| Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00:00.03 | Jill Hoffman | To the Tuesday, November 29th regular city council meeting for the city of Sausalito. Debbie, could you please take the roll? |
| 00:00:12.23 | City Clerk | Councilmember Weiner. Present. Councilmember Theodorus. Present. Councilmember Pfeiffer is absent. |
| 00:00:13.35 | Unknown | THE CITY IS GOING TO BE Present. |
| 00:00:18.75 | City Clerk | Vice Mayor Withey? Here. Mayor Hoffman? |
| 00:00:20.15 | Jill Hoffman | here. |
| 00:00:21.63 | City Clerk | Thank you. |
| 00:00:21.65 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:00:21.66 | City Clerk | Thank you. |
| 00:00:21.70 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:00:21.77 | City Clerk | THE FAMILY IS NOT. |
| 00:00:26.73 | Jill Hoffman | Mike Kelly, could you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, please? |
| 00:00:33.75 | Mike Kelly | Amen. of the United States of America. and to the Republic for which it stands, One nation. Thank you. Thank you. for a lot of people. |
| 00:00:48.29 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Okay, so we do not have any closed session announcements. Do we have any public comment on closed session items? See no one. Do I have a motion for approval of the agenda? |
| 00:01:00.98 | Ray Withey | So moved. Second. |
| 00:01:03.14 | Jill Hoffman | All in favor? |
| 00:01:03.80 | Ray Withey | Hi. |
| 00:01:04.14 | Jill Hoffman | Aye. Motion passes. We have a special presentation this evening. The first presentation is going to be for the Art Festival and Paul Anderson. I'm sorry to say Mike Langford will not be with us this evening. And so, Paul, if you would like to come forward and give us the report, that would be appreciated. |
| 00:01:26.04 | Mike Kelly | Thank you. |
| 00:01:26.16 | Unknown | It's a pleasure to come forward and address Volunteers. All four of you have put in your time It's lovely to see you. I look to my left and I see more volunteers, and I look in the crowd and I even see more volunteers. And that's what makes this event happen. It's been 64 years, 1952, down approximately where the Bank of America is now. the first Oscillator Art Festival was held. By 1957, believe it or not, in that same location, there were 25,000 people coming from San Francisco This year we had 27,246 come and pay their money. And for the first time in the history, I think, of the show, children under the age of 12 were free. We avoided and got rid of all children's tickets this year. And just to make up for it, because there were 733, and we made $5 a piece on them, We did something that was unusual. We had something called the VIP ticket for one day. Now, if you're a VIP, you have to pay money for it, right? So we only charged $100 for that one-day ticket, but we gave everybody two drinks, right? And for some reason, there were 220 people that wanted to be volunteers. And if you take 100 times 220, you know it was a good bet. It was a fun thing to do. The festival this year, 260 artists, representing, I believe it was 39 states. We had three foreign artists that were there this year. 50% of the people that we surveyed that actually came back in that were, we send out 260 surveys to all the artists. Most artists do not read. Anything we send them. That happens to a lot of people, but also artists. And out of those, we got 63 responses. And of the 63, 50% of them told us they made over $10,000, which is a wonderful thing. Last year, an independent group Did a survey of the shows, the top shows in the country, and they came back to the Sausalito art worth of $9,991 per artist, which brings a few dollars into the town and also brings a lot of people to Sausalito to spend money, buy art, and enjoy our beautiful waterfront. as I said, the attendance was... really important this year to us because we've been trying to raise the bar, make sure that we have the family entertainment, which is perfect. The children's area was fantastic this year. Chris Gallagher from the Bay Model runs that, along with Kim Christie, Greg Christie's wife, who takes care of all the refuge and all of our recycling efforts. I can't tell you the number of times I would walk back there and see four people headed by, not only then, Mr. Ray, the man of all men when it comes to garbage. It was wonderful. Once again, thank you very much. It was great. Okay. Herb's going to have a comment somewhere along the line. The thing we do with Herb, though, is we keep him downtown where the buses are running. Thank you. We know he knows how to do that. And it works. Our sponsor tickets this year, and our sponsors are people that step up and either sponsor a table at the gala, which is a fundraiser, and I'll tell you more about that later, or they take and actually buy a booth. This year we had Hershey Chocolates with the Scharfenberger Chocolates, who stepped up with a $5,000 sponsorship and gave away chocolates and also then promoted throughout the town at stores like our sponsor, Molly Stones. So sponsors are very important to us. volunteers. which is a biggie for all of us. 2,087 individual volunteers. Out of a town of 7,000, I think we have to all be proud. It's a wonderful thing that this town has that volunteer effort. I'm not sure if I'm not sure if The breakdown in terms of who shows up Um, It's been almost consistent now for the last five years that I've really checked it. out of a group of a hundred. 67 of them are adults up to age 62, and the other third is over 62. one-third two-thirds And once again this year it was almost dead right on with those numbers 54% where the adult ticket up to 62 and 24 percent were under so it just keeps moving back and forth and then we have at that point in time our VIPs which was great and We always have a good time. It was also a year where I Online sales are something that's new, that's coming on heavier and heavier. 15% of all the tickets we sold to the festival this year were online. So people would walk up and walk right in the gate with their ticket in hand. I think we'll see that happen more in the future. And it's something to think about. Online is the way to go when it comes to selling tickets and also for most things. I know it's getting close to tax time and online is a nice thing to do there too. Thank you. Yeah. Food booths are run by Saucero non-profits. They're the only people that can run them. They pay a normal fee of $1,000 for the booth, and they take home all the dollars. Every year I have a kind of a, a fun game. The deal is everybody gets in the room, and we're all talking about how great it was, how much fun we had, and how hard it was. And then we do this. Was it equal? Was it up? Or was it down? And this year, it was amazing around the room This is the only thing I saw. Sales were up in every single booth. And I know Jerry's back here someplace for the Lions. 49. I'm not telling any numbers either, but if you think about a football team that's in the area, Take that number and put a dollar sign in front of it. That's a lot of hot dogs and a lot of turkey legs. It works, okay? They had a great time. Beverage sales. One of the things that we love in Sausalito is fine beverages. We're kind of noted for that. Champagne alone, $73,000 worth of champagne. One booth by the Varda mural, and I think probably Varda had a lot to do with this, did $38,000 in one booth in three days. Just amazing. That was a Rotary champagne. The wine, once again, our number one Chardonnay was Rombauer Chardonnay out of Napa at $15 a glass. Twenty cases were gone by the middle of the second day. We wish we had more. Margaritas, always a favorite of everyone. After we moved it up to Don Julio, upgraded to $10, people bought 20% more. This year it was $43,000 worth of margaritas. Beer. When you have a beer and you say, well, you want a Bud? Nah, I don't want a Bud. I want a Stella, but I'll pay two bucks more for it. You sell $92,000 worth of beer in three days. We didn't have any trouble. I don't believe the chief had any problems at all with the group. It was wonderful. Everybody was under control. And the part that really is hard to look at, but it's real, and if we had a soda tax, we'd be in trouble in this town. Soda was $22,000. Sugar is just not something that people are drinking in Marin County, and especially Sausalito, which is great. Bicycles, we have lots of bicycles downtown. We had a lot of bicycles at the art festival also. We have the Marin County Bicycle Coalition. They parked over 1,000 bicycles in the three days. So it's a nice thing to have that happen. The Rotary Club once again parked cars, over 6,000 cars and raised over $70,000 for projects that they'll be doing in the town. And then we have our own programs that we do throughout the year that the Art Festival funds. This year the silent auction, which is put together with local contributions by business people. Pojo was a big one. Spinning care of most of the restaurants in town some of the businesses downtown we had 171 separate items donated of that there were approximately 120 of them by artists which was artwork and We raised $33,461, and there were 884 bids made this year on those items. So people were having a good time. when it came to enjoying the Cylon auction. We actually today even sold one more piece. We had a gentleman call us from Salinas. And he said, I just can't get that one piece out of my mind. It was by a photographer by the name of John Gravelis, who lives down in Santa Cruz. He said, I'd really like to have that shot of the sunrise or sunset, I can't remember which, over the Golden Gate Bridge. So we called John, made a deal. Made a few extra bucks for the slide at auction this afternoon. So people remember things they get to see, and sometimes they get a chance to have it. The foundation over the last 10 years has awarded over $250,000 to students because of the silent auction. This year we had Princeton, Marymount, Manhattan, Chapman, Dominican, Parsons School of Design, UC Burskley this last year. And the ones for this year will be going to Chapman, Pepperdine, and the California Academy of Art. This is one of the things the festival produces every year. It's a great program. The gala this year was a supper club, for those of you that attended. It had over a thousand patrons. The proceeds of the gala go to a program that we established four years ago called Artists Teaching Art. Artists Teaching Art takes artists from the festival and puts them into public and private schools in Marin County to teach along with the teacher core subjects but putting art into a core subject. This year we completed 124 classes, students 2,298 students, 22 artists, teachers. Classroom teachers were 64 that we worked with. There were a total number of 16 schools and five school districts throughout Marin County that the Sausalito Art Festival actually took and put art into the classroom, which we're very proud of. Our community grants, $150,000 in community grants in the last eight year. And our program is closing on the first for any nonprofit in town that has a project that involves art. As you know, we call them the Leonard Caprillion community grants and they've been going on now for many years. This last year we gave to the Bay Area Discovery Museum, The Call of the Sea, the Friends of the Public Library, the Performing Arts of Marin, and Willow Creek Academy. As always, we look forward to the art festival, but next year, it used to be the age you retired. 65 is coming up, and I know that everyone has Labor Day weekend on their calendar, and everyone in the audience I know is going to be volunteering, and we'll make sure that there's a great party afterwards, and I appreciate the opportunity. be here and I appreciate all that you do for this House of York festival thank you very much |
| 00:13:32.06 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:13:37.61 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Next on the agenda, we have our proclamation celebrating the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Marin ship. So I have the proclamation here. I'm going to read it first. Mike Langford, again, is not here this evening. Okay, here we go. Proclamation of the... Sausalito City Council celebrating the 75th anniversary of the creation of a marinship. Whereas from the earliest days of Sausalito, the city was an important transportation node between the people and products of Northern California and the growing metropolis of San Francisco, where the network of trails, rails, and roads connected with ferry boats to transverse the San Francisco Bay. And whereas the 1937 opening of the Golden Gate Bridge led to the temporary end of the ferryboat era and railroad commuter lines in Marin County. And by 1941, as automobile traffic flowed over the Waldo Grade to the west, Sausalito seemed destined to become a sleepy little community. village by the sea. And whereas the United States and Sausalito was awakened from its slumber on December 7, 1941, and over the next couple of months, decisions were made and actions were taken to utilize the country's resources to mobilize for war on a global scale. And whereas the Bechtel Corporation identified a mostly undeveloped area north of Sausalito where they believed an efficient, modern shipyard could be constructed quickly, leading to the creation of the Marin Ship Corporation acquiring the salt marsh and dairy properties and the residential neighborhood known as Pine Hill and the Northwestern Pacific Railroad moved its headquarters and shops to Tiburon and whereas in March of 1942 the Pine Hill area was dramatically leveled with blasts which shook the town and the rock and soil was used to fill in the marsh and the process of driving 30,000 redwood pilings down to bedrock began. And whereas by June 27, 1942, enough utilities, cranes and infrastructure were in place to allow the first keel to be laid, which became the Liberty ship freighter, the William A. Richardson. And whereas on September 28, 1942, the Richardson was launched, just the first of 93 large support vessels created for the United States Navy, and at its peak of construction, Marin Ship was operating around the clock, employing thousands of workers who moved to the Bay Area from all over the United States. And Marin Ship served as a test tube and a model for integration of workers with different backgrounds and sexes. And Marineship with the people of Sausalito, Marin County, and community workers contributed mightily to the American war effort. And whereas after the war ended in 1945, many of the former shipyard buildings were converted to peacetime uses, both governmental and civilian. and these uses formed an integral part of the colorful quilt that Sausalito has become. Now, therefore, to honor those whose foresight and commitment brought us marineship, to honor marineship workers and their families for their home front service during World War II, and to honor those who served on the ships built in marineship, we proclaim that the year of 2017 shall be recognized in Sausalito as Marineship 75 and request that the Sausalito Historical Society lend their services to help coordinate appropriate celebrations. And as such, we commend the men and women who made in our making marineship a source of pride to us all. and encourage the people of Sausalito in the Bay Area to celebrate the achievements and sacrifices associated with the aforementioned actions directing the departments of the City of Sausalito to lend such assistance and encouragement to the celebration as prudent management of the City resources will allow. A witness thereof, I, Jill, James Hoffman, Mayor of Sausalito, have here to set my hand and caused the seal of Sausalito to be affixed on this 29th day of November 2016. |
| 00:17:24.05 | Jill Hoffman | And if, yeah, Jerry Taylor would like to approach. |
| 00:17:29.81 | Unknown | One of the guys. The Press. |
| 00:17:48.30 | Unknown | I'm sorry. Thank you. |
| 00:17:53.97 | Unknown | Yes. Thank you. one of our moments in time, I'm going to pass them out This is a story about how the point was for medical levels, what happened to the families before and after, and we are finding several things but most of all what we want to do is get together with the other organizations in town we'll be announcing that sending those people we're having an internal planning session tomorrow night with good names and organizations businesses that want to get involved and we look forward to not the same effort that the city put in the centennial but the same type of model of getting everybody involved and doing things and you'll be hearing more about this. You're going to be involved. So let me pass these to the council, and then I'll get out of the way, and thank you for this. And we look forward, by the way, here's a key person on our team. There's back there Jim Meyer. This was all his idea. He decided to grease off and give it to me. Your library, and that was very involved in this. He'll be scheduling items around here. And Paul Anderson said he would stay for a minute, but he must be part of it. There he is, because the art festival's on board with this celebration, and so is Chris Gallagher. We've got the key players, and you're the next key player. |
| 00:18:51.21 | Bjorn Gripenberg | you |
| 00:18:59.48 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:18:59.60 | Mary Wagner | Thank you. |
| 00:18:59.90 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:19:00.39 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Oh yeah. |
| 00:19:10.48 | Unknown | Thank you. Thanks, everybody. |
| 00:19:24.96 | Unknown | Thank you. And thank you for your assistance. I'm glad to have you back. |
| 00:19:32.12 | Unknown | Mm-hmm. |
| 00:19:39.26 | Jill Hoffman | Mm-hmm. You guys have to remind me. |
| 00:19:44.00 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:19:49.92 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, before we move on to the next item, I have a brief announcement to make before we move on to Section 2. As one of my mayor announcements, there have been questions by city council members, particularly Council Member Pfeiffer, and residents regarding the status of a project called the South Gateway Project. Unfortunately, we were not able to get it on the agenda for tonight, so I'm going to make a brief announcement now on the status of the project and that a full presentation will be presented by Public Works, likely on the first meeting in January, which I believe is going to be January 10, 2017. I would like to reassure residents that there's no immediate threat of this project moving forward at any time soon, if at all. The South project first came before the City Council on November 23rd, 2010 when the Council authorized staff to submit an application for federal non-motorized transportation pilot project grant to further develop plans for a project intended to make the roadway from the South City limits on Alexander South Street and 2nd Street Safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists. On March 22nd, 2011, the council approved staff's proposal to submit a grant application for funding. This proposal was successful, and the Transportation Authority of Marin, or TAM, through Parisi Transportation Consulting, developed a plan that was presented to the Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee on February 17, 2015, And again with updates on May 18, 2016. The Pedestrian Bicycle Advisory Committee recommended that the City Council direct staff to seek grant funding for the project. The matter came before the Sausalito City Council on April 19, 2016 under item 4A of that agenda. The item was pulled and continued to a date uncertain. The project has no funding and the staff has not been directed to seek further funding for any project elements. Were the city to acquire funding to continue to move the project forward, the project would be subject to compliance with the city's process for review of public enhancement projects, including city council approval and planning commission review, as well as compliance with CEQA and any other requirements associated with the funding sources. So that ends my brief announcement here. This will likely come on the agenda, like I said, with a presentation by Public Works on January 10th. For those of you who are interested, you can tune in at that time for a full status update on the South Gateway Project. Now, moving on to item two. On our agenda this evening, public communications. This is a time for 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. However, the Council may refer matters not on the agenda to City staff or direct that the subject be agendized for a future meeting. If you would like to speak during this time, please make sure you fill out a speaker's card. Do I have any public communications at this time for matters not on the agenda? |
| 00:22:56.91 | Patricia Pigman | Yeah. |
| 00:23:15.02 | Monica Finnegan | My name is Monica Finnegan. I've been in Sausalito for about 20 years and have had the privilege of living next door to Alice May. Thanks to Tom and his recommendation, we're here tonight to honor and recognize one of Sausalito's grand doms who passed away November 13th. Alice was a 50 year resident of Sausalito and had a huge, huge impact in everything that makes Sausalito wonderful today. She had a life really very well lived. She was born in South Dakota in 1926. That made her 90 years old when she passed away. she could still cut a rug, drink a martini, and have a good laugh at our house. She moved to California in the 40s. She graduated from UC Berkeley in business and finance. I was reminded by her brother that she was accepted at Stanford, but at the time her husband insisted she go to UC Berkeley. So I'm not quite sure which team she rooted for all the time. She was married to Tom May, and I'm told he was her best husband. They were married for 30 years or thereabouts. He died 10 years ago. In her business career, she was very much ahead of her time. If you watch Mad Men, you could probably see an example of her work at Dean Witter. She was one of the first women officers at Dean Witter, very, very unusual in that time in the 60s. She managed a portfolio of investments of more than $3 billion in the 60s. Unheard of if you can relive that kind of time in the 60s. She was the first woman member of the San Francisco Security Traders and the founder of the Financial Women's Association. This was one smart woman. |
| 00:25:10.44 | Monica Finnegan | Dedicated to Sausalito was her favorite pastime. She was president of Sausalito Women's Club, founder of the Sausalito Women's Preservation Society, which is preserving the Julia Morgan building, founder of the Sausalito Foundation, founder of the Sausalito Salvage Store, which has since closed. She's a board member, a longstanding board member for the Marin Symphony, a board member on Sausalito Village with Trisha, a board member of Marin Headlands Art Center, volunteers, Sausalito Arts Festival, and many, many, many more things. She had her thumb on so much of the activity of Sausalito. Everywhere you go, you'll see a touch of Alice May. She was a delightful woman. She came to our house for Christmas Eve. Uh-oh, here I go. for Christmas Eve dinner. Perfect. Sorry. |
| 00:26:16.04 | Monica Finnegan | We're going to have a tough Christmas Eve. with. Please all come to her celebration of life. Friday, December 2nd. 11 a.m., everybody's welcome. We wanna rock the house and really celebrate her life. I promise you we'll have some good champagne at the end. THE END OF THE END OF THE Thank you very much. Thank you. |
| 00:26:45.81 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Do we have any other public communications for matters not on the agenda? Yes, ma'am. |
| 00:26:57.13 | Helene Wester Swanson | I really don't think I need this. I talk rather loud. I have a strong human voice. First of all, my name is Helene Wester Swanson. I'm a former Sausalito resident. I currently have my primary address in Charleston, Massachusetts, and I'm here speaking on behalf of an organization called Katrina's Dream, which I founded. Katrina's Dream is is organization founded in memory of my late mother-in-law the reverend katrina martha van alzheimer swanson she is one of the philadelphia 11 the philadelphia 11 the first poor women to be ordained epistical priests the reason why i'm here today is for three separate items placed on the agenda at your convenience they're not emergencies but one is the concept of sanctuary city and having had discussions with mayor bowels based on the agenda at your convenience. They're not emergencies. But one is the concept of sanctuary city and having had discussions with Mayor Bowser out of D.C. We are asking across country for cities in these troubling times to look at the concept of becoming sanctuary cities. Then working with Benjamin Cardin, Senator Benjamin Cardin's office in Washington, D.C. We're moving forward on a resolution to be introduced in the next session called ratification for CDAW. CDAW is a United Nations issue. The United States is one of six countries that have yet to ratify CDAW. CDAW is a convention for the elimination of discrimination against women. I am a member of the Civil Society at the United Nations working on ESOC status, so this is one of the programs we're trying to roll out. And third, last but not least, to ask to put on the agenda, when it's convenient for all of you, is that we reexamine the public hygiene facilities that are being installed at Dunphy Park, that as having traveled the world extensively and looking at other societies and cultures and how they are measured in terms of success, Access to proper hygiene is important to this community because diseases do spread easily. When you have a community that doesn't have access to take showers, I think that's really harmful to everyone involved, as well as tourists who come to the area. On bicycles, they might want to clean up. I've seen children get dirty at the park, not able to clean up properly. You can't just limit it to a bathroom. That's it. Those three items. Thank you very much. |
| 00:29:15.08 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Any other public comment for matters not on the agenda? See no one approaching. Okay, moving on to item three. Action minutes of the previous meeting. Do I have a move to approve? Yeah. |
| 00:29:34.32 | Unknown | So moved. |
| 00:29:37.09 | Jill Hoffman | Second. |
| 00:29:37.90 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:29:37.91 | Ray Withey | Thank you. |
| 00:29:38.03 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:29:38.08 | Ray Withey | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 00:29:38.77 | Jill Hoffman | All in favor? Aye. |
| 00:29:39.45 | Unknown | I don't know. |
| 00:29:39.80 | Ray Withey | Yeah. |
| 00:29:40.78 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, moving on to the consent calendar, item four on our agenda. 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 below. There 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 request an item be pulled, you must have completed a speaker card and turned it to the city clerk. Items will only be removed from the consent calendar by a vote of the council. Items removed from the consent calendar will be discussed later on the agenda when public comment will be heard on any item that was removed from the consent calendar. Do I have any public comment on consent calendar items? see no one Do I have a motion to approve the consent calendar items? |
| 00:30:40.35 | Unknown | SO MOVED. |
| 00:30:42.92 | Jill Hoffman | Is there a second? Second. |
| 00:30:43.81 | Unknown | Second. |
| 00:30:44.62 | Jill Hoffman | I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT I WANT |
| 00:30:45.35 | Unknown | Bye. |
| 00:30:46.61 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, consent calendar. is approved. Moving on to public hearing items. There are some public hearing items, but they're going to follow the business items. Our public hearing item addresses a penalty for violations of Sausalio Municipal Code for rental of a dwelling unit. that we're going to be hearing that at approximately 915. And it's moved down to item 5A. So moving on to item six on our agenda. is Age-Friendly Sausalito Community Action Plan, and this is going to be introduced by Tricia Smith. |
| 00:31:49.32 | Unknown | I'm missing Mike, our point man, Mike. Thank you. |
| 00:31:56.58 | Unknown | I can start by at least saying we are really proud to be here tonight. represented by the age-friendly Sausalito Task Force representatives that are here I am humbled by the incredible amount of work that this group of people have done over the last three and a half years. An incredible, incredible group. Yeah. It's on the desktop. Would it be faster on the dust tunnel? |
| 00:32:28.18 | Unknown | And I think if you close this out, it was on the right there. |
| 00:32:46.53 | Mike Kelly | Thank you. |
| 00:32:46.54 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:32:47.40 | Mike Kelly | Thank you. |
| 00:32:48.16 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:32:51.74 | Unknown | We're aware of your time and we appreciate all of your time. And you know I can talk fast. You've seen me several times over the last couple of years. really do value and appreciate. So we're going to move through this community action plan, it's very exciting. But I first have to acknowledge all of the people that are behind this plan. And we actually had two iterations of a task force. When we came before you in 2013, after Betsy Stroman stood in the audience as a Sausalito Village president at that time, and said, hey, we need to do this age-friendly thing, and the city council at that time agreed, Well, the first task force that came together was appointed by you. And it was Sybil Boutillier, Pat Christopherson, Anne Herlin, Judy Leachman, Stella Schau, myself, and Betsy Stroman. And as we moved through the different projects that we impart to the to a new task force emerged, and that was Hilaire Bell, Sybil, Charles Kaufman, Stella, and myself. And I want to make sure to note that you see overlap over that three-and-a-half-year period. I have to say Sybil Boutillier and Stella Schell stuck with me as chair for three-and-a-half years, and I truly appreciate all of the hours of blood, sweat, and tears that came into that. Special thanks to Mike Langford. He really was our rock through all of this. Incredibly helpful, always looked, saw things out of the box, made us think differently, and a great support to us as a liaison. So why an age-friendly Sausalito plan? What does it mean? Well, back in 2007, you had the grand jury report, and it was pretty frightening what was going on with aging in this entire world, but they were concentrating on Marin County. End. If you think about it, the statistics are actually really frightening for Sausalito. We are already where they project other places to be in 2030. So one third of our population is already 60 and older. And in 2014, they again focused on aging in Marin County. Still a problem, the county, you know, We're still not where we need to be. We were looking at what's the vision we want for Sausalito, for all of us to age in Sausalito. A city that works for everyone, of every age and every ability. So it really dovetails nicely with the fact that the general plan is being prepared. So what we're asking is that you really look at every different facet of the general plan through this age-friendly lens. So, So we followed. in this project, we followed the guidelines that are already set up by the World Health Organization, WHO. So they have a global network of age-friendly communities and cities. during this path. We actually became the first city of Marin and the third in the state to get this designation of age-friendly. And I'm happy to recognize Patti Stoliere, who's here from Corte Madera, because Corte Madera came in second year. behind us and then Fairfax. So really Marin County is now focusing on age-friendly Marin, and we have monthly meetings based on that. So what we're going to go through tonight is the different steps. I'm going to do step one, which is the baseline assessment. Sybil Boutelier is going to take you through step two, and then Charles Kaufman is going to follow up with the step three. the yet to be done. So in step one, it's really the baseline assessment. I want to point out, if you look at the picture of the mailing that's happening there, of the survey that took place, the woman in red is Alice May, because she was a board member on Sausalito Village, and she was always a great proponent of age friendly and willing to come to any of our volunteer events. So kudos to her. So we, I'm gonna do it year by year. So in 2013, the beginning. In June. Betsy came before you, you prioritized age friendly. By July, we had become a city task force. And we got right to work. We developed the survey. 25 questions, we got a resounding 50% response rate, which is unheard of, we had a mountain of data. 25 questions and then 3,500 additional comments. And so that brought us to a new group. This is where there really was a turn in the task force because the people who had gotten involved to do things like the survey and the baseline assessment are very different than the people who want to delve into the data analysis. So the first thing that happened in 2014, we did get accepted into the Age-Friendly Network. And that again was a unanimous vote and a letter from our then mayor, Ray Withey, that went in. Uh, In March, we started digging into the data analysis. This meant every week, every Monday, for a minimum of two hours, we met for a year to go through, plow through the data. In June, we started also complementing that with stakeholder interviews. So we interviewed every director of every program and in the city, as well as service organizations and others that would help benefit this plan. you By August, you there were priorities that were emerging. There were things that the city was interested in. Transportation was, of course, at the top. People were missing Sally's shuttle. That kind of came at the same time as us finding out about a gap grant through Marin Transit. And so again, we came before you, and thank you again. We got a unanimous vote to go ahead and apply for this money. And by applying and being awarded that money, it meant we also were gonna start cars, call a ride for Sausalito Seniors. So in 2015, You know, instead of doing the data analysis and moving right into writing the plan, we kind of took a little bit of a detour because we had so much momentum going. And we got the money for cars, and we started to develop that through 2015 with the first rides going out in May. And it's been a year and a half now and great success. But we also were focusing on the other top priorities that came in. So in January, we started with a series of workshops on alternative housing options. We did a series especially of home sharing. At this point, I want to be clear about our definition of home sharing. We are talking about long-term extended home sharing between a provider who has a home, generally a senior, a home or an apartment who wants to have a seeker, somebody to live with them long term for companionship and security and a relationship building. And sometimes that means that there's a service exchange. So we worked with Episcopal Senior Communities in Marin County who runs the home sharing program. We also did co-housing. We're going to do some more presentations in January 2017. We just want to look at everything that's an alternative that people are interested in or talking about and make sure that it's out there in the community. So again, May was cars. And then in October, we did something interesting in 2015. Kenneth Henry, a building inspector, And Michael Sheets, who's in the audience, who's one of our volunteers and an architect, got together and put a great presentation together that was attended, well attended, and it really sparked something because people Thank you. We're talking about home modifications, permits, what needs a permit, what doesn't. And you're gonna see in 2017, a lot is coming. One of our task force members has worked a lot with the city on this and the community. More will be unveiled in the future about that. So I'm going to move right along and turn this over to Sybil Boutelier, who's going to take you through the creation of the Community Action Plan. Thank you so much for your time. |
| 00:40:56.26 | Unknown | Good evening, Mayor Hoffman. members of the city council. Mm. |
| 00:41:04.96 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 00:41:14.65 | Unknown | Okay, so the findings from the community survey and the common themes that emerged from the stakeholder meetings, And the interviews with the officials and the stakeholders established the baseline and gave us guidance for the development of this community action plan. |
| 00:41:36.38 | Unknown | After comprehensive review and analysis of all the information and guidance that we received, we began to draft the community action plan and to kick start the process. We applied and were awarded small grants to bring in a short term consultant who helped us with the initial stages of organizing our thoughts and materials. And then we knuckled down to finalize and put it into writing. this plan that we bring to you tonight. And it's organized around the World Health Organization's eight domains of livability. as they apply to our community here in South Salido. So here are some of the highlights of this community plan. So, Sal Salido is blessed with great beauty and is a perfect place for walking about to enjoy and view the ambiance. But crowded sidewalks, busy bike and auto traffic. present barriers for some. So we will join with the city to mitigate any negative impact and improve accessibility for all. As we develop and redesign our parks, we have a grand opportunity to include specific features that address the need for older adults to have appropriate outdoor exercise and features that are appropriate just for them. and can be enjoyed in a family setting. In regards to transportation, you're very familiar with the cars program. Early on it was clear that we needed to help older adults to get around town. As there's no public transportation in the residential hills and valleys and limited parking downtown. And of course, as folks age, many no longer drive. So our successful cars volunteer driver program, which provides up to four free rides per day for residents age 60 and over. or those who have mobility challenges was established. And cars will continue to grow to meet demands and provide a convenient and crucial way for our older adults to participate in city events. Shop at local merchants, eat out in our restaurants, and visit with their friends. We continue to monitor and participate in county wide transportation planning for older adults and we advocate for Sausalito at every opportunity. We also can serve as part of our Car service as an information source about other transportation services for seniors like the Catch a Ride program and others that the county operates. |
| 00:44:19.23 | Unknown | Sorry. Thank you. That was transportation. And for housing, 76% of older South Salitans stated in the survey that they wish to stay in their homes as they age. And even more want to stay in the community. So we've teamed up with Southern Marin Fire, local service groups, Rotary and Lions to provide helping hands to older adults. Who have problems accomplishing light maintenance projects like turning over a mattress or replacing light bulbs, smoke alarms and such. And are working with city staff to explore ways. to make age friendly home modifications easier and less costly for older adults to achieve. We'll continue to participate. And includes South Salido and county projects like the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, which has the same goal and can provide considerable free and low cost services for older residents here in South Salido and throughout the county. We've held workshops and alternative housing options as Tricia was talking about, like the long term home sharing of carefully matched roommates to enable residents to be able to remain in their homes. |
| 00:45:41.61 | Unknown | So a well proven key to successful aging is social engagement and avoiding the isolation that can lead to depression and poor health. The city's been wonderfully responsive in working to expand and support social activities for older adults. Going forward, we plan to work with the business and merchant community to disseminate best practices and tips for age friendly commercial environments. And we encourage youth organizations and local schools to develop new ways for generations to interact and learn the benefits each has to offer the other. |
| 00:46:23.07 | Unknown | Fully a third of our residents are age 60 and older. Many have retired from careers or child rearing and have much to offer the community. Ageism aside, Older adults are reliable, full of life experience, talent, knowledge, and hard earned wisdom. We need to help make this terrific resource more visible and useful to the community. Encouraging those who wish to volunteer to participate more fully in city projects and sit on committees and commissions. And for those who are looking to bring in extra income, we'll engage in activities aimed at helping open more opportunities through public awareness and information exchange with local and nearby businesses. |
| 00:47:11.62 | Unknown | The city's done a wonderful job increasing and improving communication conduits with Sal Salido magazine, Sal Salido Currents online, and through the library and other resources. And we have MarinScope and Radio South Salido, but more can be done to reach older adults. One priority is to improve and enhance the age-friendly South Salido website, And make it more visible to the community. Today's Marin Independent Journal had an article stating elders who stay connected to family in the world through technology devices. Are less lonely and more physically well and fit. Many seniors still do not have such access at home or need assistance to fully utilize it. Such programs as the library has provided are a great help And more can be done with specialized workshops that assist seniors to become more comfortable with new technologies. and will continue to reach out to reach seniors who do not use this technology and to make sure that they're well informed and kept in the loop of activities and things that they can participate in in the city. |
| 00:48:30.31 | Unknown | So older adults include many vulnerable persons as we all know and may need extra assistance in an emergency. More can be done to increase preventive measures and emergency preparedness. The task force has reached out to and has worked with the police department to increase participation in the RUOK registry. Discuss with Southern Marin Fire new ways to promote fire emergency planning. participation in neighborhood assistance programs. Initial workshops have been co-sponsored with South Toledo Village on preventing falls. which is the number one cause of hospitalization among older South Salidans. And more such programs and outreach efforts are included in the plan. |
| 00:49:19.05 | Unknown | Ahem. So as the plan was developed, opportunities came up to implement some of the features that address the needs expressed by our residents and stakeholders in the assessment process. We took these opportunities and took the action to manifest these early programs and efforts as proof of the pudding and commitment to our community and to this age friendly South Salido effort. And Charles will complete the presentation, thank you. |
| 00:49:54.89 | Charles Kaufman | Good evening. So you've heard the inception, the data gathering, the analysis, and the early implementation of a number of the elements of the plan. What remains now is the next phase, which will be more of an ongoing and kind of... perseverance component of the program. So this is going to now require a change in the composition of the task force. And that will mean that the city and the task force will have to work together to determine both the best structures for age-friendly, as well to carry out the implementation, the monitoring, and the evaluation of the program as it's carried forth. And it will also probably require looking at some methods by which the city can become more supportive and continue to make sure this program remains vital and sustained. |
| 00:51:01.70 | Charles Kaufman | So we approached this entire effort with the vision that we started with, which was that we wanted a city that recognized the value of all its residents, and plans for the full range and variety of needs for every age and phase of life. So age friendly is concentrated in this particular endeavor on older citizens in Sausalito. But the program really has usefulness for all citizens within the community. And that's because we believe that this vision will support and sustain a beautiful and livable city in which everyone, regardless of age or ability, can participate contribute and enjoy the life of Sausalito. So with this we'd like to Now bring this plan to your attention so that we would like you to approve it. and then we can carry on with the remaining requirements for implementing it. Thank you very much for your support. |
| 00:52:03.37 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Do we have any city council questions on this presentation? Questions of any of the people that were Presenting. Do you guys have any questions? Oh, comments. Any questions? No? Okay. Do we have any public comment on this agenda item before we move on to, yes, go ahead. It would be nice if people that wanted to do public comment could fill out a card, a public comment card. If you fill out later and hand it in, that's great. Thank you. |
| 00:52:35.81 | Patty Stoliere | You're welcome. Patty Stollier, co-chair of Age Friendly Corte Madera. And I just want to publicly thank all the people from Age Friendly Sausalito for being the vanguard of this in Marin County. It's been so extraordinary to see. And now some of the jurisdictions have picked it up. As Tricia said, we followed. And then Fairfax and now all the Nevado and San Rafael, everybody's picking it up. And the county itself is going forward with plans for developing an age-friendly program. So I just am so, so indebted to Tricia and all of her folks for setting this gold standard of what it could be to develop an age-friendly program. And I never heard of the concept, but I happened to come here for a library program, and they said, hey, we're sending out these surveys, and we're making the town age-friendly. And I went, wow, if Sausalito can do that, Quartamaterra can do that. So you guys were my inspiration, and I'm very, very grateful. |
| 00:52:36.80 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:53:38.70 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, any other public comment on this item? |
| 00:53:43.51 | Grant Colfax | Hi, good evening, City Council. I'm Grant Colfax. I'm a resident of Marin and also director of Health and Human Services for Marin County. And I just want to really, again, reinforce the importance of this work. It's very hard work to do. It was done very well, as I think you can see from the presentation. And Sausalito is really one of the leaders in the county in terms of addressing our aging population. Health and Human Services has worked closely with the partners in this regard, and we also work closely with the Aging Committee, the Commission on Aging, excuse me, that is a county-wide organization that's also really looking to this group of stakeholders and leaders to figure out how do we address the broader issue of aging in Marin, and this is really a huge step forward. I just want to really express my strong support, both as Director of Health and Human Services and as a resident of Sausalito and as a member of the aging community. Thank you. |
| 00:54:34.71 | Jill Hoffman | THANK YOU. Any other public comment on this item? Thank you. you so then I'll bring it up here for city council discussion. I have, I might, I'm going to start off the discussion, because I have, and I may have, I may perhaps need some input from the people that put together the report because I had a couple questions about it, about some items that are in the report. That may be my bad. I had. My first issue was, you know, let me first say, before I start off on the questions I had, was I think this is a fantastic, fantastic program. And like 90%, 95% of the report, I think it's great, let's forward it on. But I had a couple questions specifically about the upward, on page seven, in this paragraph, the last paragraph, where you're talking about the upwards of 300 boats may be anchored in Sausalito waters with 40% of these boats inhabited. I don't want to get close to or even go near counting boats anchored out illegally in Richardson Bay and whether or not that has anything to do with a report going up to the World Health Organization on aging. I would request and suggest that we delete that line. from the report, because I don't see that it lends much to the report and it may create some issues. Sure, it's no problem. And then the second thing, Second issue I had was under Strategy number two. and this is page 17 of 114. promote development of additional affordable housing options. I'm all for that. I'm all for one, two and three, which one is promote existing home sharing. Number two is partner with community groups to offer housing related workshops that address co-housing and group housing, et cetera. Three advocate and promote age friendly policies and municipal code, et cetera? Yes. All for that. So four and five though are my The ones that give me pause. And these, I think we're getting too close into planning, and we're getting too close to our housing element that we've finally got together and was approved last year. So number four, advocate additional senior housing options, e.g. rotary type senior housing apartments or supported housing. Scattered site housing for older adults. I'm not against that, but I'm not sure that as a policy matter, that we should be including that in this type of report to the World War Health Organization and then number five promote and encourage creation next phase living options for older adults within the community such as residential care facilities for elderly and assisted living modes so again I'm not against those I just think that those are big policy issues that are more appropriately addressed with planning commission And especially when you use language like, advocate additional senior housing options or promote and encourage creation. I think that that gets too close to a prior comment on something that would more appropriately be brought on an individual basis through the planning commission, through the normal planning process. Those are the two issues, or the three issues that I have. Pause. And I'm happy to get input from my fellow council members. Would you like to comment on any of those? I'm sorry, I probably should have. |
| 00:58:14.14 | Ray Withey | just one of the things that we should we should note here is that we're accepting this plan and there's a lot of things that in the implementation stage we would have to talk about it have to go through planning commission all of our kinds of things I think you know this is a task force this is their report to us and we're accepting it because we could go through a lot of different things and others could have other opinions but I think and they talk about promotion and that kind of thing. So I'd be a little careful about trying to be picky, because we could all take a look at it. But we're not in the implementation stage. And some of these things, and promote and encourage additional senior housing, I don't know that that's controversial. We can get to the implementation part of it. So we have to be a little careful. Because if we accept this, then we're looking like we have |
| 00:58:14.17 | Jill Hoffman | I guess one of the |
| 00:58:57.00 | Unknown | and it's a great place. |
| 00:59:05.82 | Ray Withey | We're accepting their report is basically what I'm saying. |
| 00:59:08.86 | Jill Hoffman | The staff recommendation says, accept and approve the document be forwarded to the World Health Organization. So that's a policy, that's an action by the City Council approving this and forwarding. So what I'm saying is these things you know, give me pause and I would prefer that they be deleted if we're going to approve and forward something to the World Health Organization. I mean, it's not that I'm against these things. With regard to a two square mile town, Are we advocating additional senior housing at the expense of some other type of housing. And I think that's a very dangerous area to veer into. And my apologies, I should have probably sat down with you if I had read this before, an hour before our meeting tonight, that I would have brought that to your attention. But like I said, I'm happy to get input from it. |
| 01:00:07.23 | Unknown | I'm unclear what we can do at this point if you want to what you would have the task force to do at this point. I can't make a decision on my own about it. Right. |
| 01:00:15.94 | Jill Hoffman | Let me ask half. |
| 01:00:19.62 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Let me ask you this. Is there any, Time deadline are we on? |
| 01:00:22.49 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:00:22.50 | Jill Hoffman | Like does this have to be forwarded to the World Health No, December 31st. Okay. |
| 01:00:25.42 | Unknown | you |
| 01:00:26.96 | Jill Hoffman | So what we might want to do is in light of my comment and maybe other city council members' comments, continue this to another, and in that intervening time, we can have discussions about these issues and maybe continue this on to one of the meetings in January. I'm just throwing that out as an option. But like I said, I want to have input from my fellow council members. Any comments? |
| 01:01:01.70 | Unknown | Let me say a couple of, sorry, I keep kicking the microphone underneath the table by mistake, sorry. Let me just say a couple of general things, and then perhaps, Jill, we could talk about your specific concerns. I mean, to me, what we have here is a, Really well done. strategic report, I think we all are in agreement with that. If you want a model of laying out the issues putting programs in place and then indicating how to implement along with measures for success, it doesn't come much better than this in terms of its structure and its organization. So, you know, it's reflective of just the enormously fantastic work that you guys have done over the last, you know, four years. And we've been a witness to this. This started, there wasn't an age-friendly task force when I was elected to the city council in early 2013. It didn't exist and now it does and you are really the talk of the county, if not the region. we have the opportunity on frequent basis to meet the city council members from all the other jurisdictions. We meet with all the mayors and council members of every city in Marin monthly, you know, or we try to. And I can guarantee you that from any of the jurisdictions that there's always somebody who's making a comment about our pioneering role in our age-friendly task force and what we've accomplished. So I appreciate the comments from Court Madeira who've observed that. I mean, I get it all the time. I get comments all the time about how we're really leading the way. And that's just, you know, you guys have done that. So thanks. I think the most important thing that came across to me was that this is input from a group that are saying, think of all these issues when you start working on the general plan. You know, you use the term, the lens through which you look at it. You can, you know, the thread through which you weave, you know, whatever imagery you want to use, you know. and I think there's a lot of input like that we've received over the years that are all going to be looked at and examined, and if, what, this group has done is provided a blueprint for the things that we need to think about when we're going through the general plan. And so isn't that, in a sense, Madam Mayor, the way in which this is resolved because, you know, The only way, and I'm gonna have the buzzer go off in a couple of seconds, the only way in which There we go. Okay. May I? You know, the way in which, I would have your concern if I felt that, um, Things that are written down in there could sort of hurt us in as we sort of move towards and put in our policies and programs together for the general plan. But I don't see that. You know, we're not, if you like, by accepting this, changing our policies and our housing elements. So, you know, we're just getting input for the things we should be thinking about as we discuss them in the next coming... you know, years as we work on the general plan. So I don't quite share the concern that you have. |
| 01:05:15.71 | Ray Withey | the signature. I think it was a fantastic presentation in the work and I think we are supportive of so much of it. If you have a few questions, maybe we can wordsmith a few of these. For example, the one you're looking at, advocate additional senior housing, consider advocating or consider additional housing. Maybe for the ones that you have, because it would be a great thing after all. |
| 01:05:37.47 | Unknown | We like the word explore too. |
| 01:05:40.28 | Ray Withey | All right. But the point is, we've come this far, and your points are well taken, but if we can do this, and of course they will all be flushed out, as Council Member Withey said, or Vice Mayor Withey said, when we do this. So do you want to propose a few words, Smiths, and we'll go with that? |
| 01:05:56.73 | Jill Hoffman | Sure. Yeah, no, I like that. Explore instead of, on four, instead of advocate, just put explore additional housing. And then on five, explore, instead of promote and encourage, explore creation in the next phase. That's fine. |
| 01:06:10.03 | Unknown | And the reason that those are in there is in the survey, there was a significant amount of people who said they would love to be able to remain in Sausalito if indeed there were those types of communities available to them. And we wanted to be able to speak for the community that did complete the survey. |
| 01:06:25.62 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, that's fine. And then just delete that one line about the floating, about the bay, the 300 boats. |
| 01:06:31.73 | Unknown | We have 300 votes. |
| 01:06:33.58 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. Yeah, and then so from the comma on page 7 from upward, just delete from upward to inhabited. I think that fixes it. Yeah, and that's a period. So that's it, and then I'm fine. It's spectacular work, spectacular effort, I think. Really. |
| 01:06:53.01 | Unknown | Really. Incredible group of people, I have to say. Thank you. They deserve an awful- |
| 01:06:57.83 | Ray Withey | And it's spectacular that the city council has some minimal, you have done a great job. I have to say, and my comment, this is, besides being the leader in aging and all the wonderful things, this was the group, a wonderful combination of the volunteers, our staff, and the city council working together at every stage. The group brought it to the council as needed. You've done a wonderful job. The report is fantastic. As you can see from others in the county coming to congratulate us. So it's a wonderful job for everybody. |
| 01:07:28.09 | Unknown | It's a wonderful job for everybody. In the first place saying yes to this. And when we said, hey, let's do the pedestrian flags, Adam's like, yeah, let's get on. Hey, let's get the bench over for the whistle stopping cars. At the handicapped parking over here, there's no bench for the people to sit. brought it to Adam and right away it was done. It's a very responsive, City Council and City staff, and we truly appreciate it. It's a great working relationship. There's not a lot of towns where You can get so much done in such a short amount of time and that really is. an incredible relationship. |
| 01:08:01.79 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:08:02.43 | Unknown | THE FAMILY IS TAKING A |
| 01:08:02.67 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:08:02.70 | Unknown | You didn't tell me. |
| 01:08:03.38 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:08:03.48 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:08:03.63 | Jill Hoffman | Did I get a comment, Herb? |
| 01:08:04.71 | Unknown | Well, you were going at it so much. |
| 01:08:05.38 | Jill Hoffman | I'm going at it so much. |
| 01:08:08.24 | Unknown | Well, I think you, Betsy, Trish, and your group have really done a great job. I know how difficult it is to get volunteers to drive people around. And because I had been doing that for a few years before the group came along. |
| 01:08:26.31 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:08:28.74 | Unknown | So I think you've done a great job. I really do. And I think we've set an example of how we can make sure that our seniors, and I'm in that position, category. how we can really stay positive and really be able to help our community and do things that really just because of our age doesn't mean that our brains are shrinking. And we're able to really do things by thinking rather than physically doing it. So once again, thank you very, very much. And someday I might be calling you for a ride. |
| 01:09:17.07 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well done. And yeah, so do we need to vote on that? Yeah? No, yeah. Okay, motion? |
| 01:09:21.15 | Unknown | Yeah, there's a motion. |
| 01:09:22.77 | Jill Hoffman | Motion? I'll make the motion. How about I move that we approve the |
| 01:09:23.45 | Unknown | I'm like, How about this? |
| 01:09:27.28 | Jill Hoffman | accept and approve the report and forward on to the World Health Organization with the edits that we discussed. |
| 01:09:35.38 | Ray Withey | Second. |
| 01:09:36.05 | Jill Hoffman | All in favor? Aye. Motion passes. Very good. Thank you. Well done. |
| 01:09:36.74 | Ray Withey | Hi. |
| 01:09:43.09 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Okay, moving on in our agenda. We're item, oops, there we go. We're up to item. 6B bicycle wrap-up from Sausalito Plus. Very exciting. |
| 01:10:05.69 | Jill Hoffman | and that's going to be by our chief. |
| 01:10:43.03 | Unknown | Good evening, Mayor and Vice Mayor, members of City Council. I It's a pleasure tonight to bring the Saucelito Plus I'm really here just to introduce Tom Riley. AND HE'S GOING TO present the information to you. Tom is the chairperson of Sausalito Plus. But tonight also from Sausalito Plus is Patricia Pigman as the treasurer for that group. I have. Both of those people also serve, of course, on your pedestrian bicycle advisory committee. I wanted to add in advance, just to stall any questions, what tonight is not is not a end of season financial report. So that will come to you sometime probably after the first of the year. So without any further ado, I give you Tom Riley. |
| 01:11:40.15 | Tom Riley | Thank you, Chief. Good evening, Mayor. Good evening, Council members. Thank you for this opportunity. Just to put some context, the past 10 to 15 years, as we were all very painfully aware, The number of visitors to our town has been steadily increasing, whether by boat, by bus, and most painfully by bicycles. And it was roughly three years ago that you formed the Pedestrian Bicycle Advisory Committee. Thank you, Council Member Theodoros, for being our liaison attending every meeting. Chief Rohrbacher has been in every meeting Director Jonathan Goldman of Public Works has been there every meeting. We've had great support. We made great progress in addressing no riding of bicycles on sidewalks, making it illegal to park bikes on sidewalks, improving parking locations throughout the years. But it was about a year and a half ago when we made a recommendation to put in place the Saucydo Ambassador Program. And that's what I'd like to give you an update on our second year in operation. Before I talk about the Ambassador program, I do want to talk about Sausalito Plus. What we do to operate the program on behalf of the city is create a non-profit. called Sausalito Plus. Sausalito Plus is created to operate the Ambassador Program on behalf of the city. I am the chairman. Patricia Prigman is our treasurer. We will soon be appointing Jim Henry, who is a retired Price Waterhouse consultant, to our board to provide good financial oversight as well. and And then I'd like to point out that Deb Fotch is our executive director of the program. She has really operated and put the whole program together. The Ambassador Program, just by numbers, this year we had 40 people working on the Ambassador Program. 36 of those were ambassadors themselves, as you see in the photo here. You probably recognize the folks that wear the yellow vest. They're not just ambassadors for bicycles. They greet all of our tourists. They provide lots of great insight and advice. They're very welcomed. We trade them all through a program to be ambassadors for the city, and of course, address the congestion issues we have. with bicycles. There are three managers who Train them. deal with our employee matters, do our recruiting and hiring, make sure that we have the right people on staff and at the right stations, that they have water and food, and of course we have our executive director. These employees are many of our returning college students. We have some high school students that will work in the program, our retirees, many who are probably addressed by the prior presentation, season workers, and we have a handful of volunteers. So we're also very proud of local jobs that we've created for many of our people that look for nice seasonal work. Give you a little visual. Ambassadors work at five stations. Starting when you enter our town through the south on Alexander Avenue, Station 1 is right there at the border, and it's that largest picture. And this is the first experience that visitors will have to the ambassadors. They'll meet someone. We tend to welcome them to Sausalito. We encourage them to slow down. Because you come to Station 2, that's the very dangerous turn we're all familiar with, onto South Street. We like to encourage them to take that sidewalk and walk their bikes. or get single file and write slowly around the curve, reducing a lot of safety accidents. Section three in that picture in the upper right is along Bridgeway as you're approaching Princess. And this is really where we're making sure the bicycles stay off the sidewalks to reduce the congestions. We don't want bikes parked there. You notice along Bridgeway, historically, there's always bikes parked, people taking photos. We keep them moving, and we want to direct them to a centralized parking location. which is at station 4. and Station 5. With your support during the bike seasons, we'll close Tracy Way. I believe we can fit 700 to 900 bicycles. I don't know if I don't have the exact number, but a large number of bicycles there. We have a valet program where we charge $3 to park your bike in the Tracy Way. This is a cashless program, wonderful thinking of the city of how to operate this cashless. People bring their bikes into the corral, To exit, they go to a meter, they pay $3, and it prints a ticket, and allows us to let them leave with their bike, and the revenues go into the city. So that gives you a sense of how we operate it. And near 4 and 5, of course, is where the ferry onboarding occurs. And we actually do a handoff there to the ferry companies who handle the queuing onto the ferries. Here are some stats I find interesting for the March through October season. It's roughly seven and a half months that we operated the program. At station one, There is an error in this chart. It was updated, but this is a prior presentation. I'll correct it verbally. At Station One, we actually count the number of tourist bikes coming into town. So we're not counting all bikes. We're counting the tourists, the rental bikes that are coming into town, and we keep that count. We only count from about 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., so we don't capture every single bike that's coming in. It's just when we're staffed. The number of bikes we counted, not the number of bikes we parked, the number of bikes we counted over this period of time was 282,445 rental bikes coming into town. Of those bikes, 38% of them we captured into the downtown parking in Tracy Way, the valley parking. That's roughly 107,000 bicycles that we were to capture. Now, the good news is that's 107,000 bicycles, that we're not parked on our sidewalks, we're not parked in front of our merchants, causing congestion or what have you. We did in September and October get that percentage of bikes to increase to 42.5%. And one of our goals in this program is to continue to get more of the bicycles into that corral. Because the bikes that aren't coming in the corral are either going directly to the ferry and they're going to free parking, which would be ideal. which is further up in town. or they're illegally parked here. You know some other stats, you look at the bell curve. July and August are obviously the busiest months. July approached nearly 60,000 bikes coming into town. Our peak day was July 30th with 2,700 bikes. And you can see on average, we have 1,200 bikes a day. What I find very interesting is if we compare last year to this year. So this is our second year only of collecting these stats. And with each year, greater insight into what's happening. First off, if you look at those curves, they're near identical. So we're now starting to understand when the traffic occurs. We're actually starting to see patterns by weekends and the holidays and what have you. So we can be more predictive of staffing and how to ramp up with bikes as they come in. what you see is constant growth. The growth year over year was 16% in bikes that we counted coming in. When we talk to the bike rental companies, they will say they're growing 10% to 12% year over year. we actually have stats that say they're growing 16%, at least in the years that we have been tracking here. That's sizable growth. When you start projecting 15%, 16% growth in years going forward, We really need to be smart about how we manage the congestion of these bicycles. We did increase from 34% to 38% of the bikes. Of course, they went up to 42%. We owe great gratitude to Chief Rohrabacher and his police. We believe that a lot of that increase is the next line. In June of this year, we actually started an enforcement of the bike not parking regulation. And so we would impound bikes. And impounding bikes is you put a lock on them when they're illegally parked on the sidewalk. When the owner comes back, you send them to a meter, They have to put their credit card in and pay $25 and get a receipt to have that. Bike unlocked. That happened 517 times. Our goal is not to do that a thousand times, make it revenue generation. Our goal is to make it a deterrent. And that deterrent drives bicycles into the lots. And we think also that's why we saw our increases later in the season go up to 42% of the bikes coming in. And as you can see, our valet parking revenue went from $150,000 to $255,000. this year. |
| 01:20:11.58 | Tom Riley | So here are some highlights. First off, tremendous collaboration with Chief Froerbacher's sponsorship and working with law enforcement. Um, He's been a great liaison. to not only our organization and with the ambassadors and making sure that we're operating the ambassador program within the right safety guidelines within the city, but also been a great liaison to the ferry district and the rental companies. And so this year, we made a very good outreach at the beginning of the season to collaborate with them, to educate them on the program, to get them to support it. And they made... Incremental improvements, we'd like them to make more improvements, and I'll share that in the next slide of areas we can work on better with them. But we were pleased with the increased number of ferries that the ferry district sent, especially in the busy months. So they monitor and when we had a lot of people in town, they would send over more ferries to get the bikes out of town quicker Um, They handled the queuing. We think there's areas in the area of improving queuing, but they did take on the queuing. Another highlight is we're very, I was very pleased to hear from the chief of police that this season, The police department received zero complaints from merchants, from residents, from automobile drivers about the bicyclists in town. Zero complaints. I think that's correct. Right? Right? Um... And so that also has some efficiencies for the organization. The police are not spending time coming down and dealing with bikes stacked in front of a restaurant. They are hopefully addressing more serious issues. So we're pleased with that. The reduced congestion, also, we believe. We don't have strong stats. But it appears that we've had a lot less bicycle accidents, much more improved safety when you have better organization. And we've received great, great feedback from merchants in the community, even visitors into town who I've heard many times are just pleased to be greeted by someone in a yellow vest with a smile, welcome them, and answering questions. We look forward to next season. We think going into our third season, we have learned a lot. But there are actually four areas where we want to improve things. And I left one item off here, but I'll touch on that. First off, we need to have tighter alignment with the bike rental companies. There are many of them, but there are a few major ones. We think it's first off important that they encourage and have motivation to direct their customers into our corral. Today, they have tour guides that will bring in 10, 15, or 20 riders, and they tend not to bring them to our corral. They'll direct them elsewhere and often, probably for their own benefit. So we're going to work with them to get more bites into the crowd. Secondly, we want them to increase their financial contribution to this program. We're staffing this. We're putting a lot of investment into this. Their contribution this past year was to staff the queuing area onto the ferry. We would like them to help cover cost of the value program. And we believe we have established a good working relationship. We have more work to do in that area. There's areas we can have more efficiency. This is in valet parking, queuing, and the kiosk are all in kind of the same area, and they're operated with different staffs. So we'd like to find ways to make it more efficient across those three areas and provide a more consistent experience for visitors. And then finally, we believe we can work more closely with the Chamber of Commerce. In the fourth area, And we noticed it this year. We shut down in the October timeframe, the operations, but the bikes don't shut down when we shut down the ambassador program. There are several weekends when there's nice weather that we anticipate the bikes will increase coming. And so we like to explore ways, if we can figure out how to self-fund next year, when we anticipate peak times during holidays and good weather, if we could find ways to put a skeleton crew and get some of that congestion off the sidewalks. Because we already hear from merchants on some of these busy weekends when the ambassador's not around They wish they would have that. So with that, I just thank you for your support. Thank everyone who's been very actively supporting the Ambassador Program. We think it's a huge success. We think it has a great impact. It doesn't necessarily get rid of the bikes, but it does keep them organized. Any questions? |
| 01:24:52.16 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Yeah, any questions for Tom from City Council? |
| 01:24:57.23 | Ray Withey | just a while. The question are we is the chief going to give a presentation as well or just here to support so we're okay. And so I do have the question. So you started the conversation off. This is not a wrap up, so we're not getting the financial part of it. And that'll be, when will we get that? |
| 01:25:13.58 | Tom Riley | I think Adam will be pulling that together, correct? You'll have to come to the meeting. Thank you. |
| 01:25:18.49 | Ray Withey | you know, |
| 01:25:18.88 | Tom Riley | Thank you. |
| 01:25:19.03 | Adam Politzer | out there. |
| 01:25:19.05 | Tom Riley | Yeah. |
| 01:25:19.06 | Ray Withey | out there. |
| 01:25:19.67 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Sometime in January maybe |
| 01:25:23.57 | Adam Politzer | Yeah, you know, the chief and I have started the review of the financials, and so most likely we would come to the finance committee first and then come to the council, so probably in January. |
| 01:25:34.87 | Ray Withey | Okay. So I'm, Thank you. |
| 01:25:38.54 | Unknown | Yeah, sure. |
| 01:25:38.98 | Ray Withey | So I'm going to go break the rules since I'm not going to be here for that. We understand that you'll probably fall short and be in the red somewhat this year. And the question I have for you, because I know we've had conversations, you've given a thought, what will it take next year to make sure that we will be in the black? |
| 01:26:00.51 | Tom Riley | Yeah, well, I think there's a number of things we can do. And these are some of the areas we explored there. There's areas we can be more efficient. So I think if we can combine some of these operations, we can have fewer staff doing more jobs. We could deprecate some of the staff. I'd like to have the Bike vendor companies carry any shortfall that we have. I don't know the exact shortfall, but it's not a significant number. I mean, any number is large. But if it's in the tens of thousands of dollars and you step back and say, We have a program that staffs 40 people for a few tens of thousands of dollars and organizes our city, I think it's a good investment. But I do think we can... go into our third year, even close that gap. And I do believe we should put more pressure on the rental companies that cover any financial gap because they're really benefiting from this and even the ferry companies. |
| 01:26:58.42 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks. Any other questions for Tom? No. Okay. Do we have a public comment on this item? |
| 01:27:11.42 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Good evening. My name is Bjorn Gripenberg. I'm the Policy and Planning Director at Marin County Bicycle Coalition. First off, I just want to give kudos to the folks at Sausalito Plus for running a very impressive program. My feedback on this presentation isn't exactly related to Sausalito Plus's recommendations, but I think it is related to the spirit of bike parking enforcement in Sausalito. Since I began at MCBC in July, I received a few complaints from Marin residents who had their bikes impounded in Sausalito, one of whom I believe did come to an earlier council meeting and may have sent an email earlier in the week outlining her recommendations. And really the common thread in all of those communications I had with folks who had their bikes impounded was that there is an adequate signage in place in the downtown area informing people of the bike parking ordinance and the possibility of their bikes being impounded. And I just want to echo what was said in the previous presentation. I think the spirit of that ordinance and the intention was really to deter people from parking their bikes illegally on the sidewalks or against lampposts, parking meters, et cetera. And I think something we can all agree on is that it's not a very effective deterrent if there is an adequate signage in place. We want to prevent people from knowingly violating the ordinance rather than being surprised with a locked bike that they have to go pay $25 for. So really, I hope that council directs staff at some point or that staff works to possibly increase signage in the downtown area. Thank you. |
| 01:29:02.45 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:29:03.08 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:29:03.10 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 01:29:03.13 | Unknown | Uh, |
| 01:29:03.35 | Jill Hoffman | Hold on, let's see if there's any more public comment. |
| 01:29:03.38 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:29:03.40 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Yeah. |
| 01:29:03.43 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:29:03.45 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 01:29:06.25 | Jill Hoffman | And then you can comment on that. |
| 01:29:07.47 | Unknown | on the border. |
| 01:29:08.23 | Jill Hoffman | Any other public comment on this item? Thank you. Yes, Mr. Irwin. |
| 01:29:16.83 | Russ Irwin | Hi, my name is Russ Irwin. Thank you. I can't help but run some numbers when people throw numbers up. So, uh, I thought I'd let the council know that 282,000 bikes times $20 a piece And let's say spending. So I come in, I spend 20 bucks. I buy a burger and ice cream. or a t-shirt. And we get sales tax revenue out of that of $84,000. So we're trading. considerable quality of life in the downtown area for $84,000, some of which I assume is getting spent on police enforcement. So please consider that in the future. |
| 01:29:57.06 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Any other public comment? Yes, sir. |
| 01:30:01.77 | Scott Page | Hi, Scott Page. I'm just listening to this. presentation and it seems to be treating a symptom and not dealing with the disease. And I would like to propose a solution which would treat the symptom at some point going forward, so I don't know who I would talk to about that, |
| 01:30:21.01 | Jill Hoffman | You can start here. Would you like to? |
| 01:30:22.07 | Scott Page | Okay. |
| 01:30:23.40 | Jill Hoffman | You have two minutes and 38 seconds. |
| 01:30:25.41 | Scott Page | Well, fortunately I operate the ferry boats for Blue and Gold, and I know firsthand the problems with the ferry companies transporting bikes. the by the time the passenger gets to San Francisco and spends 30 minutes waiting to get off the boat there, they have had it by waiting up to several hours queuing in line waiting for a boat to get on and getting to the gate and not being allowed on. So by eliminating the bikes in Sausalito, by transporting them out of there on a trailer, you would then boats would run at capacity. The ferry companies would have less issues. The bike companies would sell the bike transport as a benefit to the rider. customer focus would their user experience would be greatly improved by just dropping off the bike and being done with it. Because around once you leave Sausalito, it's on the ferry, then it's back to the rental spot. And if they're after hours, you have to go to a third spot. So I would like to propose that at some point in the future. |
| 01:31:31.34 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. I believe bike and ped committee meets on what day, Mr. Riley? Third Monday of every month, sir. And I think they've discussed that. Okay. That would be the place. Thank you. Okay. Any other public comment on this item? Nope. See none. Okay. Up here for council discussion. |
| 01:31:42.11 | Scott Page | Okay. |
| 01:31:52.13 | Unknown | Well, the comment that I did wanna make to the bike coalition is it's very important that you do speak to other cities, and I hope next year we'll get the word out that if you are a resident of Marin County, you do not have to pay to park your bike in there. And I think it's very important that the coalition get that out rather than loading the streets with signs. I think there's another way of doing it. on a preventive basis. |
| 01:32:26.52 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Any other comments? Tom, go ahead. |
| 01:32:29.90 | Ray Withey | And on a lot of these issues that we just discussed, including the signage issues and the other proposals, we do have the bike and pet committee meets every third Monday. That's what it's there for, and they go into detail. There's a couple of hours, and we have a fine bike and pet committee. We have two people here today. They're televised, by the way, and we have them on our website if you want to. So that's where we take the time to look at specifics because all these, you know, the important parts of this are in the details. And I do want to just compliment, again, Sausalito Plus and our police department. It's good to hear the chief hasn't received any complaints. I know that when we first ran for office, it was the biggest thing. You know, what are you going to do about the bikes? What are you going do about the bikes and we have we have a lot of work to do but the beauty of what what you've done there is people know that we're working on it they see the yellow vest it's not all perfect all the time but they know that we're really working on it and it's it's always much better so we really appreciate it they do a fantastic job it's a great name because they really are ambassadors, and they act that way. And so I just want to compliment you on all the work we've done. I think we're through two full seasons, and we've learned a lot, and we've made a lot of progress, and there's still some to go. But we appreciate it because it's a tremendous amount of effort that everyone's put in, including all our staff, our police, public works, and all of you, and Sausalito Plus, and the bike and ped. So thanks so much for your work. |
| 01:34:01.49 | Jill Hoffman | No. Well, I'd like to echo just what Tom said about the thanks to the people that run this program. I'm always amazed at the caliber of volunteers that we have in our town to run these committees and run especially this incredibly successful, at least I view this incredibly successful program that's very young and the success that we've had in, creating order on our streets and creating 30-plus jobs, seasonal jobs for seniors and for kids and for anybody else who wants a seasonal job, and also the volunteers that still participate with Sausalito Plus. So I'm constantly amazed by the success of this program. When we started this program as a policy, I felt it was very important that the people of Sausalito not have to pay through their tax dollars to support outside businesses that were imposing themselves on Sausalito, and I mean the bike companies. So that's where the paid parking came from, and that's where the parking fees for the corral, for the parking along thing, came from with the idea that that would pay for Sausalito Plus and the operating costs. So I'm glad that we're close in getting to the black on that program. I want us to get closer. I think absolutely the bike companies need to contribute in proportion to how many bikes they flood our town with. So if we wanna start keeping that as account, I'm happy to do that. But I think any conversation on that, has to start from that proposition that they're operating in our town. They're not licensed here. They don't pay taxes here. But they're imposing their business model on our town. So I think that's, from a policy matter, that's very important. THANK YOU. Thank you, Tom, and your team for your incredible hard work on this and making this program a success. Thank you to our police department. who've done an amazing job this past year really implementing the programs that we've set forth and the enforcement part of it, because I think that is really, really important. And the Bicycle Coalition, thank you for coming. Help us get the word out. If we can post things on your website, that would be great. Because ultimately, we don't want to find local people. for erroneously parking during the hours that we don't want them to park on those streets. And the point is to keep those lanes clear. So anything we can do to help out with that, we're happy to. and I think that's all the comments I have. |
| 01:36:33.17 | Ray Withey | I just want to say to the Marin Bicycle Coalition, we had, since we set up the bike and pet committee, we invited, and I can't remember your predecessor's name, who's now in Sonoma, to be on the committee. We have an open spot, and that's an open invitation for you to have a non-voting spot. We would love to have you and your input at any time at the bike and pet committee. |
| 01:36:33.96 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:36:55.80 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, agreed. Yes, Patricia Pickman, you get the last word. |
| 01:37:04.59 | Patricia Pigman | Highly irregular, but yes. I just think it's important to acknowledge Ed Fotch, who thought of the Ambassador Program. |
| 01:37:10.92 | Bjorn Gripenberg | PROBABLY. |
| 01:37:15.29 | Patricia Pigman | Without it, I think we'd have chaos. And then also Deb Fotch, who has |
| 01:37:15.44 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 01:37:21.35 | Patricia Pigman | brilliantly run the program. So I think we just really should give out a huge thank you to both of them because it's due to them that we're here tonight, so just want to say. |
| 01:37:36.82 | Jill Hoffman | I agree. |
| 01:37:37.14 | Patricia Pigman | thank you to them. |
| 01:37:38.03 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. |
| 01:37:39.67 | Patricia Pigman | Thank you. |
| 01:37:39.69 | Jill Hoffman | Very good. Okay. All right, moving on to the next item. Yes, we'll take a short break. Next item up though is update on short-term rental. |
| 01:37:41.71 | Unknown | . |
| 01:37:49.00 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 01:37:54.96 | Unknown | I don't know. . Yeah. you Thank you. Bye. Bye. |
| 01:38:38.13 | Jill Hoffman | All right, we're back in session. And we are now joined by Council Member Pfeiffer. Welcome. Our next item on the agenda is an update on short-term rentals, and that's going to be by Danny Castro and our task force chair, Russ Irwin. Go ahead, Danny. |
| 01:38:55.80 | Danny Castro | Thank you, Mayor Hoffman, members of the council. Yes, this is an update on the short-term rental task force. I will be giving a brief introduction and then turn the presentation to Russ Irwin, who is the chair of the short-term rental task force. The City Council at the September 27, 2016 meeting appointed a short-term rental task force to discuss a number of items and provide recommendations to the City Council at the November 29, this meeting. The task force members are Russ Irwin, who's a community representative and also is appointed as a chair. Jill Hoffman with the City Council, Susan Cleveland Knowles, she's the Planning Commission, current Planning Commission Chair. Ben Brown, who's the Historic Landmarks Board Chair, and Kate Storr, who's also a community representative, and myself, Danny Castro. The purpose of the task force is to discuss and provide recommendations to the City Council on the following items. Consider the assistance from host compliance to supplement code enforcement. consider a penalty fee increase to impose on short term rentals that are operating illegally. Your next agenda item is a public hearing to consider that higher fee increase. Devise a plan to work with platforms to get reporting data. discuss concerns about ADUs that may be replaced by short term rentals. And consider establishing a program or regulations and restrictions In other words, developed a draft ordinance on short-term rentals and any other items The short-term rental task force had two meetings on October 20th and November 3rd. The meetings are conducted in accordance with the Brown Act, are open to the public, and are videotaped and available for review on the city's website on short-term rentals. uh, I was going to save this for the last, but I just want to make sure the next steps is that the task force will need more time to meet, at least two or three more meetings, and will likely be ready to report back to the City Council with recommendations by the end of January or beginning of February 2017. I know that the Council still will be finalizing your next year's agenda and your meeting dates, but that's a milestone that I think that the Council will be able to do. task force would like to meet and just seeking your direction as well. But right now I'd like to turn the presentation to Russ Irwin. |
| 01:41:42.00 | Russ Irwin | Thank you. |
| 01:41:45.61 | Russ Irwin | Is this a clicker? |
| 01:41:51.09 | Russ Irwin | see if I can master this. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So we had two meetings, as Danny said. There's no meetings to review this update, so this is really my own summary. So if you're on the task force and it doesn't speak for you, then it doesn't speak for you. There were really two broad areas that he asked us to investigate. One is the short-term rental program, some modification to the existing Statutes. And the second is enforcement. So I'm going to take those in that order. With regard to a program, we really just got started at identifying what we think would be the attributes of a good program. We have to identify them, we have to discuss them. That's in a very early stage. It's not ready, but the decision was made. We should identify the attributes, discuss them, air them out, decide what we could all agree on, and then explore the enforceability of those attributes. If we decide it's good if it's like X, but there's no way to enforce X, then Maybe access isn't such a good thing to have as an attribute. or you need to find a way to enforce it. That discussion needs to happen. It's gonna take a few meetings to trash all that out. And I probably don't share Danny's optimism on the schedule, but it's definitely the way we're approaching the problem. So the bigger issue is enforcement. So a little bit of enforcement in the news. The state of New York, and I thought it was interesting, it was the state, not the city of New York, because you would kind of think the rest of New York doesn't care. The state legislature passed a, a bill that was signed by Governor Cuomo fining landlords for advertising, and the fee with the fine is up to $7,500 per offense. So it's pretty steep. That immediately was responded to by litigation from the two big platforms, which are Airbnb and HomeAway. And of course, HomeAway is owned by Expedia, which is a large travel company. business. San Francisco took another approach. They passed legislation. Let me back up a little bit. San Francisco first passed legislation to adopt a program that they worked out with Airbnb that would allow homeowners to have short-term rentals in their home under certain circumstances and guidelines and regulations. They did that in 2015, they got very, very poor compliance. which upset them quite a bit, and in a rare act of unanimity, the entire Supervisor Board of San Francisco unanimously passed additional legislation with fines on the platform company itself, not the landlord, of $1,000 a day per listing, which obviously adds up pretty quick. They were also met immediately with litigation from... HomeAway and Airbnb. Airbnb chose on that case, I'm not sure what's happening with the details of the New York case, but the San Francisco case went to federal court because they're claiming defense under Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was basically set up to protect, let's say AT&T from being sued because you arranged some illegal activity while on their telephone lines. The judge... hasn't liked Airbnb's story. You know, federal judges have a lot of latitude And he said, you know, I'm not really seeing it the same way you are. You guys should go think about this some more. They came back and he basically told them the same thing. He said, I really think you can work this out. Why don't you go away and figure out a way to work it out? He stayed any kind of order fining the company in the interim. And to sort of everybody's surprise, Airbnb came back and said, you know, we have a program we're working on with Chicago to share all the listing data with the city and allow enforcement. And there's a lot of details to be worked out on that. but it seems like there's been a significant shift, at least by Airbnb. It's not clear if HomeAway will share that or not. Um... Concurrent with that, Airbnb also announced a change in their business plan. to become a full service travel company. and compete head-to-head with Expedia. So they're branching out from just the rental brokerage business. So, Those are all playing out in real time while we're trying to figure out what's going to happen with little tiny Sausalito. Thank you. And I think we really don't know how it's gonna work out. I think they'll probably come up with some kind of automated sharing platform. The city has one already. They want Airbnb to use that. Airbnb probably doesn't want to create a new one for every city in the country. I don't know what they're going to work out. we'll probably know what they work out sometime in the next few months. And, After we figure out what they've worked out, we'll probably figure out if there's a way for us to fit into it some way. THE END OF I think we should keep in mind, though, that the Internet's a very fluid thing. Now, there used to be a thing called music sharing and movie sharing. There was a company called Napster. And everybody came down on it really hard because it was robbing everybody of royalties. So long story short, they got shut down. So Napster went away. Sharing of music and movies did not go away. It just went somewhere else. So getting cooperation from HomeAway and Airbnb may not bring all this down. I've spent a couple hours just looking at listings in Sausalito. We have listings from that are direct listings by property owners, have their own websites set up and just rent their property directly, don't even go through a broker. So this is very encouraging. This is a good thing. It may or may not be the real answer, but we'll just have to wait it out, I think, to find out. Specifically, We had a lot of public comment at the two meetings we did have. And a couple of things really became apparent. The first is property owners assume that they have immunity from any enforcement in Sausalito today. I mean, I was amazed that people came on. told us what they were doing, how they were doing it, what the economics were of doing it, acknowledged it was against the law, and made it clear that there was absolutely no concern with that. So, whatever we're doing today, which is Pretty much nothing. is acknowledged by all the property owners, and there's no reluctance to continue with short-term rentals when they're profitable. So I know that you do have an agenda item on increasing penalties. There was not specifically a decision or anything made by the task force. There was some general discussion. My impression is that the general feeling was, yeah, the penalties probably should be increased, but there was not a discussion of how much or how. My personal feeling is that whatever you set it to, it has to be the number that would cause the city's staff to do enforcement. I don't know what that number is, but it costs money to litigate, it costs money to hire enforcement people, it costs money to do all this. The answer we get today is $100 a day is not enough money to make it worthwhile. So I think probably Adam and Mary are the ones who can tell you, is it $1,000 in offense? Is it $10,000 in offense? Whatever it is, that should be your guideline if you actually want to have enforcement. Because like change, you get to $500 if $500 isn't enough to hire an enforcement officer. It really isn't going to make any difference. |
| 01:50:11.39 | Russ Irwin | So the next steps are If you haven't made an action, we'll come up with some sort of recommendation. We're expecting a presentation by host compliance, If all of these things work out with the platform companies, maybe out of business, I don't know. We'll see what kind of business model they've got. If the information is going to come from the platform companies, then they may not have a business, but we're going to see what they have to say. We're definitely going to discuss and explore all the attributes of some sort of pilot program that we would come back and recommend. And we'll continue to monitor the litigation and really closely monitor what's happening in San Francisco. So I think they're really the best. guideline for us right now. And then last but not least is to explore the impacts on the housing element. We've had some discussion on that. There's a variety of opinions about, how much we need to worry about it now or not, how much it would affect it or not, That needs to be a more exploration after we know what the attributes of a program would look like. |
| 01:51:16.02 | Russ Irwin | Thank you. |
| 01:51:16.07 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you, Russ. Do we have any questions from the City Council for Russ or Danny on this issue? Go ahead. |
| 01:51:17.03 | Unknown | I'm not. |
| 01:51:22.61 | Unknown | Yeah, Russ, a couple of things. Did the task force look into the idea of how many cities have it that you, in order to rent it out on a short term basis, the owner of the house has to be in the house? |
| 01:51:42.22 | Russ Irwin | Danny's collecting SAMPLES FROM A NUMBER OF CITIES, BUT WE DON'T HAVE ANY any definitive numbers on that. It's a real national phenomena. I don't think there's any sort of |
| 01:51:56.01 | Mike Kelly | any place you can |
| 01:51:56.15 | Russ Irwin | You can collect all that. I mean, we can get anecdotal stuff from California. I know Danny went to a conference, I think, a week or two ago with some other cities in the Bay Area. Probably has more information than I do. |
| 01:52:06.74 | Unknown | And the other question that I want to ask you, were there many cities that had for the first offense and then double it for the second offense. |
| 01:52:18.51 | Russ Irwin | Yeah, both, New York's program has some acceleration. I think it starts around, somewhere around 1,000, actually a range on the first offense between 1,000 and 5,000, and it accelerates to 7,500. for multiple offenses. Thank you. |
| 01:52:33.79 | Scott Page | Okay. |
| 01:52:34.01 | Russ Irwin | you but, uh, It's really whatever it takes to |
| 01:52:38.65 | Unknown | Well, it's coming on. It started real quickly, and it's changing very, very quickly. It's coming. |
| 01:52:45.12 | Russ Irwin | Exactly. So the number that we need to do, you need to get to is a number that'll fund enforcement. |
| 01:52:46.47 | Unknown | So thank you. |
| 01:52:51.61 | Unknown | Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Russ or Danny. I mean, obviously, short-term rental Less than 30 days is illegal in Sausalito. So anybody who's doing it right now is doing it illegally. um, How many, do we have an estimate of how many illegal short-term rentals at any one time we have going in Sausalito? Estimates. I know we haven't done a rigorous estimate. |
| 01:53:26.11 | Russ Irwin | Thank you. |
| 01:53:26.14 | Danny Castro | Yeah, there's a lot of opinions on that. Yeah, the rest is right. There's a lot of opinions on that. |
| 01:53:28.00 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:53:29.16 | Russ Irwin | I'm sorry. Thank you. |
| 01:53:31.76 | Danny Castro | I did initially speak to host compliance who ran numbers for me about three weeks ago and said there was 156 in Sausalito. that he had and it wasn't just from one platform but a variety of platforms. That number changes. I know last year when I was looking on the website, I counted, you know, up to 200. And it depends, too, on the season. In the summertime, you have a greater amount than you would now probably is lesser than it is then. I'm not sure. But that's, you know, we don't have an accurate count because that's part of the difficulty enforcement was that, you know, the platforms don't provide information. that data in terms of addresses and the number of days they rent. Other than photographs. |
| 01:54:15.72 | Jill Hoffman | And... If I could add, since I'm on the thing. Let me add to the tracking has gotten much better of... who's actually renting like it used to be you had to go and actually look on vrb or whatever but this company host compliance that's their that's their business model they identify you know who's renting they do that for you so we part of the problem with our enforcement officer that we had was that it was so difficult to identify the units but now we have an online program that was like a fraction of of that cost so anyway go ahead russ you were going to say something |
| 01:54:49.28 | Russ Irwin | Yeah, we had a lot of discussion on this actually. I'd ran my own research on it on two different occasions. I came up with the number as well between 100 and 150. Some people on the task force felt that That might be the number of listings, but they're not necessarily active. How many of those people are really doing it versus just have a listing out there? There's also, there are listings in Sausalito for boats. You know, stay on my boat. There's actually, you can rent a trailer parked in Sausalito. There's... There's a... There's a water. Yeah. There's also... There's also non-platform stuff. There's people who have their own websites. They just have their home and they put up a website. But it's probably somewhere between 75 and 200. But that was this fall. That wasn't July. |
| 01:55:45.09 | Unknown | Yeah, thank you, Russ. I have a question. I think you know I voted against having this task force. I think we should maintain the status quo of making them illegal. My question has to do with the lawsuits. I've looked at some of the headlines around the lawsuits, and from what I've seen, Um, The judges seem to be landing I WANT TO BE ABLE TO not in Airbnb's favor. I mean, I saw one headline, federal judge denies Airbnb lawsuit against the city. And this was just, I think, last week. And I presume, was that the lawsuit you mentioned where San Francisco was finding the platform? |
| 01:56:33.27 | Russ Irwin | Yeah, the most recent is he didn't actually deny he stayed any kind of penalties against the company against Airbnb and HomeAway and any other platform company. and basically said, why don't you guys go work this out because If you force me to make a decision, you might not like it. which is a judge's way of telling you Maybe you should go figure out something. So that's really the status today, and the city and the platform guys are trying to work out some kind of information sharing solution, I wouldn't say the judge has not made a ruling, so there's nothing definitive. |
| 01:57:10.66 | Unknown | Okay, I'll have to just... Follow-up. as I go through this little article here. |
| 01:57:16.60 | Unknown | Because that was the headline. And that was some of the quotes in here. It seemed like it was definitely not in Airbnb's favor. |
| 01:57:18.24 | Unknown | and it was some of the things that I... |
| 01:57:19.74 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. . Thank you. |
| 01:57:20.23 | Unknown | And, uh, |
| 01:57:20.42 | Russ Irwin | Now. |
| 01:57:27.05 | Russ Irwin | The comments the judge made were not in their favor, but it was not a ruling. He didn't decide the case. |
| 01:57:34.17 | Unknown | Oh, well, okay. In other words, the lawsuit, the judge made it clear to Airbnb that it was in their best interest to talk with the city. Okay. That's a little different message. In other words, I think that the trend here is to side on local control and the side of the city with regards to how cities want, whether or not cities want to allow their neighborhoods to turn into you know hotel zones as well and you know So anyway. Thank you. |
| 01:58:08.91 | Russ Irwin | Yeah, it's hard to, I mean, that was a federal judge, and federal judges don't have jurisdiction over zoning, for example, but they were in federal court because of the complaint which Airbnb filed under a federal statute. So, you know, would a local judge or a California Superior Court judge find differently? |
| 01:58:17.22 | Unknown | the platform. |
| 01:58:19.68 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 01:58:19.72 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:58:19.98 | Bjorn Gripenberg | THE FAMILY. Thank you. |
| 01:58:20.71 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 01:58:26.38 | Russ Irwin | It's a whole other set of precedent law and it's a whole other discussion. |
| 01:58:33.53 | Jill Hoffman | Any questions? |
| 01:58:34.02 | Ray Withey | Thank you. |
| 01:58:34.26 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:58:35.14 | Ray Withey | Russ, is the task force exploring, and I know you've talked about, and I appreciated your comments about Napster, the fact that there are individual sites and not everyone needs to go through Expedia or Airbnb, but they're still the biggest players right now. And they're important in the sense that they, if you don't come to some agreement with them, they may be suing you. So there's some advantage. Have we explored, and getting information from them would be critical to collecting TOT or cracking down. Is the task force going to explore possibilities of contacting them for some agreement, piggybacking on someone else's agreement? Because some cities are making agreements with Airbnb and others. So I was just wondering, is that going to be explored at all? That possibility? |
| 01:59:18.42 | Russ Irwin | Oh, sure. I think we might as well let them play it out with San Francisco before we go knocking on their door, We're 7,000, they're 700,000, they've got a federal lawsuit, we don't. I think we just have to let them play it out. Then we'll knock on their door and say, hey, could we do something like they did AND, YOU KNOW, I'M GOING TO see what we get, but that was a key part of I think my earlier slide on what the task force was exploring was that whatever the program attributes of the program were They had to be enforceable. So, So we decided to put that part in front of enforcement, in part because we can work on that right now, and enforcement is kind of a wait and see. |
| 02:00:01.35 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Any other questions for us? No? Okay. Any public comment? Thank you, Russ. And thank you, Danny. Thank you. Any public comment on this item? If you could fill out a speaker card, that would be much appreciated. Thank you. All right. Charles Kaufman, you get the prize today for following the rules and filling out a card. Thank you, sir. |
| 02:00:25.74 | Charles Kaufman | So I would like to talk about two aspects of this. And I'm speaking as the president of the Whiskey Springs HOA. I'm also the Marin County representative to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Advisory Board and on the task force for Age Friendly. So for Age Friendly, we're very interested in following up on the fact that 28% of the respondents to the questionnaire indicated they were willing and interested in sharing their home. So we want to do extended home stays, and we want to promote that. That's entirely different than the squat and run model that Airbnb and Home Away works with, which is an entirely commercially driven model. Secondly, The difficulty we have as an HOA in enforcing the violation of our rules, which forbid short-term rentals, is enormous. It's a volunteer board. We have no facilities to do this. And there's no capacity in the property management companies to do this at all. And that turns out to be a major problem for us in terms of dealing with the consequences of short-term rentals. It's particularly bad in the summertime periods. Parking issues, problems with nobody understanding how to follow the rules to live. in an area like Whiskey Springs, and I would remind you how truly dense the housing elements in Whiskey Springs are and how important being able to maintain good, consistent obedience to the rules that are necessary to make that kind of a model work. So I am very, very interested in having you come up with some kind of an enforcement model that is practical and is easy to use. Thank you. |
| 02:02:10.21 | Unknown | I have a quick question. Thank you. Can we ask it? |
| 02:02:11.27 | Charles Kaufman | Thank you. |
| 02:02:11.59 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:02:14.21 | Unknown | No. I have a question on the age friendly. When you mentioned how many percentages of people said they would, would you say, most of them were interested in long, more than 30 days, or they would be interested in the Airbnb concept because they need that financial support. Thank you. |
| 02:02:43.03 | Charles Kaufman | So it broke down, we didn't get the definitive break, we didn't ask that question to define it as sharply as you're asking. Okay. What we did get from the comments that followed the answers to that particular inquiry, |
| 02:02:51.60 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:02:57.68 | Charles Kaufman | indicated that they were interested in having people share their dwellings in exchange for assistance with certain kinds of activities, say taking the trash bin to the curb, helping unload dwellings, |
| 02:03:08.77 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:03:08.97 | Bjorn Gripenberg | you |
| 02:03:14.20 | Charles Kaufman | groceries out of the car, making sure that there would be some assistance if they needed to have some task done. Then there was a subset that were also, |
| 02:03:21.00 | Bjorn Gripenberg | but- |
| 02:03:26.81 | Charles Kaufman | Yeah. We're an affluent community, but there are people who are looking at difficulties in terms of money. And they were looking at ways to supplement their income but they were not interested in any way that they indicated as short-term rentals. The biggest dilemma in that And the reason we need support on this is that we have to do, this is like starting a new religion. You need some missionaries to speak up and endorse this process who have done it. So the difficulty is that while people express interest, opening your home up to share with a stranger always is a big deal. We have the ability of using the Episcopalian program to set which has a structure and a set of procedures, to make that work. but we need to get the initial start of this program with some people in the community. who have success with it, who can then vouch as the people who will say, yes, this is a program. I did it. It worked. I would encourage you to do it as well. This is a gold mine of opportunity to improve the availability of ready housing. I have. gotten no traction on this idea at MTC, which complains incessantly about the need for more housing within the Bay Area. They're locked into this model that they're going to build, build, build, build. We're now having discussions about raising height limits. which is an insane model to go forward with. But that's because when I bring up something like the fact that with 30% of the aged population in the Bay Area, |
| 02:05:02.93 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 02:05:11.45 | Charles Kaufman | There are lots of people sitting in situations where they have excess dwelling capacity They simply don't have any understanding of how to unlock the value of that for their own benefit and to assist people who could use that housing. |
| 02:05:24.68 | Unknown | I hope that age-friendly also maybe would go in a direction in the future that helping elderly people who want to rent their homes out, that there's some setup of a background check or something where seniors are just able to say, well, I need somebody, so they're willing to take someone in without maybe a proper background check. |
| 02:05:54.28 | Charles Kaufman | No, that's the reason we're using the Episcopalian model that's in place. There's another one in Sonoma that we'll probably bring in at some point. That's a model that actually matches THE HOMEOWNER, who's interested in renting, with applicants to make sure there's a fit. It also negotiates a contractual agreement for that rental And it monitors that process to deal with any problems that might come up. included in that would be the betting. Okay. Okay. Thank you. |
| 02:06:23.30 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Thank you. We've gotten a little far field here from the short-term rental task force report, but thank you for interesting comments. |
| 02:06:30.62 | Unknown | I didn't say anything. |
| 02:06:33.26 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Do we have any other public comment on this issue? No. Okay. So council discussion. |
| 02:06:33.29 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:06:42.15 | Unknown | just here. |
| 02:06:43.25 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, I think Herb used his discussion time. Any other discussion from city council on this? Yeah, go ahead. |
| 02:06:52.33 | Ray Withey | No, I just want to thank everybody. It's preliminary, but we appreciate everyone getting the task force together. I think we need to explore these things. I mean, some of these we have to strengthen the areas, and we're going to be doing the penalties soon. The only thing I think that Mr. Kaufman's comment about the HOA is it did, whatever we do is we should make sure that our things support these things. So anything that we, if we allow it in any way, we have to make sure that it's support these things so anything that we if we allow in any way we have to make sure that it's conditioned on that it has to meet the hoa conditions or your lease conditions etc because we don't want to have any anything that implies that they that we're going to allow looser standards than than the landlords or the hoas allow so but otherwise thank you and we're we're moving on and thanks for the progress |
| 02:07:43.12 | Unknown | So I want to just say as a follow up to the lawsuit I alluded to earlier, it says the federal judge did hand Airbnb a rebuke in its long standing dispute with San Francisco. And the judge actually wanted Airbnb and San Francisco to talk with each other about how to enforce the law, San Francisco's new law, and signaled that he's likely to reject Airbnb's request, meaning that San Francisco could begin enforcing the new law, putting Airbnb on the hook for steep fines and penalties. So I've looked at this and other lawsuits in my mind. I think the message is clear. I think right now it tends to fall in favor of local control in enforcing bans on short-term rentals and fines. With respect to the whole topic of the task force, my personal opinion on this is that until there is a way to enforce, and there is no way to enforce, because we can enforce a ban if we raise these fines high enough, which is why I'm so happy we're approaching the next topic, which is increase in fines. But in terms of being able to track nuances of whether or not people are living there at the same time they're renting it out, that's very, very hard to track the nuances. So I support continuing the ban. I do think it should be complaint driven. Many times we enforce permits that way. Neighbors will say, hey, someone did something illegally. They added something new, and it'll be red tagged. I think people who, like the elderly, who are renting out a little home, I mean, a little room, you know, in the back, and there's ample parking off the street and there are no complaints. Frankly, I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with people establishing businesses in town and running full-time Airbnb basically hotels and taking away rental units from our residents. So I personally would still support the ban in regards to the task force. I would hold off on the task force until some of these lawsuits cleared the air and we got a clear understanding of where the law is falling on this. So that's my opinion. |
| 02:10:38.27 | Unknown | Well, |
| 02:10:38.76 | Unknown | Who is to make you think? |
| 02:10:42.06 | Unknown | We're, as Russ has indicated, we're at an interim stage here. So let's let the task force finish its work and hear what the final set of recommendations are. I want to pick up on something Council Member Pfeiffer said, which I agree with. We have, and I've said this before, we have a very simple ordinance, we have a very simple regulation right now. They're not allowed. And we can't enforce it. So if we come up with all kinds of tweaks and bells and whistles of restricted numbers, got to be owner occupied, whatever the set of, and we can write complex ordinances, we know how to do that. So we're going to end up with a huge amount of complexity And we can't enforce a simple one line. They're not allowed. So that's my problem. Until you can figure out how you're going to enforce all of this, it would be a real struggle for me to down the road approve a program. Even though I can see areas where it could be very advantageous for folks to get some extra income. They're living in their homes, they need income. They're probably in too big a home. They need income to sustain that, and this is a good way to do it. And I get that, and I think it would be great if we could do that. But until the platforms or until there's a mechanism in place whereby you know who you're renting to, who to figure out who's renting, how it's going to be regulated, how we're going to get the TOT, but more importantly, are they following our rules? And again, we have a simple ordinance. It's not allowed, and we can enforce it. |
| 02:12:50.52 | Unknown | Well, I think also what you're seeing is other cities have had this problem, big cities, and yet... they all seem to be going in the direction of, you make that fine, heavy enough. where they don't want to face that fine per day, I think you might get some movement there. But I agree. Let's not make it too complicated before we figure out the source of how we regulate it. |
| 02:13:24.23 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. My comments are just that, you know, the task force is to come up with some recommendations. It's coming back to the city council for a decision on how to move forward. So that's what we're working on, and I'm hopeful that we will. Okay, that's it for this item. |
| 02:13:39.98 | Unknown | Can I? |
| 02:13:40.43 | Jill Hoffman | make one |
| 02:13:40.97 | Unknown | One last comment really quickly, just a quick clarification. Yes. I wanted to make sure that I was clear. I believe we can enforce the ban. We have a ban, they're illegal. We can enforce it and that's why we have the next agenda item, which is to increase the fines. If we make the fines high enough to compensate our staff for enforcing it, we can enforce it. what do we enforce? In my mind, if you are a law-abiding, conscientious resident and you are just trying, and you're retired, for example, and you're just trying to make some money to make ends meet, and there are no complaints, frankly, we've got bigger fish to fry. But if you're someone who is really abusing the quality of life of our neighborhoods and holding parties and renting out clogging streets with cars and being very destructive, then we need a big fine to go after them. |
| 02:14:47.19 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks, thank you. Okay, moving on to our next item, which is actually the item 5A, which is public hearing item. This is an ordinance amendment to the Sausalio Municipal Code. |
| 02:14:50.26 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:15:00.99 | Jill Hoffman | Administrative citation collection to add a specific penalty fine for violations of Sassley Municipal Code rental dwelling unit. accessory dwelling in bread room rooms or rooms in a dwelling for a period of less than 30 days. And this is a presentation by Danny Castro, our community development director. |
| 02:15:18.88 | Danny Castro | Thank you again, Mayor Hoffman. As you just described, this is a proposed ordinance amendment. And, um, The, to give you background, the, The enforcement on the prohibition of short-term rentals has been discussed by the City Council as well as the working group and task force. And grappling that issue of how we enforce. The City Council has discussed in the past that a higher penalty fee for violations of short-term rental uses should be established to deter illegal short-term rental activity and to help offset the cost of code enforcement. Sausalito's zoning regulations do not allow rental of residential property for less than 30 days. I think it's important to just describe the code sections that arrive at this conclusion. Sausalito zoning ordinance section 1022.030. which lists the allowable land uses, and a table 10.2. 22-1. List the allowable land uses in all of the residential zoning districts. Renting is allowed as an accessory use for long-term occupancy, more than 30 days, transient occupancy, which is defined in Section 10.88 as occupancy of residential structures, hotel rooms, or dwelling units on a temporary period of less than 30 days is not listed as an allowable use in Table 1022-1. Therefore, short-term rentals are prohibited. |
| 02:16:55.03 | Danny Castro | So for any violation of the municipal code, the current fine imposed is for an administrative citation of $100 for a first violation, $200 for a second violation, and $500 for each additional violation. I'm not sure. I should indicate that the way code enforcement works is that we It is complaint driven as Councilmember Fyfer indicated. and It's based on we initially begin with a courtesy notice. informing the THE END OF THE END OF THE the person that they're violating the code, or that we receive complaints that they're violating the code, We give them time. whether it's 10 or 15 days or 30 days to correct the violation So what we're doing is seeking voluntary compliance. That's step one. Step two, if they don't follow through, then we actually issue a compliance order. And a compliance order actually gives a number of days or else we issue a citation. So that's step two. Step three is issuance of an administrative citation. And that's currently the $100, and then $200, and then $500. So it doesn't start with just an administrative citation. at the very start. The proposed ordinance amendment would, As you're all aware, the short term rental task force was recently appointed to look at enforcement methods and to recommend appropriate regulations if an ordinance is to be established. The proposed ordinance amendment would establish a specific penalty fine for operating a short-term rental use imposed by an administrative citation of $1,000 for a first violation and each subsequent violation that the activity exists. So it could be daily. |
| 02:18:52.20 | Danny Castro | And this shows that the section 1.10110, where we would add a new subsection B that states, for violations of the Sausalito Municipal Code for rental of a dwelling unit, Accessory dwelling unit, bedroom, or rooms or rooms in a dwelling unit for a period of less than 30 days. A specific penalty is established, 1,000 for each violation. And then following the subsections, we would just re-letter B through G as C through H, because it's an added. And here is just an excerpt of red line track changes of that section, where we would include a new item B. In terms of the fiscal impact, the increased penalty fines imposed for short term rental violations would help deter short-term rental activity, and to help offset the cost of code enforcement. And staff is recommending that the City Council, number one, conduct a public hearing on this ordinance to introduce and read by title only an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito, amending Sausalito Municipal Code. Section 1.10110. to add a specific penalty fine for violations of the Saucedo Municipal Code for rental of a dwelling unit, accessory dwelling unit, bedroom, or rooms or rooms in a dwelling unit for a period of less than 30 days, and to continue the second reading to December 13, 2016. And that concludes my report. |
| 02:20:31.62 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, thanks, Danny. Do we have any questions from City Council on the ordinance? Go ahead. |
| 02:20:36.99 | Ray Withey | On the ordinance, violation, how do you define that? For example, someone rents it out for 14 days, it's a high end, and they're making, they might make 1,000 a day. Is that one violation for renting it for two weeks, or is it 14 violations? |
| 02:20:52.74 | Danny Castro | The violation is based on the activity of renting. It's not based on the dollar amount or the duration of the rent, the rental. |
| 02:21:02.18 | Ray Withey | Thank you. |
| 02:21:02.20 | Danny Castro | Thank you. |
| 02:21:02.22 | Ray Withey | So in my example, that would be one violation, would be $1,000. |
| 02:21:02.29 | Danny Castro | So my example, It could be one violation and that if it continues, given the time frame we give them, then it could be violation number two, another thousand. |
| 02:21:14.28 | Ray Withey | So if someone had a pretty high end and they were renting it for a week or two, they could just say, sure, I'll pay you $1,000. And it could potentially not be a deterrent if they're making enough money on this. Because, again, my example, they rented it for two weeks. It's short-term rental. And it would only be one violation. $1,000 would be their fine. |
| 02:21:40.76 | Danny Castro | Right, with the intent that they seize this operation. They do not do it anymore. |
| 02:21:45.07 | Ray Withey | Yeah, and was there a reason that in the old ordinance, even though the numbers are small, you escalated them? Because for good reason, if someone doesn't get the message the first time, we're going to double it, triple it. Why didn't we do that in this case, especially the way you're defining violation? |
| 02:21:59.63 | Danny Castro | Well, this is modeled after Tiburon has a very similar ordinance in that they cite $1,000, and then for any subsequent violation, it's $1,000, whether it can be the next day or a week later. or Any, with a violation continues to exist, it can continue to be a $1,000 violation. It is different than what our current, we didn't escalate, we didn't increase or double that amount. THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 02:22:26.00 | Jill Hoffman | But we could if we wanted to, right? Yeah. And if I may, Madam. |
| 02:22:27.89 | Mary Wagner | THE FAMILY. |
| 02:22:27.96 | Danny Castro | Thank you. |
| 02:22:28.01 | Mary Wagner | Thank you. Yeah. If I may, Madam Mayor, in response to Councilmember Theodorus' question, an alternative way to look at it is each day is an ongoing violation. So even though the rental is a one-day activity, we could look into the possibility of, it would have to be noticed every day, which is an additional enforcement burden, but we could look into that as well. |
| 02:22:55.08 | Danny Castro | And if I can add, too, our current ordinance for issuing administrative citations allows for, for example, if we are aware that there is a violation and we cite them, they actually have 10 days to appeal the decision of that and request for an appeal hearing or administrative hearing. So they have a chance to challenge the citation and that would have to undergo. I should probably correct that when you do a citation, your first citation, you do have 10 days before you can issue citation number two. After that 10 days, they've lost their right to appeal. So, and they waive and lose the right to appeal. So after day 11, you can... provide citation number two, day 12, day 13, day 14. and so on. |
| 02:23:49.13 | Unknown | Yeah, so Tom's question was the exact question I was going to ask. I'm also concerned about it seems low to me because, I mean, if you just advertise it perhaps once, some of these repeat offenders have repeat clients, and they don't necessarily even have to advertise as much. So I guess my question is... It's right now, the way it's proposed, it's 1,000 per violation and violation meaning one like rental agreement which could be two days or could be 14 days or you know anything less than 30. And then why 10 days to appeal? You know it seems like there would be a lot of staff work you know with the whole appeal process and everything. It speaks it suggests to me that The fine is too low, and the appeal length is too long. So can you respond to why 10 days and the issue regarding recruiting staff costs? |
| 02:25:05.88 | Danny Castro | Sure. Well, the 10 days is what our current ordinance in terms of the administrative citation process currently has. That it provides for an appeal process to allow a hearing for a person who decides that they wish to challenge the the claim that there's a violation. If we were to change that, I don't know whether there's anything statutory that requires that we provide a minimum 10 days to appeal a violation, but it's currently in our ordinance. I'm not sure. In terms of cost recovery, That hasn't been studied to the extent that, and I know in a previous discussion we talked about recovery of costs for code enforcement, In the cities that I've always been with code enforcement, it's not a full cost recovery type of operation. The idea of code enforcement is to um, carry out the rules and to improve quality of life. It's like a neighborhood preservation type program. where we're typically looking for voluntary compliance and when it's achieved, then we're successful. But it's not a matter of saying that it's, you know, fully cost recovery to the program, meaning a cost recovery to the enforcement officer. |
| 02:26:29.58 | Danny Castro | However, a higher penalty fee does provide a deterrence. |
| 02:26:36.09 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:26:37.49 | Ray Withey | I'd like to ask the question Russ frame. I mean, so it's a question of staff. Is this $1,000? If we get a complaint like we have had recently, and now that if we do this and make it $1,000 per violation, is staff going to say, yeah, this is high enough for us to make it worthwhile to prosecute this violation? |
| 02:27:05.74 | Danny Castro | It's certainly higher than what is currently. It was discussed that a higher fee would help help offset costs, help help with the deterrence of this activity. But we haven't done an exact analysis as to whether it's, to what extent it's recovering costs. |
| 02:27:26.90 | Adam Politzer | I'll just add to that if I may. |
| 02:27:27.26 | Danny Castro | Thank you. |
| 02:27:28.07 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:27:31.14 | Adam Politzer | I agree with Danny that you know, we don't have a lot of information to determine if this is high enough or not. Before we went through the pilot program, we did try to... close down one of the worst offenders And on the $100 citation, we had to go through a citation hearing, and hiring the person to oversee the hearing cost the city $3,000. And that was to collect $100 in a fine. So in terms of the staff time that went in before the hearing was actually set up, and then to reach conclusion of a $100 fine, the person happily paid it and went on and continued to be a big offender. And that's when it was apparent to the city that it didn't make sense to be spending $3,000 to collect $1,000. I think from the conversations that Danny and I have had, and we are also recommending that the task force continue these discussions as shared earlier tonight, that this is a good start. And we've talked to the town of Tiburon who have implemented increasing their fees when they actually took the position to not allow short-term rentals in their town, and they increased their fee up to $1,000, and they've had good results. And so that's why we started with this fee. I think as the committee continues their work, they may want to come back with recommended changes as they propose a program to the city, that may have a step increase or lower it and step up, or start at 1,000 and go higher, depending on what they recommend in terms of a program to the city. So I think from the staff's perspective, this is, we're recommending that 1,000 is a good place to start. |
| 02:29:21.77 | Unknown | Okay, thank you for that, Adam. I'll follow up. I wanna make this clear. Before the task force was ever formed, I was asking for this. I mean, I can recall at least a year ago saying, why aren't we charging more fines for these repeat offenders? I mean, for the past easily four years, I have received so many complaints of repeat offenders. This is not, in my mind, I don't think this is rocket science. If it's costing the city $3,000 to hire someone, well then the fine needs to be $3,000. I mean, we need to make it. Anyway, I want to stick with questions. So you've mentioned Tiburon a lot. I'm just curious, why did we look at Tiburon? further away from the city than Sausalito is. Sausalito is right at San Francisco's doorstep. You know, we're very attractive for people who, you know, the overflow for San Francisco. Would you... Would you concur that perhaps Sausalito's problem might be a little bit more than Tiburon's problem? |
| 02:30:37.88 | Danny Castro | We met with Tiburon. They were invited to speak on our workshop to describe their experiences when we had some forums over the past summer. And we felt that through their course of initially experimenting with a possible program, And then city council then move towards banning short term rentals, they then imposed that higher fee of $2,000. And then their experience has been that it's been successful in deterring. And they have been having a very low, in fact, not much enforcement is necessary because they feel that the higher fee has sent a message to the community that, that it's illegal. |
| 02:31:24.86 | Unknown | Well, here's. I'm sorry. |
| 02:31:26.19 | Danny Castro | No, that's all I wanted to comment in terms of why Tiburon was used as a model and why we felt that that could perhaps have some success in Sausalito. |
| 02:31:32.43 | Unknown | Absolutely. It's awesome. So here's a follow-up in how Sassudo is unique. I know that one repeat offender here charges his customers $1,000 as a security deposit, and if there's a complaint, he gets to keep the $1,000. So that's kind of an incentive for him, for them to actually call the police because he gets to keep the thousand. So now we're just saying to him, give us that thousand. You know, I guess I'm, I think you know who I'm talking about too. you know the guy who's got the house and he's also purchased about and sauce little marine and he's using that both of them as air B&B All right. |
| 02:32:21.20 | Jill Hoffman | All right, do we have any other city, do we have any council questions? Yes. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, Ray. |
| 02:32:29.60 | Unknown | I'm sorry. Danny, could we go back to this appeal process? And I want to actually walk through the process of how you get your $1,000. Okay. You get to the point after a period of time of actually issuing the citation, right? I can't remember what the thing you did first, but you get to a stage where you issue a thousand, and let's say we got a thousand dollars for First, for one offense. Okay, one whatever it is, yeah. Okay, the guy appeals. Okay. He's got 10 days. |
| 02:33:10.14 | Unknown | We've got 10 days. Yeah. |
| 02:33:11.39 | Unknown | Thank you. Day 9, he appeals. OK. So there's now an administrative hearing of some description. Explain what this is all about. So he appeals to. Who do you appeal to? |
| 02:33:22.69 | Danny Castro | He appeals to him. So he appeals to the city. |
| 02:33:27.15 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 02:33:27.84 | Danny Castro | and that he appeals he still has to pay his $1,000 fine He may get it back if he in fact wins the appeal. And if he loses we keep the thousand because it's, you know, |
| 02:33:43.99 | Unknown | Right, but who hears the appeal? |
| 02:33:46.10 | Danny Castro | There's a hearing officer that could be an employee or it could be a hired Um, person that the city hires under contract. that hearing officer, provides a public hearing AND, UM, Here's the claimed that that perhaps it was considered to be an error as claimed by the person who received the violation. and provides that, hears it, decides, and makes a ruling. |
| 02:34:22.70 | Unknown | So why can't we have, just like your zoning administrator, right, why wouldn't we have community development director or someone you know the |
| 02:34:36.32 | Danny Castro | I see. The ordinance does provide that it could be an employee. |
| 02:34:39.54 | Unknown | Okay. Why did we hire someone, some guy for $3,000 to do it then? I don't get that. |
| 02:34:47.47 | Mary Wagner | Thank you. if i may vice mayor with you know this isn't a typical uh as typical situation as a zoning ordinance hearing it's really a quasi |
| 02:34:49.25 | Unknown | Yeah. |
| 02:34:57.58 | Mary Wagner | judicial evidentiary type of hearing. And the cases that we have in recent recollection, we've hired this outside hearing officer to conduct the hearing to receive the information and to issue a ruling. One thing that council might want to consider directing staff to come back with or directing us to work with the task force on is, in addition to looking at the amount of the fine, include provisions in our overall administrative code enforcement ordinance that allow the city to recover its costs. So in addition to the penalty or the fine, there's a cost recovery aspect. I looked quickly at Tiburon's ordinance. They do it in the event that there's either a civil or criminal case has been filed in order to do judicial code enforcement. And if the city prevails, they then recover all their costs through that. So I think it'd be helpful for us to pull up other models for you to consider. And I think that applies across the board for code enforcement because it is a costly undertaking and could be helpful in other cases as well. Just... |
| 02:36:04.12 | Unknown | . |
| 02:36:04.15 | Mary Wagner | Oh, sure. |
| 02:36:04.48 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:36:04.52 | Mary Wagner | . I'm sorry. |
| 02:36:05.45 | Unknown | So you mean that if someone got the violation and now wants to appeal it, Pays a thousand. AND THE CITY IS IN THE CITY. then that person could be charged an additional 3,000 for the cost of THEIR OWNERS. of what it takes? |
| 02:36:27.05 | Mary Wagner | I think we need to look into the details of that for you and to determine what the law would allow. I'm not suggesting that we have that information for you tonight, but it's something that you could direct us to do some more work on. |
| 02:36:38.98 | Unknown | some more work on discouragement you know they they you know it isn't a thousand it's the idea is if they appeal and lose then they're they're taking a hit now it's going to cost them uh the cost for doing that the same as yeah with the paying lawyer fees on the other side so that might be one way where they figure you know otherwise if their attitude is well I'll appeal and if I win I get my thousand back but THERE'S ANOTHER SITUATION THERE THAT IF I LOSE IT, It could cost me $3,000 more. On top of the thousand. |
| 02:37:12.48 | Ray Withey | Thank you. |
| 02:37:13.12 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, I need a question. Thank you. |
| 02:37:14.34 | Ray Withey | I do have another question, and this may apply to other violations. |
| 02:37:14.37 | Jill Hoffman | Do you? |
| 02:37:19.52 | Ray Withey | If they decided that it was economically feasible to continue paying the fine, you know, in violation, is there any way, I mean, like in building code violations, is there some point that, you know, they red tag or do something? Or is it just that someone could just accumulate fines for forever, and that's the extent of our... ability to take any action regarding that violation? |
| 02:37:41.61 | Danny Castro | Well, you can accumulate fines and continue to pay them. The ordinance does allow other mechanisms such as placing a lien, the city can place a lien on the property and record it with the county. especially if fines accumulate and it's this compounded amount that that happens to be ignored, that's a possibility. There's other administrative remedies that I'm not prepared to. tell you other than I do know the lien that can be placed. |
| 02:38:12.40 | Mary Wagner | And if I may as well, Council Member Theodorus, administrative code enforcement is one mechanism for code enforcement. If someone's a repeat offender, it's been decided and administrative citations have been issued and they've paid but continues to just go through that process, we may come to the council and recommend judicial code enforcement for someone who is a bad actor and a continual violator. |
| 02:38:12.44 | Danny Castro | I don't think so. |
| 02:38:35.86 | Jill Hoffman | Mm-hmm. Thank you. So in other words, if they're just factoring that in as one of their business costs. |
| 02:38:43.98 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:38:44.23 | Jill Hoffman | Uh-huh, okay, go ahead. |
| 02:38:45.97 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:38:47.03 | Jill Hoffman | No. |
| 02:38:47.98 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:38:48.03 | Jill Hoffman | So I will. |
| 02:38:48.97 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:38:49.02 | Jill Hoffman | Wait. |
| 02:38:49.72 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:38:49.93 | Jill Hoffman | you Okay, any other council questions? No? Do we have public comment on this agenda item? Yes, sir? Have you filled out a speaker card, sir? All right, well, I'm not having any luck with that tonight, but that's. |
| 02:39:05.34 | Kim Von Blahn | Thank you. |
| 02:39:05.61 | Jill Hoffman | If you could state your name, that'd be great. |
| 02:39:06.73 | Kim Von Blahn | I will do that, yeah. Kim Von Blahn, a homeowner and a retired engineer. Thank you also for the task force summary. I have a problem with some of these punitive... THE FAMILY. Fines here, I mean, usually the punitive fine is for a felony or a series of crime with a wanton negligence. that may you know, the crime should fit the, or the penalty should fit the crime. If you want a red light, The fine is $490. and you risk killing people. It's huge, huge risk. So you have mom and pop running the room in the back. for $100, you're going to fine them $1,000. It doesn't make sense. The other question is, What about our constitutional rights? I think the Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive fines. So we've got mom and pop running their back room for 29 days, as I understand this discussion, they could be fined $29,000. Is that fair? Those are my questions. Thank you. |
| 02:40:16.18 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Any other public comment? Okay, so back up here for council discussion. Thank you. |
| 02:40:25.51 | Unknown | So I'll just start. Regarding constitutional rights, I'm a homeowner. And when I bought my home, it came with certain zoning parameters. that were different. It was residential, it was not hotel, was not commercial. So, you know, I do think that something that is complaint driven makes sense. Like I said before, if you're a retiree and you're just renting out a back room in your house because you're house rich and cash poor and you're renting out a room in your house just to make ends meet and you've got parking off street and you're quiet and you're living at home. I mean, like I said, we've got bigger fish to fry here. I'm interested in going after. I really, I don't even think we should go after taxes for those who are, who are wrenching a little room in the back. I really don't. I mean, you know, if they're not shaking the tree and upsetting people. But I want to go after people who are displacing renters, who are taking out our affordable housing stock, who are running businesses in this town and disrupting our quality of life complaint driven offenders people were where you know it's very clear that it's disrupting the neighborhood i personally think that um this proposal ordinance i would entertain in a motion to increase the fine to 3,000 and reduce the days of appeal to five. And I think we have a short-term problem that needs a short-term solution. And if that means increasing things so that we can make sure that staff can go after the big fish who are really hurting our quality of life in our neighborhoods, then we need to create an ordinance now that is going to get there. So that's what I would recommend. And I think we need to move on this. I mean, later on, down the road, the short-term rental task force comes back and says, you know, we recommend this and this is why. You know, that's fine. But I've been asking for this particular increase in fines for easily more than a few years, and I think it's time we do this. We really need to act on this. We need to give our staff tools and our residents the means to be able to enforce the ban. Thanks. |
| 02:43:14.94 | Ray Withey | I would support it for now, but of course, we'd have a longer discussion except we have the task force. And I think we need to look at this. We've raised some of the issues that the task force has to take a look at. What is a violation? How you do it? Do we have it escalating and all that kind of stuff? I do want to make a comment on councilmember Spifer. She said a number of times complaint-driven. I think we have to be very careful. I do not support only complaint-driven because it forces, first of all FURTHER THAN COMPLAINT further than complaint-driven. I think host compliance takes a look at that. And it'll be too late when we have half of the city, that's an exaggeration, of course, but you're doing short-term rentals when we have complaints. So I don't think it's fair. And if you look at any studies on it, I don't think we need to do it. I think the idea of at some point that we may have some reasonable shorter number of days, but I think complaint-driven has proven it doesn't work. It works in a lot of other areas that we have. And this is something that the task force will take a look at and come with some suggestions. But because that was mentioned a lot here today, I want to just be clear that I don't necessarily support only complaint driven type enforcement. |
| 02:44:49.00 | Unknown | Yeah. I think the task force should come back soon with their recommendations. My recommendation would be that We allow people, if they're living in the home, to have someone stay at that home. in a short period of time. THAT I'M And go in a direction that you start off with on a violation, that it's $1,000. And then if they appeal it, and they lose, then it could be up to $3,000. And I think something like that would deter people from All right. Thank you. |
| 02:45:34.80 | Unknown | No. |
| 02:45:35.76 | Unknown | not renting it out so easily, thinking that they're making money on it. |
| 02:45:46.80 | Unknown | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 02:45:46.90 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:45:49.82 | Unknown | No. Strictly sort of focusing on the enforcement piece of it I guess the... The issue is, are we going to pass an ordinance tonight, even though we know there's more work to be done, right? |
| 02:46:06.83 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:46:06.84 | Unknown | I would say yes. What do we set the fine as? Staffs recommended $1,000 and it's allegedly had some effect in Tiberon. Do we go with that for now, knowing that we're going to be revisiting this as a task force come back with his recommendations, staff come back with his recommendations. Or do we... pluck a number out of the air, and that's the problem I have, plucking a number out of the air without some data. So I would say let's start with 1,000 and... |
| 02:46:38.32 | Bjorn Gripenberg | have. |
| 02:46:42.55 | Bjorn Gripenberg | No. |
| 02:46:47.53 | Unknown | That's right. staff's recommendation and then see how it goes and start to build on it if we need to. And in terms of, I think, exploring the cost issue, because just the $3,000, we made up that number because it was a, right. |
| 02:47:04.69 | Unknown | THE FAMILY. I said it could be up to. |
| 02:47:07.76 | Unknown | Right. So I think what Mary indicated is staff need to do some work, just incorporate language into the ordinance to that we recover our costs, whatever it is, might be 15 grand. You know, whatever it is, you know, we recover our costs. That's good. |
| 02:47:21.99 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 02:47:22.02 | Unknown | MAKING A LITTLE BIT OF |
| 02:47:22.31 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 02:47:23.34 | Unknown | So, |
| 02:47:23.47 | Ray Withey | I love it. |
| 02:47:23.66 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:47:23.69 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Thank you. |
| 02:47:24.35 | Unknown | So do we want to sort of like wait and do nothing until it's all perfect or just move ahead? And I say move ahead with what we got right now with $1,000 and let's keep improving it. That would be my recommendation. |
| 02:47:36.97 | Jill Hoffman | THE END OF THE I like all the comments. So I have a couple, I'm sorry. I do have a question though for a follow up question based on these. Is the cost recovery, would that be part of this ordinance, or would that affect another part of the code section? What are our code sections that we're dealing with? What? |
| 02:47:58.96 | Mary Wagner | It would be part of your overall administrative penalty section. So it's the same chapter of the municipal code. So it would apply to more than just short term rentals that apply to other code violations that go through that same process. |
| 02:48:14.23 | Jill Hoffman | Great, so that would be something that you would come back with at a later time, it wouldn't be tonight. Correct. Okay, well I think we're all in agreement on that, that we'd like staff, direct staff to look into that and to figure out how we can do cost recovery. I think that's a really important piece. Can we, same question for reduction of the appeal period from ten days to five days. Is that council member Pfeiffer brought up, is that possible or how would we go about doing that? |
| 02:48:41.13 | Mary Wagner | I think that's another one that needs a little bit more research. I mean, I think that you need a reasonable appeal time. And whether five days is considered reasonable, I don't know. I would need to look at that. |
| 02:48:54.06 | Jill Hoffman | So I think we're all sort of in agreement on that. We'd like to direct you to do further investigation on that and to come back with a recommendation on that. So now we're left with do we want to go forward with the ordinance right now as it's proposed? $1,000, do we want to wait, or do we want to increase the fine? I'm leaning toward going forward with the ordinance now. Yeah, and I don't know, what do you guys, can I ask for further input on how you feel about the fine, the number? |
| 02:49:25.82 | Unknown | I say we can always do a repair and change it |
| 02:49:27.76 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 02:49:30.46 | Unknown | THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 02:49:30.59 | Jill Hoffman | and amend it to |
| 02:49:31.77 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:49:31.79 | Unknown | or not? |
| 02:49:32.62 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 02:49:33.19 | Unknown | Of course, I support raising the fine. I mean, we heard the city manager say it cost them $3,000 to hire someone. |
| 02:49:33.24 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:49:42.29 | Unknown | If the votes aren't here, definitely I want to move forward on what we've got because anything is better than that. The $100 we're charging right now. How does it work? |
| 02:49:51.57 | Jill Hoffman | How do you guys feel about if we did an escalator? Like we start with 1,000 for your first offense and then 2,000 and 3,000, up to three. Because I think that's a really good deterrent. That's fine with me. How do you guys feel about that? |
| 02:50:05.74 | Unknown | Like I said, I'll take anything at this point. |
| 02:50:09.74 | Ray Withey | As long as staff feels they can do it, I think it makes sense. Because, again, the likely thing they'll give one violation, they're not going to be able to give this daily thing. And then next time around, everything goes. You get a little bump in it. |
| 02:50:10.01 | Unknown | As long as staff feels easy. |
| 02:50:19.50 | Unknown | You get a little bump in that. Thank you. |
| 02:50:20.66 | Ray Withey | So I would go, I would go with the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because frankly, we're not negotiating with anybody. It's illegal. These are people that aren't supposed to be doing it. And if we tell them once we have to bring an action, doubling it doesn't seem that hard, and tripling. So I'd go 1,005. |
| 02:50:29.52 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:50:29.54 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:50:29.71 | Unknown | THE FAMILY. Yeah. |
| 02:50:36.07 | Unknown | in the future. I'm fine with when... |
| 02:50:39.63 | Ray Withey | and then, okay. |
| 02:50:40.79 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:50:40.83 | Unknown | Let me ask our staff, how do you guys feel about that? |
| 02:50:43.04 | Jill Hoffman | How do you guys feel about? Have a good one. |
| 02:50:46.73 | Unknown | THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 02:50:46.77 | Adam Politzer | No, no, no. Let's do it. |
| 02:50:46.77 | Jill Hoffman | No, no, no. Let's go see what you do. I'm kidding. |
| 02:50:47.85 | Unknown | Yeah. I don't know. |
| 02:50:49.23 | Jill Hoffman | How do you get input from Mary and Danny? |
| 02:50:51.64 | Adam Politzer | I would say consistent to how we have it now, which, so what I'm hearing would be one, two, |
| 02:50:54.55 | Jill Hoffman | Yep. |
| 02:50:58.21 | Adam Politzer | And then five. |
| 02:51:00.17 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, okay. And then every event after would be five. |
| 02:51:00.59 | Adam Politzer | And then every event after would be five. Thank you. |
| 02:51:03.27 | Jill Hoffman | ANYBODY OPPOSED TO THAT? |
| 02:51:03.46 | Adam Politzer | . No. |
| 02:51:05.25 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, so let's do the let's any anybody want to make a motion or maybe I should make a motion. |
| 02:51:08.77 | Adam Politzer | Before you make the motion, we did hear two comments from two council members about the enforcement selectivity, and we don't have that. So if someone doesn't like their neighbor and they're renting it out, they can call us, and that's a complaint. If we use host compliance to come and give us the listing of it, they'll all get a code enforcement letter telling them to see. So we don't don't have you know that that's part of the challenge that the community development department has on all code enforcement actions is that we can't pick and choose you know when they come in we have to investigate and hopefully we get people to self-comply when they get the courtesy notice |
| 02:51:26.46 | Bjorn Gripenberg | That's a good thing. |
| 02:51:48.68 | Ray Withey | Thank you. |
| 02:51:49.12 | Unknown | So. |
| 02:51:50.15 | Ray Withey | Just to clarify my comment was, it was just to say, and it was really more directed to the task force that we don't necessarily are directing them to find only complaint driven. And it's a different thing in the interim period and then we'll look toward the task force for the recommendations. |
| 02:51:50.18 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:52:05.74 | Unknown | And as you know, I personally am very comfortable with complaint-driven, just because I think we've got a lot of things going on in town, and there are some really bad violators that I think we could go after. Anyway, I would move... uh, move to approve. Um, I'm just reading the, um, What is the motion here? I guess a move to approve the ordinance amendment to Saucydo Municipal Code section 110.110, administrative citation collection, to add a specific penalty fine for violations of the Saucydo Municipal Code for rental of a dwelling unit, accessory dwelling unit, bedroom, or room or rooms in a dwelling unit for a period of less than 30 days, with the first violation at 1,000, the second violation at 2,000, and the third violation at 5,000. Second. |
| 02:53:00.81 | Ray Withey | Is that... 5,000. |
| 02:53:04.11 | Unknown | Third and subsequent violations at 5,000. Okay. |
| 02:53:09.82 | Ray Withey | Second. Yep, second. |
| 02:53:10.14 | Jill Hoffman | Second. All in favor? Aye. Very good. Motion passes unanimous. |
| 02:53:12.72 | Ray Withey | Bye. |
| 02:53:17.09 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, good work, excellent. Moving on to our city manager reports, we're on item seven. Yeah, thank you, Danny, and thank you to the task force. Thank you, Russ. |
| 02:53:26.49 | Unknown | Thank you, Russ. |
| 02:53:27.23 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. and the task force members. |
| 02:53:29.05 | Unknown | Yeah, thanks. |
| 02:53:29.97 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, item 7, city manager reports, council member reports, city council appointments and other council business. |
| 02:53:38.76 | Adam Politzer | City manager. |
| 02:53:38.83 | Jill Hoffman | City manager. |
| 02:53:47.45 | Adam Politzer | Um, And between now and then, a lot of holiday events in town that you're getting invitations to. including the city's women's club, uh... the the Sausalito Winterfest, so lots of good things going on in town. But happy to answer any questions from the council. |
| 02:54:08.24 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, any questions? No public comment on that item. See none. I'm assuming there's no council discussion. Moving on, council member committee reports. Do we have any council member committee reports? Thank you. |
| 02:54:24.93 | Ray Withey | I do. Last night I attended the MCCMC Homeless Committee, which is a reconstituted reconstitution of a committee that went on for about 18 months and I think it's been over 12 months and their objective and it's just MCC MC so it's just the city's involved and their objectives are reduce chronic homelessness in Marin County, reduce the total number of homeless individuals and families in Marin and support implementation of appropriate countywide and regional solutions so it's a very ambitious Um, goals and objectives. And what came out of the one last time, if you recall, was they decided to support the REST program. And we had a presentation here, and we made commitments to fund them for three years. And I think we're one year into it or two years? We're two years. |
| 02:55:16.19 | Unknown | Second year. |
| 02:55:16.77 | Ray Withey | Second year. Second year. So this will be looking forward. There was also discussion at that time of the city's of finding some way that there would be some permanent establishment. And how that would be funded would be way beyond any of our contributions from REST and all that kind of thing remains to be seen. The meeting last night was the first one. and They were just looking to settle on the objectives. I'm just handing the baton over to whomever would be taking over this. It'll be important to have someone on there for a few reasons. One is homelessness is an important issue for us as community members in Marin County. But secondly, there's this discussion, there's money issues about how it's going to be funded. And as you know, what comes out of that committee will come to hear, and we'll be getting asks based on what everyone else does. And thirdly, it hasn't been articulated yet, but one of the goals will be where are these centers might be when they do. And we have to really be there to have our input on that kind of thing. And there are minor issues. For example, I know the mayor had some concern about how our Richardson Bay anchor routes or mariners are characterized, and of course they're characterized in them as homeless at that. And so there's just issues. So it's very important. I think yesterday was just the first meeting that will go on. I made one of the suggestions that I think they need a county elected there because a lot of this is the county, and this is only the cities that are representative. And if you think of a lot of other of our committees, we have both supervisors and city council members. So I think the next meeting will be sometime in January, and I just recommend that when there's a transition that there'll be someone appointed who has some interest in this issue. But it'll be both on the homeless side, but also as far as there'll be financial implications and possibly other implications involved. |
| 02:57:16.17 | Unknown | Thank you. I have a quick question. If you're a member of a public and you'd like to know when they're going to meet next, how would you find out? Oh. |
| 02:57:24.76 | Ray Withey | Well, Kate Collin is the chair. And I think that's off my head. Kate Collin is? And she's a council member of Sammerfeld. |
| 02:57:30.23 | Unknown | Kate Collin is... Okay. |
| 02:57:34.50 | Ray Withey | And she'll be. |
| 02:57:35.36 | Unknown | I think it is important that we advocate that the anchor else are not not homeless and in fact, they're illegal. So |
| 02:57:40.27 | Ray Withey | Yeah, I'm Well, that's kind of a county... uh, that's a big issue in terms of how they do that. So it's a little bit bigger. But you can start there. That'd be one place that you may want to. |
| 02:57:48.62 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 02:57:48.64 | Jill Hoffman | Well, we- |
| 02:57:52.88 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Any other council member, committee, thank you Tom. Any other council member, committee reports? Any public comment on this item? Thank you. No further discussion, it sounds like. Okay, appointments to boards and commissions. We're up to item 7C. So we interviewed two people we had to applicants today and for our planning commission and further the soon to be vacancy our planning commission that will be made by uh... miss cox elevating to the city council and so We do that by I nominate somebody. I always get this wrong. I'm sorry. Okay, so I'd like to nominate Janelle Kelman. FOR THE PLANNING COMMISSION. |
| 02:58:38.56 | Unknown | I'll second that. |
| 02:58:39.96 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:58:39.98 | Unknown | I guess I just have a question as to process because I mean did we Did we do enough outreach and announcements with regards, I mean, we have strong candidates, but I'm just a little bit unsure as to the outreach we did for the applicants. Because we only had two for this position. |
| 02:58:59.89 | Patricia Pigman | I do. |
| 02:59:03.87 | Adam Politzer | I think that we've been doing a lot of outreach since Joan has been serving. for us over the extended period of time. And we've asked planning commissioners, I've asked staff, we've put it out in announcements, and I know that many of the city council members have been also talking to individuals in the community, asking for their ability. So this is the first time in many, many that we've had more than that we've had that we've had any actual applicants so we started off with what we thought was for one wasn't qualified because the applicant didn't live in the city limits and the third chose to withdraw her name and it left this with two. But we think that they're both qualified candidates, and so it's up to the council if they want to appoint or not. |
| 03:00:02.26 | Unknown | One to a point. Yeah, and I agree you have a very qualified person. And not only that, they have been on the Planning Commission before. And I think at this time here, with Joan coming on, I think it's important that we get someone that could get right up to speed very, very quickly. And I think Janelle fits that. |
| 03:00:11.88 | Bjorn Gripenberg | you |
| 03:00:12.03 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 03:00:12.26 | Bjorn Gripenberg | Bye. |
| 03:00:21.31 | Unknown | Yeah, I... |
| 03:00:25.14 | Unknown | very, very qualified. You won't get anybody. |
| 03:00:28.77 | Unknown | So I've said this before, but I think it's helpful to to say before. we go into interviews and appointments for Planning Commission that we kind of announce it publicly up here in the dais, too, because I did not realize that we were going to be interviewing and appointing. until we got the packet. |
| 03:00:50.88 | Unknown | And we weren't either. But the individual that came in is so, so qualified that it rises above all the others. And I don't think you're going to get a better one. So could we call for a vote on that? |
| 03:01:06.03 | Mary Wagner | If I may, Madam Mayor? Yeah, there's a... The process is slightly different for these appointments. So the mayor's made her nominations, which it's her right to go first. You ask for any other nominations, and then everyone has an opportunity to vote on the candidates. |
| 03:01:07.87 | Unknown | Yeah, there's the... |
| 03:01:08.97 | Bjorn Gripenberg | the problem. |
| 03:01:15.09 | Unknown | And then yeah, to go first. |
| 03:01:21.98 | Unknown | you |
| 03:01:22.03 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 03:01:22.13 | Unknown | DEMONSTRUCTED. |
| 03:01:23.14 | Unknown | okay so okay so i'm just going to abstain i don't think we've had enough time to you know really do outreach i mean i i certainly haven't i just didn't know it was happening tonight until we got the packet the packet |
| 03:01:36.47 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 03:01:36.49 | Patty Stoliere | the packet |
| 03:01:37.40 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 03:01:37.94 | Unknown | you |
| 03:01:38.18 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. |
| 03:01:38.90 | Unknown | Thank you. |
| 03:01:39.07 | Jill Hoffman | Do we have any other nominations? |
| 03:01:41.28 | Unknown | No. |
| 03:01:41.80 | Patty Stoliere | Thank you. |
| 03:01:41.96 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Okay, so we're going to vote on Janelle Kelman for the planning commission. All in favor? Aye. |
| 03:01:46.73 | Unknown | I... |
| 03:01:48.54 | Jill Hoffman | Abstain. Okay, all right, thank you very much. |
| 03:01:48.55 | Unknown | Abstain. |
| 03:01:53.23 | Jill Hoffman | Moving on. But I do see Councilmember Pfeiffer's point. And I, yeah. So I. |
| 03:02:04.08 | Unknown | And I want to clarify. |
| 03:02:05.43 | Unknown | And I want to clarify, too, that I'm sorry, Mayor Hoffman, because I had not articulated that view to you before. I'm looking at past councils when this has happened. I just... You know, anyway. |
| 03:02:20.53 | Jill Hoffman | I can see that. What? I think that we should try to implement that in the future, that we're taking nominations for applications, and then we're going to vote on. I don't see a problem with saying we're going to nominate and vote on this night. |
| 03:02:33.85 | Ray Withey | Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I think that's fine. |
| 03:02:37.91 | Jill Hoffman | I think that's fine. I mean, that's good. |
| 03:02:39.28 | Ray Withey | I would say that generally I think it's a good idea to wait until next week. I think in this case we're having a change in council. We actually need someone and we have an excellent candidate. But I'm just saying, and I wouldn't even make it a hard and fast rule, but I think it's a good idea to do it the next time. |
| 03:02:55.01 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, all right, future agenda items. We're at 7D now. Future agenda items, anybody? Yes? |
| 03:03:02.97 | Unknown | Okay. Oh, I've got my future agenda. I say this all the time, South Gateway Plan. The reason I wasn't in some of these meetings tonight in protest, I've been asking for that for a couple years now, and it was promised when we reviewed the budget. So I would... Oh, yeah. I was told it would be agendized this year. And... and it it should have been anyway that's what i would agendize and then i would um Also, as part of that agenda item, by the way, I would send a notice to everyone living along the corridor. Before I would spend another hour, another dollar of consultant dollar, taxpayer dollar, staff time on any of that plan. Notify everyone it impacts living along the corridor in Hurricane Gulch. And the other future agenda item I would recommend is to ban leaf blowers. The other one is to ban the northbound buses on the narrow Alexander corridor. With all the bikes, it's just too dangerous. So OK. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. |
| 03:04:23.05 | Jill Hoffman | Okay, any other future agenda items? No. Any other reports of significance from the City Council? I have one very important report of significance, and that is to wish Council Member Weiner a happy birthday tomorrow. I know. Well, it's sometime soon. I'm not saying when it is. It's early now. I think we should sing happy birthday to him. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Councilman Harwiner. I look pretty good for 90, don't I? Happy birthday to you. |
| 03:04:58.90 | Unknown | I look pretty good for 90, don't I? |
| 03:05:00.96 | Unknown | Bye. |
| 03:05:03.71 | Jill Hoffman | Very good. |
| 03:05:04.88 | Unknown | I'm going to get a cat in their microphone. Thank you. |
| 03:05:06.28 | Jill Hoffman | I didn't even have the microphone on. And all right, we're going to adjourn tonight in memory of our dear friend Alice May, who has passed on. Thank you very much. And we are done. All right. |
Helene Wester Swanson — Neutral: Requested the council consider three items: exploring sanctuary city status, ratifying CEDAW, and improving public hygiene facilities at Dunphy Park for health and accessibility. ▶ 📄