| Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00:06.09 | Jill Hoffman | Welcome to the regular meeting of the Sausalito City Council for Tuesday, November 17, 2015. Lilly, would you take the roll, please? |
| 00:00:14.68 | Unknown | Councilmember Weiner. |
| 00:00:15.64 | Jill Hoffman | President. |
| 00:00:16.55 | Unknown | Councilmember Pfeiffer? Here. Councilmember Withey? Here. Vice Mayor Hoffman? |
| 00:00:19.44 | Jill Hoffman | here. |
| 00:00:21.78 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:00:21.80 | Unknown | THE FAMILY IS THE FAMILY. |
| 00:00:22.91 | Unknown | Mayor Theodorus. |
| 00:00:23.89 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:00:23.93 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:00:23.94 | Jill Hoffman | President. We will be discussing in closed session item D. D1. The lease negotiations with the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. Before we go into closed session, do we have any public comment on the closed session items? See no public. I will assume not. THE CITY IS A LITTLE BIT OF Um, I hope Public comment, and we'll move to closed session. |
| 00:01:07.48 | Unknown | Did you... |
| 00:01:13.44 | Unknown | I'm just... |
| 00:01:21.01 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:01:26.40 | Jill Hoffman | Good evening, everyone. Can we have a seat? Welcome everyone to the regular meeting of the Sausalito City Council for Tuesday, November 17th, 2015. Lady, would you take the roll, please? |
| 00:01:38.77 | Unknown | on some of our whiner. |
| 00:01:39.73 | Jill Hoffman | President. |
| 00:01:40.62 | Unknown | Councilmember Pfeiffer? Here. Vice Mayor Hoffman? Mayor Theodoris. |
| 00:01:45.75 | Jill Hoffman | President? |
| 00:01:45.77 | Unknown | THE END OF I'm noting that Councilmember Withey is here and will be joining us shortly. Okay, thank you. |
| 00:01:51.03 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Can we have Mike Stone lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, please? |
| 00:01:54.26 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:01:54.29 | Unknown | Please. |
| 00:01:54.90 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:01:54.95 | Unknown | . |
| 00:01:55.89 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Pledge your allegiance. |
| 00:02:00.03 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. to clarify. of the United States of America. and to the Republic. Over his hands. One nation. Amen. Indivisible. with liberty and justice for us. Thank you. We met in closed session on item D1, which was lease negotiations with the Golden Gate Bridge District Highway and Transportation District. The On that matter, I do have an announcement that the council met in closed session to discuss the lease with the bridge district. Specifically, we discussed the provisions in the lease with the district, which allow for periodic rent adjustments. We directed the city attorney to send a letter to the district. confirming that the appraisal process for rent adjustments It can be commenced at any time. but not. more than every 10 years and that There is no December 1, 2015 deadline to start that process. This was a technicality in our lease agreement, and we are ensuring that we are not waiving any rights to adjust the rents and the bridge district has essentially agreed with this. So we're just handling that technicality on the subject of the ferry landing. I also would like the, um, to announce that the, uh, very landing, working group that was formed by supervisor Kate Sears. met on Saturday the 14th of last Saturday. for its third and possibly its last meeting I want to thank all the members of the working group. We had about 20 of our Sausalito residents working on in dialog with the Bridge District about the ferry landing design. And we really appreciate all of them taking up three Saturdays, one full Saturday and two half Saturdays. The consensus of the group is that progress has been made, but we still have a long way to go in the sense of It needs to be open to a wider public process and needs to come to the city council at some point. Further, our negotiating team of myself, the vice mayor, and the city manager will meet with the bridge district to discuss how they will bring They're revised. proposal to the city. It will certainly be a public process. that we will agree to by in Council before we even bring the process, and certainly the design will be subject to a public process and final approval by this Council. Okay. Is there any public comment on our closed session item, on item D1? Seeing none, we move on to item to e approval of agenda can we have a motion to approve the agenda |
| 00:04:37.44 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, so moved. |
| 00:04:40.34 | Jill Hoffman | in favor aye aye that's a approved for zero |
| 00:04:41.30 | Jill Hoffman | Bye. |
| 00:04:45.67 | Jill Hoffman | Now the good part. Our special presentations, the Sausalito Art Festival Annual Report, Our parks and rec director. Mike Langford, and our Sausalito Art Festival Managing Director, Paul Anderson. |
| 00:04:59.14 | Unknown | Well, good evening, city council. Before I begin about the art festival, I do want to remind you about the 50 tour, which is coming to downtown Sausalito this Saturday. It is your opportunity to see all eight Super Bowl trophies. from the 49ers and the Oakland Raiders. It will be there from noon to 5 p.m. There's also the Reed Zone, which is a takeoff of the Red Zone, where Celebrities and football players will be reading to the children. We have the Play 60 zone and, of course, the Chevron STEM zone. So, again, this coming Saturday, right downtown at the Saucaduwa Yacht Harbor parking lot from 12 to 5. Now on with the show... As per the contract that the city has with the art festival, the art festival is required to give a update or actually a report on the festival preceding. with items such as attendance, number of vendors, items like that. We have the privilege of having Paul Anderson, their director here, to give this report. So I'd like to bring Paul up. |
| 00:06:01.98 | Paul Anderson | Thank you. |
| 00:06:05.88 | Paul Anderson | Thank you, Mike, and good evening. It's nice to be here. Nice to see so many volunteers in one dais. It's so lovely. Thank you. Believe it or not, the Sausalito Art Festival began in 1952 on the shores of downtown Sausalito when some artists got together and put some easels And five years later, According to the Saucyutl News, there were 25,000 people. It's. We're now in the parking lot, which is now the Bank of America. So believe it or not, in those five years it went from probably 55 to 25,000. Amazing. Then it went up and down over the years. I'd like to report this year that our attendance was 27,347 people. A nice round number, everyone fit on Marinship Park, everybody was happy. Everyone enjoyed themselves. did things they hadn't done for a long time, like view great art, have good food, and drink a beverage or two. And we enjoyed having them there. The things that are, coming to Now is how different. the festival businesses and of the 27,000 plus that attended, There were over 20,000 people come to the gate And 7,000 of them. bought their tickets online. which is an amazing number when you think about it. And of those. people that bought them online and only the numbers that bought them online Nine of them. We're from outside the United States. Okay? 29 of them were from US states. There were 29 different states the tickets were bought from. And then the top cities... to buy tickets were San Francisco number one, San Rafael number two, Mill Valley number three. Oakland, number four. San Jose, number five, Nevada, number six, San Anselmo, seven, San Mateo, eight, Santa Rosa, nine, and Berkeley. Number 10. When you look at this, you're going all over the Bay Area, but the numbers kind of say that we are a Bay Area. destination for Labor Day weekend. Now part of it has become this year we took and expanded our media reach. and that we were able to work through a company used to be CBS billboards they know on digital billboards and we were able to acquire the billboard As you leave, To come into Silicon Valley on the San Mateo Bridge, we had that 60 foot digital billboard talking about the South Sea to War. We had the one at the Oakland Coliseum. We had the one over at Emeryville as you came along Highway 80. So part of it is giving the message, telling people what's going on. But the minute they saw the word Sausalito Art Festival, they knew where they wanted to be on Labor Day weekend. And they showed up, which is great. Monday was our busiest day. And in the past, it's been. Sunday. And why did that happen? Well, one of the things is it was a beautiful day. It was hot. But also Jimmy Clef, the entertainer, the reggae guy, showed up and made the crowd really happy. Sales that day were off the chart. This year we had 264 artists. representing almost every state in the union, and our largest number of artists from any one genre was painting, jewelers were second, sculpture was third, and we had one sculptor this year sell every single item he had in his booth and went home with two commissions of his largest piece. So we look at that and we say, thank God, you know, the art business is now back in place. and people are enjoying it. 19, 2007, 2008, things got a little grim. of the art world but I think we can all agree that things are back. One of the things we pride ourselves on is volunteers. And this year we had over 3,500 shifts And I'm looking at faces up here. that say I had to shift two or three or four, 1,925 volunteers signed up on our website. and volunteered those 3,500 shifts. And we had 70 people that actually took the lead on being captains, of which Councilman Withy was one of them, making sure the grounds were clean and handling the mayor's blue ribbon garbage committee so we want to thank him personally Food booths, there were 11 nonprofits. All of our food is provided by nonprofits that have to have a 94965 zip code. And this year, each of them I do at the end of the year, I say, okay, let's have a meeting. And my question is, I don't want to know how much money you made. I don't want to know if it was good or bad. I don't want to know what happened. but give me a thumbs up if you like it. this if it was okay. and that if it wasn't. I'd like to report that everybody went especially the Lions Club, believe it or not, sausages, turkey legs are still the number one seller. to the tune of around $35,000 worth of that stuff for the weekend. Kind of crazy. All together, the total profit, the bottom line profit that went to the nonprofits, we do not take any money at all from their sales. It all goes to them directly. It was over $150,000. It went back to the nonprofits here in town. This year we also kind of re- re-brought to the public our silent auction. SIGN AN AUCTION IS BASICALLY where the artists give us a piece of art and we then auctioned it off for our scholarship program. We did something called BidPal, which is an online service where you could actually take and do it on your phone. You can do it right there in place and at the end of the day you know exactly if you bought it or not. That raised over $30,000 and all of that, 100% of the proceeds go to the Sally Califf Memorial Scholarship Fund. So that'll be given away this last year. We gave away $20,000 to students here in the Bay Area. They went to schools, they went to Parsons, they went to Fashion Institute, they went to Cal Poly, and we will continue with that again this year. We have a minimum that we give of $20,000. It can go up from there, depending on the people that apply to us. Um, We also... for the silent auction had some incredible local businesses donate, which was really important to us. Most of the restaurants in town had gift certificates. Hotels gave us hotel rooms. So it was really a win-win for everybody, and we enjoyed it. We still have one thing available for you, a week in Paris. The person that got it all of a sudden got cold feet, and we discovered yesterday that we have a week in Paris to some lucky person out there that wants to call us up. and say, we'll give you some money for that. We'd be more than happy to. I'm looking at some people up here that just might want to do that. But we have a week in Paris waiting for you whenever you want to go. Last year, part of our... giving back to the community is through grants, and it's the Leonard Caprillion Community Grants. They are now open. They close on November the 30th. And on the 15th of December, we actually select the people to get it last year. We gave over $20,000 to the Discovery Museum, the Educational Tall Ship, the Friends of the Saucena Library, the Historical Society for the Ice House, the performing stars of Marin, the Spalding Wooden Boat Center, and the Willow Creek Academy. All of these were very important. Each of them had an art project to work on, and we will be doing that again this year. Thank you. The other things that we do, and I always like to see Una when she walks in the door because she always has a big smile on her face. On Friday night, we gave her a check for $100,000 for the Chamber of Commerce. We gave the Bay Model Alliance $10,000, $5,000 for their programs they do for educating children in water, and $5,000 for an art project that will happen within the Bay Model. And then we give $5,000 to the Saucer Women's Club Scholarship Fund. So those are all things that are kind of built in, and on top of that will be the other things we give. The gala this year was a smashing success with a disco theme. There was a lighted dance floor for those of you who were there. And the minute that the music started, the floor was filled. And I did see the mayor there. We also made some good money on the gala and that funds a program called Artist Teaching Art, which is a program that's three years old, the festival funded. And hopefully in two or three weeks you're going to have a presentation by Willow Creek and there's a film that was made with the funds given by the Saucyotl Art Festival Foundation about the Willow Creek down by Whiskey Springs that I think you're going to find interesting. If you don't get a chance to see it then, I'm gonna give it to you anyway, I'm gonna email it to you, so I hope you take it. It's a nice history of Sausalito, and it's wonderful. This year that program taught over 1,600 children throughout Marin County. We went into 15 different schools and 150 classrooms, and we pay for the artists to go in match up with the teacher and teach core subjects that we involve art at the same time. It's a great program. We plan to continue with it. We also plan to have an exciting 2016 art festival and I know that all of you will be there volunteering. and I always sometimes ask the crowd if they raise their hands, or there. I'm not going to do that this year because I don't want anybody to be embarrassed. Anyway, I thank you very much for your attention, and it's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any questions? |
| 00:15:34.75 | Jill Hoffman | Any questions? Thank you, Paul and Mike and everybody that's involved in it. The Sausalito Art Festival is a wonderful thing for Sausalito It's a lot of fun for all of us, even though we all put a lot of work in, as you mentioned, What we had 1900 over 1900 volunteers. And it's pretty amazing. So thank you, and thanks for reporting the success that we had. |
| 00:15:56.57 | Paul Anderson | One more little thing is I couldn't do it without my assistant, our operations coordinator, Lexi Matthews. Thanks again. Thank you. |
| 00:16:09.21 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. We'll be right back. Item two, this is the time for the city council to hear from citizens regarding matters that are not on the agenda. Except in very limited situations, state law precludes the council from taking action on or engaging in discussions Concerning items of business that are not on the agenda of the however the council may refer matters not on the agenda To the city staff or direct that the subject be agendized for a future meeting. I don't have any speaker cards Is anyone here? Would anyone here like to speak on a matter not on the agenda? Neil? |
| 00:17:01.79 | Neil Whitelaw | Neil Whitelaw, residents of you 48 years living across the street. I'd like to thank the City Council for bringing the ferry issue to public comment I was kind of worried before because it was frustrating at the, uh, at the meetings beforehand. that the public that was there weren't able to comment, but I'm glad that's open to public comment now. I personally myself thought it should have been a public open meeting to start out with, but there's different viewpoints on that. So thank you for bringing that to the public at large because I think it needs the public at large to take a look at this issue. Number two is Paul's gone, so maybe I'll have to get in touch with him. But I'm 78 and enjoy music of all types of venues. And what I've noticed is that I think they need somebody younger on the music or the band selection committee. because they're missing the music that a lot of people in their 20s, 30s, and so and like enjoy. I enjoy it. I'd be glad to volunteer to help pick bands in that genre, because I know music of the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. And I know that people that are 20 and 30 don't have as much money to spend on attendance as uh, Older people. But I think we're missing an opportunity to have more younger people. Because I love Jefferson Starship. In fact, a couple of them are friends of mine at coffee over at Cafe Trieste in the city. And I love the group, but, uh, People that are 20 don't even know who they are. Third issue, I think it's about time for my annual asking that We get some flashing light crosswalks. on Bridgeway. like we have in Petaluma. It was five years ago at least. that I got hit by a hit and run. I've since been Run over. slightly, just my toe, Two other times. So it's three times in the last five years. that I'd been hit by hit and run. And there's still no flashing lights there. Um, One of the city councilmen and a former mayor five years ago said, yeah, we'll get that right away. Well... Time goes by fast, but five years seems to be an exceptional long time. And somebody told me after I Asked for that at the first city council meeting five years ago. said, I'm a paralegal. And because of the fact that you have brought this to the public attention. It would now be if somebody gets seriously hurt or killed... There would be a multimillion dollar lawsuit for gross negligence now that the city council and the city knows about that due to my uh, bringing that forward. So I don't know if that's true. I'm not a lawyer. |
| 00:20:06.51 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:20:06.53 | Neil Whitelaw | Right. |
| 00:20:06.59 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:20:06.85 | Neil Whitelaw | you |
| 00:20:09.06 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, Neil. Anyone else like to speak on a matter that is not on the agenda? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. We'll move on to item three, action minutes of previous meetings, the meetings of the regular city council meeting of november 10 2015. we have a motion to approve those minutes |
| 00:20:35.13 | Unknown | So moved. |
| 00:20:36.55 | Jill Hoffman | Second. |
| 00:20:36.97 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:20:37.02 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. All in favor? Aye. That passes 4-0. Now we move on to the consent calendar, item four. Matters listed under the consent calendar are considered routine, and non-controversial. require no discussion. are expected to have unanimous council support and may be enacted by the Council in one motion, in the form listed in the agenda. will be no separate discussion of consent calendar items however before the council votes on a motion to adopt The consent calendar items, council members, city staff or members of the public may request that specific items be removed from the consent calendar for separate action. In order to make such a request, you must fill out a speaker's card and turn it into the city clerk. Do we have any public comment on the consent calendar item four? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Move on to the council. Any comments or would... Are we able to And someone like the motion to approve the calendar? |
| 00:21:38.77 | Unknown | Yeah, I actually would like to pull item 4B regarding the post study and just get a little bit more. I just have a few more questions about this. I'm fine if you want to continue it or put it at the end of the session. |
| 00:22:01.19 | Jill Hoffman | Do you want to put it at the end or do you want to put it after the parking in terms of the police are here? What would I recommend? |
| 00:22:06.37 | Adam Politzer | You really have two choices here. If Councilmember Pfeiffer wants to hear a full presentation, then I think we should continue it to next year, January. If there's just some clarification and would like a brief staff report, then I would recommend after the parking status report to make it the new 6C. So if you want the full presentation, move it to January. If you want a brief presentation, move it to after 6B as the new 6C. |
| 00:22:43.51 | Unknown | Okay, so I actually am looking at more of a robust presentation just because we waited, I don't know, at least a year for the post-study to be done, and there was a lot of buildup. with residents about this with different crime aspects in the city and I know a lot of these recommendations there was a lot of interest around them so you know perhaps it might make sense to put it in January fresh start and kind of look at at some of those action items. |
| 00:23:12.94 | Jill Hoffman | the members of the council? Okay, we'll take it off the agenda for tonight and we'll move it to, we'll have it on the agenda setting to be scheduled sometime in 2016, early 2016. Okay. With that, that's item B. Do we have a motion to approve item four? |
| 00:23:31.30 | Unknown | A. |
| 00:23:33.21 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:23:33.48 | Unknown | So moved. |
| 00:23:36.28 | Jill Hoffman | There's a second. Okay. All in favor? Aye. That passes four zero. Now we move on to our business items. The bicycle pay for parking pilot project, end of season review and next steps for 2016. Captain John Rohrbacher and Deb Fudge. |
| 00:23:36.38 | Unknown | that. |
| 00:23:36.62 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:23:38.78 | Unknown | Hi. |
| 00:23:58.19 | Unknown | Good evening, Mayor and Vice Mayor, members of the Council. I need just a second here. |
| 00:24:24.44 | Unknown | Okay, it's a pleasure to be here and provide this end of season report. And I have a few disclaimers. This is my one and only slide. Everything else I'm presenting are documents that somebody else created. This is my first slide ever. And so I needed to get it here so that people could see it. And I'm going to do better each time. |
| 00:24:47.70 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:24:50.36 | Unknown | That's it for my slide. I'm gonna go to some documents. that will illustrate some of the things that I want to talk about. and provide some you know, news I hope that you find interesting about the season itself, and then some discussion about what we're gonna do next, because that's probably what's on a lot of people's minds. So I have to take down my one slide. |
| 00:25:32.40 | Unknown | and then we'll go to this in just a minute. So just as a bit of a recap, THE END OF THE END OF THE In the spring of 2015, the council approved the pilot project to charge for parking, on Tracy Way for bicycles, also approved the Ambassador program operated by Sausalito Plus. and So YOU KNOW, THAT caused us to spring into action and try and get a lot of things done in fairly short order. because as we've learned from this season is that It seems like the season starts earlier. And so as you'll see later as we talk about some of our accounts and some of our money in and money out, that we started work, and I say that in the global we sense, really in May, which is already a little bit behind because already the spring break was over and there's lots to do, and we're going to use all that as lessons learned. We'll talk about it coming up. So one thing about all the documents in my report is I was fortunate enough to be able to get them from lots of other sources. I'm hopefully gonna be able to answer your questions about them if you have any, but Amen. A lot of partnership involved in putting together this tourist season. and So clearly the Saucyutu Plus and the ambassadors were a huge component of a successful season. But so was the Golden Gate Ferry, the Blue and Gold Ferry, all the bicycle companies and the Chamber of Commerce And so lots of teamwork, lots of partnership, frankly we learned a lot each day each month as we proceeded through so what things looked like when we started, It was a little different by the time the season, really, I don't know if the season's over, but by the time we ceased operations. In October, we had made adjustments all the way through And I think that's sort of indicative of how this goes for us. So I appreciate the partnership of everybody. I certainly appreciate them all willing to share documents that I can show you, but I'm just claiming that they're not mine. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the counts, because this year, different than any previous year. We are Truly blessed with abundance of data and learning from that We now have actually a hunger for more data. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit. The information that comes from Parisi was actually not contract with them for the purpose of this item tonight this was part of the south gate project for the city that jonathan goldman and contract with Prezi to do for them counting, but it turns out that because they installed a camera or a set of cameras along the Alexander South, 2nd Richardson, you know, through ways and actually I don't know exactly where they were located, They actually captured a lot of information on camera that they later turned into counts. And as the counts you'll see as we move forward, The PRISE folks prepared these slides for us to be able to use. some information about the nature of the writers on the particular sampling days, and also the ferry ridership, but I have a separate slide later to show you about the ferry ridership. So this was a spring weekday. And It's illustrative in many ways. They count both inbound or northbound traffic. They also counted traffic going back out of town. And they... differentiated between the tourist riders and then the other category of riders being the commuters and Recreational writers. And then on that particular... given time period, they counted how many people rode back on the boats. with their bicycles and how many boats they actually And so this is a spring day in... March of this year. and The next slide. would be. a Saturday also in spring. And if you look at the number, it's almost double. It's a weekend day now, a Saturday. more riders, and boats taking people back, and I'm not. One of the things about the slide table across the bottom is the you know, time of day blocks so it helps in some ways just verify those things that we've been seeing all along, and we'd probably be able to comment on them anecdotally and say, sure. particular time of day, we know and Our visitors are coming in. And this actually provides an account of that. |
| 00:30:29.59 | Unknown | So now moving to a weekday in the summer, and now here we have, again, a ridership that's fairly robust and more boats in service carrying people back. And again, the peak times. you know and the peak numbers still look like what we would expect them to do starting at afternoon. and of course the You know, the blue line is the people coming into town and the red line is people coming back. |
| 00:31:05.55 | Unknown | In the Saturday in, let's see, what did I do there? That's not right. Okay. So Saturday and August, you can see the numbers go up. Again, not really a surprise, but it's nice to have a count. And so, again, we would have probably been able to guess some of this, but it's good to put an actual figure to it. Again, understanding it's a sampling done by you know, cameras that capture people coming in. And uh, and people leaving town. So you can see all the numbers are up. The time of day thing is still fairly consistent. about what we would expect Again, this was 17 boats in service taking people back to San Francisco. |
| 00:31:55.31 | Unknown | So the Preece folks were putting together sort of a trend Slide for us. capturing You know, the ridership numbers from the Golden Gate Ferry, and their numbers of the bite counts and and then some projections as a result of that You'll see a different slide having the Golden Gate Ferry bicycle ridership numbers in it. But this is sort of a snapshot of the total showing that. Certainly we saw, and of course we would again say this just from our experience point, it looked like 2013 was busier than 12, 14 certainly was what we would call our Big year. 2015 is projected because of course the year's not over. And even though it's by their count, by the ferry count, slightly less, it still exceeds whatever the number was in 2012 and 2013. Again, not drawing any conclusions from the numbers, just presenting them as they're drafted there for... for us to look at. So this particular slide from Parisi shows um, more of a summary of the four days, the time period that they captured for us, but looking at the bottom line number of how many Tourists they counted coming in. Then, of course, that's their extrapolation of those capture days that they did. How many were counted as recreational commuter. bicyclists, and then of course the total. I think the numbers are important, but not necessarily the last word on anything because there's more sources of numbers. But it does help us get a bigger picture I think it also helps us put a little bit of of a factual spin on some of the numbers that are tossed around about how many bicyclists come in, and whether they're tourists, recreational, or commuters. And then for Just a little bit of interest not to forget about our pedestrians. They actually counted how many people were walking in and walking out. don't really know where they were walking to or walking back to, I'm not sure they walked to San Francisco or from San Francisco, but they did count them. Um, So that number is here for us to look at. and then they had another day on a weekday Thank you. for pedestrian counts. So, To move on to another document requires me to leave this document, open up another one. So maybe while this one is open, if you had any questions I could take them out but if that's kinda out of order about how things go I'll wait it's up to you but Otherwise, I've got to reopen the document later. just about my slides and then I can move on to some other. I'm still gonna answer all your questions later. |
| 00:34:51.33 | Unknown | FOR SURE. |
| 00:34:56.16 | Unknown | Just a quick question about the camera that was recording these numbers. Was it north of the Alexander area? intersection there where it meets South Street? Or was it further up? I'm just curious because I know that some, we have, you know, different feeders. |
| 00:35:13.88 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 00:35:13.89 | Unknown | I'm just curious because I know that. |
| 00:35:19.92 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:35:19.94 | Unknown | Sure, I'm confessing to not knowing. |
| 00:35:20.36 | Unknown | I'm confessing. |
| 00:35:22.06 | Unknown | I remember that when the cameras were put up, |
| 00:35:22.26 | Unknown | THE FAMILY. |
| 00:35:24.71 | Unknown | people contacted the police and said are those your cameras and we're looking at the little pod of things and said Actually, they're not, and we all saw them at the same time. But I'm actually not recalling on what post or what telephone pole they were put on. |
| 00:35:36.36 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:35:36.39 | Unknown | Okay. Okay, thanks. |
| 00:35:38.41 | Unknown | I could be glad to find out for you later, though. |
| 00:35:40.47 | Unknown | Just curious, yeah. Thank you. |
| 00:35:41.50 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:35:41.67 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:35:42.63 | Jill Hoffman | Any other questions on the slide? So please move on. There were no questions on the slide. |
| 00:35:45.08 | Unknown | AND WE'RE... questions. |
| 00:35:53.23 | Unknown | you |
| 00:35:58.49 | Unknown | Okay, so this slide is gonna be a little compressed when I shrink it, but it's the 2012, 13, 14, 15 detail the Conigate Ferry. And I have to make it a little bit smaller. just to get it on the screen here. I don't know if you can actually still look at that okay. That's just the detail behind the numbers that were already on the Prezi slides. If you were interested in seeing what the month-to-month counts look like per month, per year. I believe I put it in my staff report, the ferry district actually logs Every departure for all the same time period for each departure time southbound and then the bike count per departure. It's a rather big set of numbers and it didn't really fit on the slide. If you are interested in having a document like that, I'm happy to share it, but it's It's actually weekdays. and weekends and holidays and for all those years. So they actually are counting. So if there was a 430 boat on its way to San Francisco on a particular day of the week, making up that time, it would tell us how many boats, I'm sorry, how many bikes are on that particular boat? So they've clearly been at this a while. This was our only source of actual counting until this particular year, and now we have the Prezi counts, and then we have one more count. I'm going to show you a slide from the ambassadors at Saucydo Plus. So that's what this represents, and, again, if you have any questions about that one, otherwise I'll move on. |
| 00:37:48.61 | Unknown | So clearly a little bit more difficult to read, but I didn't wanna actually change picture of it, just as an example, more illustrative. So the good folks at the Ambassador Program at Sausalito Plus wanted to count for a number of reasons. One, just because we want to know what's coming in. They also were looking at, of course, using those numbers to help them decide about staffing. Because remember, this is a new year, new program. How many people do we need on the ground to do the job? you know, to help direct our you know, visitors on bicycle down into our parking area and get them into Saucyut safely. So... I'm They actually counted each week, starting September, back in June and doing weekly counts by day of the week. And Depthwatch might even have more detail behind that, but again, this is just to illustrate another source of data for us that this particular snapshot represents about 160,000 tourist visitors. boots on the ground with a hand clicker counting the visitor bicycles, but just the tourist bikes, not the recreational riders only northbound, not southbound. And, um... Thank you. and not the commuters. So they were looking for a particular target But again, another source of data that we will use to help us with decisions in the coming year. So this represents, just the months here. They probably continued their accounting in October, but I'm not sure, but it doesn't really matter at this point. I just wanted you to know that there's another source out there. It was you know, each day of the week. their counts were from 11 a.m. to 5pm. So it's a little different timeframe, but as we look at each source of data for us, it will help us determine when, and actually corroborate what we're getting from other sources. So that's when they have their people posted there to do the counts. If you have a question about that, actually later when I introduce Ed, he might be able to answer for you about it. |
| 00:39:55.99 | Jill Hoffman | Well, those are much further apart than the other two reports, so maybe you can address that in terms of the methodology and why there's a difference. |
| 00:39:56.20 | Unknown | Well, |
| 00:40:05.56 | Unknown | Yes, but we'll look at that as there's different counts based on time of day and the series of how many months were counted versus the other report. And so when I reviewed this with Depwatch and showed her the numbers from the others, she said this all seems to make a lot of sense, not really disagreeing entirely that there's some really huge significant difference that needed to have some explanation. Again, understanding that each one is its own separate snapshot of data. |
| 00:40:33.68 | Unknown | Can I just follow up that question with a question of my own, just a clarification? That in this far column, it's saying $29,949, so that's rental bikes for the month of June that the ambassadors counted. Did I get that right? |
| 00:40:35.75 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 00:40:51.63 | Unknown | Yes, and that's from the hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| 00:40:54.08 | Unknown | And that's only from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the month of June. So we're looking at 29,000... 940 so almost 30,000 rental bikes from the month of June and then I look at the numbers for that the Golden Gate Ferry counted and the ferry counted for the month of June and 14,444. |
| 00:41:19.12 | Unknown | Correct. |
| 00:41:19.69 | Unknown | So that's the discrepancy we're talking about in terms of the numbers? |
| 00:41:19.73 | Unknown | So that's the description. Well, it is a little bit, but remember the ridership is those bikes that actually got on a boat to go back. One of the things that we're all still looking to resolve is now that we've captured data is where are the missing bikes? Yeah. That was my next question. That's a great question because it's one of the things that we don't know, but we're going to. |
| 00:41:29.51 | Unknown | Yes. |
| 00:41:37.21 | Unknown | Yeah. That was my next question. |
| 00:41:43.91 | Unknown | to have more count of coming up in the new season, they went someplace, whether they went back on a taxi, whether they went to Tiburon or Mill Valley, or some other way. again, we don't know yet. But... It's interesting to do the counting now this year with these different methods, gather them all up, and then really start to learn what we don't know. And that will help us, you know, in the upcoming year. And I think it'll make more sense. Yeah. But you're right. There's clearly less people going back on the boat than coming in. |
| 00:42:09.24 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. Yeah, because I noticed |
| 00:42:16.65 | Unknown | I noticed there are a lot with the electric bikes now, which make it easier for them to go back uphill on Alexander. to so anyway. |
| 00:42:26.00 | Adam Politzer | John, just to clarify, that's only Golden Gate Ferry, not Blue and Gold. So we don't have Blue and Gold's numbers. |
| 00:42:29.81 | Unknown | So we don't have Thank you. Thank you. we don't have the blue and gold numbers well maybe that's the delta then huh okay |
| 00:42:32.04 | Jill Hoffman | We don't have the blue and gold numbers. Yeah. I do have a question on this slide. You said rental bikes. Is this only a rental bike count? Yes. Oh, OK. It's not just be a good idea to maybe note that, because I think the other, of course, Parisi was was both types. And he differentiated. This is only rental bikes. |
| 00:42:49.96 | Unknown | TAKE A LOOK. Sure. Yeah, because initially the Preezy Transportation Consulting Group was counting every mode of transportation in the town. They were looking at buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, both north and southbound, because they're working on a separate project. We just asked them that, hey, by the sense you captured that, could you share some of that with us that we could pull out that might be relative to this. So their count looked at all the types of bicyclists and counted them up and then presented them to us. |
| 00:43:00.59 | Jill Hoffman | you |
| 00:43:21.40 | Unknown | I'm sure that at the time that the ambassadors were making their count here. They're just counting incoming tourist bikes. That's their focus. That was their mission. |
| 00:43:29.33 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:43:30.00 | Unknown | And so, and... |
| 00:43:30.76 | Jill Hoffman | And if you look at Parisi, it was half and half. So if you want to look at total bikes, you just double this number. I mean, if you have rough, for rough estimates. These are only rental bikes. Right. Okay. |
| 00:43:38.02 | Unknown | Well, these are only Thank you. |
| 00:43:40.87 | Unknown | John, and these were only bikes northbound coming into town? Yes. |
| 00:43:45.92 | Unknown | Yes. |
| 00:43:46.32 | Unknown | Okay. |
| 00:43:49.88 | Unknown | If I've made any misstatement, Ed will correct me later. I have no doubt. |
| 00:44:00.77 | Unknown | Okay, so that's the three different methods of counting being done. It does bring a lot of questions, sometimes more questions. |
| 00:44:01.27 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 00:44:09.03 | Unknown | questions and answers at this point. But now we know what can be gained and we'll see where that becomes important because we're going to talk about the checklist for next year And. So even that, again, is not originally my document, but I was able to Um, Use the action plan. And again, with permission from Saucedo Plus. It's never gonna show up exactly right on the screen, so I'm gonna concentrate more on the column. You have the entire document in your file. So they had ambassadors and South Dakota Plus had a list of 10 items. And what we were looking at as from our view, the police department representing the city on taking the lead on this is we rearranged them in order of what we thought would be things we should, we, the police, then the city would do first and work with They want their... when they were listed by Saucyutoplus and ambassadors, I don't even know that they put them in any order in particular So you can't read anything into theirs, but I gave you both. in the package. Mine slide's just the one that I renumbered. So, An example, I don't know where the number one was later, earlier on the original document, but on I've moved that item to number one, because as we look at action items for this coming season and things that we can reasonably expect to make some progress on or accomplish Our first choice is looking at consolidating the ambassador program with the bike ferry queuing program to improve the coordination and efficiency. That's their language, their wording, but we agree with that. And in my staff report, I noted like in the first six items that I agreed in essence with everything that was being said, I did a little bit of other... Um, modifications of some of those cells in that table. For example, I certainly didn't invent the tiger team term. That comes from Saucedo Plus. But I did rearrange a little bit of who was involved in something because in this particular one, item number one, we'd be working with SOSTUTO+, myself representing the city and the police department, and then coordinating the efforts of how we're going to work that out. but very important first step for us to get right on. um, as we progress through. So that's an example. I'm going to walk through the rest. I'm It's a little bit cumbersome to go across the slide. I don't know how much you really need to see that right this second, but I'll be happy to come back to them. |
| 00:46:54.11 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:47:01.33 | Unknown | So the next few items actually are, were tough to say whether it was really number two, three or four, but, We're looking at safety and congestion management, that's certainly our mission from the police department. And these are all related. we would certainly like to I'm not sure. make some progress and some effort and you'll hear a little bit more about the um, kiosks that are taking our paper parking, coming up from Sergeant Gregory's presentation, But we're looking at is there a way that we can make easier for our visitors to pay for their ferry ticket, their pay for bicycle parking ticket and anything else they have to pay for with one stop. So that right now they have to move from maybe from line to line if they didn't pre-buy a ferry ticket that moves that little congestion point all around our area and we'd like to you know, work on eliminating that. So that is... You know, the second item for us. I'm not sure. We want to, items three, and and really five to all come back to what are we going to do for people here. And We spent a lot of time talking about this last night at the Pedestrian Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting. And there's a lot of enthusiasm about making it possible for our residents to have a place to park You would have seen in, maybe Ed will have one of his slides about the covers for the bike racks so that there's places for residents to park, but when they come off, they're there earlier for the resident, but later the cover comes back on saying no parking. So we're trying to come back and figure out where did we... you know, leave room for improvement based on what happened this year. The same thing with – That's really related to number five too, is about putting the bike loops back. And four is the- result of knowing that we had overflow out of the pay for parking area where people chose not to or and then decided that they were going throw caution to the wind and park someplace where we really didn't want them knowing that we had They don't know we have an ordinance. We'll talk about that in my last item, So we have. All these are combined because we want to be able to have our residents enjoy the use of the sidewalk and a place to park. those restrictions that are in place don't really have to come into play until we know our visitors are starting to show up there should be a way for us to accommodate Our residents, certainly early in the morning, I'm sure you've heard Ed say that many times, and he's right. and So that's what's happening with those. and and the rest of the sales are just who's probably going to end up working on it. |
| 00:49:58.35 | Unknown | Number six, actually, I'm actually more interested in number six than I originally was when I worked on this because as we started to collect data, and I don't want to limit it to just the you know, ferry service data, but Knowing that the data is going to help us determine some of our next steps, even just the data that we have already. whether the people are coming in with time, what, you know, mode of transportation, where's all those other missing bikes go? And so there's plenty that will come from that. And So that was certainly not six just because no interest, but we really like to get more information because we're looking at where's. Where's the... the cause for people being left on the dock, the boats are leaving, what's happening there, You know, we all probably have some theory about that and We're going to get to work in the first week of December on bringing our partners together on what happens next with that. So the item about number seven, let Ed talk a little bit more about that. When I was putting together the report, I didn't feel I had enough information yet, even though I am one of the staff liaisons to the Pedestrian Bicycle Advisory Committee. This is kind of a new item, and it has some interest to us, certainly, but there's a lot about it, and so I'm kind of going to leave that. Maybe I could do a better job of explaining that. Items 8 and 9 to me are items for you, the City Council, and Ed, as the chairperson of the pedestrian bicycle advisory committee, I believe that's his role to bring that to you and say, and I think he's got an adjustment that there's some things that you might be able to do to help, and whether that comes from you, um, then You know, that's... That's the discussion for you to have there. It's not really what I look at as like a police action item. qualify those as neutral. just for lack of a better term. |
| 00:51:54.82 | Unknown | Bye. |
| 00:51:55.22 | Unknown | So 10, I know, is of huge interest to a lot of people. about what are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about violators? There's certainly lots of call and interest in seeing some level of enforcement We are not ignorant of that. However, there's a significant amount of practical application involved to execute. the what seems like a simple step of putting a parking ticket on a bicycle. Doesn't mean that we're not gonna be able to do some enforcement, doesn't mean that there's not some solutions, But I have to say it's not quite as simple as it sounds. It's not exactly the same as a car. There's no registration database. There's no provision in the vehicle code to do it. And so it doesn't mean that we are without the means to address the overflow of people who choose to park outside of the pay parking area or outside of the parking that was provided for free, and just attach their bikes wherever they feel like it. Nobody likes looking at it. It's really a blight. We feel that there's certainly some unsafe conditions as a result of having those bikes all piled up So we're very interested in being partners in that solution. I just can't stand here and tell you that it's going to end up with being a parking ticket on an unattended bicycle. It might be, but I'm not saying it's gonna be. So there's a lot of hedging on purpose. There's a lot of work to be done on that particular item. But please know that we are aware that. It's an item of concern probably to many of you on the council. It certainly is to the community. end. We're gonna be reporting back probably sometime in February Council about our work over the winter on what happens next. So I would leave it at that. So before I leave this slide, if you have any questions, I'll move on to something else. I have a couple things more to say. |
| 00:53:52.27 | Jill Hoffman | And are we going to have the chair of the bike and pet committee present? So maybe we can have Ed Fodge present. And then if we have any other questions, anything that he hasn't covered, we can come back to Council. Is that okay? |
| 00:54:04.10 | Unknown | That's okay. I just have one last part, really. That's my – I don't have to put it up. It's not critical, but I provided you an end-of-season financial report. Frankly, it's nothing of great concern, I don't believe. There's a significant amount of effort to put in to get the program rolling. |
| 00:54:04.20 | Jill Hoffman | That's okay. |
| 00:54:21.48 | Unknown | That all happened way before we were collecting any money. And so when the funds started coming in, every month after that, more money came in than money that was spent. So the income exceeded the expenses afterwards But it's a startup. And a lot of the things that were purchased this year were one time items that we'll be reusing for the next season. It may look a little alarming on face value, I'm not terribly concerned about. I think that we're going to look forward to a full year of balancing that out come the next season. So I'm happy to put that up if you think you want to see it, but I'll attach it to there. So before Ed comes up, I wanted to mention a couple things my report. just sort of at the end. because it's more of a really an important thank you I'm not sure. A lot of people are involved in trying to make this work out right. And I mentioned it under the fiscal impact part. because there's a lot of other people that contribute in some way, shape, or form to try and make this happen. Whether it's enough or not maybe is a little bit of a value judgment, but we would be remiss not to mention them. The bike companies... play an important role in trying to make this work out. And I know that there's a variety of opinions about them and their role, but at least six of the companies actually contributed money to pay for the workers that You know, the money was funneled through the Chamber of Commerce to organize that. That's certainly a big effort on the Chamber of Commerce part, and we appreciate all that UNA has done for us in that regard. to get those people on board and take care of, you know, making it paid and insurance all that type of thing. But between the Blue and Gold Ferry. and their financial contribution and the financial contributions of the bicycle rental companies which is Bay City Bike Park wide. bike and roll, Blazing Saddles, San Francisco bike rental, and sports basement, it's about $60,000 worth of money. And worth of payroll money, expense money that goes to the chamber to pay for those things. that's a big piece of money there just as part of their contribution, but again, the Bike rental companies, at least Blazing Saddles, they contributed bicycle racks. That company also put a person on scene nearly every day during the busy part of the season where That person was there to greet all bicyclists, not just the Blazing Saddle riders. and to come in and help them. with where to park, and explain to them about the $3 or where free parking might And I watched them several times myself, very energetic young men, trying to help out and work in concert with the ambassadors. Of course, the Golden Gate Ferry, a big partner in this, their boats certainly and their customers, they also contributed people which is what we would expect that some of that is certainly what we want them to do. It's their people, their responsibility to help us get those people on the boats. But again, without them, it would be pretty tough. And so, um, all those people come together to make this happen and so whether it's enough or too much in different spots, we're going to work on all that. And, uh, you know, We're pretty excited about it, actually, with so many things in play here, knowing that we've got challenges of what are we going to do for President's Day weekend if the weather's good, what are we going to do for spring break, and how are we going to get ramped up by way sooner than we were this year with collecting money and paying for parking. So with that, I can take your questions later. You know, Dr. Fotch is here. You can make a few presentations. |
| 00:58:06.56 | Jill Hoffman | They would like to hear from Dr. Fletcher and we'll have questions and we can call on either one of you. He may answer some of our questions. |
| 00:58:08.58 | Unknown | questions and we can call on either one of you. |
| 00:58:25.07 | Unknown | Well, Jonathan provides AV services. I want to thank Captain John for his hard work and his presentation tonight, and also for the Council's time. Just a few comments about the information that was provided. First of all, You immediately start to do what we've tried to do, which is rationalize all the numbers that you see. and you try to triangulate on the data, and every data set that you get, like most data sets, has flaws. So I'll start with the ambassadors. The flaw in the ambassadors data is that it only runs from 11 until five. During that time, the people, what they call Station 1, are really crazy about accurately counting the rental bikes. And it probably won't surprise you to hear it's not hard to figure out who the rental riders are. First of all, they're going slow enough that you can count them. and just the way they're dressed, and the bikes, and so on and so forth. So it's accurate data. The Parisi data is very accurate, but it's sampling data. And one of the things that you find is that the bike counts of the tourists are so heavily impacted by the weather that you can get tremendous bias depending on when your sampling is. And then you look at the ferry data, which, I'm not sure is accurate, but what it oftentimes indicates is that day's capacity on the ferry to take bikes out, as opposed to how many bikes actually come in. There is a reason that there's a queue of 10 taxis sitting there all summer long to take people out of here and more bikes are going back up the hill. It's not necessarily because they want that. It's because in fact that's their only option if they can't get on the ferry because they haven't been boarded. The reason that we were getting, that the ambassadors were getting the data is number one for staffing purposes, and number two because we hope that next year we could be comparing apples to apples. in an accurate way and saying, here's the numbers. If you simply looked at the data that Captain provided from the from the ferry district, you'd assume that this was a down year. But all of the bike vendors, and that's the one bit of data that you don't see, that the ambassadors do see, is that they, uh... their phone calls to the bike vendor singer you up or down and how many bikes are we expecting so they're trying to use any data they can. to make their staffing more efficient. You see actually August, the cost for the Ambassador Program was down because they got their staffing more efficient, sort of prototypical of a startup. The issue, and I'm going to talk about it here in a little bit, really that we have to get serious about is how we get bikes out of town, not just how we limit bikes coming into town, because the bikes in town at any point in time, is the number who came in. minus the number who get out, and when we trap them here, then we trap them here. It's not really fair to those folks to say, well, gee, we wish you had fewer bikers. And while they're sitting there saying, please let us leave. |
| 01:01:30.09 | Unknown | So this is the 10-point plan. I just want to make a few minor modifications of the 10-point plan that the Pedestrian and Bike Advisory Committee gave to you, and from that, an action plan, at least a draft action plan, has been created. Reinstall and increase bike loops in the downtown. Cover with cozies that become basically signage directing people during the peak hours. Two on that one is that with the direction from the committee last night we're going to go to HLB and get their impact or get their feedback on this for colors and so on and so forth the second is that councilmember Pfeiffer last time requested specifically that we look at some dedicated parking for the residents. And we discussed that last night and a few pieces of follow-up. Actually, I have a slide on it. which is right here. So among the challenges that we identified, first of all, everyone agreed it would be great to have more resident parking. One of the things we weren't able to do was to really quantify demand. We simply don't know how many people would use whatever parking that we provided. But in terms of actually saying we're going to remove a parking space or we're going to create an area that's resident parking, and what we heard was, well, don't put it in one place. We actually already have that. The residents can park for nothing in Tracy Way and have someone watch their bike. and they provide locks for them, so on and so forth. So you need to kind of move it around town for it truly to be convenient. So you have to identify the resident's bike. So you're going to have to have a medallion and a sticker or something like that. We also, anytime we suggest removing any car parking from anywhere. Thank you. in North America. Our committee here, we can't remove that. The next challenge is visitor education. If you see how our bike visitors park, they lock their bike to anything that holds still. I actually think that, and Jonathan could correct me, I think that the reason that there's a canvas cozy on the new ADA ramp near Napa Valley Burger is because if you don't do that, they're going to lock a bike to it. So the challenge we have is visitor education. on the new ADA ramp near Napa Valley Burger is because if you don't do that, they're gonna lock a bike to it. So the challenge we have is visitor education. How do you get people who may have limited English skills understand there's a bike park there, but you don't get to park your bike there? But I think the biggest challenge we have is enforcement. Who's going to go and enforce that who and how are they going to enforce it and how much we've already heard that we have a challenge. enforcing bike parking, even when it's patently illegal, even when... they park their bike to the outside of the valet parking fence. So we sort of left this. with a question of if we install a bunch more bike loops, which is what our recommendation is, can we see what the demand is, and do we see if they're utilized, and if the demand strips the number of local bike parking spots we create through a series of hopefully a half a dozen to a dozen bike loops in the downtown, then we're clearly, and with time, perhaps anyway, we're going to have to look at more options for local parking. But our suggestion for the 2016 season is let's get these loops in and see if that addresses the issue for the 2016 season. The captain already mentioned enforcement of the bike parking. It's really going to be hard to get control of our streets and sidewalks if we don't enforce the bike parking. You've heard me say that before. The issue, I don't think, is so much of if or should we but how, and so we had suggestions there. But the wording is slightly changed here. You might not have seen that, but I just sort of did the magic of PowerPoint there. because before, the bike committee said, aim the citation on the bike rental companies, not the renters. Actually, just sort of to clarify, aim the citation on the owner of the bike versus the renter of the bike. In other words, take the metaphor that we use, if the car came from Hertz or it came from Avis, you send the citation to the owner, and they track down whoever it was that used this. And the reason, frankly, that we like this isn't because we don't like the bike rental firms. It's because the education regarding parking in Sausalito has to start with a bike rental company. There aren't enough ambassadors in ambassador land to deal with this, and so we have to get the bike vendors motivated, and I think the way to do that is to have them see some of these citations organize and improve signage and our free bike parking needs to be better organized next year consolidate the ambassador program actually five six and seven here to us as a package deal we aren't't suggesting that the city, through the ambassador program, take over the role that the ferry district and the bike vendors have funded in the past, absent sources of funding to do it, which should include but not be limited to receiving the funding that was provided last year And in addition, institute a $2 peak bike boarding queuing fee for the 2016 season, which order of which which is a plan presented or provided to you in some detail. when last we spoke, we co-authored or at least it was edited by the Marin Bike Coalition. This will generate, conservatively, will generate $300,000 for next year if it's instituted correctly. So this could be a source of revenue for a lot of the things we need to do to mitigate the impacts of bikes, including transportation. additional bike parking and more staffing. bike loops, so on and so forth. And I'm happy to answer any questions about that. In essence, we did that this year, by the way. We issued a token that you needed. to board or to get into the queue that was Sausalito Property that could be used for any other purpose including fee-based bike parking we issued that coupon this year We just didn't charge for it So in essence, what we would do is the same thing next year, except there would be a $2 fee associated with it. And if you don't want to pay the fee, you have lots of options. You can come before 1 o'clock when peak queuing starts. You can leave after 7 o'clock when it ends. You know, you can ride back, you could take a cab, but if you could afford $20 for a cab, you can certainly afford $2 for a queuing fee. So we look at these three things as a package deal, not to pluck one apart. Previously suggested that you immediately engage the PUC. I actually had a conversation with folks at the PUC, and they were very kind to say, you don't understand, you don't need the PUC. It's your ferry landing. If you want other folks to be able to land at your ferry landing and pick up bikes and take them back because the current ferry service is substandard, that's a ferry lease issue. So I'm changing that to include performance guarantees in the ferry lease negotiation, assuming that there is one along with recourse. Meaning, if they don't hit the numbers that we agree to, and to give you a sense of it, on average, the ferries are leaving half full. The reason we know that is because we had the ambassadors actually count the number of bikes. We kind of know what the capacity is. And it's not because they're bad guys. They're trying to keep on a schedule. But their schedule is getting in the way of our ability to move folks out of town. The visitors don't like it, and frankly, the locals don't either. So that's our recommendation there. The captain mentioned direct the ambassadors to collect additional information. I would suggest that that needs to include the number of bikes that are leaving by ferry so that we know that the performance guarantees are in place and engage the Park Service with a timeline for reopening Vista Point Trail to facilitate the bike staging. That's a tough thing. It involves the federal government. But it seems to have a lot of promise in terms of reducing the number of bikes that come into town. And order of magnitude, if you can't reduce the bikes by at least 300 to 500 bikes per day, it's a rounding error. On our busy days, we have over 3,000 tourists that come into town. So if you can't knock that down by 10%, it's probably not worth the effort. And the only space big enough for that is the only space that we have. on the south end of town, because once they're here, I mean, you could stage on the north end of town, but I'm not sure you're getting a whole lot there. I had mentioned that we're going to go to the Historic Landmarks Board for this, which was suggested. In fact, one of their members was at our meeting last night and suggested that this could be considered to be signage, during the peak hours when these quote-unquote cozies could be covered. And one of the things that we've tried to do ahead of that is do a little bit of surveying in the downtown using one of the ambassadors to survey both merchants and residents who are in the downtown, sort of saying, well, which of these colors do you think would be most appealing? We've got forest green, which would match some of the canvas awnings. We've got the aqua color, which actually matches the current ramp that we have. We have saucer blue off of our emblem, and then we have chamber blue. We've got the aqua color, which actually matches the current ramp that we have. We have Saucedo Blue off of our emblem, and then we have Chamber Blue. We've got some initial survey information. We're going to present that to the Historic Landmarks Board. And I'm not sure when we'll get on their agenda, but we're going to try to move that forward so we have their input. A couple additional suggestions briefly is that for the 2016 season or 2016-17 season, that we look really hard about continuing the ambassador program on a skeleton basis or just a couple ambassadors unless it's raining. And the reason for that is that while the ambassadors stopped working in October, the bikes didn't stop coming. So this is a photograph from November, and you see several things. First of all, the remaining parking is jammed and not very efficiently used. The lines are long, and the bikes parked to anything that doesn't move just sort of runs rampant. We can run the program on a two-ambassador, and our recommendation from our committee is to have a minimum of two and probably a maximum of two during the off-season months, but we can run that on a break-even to marginally profitable basis. And the advantages of doing that is that it's self-funding, we can manage the queues. We do expect during the holidays, if it's warm over New Year's, over Christmas holiday, certainly during President's Weekend, we will have a lot of bikes and there will be exactly no one managing them. There's no ferry staff down there managing the lines. It's just us. The other thing that maybe is not self-evident, but when you think about it, it becomes apparent, starting up a program that involves 30-plus trained people |
| 01:12:16.65 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:12:23.81 | Unknown | and scheduling from a dead stop, in other words, all off-season there's nobody doing any of this, and then suddenly you try to ramp it up because there's a deluge of people coming in the spring break period, it's just really tough to do. So having some people who've worked during the off-season, have some experience, who understand your standard operating procedures, so on and so forth, is really helpful in terms of continuity and in terms of ramp-up in the spring. So that is the extent of my report. I think that maybe also to Captain John's point, it's four months from spring break. And spring break was as busy as weekends in late June. And the clock's ticking and obviously not a lot's going to happen over Thanksgiving weekend. And then you've got the holidays. If we want to execute against a 2016 plan that builds on the 2015 successes to some extent, but also learnings, we really have to get going now. And this Tiger Team thing is something we use in technology all the time. If it's everyone's job, it's nobody's job. So you have to have someone to blame when it doesn't get done, so we create Tiger Teams today. to do that. So let me stop there and see if there are any questions. |
| 01:13:39.20 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks, Ed and Kep, John. Who would like to start with the questions? |
| 01:13:46.18 | Unknown | I have some questions. Ed, can you just, or Captain Robark, or either one of you, just walk us through the financials here, because I look at the bottom, and it looks like we're $25,000 behind at the end of the season. |
| 01:13:46.65 | Jill Hoffman | No question. |
| 01:13:58.98 | Jill Hoffman | And can we put that slide up? I can't. You might as well do that. |
| 01:14:02.00 | Unknown | We might as well do that. Yeah. Just quickly, I mean, I just wanted be clear on this. progression. |
| 01:14:25.16 | Unknown | Right. Let me go down to a particular section. Nope. Down to the end. |
| 01:14:30.51 | Unknown | If you want to just quickly walk us through the progression of the season, I know that we started behind because we weren't actually collecting money and Thank you. |
| 01:14:37.69 | Unknown | Sure, of course. So... |
| 01:14:37.71 | Unknown | Sure, of course. It's a disorder. |
| 01:14:40.21 | Unknown | You know, the Saucydo Plus ambassador group began in earnest probably really before May, because there's so much planning involved. They were really, into the game in May. And as you can see, spending some money. And... but we didn't have any income stream until, let's see here, I'll make that. |
| 01:15:01.49 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:15:06.72 | Unknown | too far probably. No, probably okay. So the... |
| 01:15:19.90 | Unknown | All right, so you can see May income, nothing, right? Just the May expenses. in, uh, June. still continuing some expenses, We didn't start collecting money. We didn't have the, you see that term, Ventech. That's the brand name of the machines that dispense the tickets. People pay $3 to park. Our first customer didn't come through the turnstile until June 15th, or roughly thereabouts, not any sooner. And so expenses were, of course, mounting, but we started getting our first taste of what the revenue stream would look like. So that only represents really a half a month's worth of income, I think is fairly remarkable. There's a lot of people came in and paid for parking. More important, and more telling about whether this is working or not, is starting in July, Sure, there was July expenses for certain, but the July income exceeded expenses. So we're hoping this is an indication you'll see for the next couple of months that the income exceeded expenses and if we'd had a full year program, we probably would see a better balance at the end of the season. But clearly this was a late start. with collecting funds. But each month that the income was higher than expenses, it took a little money off the top of that that red number there. and brought it down. So August, same kind of way, again, $36,000 in expenses, but $44,000 in income. Those numbers, the cash and the credit, the income numbers, those are provided by the machines itself, that Ventec system that took people's money. and |
| 01:17:16.22 | Unknown | Again, September, income exceeded expenses, and then October is another one of those months that It... had a payroll offset in there of almost $7,000. It had to be brought back in from an earlier month And of course, Deb provided a significant amount of detail behind all that. I didn't include it in here. again they be we only ran the program partial through the month we had to come up with a cutoff date And so we really didn't get a full month's worth of income out of October. So we have a little bit of a. off month in June, a little bit of off month in October, really looking at July, August, and September to tell us about what are the real possibilities here about having a fully operational program sort of a stabilized... expense stream of payroll and some fixed costs and then income, income from people paying the $3 to park. Okay. So if you have questions about any of the detail, I might be able to answer some of it, or maybe Ed could. |
| 01:18:22.05 | Unknown | I have one question. The fixed costs that our startup costs are hard assets, which I see are barricades and looks like some fencing and things that I assume. Of that 25, do you have a sense of how much those fixed costs are that we won't have to pay for? |
| 01:18:37.18 | Unknown | I did a little rough calculation before tonight, and it's about half of that number. So we spent about 12 grand on things that we're going to reuse. That's the barricades, the fencing, and the signage, the feather banners and things like that that we're going to take out of storage and put back in service. So that adjusts that number some. It could be plus or minus $100 or $200, but it's about $12,000. |
| 01:18:59.04 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:19:02.51 | Unknown | Okay, so then your assessment is that we're 12,000 in the red right now? |
| 01:19:08.49 | Unknown | I would say that's yes, that's pretty accurate. |
| 01:19:10.18 | Unknown | So I'm noticing that payroll for the six months that we've done this, or SOSITO Plus has done this, payroll totaled roughly $130,000. So was that all ambassadors? I'm assuming it was all ambassador payroll. Thank you. |
| 01:19:36.06 | Unknown | Well, not precisely because there are some ambassadors who are volunteers. |
| 01:19:36.08 | Unknown | Well, |
| 01:19:40.31 | Unknown | So, Thank you. |
| 01:19:41.04 | Unknown | Okay. |
| 01:19:41.44 | Unknown | Yes, and I don't know the number of paid versus. |
| 01:19:43.57 | Unknown | What, the breakdown? |
| 01:19:44.65 | Unknown | volunteers but that clearly is all the paid ambassadors but There's additional ambassadors that were volunteering their services at different times throughout the season. |
| 01:19:53.54 | Unknown | I'll ask a different question. |
| 01:19:55.28 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:19:55.59 | Unknown | Can you break down that payroll? Because I know you mentioned there was like a part time police officer. Is that part of payroll too? No. Okay. So I'm just curious as to the breakdown on that payroll. |
| 01:20:02.62 | Unknown | No. So I'm just curious. Sure. I wouldn't be able to do that tonight for you, but if you would like that in the future, I'm sure that's something that we can work on in the off season. I have no doubt that Saucyuta Plus has impeccable records behind all this, which is how they discovered their bookkeeping adjustment for August and September, that $6,800 adjustment, because they're auditing their own books and making sure that everything they submit is precise. |
| 01:20:13.78 | Unknown | I have no doubt. |
| 01:20:14.28 | Unknown | . |
| 01:20:33.25 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:20:39.21 | Unknown | I do have other questions. Thank you. THE END OF THE END OF THE So I'm just curious as to, you know, my question that I had asked the... that I had asked the pedestrian and bicycle committee to explore regarding the resident parking was actually regarding the permits for residents, you know, giving residents free bicycle parking permits. And the thought was that we would not add additional bike parking spaces. I wanna say we have roughly 1,200 spaces downtown right now. And I could be wrong with that number. And that's my follow-up question. |
| 01:21:30.10 | Unknown | So Tracy weighs about 450 depending on how the bikes are parked? |
| 01:21:35.37 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:21:35.38 | Unknown | . |
| 01:21:35.40 | Unknown | Ah, okay. |
| 01:21:36.16 | Unknown | The reason we get to higher numbers is because we turn them. Oh, okay. Turn them on average two and a half times. Okay. At least last time I looked at the numbers. |
| 01:21:39.89 | Unknown | Oh, okay. Thank you. |
| 01:21:42.89 | Unknown | Okay. Okay, so there's 400 spaces in Tracy Way. |
| 01:21:48.29 | Unknown | I think in terms of 450. |
| 01:21:50.10 | Unknown | 450. And then I know that when I was walking through downtown Sauselita, I noticed there were new racks, you know, other racks that have been placed in other places throughout the parking lots for the bike parking. That is the free bike parking. Do we have a sense for how many bike parking spaces we have right now downtown? |
| 01:22:11.14 | Unknown | There's a I believe it's 20 additional racks that were free bike parking because the ambassadors didn't manage that and the bike committee, frankly, didn't choose. And I think what Jonathan did was the best he could to find spaces that didn't remove parking spaces and kind of plug some in. But my recollection is it's order of magnitude 20 racks. And each rack, you should think in terms of each rack, parks 15 bikes. That's about five, six. |
| 01:22:36.10 | Unknown | It has about five, six, oh, 15. |
| 01:22:39.00 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:22:39.05 | Unknown | Ah. So I would be interested in just getting a total number of not only just the paid parking, but just overall how many bike parking spaces we have right now. You don't have to tell me now. |
| 01:22:49.36 | Unknown | I think if at any one time you thought in terms of 800, that was probably not a bad number. Now, you have to keep in mind, once you leave the downtown and where the bike parking ordinance comes into effect, if you go further up far north, you can park anywhere and you don't get a citation. Not unlike if you want to park your car, there's so many spaces in the downtown, but if you go up into the hills, you probably can find a free place to park. But in the downtown, I think 800 is not a bad number. |
| 01:22:55.44 | Unknown | Uh-huh. THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 01:23:03.88 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:23:17.51 | Unknown | Okay, the reason I'm asking the question is because it relates to the question I had regarding the resident permit, the concept of a free bike permit for residents. The idea would be not to add additional bike parking spaces. I think 800 in our little two-block radius of downtown is plenty, in addition to the private parking that I know Trident offers on their parking lot. But rather, I was looking at perhaps that's a creative way of perhaps enforcing a limit on the number of bikes that can come downtown. Because if we start enforcing the bike parking, which I believe we should, I THINK and we only have a finite amount because we have also given a certain amount for, for resident permit parking that might be a way, to better manage the numbers that we're getting inundated with from a safety perspective. |
| 01:24:19.75 | Unknown | What I would say is that based on our experience with demand for residents bike parking, it is not a big number. And the way that I frankly estimate that is having worked as an ambassador a lot of weekends, you don't need to show anything to park for nothing in Tracy Way and have someone watch your bike. All you have to do is say, I'm local, and frankly, it wasn't just. Sausalito, we did it for all of Marin County, and it was kind of a deal that we cut Most locals and certainly most recreational riders are way too smart and experienced to come into our downtown and try to park a bike during those hours. Because it's not convenient, it's not fun, you can't ride through at a decent speed. Even if a decent speed is 10 miles an hour, you know what it's like. But your first point, I think, I'm actually in agreement with, at some point there is a saturation in this town, and we simply have no place else to put bikes. that having been said if we don't enforce the bike ordinance the saturation is i don't know how big it is but it's probably ten thousand fifty thousand bikes in the new |
| 01:25:19.53 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:25:23.82 | Unknown | They get very creative with where they put their bikes. So, in fact, you may recall, even before we started, just before Tracy Way, I said, if we, you know, not because I'm a genius, because it's obvious, if you don't enforce your bike parking, you just really can't control the town. So it all hinges on that. And I think whether you set aside a small number for residents or not, see, if you say residents only, then of course you have to enforce that. I'm frankly more interested in using our enforcement on the people who are blatantly either ignorant of our laws and violating them or understand our laws but violate them because we don't enforce them. |
| 01:25:42.50 | Julie Dixon | Nice. |
| 01:26:00.00 | Unknown | So I have a follow-up question on that regarding the tickets. I know that one of the suggestions is that you would start selling tickets in town. And I'm curious as to whether there is traction for bundling the bike parking ticket at the point of sale in San Francisco when they buy when they rent the rental bike because it seems that that would be an elegant you know, point to do that. |
| 01:26:38.65 | Unknown | It would, and frankly that was our starting point. And we, I was going to say almost begged, we in fact begged the bike vendors to sell the tickets. And unfortunately they used it as a point of leverage to sort of say, well we're going to dictate this and we're going to tell you how much you can charge. And we gave them sort of, anyway we disagreed with their approach and took a gamble that the ambassadors with the kiosk would be able to handle the sale and it turned out that that worked. In fact, we were going to discount the valet parking and sell it at $2 at the bike vendors, they balked on that. So we sold it at our retail price of $3, and we really had no problem with that at all. There were four machines. They worked very effectively. There was a bike ambassador handling it. And if you think of it, even though the difference between $3 and $2 is only $1, when you multiply that times these numbers, it's a 50 percent – well, actually, it's a 33% drop in revenue so in retrospect I'm really glad we that they were as unwilling to assist us as they were because we ended up with more revenue than we would have if we were selling them for two bucks a piece And on that point, let me just tell you, if you were my board of directors, I'd say this is how you should look at these numbers. Every month you ran the program. charge for the full month. You made a prophet. and every month you had the expenses and you didn't charge for the full month, You lost money. My suggestion would be run it, charge for the full month, including the full month of October. And as I mentioned, I continue to run it in November. and be very sure that you don't start incurring expenses before you have the revenue. And the last thing, just to mention this, is no one asked where did the money come from because you see the city is reimbursing in arrears, right? The ambassadors have the expense during the month and have to make their payrolls because the kids want to be paid every two weeks. And the answer is, so I loaned the not-for-profit $50,000. I haven't quite been paid back yet, but I'm assured by the executive director that I will be. But I'm not sure you're going to be able to continue that model in the future. So when you start looking at finances for next year, even though I believe the total revenue associated with this program should exceed half a million dollars next year, you might want to think in terms of, boy, do we need to have a budget and have funds available ahead of time as opposed to finding people who are not particularly good investors. |
| 01:29:21.34 | Jill Hoffman | Ed, would you say probably at 2.30 in the afternoon, it's pretty close that the time starts changing where you have more bikes leaving than you do coming in? Thank you. |
| 01:29:34.52 | Unknown | So I know, unfortunately, more about that than I wish I did. But it's actually quite interesting. It's between 2.30 and 3.30, but it depends on what day it is. So Fridays tends to be a later day. Saturday is a later day, but Sunday the peak is earlier. And we could see that's actually one of the efficiencies of having the ambassadors run both the queuing line for the and the bike. valet because suddenly around 3 o'clock on average, it's not 233, you don't need that many people parking bikes, but your queue for the ferry is getting long and you need more people to manage it. since those were two different groups this past year, You didn't have the efficiencies of reallocating your staff. But next year they should be able to pull staff and allocate them based on need not based on whether you have a yellow vest or an orange vest. I would also add that in your expenses, you also have some of fixed expenses that frankly were expenses associated with the bike queuing staff. There was an entire bike queuing program with cards and acrylic signs and printed numbers that there were 3,000 a day and they had to be paid for, and it ended up being thousands of dollars. And the reason that the ferry staff didn't pay for it frankly, is because we waited for the ferry staff. They'd probably be coming online now. So we just sort of stepped in and said the job of the ambassadors is hopefully to create a profitable or break even company. But the real job of the ambassadors is to make things better in Sausalito and say they were somewhat more proactive, including some of those hopefully one-time investments that next year should be folded into a $300,000 income stream. |
| 01:31:15.72 | Unknown | Did we have to turn anyone away this season from parking on Tracy Way? In other words, did we ever exceed capacity? |
| 01:31:23.23 | Unknown | There was one day where we hit capacity. But there were no days in which we turned people away. We basically hit capacity and what the kids did was just took the bike and kind of set it to the side, locked one bike to the next, and said it's inside the corral. Now that having been said, |
| 01:31:39.93 | Unknown | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:31:41.87 | Unknown | To my knowledge, there was exactly zero enforcement of our bike parking laws. And you can't disassociate those two things. because if you enforce the law, they'd have to find a legal spot either go and find the legal spot further north in town. or they're going to... So I would think, I mean, just to Thank you. I think if you enforce the law, you see a 15% to 20% jump in your revenue. |
| 01:32:05.83 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:32:06.88 | Unknown | because literally we had times where people were locking their bikes to the outside of the picket fence where the valet parking was. And there just weren't enough ambassadors to say, no, you can't do that. The other problem is that if you don't, if there's never any enforcement, when the bike ambassadors say you can't do that, The people from out of town go, well, everyone else is doing it. So thank you for your information. know. So it really is critical on a number of levels. |
| 01:32:35.31 | Unknown | Did you have any... To me, the parking in the valet part of Tracy Way has made it incredibly efficient in those bike racks because the ambassadors park them in an efficient manner and they get the maximum space out of those. The other benefit is that there's someone there, and it's a secured area. Did you guys have – I'm assuming that you didn't have any thefts of bikes in Tracy Way. |
| 01:32:59.89 | Unknown | Now, there was a couple times when people thought their bike was stolen, and in fact, they just didn't remember where they put it. So the ambassadors got much better at saying, now remember, you're in RAC 27, The problem is two hours later when they come out of the no name, they may not remember that it was RAC 27. But no, there was no theft. There were lots of other problems. People lost their keys and we had to, you know, cut the locks and there's lots of of stuff, but no, there was no theft. And frankly, the rental bikes aren't a big target for theft because they're big steel monsters. They're not worth that much. There's many better bikes to steal in town, including mine that was stolen. It was stolen in San Francisco, though, in fairness to Sal's leader. |
| 01:33:43.05 | Unknown | you Of the other, the private... I mean, I know of one private lot at Trident that he charges bicycle parking there. Do you know, what did he charge this summer? |
| 01:33:55.56 | Unknown | That seemed to have been a moving target. He came to our committee a few times. So their official word is they don't charge, but they don't charge if you eat there. And then their sign kept changing. It looked like, you know, sort of farmer's market kind of thing. On the side of the road, they draw lines through it. But I think it was either $2 or $3, but it was not all you can eat. In other words, you pay $3 for valet and you can stay there all day. His had a time limit. Mm-hmm. |
| 01:34:04.99 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. |
| 01:34:22.25 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. |
| 01:34:22.57 | Unknown | Or at least that's what it said. Now, exactly how they enforce that, I don't know. Sadly, the amount of bike parking they have there is a rounding error compared to the needs that we have. And I think that I would look at that as an interesting, enigmatic thing that you see on the way into town. Probably the best thing that they do for us as a town is there's a big sign that says free bike parking here for clients, and it puts in the mind of people, I guess bike parking isn't free everywhere in Sausalito, so it's almost a little bit of advertising for the valet parking, or at least education. And to anticipate perhaps another question, there really aren't a lot of other good parking lots for bike parking. I haven't seen the one next to Angelino's have any interest in that at all, or perhaps, I mean, they're usually pretty full, and they charge a fair amount for the cars. The next place where you can park that has any volume at all is up toward Chibo. And then for us by then, that's far enough up Thank you. They're not in the red zone where we're focused. I would say just on that point, you make a really good point. We're parking, again, based on my math, 20% to 25% more bikes and much more efficiently in Tracy Way than if it was just an empty lot. and people are just in there just parking them any way they want. That same metaphor holds to the ferry. The reason those ferries are leaving half empty, in my estimation, you heard me say this last time in Provida related video, is no one's grabbing those bikes and parking them. It's not just getting them in the boat. It's taking them in. It's parking them efficiently, and it's sort of jamming them in like sardines the way you have to. And if that doesn't change, I think we're going to have a real tough time managing the crowds because we do trap 200 to 400 people here pretty much every afternoon in the warm weather months, but I mean Thursday through Sunday. |
| 01:36:19.94 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. I think at this point, I'd like to open up to public comment. But is there anyone who would like to speak on this issue? All right, Adam, anyone else? Would anyone else like to speak? Could you stand in line? And on, would you guys, David, Adam, please? Anyone else on this issue? And just looking ahead, if anyone's here for item 6B or C, would you fill out a speaker card? |
| 01:36:51.06 | Jill Hoffman | All right, David. |
| 01:36:51.66 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:36:55.78 | Unknown | I guess I'm first. David Sudo. I'd like to thank Ed and the PBAC for all the work they did this year, really trying to organize the tourist issue. A couple of things I would like to note, though, are if you looked at those Parisi numbers, 50% of those bikes or more were locals. They were either commuters or people from San Francisco or Sausalito Mer Valley moving back and forth. So, you know, we can say we want to block bikes from coming in town, but when we have, you know, 1,300 locals biking, you're not going to block those people from coming in town. And we need to make sure that we have adequate facilities for them to put their bikes somewhere. You know, Chibo has racks and they're full every day. Maybe other businesses that sell coffee would think about putting racks out. They'd probably get more business. And I think it's a mistake to limit bike parking downtown. We don't limit car parking downtown because we have too many cars. And we're trying to support bicycles as a legitimate form of transportation. So I think we should act like it's a legitimate form of transportation and plan accordingly, rather than just saying we don't want them in town. |
| 01:38:21.30 | Unknown | I think those are the most important things. I still think we need bicycle parklets. We need to take a few strategic car spots downtown and put racks in there. If we need to make it a local permit system where we allow locals to have stickers, whether they're free or whether you want to charge $35 like we do for resident parking, that would be fine too. Just some way to make sure that we have parking where people want to bike in town. Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:38:58.87 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:38:58.92 | Unknown | Adam? |
| 01:39:03.05 | Unknown | Good evening, Adam Krivach, Mr. Mayor, Vice Mayor, General, uh, respectable Council members. I would like to, Adam Krivashi, 840 Ulima Street, I'm sorry. I would like to compliment the city for having sponsored and for conducting such a thorough problem-shooting program. Started with Councilman Herb Weiner when he was still mayor, organizing the flow of bicycles, Through the Bike and Pet Committee, it turned into a very sophisticated operation of crowd control with Captain Rohrbacher's assistance and his staff's assistance. It is an organized, disciplined system that addresses changing conditions. As we understand, the conditions change daily, and within the day, and seasonally. So it has to be a live, responsive system that you constantly have to manage that presents new problems that you have to deal with every day. most respectable and most impressive. I'm wondering How many people in this town know about the sophistication of this operation. What I would like to I'm inspired What I would like to contribute is to, shift the focus a little bit on visitor satisfaction. how to accommodate visitors in Sausalito that each of the visitors goes home with something positive to remember. because they are the best ambassadors for Sausalito They are much more useful than a TV ad. or a well-placed ad in a flight magazine. And they're going to remember Sausalito as a delightful place and not as a place where somebody solved their problems. So. They are coming here for vacation. Enjoyed this place they heard of it And. I would like to bring to this theme the thought of creating a more enjoyable experience for visitors. How? Well, first thought is to reduce the crowded conditions when there is peak occupancy downtown. How? creating attractions, through art, in places Sorry. So, I would like to offer my services and Marta Carvalho, who is a member of the Business Advisory Committee, also an architect and urban planner, would like to help me working on this with the team. Thank you. |
| 01:42:27.68 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, Adam. Anyone else? Public comment on this issue? Okay, seeing none, close public comment, bring it up here for comments. Who would like to start? |
| 01:42:41.40 | Jill Hoffman | Well, I'd like to thank Ed and the captain for dealing with a real tough problem. But I think you've done a real good job this year. I think we've learned things from this year. |
| 01:43:00.62 | Jill Hoffman | And I'm pretty confident that next year will even be smoother than it was this year. So thank you. |
| 01:43:02.51 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 01:43:02.52 | Unknown | All right. |
| 01:43:08.95 | Jill Hoffman | And Deb also. |
| 01:43:21.76 | Unknown | So yes, thank you, Captain, and thank you, Ed, for the presentations. I apologize. I missed the first part, but quickly got the gist of our story. I think this last year, we've taken steps from what I've seen over years of trying things, seeing what worked, moving on. We changed gear this year in that we had the ambassadors. I think it started its... As a first year, it's shown its viability and that it actually works. I think Adam Cravashi's comments about a sophisticated operation, perhaps people don't realize the amount of planning and work that's gone into this. And there is an enormous amount. And he's quite right at pointing that out. So I think we've made some really good progress. And now I'm not certain how we're going to sort of digest all of this and quickly act because As you pointed out, there's not that many months left before we got spring break, and it's going to be upon us, so we better have the plans in place, start formulating them pretty soon. Thank you. Thank you. The other thing that And I know Captain you're hedging your bets a little on the You know writing tickets for bicycles or for enforcing the the part the our ordinances in particular Parking on the sidewalks and the lap posts and the various things that you park I think we really do have to I |
| 01:45:10.89 | Julie Dixon | Yeah. |
| 01:45:30.38 | Unknown | get some creative thinking going about how we're going to enforce. Because all I've heard all year is this is only going to really work if we can enforce our sidewalks and enforce, you know, not having bikes lying all over Vina Del Mar Park, for example, or up against parking meters, all the various things. I understand the issues, the logistical, practical issues of how do you actually ticket a bicycle. But I think we really do need to work this through, because what Ed is saying about, unless we can find some tactics to do that, we're not going to solve this problem. |
| 01:45:52.52 | Julie Dixon | Well, |
| 01:46:21.26 | Jill Hoffman | Councilmember Pfeiffer, good to go. Thank you, Jacob. |
| 01:46:24.99 | Unknown | Sure, I'll be able to go. |
| 01:46:25.09 | Jill Hoffman | you |
| 01:46:26.56 | Unknown | Well, you know, add my thanks to the tremendous effort. I mean, just tremendous effort from the soft seat plus and from the police department and every public works to sort of get this thing off the ground. In my mind, it's been incredible success even though we you know started from a flat footed jump and within two months we were revenue positive over our expenses. So Thank you. I think that was great. I would have been happiest if we had ended the season at a break even. But I think we're very close. And I think next year, now that we've got the engine built, I think we should be fine. You know, one of the things that Councilwoman Pfeiffer talks about and I agree with is that the problem is not just dealing with bikes when they get here, it's the volume of bikes coming into town. And so this first year, I felt like the most important piece of the puzzle was to get. the parking and the revenue stream in place so that we could have a method of managing the bikes that didn't cost the city and the citizens of Sausalito to support someone else's business model that was being imposed on Sausalito. And so I think we've made tremendous strides in that direction. So I think phase two that I would like to take a look at would be turning the volume down of bikes coming into town. And I see that as a comprehensive plan with the bridge district, the park service, the vendors, the rental companies to ensure that there's adequate points along the route from San Francisco to Sausalito where you have staging areas and people can leave their bikes if they choose. And again, that's a huge assignment to Sausalito Plus and the organizers, but you guys did a tremendous job last year, so I'm setting the bar high for you again. Um, But I think it can be done. And I think if we had a point at the south side of the bridge, at the north side of the bridge, and particularly down in the park, Fort Baker for staging areas that people could leave their bikes there if they wanted to and come on down into Sausalito, that would be successful. The second thing we have to get into place is the enforcement of the bike parking. I don't see this as, you know, insurmountable. I think we have to have a vendor that will do it. We have to get bids and we have to let them go for it. nothing drove me more crazy than going through town last year and seeing whole huge groups of bikes from tour bike companies and you know it was a group because they were all parked and there were 10 bikes all in a row of the same bike company. And they were everywhere. I mean, they were parked next to trees, and they were making sidewalks impassable, and they were parked in parking lot spots. They were parked in parking spots on the street. And I doubt that they were paying for that parking, even as, you know. So I think we have to get better with that. It was still a success this year, though. Even though we had those challenges, it was still a success. And so... I have an idea, anyway, about some other places where we might have the free bar. bike parking area one is maybe the corporation yard down by that's empty right now, it's got a fence around it, that might be a good place for free bike parking next summer. Thank you. Sorry. |
| 01:49:50.23 | Unknown | So I want to thank Captain Roerbacher as well for the presentation and your hard work and efforts. And I want to thank Ed and city staff and the Pedestrian Bicycle Committee. I know some of you are here. And the ambassadors for their hard work. I really appreciate it. I want to make something very clear, just in case my message has not been. I'm not talking about blocking bikes from coming into Sausalito. I'm talking about a hazardous situation where over four months alone we had 160,000 bikes, rental bikes in four months coming into our small town. That's only like a two-block radius. It's an unsustainable model. I have said this since 2009, 2010, and I've seen the numbers explode. We're looking at, you know, we used to talk about the peak summer season. Now we talk about spring break. Pretty soon we're going to talk about the winter snowbird season. You know, we're going to talk about the winter snowbird season. This is becoming a year-round. Um, situation. In January, which is off-season, in 2012 the Golden Gate Ferry counted 4,000 bikes in January. That's our off-season. In 2015 it's 10,000 and that's just the the bike count for one ferry service. As we talked about, we've got two ferry services and it doesn't count the people going back or going on to Mill Valley or Tiburon or elsewhere. So, and when I talk about limiting, you know, the bikes that come in here, we have got to get our arms around this in terms of how we limit these bikes, the rental bikes. I heard a comment that we don't limit car parking downtown. Well, of course we do. We have parking lots, and if you're a car and you're driving around and you can't find a parking space, you can't just park in the middle of the street. You know, you can't pull up to a meter and just, you know, or a tree and just stick your car in the middle of a park. You know, of course we limit park, a car parking downtown. We must enforce bicycle, the rental bike parking. The approach, I believe, with the resident parking permits, which would be free and free to commuter bikes as well, with a color coding system to be paid for by the bike parking I think would would work and we need enforcement I believe we need a full-time police officer to look at safety enforcement of the bike speeding through crosswalks etc you know I have I'm out of time but yeah so I have a lot of concerns about this I really am happy that you know we've made some progress but I'm concerned we are $12,000 in the red we paid $130,000 in income over six months. If we look at that for the year, that would double it. It's $260,000. I just have some questions. So thank you very much. And it's something that is unsustainable, and we need to get some sort of a solution around to control it. |
| 01:53:33.97 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, Captain Moerbacher and Dr. Fotch for great presentations and all the work that you've done, including the Bike and Ped Committee, our Public Works Director, Jonathan Goldman, the Chamber of Commerce gets involved, the Marin Bicycle Coalition. We pull it all together and we'll work on this. And I have to put a plug in, the Bike and Ped Committee meets third Monday every month. And that's where the work's done. So I really recommend everyone in the audience to come there and council members to see the details of what's really being done because there are ideas but these are people that are really taking the time to explore what really can be done they've been a lot of work we've been at it two years and a lot of progress has been done we have a lot more work to do but i really thank all of you it's very important that we we have the police and public works and all these people here working on this problem together. So it's really a model of how to approach an important problem that that the city has. I do agree of what was presented tonight that we do need to have staff, including our police department, our city attorney and bike and pet committee to get together on enforcement. That's a key part of it. It's something we struggled with. We have to be careful. We've made a few blunders on enforcement. We can't be heavy handed, but we need to make this enforcement. So we need to work together on what will work, what's enforceable, what we can actually do. So that's some work that we need to do. I think as far as the presentation has gone, there's nothing that you've asked council to do But there's the action plan with the 10 points, and I certainly think Those are good points. the Tiger teams and the dates that that's, that should be our working plan going forward. There's a lot of work to do before February as we go forward. The President, stay a weekend will be here on us very quickly. So I do want to thank everyone. And I think as far as I know, there's there's no council request for any motions other than we have a general consensus that we support the action plan. |
| 01:55:40.03 | Unknown | I have to say that I have questions about the action plan, especially the – am I reading this correctly to add 30 new racks downtown? That's number four. It says identify new free parking area north of downtown to accommodate 30 racks. |
| 01:56:03.75 | Unknown | report. |
| 01:56:04.51 | Unknown | Yeah, but irregardless, I'm just, I'm just curious. I would like to know, know a little bit more about, you know, what, where that would go and what that would look like. I'm just concerned. I still don't have a total number of bike spaces we already have added downtown in just the last year alone. Well, what were |
| 01:56:26.40 | Jill Hoffman | Well, what we're asking for, we're not going to finally do this tonight. This is the general goal. We'll come back on specific items. But is this the general direction? Do we have a general sense? |
| 01:56:33.65 | Unknown | But as Yeah, I think so. And to Councilwoman Pfeiffer, I think if you look under key next steps, under number four, item number four, which is the bike racks, it's for them to bring back to us council options for better organized free parking. |
| 01:56:48.54 | Unknown | It doesn't say, yeah, thank you very much. Because it wasn't clear. It doesn't say come back to council. It says create a plan for enforcement, consider immediate off-season enforcement. |
| 01:56:51.74 | Unknown | . |
| 01:57:01.57 | Unknown | Thank you. Oh, I was looking at the wrong item, bring to PBAC and council options. So it wasn't clear, bring to PBAC and council options. So that means they're coming back. Okay, I just read it wrong. Okay. |
| 01:57:17.72 | Jill Hoffman | I'm happy we have a general consensus on that. These are what staff will come to be coming back to us. But we have a lot, a lot of work to do in the next couple of months. But again, thank you so much. OK, so we're that I'm closed. We'll take a five minute break. |
| 01:57:18.02 | Unknown | I'm happy. |
| 01:57:43.53 | Jill Hoffman | Welcome back. We're moving on item 6B, parking status report, Sergeant Stacy Gregory and Julie Dixon. |
| 01:57:51.69 | Stacy Gregory | Okay, good evening. Sergeant Gregory. Mayor, vice mayor, council members, can you hear me? Okay. Okay. |
| 01:57:51.85 | Jill Hoffman | Good evening. How are you? |
| 01:57:57.98 | Stacy Gregory | Thank you for having us. I am Sergeant Stacy Gregory, and with me tonight is Julie Dixon and Patrick Smith from Dixon Resources Unlimited. They're our contracted parking consultant that have kind of helped us navigate through the vendors and the different products that we vetted and finally ended up with, which we'll be talking about tonight a little bit. Um... I think I'm lucky to be talking about car parking rather than bike parking tonight. And I never thought I'd get to say that. Um, So car parking is also a hot topic in Sausalito. It always has been, always will be, and it's pretty exciting to be up here tonight to talk about some successes since in the past that really hasn't been the case. So Julie and Patrick are with me tonight to kind of talk about the details, the technology, and some of the stuff that I don't have the knowledge on they're the experts so once I'm done they're going to get up and give you a little bit more detail about what we have in place but we do have some super exciting improvements that we've made. But first, what I wanna do is talk about the parking team. Um, in July of 2015. This year I took over from Lieutenant Scuga, took over the parking. So what that means is everything parking related, parking lots, The parking improvements that were already in place when I came in. and the parking staff as well. Thank you. So I want to talk a little bit about that team of people. There are five people, six including myself, but the team consists of three parking enforcers, Lillian Sereniers, Beth DeLego, and Marie Coleman. They're the parking enforcers that you see around town writing the citations. We have the behind-the-scenes staff who do the finances, the analyzing, the back-end programming. stuff that I don't even understand, don't want to understand. That's Elliot Holt and Jean Schertz. This team, they work really hard to keep this whole parking enterprise working. And a lot of the work that they do behind the scenes goes unnoticed. And people don't know about it. So that's why I want to take the opportunity to talk about that team. They're super passionate about what they do. They want to make sure that all these programs and improvements that we're doing go smoothly. and there I mean there's been blood sweat and tears through some of these projects I mean we've really worked hard to get what we have now. and to come to the point where we are There's still a lot to do, but... this team of people I came in I didn't know anything I knew a little bit about a park five years ago when I was involved with that but prior to that I didn't know anything so they've you know they trained me they brought me up to speed they actually made me kind of enjoy parking as part of my job it's about 90 percent So anyway, I wanted to give out an Elliot is in the room tonight. Elliott? Okay. So I'm just going to go briefly into some of the things that are pretty obvious that you see around town. The first and foremost is the new parking meters. There's These are live photos of some of our equipment. So the single space parking meters as you drive through town. You no longer see different colored meter heads, different height meter heads. They're all standard, black base, silver head. They're solar. They're digital. They're smart. They know when it's not time to pay for parking. They look sharp. They make the city look professional. And once they were put in, the completion was the end of October. At that point, excuse me, I'm also sick. I'm not. at that point, once they were in, they started working and zero complaints. And I made it a point to go downtown and talk to people and ask them how they paid and how you know, whether it was easy or not. And there's not one person that has had a problem with these. The difference now also with these new meters is, is they no longer just take a quarter. They take all silver money and they take credit cards. So people can easily pay for parking when they park and find a spot in town. Um, So one thing we did when we installed the meters is we cut all the poles. They're all standard. They're all they all comply with the ADA regulations. and the signs are new, they just look really sharp. Yeah, thank you. I'm sorry, I should have been prepared. Thank you. Mm. |
| 02:03:11.52 | Stacy Gregory | So that's the single space parking meters. And we haven't had any issues, the ease of them. Our parking enforcers haven't had to go and fix anything. I mean, they're just working perfectly. The next big thing is the multi-space, the digital multi-space pay station. You'll see those around the Muni lots, lots one through four. There's 14 of them installed in the lots right now. The blue pay stations are still there also because the residents and the commuters are still using those. And we'll talk about that in just a minute. These pay stations, the same. We don't have any issue. The ease of use is good. Visitors who are coming to town are currently using them. Once in a while we get a paper jam. That's the only issue that we have. The one other issue is that visitors don't know that they're supposed to go to the gray pay stations as opposed to the blue. Hopefully the blue will be out by the end of the year, and that's not going to be an issue, so that will go away with time. So with that, we're working on the transition to move the residents and the commuters to using the gray pay stations. That's currently in the process. Here are our new parking cards, the resident parking card, and then the commuter and or the daily. It's called both, parking card. Both Jean Schertz artwork. Had to give him that plug. So what we did prior to letting these cards go live was once we got them in hand, we did the staff, the parking enforcement officers, Gene and Elliot specifically, spent a bunch of time testing them and trying to come up with every scenario. And so once we were satisfied with that then we we gathered some commuters and some residents and we did a beta test and we gave them the cards and told them to use it in every which way possible reload their card use it you know whatever scenario they think they're going to come across and give us feedback and they did that it was all positive so at that point we felt like it was okay for us to to move forward with um issuing the cards to all the residents and the commuters. You'll see that we expect to give out about 1,500 of the resident cards to date, and this has only been in the last two weeks. We've given out 350, and we've given out about a third of what we think we'll give out as far as commuter cards. And again, kudos to the people doing the work. To Elliot, it's Gene, it's the front staff. All these people are coming into our front counter and we're processing them, getting them their cards, gathering the information, making sure they're valid. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. I think I've heard Gene and Elliot give the spiel about how to use it and what the rules are, you know. so many times sometimes they gather everybody there in the lobby make sure they're all there for parking and just give it you know give it to everybody so uh... they're working hard to get this done and I think we'll be by the by the middle of December, we'll be ready to. pull the blue machines. I'm confident that everybody will have their card, especially when we say this is the deadline as far as coming in to get your card, and then we'll be able to pull the blue machines out. So that's exciting to have that happen. Thank you. Um, |
| 02:06:56.26 | Stacy Gregory | So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Julie and Patrick because I don't want to get into a lot of the technical stuff. I'll let her explain to you some of the highlights and some of the capabilities that these programs that we have in place now will be able to do in the future once we move to that point. So Julie. |
| 02:07:21.13 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. So I'd really like to acknowledge what Sergeant Gregory said about the team. I've had the pleasure of being able to come and speak to you all a couple of times this last year. And if it wasn't for the parking staff and the parking team, we really wouldn't be where we are today. And I really also have to acknowledge yourselves and also the community because You guys have been very patient over this last year in particular. So it was about a year ago that we got engaged here in the city. And I don't think it's any secret that Sausalito had a real rough time with parking as a result of your previous vendor. So one of the things that we really had to do and focus on with the industry was really to teach the folks that they had to be patient with Sausalito because we really had to regain trust into the parking system, whether it be the enforcement, the meters, or just the ability to pay for parking in the city. And so I think all of you know from a recap, we ran an RFI, Request for Information, basically last fall. And then starting in February was when we ran the pilot in the parking lot one. And a lot of you actually came out there and actually touched the meters and experienced the meters for your own experience. And it was really the parking staff and the parking selection committee that ultimately decided on the vendor. I know in April, May, it was a little rushed because unexpectedly APARC basically went out of business about two weeks faster than we were really prepared for. So we had to fast track some of the contracts with you all to get the rental agreements with digital T2 systems, the ones that are out there with the pay stations. But as a result, and actually the cooperation of the vendors too, the technology was basically installed throughout the summer. So the pay stations that you now see have been operational basically since effectively July 1 wholly in the parking lots. And then as Sergeant Gregory mentioned, just here at the end of October was when we installed all of the single space meters. So that gets us kind of up to date on the technology and the timeline. As Sergeant Gregory mentioned, the capabilities for the T2 digital pay stations really are quite vast. We recently met with the city manager's office, and one of the things that I really want to highlight is we've gotten to a point now that all of the technology has been installed, And what we're really recommending is that we kind of stabilize for a couple of months. This is we're basically in a position right now where everything's working. It's working really well. We're going to make sure everybody's really comfortable with the parking solutions. And then what you're going to start to see is basically some of the potential of some of the things that we can actually do with the parking program in Sausalito. There's opportunities to introduce what we'll call demand-based pricing, special event rates, so that when you have festivals or things like that, that you're actually going to be able to have an impact on the parking rates if the council so chooses. But the neat part is that the demand-based pricing, special event rates, so that when you have festivals or things like that, that you're actually going to be able to have an impact on the parking rates if the council so chooses. But the neat thing is, is that you're going to have the opportunity to do that. The other part that I really want to highlight, and to the right of the screen you're going to see the display, is that the immediacy and access to the revenue information and the performance information is that your staff basically has their hands on the button at any point in time to talk about how the system is performing. There's a neat little dashboard feature that comes along with the management system so that you can actually recognize your revenue at that point in real time. You can also check the status of a parking meter. You can also see basically how full the parking meters are too so that if the parking actually needs to be collected, it'll actually key into you onto those types of notices. It also sends out automated messages so that if the machine basically is injured or needs some help or needs some support or maintenance, it actually will send an alert out to the maintenance staff as well so and sergeant Gregory already mentioned all the different payment capabilities one of the things I wanted to prepare you all for in the upcoming council meetings you're gonna see a request that we're gonna request to put an additional five pay stations in throughout the parking lots what we recognize now is the opportunity the system's working we want to put a couple of more pay stations out there so that it's just easier for people to pay and basically more accessible. So a couple more spotted out throughout the parking lots is one of the next steps in the recommendation. I do want to highlight one thing, too, that's important about this particular pay station solution is that as you all are talking about the bike valet programs and ferry ticket programs and advancements, one of the neat things that we can potentially evolve the pay stations that are out there in your parking lots to do is actually to become payment locations for you to potentially buy ferry tickets or to potentially pay for your bike valet systems too. So it's one of the things that we put on the roadmap for the technology solution when it comes to your parking pay station. The neat thing is that it's basically a computer. It's got a display screen. There's a lot of capabilities of what you can do into the systems. You actually have the ability to put tourist welcome information, you know, general information about Sausalito onto the information screens, too. There's a lot of capabilities with the system that we basically can maximize. Onto the single space meter, Sergeant Gregor already mentioned, and this was one particular thing that I was really excited about was when the poles got cut. Because I can tell you, I thought I was actually a fairly decently height person but on via princessa i couldn't even see the top of the parking meter on the old school meters so to know that all the meters are now cut down to the appropriate size and height i think that's a really important aspect from an ada compliance standpoint but another neat feature that's tied into your single space meters is that you all selected to put in what's called an electronic lock system so what's really neat about that solution is that you actually can, unlike previous what are called mechanical keys, the system is programmed so that anyone that accesses that parking meter, you actually can identify when that parking meter was accessed and also which key accessed it to. And so the keys are assigned to designated parties, so it's another revenue control point. So when there's issues in the parking industry, it's called shrinkage. If that were to be an issue it's very easy to be investigated and locations that use the smart key systems basically don't really have too significant of a problem when it comes to that. The real-time capabilities, the solar aspects of it, it definitely is a real benefit. And I think one of the things that Sergeant Gregory said, too, that's really important is it's just really clean and really professional looking. Another neat feature about it as well, and I think I've heard feedback from the police department on this, is that as you drive down the street, you can actually see the green or the red light on the back of the parking meter. And that's basically a display to say whether or not the parking meter is paid. And so it actually makes it very easy to enforce because of the visual indicators that are on the back of the parking meter, and that's basically a display to say whether or not the parking meter is paid. And so it actually makes it very easy to enforce because of the visual indicators that are on the back of the parking meter. So it again, much more manageable, very easy to see, and readily enforceable as well. |
| 02:13:31.69 | Neil Whitelaw | And so, |
| 02:13:43.00 | Julie Dixon | One of the other key features that's really rolled out and some of the things that are going to be coming soon, we already have the Park Mobile which is the mobile payment solution your cell phones to pay for your parking solutions, the mobile payment vendors actually offered to come out to the city of Sausalito and do an assessment of the current signage that's out there and actually has offered to basically implement additional signs and help with some of the marketing campaign on the ParkMobile solution. That's included in the costs that are paid for. It's basically a turnkey service. It's really paid for out of the transaction fees from the users of the system, but I thought that was a nice nuance that could be a potential for improvements on overall signage to the The other thing that just recently implemented is in the bottom right hand corner, Your parking enforcement officers actually have new handheld devices, and this was a real big nuance for the parking program because if you ever see your parking enforcement officers out there, I really encourage you to ask to see what they're using for enforcement because they've actually gone to an Android smartphone device, and they really seem to like them too because, first of all, they're very capable, they're live, they're fast, they can take really great pictures with it, but what they can also do is, in the bottom right corner, they actually have an app that they can actually check the payment status on a vehicle as well, so that if they paid on the park mobile system, or if they paid at the meter, because they parked by space in the parking lots, they can actually use that app to verify in real time if that vehicle is in violation. So it really allows for them to be very efficient when they're working in the parking lots as well. So that combined with the light on the back of the single space meter, it really has helped optimize the parking enforcement officers. And I should mention, because we're really kind of talking about the parking roadmap also moving forward, that's really going to hopefully allow us to, now that we've got the technology aspects focused on, we can start to talk about the permit programs and the signage throughout the city and the permit signage and things like that. And I'd say that those are some of the next stages of the things that we're going to really start to evaluate when it comes to parking in Sausalito. So I'm going to actually step out of this program and basically show you the numbers in a little bit. It's a little hard to see, so I'm just going to zoom in on this particular slide so that hopefully we can see it a little bit better. Sorry for the shading on it. But what we wanted to highlight here is that this is the first four months of the fiscal year. And in just confirming with Elliot before we came up here I wanted to verify last fiscal year numbers last year last fiscal year you were at 1.6 million dollars for all parking related revenue that would include parking permits, parking meters, parking citations, etc. Right now, just from your pay by phone, your parking meter, and your citation revenue for the first four months, you're already almost at $900,000. And what this really goes to show you is the APARC system just frankly didn't work and so you have a system now that's basically working when it's supposed to it's accurate people are able to pay it's easy for them to pay and what we were talking about earlier about the management system is this is a monthly report that we're producing on a monthly basis using the system so that it's a report that is readily available to staff we were just recently on the phone with um charlie francis about being able to put it on to the city network so that the the numbers would be available to yourselves as We were just recently on the phone with Charlie Francis about being able to put it onto the city network so that the numbers would be available to yourselves as well as to the general public, so that the information, again, is readily available and out there. The nice thing again is the stability and reliability of the system. One of the cores whenever we talk about parking is that parking needs to be easy and it needs to be simple. And I think that that's something that we've truly achieved. And a particular part that I'm really proud of is the fact that the city of Napa is currently in the process of evaluating and implementing paid parking. And they've actually chosen to model their approach after Sausalito and how you guys have basically gone after the vendors and kind of managed the program over this last year. And I think that's a real testament to your program that they're really looking to you all to really model what they're looking to do for the next steps. So I'll open it up to any questions for us. |
| 02:17:56.22 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, thank you so much. We'd like to start with the council questions. |
| 02:18:03.58 | Jill Hoffman | Just a couple of questions. I noticed, and what does make this a lot easier, especially the meters, is that... They're very, they're similar to the ones in San Francisco. and sin were felt. So people are getting used to it from that end. The only thing I noticed, not in San Francisco, but up in San Rafael, Some of the meat is. We're at a little angle. And I asked up there why. They said it was much easier for the meter people to see it. Yeah. |
| 02:18:43.46 | Julie Dixon | And she will be able to anticipate that one. |
| 02:18:47.27 | Jill Hoffman | Were you waiting for that one? |
| 02:18:47.34 | Stacy Gregory | So that... I didn't expect it, but it has happened. And unfortunately, when we installed the meters, we weren't advised of that until we were about halfway through. So at that point, I said, well, we're not going to make half of the meters sideways and the other half not. So as the parking enforcers started doing their enforcement, they do have to drive basically past the car and then back up. So it's a safety issue for them. So IPS is coming out hopefully within the next week to angle all the meters. So that problem will be alleviated. |
| 02:19:14.86 | Julie Dixon | the car. |
| 02:19:22.99 | Jill Hoffman | Good. That's right. The other thing is... what I do recommend that on the on the pay parking in the lots. that the back of the units also have the letter P on it. all the way around. And we should really maybe take the pee off of the blue units. The locals know it. But if it's on there, People have a way of going over there because they see it. And I'm thinking maybe we should take that the letter off. And I do like the idea of congested parking. That's the wave of the future. That's it. |
| 02:20:08.86 | Unknown | I had a question about the comment. It said that these are smart meters that they They know when, you know, the pay hour starts at 9 a.m. or whatever. So what if you're a resident and you arrive at 845 and you're going to be there for, you know, you know you're going to be there for two hours? I'm assuming that it lets you pay forward. |
| 02:20:33.40 | Julie Dixon | It does you actually I think it's two hours beforehand. Yeah, even earlier than that. Probably starting at 6 I would assume, right? 530. 530. So you actually can start paying as early as 530 in the morning to basically make advance payment on your parking meter. But the transaction cost only starts at the operation hours. But if I'm going to park, I can put in my money and go about my business. |
| 02:20:56.53 | Unknown | Okay, great. And then the resident cards, right now they only work in the lots. It's my understanding that's still the case, that they're not for the meters, the standalone meters. |
| 02:21:08.73 | Unknown | Yeah, they're supposed to. |
| 02:21:08.75 | Stacy Gregory | They're not they will not ever work in the standalone meters. Yeah, different different programs. |
| 02:21:12.50 | Unknown | standalone meters yeah different different programs okay good thank you |
| 02:21:19.48 | Jill Hoffman | Going back to the numbers that I think I've heard, but I think you said that in the first four months we've collected 900,000. |
| 02:21:27.38 | Julie Dixon | In total, with your pay-by-phone services, your pay station meters, and your single space meter revenues, and your citations, you're about $885,000 to date. |
| 02:21:39.67 | Jill Hoffman | I can't find that number on this chart. |
| 02:21:40.71 | Julie Dixon | on this chart. I'll, you know, that's, these have a cumulative number on this, so we'll definitely update the report to show that. |
| 02:21:46.62 | Jill Hoffman | But somewhat less than 900,000 in four months, correct? |
| 02:21:47.12 | Adam Politzer | . |
| 02:21:50.97 | Adam Politzer | Can I just clarify, because our peak parking season are the four months that we've been collecting, so I don't want that to be the average. |
| 02:21:51.56 | Jill Hoffman | I'm not sure. |
| 02:21:60.00 | Adam Politzer | Yeah. |
| 02:22:00.07 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:22:00.10 | Adam Politzer | Thank you. |
| 02:22:00.22 | Julie Dixon | Bye. |
| 02:22:01.79 | Jill Hoffman | But going back, you also made a point that – So that's a good point. clarification, but that the total for last year was 1.2 on a park. |
| 02:22:10.02 | Julie Dixon | 1.6, that included all of your permit, your citation, and your media revenue. |
| 02:22:10.70 | Jill Hoffman | One point. |
| 02:22:15.88 | Jill Hoffman | And I think I heard you say that some of it, some of the, um, the reason for the difference is that because the APARC system, we actually lost money because it didn't count it or that's what I'm going to get. Okay. That's my question. The meters. |
| 02:22:27.18 | Julie Dixon | That's what I'm going to get. I wouldn't say that the meters weren't always working properly. And so, yeah, that's really where your core issue really came into play. |
| 02:22:32.64 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Okay, thank you. |
| 02:22:36.97 | Jill Hoffman | break down on the weekend. |
| 02:22:40.84 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:22:40.87 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:40.89 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:22:40.97 | Unknown | to questions. Thank you. |
| 02:22:42.19 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:22:42.20 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:42.52 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:22:42.58 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:42.96 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:43.03 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:22:43.37 | Jill Hoffman | All right, we can open up for public comment. Who would like to comment on this issue? Thank you. Anyone from the public? Okay, seeing none, we'll bring it back up here for council comment. |
| 02:22:55.25 | Unknown | I actually had a quick question that I didn't get out quickly enough and maybe Adam can answer it. But I noticed that the the pay parking in the lots two and three stop at 6 p.m. But parking lot one. |
| 02:22:57.73 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. |
| 02:23:15.72 | Unknown | it goes till 7 p.m. And I just didn't know. I mean, do we always have, have we always had it that way? Was it, was it just changed recently? It's just a little trivia question. I just had a resident ask me that. |
| 02:23:31.02 | Stacy Gregory | So the time for the parking in lot one is actually 10 o'clock. |
| 02:23:37.03 | Unknown | Oh yeah, but it, you pay up until seven in lot one. |
| 02:23:45.84 | Stacy Gregory | Lot one is paid up until 10. If you're a resident, parking is free after six. |
| 02:23:50.38 | Unknown | Oh, okay. All right. Oh, I didn't know it went up to 10. Has it always been up to 10 p.m.? Oh, okay. . Okay. |
| 02:24:01.06 | Jill Hoffman | Just clarification on that too. |
| 02:24:01.47 | Adam Politzer | Just clarification on that too. It used to actually parking lot one and three had longer hours when we went to the automatic pay gate. So it was actually 24 hours. So when we switch systems, we went to a different and more consistent hourly. based on some of the demand and the data that we had back then. The feedback that we got from our residents when we went with the original APARC program was to relax the hourly parking late at night because of the demand. So that's why parking ends at 10 o'clock. Thank you. |
| 02:24:40.97 | Jill Hoffman | OK. |
| 02:24:40.99 | Adam Politzer | Okay. |
| 02:24:41.49 | Unknown | one. Cakes. |
| 02:24:42.44 | Adam Politzer | Thank you. |
| 02:24:42.47 | Jill Hoffman | And I do. The staff report says, and it's been almost a month, the meteors are working perfectly with no complaints. Is that right? Zero? Okay. |
| 02:24:50.96 | Unknown | No complaints. |
| 02:24:52.51 | Jill Hoffman | That's quite impressive. Okay, comments? |
| 02:24:54.11 | Julie Dixon | Okay, question. |
| 02:24:55.90 | Unknown | I thought I saw a couple reports that someone stuck in the wrong credit card or something, and it got stuck in the meters or something in the case report. |
| 02:25:06.52 | Stacy Gregory | So that's... The human error aspect is gonna happen. That's... |
| 02:25:10.91 | Jill Hoffman | that's There's no way to control that, unfortunately. |
| 02:25:12.83 | Stacy Gregory | There's no way to control that, unfortunately. |
| 02:25:14.96 | Unknown | Yeah. Okay, thank you. Right. |
| 02:25:18.55 | Jill Hoffman | We're now at Council Cummins. Who would like to start? |
| 02:25:20.27 | Jill Hoffman | Would you like to start? I just want to thank you and good job. And we look forward to working with you in the future. |
| 02:25:30.21 | Unknown | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 02:25:31.44 | Unknown | Yeah, good job on the part of everybody to respond to the meters that weren't working last year and very quickly change course. So thank you. |
| 02:25:40.81 | Unknown | Yeah, a big thank you to... to... Stacy and to see staff and to all the hard work you you've done with this I mean, it's it's pretty pretty amazing The a park system the the prior system was just a problems for the get-go. I remember we had a 60-day pilot period and I wanted to bring it back up and I was stonewalled, frankly. I have the emails to prove it. They just would not come back and they would not look at it again and open up the books. I'm so happy to see this implemented now. Regarding the peak parking congestion rates, I think that the one thing to consider about When we might charge for peak parking during events or what have you, keep in mind that residents would be using those lots downtown too. And so presumably their resident cards would not be charged that peak. you know, rate because they would get that three-hour, you know, free parking. So I think that's the one caveat I have with that. So anyway, yeah, I'm happy. The other comment I would make is I heard the comment about signage for these, kind of to advertise some aspects of the parking meters, and I guess I would just suggest that perhaps touching base with HLB in that process to, you know, make sure that... The HLB is in the loop with regards to the signage downtown and the placement and design aspects and stuff. So good. Very good. Thank you very much. Good stuff. |
| 02:27:32.79 | Unknown | Yeah, good stuff. It's great to see that this has rolled out as successfully as it is. So thanks to everybody who's participated in this. Just echo the comments of my colleagues up here. And also to remind everybody, who may not appreciate this. that our parking enterprise provides you know in this year's budget 1.4 million dollars into the general fund so the parking enterprise is a very very important revenue component of our city |
| 02:28:13.63 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, thank you both Julian, Sergeant Gregory, the presentation and all the work that everyone's done on this. And it really has a different feel to it from what we had before. I love the flexibility, the peak parking, the fact that we can use it for bicycle parking and other fees, it's really great. And zero complaints in almost a month, it's fabulous. So thank you everyone. Okay. Okay, now we move on to... Item 6C. And that's information technology, strategic plan, and proposed IT expenditures. for 2015, 16 and future years. Our Interim Administrative Services Director, Brian Mora, and Technology Manager, Rhett Redlings. |
| 02:29:12.29 | Brian Moore | Thank you, Mayor and members of Council. Brian Moore, Interim Admin Services Director. And as the Mayor indicated, Rhett Redlings is here in the audience with me, the technology manager. wanted to give you an overview of the city's IT system, tell you a little bit about the third wave report, and then what we're recommending to you tonight. This is a quick overview of the IT infrastructure in Sausalito that Rhett and his staff have prepared. It shows you that there are four major sites along with the library. |
| 02:29:40.05 | Paul Anderson | Yeah. |
| 02:29:47.49 | Brian Moore | on your, enterprise-wide network. And even though Sausalito is a relatively small community, nevertheless, you have a a relatively complex IT infrastructure. A question that I received early on in my tenure here in Sausalito was the question of comparing the number of cloud or hosted systems that the city has versus the ones that are on so-called on-premise servers. And what this chart shows you is that there are 22 major departmental systems in use today at the city. Of those, 22, 16 are of the hosted cloud-based variety, which is over 70%, which is pretty impressive, and it suggests that the city is well on its way to... taking advantage of the move in the software industry from server-based software to hosted software. A quick overview of the third wave study. This is a IT assessment that was done for Sausalito under contract. All of the city departments were interviewed. The consultant worked with all of your divisions and departments, came up with a series of issues and needs throughout the city. This report was presented to the Finance Committee in July. And As you can see in the slide and in the Council report, There are over 50 recommended actions in areas of improvement. Some of the themes that the report highlights is the fact that the city's IT infrastructure is very dated and in some cases is beyond end of life, which in the world of technology means that if you call for support, you won't get it because that product is no longer in the catalog. So those are areas that have to be addressed fairly quickly. In terms of software and systems, there are a number that need to be upgraded as well as the need for new systems. There's some issues with IT governments and coordination between IT and the city departments. The consultant found that the current IT staff was understaffed to meet the current needs, much less the additional needs that are recommended or requested. but the report was rather ambitious, I would say, in terms of laying out a vision and a plan that if you implemented it, you could address all of the department's needs in a five-year period. So a very aggressive, very ambitious program. And at the end of this slide, we kind of, show you the overall summary, which is a suggestion to add two additional full-time IT positions and also to ramp up your IT major spending from roughly $225,000 a year, which is the current level, to somewhere between $300,000 to $600,000 per year. And this is a quick listing of the 21 systems that are recommended across the city in this report for either upgrading or new systems. The total cost if the city were to do this and follow through with all of these recommendations is an acquisition cost, assuming you were buying the software versus having it hosted, of over a million dollars, one-time cost cost and annual additional cost to the city budget of $228,000. And then this is a five-year look at the same report showing you that the total costs of fully implementing the third wave approach to this is well over $3 million over that five-year period. One of the things that I did when I got here and met with the city manager, Adam, and with Rhett, is to take a close look at not only your IT systems but also to look at your budget and perhaps zero in a bit more in terms of what was actually achievable. You know, I have an extensive technology background, certainly. uh... you know i appreciate the work that the third way folks did uh... and i think if the city had that level of staffing and financial resources you you could indeed achieve all of those things in five years uh... my my uh... feeling is that that's probably not a realistic expectation and that it's probably going to be the case that's also leader needs to move and a bit more measured pace may be a little slower so it may take you a little longer than that So what we're proposing is a bit more of a measured approach to this. In the current year, you have $225,000 budgeted in the operating IT budget under the category of IT capital needs. And what I'm proposing to do here with RET's assistance is to first of all focus on infrastructure needs because without your servers and switches and your network and your background systems being fully up to date, you really can't move forward with upgrading your current systems, much less adding more. And so we're talking about spending Approximately half of the budgeted funds this year for IT infrastructure upgrades and we've broken this out into two categories and the numbers our our estimates that we may fine tune these between now and when we come back to you next time in january But what we've tried to do is triage this a little bit to say, what are the IT infrastructure pieces that are out of service, out of date, you know, we're at the limit, we're going to fall apart, we need to do it immediately. We think that that's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 one-time expense. It may be a bit more. We may shift some of the Part 2 infrastructure to Part 1. And I think if the Council is agreeable to this approach, my proposal would be to come back to you at your first meeting in January to move ahead with that. The second piece of this proposal is to move ahead with one of the projects you did have in your budget and you scheduled this year, and that is, to implement an online permit system for public works and community development. The budget shows a figure of around $110,000 if such a system were to be purchased. I've been doing some research with your community development director and with RET. We've identified three vendors in particular that would seem to have solutions that would fit a city of this size. Some of them are server-based. Some of them are cloud-based. The prices vary quite a bit. So what we need to do is put together a request for proposal, do a procurement process, and take a look at matching the city's needs with what's on the market and also having a discussion about whether a hosted service makes more sense than a server-based service. And I think it's probably too early to know the answers to those questions. But that's kind of what we think 2015-16, the current year, will look like in IT. And then going forward to your next two-year budget cycle, which of course will start this summer, what we're proposing is is using a similar model in the next two years in 1617 and 1718 in 1617 we are envisioning doing most of the rest of the infrastructure work another 110,000 that should get us most of the way maybe not all the way there but pretty close and then we've highlighted two systems that are at the end of life. In fact, I recently met with with Lily, the city clerk with Rhett, your library director and with the website vendor. and uh... they made it very clear to us that uh... the plug was about to be pulled on this product and that once it was, there would be no support. And since that's driving your city website, obviously fairly high importance in terms of fixing that. The good news, I think, for the cities, that's a relatively low-cost item, $30,000. For the city side, there may be more if you continue to have the library hosted on a separate website, but probably, again, not a big-ticket item. The document management system is in a similar place, again, at end-of-life. So those are the two that, as we looked at the list, I said, I think we have to move those to the head of the class because those have to be replaced pretty much as quickly as we can. And then I'm also suggesting or proposing that during the 16-18 budget cycle that the city manager and the council consider the notion that, of, bringing on some contract IT support services. One of the things I've found over the years in working in city and county IT is that if you have permanent staff and in this city you have to that it's usually a good idea to have those folks working with your departments and getting expertise on your departmental systems and that things such as IT support and desktop support are something that could be contracted out to the private sector and so I'm suggesting that perhaps as a pilot in 1617 the city try that and see how that works That's going to be a somewhat... less expensive approach than bringing on a third employee in IT. And indeed, it may indeed buy you enough additional bandwidth, at least in the short term, to bring on not only update these two systems at end of life, but also maybe bring on some additional systems. And then in 17, 18, again, I've listed infrastructure upgrades. I think at that point it's going to be pretty minor if it isn't already been done. But I think that, again, I'd recommend get first call on the money. continue the IT support services, assuming that that is working for you, and then begin to get into the departmental systems, that list of 21 different systems that need to happen over a multi-year period. And I've sort of underneath listed some of the ones that I think may come up first. In the case of both recreation and finance, those are existing systems that probably need an update. In the case of maintenance management, that is a system that Public Works has a lot of interest in. However, it's a pretty high ticket item. uh... we brought this concept both the original third wave plan and the revised i t strategic plan to the finance committee last month on october twenty first and these are the findings that the uh... committee came up with uh... they agreed with the staff that i t infrastructure should be the top priority to address that first they uh... wanted the staff to work with community development make sure that that investment if the city is ready to make it will pay off handsomely by both having city staff and the consultants worrying in community development to be fully trained and ready for such a new system. Thank you. The third item is to review the practice of putting aside $225,000 a year to see if perhaps that needed to be bumped, particularly in the years where we encounter some of the bigger ticket departmental systems like the one for public works. And you notice in the original third wave report, they had a range each year. So one of the observations from the committee, which I think is a wise one, is the notion of not being wed to that number that it perhaps could move a little bit up and down depending on what systems were focusing on in the year at hand the fourth was to take a look at the impact of on the budget of as these systems are added, what is that going to do to the general fund and the other fund budgets. Obviously some of these systems, the annual update and hosting costs are low, but if you look at that earlier table, some of them can be high. So the committee basically said take a close look at that, in particular the higher ticket items, to see how that's going to impact the budget. And then finally, The suggestion was to bring this to the council as the IT plan evolves. And, uh, The vision would be this year, in addition to this report tonight, obviously to have the critical infrastructure come to you in January. And then. You'll probably see some of these discussions and issues again as we get into the permit software, if we're able to pick a vendor between now and the end of the budget year, but also in terms of your budget development process because obviously some of these items are fairly big ticket items staff concurs with the finance committee recommendations. We would agree with all of them. And so tonight what we're recommending is that you authorize the city staff, if you're comfortable with this approach, to... Prepare the technology purchases, the urgent ones, to come to you in January. and also to begin working on the balance of the IT infrastructure for this year. and the new permit software in terms of starting the request for proposal pot process and hopefully getting at least two if not all three of these to you between now and the end of the fiscal year in June. And then second, that you authorize the staff to develop a budget for these areas and the strategic plan going forward, initially focusing on 2016-18 for your next two-year budget cycle. and then ultimately doing a longer-range plan. I think as part of that, What I have suggested is even though there was the third wave report and even though the list of 21 was compiled with the assistance of the third wave team and your department heads and staff, it's probably good. to take another look at that both in terms of the years that those would come online and also with an eye towards the fact that I'm suggesting, and I believe red is too, that we take this at a bit more measured pace. And so that may impact what years these different things come online. And again, the key trade-off here is I think that if you move ahead with this approach is that... all of the city's needs may take longer than the five years originally planned. I think it was a bold step for the city to tell Third Wave we want to solve everything in five years, and I thought if you had that kind of money and staffing, you could in fact do that. But I, looking at your budget and your resources, I thought I'd like to kind of try to shoehorn things a little bit into the current level of your budget funding. understanding that over time if there is growth in your revenues and if this is a major council priority you could shift more resources in this area but the good news is with this more measured approach as I would as I think your finance committee referred to it last month I think you can achieve a lot and yet stay within the parameters of your current budget. So with that, Rhett and I are available. We'd be happy to answer any questions you have or certainly listen to your feedback and get your direction. |
| 02:44:52.39 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks, Brian. Questions? We'd like to start. Okay. |
| 02:44:56.73 | Unknown | I have a question. With the permit system, we talked about hosted versus server based. And, you know, not only the permit system, but other other potential strategies, would any of these result in residents paying a surcharge or having to pay something, you know, like for the, if it's a permit system, having to pay something for processing? |
| 02:45:03.41 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. |
| 02:45:13.60 | Julie Dixon | with it. |
| 02:45:25.77 | Brian Moore | I've seen some communities where they will use a surcharge to help pay for a permit system. I think the fact that we have sufficient funds in the current budget, my recommendation is to, you know, our observation, I guess I should say, is you don't have to do that, but you could. |
| 02:45:46.53 | Unknown | Well, no. Thank you. Yeah, I wouldn't want to, but it was just a – I've just learned that sometimes when we look at outsourcing or new technologies that it turns out to be a hit to residents, and that's what I was concerned about. |
| 02:45:48.97 | Brian Moore | Yeah. |
| 02:46:07.50 | Unknown | um, Brian, thank you for that report and, Rhett. I know there's a lot of work gone into this. The idea of considering some contract services next year, basically, do you see that as mainly providing, you know, like help desk and basic enterprise sort of servicing, or do you see that more as specialized work for specific deployments? |
| 02:46:24.53 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:46:24.63 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:46:24.67 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:46:50.42 | Brian Moore | It can go a couple of ways. I'll give you an example in the permit area. In talking to the community development staff, they are familiar with one particular firm that helps not only implement permit software but also can give ongoing support. And so one scenario might be to have someone like that work with community development and IT. uh... another approach which is a little more of what i was envisioning when i'm made this recommendation is that if you begin to have uh... someone in the department sort of embedded if that's the right term or become the expert or key user on a certain software program or system such as the proposed permit software and you team them up with someone in your IT department who deals more with the network and the firewall and more technical piece of it I think a couple things happen number one you can better leverage the small IT staff that you have and also create some expertise in your departments. But the other thing is I think that is a way for you to also get at the consultant's concern about the current lack of coordination in some instances between IT and the city departments. I've noticed a little bit of that myself in the short time I've been here. But my experience working in other cities and counties over the years is if you have someone in each of those two areas trained and they sort of become, I don't know, dependent on each other if you want to use that expression, it becomes very powerful. And oftentimes what you can do is the vendors will have local workshops and they will have events where you can bring your technology person in to learn about the technical side the back end the software and say your building inspector or your planner, the front end, And, um, The benefit there, again, is that they are working together from day one. and, the idea about the contract person to you know council member with these point is that if you this the pieces that are a bit more I don't know. generic run of the mill like desktop support, Then you can take your two permanent employees who have been with you for a while, and we will continue to be with you, hopefully, and invest in them. then you have a much more powerful setup because the stuff that, I don't want to say anybody can do, but, you know, many IT analysts can do, that's the piece that you contract out. And then you develop your staff. Their jobs become much more interesting and engaging, and also the departments just naturally, you know, will work with them. So that's kind of the vision of what I'm suggesting. |
| 02:49:43.52 | Unknown | Yes, and thank you for that great presentation. And I wanted to ask a question about process. I see that the recommended motion tonight is to authorize staff to prepare technology purchases to upgrade, and then the purchase of systems will come to the City Council for approval at a later date. So tonight we're going to be seeing the results of the RFP, is that it, and your recommendation before the purchase actually is made? We'll be able to review that? |
| 02:49:51.47 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:49:51.67 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:50:06.49 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. |
| 02:50:20.95 | Brian Moore | Yeah, the intent is that what we would do tonight is, because we wanted, first of all, to bring to you the third wave report, city-based. you know. retain the firm, The report came to the Finance Committee. We wanted to make sure the full council had a chance to look at it, weigh in, ask any questions. And then second, to also bring to you this measured approach, which we're now recommending to you. But the idea would be, as Council Member Pfeiffer has stated, that we would come back to you first in January with the urgent IT infrastructure, and then we would come back to you uh... later in the year with either the infrastructure phase two or hopefully if the permit software processes running you know at a quick pace we could do them together And then also we could come back to you during the 16-18 budget process. We're envisioning a couple more visits, as it were, presentations to you during the next six months. And I think, again, that's very consistent with what the committee had recommended in terms of saying these are big dollars. We need to have this come to the council a couple more times. And I think we can do this process in such a way that we can achieve the goals that they were looking to achieve. |
| 02:51:37.83 | Unknown | I had a couple more questions, but it's just because I'm kind of absorbing the third wave proposal versus what we're looking at moving forward. So I'm glad that we were able to chunk that down and you were able to kind of phase that in. So that's good. I guess my question was, too, with respect to the software, I know that with leasing software, you can purchase leases where you have the automatic upgrades that are baked in and everything. So I presume we're looking at. |
| 02:51:43.20 | Unknown | Sure. |
| 02:51:47.01 | Unknown | Right. |
| 02:51:51.53 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. THAT'S GOOD. |
| 02:52:06.53 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 02:52:11.14 | Unknown | you know, that are |
| 02:52:12.17 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:52:12.20 | Unknown | and everything. |
| 02:52:14.80 | Unknown | All the purchases that we might make will bake in the upgrades and everything, so we wouldn't have to worry about it. |
| 02:52:20.09 | Brian Moore | Great. Thank you. Yes, Council Member Pfeiffer is correct that if you use hosted services, the advantage to the agency, to the city, is that you're always on the most current version of the software. Sometimes what happens on the other side of that coin, particularly for larger cities, is that if they previously owned the software and they made specific tweaks or changes to, When you go from the server based solution to the hosted, you lose some of those custom solutions, or if you want to keep them, you have to pay extra. My guess, and certainly in talking to the departments and talking to RET, is it doesn't seem that there's much of that happening here, if any. So I don't think there's going to be a major issue if you continue down this path of most of your systems are hosted. The other thing that we do have to look at, though, is in each case, sometimes the vendors offer trade-offs where they basically say, if you buy the server software, your monthly charge is less, and if you want hosted because there's not that initial buy-in, we charge you more. A good example of that was a recent discussion I had with the town of Portola Valley, which recently went through the permit process, It actually started when I was there and then they've recently finished up. So I was curious of where they landed. And interestingly, in their process, they ended up going with a server-based solution, which surprised me a little bit at first until they said the reason we did that is we had money in the current year budget |
| 02:53:46.35 | Julie Dixon | THE FAMILY. |
| 02:53:50.79 | Brian Moore | And we're trying to reduce the annual budget going forward. And so we actually were willing to spend more and put it on site than the hosted solution. And I thought, okay, well, so there's a good example of you don't always go with hosted. So I think those are the kind of things we're gonna have to weigh |
| 02:53:59.72 | Unknown | And I thought, |
| 02:54:04.56 | Unknown | I think those are the ones that I think. |
| 02:54:05.01 | Julie Dixon | Thank you. |
| 02:54:07.12 | Brian Moore | as we do this selection and then obviously will bring the options to the council and say here's the vendors we looked at, here's the choices they gave us, here's what we're recommending, and then the council, of course, will make the ultimate decision. |
| 02:54:19.49 | Unknown | One last clarification. It looks like we're really talking about back office, right, not front office. We're not talking about the customer-facing things. It looks like we're looking at infrastructure for city staff, you know, efficiency softwares and such. Is that correct? |
| 02:54:21.33 | Brian Moore | Sure. |
| 02:54:40.10 | Brian Moore | Is that correct? Yes and no. I mean, it's going to depend on the system. The website would be a good example. one of the things that |
| 02:54:49.55 | Unknown | That's right. |
| 02:54:49.78 | Brian Moore | Right. we can get, for example, with the website, is the newer version of the software. And in the website, again, we're an end of life. We're a couple versions behind. so we need to do something quick. But the carrot, if you will, both for the current vendor and, frankly, a couple of the other vendors we may also want to take a look at, is they now have websites optimized for mobile devices like tablets and phones which we don't currently have in the city they most instances when you refresh websites these days they throw in a graphic redesign so there are things that we could pick up there and in the part using the permit is another example There's both a win, I think, on both sides of the counter. If you go with a modern permit software, most cases you're able, for example, to request your building inspection online, which means it's easier for the resident or for the developer or contractor but it's also win for the city because what happens is you don't have as many phone calls coming into city hall and then your staff has more bandwidth to deal with perhaps more complex applications similarly what happens on a permit system is oftentimes they have what they call permit status, which basically allows both the applicant and the contractor, and for that matter, even members of the general public, to see what permits are pending on a certain address of property. and they don't have to call city hall to say is my permit ready or is my plan been checked because they'll know And so those two things alone free up your staff to do more complex operations. There's also an opportunity in those programs to allow people to pay for routine permits like water heaters, HVAC, roofing, things like that. over the internet. But you still, in most cases, again, I won't prejudge what will happen here, but in most cases, you still want people to come in on the more major work or whatever. And again, from my perspective, It's both a convenience win for the resident and for the public and the contractors But it's also a win for the city staff and community development building in that it's a better use or leverage of their time because what happens is they're spending more time on complex projects and proposals, which is probably where you want the emphasis of those high-paid folks to begin with. In other words, use their expertise on the tougher assignments. Sure. |
| 02:57:07.10 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:57:11.11 | Jill Hoffman | Open up the public comment. Thank you. Do you have anybody in the public who wants to? Seeing none, we'll close public comment and bring it up here for Council discussion. Who would like to start? |
| 02:57:22.86 | Unknown | I'll start. Thanks for that report. Thank you, Brian, too, for drilling down with the third wave, you know, budget and slicing that off. I mean, no, 3 million was. not realistic, I don't think, for our town. So I appreciate that. I like I like the plan that you've laid out. I like the you know, hiring, contract, IT staffing to augment as needed and having the flexibility that that affords us. So thank you. |
| 02:57:55.93 | Unknown | Yes, thank you, Brian. Thank you, Rhett. Thank you, city staff and everyone who worked on this. Yeah, I think it's important that we keep up to date with this. I think too often cities sometimes wait until something is a crisis and then you're running around trying to cover your bases. that said I would say that what I'm keen about is that we do look at this, the customer facing, you know, the front office solutions, that the emphasis is about, you know, convenience and user friendliness that we bake into the contract, you know, user testing and user navigation testing and stuff with real audience reps, and that there's no extra cost or fee that gets passed on to residents, like, oh, you do it online and it's less, or you have this convenience and it's more. I think that when we're introducing software and we're asking people to use it and not everyone has access to that software or is user-friendly or comfortable with it, or maybe they have more complex scenarios, that i like to see an even playing field so that's my personal opinion um but uh yeah i'm really happy to see this moving forward and i know a lot of effort has gone into this and i look forward to seeing what you come forward with in january |
| 02:59:42.53 | Unknown | Yeah, thanks again for the update. Obviously, I've been tracking this through the Finance Committee when the third wave was first brought on board to get this report. It's really important because it's good to have an independent objective analysis of our sort of options. But then the important thing is that we also then go to the next step. and make recommendations that third wave proposed work for us and that's what we've done so that that's great thank you for that you know a city of our size is sometimes really difficult because you see you you first of all think well we're a very small city we don't need much but in actual fact a small city often has as much complexity in terms of, you know, what it needs to do as a large city. So there's a real scalability issue here, which everybody struggles with, right, who has anything to do with IT departments. So I think we've got a great, good start here focusing on what's really urgent, which is our basic infrastructure, but also have mapped out over time those things that can enhance the department's efficiencies. So I'm very pleased with the way this has come out, actually. |
| 03:01:19.90 | Jill Hoffman | I agree and thank you both. Thanks, Rhett and Brian. I mean, the third wave report and was was comprehensive, but I think you brought it down to reality. I like the your measured approach to it and in the prioritize prioritizing and making it fit with with our budget and our needs, though, because it's important to balance both what we have, what we want to spend and what we really need right now. And I think you're you're on the right track. So I would entertain a motion. Thank you. We would like to. |
| 03:01:52.35 | Unknown | So I would move to authorize city staff to prepare technology purchases to upgrade the IT infrastructure and new permit system for presentation to council during fiscal year 2015-16. and I'm assuming I can do this in one motion and to authorize, move to authorize city staff to develop a budget for IT infrastructure updates, contract IT staffing, and departmental systems for consideration during fiscal year 26, fiscal years 2016 to 18 operating budget process. |
| 03:02:28.23 | Jill Hoffman | Second. Let's try this all in favor. Aye. That passes five zero. Thank you both. Thank you, Brett. Thank you, Brian. |
| 03:02:31.57 | Unknown | Bye. |
| 03:02:37.22 | Jill Hoffman | We move on item 7a city manager information for council. |
| 03:02:45.66 | Adam Politzer | Thank you, Mr. Mayor and City Council members. I think the last two presentations that you received, well, actually all three of them, are good illustrations of just the very detailed work that goes on here on a day-to-day basis and the expertise that we have assisting the city in terms of the consultants and then the expertise that our staff I bring to the table and then just the passion that I think all involved When we look at some of the teams with the bike and ped committee, and South Dakota Plus and the Ambassadors, the many residents that have asked to participate and help in terms of how to move these items forward and then just the pride that you saw with the parking staff, especially with Sergeant Stacy Gregory. and our consultant with Julie Dixon and the rest of the team. I mean, they're very excited to come to work and tackle these big issues. And just as our interim administrative services director stated, to focus the limited manpower that we have, the full-time employees we have, on the big problems and on the complicated issues is something that they also enjoy working on. And as we work in these teams, with the hand-in-hand with the community, I think we're bringing forward a lot of favorable results. So I just again want to give a shout out to the staff here and and to Councilmember with these comment, you know, We're a small city, but we're a full service city. You know, the residents here expect full service from their staff. and I think that we do a pretty good job of keeping our heads above the water and moving the ball forward. With that, I just have a couple items of interest for you folks. The main item was last Thursday's RBRA workshop that we had at the Spinnaker. Vice Mayor Hoffman and Council Member Weiner may want to add to this or share their insight to it. But I asked the county who had collected the sign in sheets, how many people had actually signed in, and not everyone signed in that came, but we had 257 people sign in that attended the Spinnaker, hosted workshop 185 of those that signed in said that they were salsa to residents and then 154 of those folks wanted more information as the discussion continues so You know anyone that was there. I think that CM CM has been is Broadcasting it or has rebroadcast it. I'm not sure if they have an on-demand feature, but if they do, I'm sure that you can find that meeting and listen to it through our local cable provider and cable producer, our local television producer. But basically every chair in the house was taken, and we had two to three deep on the west wall of the spinnaker and then people sitting on the floor all around. So it was it was incredibly well attended and exactly what we were hoping for. Good presentation of information went into a little bit more detail in some of the areas and then had an opportunity for. residents to ask questions, community members to make comments, and then we've asked people to continue to ask those questions and make comments through sending us emails. So I'm interested to find out at the end of the month if we received many emails questions or comments. from our community. And then the city council will pick this issue back up in the new year. The subcommittee of Vice Mayor Hoffman and Herb Weiner and myself had a debrief meeting with them this past Monday, yesterday. Seems like a week ago. But we had a debrief meeting yesterday, and we thought it was premature to bring this item back before RBRA has its meeting on December 10th. and thought that we needed more feedback from our community. So I encourage all the council members, to talk to the residents. and ask if they attended the event, if they Follow this discussion. because when it comes back to Council, it'll be important that again, we also have a full house of interested parties and that we continue moving forward on looking at solutions. If you didn't see this morning's paper, there was an editorial article in the IJ that gives one opinion. And so it'll be making sure that this this conversation this dialogue remains vibrant as we go into the new year it seems that there's no lack of big projects for us to work on you know bikes parking I think are going to be dwarfed when we get into the discussion about the RV array it's so complex and it involves multiple communities and significant dollars just in terms of the planning process so you know feel free to follow up with either myself or vice mayor Hoffman or councilmember Weiner to get our feedback feel free to come meet with me to get a bigger picture of the discussion happy to meet with council members or anyone in the public for that matter we want to hear from from them Just a friendly reminder that MCC MC is tomorrow night in Larkspur at the American Legion. of honor and there looks like the Golden Gate National Recreation uh, service will be there to talk about um tell mount tamapias so a new uh new topic not muir woods or fort baker um or some of the other areas here next to the golden gate bridge so we'll see what's in store to us tomorrow night the marine managers we hold our annual retreat uh in december and we'll be doing that on december 17th uh if there are topics or subjects that you're interested in us talking about if there's things that are on your mind that this is a good opportunity it's an all-day retreat and we look at at common objectives and opportunities to work together as a collective team versus individual cities so if there are items that are interest to you that we talk about, please send me an email or leave me a voice message with those suggestions. I'd be happy to take those forward. And then lastly here, I want you to know, and we may try to put it on the December 1st agenda, although the December 1st agenda is already getting crowded. Um, But our fire chief and police chief and public works director, as you've been seeing in the current, have been working to communicate to our community on all the winter storm preparation, And the more you listen to the news and the future forecasts, We have a huge storm of our lifetime that is brewing. And I want you to know that these folks not only are working together very well to look at our weak areas here in our own community, but they're also working with the rest of the region. both from the Southern Marin, to Central Marin, to all of Marin. And then all of the various utility providers, specifically PG&E, But the other folks as well. to make sure that we're well coordinated and we may not have an event here, you know, knock on wood. But if our neighbors in Mill Valley do, we're collectively working together to be able to move resources to deal with those issues. But ultimately, the majority of the property in town is private. And so we are really, You're stressing to our residents to take precautions have their trees pruned Look at their retaining walls that may be 30 years old and you know, this is a good opportunity to at least Give them some support if not time to replace them Make sure that you know where everything is in terms of phone numbers candles Batteries all the various Needs that you'll have in case the power goes out or were shut down like the one year when a tree came down and took out two poles on Spencer Avenue. Councilmember Weiner and I went up there And as we're looking at it, ABC News showed up and wanted us to tell them what happened. But that power pole, those two power poles that went out shut down electricity for the residents in that neighborhood for four days. And PG&E was working as hard as they could to get it restored but you know those are those are realities with a tree-lined community like we are in an aging infrastructure so the chiefs and our public works director are meeting with me in in the very near future to go over in detail what they've done in preparation and i actually think it would be valuable for the community to hear it and so you know i'll work with the mayor and the vice mayor to see if we can squeeze that in and maybe give an abbreviated report and then direct them on where they can get the additional details if people are interested. But with just the alerts that were being shared that the El Nino storm season is going to be massive, I want to make sure our residents know that we're working very hard behind the scenes, and we've been working hard behind the scenes, and we've been working hard behind the scenes for months, and we hope that our residents are also taking those precautions. The last one and it was mentioned not with any humor but it but we did then Paul Anderson when he talked about the raffle or the auction item to Paris was still available. Obviously the events of last week are on the news 24-7 about the terrorist acts in Paris. And then the reports that this was bigger than just Paris, that there was concerns that it was going to hit London and Rome and other key cities. and landmarks and obviously the Golden Gate Bridge is always one of those. the council and the community to be assured when these acts happen, Homeland Security and our regional team here in the Bay Area specifically related to the Golden Gate Bridge are in contact and working together in our Police Department and Fire Department are active actively a part of those calls and in conference calls and in discussions as Council Member Weiner mentioned earlier. You know, the the French school in the city was vandalized. We don't know if it has any relationship with terrorism. or just an opportunity for a hate group to go and vandalize the French school But with that knowledge, understanding that information, we've increased our patrol during the evening and early morning hours, basically from 11 o'clock at night to 6 in the morning, making sure that the entire MLK campus gets a little bit more attention, just in case these folks that look at this as an opportunity to vandalize don't look at Sausalito as a target. But I just wanted to assure you that just because it's on the news and we're all watching, it doesn't mean that there's not a lot of activity underneath the layers of what staff does here, and particularly our police and fire department. Happy to answer any questions of counsel. That's my report. |
| 03:15:09.10 | Jill Hoffman | The President. Questions? Public comment? No public comments, seeing none. Okay. Thank you. So we'll move on to item 7B, council member committee reports. Any committee reports? Okay. All right, moving on to item 7C appointment to the trees and view committee. We have one candidate and I nominate for the trees and views committee, Paula Baron. Any other nominations? Okay, any public comment on that nomination? Seeing none, and I think the appropriate procedure is we do a roll call on this. |
| 03:15:55.86 | Unknown | Councilmember Weiner. |
| 03:15:56.76 | Jill Hoffman | Yes. |
| 03:15:58.08 | Unknown | Councilmember Pfeiffer? Yes. Councilmember Withey? Yes. Vice Mayor Hoffman? Yes. |
| 03:16:00.73 | Jill Hoffman | Yes. |
| 03:16:02.83 | Unknown | Yes. |
| 03:16:03.37 | Unknown | Mayor Theodorus. |
| 03:16:04.20 | Jill Hoffman | Yes, passes 5-0 and Paul Baron is appointed to the Trees and View Committee. Future agenda items. Any council questions? questions on that that's listed we have the proposed agenda for December 1st listed any other questions on that or any other future agenda items |
| 03:16:22.86 | Unknown | I have four very quickly. One I've mentioned before, permit enforcement at Bridgeway Marine. I know that Tom, I think you created a subcommittee or working group with you and and |
| 03:16:43.20 | Unknown | Amen. |
| 03:16:43.60 | Unknown | Okay. All right. I wasn't sure. But anyway, irrespective, I don't know actually if the subcommittee is even focused on that aspect of Bridgeway Marine. But I think that we need that on the agenda. This has been going on for years. And... |
| 03:16:46.88 | Unknown | But anyway, No. |
| 03:17:00.34 | Jill Hoffman | And sorry to interrupt you, but it's true. We are not focused on enforcement. We are for negotiations of potential changes. Very good. And the city manager is handling the enforcement. |
| 03:17:05.59 | Unknown | Okay, good. Oh, great. Very good. So I would like to, I think as a future agenda item, I think it rises to the level of the council because of the impact on the environment and the impact on the residents of Sausalito who live at that live aboard community. You know, very unsafe conditions, the pictures that they've shown me. So that's the first agenda item that I'd like to see. The second one is crosswalk pavement lights downtown. This was something that we heard a resident tonight raise. It's just a key, key safety issue to have downtown. I commute through Petaluma every day, and those crosswalks light right up, and it it's such a wonderful safety feature and it would also help with bikes coming up and blowing through crosswalks the lights would light up and the bikes would have to stop because they know that there are children or elderly people walking through the crosswalks so that's number. The third is the homeless emergency shelter working group that Tommy created. I think I'd like to have closure around that, understand what's going on. That was, I think, six months ago. And the fourth one is a topic I've raised before. We have a Muir Woods shuttle stop in Sausalito. This just popped up like last year or so. And, you know, that's making us a transit, a tourist transit hub. That is precisely what residents don't want to see. I saw a line of people lining up on a sidewalk in Sausalito. Those numbers are going to grow. So I don't, I just think that's a conversation we have to have up here. lining up on a sidewalk in Sausalito, those numbers are going to grow. So I just think that's a conversation we have to have up here. I think that they should have consulted us before they put that stop in. |
| 03:19:08.83 | Jill Hoffman | Just to be clear, they've been there for eight years, I believe. |
| 03:19:14.05 | Unknown | I actually checked this out, and there are two different lines, but actually having a Muir Woods shuttle, that is new. |
| 03:19:23.63 | Jill Hoffman | No, I don't think so. Anyway, we'll bring it to you again. |
| 03:19:24.59 | Unknown | Anyway, we'll bring it to you, Jim. I researched that, actually. |
| 03:19:26.78 | Jill Hoffman | I know. I researched that, actually. OK, we'll talk about that. feature agenda items. Okay. Okay. Moving on, other reports of significance. I will make one report of significance. We did have the art festival report, but we have art in our city hall chambers, and that's the result of the Sausalito Village art opening that was held November 8th, which was quite a successful art opening. They had, this room was filled as well as the library. I think, I don't have the exact numbers, but I believe we had 15 artists here, and I think we had about probably another 12 authors and music and it was quite an event. That was the second annual and I'd recommend it for anyone else. And I'm not sure, And do you know how long we're going to have it in here, the art Okay. November 29th. Okay. Up until November. So people can stop in. Okay, any other reports of significance? Okay, and we'll adjourn and we'll close in solidarity and support. for our allies and friends in Paris. So we'll do that tonight. Okay. We're adjourned. |
Adam Krivach — In Favor: Complimented the city for a sophisticated and responsive operation, suggested shifting focus to visitor satisfaction by reducing crowded conditions through attractions like public art, and offered to collaborate with Marta Carvalho to enhance the visitor experience. ▶ 📄