by doing projects, probably similar to what you're working on. But I could focus on very specific organizational kinds of things for the department I was with. and it really did benefit my career. So congratulations to all of you for being engaged, and I hope you have a very productive time.

Thank you.

Mr. Dink.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you and welcome everyone coming to our beautiful town of Sonoma. My name is Jack Ding. My former name, Junhui Ding, originally I came from China. That is 1993. I got my master degree in Dominican University, MBA. At that time, I always visit half the business school's library, try to gather more information. It took me 40 minutes, and try to save the gas money. I always share with my fellow students. My political career started from my volunteer work. I have been involved in a local nonprofit organization for decades. And first of all, I help La Luz, that is a Spanish-speaking service provider, set up a free tax clinic using my tax background, help them set up and free the tax return, encourage them to file a return to become compliant. That is 15 years ago. And then later, I joined the Advisory Commission. That means the first step of the political politics. I was appointed by the then mayor, Ken Brown. So I believe that time, I was the first Asian commissioner for that in the meeting. I took eight years for that position, and also a couple of years for the chair. I really understand how to become a real citizen. That is, you should participate in the local charity work and volunteer work. So I keep working on that for the rest of the year. 2018, I was running. for the city council, because it's very natural. I was the commissioner, chairperson for advisory commission. So I tried to donate my time to more opportunities for me to serve. 18, 2018, I couldn't won, but I'm the runner up. It encouraged me to run in 2020. That is, I made it history. I become the first Chinese council member serve this position. And two years later, 2020, again, I was elected by our fellow council members become the first Chinese mayor of the Sonoma. Why this is very remarkable in the moment is because right now, the Sonoma here, we just only have 0.3% of the Chinese population. If we go back 150 years ago, in this town, in this valley, At least 25% population were Chinese laborers. Where they are going? Where they are? Because on the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, they worked here, they lived here, they helped build economic foundation here, but they were driven away. So right now, time isn't changing. And then we have this kind of opportunity to celebrate all the diversity. So the people sometimes ask me, how do you think, this is the whitest town, you live there, how do you think? I said, I'm the working heart. I strongly fear, I'm the welcomed, accepted, and honest. They selected me as their representative. That is such a wonderful thing. So it always reminds me, and we never forget our own history, and celebrate diversity. continue to build a community where everyone belongs, everyone is respected, everyone has got a chance to be successful. That is my short remark. Thank you again.

Let's see if I can follow that. That's amazing. As you can see, we have an amazingly skilled and diverse council, and we work very well together. It's been a pleasure to work with all of these people. So I'm Patricia Farrar-Rivas, and I'm a former mayor. This was my first term. I started in 2022. My background, I won't go too in-depth because it's a bit complicated. So I moved to Sonoma in 2000. 74 to work as a psychiatric technician at Sonoma Developmental Center. And that is when I fell in love with Sonoma. And then I moved away from Sonoma after about 13 years because I was in a Nirvana rut. It was just too beautiful here. I needed to go out and experience the rest of the world. But before I did that, I had a dance, a teenage dance company here. So I went from psychiatric technician to teaching dance. But I was a behavioral modification specialist when I was a psychiatric technician, so it helped certainly with his counsel, but it helped with the dance, too. I moved then into the nonprofit world. I worked on issues in Central America. I spent a great deal of time working with the popular movement. supporting the popular movement in El Salvador during their civil war. And it was actually through that work that got me to go into finance. And so it was the economic development issues that really created that war in the first place. So it was from that, thinking about economic development in Central America, that brought me to work at a brokerage firm. in the United States. My father was very happy at that point that I switched my career to finance, but it was really, I was very early on in the movement for socially responsible investment, for ESG, environmental, social, and governance approaches to investing. I was in that industry for 30 years, and in 2007, perfect time to go into finance, was a co-founder of a national wealth management firm focused on impact investing. In 2023, Wait a second, was it 2023? No, 2021 it must have been. Anyway, earlier than that. I'm not good with all these dates. There's too many switches. So I retired as a practicing partner in my firm. I was the CEO for 13 years, and I also, in many roles during that year, played a role as a compliance officer. So when I moved to Sonoma when we retired, it was the one place we wanted to come back to, I felt as if I was convinced by a number of people, one very important person sitting on this dais today, that it would make sense for me to run for city council And I felt that, you know, I really looked, I've just retired, why am I doing this? But, you know, I felt as if my work in the impact investing world, we'd invested in housing, we were one of the companies to create gender lens investing, worked on working in portfolios that were focused on renewable energy. worked on housing, worked in all of those areas. I had experienced legal issues with research. I felt like I had the skills or some of the skills. You don't get all of the skills until you actually serve on this council. but I had some of the skills that would be necessary to make me a good council member. I serve on the finance committee. I'm also on the board of Sonoma Clean Power, and that I serve as a member of this council on that board, but I'm also on another board, the Sonoma Ecology Center. I'm very focused on the issues of, and I'm a generalist, so the issues of housing, equity, climate, immigration, and how those the current immigration stance, how that affects our city, our community, the Valley, and of course I'm very interested in economic development and how to really look at the transformation that we're going through right now in Sonoma County and certainly our whole region in regards to what's happening in the industry with the wine industry. There you go.

Thank you very much. I will wrap this up with a brief background. Before I do, the young woman who came forward and was saying that there was magic in the Bay Area, there is a lot of magic in Sonoma, so I just want to hope you discover that in your short stay here. And also for full disclosure, I did not go to Berkeley, but I did go to at least one Berkeley football game. California kid, born and raised in the Central Valley, educated at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, been a landscape architect for the last 45 years. Was fortunate enough to move here in 1985 and raise my family. And with that, I felt very grateful, and so I began my journey in public service. I started out in the design review commission many years ago, which I felt was right in my wheelhouse. i segued into the planning commission where i sat for five years and shared it for two years and then uh as my cohort two cohort cohorts here uh joined the council in 2022. absolutely love my community i think that why it's challenging in the sense that SACRAMENTO DEMANDS CERTAIN THINGS EVEN THOUGH WE'RE A TOWN OF 10,730. I am very motivated to attempt to keep Sonoma a town and yet still comply with all the demands of Sacramento for housing and other issues. So with that, I will close this portion of the meeting and we'll- Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, if we could take public comment on this. Well then, again, forgive me. I'M OPENING IT UP FOR PUBLIC COMMENT. I AM SEEING NONE. I'M CLOSING PUBLIC COMMENT BECAUSE I'M SURE WE'RE GOING TO BE GETTING COMMENTS IN A LITTLE WHILE. SO WITH THAT, I WOULD LIKE TO ADJOURN THIS SPECIAL MEETING. Oh, let me preface. The council will be departing, but if you happen to see someone that might be of interest to engage with sometime while you're here, please grab them and see if you can coordinate a time. No, you're stuck with the mayor.