| Time | Speaker | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00:00.17 | Unknown | Thank you. We like a snake. |
| 00:00:02.63 | Heidi Scoble | Okay, our audio is on. Now we're going to start with our video. |
| 00:00:10.32 | Heidi Scoble | Good evening, Mayor Cleveland Knowles and Council members. This meeting is being held pursuant to Section 3 of Executive Order N-29-20 issued by Governor Newsom on March 17, 2020. And all members are joining this meeting telephonically through Zoom and is broadcast live on the city's website and on cable TV channel 27. |
| 00:00:31.91 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, everyone, welcome to the regular meeting of the Sausalito City Council on Tuesday, October 27th. Heidi, would you please call the roll? |
| 00:00:41.26 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman? But presently, Councilmember Burns? |
| 00:00:45.48 | Jill Hoffman | here. |
| 00:00:46.42 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox? Thank you. |
| 00:00:47.74 | Ray Withy | here. |
| 00:00:48.50 | Heidi Scoble | Vice mayor with you. |
| 00:00:49.91 | Jill Hoffman | here. |
| 00:00:50.28 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 00:00:51.06 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. Thank you. |
| 00:00:52.82 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Here. |
| 00:00:53.09 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. All members are present and there is a quorum. |
| 00:00:56.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, so we are starting this meeting at six o'clock and the first item on our agenda is items D1 through D4, which are our closed session items. Um, Are there any members of the public who would like to comment on any of the items that we'll consider in closed session? |
| 00:01:18.06 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles, there are no other participants in this meeting, and therefore there are no public comments. |
| 00:01:23.95 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. So with that, we will adjourn into closed session. We will return at 7 o'clock for our open session regular meeting. We'll see you then. |
| 00:01:57.53 | Jill Hoffman | you |
| 00:02:08.65 | Heidi Scoble | The video is on and now we are admitting all of our participants. And we are ready to go. |
| 00:02:16.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, great welcome back everybody to the regular meeting of the Sausalito City Council on Tuesday October 27th we are just coming. back out of open session and we have, I mean, I'm sorry, coming back into open session from closed session. And we have no closed session announcements. So we'll move on to item 3B, approval of our agenda. Do I have a motion or any changes? So moved. Second. Okay, could our clerk please call the roll? |
| 00:02:51.26 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman? Yes. Councilmember Burns. |
| 00:02:55.65 | Joe Burns | Yes. |
| 00:02:56.41 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox? Yes. |
| 00:02:57.98 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 00:02:58.57 | Heidi Scoble | Vice Mayor Withey? |
| 00:02:59.85 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 00:02:59.87 | Heidi Scoble | Yes. |
| 00:03:00.05 | Joe Burns | Yes. |
| 00:03:00.69 | Heidi Scoble | and Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 00:03:02.43 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. That motion carries five, zero. So we are going to move on to special presentations and mayor announcements. Before our main item, I did just want to remind everyone who everyone probably knows this unless you've been under a rock that it is one week. until election day, November 3rd, next Tuesday. But I did just want to give our city clerk the opportunity to let everyone know of kind of new voting opportunities in Sausalito under COVID. So Heidi Scoble, if you could just give a brief summary of how in addition to kind of our normal procedures, people can vote this year in Sassolito. |
| 00:03:50.10 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you and good evening Madam Mayor, Council members and meeting participants. Appreciate this opportunity to provide you with a quick update regarding voting in Sausalito. As you know 2020 has been the year of constant change and with that the Marin County Elections Office is introducing early in-person voting this year. What that means is that the Sausalito polling location at City Hall will be open for three days prior to Tuesday. So on Saturday, October 31st from 9 to 5, you can come to the City Hall to vote. We have Sunday, November 1st from 9 to 5, Monday, November 2nd from 9 to 5, and on voting day, Tuesday, November 3rd from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. the polling location will be open In the spirit of change, we've also changed the location of where you can vote. Historically, the voting has always been within the council chambers, but with COVID and the need for social distancing, we've moved the location down to the exercise room. This will allow a much larger area where the voting booths can be spread out. We're also implementing a different circulation pattern with entrance coming in through the exercise room, and then you would exit through the recreation room or the game room. Access to the exercise room will be from the first floor of City Hall. This will be at the northeast corner of the building where the Park and Rec's offices are right on top of the patio adjacent to the basketball courts. I want to also let everyone know that we will have a ballot box within the exercise room as well. So if you want to come already prepared with your ballot, you can just go into the exercise room and drop off your ballot. The ballot boxes... in the exercise room as well. So if you want to come already prepared with your ballot, you can just go into the exercise room and drop off your ballot. The ballot boxes will be available in those four days. If you miss the voting times over the weekend, you can also still drop off your ballot at the library in Marin City. And then if you wanna make double sure that your ballot actually goes into a box, you can always go to the Marin Civic Center and there is a ballot box outside of the Civic Center at 3501 Civic Center Drive in San Rafael. Other items that we thought would be important to note is that if anyone has been around Caledonia and B Street, there is a lot of construction going on. We are working with the Department of Public Works to get more information out to the public prior to this weekend to identify whether or not street parking access on B Street will be available. We understand that the city hall parking lot will be available. However, people that park in the parking lot will need to walk down the street and access that lower level to vote. Other notable points would be that the Marin County Transit is offering free ridership this weekend, starting on Saturday through November 3rd to promote voting. So if anyone wants to use public transportation to vote, you're able to do that and it will be free. the Marin County Transit is also offering a special promotion. If you take a selfie, hashtag transit to vote on Facebook or Twitter and you will be entered into a contest where you can win a 31 day free pass. And lastly, regarding provisional voting, if you've forgotten to register to vote or you forgot to re-register to vote, you can always go to the Marin County Civic Center, go to suite 121 to file a conditional voting ballot and their offices will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday. So with that, I will conclude my information. |
| 00:07:46.64 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you very much. That's all very helpful. And I think we also have additional information in the currents if you didn't already mentioned that and so I hope everybody will take the opportunity to vote on or before next Tuesday. Um, great. So we now have, um, a special proclamation, but I want to make sure that the |
| 00:08:12.90 | Heidi Scoble | Yes. |
| 00:08:13.36 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes. Okay, great. So we have a proclamation of the mayor of the city of Sausalito recognizing the dedicated service and contributions of Susan Rose to the Sausalito Sister Cities Program. and the city of Sausalito. So we had a number of hands in this proclamation, and it's a little long, so I hope everyone will bear with me but it's well deserved. Whereas in the summer of 2006, Susan Rowe being a homestay host along with her husband Tom Clark for two delegates from Sakai-de Japan worked with the city to revamp the existing Sausalito Sister Cities program to make it more organized, functional and effective and Whereas in February 2012, Susan Rowe was elected to be the chairperson for a consolidated Sausalito Sister Cities program. including Viña del Mar Chile, Sakai de Japan and Qashqai, Portugal. is authorized by the city council to replace the former non-profit 501c3 group And whereas over her long tenure as the chairperson of the Sausalito Sister Cities program, she led the effort to reestablish the relationship of Vinaldo Marchelli um, Oops, I'm sorry, Chile in 2011 and established the newest sister city relationship in 2013 with Qashqai, Portugal. And whereas every year since 2006, Susan and Tom have opened their home to a Sakai-Day Japan homestay student. with the renewal of the Viña del Mar Chile relationship. Susan and Tom, since 2011, have hosted a Chilean businesswoman during their seven-day stay in Sausalito. Their home is a haven for global travelers and an exchange of cultural learning. Yeah. Whereas, Pending a permanent display within the city, Susan and Tom's home on Lincoln Drive has become an archive of safekeeping for all historical details of the Sakaide, Viña del Mar, and Qashqash relationships. Thank you. including gifts and tokens from Japan, Chile, and Kashkis. Susan has learned the culture and meaning of gift giving in Japan. Seeing firsthand how we can empower women in Chile to dream of new possibilities and given student sailors the opportunity to say all the world and experience global relationships. And whereas during Susan's 14 years as chair of the Sausalito Sister Cities program, she has been a consistent representative and ambassador to each sister city. Having traveled seven times to Japan, having traveled six times to Vina del Mar, and have visited Qashqai once since its inauguration in 2013. Each city, their citizens and students have benefited significantly from Susan's dedication and commitment to this unique people to people diplomacy program. And whereas Susan has demonstrated a relentless devotion and been an inimitable champion of all things Sassolito's sister cities related. including holding hostage. |
| 00:11:18.74 | Joan Cox | Mayor. I am so sorry. I just got a text saying that Susan Rowe is still trying to get onto Zoom. even though we have Susan said, |
| 00:11:29.04 | Ray Withy | iPad. |
| 00:11:30.27 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:11:30.30 | Ray Withy | I think that's really a shame. Um, Okay. Well, So Heidi. |
| 00:11:38.07 | Jill Hoffman | I hate. |
| 00:11:39.31 | Ray Withy | I don't know. I really reread all of this. |
| 00:11:39.99 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:11:40.02 | Joe Burns | I dream. I'm sorry. Thank you. This is a good time for a break. |
| 00:11:44.51 | Ray Withy | Heidi is in the waiting room? |
| 00:11:46.92 | Heidi Scoble | No, there's no one in the waiting room. Susan was online right before we started, and she jumped on, and I'm not quite sure what happened to her, but we have no one in the waiting room. |
| 00:11:58.99 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Well, how about this? Why don't we take general public comment, see if we can get Susan here. And if we can't, we'll just wait a little bit longer. How does that sound? Well, I'm sorry to everyone. Sorry. Thank you for letting me know, Joan. |
| 00:12:14.85 | Joe Burns | There are a lot of sister city representatives on the call. I'm glad they heard it. And then when Susan jumps in, maybe we can just give her a quick shout. |
| 00:12:22.84 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Oh, well, I wasn't. Okay. |
| 00:12:24.22 | Joe Burns | Oh, or read it, whatever. |
| 00:12:25.74 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. I can start off where I left off and we can Okay. All right. So let's move on to general public comment on items not on the agenda. This is item One. to communications. So this is a chance for members of the public to comment on items that are not on our agenda tonight. I see Carolyn Revell, welcome. Actually first, Heidi, do you wanna just let people know how they can participate via Zoom? |
| 00:12:58.81 | Heidi Scoble | Yes, public comment will be accepted by video or audience audio participation via Zoom. Video or audio public comment participation is limited to three minutes per speaker. If you would like to make a comment, please raise your hand in the Zoom application and you'll be called upon when it's your time to speak. To raise your hand from a phone, press star nine. Each speaker will be notified when the time has elapsed. |
| 00:13:22.52 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, Caroline, welcome. |
| 00:13:33.44 | Carolyn Revell | THE END OF THE able to do it. Okay. Well, hello, good evening, Madam Mayor, members of the council. I'm Carolyn Revelle, 515 North Street. Since PG&E power shutoffs are on everyone's mind recently, The neighbors on North and Fourth Street want to remind you that we're still living with the new power pole festooned with sectionalizing devices that was erected with no public process on July 24th in front of for Weiner's house. when Mark Van Gorder addressed the count of PG&E, addressed the Council on September 8th. Each of you expressed your concern at the high handed way the company had treated your citizens. You also elicited Mr. Van Gorder's commitment that PG&E would work with us to find a satisfactory solution. We need your continued support. regarding the lack of public process, I suggest that the city attorney be asked to investigate what gives PG&E the legal right to erect such a poll on city right-of-way without a public process. following council member Withy's concern expressed on September 8th, The city of Sausalito should work with other local governments to challenge the power the state has given PG&E or at least lobby our state legislators on our behalf to redress the harm done to our small group of neighbors. Secondly, we asked the city to advocate for Rule 20A underground funding for our block of 4th Street and put the block on the city's priority list for such funding since PG&E has deemed it a critical power corridor. and it does adjoin a public recreation area. And finally, we ask that city staff again, help facilitate a meeting with PG&E representatives in the next few weeks. so that we can find a mutually agreeable site to relocate the pole after fire season. if undergrounding is not feasible you've given your commitment to help us and We have every anticipation that you will continue to do so. Thank you. |
| 00:15:23.84 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. Holly Holderman. Welcome. |
| 00:15:34.64 | Holly Holderman | Can you hear me? |
| 00:15:35.80 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 00:15:35.82 | Holly Holderman | Yes, we can. Welcome. Oh, great. That's a first. Okay, so... I'm just calling to support our neighborhood group, which is Fourth and North Neighborhood Association that Carolyn is a part of. And to let you know that we have Um, Hired an attorney to represent us to make sure that our rights aren't trampled on by PG&E or anyone else associated with this situation with the power pole. and we're all still quite distressed, and we know it's fire season. but um we're not going away and this is going to be something that lingers on to the next city manager The next mayor. the next group of city council members and you know, we're just calling in to voice our opinions. |
| 00:16:27.84 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you very much. Bill Hines, welcome. |
| 00:16:39.50 | Bill Hines | Sorry, just wanted to unmute there. I wanted to kind of flag an issue for the council that has recently come to Sausalito Beautiful's attention. I understand recently that some regulations were sort of passed on consent regarding vegetation management plans or vegetation management in the city And I think it is... |
| 00:17:03.85 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. I'm sorry, I'm going to interrupt you. I think this item that you're talking about, are you talking about the WUI vegetation management? issue because that is on our agenda tonight. |
| 00:17:15.82 | Bill Hines | We are. I wasn't sure if... this was necessarily the same agenda. I can be really brief with what's kind of on our minds. |
| 00:17:26.97 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I think that's actually under seven C because, um, when it was on consent, someone asked that we put it on our regular agenda. |
| 00:17:27.09 | Bill Hines | I think that's all. |
| 00:17:35.55 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. |
| 00:17:35.78 | Bill Hines | Okay. Perfect. |
| 00:17:37.35 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Great. I'm sorry to interrupt you. |
| 00:17:37.42 | Bill Hines | Thank you. |
| 00:17:39.46 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, Alice Merrill, welcome. |
| 00:17:44.03 | Alice Merrill | TODAY. Okay, later. I'm going to just talk without video. Um, I. Is there going to be time to talk about Susan Rowe? Is she going to come on and we'll get to see her? |
| 00:17:56.57 | Joan Cox | He's on. |
| 00:17:57.48 | Alice Merrill | She is on. |
| 00:17:58.38 | Joan Cox | Alice. |
| 00:17:58.82 | Alice Merrill | Thank you. |
| 00:17:58.83 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:17:58.85 | Alice Merrill | OK, I'm going to tell you, Susan Rowe. that you one time put out a thing that said, All city. Hot luck. in the honor of the sister cities. And I thought that's the craziest idea I have ever heard of in my life. All city potluck, but I'm going to go to it and I'm going to see how it goes. And it was at the Bay Model, and it was one of the coolest things that I've ever been to. And it was you who did it. And it was the exact right number of people. It was the exact right place. we had the drums, the Japanese drums and It was a potluck. It was just, it was so cool. And I will thank you forever for having done that. And I really appreciate. that We got to do that here in Sausalito and all city potluck. So thank you. Thank you. |
| 00:18:52.26 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Thank you, Alice. And that's a perfect segue back to our, we're gonna end general public comment and we are gonna segue back to our |
| 00:18:52.28 | Alice Merrill | Great. |
| 00:19:02.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Number one, presentation of a proclamation by the mayor for Susan Rowe. So welcome Susan, I understand that you're here now. I'm sorry that you had difficulties. signing on. So I'm just going to take a quick poll from the council. Should I just start where I left off or? I was coming to the good part about her. |
| 00:19:23.88 | Joe Burns | I'd like to see Susan's face as you read it, if we can pull it up. |
| 00:19:26.65 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. We would love to have her on. This is so exciting. We're just amazed by all your dedicated years of service. Do we have Susan? She's going to have to speak to bring her up, I think, onto my screen. Yes. |
| 00:19:43.90 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 00:19:43.95 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 00:19:43.96 | Heidi Scoble | And Mayor Cleveland Knowles, I am not seeing- |
| 00:19:47.17 | Joan Cox | Thank you. Clark. She's under the name Clark. Heidi, I'm not able to text you. So I'm trying to get your number from the city manager, but she's under the name Clark. |
| 00:19:48.23 | Heidi Scoble | Okay. |
| 00:19:55.51 | Heidi Scoble | Okay. I'm sorry. |
| 00:19:56.06 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:19:56.23 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. Okay, perfect. I assumed that Clark was Tom Clark and I provided co-host functions already. So all Susan needs to do is unmute and share her video and we can send a little prompt as well. |
| 00:20:19.64 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Hey. All right. That's awesome. Hi. Welcome Susan. |
| 00:20:23.35 | Susan Rowe | Hi. |
| 00:20:25.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you, Susan. All right. Well, we were in the middle of reading an exceedingly long proclamation, documenting all your amazing accomplishments. So I'm going to, if it's okay with you, I'm going to start back up where I left off and, um, honor you. |
| 00:20:43.48 | Joan Cox | We captured it on videotape, the first part. |
| 00:20:46.42 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I don't know. Alright, so I'm gonna... go back just to cut a little bit. So, whereas, so this is a proclamation of the mayor of the city of Sausalito, recognizing the dedicated service and contributions of Susan Rowe to the Sausalito Sister Cities program and the city of Sausalito. And then we have a number of paragraphs that I've read and I'll pick up where, whereas during Susan's 14 years as chair of the Sausalito sister cities program, She has been a consistent representative and ambassador to each sister city. having traveled seven times to Japan, having traveled six times to Viña del Mar, and having visited Qashqai once since its inauguration in 2013. Each city, their citizens and students have benefited significantly from Susan's dedication and commitment to this unique people to people diplomacy program. and Whereas Susan has demonstrated a relentless devotion and then an inevitable champion of all things Sausalito's Sister Cities related. including holding hostage a group of US Marines in the elevator of the San Martin Hotel and Vina del Mar. in order to expound on the virtues of the people-to-people Sister City Program established by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. And Whereas Susan and former city council member Herb Weiner shared a special relationship traveling to each sister city and working together to develop and enhance each program which included extended karaoke sessions in Sakai day. And whereas having been inspired by her travels to Chile and now and to now pursue development of a Marine Mammal Research and Rescue Center in Chile. and to assist with fundraising for the San Francisco Zoo. Susan continues to contribute to local and international communities and follow her passion. Whereas, in keeping with her committed leadership style, Susan has recruited new and diverse local leaders for all aspects of Sausalito's Sister City program to ensure its continued success in the coming years. Now, therefore, the city of Sausalito wishes to recognize and wholeheartedly thank Susan Rowe for all she has contributed to the Sausalito Sister Cities Program and the many, many, many hours she has given and continues to give to our community. In witness thereof, I, Susan Cleveland Knowles, mayor of the city, Sausalito, have here unto my hand and cause the seal of the city of Sausalito to be affixed this 27th day of October 2020. And I am going to present you with this affirmation. with my signature, which I think might be coming through the Zoom and hopefully being handed to you. by special delivery. So thank you. Do I have other city council members who might want to add? I know many of you contributed to this proclamation. Joan? |
| 00:24:02.24 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Joan, do you want to add something? |
| 00:24:03.64 | Joan Cox | I don't have anything to add other than, you know, when I was the mayor, I had the privilege of visiting all three sister cities in one year. I never could have accomplished that without the support of Susan Rowe and the other sister city members. Susan came every weekend to my house to plan our gift giving and our logistics and our travel, she and Herbie Weiner. And I never could have accomplish that feat without them. And it's just one example of her unwavering devotion to the sister city program. for years and years and years. |
| 00:24:40.05 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right. |
| 00:24:40.31 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:24:40.32 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. anyone, Jill? |
| 00:24:42.67 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. I, you know, Susan, I can't believe that, that you haven't gotten a proclamation yet. I mean, this is amazing to me, but, um, You know, this just shows you the kind of caliber of people that we have in Sausalito by about the sheer force of one person's. will and personality and able to bring people together for such a positive thing. I mean, there's nothing negative about Sister Cities. It's such a great program for people in our community and for our three sister cities. I can't tell you, you know, when I went to Cache Cache, And all the people that have come here through this program, nothing but absolutely raving, positive, positive results and really is, you know, the essence of building bridges across, you know, international lines and building. I must have a French sister city. |
| 00:25:26.48 | Heidi Scoble | Yeah. |
| 00:25:26.49 | Heidi Scoble | and like, |
| 00:25:28.75 | Jill Hoffman | stuff. Sorry. And so anyway, thank you, Susan, for all of your hard work. I appreciate it. on behalf of all of us. |
| 00:25:37.55 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | All right. |
| 00:25:37.75 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:25:37.80 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Joe or Ray, anything? |
| 00:25:39.30 | Joe Burns | I agree those are great words and |
| 00:25:39.32 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Well, I- |
| 00:25:41.78 | Joe Burns | Susan is a force and Jill used force and will and I see why people follow your passions with you. And I'm glad that you're onto your next one and it's gonna be fabulous as well. So congratulations. |
| 00:25:55.11 | Susan Rowe | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 00:25:57.91 | Ray Wendell | You know, people get stuff done in part by force of personality. Um, Susan and I have she wrote me in right at the very beginning in Sister City. So I've been, doing this for like eight years. I WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE For someone who can actually get people to do something that they have no ability or no desire to do. is quite incredible. And so on my first visit to Vigne Del Mar, I found myself stood up in front of an audience of 400 women entrepreneurs and gave a speech to them in Spanish. Now, I don't really speak Spanish very well. And The idea of doing that is so like counter to my personality. But Susan actually somehow found the way to make me do it. And so that's why we had a sister city program. because she's motivated and energize people. a vast number of people to do stuff outside their comfort zone And it's one of an incredible competitive advantage. and wonderful thing for social leaders. |
| 00:27:33.36 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right, Susan? |
| 00:27:35.03 | Susan Rowe | the floor? Do you have any? I'll just make some brief comments. Welcome back, Jill. Thank you for serving our country. Um, each and every council member, I'd like to give you just a little piece of my heart tonight about how I feel about this. going through what we're all going through. which is a very different period in our life. I happen to Love Sausalito in a way that you all do because our hearts are in this right now for our local business people. and everyone who is struggling. to survive right now. And the city of Sausalito, I started in Parks and Rec. under Adam Pulitzer, imagine that. and many years there. And my predecessor went away. I took over South Amedo's sister city. At that point, there was one that was fumbling and crumbling. And we picked that one up and then we resurrected Vina de Marchile. Thank you, Ray, and a few others. And Joan went to all three of those. Herbie went to all three different times. I hope you all go to a sister city and understand the global recognition that Sausalito gets as a result of a very small town supporting three sister cities and not really begging and asking for money because we know how to raise that within ourselves because the program itself. supports that. I want to thank you from my heart. Now. all of you to stay healthy and happy. And I appreciate the time tonight in this proclamation. It means a tremendous amount to me right now. As I move forward, hand off Sister City. It's been 18.5 years. to be exact, 18.5 years that I've been involved and handing it off and going off to build a marine mammal center in Chile. And to work at the San Francisco Zoo, which is what I do, because I'm all about saving animals, people, and marine life. No. I appreciate you, all of you. And let's hope for a great reason. In November. |
| 00:29:50.92 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Great, thank you, Susan, and I'm sorry that we had to past your proclamation, but I'm so glad we got you here tonight. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, so just back up on, we already had Alice, public comment, thank you Tom. Anyone else who wants to public comment on the proclamation? |
| 00:30:15.26 | Christy | No. |
| 00:30:15.49 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I'm not seeing any hands raised, but thank you. I know there's a number of supporters in the house, so. Thanks for that. Okay, so now we've had general public comment and we will go on to Item three on our agenda, which is the action minutes of two previous meetings, a regular and a special meeting. Are there any corrections or comments, or do I have a motion? |
| 00:30:47.62 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I'm not seeing any comments. Anybody want to make a motion? |
| 00:30:54.20 | Ray Wendell | I move to accept the minutes of... October 13th and October 21st. |
| 00:31:02.46 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Second. Great. Could the city clerk please call the roll? |
| 00:31:09.66 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman? |
| 00:31:15.16 | Heidi Scoble | Sorry, yes. Councilmember Burns? |
| 00:31:17.61 | Joe Burns | Yes. |
| 00:31:18.51 | Heidi Scoble | Council member Cox? Vice Mayor Withey. |
| 00:31:21.88 | Ray Wendell | Yes. |
| 00:31:22.67 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor of Cleveland Knowles. |
| 00:31:24.23 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes, that motion carries 5-0. We'll move on to council member committee reports. I would note that we have a pretty packed agenda tonight. Hopefully we can give high level Summaries, does anyone want to start? |
| 00:31:44.00 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Uh, no. I can start then I had a transportation authority of Marin board meeting and I think I reported we had already heard this an executive committee the main item On that was an alternative report on the alternative fuel program, which will be really important as we try to meet both our greenhouse gas emission goals and the governor's new directive to move over to alternative fuel vehicles. So, TAM is prioritizing that, but even so has, um, you know, only about $460,000 budget for that at this point. The second thing we had a PBAC meeting with a bunch of very interesting issues We looked at 2nd Street and some accessibility issues. Got an update on the North Street steps. Looked at possible crosswalks near Golden Gate Market area. talked about the Nevada street striping and bike lane, which will be coming to the council and got an update on Caledonia outdoor dining. and the Gate 6 project, which, as I mentioned before, is upcoming. I think those were all my committee meetings. Anyone else? |
| 00:33:19.30 | Jill Hoffman | Do you want to give the waterfront update? Or you want me to? Uh-oh. You're still on mute. |
| 00:33:26.38 | Joan Cox | Sure. Okay, yes, so we've had several meetings related to waterfront management, the outcome of most of which are reflected in your consent item on our calendar this evening. I do wanna mention that we did start a listening session with RBRA and other regional officials concerning restoration of eelgrass and other ecological components of the Bay and Councilmember Hoffman and I happened to attend the same one, which was a great way to welcome her back to this process. And her feedback was valuable as always. We are presenting an update to the Bay Conservation District I'm not. Enforcement Committee tomorrow, which in our presentation is in your on your consent calendar for this evening, so we'll report back to you. We expect to receive from BCDC an enforcement letter sometime in November that will solidify the negotiations that we've been undertaking with them for several months. essentially to continue on with our good efforts to manage our waterfront in a compassionate, and efficient manner. |
| 00:34:48.24 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, thank you. Joe or Ray, anything or Jill? Thank you. |
| 00:34:56.93 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Ray, did you have anything? |
| 00:34:58.93 | Ray Wendell | Um, Yeah, I was just looking back to try and figure out what I'd actually done. Um, I think we, Council Member Cox and I attended a sewer committee meeting since our last meeting. As you know, we have phase two of a consolidation study underway being led by the district and that is ongoing. We went through progress and assess progress on that nothing much more to report. The only other thing I would have to say is I attended a Drawdown Marin meeting. It was the first one for about three months. And where this is leading to is a... meeting of the board of supervisors on December 8th. Actually, that evening we have a changeover of City Council here. But in the morning is a Board of Supervisors meeting in which they're gonna discuss the whole structure and funding of Drawdown and I will be planning to participate as a member of the public at that meeting. The key is that Drawdown is moving now towards reorganizing itself into a non-profit and we're trying to determine and discuss should there be a more formal interaction between the cities and the county on the whole sustainability thing. or is it just going to be through MCCMC? and its committee. These are some issues to think through And, um, it will take another year to get sorted out. |
| 00:36:54.34 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, great. Sounds interesting. |
| 00:36:57.37 | Ray Wendell | Yeah, it is interesting stuff. although... I This is something the next council is going to actually have to grapple with and how it wants to optimally interface with all the various structures that are being put in place. |
| 00:37:12.81 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. Great, thank you. Anyone else? Okay, great. I think we can move on to our consent calendar. We have seven items on our consent calendar tonight. Do we have, I know we've received some public comment on 5F, Joan, I see your hand raised. |
| 00:37:43.98 | Joan Cox | Thank you, Mayor. I would like to recommend that we revise the recommended motion for 5F to go ahead and adopt the resolution rejecting all bids, but move from consent to our business item calendar, at the next available opportunity, the discussion about next steps with respect to the Dunphy Park soil stockpile removal project. |
| 00:38:15.69 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, we do have a pretty packed agenda tonight. So if our city manager and director of public works agree, and I do think we have had some public comment on this, so it's probably worth |
| 00:38:19.20 | Joan Cox | you |
| 00:38:29.80 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | hearing it as a separate item could the city manager just let us know if it would be accessible to hear the second portion of this the discussion of next steps at our next meeting on november 10th or as soon thereafter as practicable |
| 00:38:48.14 | Marcia Raines | Yes, that would be fine. Obviously, the key request tonight is to reject the bids, and so we need the council to take that action, and we can come back at the Council's next meeting to provide next steps. |
| 00:39:02.60 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:39:02.64 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:39:02.65 | Joan Cox | Okay. Based on the public comment, it does not appear that this is a non-controversial item, so I do believe it bears discussion as a business item and not consent. |
| 00:39:12.09 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so just for clarity for the public what this means is that item 5F is now merely the rejection of the bids and we will come back hopefully at our next meeting. perhaps later depending on our next agenda to discuss the next steps. So are there any other comments on the agenda? consent. I had, oh yes, go ahead. |
| 00:39:43.02 | Joe Burns | I just wanted to point out on 5G. I think that's a very interesting report. our police statistical report. And it's given during a time where we have a lot going on in policing discussions. But I think there's a really interesting number in here. And I just wanted to say it out loud. but There was 14 violent crimes in the quarter, 60 some burglaries, some thefts. 126 arrests, but there were 9,000 calls for service in a single quarter. Um, That is a tremendous amount of calls to a police department that as we talk about social justice issues and policing issues and repositioning police be in areas of success. we need to, as a community, kind of bring that number down a little bit. you know, 6,000 maybe, or 5,000 calls in a quarter to the police department, 9,000 is, I mean, and sometimes it's been up nearly as high as 11, 12,000. We can't just call the police every time we have an argument with a neighbor or something because you can see that It's a tremendous impact. And we have a lot of decisions to make about leasing in the future here in Sausalito, actually as a society in the world. So I just wanted to bring that up as a very interesting number that we have in our consent tonight. |
| 00:41:16.24 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. I had two comments. First, we have our COVID-19 update on consent. But I did just want to note that today Marin got some good news, which we are moving up on the level of COVID recovery from the red into orange. So I think that's great news. But I do just want to emphasize that the rest of the country is experiencing quite a surge. And so just urge people to continue to be really careful as we move into colder weather. And so that we can keep our businesses open and keep our numbers down. So the great news on that. And then I did just comment on the safe harbor program. Thank you to Councilmember Hoffman and Cox for your work on this. I do continue to have substantive comments on some of the slides, you know, and I think at some point, maybe Council Member Cox Mention that we have an upcoming letter to BCDC. Maybe we could have an actual business item on that, but there are some changes to the presentation. you know, that I, I, you know, if we didn't have such a full agenda tonight, I would have liked to I will hold off on those. I do think it's great to have a the impact that the mobile shower is having during COVID. So thank you for including that. And I would also note that I hope we can get the food donation days back up to two. as the colder weather and rain starts. So hopefully we can work as a community to get volunteers to make that happen. Okay, so I will open it up to public comment on our consent items. I see Sandra Bushmaker has her hand raised. Welcome, Sandra. Thank you. |
| 00:43:17.18 | Sandra Bushmaker | Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I just want to strongly support the removal of item, except for the bid rejection. question on the Dumpy Park dirt pile. I think we have a public health issue here and I'm very concerned about the way this is being handled and would like to have full opportunity to discuss it as a business item. So I'd appreciate that. the fact that it's being pulled or rescheduled as a business. Thank you. |
| 00:43:50.42 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. Okay, we have Jesse. |
| 00:43:53.04 | Susan Rowe | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 00:43:55.06 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And I am now getting an echo. I guess it's gone. Okay. Jesse, welcome. |
| 00:43:59.64 | Jesse Taylor-Vermont | Hi, thank you. This is Jesse Taylor-Vermont with Downtown Streets team and we're in mobile care. Just wanted to share my appreciation again for the council and mayor for approving this program and letting us go past the pilot. As you can see from the statistics, we've continued to grow, especially in this time of COVID. It is a vital service and we're seeing so many folks using our showers who weren't before and connecting them with different resources as we can. you know, like was mentioned with food services, we would love to continue to grow the SF Marin Food Bank's donations with the help of our fantastic volunteers from the Sausalito Presbyterian Church. Yeah, I think that the results speak for themselves on how fantastic you know, such a simple thing as a shower can really have in folks' lives. So thank you again. |
| 00:45:11.68 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, no, thank you, Jesse, and thank you to the whole Downtown Streets team and all the work that you've been doing tirelessly. It's really amazing. So thank you for being here tonight. I do not see any other hands raised, so I'll take a motion on the consent calendar as amended by our earlier statements with respect to item 5 |
| 00:45:36.72 | Ray Wendell | So I move adoption of consent calendars 5A through 5G. with the modification to item 5F, that it be restricted to the rejection of the bids, the removal of the stockpile, and the other matters to be scheduled, agendized for a future business item discussion. |
| 00:46:03.58 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | THE END OF THE END OF THE Great. Heidi, will you please call the roll? |
| 00:46:08.59 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman. Yes. Councilmember Burns? |
| 00:46:14.91 | Jill Hoffman | No. |
| 00:46:15.14 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 00:46:15.18 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:46:16.91 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox. Yes. Councilmember Withee. Cheers. Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 00:46:24.66 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. That motion carries four to one. |
| 00:46:29.11 | Joan Cox | Mayor, as a point of order, do we want to segregate out an item so that we can have a unanimous vote on the majority of the items? Would that assist Council Member Burns? |
| 00:46:39.95 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I think if council member Burns had wanted to segregate out an item, he could have asked council member Burns. |
| 00:46:46.56 | Jill Hoffman | Councillor John Gallo, about the public. |
| 00:46:48.71 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Excuse me? |
| 00:46:48.98 | Jill Hoffman | All right. |
| 00:46:50.83 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So Council Member Burns, would you like to ask for any matter to be segregated from the vote? or to let your vote go out. |
| 00:46:58.49 | Joe Burns | Thank you. Yeah, I guess I should. So it's not on record of not liking the Safe Harbor program. Yes, thank you. |
| 00:47:04.23 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:47:04.25 | Joe Burns | We'll be right back. |
| 00:47:04.32 | Joan Cox | THE POLICE. |
| 00:47:05.04 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 00:47:05.21 | Joan Cox | you |
| 00:47:05.39 | Joe Burns | statistics. |
| 00:47:06.34 | Ray Wendell | So why don't I modify my motion to basically include everything I said before except for The part that we're carving out of 5F to be the subject of a separate motion. |
| 00:47:23.18 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 00:47:23.20 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 00:47:23.22 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 00:47:23.23 | Ray Wendell | SECOND. |
| 00:47:23.62 | Joe Burns | you |
| 00:47:23.94 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | of |
| 00:47:24.57 | Joe Burns | Oh. |
| 00:47:26.00 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so on that amended motion, we are going to rescind the earlier motion and we are going to vote on this new motion, which is now on the floor. So on this new motion, could the clerk please call the roll? |
| 00:47:40.68 | Joe Burns | And this is on 5A through G. |
| 00:47:43.45 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | 5A through... I... G Thank you. |
| 00:47:48.48 | Joan Cox | And the rejection of all bids of 5F. |
| 00:47:51.82 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. |
| 00:47:52.09 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 00:47:52.75 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 00:47:56.26 | Heidi Scoble | Council member Hoffman. Yes. Councilmember Burns. |
| 00:48:00.07 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:48:00.09 | Ray Wendell | Yes. |
| 00:48:01.13 | Heidi Scoble | Council member Cox. Vice Mayor Withey. |
| 00:48:05.15 | Ray Wendell | Yes. |
| 00:48:06.55 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. Yes. |
| 00:48:10.21 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, that motion carries five zero, and then we will have a vote on the rest of, on taking the rest of item 5F at a later meeting. |
| 00:48:22.58 | Joan Cox | So moved. |
| 00:48:25.16 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | THE END OF THE END OF THE Okay, Heather, could you call the roll on that motion? |
| 00:48:29.77 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman. Thank you. |
| 00:48:31.14 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 00:48:31.17 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 00:48:31.19 | Heidi Scoble | Yeah. |
| 00:48:31.22 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes. |
| 00:48:32.20 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Burns. Thank you. |
| 00:48:33.60 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. |
| 00:48:33.68 | Heidi Scoble | I'm not sure. |
| 00:48:33.72 | Ray Wendell | I'm not sure. |
| 00:48:34.66 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox. Thank you. |
| 00:48:36.10 | Joan Cox | Yes. |
| 00:48:36.37 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. Vice Mayor Withey. |
| 00:48:38.34 | Ray Wendell | No. |
| 00:48:39.54 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 00:48:46.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I will vote yes, but thank the vice mayor and council member Burns for their votes. So that motion carries three to two. |
| 00:49:00.92 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | we will move on from our consent calendar to item six we are going to go to public hearing items. |
| 00:49:13.27 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And the first item on our agenda is the introduction and first reading of an ordinance to amend section 15.20.040 about residential parking permit stickers. And we have Chief Warbacher and Elliot Holt, Parking Analysts, to give us a presentation. Welcome. |
| 00:49:38.13 | Unknown | Hi, good evening, Mayor, members of City Council. Just want to make sure you can see Elliott. Is Elliott up? |
| 00:49:38.20 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Bye. |
| 00:49:43.50 | Unknown | Yes, ma'am. |
| 00:49:43.67 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I can. |
| 00:49:43.97 | Alice Merrill | Thank you. Yep. |
| 00:49:45.56 | Unknown | All right, so Elliot's actually gonna give the presentation, but I wanted to take the opportunity to formally welcome Elliot to the Saucyote Police Department. We don't get to do many introductions of our employees lately. And so, uh, Elliot's a little bit unique in this regard. He actually joined us as a full-time employee in May as our parking analyst However, He began his career with the city of Sausalito back in 2011. when he was a part-time parking attendant. and he worked for many years supporting our city's various parking programs and services. If any of you remember the little parking huts that had the arm that went up and down to let people out, that was where Elliott was. It's come a long ways since then. Um, A little bit of background about Elliot. He's a California native. I moved to Sausalito when he was very young. I grew up here, I went to school here, graduating from Tam High, And then he went. Excuse me, you went to college remdesiv study and then to the University, San Francisco State University, I'm And He graduated with a bachelor's degree of science in cellular and molecular biology. Isn't that what all marketing analyst study. So, Clearly lots of brain horsepower there for Elliot. He's actually already working on his master's degree in that same field. Elliot and his wife live in Selma County and we're Very pleased to have him with us. and you'll get that same feeling if you don't already. He's gonna do his presentation on our, expansion of our residential parking permit. It's all yours. |
| 00:51:37.30 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you Chief. And on behalf of the council, welcome Elliot. It's really nice to see your face. We've heard a lot about you and we're really happy to have you here tonight. |
| 00:51:46.11 | Elliot Holt | I hope it's all good things. Thank you chief. It was a very flattering introduction. I appreciate it very much. And good evening mayor and council members. I'm pretty pleased to be here. This is my first presentation as the chief mentioned. I'm also pleased to be the staff member bringing this item up for a public discussion. It's a good opportunity to provide some inclusion to the greater community around Sausalito. So the item in particular is introduction and first reading of ordinance 1280, addressing a modification of the municipal code section 15.20.040 not to mislead you but it's the item in particular this evening would be to address a proposed modifications to the entire chapter the intent of which would be to increase the eligibility of a resident parking program to all members within the 94965 zip code. um, Currently that program is restricted to Saucedo residents living within city limits and the extension to the eligibility requirements. would add in about 3,000 new residents eligible to apply to the program. By way of background, staff brought this proposal to council's attention on August 18th. at the regular meeting. The proposal at that time was to identify a modification to the ordinance or an ordinance modification to the chapter uh 15.20. specifically addressing the eligibility requirements. staff at that time identified that there was a uh, a substantial amount of the chapter that needed to be addressed as well. And this evening we have some proposed modifications to that entire chapter. I think every section within the chapter And I think you should have in your packets, both the current chapter and also the proposed modified first Um, I do have a presentation to just briefly go through each of the proposed sections and their changes. But just briefly before we move on, there is a fiscal impact expected between about $3,000 and $5,000 annually by adding in these additional residents of the 94965 zip code. Now I'll just briefly share my screen. Okay, let me see. There we go, I think. Can you see the presentation? |
| 00:54:23.67 | Mary Wagner | I guess. |
| 00:54:24.03 | Ray Withy | Thank you. |
| 00:54:25.22 | Mary Wagner | Thank you. |
| 00:54:26.10 | Elliot Holt | So essentially the, the, Proposed modifications, again, are to the entire chapter 15.20, currently titled municipal parking lots. The title of the chapter won't change. However, some of the sections within the chapter will change. um, Let me see if I can. Okay, so the chapter covers the municipal parking lots. but it really establishes the operational and regulatory elements of those parking lots within the city and in specific we'll establish the parking programs namely the resident parking program operating within those parking lots. The update needed, the entire chapter again, needed some updates. I think the most recent update to the chapter was, was back in the early nineties. Um, But more specifically, the parking lots needed to be redefined. Certain areas of the parking lots weren't defined up to the current standards. Um, and again, Thank you. We just wanted to clarify some of the language within the chapter and bring it to current standards. Again, in the August 18th meeting council approved the recommendation to extend the program. Well, to bring a modified an ordinance to modify the chapter in order to do that. Um, so tonight uh what we're going to be doing is just essentially defining each of the parking lots We're going to update the eligibility enrollment criteria for each of the parking programs, namely the resident parking program, but also remove some outdated language and clarify some inconsistencies within the various sections of the chapter. Uh, starting off with, uh, the first section. to be modified would be section 15.20.010. currently titled Parking Privilege Ticket Lots. That goes back a ways. Like the chief said, we used to have ticket lots with gated arms, and that's where I got my start with the city. Um, but the current version of the parking lot doesn't operate this way. So we're proposing to modify a modification of this section in the title to read municipal parking lots defined. And the body of the section would essentially clearly define each of the different parking lots within the city of Sausalito. The next section, which is currently titled Rental Parking Permit Sticker Lots, would be amended to read installation and maintenance of parking revenue equipment. This is the most drastic change proposed tonight. removing the rental parking permit sticker lots title and definition. is in line with the idea that we're clarifying the parking lots and what they actually, how they operate but this rental parking, or sorry, the installation of maintenance and parking revenue equipment It's pretty consistent with the rest of the municipalities in Moran and the Crater Bay Area. In fact, a lot of the language in the proposed modification to this chapter or this section. comes from neighboring cities like San Rafael and essentially just describes the city's intent to install and maintain some sort of revenue access control device within the cities. to capture revenue, but also regulate the parking vehicles in those lots. Moving on, the next section titled Fees and Charges remains relatively unchanged. I think the major change would be essentially describing that the fees for the various parking programs, but also the lots, the hourly rates, the hours of operation, are established by a resolution of the city council And it can be changed from time to time. The next section, which is the meat and bones of tonight's proposal, would be to expand the eligibility requirements for the resident parking program. We would be retitling this section, Resident Parking Program and Enrollment Criteria. essentially just restating the requirements for eligibility, how to go about applying, but also extend it to all residents within the 94965 ZIPCO. Moving on just really briefly. The following section 15.20.050, which was titled rental parking program or parking permit sticker issuance and use. It's a mouthful, I know. That one will be amended to read downtown resident, employee and commuter parking programs and enrollment criteria. Essentially, this is capturing all the different parking programs operating within the municipal parking lots downtown Um, Similarly, just restating eligibility requirements and enrollment criteria. Um, Next we have the following sections of the chapter. Um, more of the regulatory sections of this chapter. So subsections 060 through 080, essentially it's mostly clarification. We're removing some inconsistent language, some gendered language, things that just needed to be brought up to a more current standard. simple changes to those sections, nothing really to note. And with that, essentially, I'm ready for any questions or comments from council and from the public. |
| 00:59:58.22 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you very much for your presentation. Are there questions from council members? Okay, I gotta get everybody up here to see. Okay, we don't have any questions. I guess the only question that I had is, what outreach we're planning on doing about new eligibility. |
| 01:00:26.60 | Elliot Holt | Thank you. That's an excellent question. And luckily we do have some opportunities to get it out through the Sosilip Currents. I know that for a fact that a lot of residents outside of Sausalito do utilize that opportunity. get information. Personally, I know that I've had people stop me in the street, ready to give me their application to meet directly. It seems that people are pretty motivated to get into it. But that's certainly something we can work on. Um... and address more specifically. |
| 01:01:00.02 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. I think that would be wonderful. And also outreach to both everyone in the 94965, but also I think it would be good to do a refresh to locally to residents as well as, I'm not sure everyone's completely familiar with the program or how it works. So, great. Okay. Any other questions? We'll open it up to public comment. I am not seeing any raised hands. Heidi, could you confirm? |
| 01:01:31.66 | Heidi Scoble | Near Cleveland Knowles, there are no hands raised at this time. |
| 01:01:35.25 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, okay, we'll bring it back up to the council for discussion. Anybody want to? lead off. I guess so. First of all, thank you, Elliot. We really appreciate this. I'm really excited that we are moving forward in many small and big ways with our renewed commitment over the summer to work more closely in the whole 94965 to extend benefits to Bye. to our neighbors. So I think this is an important step in that continuing conversation. I also am excited to have you in your role. And I'm looking forward to also talking about other great parking related tools that we can continue to employ during COVID and increasing our parking demand management strategies Um, to help our businesses with increased turnover, I... increase, you know, um, incentives for people to walk downtown instead of driving and probably incidentally increase some of our revenue. So Not in front of us tonight, but I'm happy to have you here to continue that conversation. And I'm fully supportive of this program. Any other comments? or emotion. |
| 01:03:05.11 | Joe Burns | I'll say thank you, Elliot, for your presentation and that you had the opportunity to go back and clean a lot of this code up, as well as be a part of providing a great opportunity to our, I'd say our neighbors, but really our community, our community of all 94965. So thanks for your work on this. |
| 01:03:24.87 | Ray Wendell | Yeah, let me just add that I'm obviously totally supportive of the policy, so this is great. So Elliot, good to meet you, man. Well done. That was good. That was good. |
| 01:03:40.41 | Joan Cox | I love that. I was not nearly so poised during my first presentation, however many years ago that was. Great job, Elliot. and it could not be for a better cause. I'm so happy to see that a lot of the plans and programs that we've that we have drafted for our general plan we're already embarking on consistent with the resolution we adopted back in July. So great job. |
| 01:04:06.77 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Can I take that as a motion? Yeah. |
| 01:04:08.95 | Jill Hoffman | I agree on all. Thank you. |
| 01:04:13.91 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, we have a motion. Do we have a second? Thank you. |
| 01:04:17.08 | Jill Hoffman | and it's not. |
| 01:04:18.52 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, Heidi, can you please call the roll? |
| 01:04:21.74 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman? |
| 01:04:22.75 | Joan Cox | Thank you. Yes, sorry, as a point of order, since this is an ordinance city attorney, do we need to actually read it out in full to read by title only? |
| 01:04:37.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Well, while we're waiting for Mary, I will just read it. |
| 01:04:40.93 | Joan Cox | Yeah, I move we introduce and read by title only an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito amending chapter 15.2. Oh, of the Sausalito Municipal Code municipal parking lots. |
| 01:04:53.09 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Second. Great. Heidi, could you please call the role? |
| 01:04:56.23 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. Councilmember Hoffman. Yes. Councilmember Burns. |
| 01:05:01.33 | Kevin McGowan | Yes. |
| 01:05:02.78 | Heidi Scoble | Council member Cox. Thank you. Vice Mayor Withey. Yes. |
| 01:05:06.43 | Kevin McGowan | Yes. |
| 01:05:07.18 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 01:05:09.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes, and that motion carries five zero and thanks again. to Elliot and Chief Warbacher and moving on we are have item 6b on our agenda which is introduction of the zoning ordinance with amendments to the Sausalito Municipal Code. related to accessory dwelling units. or ADUs, and we have our Community Development Director, Louis Whelan here. to kick us off. |
| 01:05:43.60 | Heidi Scoble | Excellent. Hi. Good evening mayor council members. I'll let Christy take over in a minute here but I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Christy because I think this is your first time meeting Christy. Kristy is our new senior planner. She started with the city of Sausalito at the end of June of this year. during COVID. She comes to us with 20 years of professional planning experience, a master's degree in urban and regional planning, |
| 01:06:09.86 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:06:10.58 | Heidi Scoble | and she has extensive experience working with urban suburban and coastal jurisdictions in the Bay Area. Christy is an avid sailor, and I'm so pleased to introduce her to you this evening. And we'll now hand it off to Christy to give the presentation on the ADU and the JADU ordinance amendments. |
| 01:06:30.88 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Welcome, Christy. Great to see you. behalf of the whole council. |
| 01:06:35.90 | Christy | Thank you. Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council Members. |
| 01:06:51.32 | Christy | Tonight the council will be conducting a public hearing on the proposed zoning ordinance amendments for accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling units. These amendments will bring the city's municipal code into compliance with recent changes to state laws regarding ADUs. By way of introduction, an ADU or JADU is a small unit that is accessory to the primary unit and contains its own kitchen and bathroom facilities, as well as exterior access. ADUs can be attached to the main residence or located in a detached structure. By way of background, the city existing regulations were initially adopted in 2012. And we're then updated in 2017 and 2019 to comply with state laws. EDUs provide needed housing units, income for homeowners and affordable rentals, just to name a few of the benefits. |
| 01:08:00.74 | Christy | The most notable of the new state law provisions include that the state now requires that ADUs and JADUs be a non-discretionary review process at the staff level. If certain requirements are met within 60 days of a complete application, The state now has required that the city cannot require more than a four foot side and rear setback. and no lot coverage, floor area ratio. or floor area ratio standard. can be applied to prevent the construction of an 800 square foot ADU that is 16 feet tall. No replacement parking can be required if a garage, carport, or covered parking structure is converted to an ADU. |
| 01:08:47.34 | Carolyn Revell | you do. |
| 01:08:48.67 | Christy | And no parking can be required for an edu that's within one half mile walking distance of public transit. you Sorry about that. I also wanted to mention that Solar panels are required for detached accessory dwelling units which are newly constructed and fire sprinklers are required in an ad you if required for the primary residence. In March of this year, the Planning Commission conducted a study session on the zoning ordinance amendments and earlier this month, conducted a public hearing at which the planning commission made a recommendation to the city council that they adopt the zoning ordinance amendment. The planning commission did make a specific recommendation to the council with respect to proposed height limits for detached ADUs located above a garage or accessory structure. The Planning Commission also examined closely the following topics during their study session. For example, just to name a few, JADUs in commercial districts, allowing them or not allowing them and a discussion regarding the amnesty period for ABUs or JABUs. The state permits a minimum height of 16 feet as measured from the ground to the top of the building for detached ADUs. Therefore the planning commission recommended the city council consider a maximum allowable height for detached ADUs. Consistent with state regulations, the PC recommended the council adopt 16 feet as a maximum height for standalone ADUs and ADUs that are located above existing garages. as illustrated here, So the combined height of the garage and ADU located above the garage would be 16 feet maximum. |
| 01:10:55.79 | Christy | For background, the city's existing ADU code allows ADUs themselves above garages to be 14 feet for sloped roofs and 11 for flat roofs. In making the combined 16 foot height recommendation to council, the planning commission cited concerns related to view impacts, mass bulk, and reduced setbacks. Consistent with state law, the ADU ordinance has requirements with respect to light, privacy, view impacts, and architectural compatibility. |
| 01:11:35.77 | Christy | Due to safety concerns, the ADU ordinance requires off-street parking be provided for ADUs on parcels where the street width is less than 16 feet. |
| 01:11:45.87 | Jill Hoffman | and |
| 01:11:47.05 | Christy | A letter from fire chief tubs is it. South report in support of requiring off street parking in these areas, echoing those public safety concerns to do narrow steep roads and minimum clearance for fire engines. Lastly, a few miscellaneous yet important provisions to note in the city's ADU ordinance include Um, the ordinance extends the amnesty period through December 2021. The staff report erroneously notes March 2021. And an ADU may not be rented more than 30 days and there is no owner occupancy requirement for an ADU until 2025. In conclusion, staff recommends the council introduce the ADU ordinance amendments and continue the public hearing for adoption on November 10th. And that concludes the staff presentation. Myself, Director Wayland, Mary Wagner, and Barbara Kautz are all available to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. |
| 01:13:00.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you so much, Christy. And thanks for being here tonight. And thanks also to Barbara and her legal team and Mary Wagner. and to the Planning Commission for their work on this. So I will ask council members if you have Any questions on the presentation or on the staff report before we open it up for public comment? |
| 01:13:27.61 | Joe Burns | I have a question. Hi, Christy. Nice to welcome. Related to the planning commission's determination on, um, ADUs located above garages and it was out of concern for four items, view, mass, bulk, and setbacks. What? changes any of those, whether it's above a garage or any other part of the building. But more importantly, doesn't view have its own set of criteria already. in our view ordinance. Setbacks is an objective already set forth as well. So is it really just out of concern of mass and bulk? in |
| 01:14:19.05 | Christy | Yeah, I'd be happy to elaborate on that. I'm gonna go back to the presentation and let's see. So yeah, I think the height, the height As it relates to mass and bulk, I think was where the planning commission was coming from. And then just because the. The four foot setback requirement was also a concern like that they, they weren't able to set it in further, for example. So, and then with respect to what the city currently requires for views, let me go back to that slide. Let me hop around here. What was that? |
| 01:15:06.64 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So also, Christy, while you're going back, I think also Councilmember Burns I think part of the issue here is these are for ministerial approvals. So if I'm not mistaken for the ministerial approval, our typical view ordinance and other issues wouldn't. come into play in a public hearing. |
| 01:15:27.09 | Joan Cox | there is no discretionary review. Yes. the over the counter approval. |
| 01:15:33.31 | Joe Burns | If the, if the staff believes that there's no primary view impacts. So again, view, view impacts is already has a test to it, whether it's 16 feet or 15 feet shouldn't be an issue. separately than if it has a view in whatever feet if it has a primary view impact it has a vibrant view impact correct Okay. |
| 01:15:59.08 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So I guess the question is, thanks for that, Joe. So the question is to Christy, would staff apply the VUE ordinance or is that not something that can be considered in a ministerial ADU? evaluation. |
| 01:16:17.63 | Christy | We would we would the the EDU ordinance does include provisions that views from primary living areas shall not be impacted so staff would require story polls and would do that analysis if we. found any issue, it would be elevated to the Planning Commission then at that level. Thank you. |
| 01:16:38.87 | Joe Burns | Okay. |
| 01:16:39.23 | Christy | to support it. |
| 01:16:41.10 | Joe Burns | And in ministerial, you would also determine if the setbacks met the code. |
| 01:16:48.05 | Christy | Yes. That's good. |
| 01:16:50.31 | Joe Burns | So I don't see how any of those impact the 16, other than masks and would be the only discretionary consideration. |
| 01:16:59.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So I just have a follow-up question. So when you answered that question, Christy, were you saying under the current proposal by the planning commission that you staff would elevate it to the Planning Commission or without Yeah. |
| 01:17:20.18 | Mary Wagner | Basically it's ministerial if they don't obstruct any primary views. If they do obstruct primary views, then the ordinance has a discretionary process. that the applicant can choose to can choose to follow. It's not a question of the staff elevating it in quite that way. Um, HCD came up with some guidelines that said if you have ministerial standards but then, but you choose to be able to look at projects or ADUs that don't meet your ministerial standards, you can set up an alternative discretionary process. So that's what the city's done. But it's not a question of a of a discretionary of the staff making it a discretionary process, the applicant would need to decide that, you know, I mean, the applicant would have a choice. They could modify the design, so it would not obstruct primary views or they could apply for this discretionary process |
| 01:18:26.33 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So just to follow up then, so that's without this height, limit. Correct. |
| 01:18:32.78 | Christy | Thank you. |
| 01:18:32.83 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 01:18:32.88 | Christy | Thank you. |
| 01:18:32.98 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 01:18:33.00 | Christy | Thank you. |
| 01:18:33.03 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So we don't, if we don't accept the, if we don't adopt the special height limit established by the planning commission or recommended by the planning commission, |
| 01:18:33.25 | Christy | Yes. |
| 01:18:42.31 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | then Council member Burns is correct, but the ordinance still applies. And if there is a view impact, it wouldn't go through the |
| 01:18:52.44 | Christy | Thank you. |
| 01:18:52.79 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Correct. |
| 01:18:54.56 | Christy | you |
| 01:18:54.92 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 01:18:55.86 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | That's correct. Thank you. Councilmember Cot. |
| 01:19:00.73 | Joan Cox | But if we don't, utilize a height restriction the uh, final project exceed our height. limitations. in Sausalito. |
| 01:19:16.99 | Mary Wagner | Let's see the ordinance base, the ordinance basically includes, basically references the rest of your municipal code, unless it conflicts with this. Does that make sense? Because the ADU, you know, the ADU, statute changes the setbacks it changes a lot of things allows people to exceed far's so basically it incorporates the rest of your minute you know it incorporates the height limits unless they conflict with the ADU statute. And the ADU statute only requires that you allow ADU 16 feet high. It doesn't require that |
| 01:19:56.97 | Joan Cox | you allow higher But if you're put on top of a garage that's already 20 feet high. Right. that would exceed our 32 foot high statutory |
| 01:20:08.92 | Mary Wagner | Right, but the 16 feet generally it's defined as measured from the ground, you know, Yeah. It doesn't mean that you can put 16 feet on top of an existing building. |
| 01:20:25.51 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, are there any additional questions? |
| 01:20:30.10 | Ray Wendell | Yeah, I must admit I'm a little confused about the 16 feet because If it's 16 feet total, Okay. and you got a garage. It could be 10 feet. high. That leaves you six feet for an 80 years. |
| 01:20:49.30 | Mary Wagner | Right, I think- That doesn't make sense. |
| 01:20:51.15 | Ray Wendell | That doesn't make sense. |
| 01:20:52.82 | Mary Wagner | Right, Christie and Lilly can better describe this. There's a number of cities that have decided they just don't want to allow ADUs on top of garages, you know, because they would be more than 16 feet high. But my understanding was that the Planning Commission wanted to allow ADUs on top of garages, correct? because it was a good, they felt it was a reasonable way |
| 01:21:13.53 | Carolyn Revell | Yeah. |
| 01:21:17.60 | Mary Wagner | to construct ADUs. And then they were trying to limit the height of, And Lily and Christia, you know, this is like getting into the planning rather than the legal. issues. um, but then they wanted to limit the height above the garage to either 11 or 14 feet. And now recognizing that the total height of course, would be more than 16 feet. |
| 01:21:43.74 | Ray Wendell | So that doesn't make sense. |
| 01:21:48.65 | Mary Wagner | I'm sorry, I'm not explaining it properly. |
| 01:21:53.10 | Christy | verify the planning commission. was not comfortable with what staff presented. Let me show you what is in the existing um, ADU code. So, let me see here. So the existing ADU code allows an ADU on top of an existing garage and the ADU itself can be 11 feet for a flat roof. or 16 feet for an ADU. And the planning commission was really concerned about this. I think, you know, in the context of so many regulations being relaxed Um, They felt this was a bit too much and they didn't want to prohibit. They said several times. So I think for them, the 16 feet was a middle ground where maybe there would be at best a loft scenario. I think that will. that will extremely limit really what we see at the staff level. it may result in more of these going to planning commission if they have, because it will be, it will be quite restrictive to do a garage and an edu at a total 16 feet um But the commission, again, really wanted that sort of conservative approach. Um, one thing I know the director wanted me to mention was that, um, you know, an unintended consequence of, of restricting the total. Um, garage and adu to 16 feet is that we may get more people just doing a straight garage conversion and just saying well forget it I can't sort of get my space above so all this convert my garage so one unintended consequences, we might get more we might lose some you know covered off street parking as a result. again, like an unintended consequence. So I hope |
| 01:23:58.97 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Does that clarify Yeah, I think that clarifies. I'm just wondering, Ray, does that answer your question? |
| 01:24:06.62 | Ray Wendell | No, that absolutely answers my question. and actually says that 16 feet is incorrect. |
| 01:24:17.50 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Well, that it would be extremely limiting, I think, or pretty much it. |
| 01:24:21.42 | Ray Wendell | Well, it's bad policy. |
| 01:24:24.35 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 01:24:24.39 | Joan Cox | Yeah. But is the policy reflected in the slide, Christy, because the slide shows a 15 foot plus 11 to 14 foot on top. So is that the recommendation? See? |
| 01:24:37.31 | Christy | Thank you. This was the staff recommendation to planning commission. This is the existing code. So the planning commission then revised that and staff is presenting to you their recommendation Let me update this slide and tell me if you don't see this new exhibit. which is a combined 16 foot tight height for the garage and ADU above. So this is what the planning commission recommend. We can't see that yet. |
| 01:25:08.50 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | It's... |
| 01:25:11.54 | Christy | And I should say that sort of where this all evolved is really, um, you know, the state, The state again really set the minimum at 16 feet so We were feeling like, you know, we clearly needed to define a maximum. So we defaulted to what we had in the existing code, which seemed to be working. And, um, so that was sort of where the original staff recommendation came from. |
| 01:25:43.60 | Joe Burns | So, And that was my concern is we're going, 16 feet just is not enough. And we're gonna push you to the planning commission or just not have anything built at all. And I don't know if that's the intent of these is to limit them down to non action. |
| 01:26:00.56 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 01:26:00.61 | Joe Burns | especially if it's based on a view or a setback, which is already stipulated in other parts of the code. Don't even get me started on mass and scale. We can talk about that later, but I think that's gonna be a whole other avenue of issues that we're gonna run into. But I don't support that 16 feet is where I was headed. |
| 01:26:20.42 | Ray Wendell | Joe, let me clarify. You do not support that. |
| 01:26:24.32 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 01:26:24.34 | Ray Wendell | No, I needed to why. Neither do I. I mean, it's inappropriate. So the question is- |
| 01:26:31.96 | Joan Cox | And the other thing we want to do is avoid |
| 01:26:33.56 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:26:33.68 | Joan Cox | is get rid of off-street parking. |
| 01:26:36.69 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. And so, |
| 01:26:36.77 | Joan Cox | Yeah. |
| 01:26:38.95 | Ray Wendell | them to build on the garage if they can. |
| 01:26:39.15 | Joan Cox | to build on. Thank you. |
| 01:26:40.94 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 01:26:41.97 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so I think we're still in question mode, but so it seems like we have the alternative is the existing, what was in the existing ordinance, which was what was Okay. Recommended by staff. to the Planning Commission, which was the first slide. that Christie showed us. So I think we're all. |
| 01:26:59.82 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:27:00.75 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I think we all know what the issues are right now. |
| 01:27:02.84 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. |
| 01:27:03.67 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. And then I just, I want to have public comment. Sorry. if there aren't further questions. Are there any further questions? Okay, so why don't we open it up to public comment? I see Vicki Nichols. Welcome, Vicki. |
| 01:27:38.77 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I am not hearing Vicki. Oh, there you are. |
| 01:27:43.24 | Vicki Nichols | Okay, are we good now? Yeah. I just want to say I'm a little concerned about this discussion, obviously the, The tape of our conversation at Planning Commission was not listened to to see the context of why we were We made our determination We were presented with the 16 feet. We were not, as I recall, Um, didn't have the benefit of staff reviewing with us unintended consequences. So this discussion is, um, It's almost like a new discussion. We were concerned as I recall, about the fact that, and I do understand these new points that have been raised, but I don't think we considered those. I wish Lily was on this call to provide some context. |
| 01:28:32.67 | Joan Cox | call. |
| 01:28:33.90 | Vicki Nichols | Okay, but I do see the points that were discussed, but this didn't come up in our discussion. I think what was guiding us was the fact that you could have an existing garage You could have 16 feet then for an ADU, With no setbacks, you would have this huge mass and bulk right at the streetscape. And if you had a pattern of these along a streetscape, that was the concern on a higher level. But I don't think the whole discussion is being, inclusive of what we talked about here. So, That's just my two cents. Thank you. |
| 01:29:11.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, thank you. adding some context. Okay, are there any other members of the public who would like to comment? I am not seeing any hands raised, so I will bring it back to the council for discussions. |
| 01:29:32.76 | Joan Cox | So Madam Mayor, I will admit, this is one of the few meetings for which I did not listen to the Planning Commission tape. on this issue I read the staff summary of the Planning Commission concerns and how the Planning Commission addressed concerns of other community members, including Bill Ziegler and Michael Rex. So I don't know if I'm missing context, but You know, the planning commission is concerned with the law. We are concerned with policy and from a policy perspective, I believe it's important to preserve off street parking, but also to incentivize the creation of additional. Low, low cost housing integrated throughout Sausalito, which is exactly what ADUs and JADUs do. So I think it's important that we embrace a host of solutions in compliance with state law but also being respectful of Sausalito's constraints with narrow streets, the ability of fire to get through, the requirement of off-street parking and the avoidance of view impacts. So that's the balancing act. I see from for us to consider. |
| 01:30:51.62 | Joe Burns | Yeah, and I agree with all that, Joan. And then as a comment, as opposed to my questions earlier, I think we need to be looking at these things in complete objectives. That covers both law and policy because the further we get down these discretionary opportunities, the further we're going to get into both trouble with HCDs and those types of places, but more importantly, we're going to be spending more time and less streamlining of projects. Mass and scale and mass and bulk on 5,000 square foot lots is a recipe for failure. It makes sense on 12,000 square foot, you know, one acre lots where you really do consider mass and scale in your architectural design with the flow of the land. But um, on a hillside where you have a small building envelope on 5,000 square feet. And we get so wrapped up in these mass and scales as a discretionary item, we're opening ourselves up to just the constant NIMBY Maybe... opportunities to keep anything from happening so that's that's and that's not a comment on what planning commission came up with anything like that that's just in general we need to start on these conversations as we pass these new ordinances to get them more bulletproof for objectives and less on these non-stated discussion uh discretionary items |
| 01:32:09.94 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you Councilmember Hoffman or with you do you have any further comments yes Jill |
| 01:32:15.52 | Jill Hoffman | I just wondered if if Lily wanted to weigh in on that discussion and I do take you know, I do take some of the comments by, um, by planning one of the planning commissioners, Vicki Nichols on this and especially about You know, when you're talking about mass on the street front, right? When you're talking about and the impact that that has. And to Council Member Burns' point, I think that's a good point. Um, you know, maybe you, maybe it is, you know, you're thinking more about it when you have a much larger yacht, Sorry, lot. but When you're walking down the street, you know, in some of our neighborhoods, that houses are very close together. So if every house on that street all of a sudden starts throwing up, you know, two and a half story, you know, things right on the street front that does that does affect the cityscape so I mean I take everybody's point into consideration and you know we want to support obviously our housing opportunities in Sausalito and for everybody involved so I'm just wondering if there's a way to address that concern. um in a way that fits in with the ordinances uh fits in with the guidelines that are set down from the cities or sorry from the county and state to us. So Lily, do you want to weigh in on that? Or do you have anything to add on that? |
| 01:33:35.51 | Heidi Scoble | Sure. So the planning discussion was a pretty long discussion, and I did not go back to the record before this meeting to refresh my memory on what the Planning Commission said. I recall during the discussion raising the potential unintended consequence of the garage conversion to the commissioners. But again, it was a long conversation. And so, you know, that was a part of the conversation. I do recall the planning commission did I definitely have concerns with the mass and the bulk on the streetscape and the inability to |
| 01:34:09.21 | Carolyn Revell | And it's a good thing. |
| 01:34:11.33 | Heidi Scoble | objectively regulate You can do that objectively with a ratio that everyone has to. But you can do that objectively with a ratio that everyone has to. Um, you know, so that that is an option to consider and the planning commission decided not to go down that path, but to that this was such an important issue that it should be elevated to the planning commission. Um, right off the bat. |
| 01:34:35.67 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 01:34:35.68 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 01:34:37.59 | Mary Wagner | Okay. |
| 01:34:38.54 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 01:34:39.02 | Jill Hoffman | you |
| 01:34:39.62 | Mary Wagner | Yeah. |
| 01:34:39.97 | Jill Hoffman | Amazing. |
| 01:34:40.19 | Mary Wagner | Thank you. |
| 01:34:40.21 | Joan Cox | I think we have to bear in mind that in our future, we may lose all single family home zoning throughout California. We have to start now to figure out how we're going to design our city to accommodate the additional housing that is needed throughout Sausalito, sorry, throughout California. in all towns, including Sausalito. I think we have to do it in a thoughtful way. The legislative committee did consider this ordinance a year ago. back in November. before it went to the Planning Commission, we're way behind adopting this ordinance, but it might be worthwhile. to go back to the legislative committee, to fashion a solution that perhaps is different if it's a single-story garage from an addition on top of a garage or fashion a solution that encourages Um, that continues to accomplish our goal of encouraging ADUs and JADUs while preserving our very important off-street which is critical for the fire safety in our already congested town. |
| 01:35:59.59 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, Jill, were you finished with your comments, Jill? |
| 01:35:59.64 | Joan Cox | Good. |
| 01:35:59.96 | Jill Hoffman | you. |
| 01:36:03.60 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah, well, I'm just add then that can we do that? Can we send it back to legislative committee? to address that one issue, right? Cause I wanna reopen. |
| 01:36:11.65 | Jill Hoffman | Bye. |
| 01:36:12.41 | Jill Hoffman | Because I think, Joan, I remember we looked at the you know, like, |
| 01:36:16.11 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:36:16.12 | Jill Hoffman | to hear in Korea or something. |
| 01:36:16.19 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. Yeah. |
| 01:36:17.85 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. just for that one issue. And I'm not saying that we won't fall out on exactly where we are tonight, but I at least want to have us look at it. And if we can, Thank you. you know, address it somehow. I think that's worth it. But. I'm happy to do, you know, |
| 01:36:35.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Vice Mayor, did you have comments? |
| 01:36:37.89 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. um, Part of what I've noticed over eight years is that sometimes you guys want to make the ordinance perfect instead of just adopting something and knowing there's something else to solve down the road. And this is one of them, I think. We need to adopt the age, and you're sort of saying this, but let me summarize in my sort of non-lawyer layman's terms for how I'm understanding this. Why not? We are in the first rating of an ordinance. We are behind the eight ball in terms of state law of adopting this damn thing. So why don't we just adopt it? And reject temporarily the changes to our existing ordinance that the Planning Commission proposed, which is the set 60 feet. stuff. It clearly needs further discussion. So adopt the damn ordinance without that using our existing and make sure that the next item for legislative committee is to look at this specific aspect of the ordinance, which is the 16 feet limitation on garage build-outs, and come back, and if we need to further modify the ordinance, we do so. What's the problem with that? |
| 01:38:04.63 | Joe Burns | right I think that's in your in your motion |
| 01:38:08.85 | Ray Wendell | And so I make that motion. |
| 01:38:11.99 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. Thank you. Is there a second to that motion? Was that a second, Jo? |
| 01:38:19.14 | Bill Hines | I'll second it. Okay. |
| 01:38:21.52 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | All right, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think hopefully the legislative committee could consider this fairly quickly so that if there's a good solution to come back with, I like the direction that both Council Member Cox and Council Member Hoffman were going in terms of setbacks and other kind of mitigating um, impacts. You know, I do think we have not we have had great success with our ADU ordinance. It is not like every house on any block has an ADU at this point. So we're still creeping along at a you know, healthy rate, but so I think we're, we're good. I don't think we're going to see a second story on every garage in the next, um, month while legislative committee hopefully can, |
| 01:39:10.48 | Carolyn Revell | I'm sorry. |
| 01:39:12.10 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | can hear this. So I think we understand |
| 01:39:13.72 | Joe Burns | We understand. |
| 01:39:15.74 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Sorry, Jo. |
| 01:39:16.72 | Joe Burns | We don't really have a motion on the table because we have to do a title only or are we going to do a reading of motions? |
| 01:39:22.83 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, just yeah. Go. Yeah, anyway, so I think, I mean, I appreciate the concerns of the planning commission. It does warrant further I also just wanted to say we haven't talked about this, but I'm very glad that we're recommending extending the amnesty period. I think there was a really good project in terms of making more objective and clear standards on the parking requirements. So I appreciate the work. that was done by Mr. Precy. and the Planning Commission on that side. So, okay, so let's go back to the motion. So Ray, do you want to... craft that motion once again, reading the ordinance title. |
| 01:40:10.99 | Ray Wendell | Oh, yeah. Once I can get that back up on my screen, I'm quite happy to do that. And so, Where are we? |
| 01:40:23.41 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | B. |
| 01:40:28.57 | Ray Wendell | All right. |
| 01:40:35.09 | Ray Wendell | So the recommended mode, introduce and read by title only, a zoning ordinance amendment to Sol Solito and in simple code section 10.44.080, section 10.44.085. section 10.88.040, section 10.40.02. 40.c table 1022-1 So, and table 10. 24-1. attachment one Direct staff to return on November 10th, 2020 for a second reading and authorize a summary of the ordinance to be published five days in advance of the second reading and 15 days after its adoption. |
| 01:41:30.98 | Joan Cox | I will. |
| 01:41:31.05 | Ray Wendell | with |
| 01:41:31.74 | Joan Cox | And that version is previously enunciated by the vice mayor. to convert to the |
| 01:41:35.97 | Ray Wendell | Yes. |
| 01:41:36.38 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 01:41:39.01 | Joan Cox | Thank you. diagram in our existing ordinance in lieu of the revised 16 foot height limit recommended by the Planning Commission. |
| 01:41:48.06 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 01:41:48.07 | Ray Wendell | I'll dodge that you got that. All right. |
| 01:41:53.69 | Holly Holderman | Okay. |
| 01:41:53.93 | Ray Wendell | Is Mary happy with that? |
| 01:41:53.94 | Holly Holderman | is not. Thank you. |
| 01:41:57.27 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes, thank you. |
| 01:41:58.69 | Ray Wendell | you Jolly good. |
| 01:42:00.81 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, but we're accepting the other recommendations |
| 01:42:04.51 | Ray Wendell | Yes, that's right. |
| 01:42:06.23 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. Great. Heidi, could you please call the roll? |
| 01:42:10.19 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman. |
| 01:42:11.77 | Jill Hoffman | Yes, I support the damn motion made by Vice Mayor Wendell. |
| 01:42:16.61 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 01:42:16.66 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:42:16.68 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Burns. |
| 01:42:18.13 | Joe Burns | Jolly well, yes. |
| 01:42:20.66 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox. |
| 01:42:22.26 | Joe Burns | Yes. |
| 01:42:22.56 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 01:42:23.51 | Heidi Scoble | Vice Mayor with you. |
| 01:42:24.91 | Ray Wendell | It's jolly good. Yes. |
| 01:42:28.81 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 01:42:30.12 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I'm just gonna go with a straight yes. Thank you everybody that motion carries. Five zero. Thank you. |
| 01:42:36.40 | Joan Cox | AND, YOU KNOW, |
| 01:42:36.57 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I'm sorry. |
| 01:42:36.64 | Joan Cox | may we direct staff to convene a legislative committee meeting at their earliest convening for us to consider. this one component of this ordinance. |
| 01:42:48.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right. Thank you. Thank you. um, Steph, and thank you to Barbara for being here with her team. Okay, we're going to move on to our next, to our business, I'm sorry, to our hearing items. |
| 01:43:08.50 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | PB, Sarah Silver, Okay, we're on our business items and our first item is seven a, which is the consideration of appointment and employment contract for interim city manager. And we are going to have our HR consultant, Deborah much more here to provide a brief report on this item. |
| 01:43:30.28 | Unknown | Thank you. Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council Member. This item asks council to consider the appointment of an interim city manager and approval of the related employment agreement. The item is before you tonight because city manager Adam Politzer announced his retirement at the end of this Council must now undertake a thoughtful process of selecting a new city manager. The first step in that process occurs in two days on Thursday, October when council hears proposals from search firms. The entire process of selection is anticipated to last well into the new calendar year. leaving a gap between the retiring Adam Pulitzer and the arrival of the new city to ensure a smooth transition between Adam and the new city manager, support for department heads and to capture the wealth of knowledge Adam has acquired about the city over the last 13 years. Council has undertaken a search. for an interim city manager. Our council has directed staff to undertake and council has taken a search. The search for interim city manager began at the end of September after Adam announced his retirement. Council directed staff and staff identified and reached out to 12 individuals. Those that were both available and interested in the position were interviewed by council on October 21st. Tonight we bring forward for consideration the successful candidate from those interviews Marcia Reigns. A consummate professional, Marcia comes to us with 23 years of experience in municipal leadership. She has championed inclusion and diversity through projects and initiatives promoting equity and representation and facilitating multiracial access to programs, facilities and employment. She has facilitated transit related housing, effected completion of the award-winning Martinez intermodal station and revitalized a downtown. her work. She has been innovative in her budget leadership. by developing shared agreements with other entities. promoting and affecting efficiencies in government and establishing a community foundation for industry to fund community projects. Marsha holds a graduate degree in urban planning. and a postgraduate degree in Homeland Security. She has served on many boards, commissions, and committee being a past president of the League of California Cities and serves as director for the California Community Development She has retired from service. as a CalPERS retiree, which makes her a CalPERS annuitant. So she would enter this appointment should the council consider this appointment as a retired annuitant. And the salary for a retired annuitant is controlled by government code. The city would be required to pay her in the same range as other employees implied employed in the classification of city manager and she would be able to receive no benefits or remuneration other than that salary. Staff recommends council consider the appointment of Marsha Raines as interim city manager and approval of the associated employment agreement. That concludes my presentation on this matter, and I'm open for any questions from council or public comment. |
| 01:47:08.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you very much for that presentation. Are there any questions from council members? PB Sarah Silver, Okay, great why don't we open it up for public comment Thank you Deborah. PB Sarah Silver, Great so are there any members of the public, who would like to comment. I am seeing none, so I will bring it back up to the Council for discussion and we do have Marcia Raines with us tonight. So I wanna welcome her to our meeting. |
| 01:47:43.54 | Marcia Raines | Thank you, I can hear you. Thank you. |
| 01:47:46.28 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Thank you. |
| 01:47:48.27 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 01:47:50.82 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, Marsha, do you wanna say a few words? Or glad to have you here, Vanessa. |
| 01:47:51.37 | Marcia Raines | Do you want to |
| 01:47:55.52 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. I would love to. I want to thank you for welcoming, being so welcoming of me and honorable mayor and members of the council. I'm very encouraged by your consideration of my skills and experience for your interim city manager position. have a fantastic organization that over 13 years has grown in strength. I see this as a transition period. where the experience that I have with Northern California cities and counties as outlined beautifully by Deborah much more. will assist during that transition and Sausalito obtaining the best possible city manager to guide you into the future over the next decade. And I look forward to the opportunity to work with you, the talented staff, the residents, and all the business members of the community. over the next several months to make that transition the best that you can absolutely hope for. |
| 01:48:52.16 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you so much. Any council comments or comments? Yes, Councilmember Hoffman and then Cox. |
| 01:49:01.66 | Jill Hoffman | I just wanted to say that thank you, Marsha, for joining us tonight and for joining us the other night when we did our interviews. I just want to let everybody know that. we interviewed three really really outstanding candidates. And so we're very lucky in the array of talent that we had to choose from. and remember this is just for our interim city manager this isn't for the city manager this is interim to sort of bridge that gap between when Adam leaves and when we actually have a new city manager come on board. I'm just really happy that we have Marsha available to us. She lives locally. She's been the city manager in three different cities, Marcia, is that right? Yeah, so I think, you know, to be, and you've been a part of the city managers association and lots and lots of experience in this area that, that we can bring in this limited time to the city of Sausalito and this expertise. I'm excited to vote yes on this and I was, really pleased with the choices that we had, even when we were doing an interview. So thank you, Marsha and welcome. Thank you. |
| 01:50:05.99 | Joe Burns | I think that's a great way to say it Jill. And thank you for that. We did have great candidates and we have a great interim city manager and I'm excited to vote for this as well. So welcome Marcia. I hope you get the support from the other three as we go forward here. |
| 01:50:19.70 | Marcia Raines | Thank you so much. I think the two of you so far that I heard are definitely on the mark that you have the opportunity in this organization to attract the crop for your next city manager. that a city manager midpoint with experience in their career would want to come to the city. So I'm very excited to have the opportunity to work with your organization. |
| 01:50:42.93 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, Council Member Cox, did you have some comments? |
| 01:50:45.71 | Joan Cox | Thank you and thank you, Marcia, for joining us and thank you for providing us such a great overview of your qualifications. I really appreciate your focus the other night and tonight on focusing on the transition and on identifying the best candidate as our permanent city manager. I appreciated your focus on mentorship and boosting of the careers of our existing city staff I appreciate your estimable body of experience dealing with many of the issues that Sausalito is grappling with itself today. I appreciate your broad local contacts that I know will not approach the level of Adams, but will be a great starting point. And I also appreciate the fresh eyes that you will bring that will match the fresh eyes that our permanent city manager candidates will bring. And so I believe that your qualifications are uniquely suited to exactly what we need now in our transition period, so welcome. Thank you so much. |
| 01:51:53.65 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Ray, anything to add? |
| 01:51:57.29 | Ray Wendell | No, I think well said by everybody. You know, interim, is A tough job. It's a mission. |
| 01:52:08.77 | Jill Hoffman | Mm-hmm. |
| 01:52:09.04 | Ray Wendell | where you have a clear objective and that is to provide a smooth transition to a new permanent city manager. And I'm very pleased to have met Marcia, who I believe has the professionalism to understand what our mission is, and we'll get on and get it done. So welcome and thank you much. |
| 01:52:33.96 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 01:52:35.31 | Ray Wendell | so much. |
| 01:52:35.68 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 01:52:36.44 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Yes, agree with the vice mayor that everyone's comments are perfectly on the mark and definitely very excited to have someone of your caliber with your managerial expertise and your willingness to help us through this transition. So I just, think that you're the perfect fit for this time. You'll be very confidence inspiring for both our |
| 01:52:58.26 | Carolyn Revell | Yeah. |
| 01:53:05.05 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | existing department heads, staff, residents, and the council. Thank you for being here tonight and thank you for applying. And it sounds like we can safely say, we'll look forward to working with you. So with that, I will ask our city clerk to call the roll. |
| 01:53:25.23 | Joan Cox | Well, may I? |
| 01:53:26.44 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I guess I need a motion. |
| 01:53:27.74 | Joan Cox | Yeah, I will move that we adopt the resolution authorizing appointment and employment contract for interim city manager, Marsha Rainey. I'm going to go ahead and |
| 01:53:39.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And I guess actually that does remind me there was one note in the staff report that the expectation is that Marcia is willing to start quite soon in early November next week. And There was just a question if we were all on board with an early start to take full advantage of the time that she would have to overlap. for their current city manager. And I'm very much on board with that. And it sounds like others are as well. |
| 01:54:05.81 | Joan Cox | I think it's critical. |
| 01:54:07.77 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Okay. So with that, I think, do we have a second? |
| 01:54:11.62 | Mary Wagner | Yes, second. |
| 01:54:12.94 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, we have a motion in a second. Now will the city clerk please call the roll. |
| 01:54:18.37 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman. Yes. Councilmember Burns. |
| 01:54:22.01 | Bill Hines | Yes. |
| 01:54:22.94 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox? |
| 01:54:24.24 | Bill Hines | Yes. |
| 01:54:25.12 | Heidi Scoble | Vice Mayor with you? |
| 01:54:26.45 | Bill Hines | Yes. |
| 01:54:26.98 | Heidi Scoble | Mayor Cleveland Knowles. |
| 01:54:28.66 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yes, and that motion carries five. and thank you very much to Marsha Raines for agreeing to serve as our interim city manager and congratulations. Thank you. I look forward to working with you. |
| 01:54:42.55 | Marcia Raines | I'm very excited about this opportunity to work with each of you and all of you as a And I will see you next week, if not before. |
| 01:54:50.18 | Jill Hoffman | THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 01:54:50.24 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 01:54:50.26 | Marcia Raines | all the time. |
| 01:54:50.43 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:54:51.24 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you very much and welcome to the team. Thank you so much. All right, we're gonna move on in our agenda to item 7B. presentation of the Economic Development Advisory Committee or the EDAC to the City Council And first, I just want to extend Our thoughts to Jessica Rogers, who could not be here due to a family emergency. that she needs to attend to and welcome Vice Chair Ian Sobieski and staff Brian and Mora to do the presentation. So thank you both for being here tonight. |
| 01:55:32.13 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And I think we are turning it over first to the EDAC Vice Chair Ian Sobieski to start the presentation or Brian, are you reading? |
| 01:55:41.26 | Ian Sobieski | Yes. Thank you very much. As far as I understand it, Brian is going to be running the slides. We were both doing the presentations. So is that right, Brian, or do I share my story? |
| 01:55:51.74 | Adrian Brinton | Yes, yes, and you're up first. |
| 01:55:53.90 | Ian Sobieski | Ian Sobieski, All right, very well, well, thank you very much, my name is Ian Sobieski, I'm the Vice Chair of the Economic Development Advisory Committee. EDAC was asked by city council to review the land economic study done by the Cosmot company. The recommendations of the business advisory committee and the hospitality committee recommendations of the public we received in written form and via public comment at our edac meetings and digesting all this to make recommendations to the city council I want to begin by thanking our predecessor committees, the hospitality committee and the business advisory committee for in making this study happen, analyzing it, to the public for their comments and to the liaisons from the city council, Tom Riley and Jill Burns and from the Chamber of Commerce, Julie for their help and to all the EDAC members for their work. |
| 01:56:41.44 | Carolyn Revell | there. |
| 01:56:45.15 | Ian Sobieski | The members of the committee are Teresa Ancona, Don Daglow, Monica Finnegan, Cast green. Walter Limmerman, Malcolm Morgan, Marina O'Neill, Jessica Rogers, myself, Gary Testa, and Jacob Wittish. I recite the membership for the benefit of the public and to emphasize the diverse cross-section of the community that they represent. This is significant to note since the recommendations I'm presenting tonight were approved by unanimous vote of 11 to zero. with all members present. I want to particularly recognize the leadership of Chair Jessica Rogers in pulling these unanimous recommendations together. Chair Rogers was, as Mayor Knowles said, planning to attend and present herself tonight but was pulled away by her last-minute personal conflict and sends her regrets. So the first slide there, please, Brian, the 30 opportunities. |
| 01:57:41.32 | Adrian Brinton | Okay. Here we go. |
| 01:57:45.74 | Ian Sobieski | So these were the 30 opportunities that were identified in the report by Cosmic company. Our goal was to pick the subset of these recommendations that we felt were the most urgent to address and we recommend the six on the next slide. I will go through each of these six in order. However, I want to emphasize that by recommending these six, we are not saying that there is no merit to any of the others. Rather, with limited time and attention, our recommendations are where we believe we should start. EDAC will continue considering the other recommendations and may come back to City Council with further thoughts in the future. But today, EDAC unanimously recommends that the following six points be added by City Council to the City Strategic Plan. Next slide, please, Brian. The first recommendation is that we revamp the permit process. We discovered in talking to businesses that our city has a bad reputation for the degree of difficulty it takes to manage our permitting system. The current system imposes a material burden on the finances and morale of our businesses. to help our current businesses in this time of COVID. and to attract new ones that we want. We recommend improving our permitting process. We want to emphasize that this does not mean relaxing standards. It means rather improving customer service. Prioritizing rapid response for key proposals from designated businesses and generally reducing turnaround time. We want to emphasize that we know that our hardworking and dedicated city employees want this as much as our business applicants and will be an essential part of a solution. |
| 01:59:33.78 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 01:59:34.22 | Ian Sobieski | We also want to note that similar issues exist in our building permit and inspection processes. And these are areas of improvement as well. Point two, please, Brian. Side two. Recommendation two is to encourage business development. Currently, we rely on chance and the matchmaking of individual landlords and entrepreneurs to define what businesses we end up getting in Sausalito. We recommend being more proactive. We recommend that the city hold design charrettes in all three major business areas, the Downtown, Caledonia and Marinship, to meet with businesses, property owners, residents and customers to define and establish a business development outreach program. to bring in the kinds of companies we want here. Such a business development outreach program would include someone from the city reaching out to potential businesses It would include establishing relationships with brokers, promoting ourselves to brokers. and investigate establishing an incentive package to get the kinds of businesses we want. Such an incentive package could include items such as a temporary business license fee waiver or free parking. We also recommend helping our local businesses by exploring short-term marketing and outreach programs to attract more regional and local visitors to our South Salido businesses. This could include strategic alliances with other Marin hotels, and partnering cities as well as coordinating public relations efforts with the goal of promoting Sausalito as a destination. The next slide, please, Frank. Recommendation three concerns hotel rooms. Our overnight hotel visitors, we're going to the next slide there, Brian. Yes. Our overnight hotel visitors pay a significant But more so, they even spend significantly more money at our local businesses than simply day visitors do. They also support a different kind of business than day tourists support. Many of these kinds of businesses also would cater and serve our local residents. |
| 02:01:44.05 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:01:44.56 | Ian Sobieski | The land economic study identified that increasing the current 128 hotel rooms in our city would benefit our city's businesses and our city's budget. Examples of things we can do to accomplish this goal range from prioritizing an application from a local hotel that wants to increase the number of rooms, the Gables Inn for example, to allowing a boutique hotel in downtown Sausalito next to Angelenos. to allowing bed and breakfasts on land or potentially on houseboats or at the Bridgeway Marina. or with exploring how to increase overnight voting options, voter night stays. Next slide, please, Brian. Our fourth recommendation is to revise our prohibition on formula retail. We believe that it is possible to achieve the goal of maintaining the character and quality of our town while providing an exception process to our ban on formula retail. We are not recommending abolishing our prohibition on formula retail. No one on the EDAC wants a McDonald's in town. that our businesses are suffering, the vacancies are increasing, and even before COVID, our 145,000 square feet of commercial space on Caledonia could not be served well by just our residents. In talking with local businesses, it is clear that we need to attract more local visitors. These businesses believe that one or two well-chosen formula businesses could attract more local visitors and that this foot traffic would help them and thus our residents. So we recommend that we establish a procedure for allowing a very limited number of exceptions to formula retail based upon curating the kinds of businesses that will help our local business community. Deciding what kind of businesses we want to have here in town ties to the idea of recommendation number two, proactively encouraging business development. We are an artistic and creative community and our proposal is to bring that approach to curating the kind of downtown and Caledonia Street that we Using the tools of the incentive package I mentioned in recommendation number two, with the exception process we are proposing here, we believe can help our businesses and residents while enhancing the character of our town. Next slide, please, Brian. Our fifth recommendation is to allow residential uses on Caledonia Street. In keeping with the theme of proactively encouraging business development and revising formula retail prohibition, our recommendation here is to propose allowing the conversion of some of the 145,000 square feet of commercial space on Caledonia into housing. This would eliminate vacant space, increase demand to the local businesses, and enhance the character of Caledonia Street. Final slide, Keith Bryan. Our final recommendation is to perform an analysis of the infrastructure needs in the The partnership generates 71% of business license revenue, 41% of property tax, and 40% of sales tax. It is a key business center of our city, but it is also a key part of the character of our community. The working waterfront, the artists and applied artists, the makers and the fabricators and the other workers there are all an essential part of what we think of as Sausalito. We know that much of the infrastructure of the Marineship was built hastily due to the exigencies of war. and that the infrastructure is thus more susceptible to deterioration. Some of the area is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. All 225 acres of the Marin ship are not the same. in the same condition or facing the same threats. To protect this area for today and tomorrow, we recommend getting the facts about what it will take to do so. Hence, we recommend an engineering study of the infrastructure required to address issues related to road maintenance, drainage, and speed level rise. There may be grant money available to help fund this analysis. |
| 02:05:46.89 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:05:47.27 | Ian Sobieski | This summarizes the recommendations of the Economic Development Advisory Committee. |
| 02:05:47.29 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:05:52.45 | Ian Sobieski | We recommend that these be included in the strategic plan and in so doing, city staff, committees and council will all be on the same page about what we are working towards. Thank you for your time and attention. |
| 02:06:08.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Brian, do you want to just, why don't we go into your presentation, then we'll take council member questions at the end. |
| 02:06:16.11 | Adrian Brinton | All right, thank you. |
| 02:06:16.62 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Great. |
| 02:06:18.24 | Adrian Brinton | Great, thank you. Thank you, Mayor Cleveland Knowles. This is an update of the commercial revenue report that we gave the council in 2019 last year. Council Member Burns and interim council member Riley felt strongly that it should also come to council. So that's what we're doing tonight. Our first category of business license taxes, and you'll see on the slide, Aperio, this is one of the top business license taxpayers this year in the city. We projected last year that this category would go up about $900,000 a year once it was fully implemented, and indeed we've already passed that number. This is the first year where Measure M is in full effect. It also includes the subcontractors and commercial property rentals that were previously exempt from your ordinance, A couple key findings, 21 of the top 25 business license taxpayers are located in the Marinship Inland area. These are primarily the businesses that are in professional applied arts and office uses. of also of key interest, 12 of these taxpayers in Marinship inland pay more business license tax than any business in the other seven areas. But the one cautionary tale here is we anticipate a drop of between 35 to 40% of this revenue come January because it'll be based on 2020. from all your businesses in town and because of the COVID pandemic, we anticipate those to drop off. In terms of the distribution, as Ian noted earlier, 72% of the revenue comes from Marinship Inland. All of the other categories are less than 10%. This shows you the comparison from year to year, and you can see Every geo zone is up, but obviously the big change is Marinship Finland, which went from $264,000 last year to almost a million dollars this year. |
| 02:07:58.83 | Carolyn Revell | Thank you. $200. |
| 02:08:06.37 | Adrian Brinton | And then this is an interesting table that shows you the average business license tax payment by geo area, which ranges from $750 in neighborhood commercial to $2,700 in Marinship inland, but perhaps more significant, is if you look at the, top payment which is an average of the top two players in each category it ranges from seven to nine thousand dollars in most areas 1500 neighborhood commercial but the top two is licensed taxpayers in marineship inland each pay well in excess of 125 000 which again shows you the high level of gross revenues and also revenues the city's receiving from that business district And then here's a list of the top 25 business licensed taxpayers. This will show you the distribution by GeoZone. And again, you can see that the lion's shares of these are in fact from Marinship Inland, categories like finance investments, tech companies, marketing companies, legal, et cetera. On to property tax, and there's a slide here showing the harbors, which is your number one commercial property tax payer. This year, we're estimating that, or in the coming years, that commercial property tax will be in excess of $670,000. What's interesting in this category is that the changes from last year are very slight and indeed in some cases are even less than last year. We've also added in this report some reports of the so-called unsecured roll which gives you some insight into the revenue that the city receives from boats and floating homes. And here's the distribution. Again, you can see that Marinship Inland and Downtown Commercials, where most of the money is from, Caledonia's at 13%, and then the other three areas are less, they're in the five to 6% range. And here is the year to year projection. And again, this is very interesting because it basically shows you that in the commercial sector, your property tax overall is actually declining compared to last year. This shows the so-called unsecured property taxing commercial, which is around $69,000. And this is perhaps the most interesting slide in this section, and it shows you the unsecured property tax revenues for boats and vessels. floating homes, and then other categories, including possessory interest tax, which by the way is a tax levied on tenants of government buildings. And then we have sales tax. We have two slides, both the first and second quarter. We'll start with first quarter 2020, the months of January through March, which is mostly pre-COVID, although it has two weeks of COVID in there. You see on the slide, we have Serena and Lily, which again is one of the top sales tax producers in Sausalito. As with the other reports, Marinship Finland and downtown commercial generate the lion's share. of this revenue and the key categories are restaurants, home furnishings, and yacht sales, and it has, as I noted before, a couple of weeks of COVID impact. |
| 02:10:56.98 | Carolyn Revell | I'm not sure. |
| 02:11:00.88 | Adrian Brinton | And this shows you the breakdown by area, Marinship inland 40%, downtown commercial 22%, downtown waterfront 10%, the other areas less than that. And this shows you the distribution in terms of number of businesses, amount of revenues. and this shows you the top categories. I will note here that you have restaurants shown in three different categories. These are state designations. If you add the three restaurant groups together, you'll see that those are actually the lead category, followed by home furnishings and interior designers, and then yacht sales. And these are your top 25 sales tax producers. You'll note that the majority of the businesses on this list are restaurants. Second quarter is a little different. It reflects the three months of COVID, April through June, And it shows significant growth in home furnishings, grocery, yacht sales, and online sales. Hence, we have a picture of Silver Seas Yachts, which is one of your top sales tax generators in the second quarter. But it also, unfortunately, shows declines pretty much in every other category across the city. And in particular, in hotels and restaurants, there's pretty dramatic drops. Here's the geo zone comparison. The one interesting thing here is because of the downturn in restaurants, downtown commercial drops all the way to fourth place and Brinship Waterfront moves up to second again because of the yacht sale strength |
| 02:12:19.01 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:12:26.98 | Adrian Brinton | And this shows the second quarter changes. You'll see that Marinship Inland is up primarily due to home furnishings. Marinship Waterfront is up primarily due to yacht sales. And others also up due to what we think is a yacht sale from a Sausalito resident who bought a yacht from a non-Sausalito yacht broker. But the other categories are significantly down. in particular downtown commercials down almost 80%. And then you see the same trend in sales tax by type I'm furnishings that. Yachts up. the various restaurant categories down and business services also down. And then here's your list of the top 25 producers, sales tax in the second quarter. What's very surprising here, by the way, Even with the downturn in the restaurant sector, 11 of the top 25 are still restaurants, which to me is quite surprising, but it shows you that in the sales tax category in Sausalito, restaurants really are the backbone of that revenue type. And then finally, we have the hotel tax, TOT, And it shows you that this year, there's a 23% overall reduction, primarily due to the pandemic. The fourth quarter shows a 90% drop in revenue We're hopeful that as the shelter-in-place orders are modified as as the mayor noted earlier in the meeting that things will change. But as you can see, Here's the quarter by quarter returns in this area. And so we started the calendar year or started the fiscal year last summer up 12% and then up 10%. But then once the COVID impacts kicked in, we had a quarter of minus 19 and then a quarter of minus 90%. So next steps, as Ian mentioned, in terms of the EDAC land economic study, what we're recommending is to consider including those six items in the Council's strategic plan and also considering them as you develop your 21, 22 budget starting |
| 02:14:18.15 | Carolyn Revell | at all. |
| 02:14:22.70 | Adrian Brinton | early next year, and also to have EDAC work with both community development and public works in developing those six items. And we think if those move forward, it provides a real strong platform for the second year of your economic development program. |
| 02:14:24.34 | Carolyn Revell | and also, you. |
| 02:14:36.73 | Adrian Brinton | And then in terms of the revenue report, what we would recommend is that the city resume its business retention program, which was something the city did in the past And we think it's important, particularly in a time like the COVID pandemic, to reach out to some of your top revenue generators and make sure that they know that they're appreciated and also that they are hopefully going to stay in Sausalito to help provide for the revenue that's needed to pay for existing and future city services. So with that, I'll turn it back to the mayor. |
| 02:15:13.67 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you so much to both of you for your presentations. Brian, I'm going to ask you to stop sharing your screen for just a moment. |
| 02:15:23.67 | Jill Hoffman | Okay. Thank you. |
| 02:15:24.80 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:15:24.84 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 02:15:24.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I got it. We need a council. Great. So are there questions for either Ian or Brian, Councilmember Cox? |
| 02:15:39.65 | Joan Cox | Thank you, Ian and Brian. My question is for Brian and it may not be a question for this evening, it may be a question for you a future agenda item, but I appreciated the report on So we're going to have our measure M revenues On Monday, Brian, I forwarded to Yulia, who forwarded to you a letter from a concerned citizen about overcharging slash undercharging by the city of Sausalito under Measure M, complaining that we are undercharging on our general retail and hotel and overcharging on our services and professional services. service businesses. So I guess the quick question is, have you had a chance to look at that? I know that Joe and Tom worked with you. Uh, several months ago to look at the outcome of our BLT, our our equity measure, but I would like to know if you have any initial response to those concerns, or if this is something you plan to address at a future update to the council. |
| 02:16:53.97 | Adrian Brinton | There are a couple of things we're doing on this. One is I'm working with Yulia on a draft response for the individual who had the questions about the new ordinance. And then the other thing we're talking about is bringing to the finance committee an update on the business license tax in its first full year. Because as you'll recall, the council heard a report similar to that last November. The thought was we probably need to update it now that it's in full effect. and perhaps right before we do the renewals in January. So that's sort of what we're thinking right now. |
| 02:17:22.39 | Joan Cox | And I just as a follow up, I do know that we did make a decision at the finance committee and at the council last year to encourage. the viability of our retail and hotel businesses, so we did make some adjustments to our BLT that not everyone may have been fully aware of. So I do recognize that this perceived lack of parity may actually be somewhat intentional through direction that was given at a public meeting, but I would just like to get to the bottom of these concerns. So thank you. |
| 02:18:00.00 | Adrian Brinton | Thank you. |
| 02:18:00.02 | Joan Cox | All right, thank you. |
| 02:18:00.59 | Adrian Brinton | Thank you. |
| 02:18:01.28 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thanks. Joan, any other questions? Ray? |
| 02:18:06.97 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. Mm-hmm. After we've taken public comment, well, obviously, we really do need to get our arms around the six recommendations and discuss them specifically. But I have one particular technical question. When we did several years ago now, it seems 18 months ago, when we decided to do the GeoZone analysis, You went to and I think that's a good and you mapped the economic geozones to our existing Lanyu's Thank you. That's correct. |
| 02:18:48.69 | Adrian Brinton | That's correct. |
| 02:18:49.80 | Ray Wendell | we ended up looking at effectively, in particular in the Morinche, the waterfront. across the whole strip. And the industrial across the whole strip. Um, and called it eventually inland and out or whatever we call it. Now, because of the fact that you know. The economic impact of sea level rise is so disproportionate to the South. Sorry to the north, to the north, my apologies. And because we have in the middle the boat yards. Would it? Is there anything precluding us from taking a different hot at geozones. and looking at the north, the middle, and the south of the marine ship, as geozones across both water and industrial, just to get a sense of the relationship between the economic output and the risk for inundation that's going to occur rather than this artificial Um, land use designation between waterfront and industrial. Does that make sense, Brian? The question I've just. |
| 02:20:09.03 | Adrian Brinton | that. You absolutely could do that. In fact, one of the things that we reported last year when we set up the geo zones is I said, I anticipate that you'll probably want to drill down and make more geo zones and have exactly the kind of analysis, Vice Mayor, that you just described. So it's absolutely possible. Yes. Thank you. |
| 02:20:27.22 | Ray Wendell | So, |
| 02:20:27.68 | Adrian Brinton | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 02:20:27.95 | Ray Wendell | at some point later on, we need the discussion. Let's get on with that. Mm-hmm. |
| 02:20:35.45 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you for that question. Other questions? Okay, great. Thank you both. We'll open it up to public comment on both these presentations. Any members of the public who would like to comment? I'm not seeing any. I would just like to thank, I do see some members of the EDAC, other members of the EDAC here tonight. So thank you to them for joining us. And thank you for your work. on this presentation. Okay, I do see one member of the public, Wendy Richards. Welcome. |
| 02:21:20.98 | Wendy Richards | Thank you. I'm going to go to the Mayor and council members. I'll just go very quickly. My, you know, I have spoken out many times against the, I spoke out even before you passed the increase on the business license tax. And I have spoken out consistently against imposing this tax on small businesses, on home-based businesses, on freelancers, and on professional businesses. So I reiterate that and I would be more than happy to work with Mr. Mora and whoever else is going to work on a reform of this business license tax as Joan Cox has said. and get this in line to take care of our residents. Why in these days should a home-based freelancer be subject to a business license tax. if it's 300, 500, $700 a year, just to make a living when that money could go towards paying for a Zoom account for that person to take their business online. It's crazy. And if that business is paying, they're paying for the city manager before they're paying themselves because a gross receipts tax is not an income tax. It is a gross receipts tax. And if you're in the business of home decorating, Your gross receipts include the furniture you buy for those people. That doesn't even go to you. So, It's very important that you take a second look at this. The financial people are leaving town. The rents are done. The leases are up. People are working from home. What have you done lately for a perio? What's going to have them stay when those people are working from home? I've talked to many small people that have had businesses. They're gone. They're leaving. So it's very crucial that we get equity back for the residents. for the people who are now all working from home And that we think about what have we done lately for our businesses? The tax on professional services. Why are we surprised that it's now a million instead of 300,000? You traveled it. And it's way out of line. It needs to change. And I will work to help do that. Now on the recommendations, I want to confirm what Tom Theodora said, do not allow Airbnbs, whether it's on boats or B&Bs or whatever, 650 people sign signatures saying, we want to keep the 30-day rental minimums. So I oppose that. I oppose spending a dollar on attracting the right kind of businesses. What is the point of attracting businesses when we're just tripling our tax on them? Cut the tax, that'll attract business. And I definitely support simplifying the permit process for residents, businesses, and everybody. And for the staff, make their lives easier too. So thank you very much. I really appreciate it. the opportunity to speak tonight. Thank you. |
| 02:24:40.43 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. And I am not seeing any other members of the public who wish to speak. Heidi, can you confirm? |
| 02:24:51.79 | Heidi Scoble | There are no other hands raised at this time. Great. |
| 02:24:55.11 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | All right, thank you. So I'm gonna close public comment on this item back. to the council. Um, I did just have a question actually, sorry, but I forgot to ask Brian, you mentioned a business retention program. |
| 02:25:12.97 | Ray Withy | Thank you. |
| 02:25:12.98 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And I also think the EDAC was, it was either the EDAC or the chamber that was touching base with our existing businesses to see how they are doing and faring. overall and during COVID. So could you just speak to both of those if you can. |
| 02:25:31.54 | Adrian Brinton | What happened is when we presented this revenue report to EDAC |
| 02:25:31.56 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right. |
| 02:25:36.77 | Adrian Brinton | in August, one of the first comments we had, in fact, it was actually from Council Member Riley, he said, I'm not familiar with some of the firms on this list. And there was some discussion at EDAC about that being a problem. really the city should be very familiar with the businesses that are helping to fund services. but City Manager Pulitzer and Adam could probably amplify on this, described a program that the city had in years past where they would invite, I believe it was to a breakfast, some of the top revenue generators to get updates from the city, from the county, from the Chamber of Commerce, and from the Business Advisory Committee. And he said something like that could be restarted. And I think that was part of what we were talking about. And in particular, one of the things that we highlighted for EDAC in August is we said, even if you involved a small number of businesses, it could have a big impact. five businesses in Sausalito are responsible for 50% of your sales tax. And there's about 10 businesses that are responsible for a third of your business license tax. So while we did show you top 25 lists, you don't necessarily have to invite that many businesses. You can start out with the hotels and then the businesses in those two categories and you'd have a very robust program so that's what we were thinking conceptually but we do have this on edX next agenda for november and so the idea is to kick it around with them and to see their vision. for how that sort of a business retention program might work. |
| 02:27:09.62 | Ian Sobieski | And I might add, Mayor, this design shred idea, that's one of the follow-ons to one of the recommendations specifically built on this idea of asking the businesses what they need to be retained. and soliciting their own creativity and feedback in that regard. So that's part of the part of the answer. |
| 02:27:29.58 | Marcia Raines | Madam Mayor, I just want to clarify, I appreciate your Brian's comments, it's accurate. but really important to recognize that that breakfast was hosted and co-sponsored. by the city, but the Chamber of Commerce hosted that breakfast I just want to make sure we have that clarified. |
| 02:27:48.79 | Ian Sobieski | Okay. |
| 02:27:49.09 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 02:27:49.45 | Ian Sobieski | Great, thank you. I want to make sure, Mayor, if I'm righteous, that |
| 02:27:49.72 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 02:27:53.04 | Ian Sobieski | In response to Wendy Richards' comment, I want to make clear that the recommendations do not include changing the short-term rental ban in the city. The recommendation concerned hotel rooms. and simply increasing the number of licensed hotel rooms. It had nothing to do with short-term rentals. |
| 02:28:09.76 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, great. Thank you for that. Are there okay so. Sorry to break into the question period here. So are there comments from council members? I think we've got six recommendations. from the EDAC, I think one of the things I would like to talk about is how we feel about the six recommendations, but also which one of them, which of them might we refer for back to the EDAC for further public comment, elaboration, and study. you know before we can kind of scope them for our strategic plan. So, Council member Cox, do you want to start? Thank you. |
| 02:28:55.33 | Joan Cox | Well, I first want to thank the EDAC for all the hard work they've done on their recommendations. I do my comments are really intended to focus on the integration of our strategic plan our general plan and our economic plan moving forward and so for that reason I. And endorse the comments we got from Tom Theodorus about the importance of understanding. uh, on what basis the EDAC is prioritizing certain of the Cosmon proposals to include a discussion of the benefits and costs of each proposal. So that the current recommendations are subjective but not all of them include that economic component not all of them need to so i will say to start off i wholly endorse first recommendation about revamping the city permit process although i believe we need to ensure that residential permits are not adversely impacted in encouraging the um revamping of the city permit process with respect to our commercial businesses. I also not surprisingly wholeheartedly support the marine ship engineering analysis of infrastructure needs and believe this should be a top priority for the EDAC to make sure we don't lose any more key businesses in the marine ship. I have previously endorsed the vice mayor's proposal for exploring this concept of geo zones. And I do encourage our continued exploration of that approach. I think that will assist us in I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS. better understanding infrastructure needs. in the marinship and better prioritizing how we use infrastructure and I'm not as sanguine about Um, increasing our existing hotel rooms. Our TOT is down 90% in the fourth quarter, which is hugely impactful to our existing hotels. So until we understand the impact of COVID-19 on regional, national and international tourism, and until our existing hotel rooms are once again down to a near zero vacancy rate, I don't believe we should focus on increasing the stock of hotel rooms. I also think that such a policy, we've already made allowance for such a policy in our general plan, in our tourist plan at policy E.7.2. I THINK I'M GOING TO BE As a planning commissioner for eight years and as a city council member, I have been encouraging and placing at the top of our priority list, the rewriting of our formula retail ordinance. That is in dire need of attention. I'm concerned, however, about relaxing restrictions on formula retail, because if we relax them in order to encourage a rustic bakery, How do we then avoid a McDonald's? So I think we have to be very thoughtful about the manner in which we rewrite our formula retail to encourage those types of businesses that fit Sausalito's character Um, without being overwhelmed by Formula Retail. As our vice mayor pointed out several meetings ago, We would love to have a pharmacy in town, but the only pharmacy that could actually survive especially in the era of COVID-19 is a formula retail that has the backbone to sustain the losses that it will incur as it ramps up. like a Walgreens or a CVS. So these are the types of things I think we have to carefully consider as we I'm not sure. CONTEMPLATE. formula we do. I received a bunch of comments about short-term rentals on houseboats, I... First of all, the only houseboats we have in town are Galilee Harbor. Those are live work, those are owned. You know, that's not eligible for short-term rentals. And the other houseboats are in the unincorporated area of Marin County on gate six road. If we're proposing considering short term rentals on live aboard slips, I think we have to be very cautious about that because those comprise a huge component of our affordable housing stock in Sausalito, as do our ADUs and JADUs. So I did hear Ian's comment that he's not proposing short-term rentals. I'm not sure where my confusion or the confusion of others arises from the discussion of this policy. but we do have a ban that was unanimously agreed to by the council I think we have to be respectful of that ban and And be very careful to preserve our existing affordable housing stock in town. So those are my initial thoughts, but I, so I, wholeheartedly encourage several of the proposals I have and want to be cautious about some of the others. But once again, I really appreciate the EDAC's work and I'm so impressed by the level and caliber of effort and creative thinking that this committee is bringing to us. So I want to really encourage their ongoing work for us. Thanks. |
| 02:34:33.86 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Karen Hollweg, Great Thank you, our Council Member burns or Hoffman you want to go next. |
| 02:34:39.41 | Joe Burns | Um, Thank you, Brian and Ian for this. especially Thank you. the amount of data that we now have to work with as a community and as an as an EDAC and as a council, Um, It's... It's just fabulous to be able to look at some of this information. And granted, the entire world is upside down now and then we have to what's the world going to look like when it writes itself and all that type of stuff. We We wanted this, right? We wanted somebody to give us a bunch of options. We got those from Cosmo and I think that was fabulous. We want a lot of data and we want a committee to really go through it. So I want to thank you both for that and all the EDAC members. I'll also pitch right now that this is a talented that I would say is working about 40% of their horsepower capacity So even though they've gotten a tremendous amount done, they are so talented that they just want to go. And so tonight, part of this process, as the mayor mentioned, is, We want to send back some questions. We want to give them the advisory information they're asking from us to empower them to go do that. So as we look at this list I think it's important as Council Member Cox said, to put it into the scope of what falls into the strategic plan, what falls into the general plan. But what do we turn the EDAC around and say, go conquer. Here's an idea that you've brought forth and you find validity to it. go get more data on it, go research other communities, go go forth because they do have that type of horsepower in that in that committee. Um, I, I'm not sure. There's much I would take out of here. I agree that I don't believe short-term rentals has come up in conversation with this group. But if I say I'm going to trim a tree down on Caledonia, I'll hear about short-term rentals. It just comes up with every single thing that we talk about that short-term rentals are reminded that We can't have those. But I don't think anybody's pitching that But hotel rooms were actually discussed both by Cosmont as something that said even though that industry is in a serious pain right now We had such a low number and such a proximity to city, to the San Francisco and those types of things that we could stand to gain a few and probably be okay. the work this group's going to do now and us considering it should not have a part of what's going on with COVID. nothing will happen for five, six, seven years, you know, as far as putting a hotel on the ground, four years, so, but we absolutely need to be identifying spots. And I think they've actually identified a great spot, something that I've been talking about, I've heard it from somebody else years ago, and I think it's an ideal opportunity. Um, So I encourage that number revamping the city permit process. That's one that I think if we accept as a group, as a council, Um, That's where we have to really give them the proper direction on how much are they going to go out and research or worse, how much they cannot disrupt our current staffing as they do their research. Because we have a backlog that we cannot take bodies from. right now in a lot of those areas. But we all, there isn't anybody who's been in Sausalito for the last few years that, hasn't said that we need to revamp and change and streamline that permitting process I will tell you having been involved in government in three different cities and done business Every city's the worst. Every city is the worst. Their residents think that they're the hardest ones to get building permits through, applications through and all that stuff. We've painted ourselves into a couple corners that I think we can get out of with some of these permitting processes in this group. as they do some research they'll be able to find and present to us some some ideas so i encouraged that we we let them go do that, but that we give them some, some parameters on, on how much they can work, you know, and with staff and that type of thing. Business development and those types of things, I think that's something this group can start doing outside of a strategic development process. That's just good business and we don't really need to put into a strategic plan or a general plan, just doing good business. and the same as the as council member Cox said on retail formula retail the code needs to be stronger it needs to be buttoned up and and very complete but i also agree that it should have some uh allowances that both protect and enhance our opportunities um We allow residential uses on Caledonia. I'm not sure, again, I think this is probably a good one for them to kind of look at what spaces are we talking about? What's the actual opportunities there? I'd be curious. I know that was a big Cosmont identification. I'd be curious to see the information that comes from that as well as the friendship engineering analysis. Absolutely. We need that. We know we need that through our entire town. You know, we have infrastructure issues up and down our hillsides on sewer, storm water, power, streets, sidewalk. I mean, yeah, we could do that all day long. But an engineering analysis, especially as it relates to subsidence, that's going to get us long before sea level rise does. Subsidence, and I always tell people, go down under Manzini |
| 02:40:20.72 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 02:40:31.96 | Joe Burns | parking lot and look at how much of that separation we have, we're subsiding at a rate that I'm frankly alarmed where sea level rises is a smaller portion. So I think that is something that I would love to have an analysis of, though most of that is private land and that'll be interesting. But again, let's see what we're gonna task this group with, what we're gonna pull back and structure through a strategic plan. But let's give them the, the ability and direct them on what we want to get out of this group because they are powerful and they're ready to go. That's it for now. |
| 02:41:15.85 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Joe. Yeah, I just, you know, really an amazing amount of work and expertise with EDAC. I just, you know, continually impressed by this group and kind of the power they bring to problem solving with the city also with the Cosmot study and Brian, the work you did on that. This is the power of the COSMOT study is that, you know, we're basing decisions now on metrics, actual metrics and defining you know, what these areas of town mean and what they bring to the table, especially the Moran ships. So. you know, allows us to make decisions based on metrics instead of myths that have kind of been passed down. I think this is tremendously helpful and really eye-opening. With regard to the. And thank you, obviously, to EDAC and everybody that worked on both of those reports. I so appreciate that and appreciate the hard work. Um, So with regard to the six recommendations, I think we're kind of all agree that one, one, two, and six I think I mean I don't everybody that's spoken so far you know revamp the city permit process encourage business development activities yes commission Marinship engineering analysis of infrastructure needs. Yeah, I think we need to do that. I mean, that's fairly obvious. Also, I like the other recommendation, the number three recommendation that refers to development of a business retention program. to the economic, you know Development Advisory Committee I like that one. The other three I think I need to, they need to be tightened up a little bit because they do, they affect, they have ordinances that they may run afoul of and we need to think about that before we add them to the strategic plan and what we wanna do about that. adding hotel rooms. You know, I agree that that recommendation does kind of veer into unknowns with regard to certain wording in here, specifically rooms or bridgeway marina, other non-traditional uses, which I think is probably the language that people are concerned about. Um, and bed and breakfast options on house votes. that those are kind of concerned to me, and I think other people too that we've heard from. um, And also, you know, these things also might run contrary to policies and ordinances that are already in effect. Also, residential uses on Caledonia, not against that, you know, in concept, but also kind of the same thing. We have to look at what our current ordinances and policies are with regard to what's allowed. with regards to commercial and residential on on caledonia not you know not next to caledonia as it is now but on caledonia itself I know we do have some housing there, but it's limited, I think, in scope. So same kind of thing. We need to see what we're talking about with regard to ordinances. Same thing with revised formula retail requirements. Um, you know, that's a big concern of people. We don't wanna become a walking mall that's the same kind of stores that you see Other outdoor malls that have kind of sprung up, but. you know, People come here because they want to see something different. And they want to see something unique. And I was just in Austin, Texas last week, and I was struck by Um, You know, there are differences in how that that town is changing in a dramatic and fast pace. But the interesting thing for me as a traveler there was to see the quirky little stores and the humor that you see in these businesses and the creativity. So that's what makes that town unique. I think those things are what make our town unique. and the people the issues that people are concerned about with formula retail is that when you start letting those businesses in, obviously they crowd other things out and they crowd out creativity and uniqueness. And so, those are my comments and I think I think we're all going to be, you know, aligned on certain things. But anyway, thanks. Excellent work, you guys. Really, really great. Thank you so much. |
| 02:45:19.39 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Anyway. |
| 02:45:22.63 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 02:45:24.79 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thanks, y'all. Amen. Ray. |
| 02:45:31.44 | Ray Wendell | Okay, well, it is 949. And I could go on for an hour. But don't worry, Madam Mayor, I won't. I have a mute button. Okay, there we go. So thank you, EDAC. Thank you, Brian. Um, Where we're at, I think, is let me, I want to do, I'm going to run through each of the six things. But before I do that, I want to make some general comments about economic development. |
| 02:46:11.03 | Ray Wendell | Um, Eight years ago when I ran, economic development was a little bit of noise in the back. And we sort of knew that we needed to be involved in economic development. But we also knew that we didn't have the money to do it. At that time, everybody wanted to invest money in our parks. And that's what we did. And so we invested money in our parks and we found a way to do it. By 2016, there was a lot more conversation about economic development. And eventually, in the next During this last four years of the council, we actually, especially with the introduction of measure L and M, decided to have a and commit to a major Um, investment in economic development. We were no longer just going to argue about whether the the hospitality committee was going to get $30,000 to invest in this or that. We were actually going to put together a set of coherent programs of which the Cosmos study was one of those programs, and one of the early programs. to give us data, and to give us options that we could then discuss as we further evolve our economic development program. Brian has been leading this effort. And I think is would attest to the fact that we have being in a very methodical way, instead of outsourcing our economic development to our BAC or our hospitality, the city was actually going to issue RFPs and was actually going to take charge. of economic development. That's what we did. And let's not forget it. That's the transformation. that has occurred over the last three years, two, three years, that we took charge of economic development. OK. Yeah. With that, we then evolve the committee structure to EDAC and thank you for all the hard work and the recommendations. Let's get to the six recommendations. This has gone through the sort of like, the Buffeting of the general plan process. It's gone through, you know, all kinds of uh, various hurdles, but we've now got EDAC focusing on a variety of things in the context of our strategic plan, our general plan. or ongoing. average operational budget. Great. |
| 02:49:23.66 | Ray Wendell | EDAC is specifically recommending that these six items come into our general, items into our strategic plan. Okay. Okay, let's get the strategic plan back up on the table, for God's sake. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in that. that could help guide us as we go through these stages of the COVID situation and the energy that EDAC and sustainability, for example, are bringing to the table. Great. So let's not forget. These guys want us to incorporate into the strategic plan. Let's, as a council, start talking about the strategic plan. And then, In terms of the various issues, In terms of revamping the city permit process, I'm You know, this is something I must admit we've been talking about for eight years. I thought City of Sausalito took the lead actually in the county, of figuring out how to put a virtual process in place in light of COVID. So I really do believe that we need to instead of going from the conceptual and the abstract of The city makes us difficult. The city does this, the whatever, A, B, C. We get down to some facts. What is it specifically? A, B, C, D, you want to change. |
| 02:51:06.61 | Ray Wendell | not abstract, let's change our permanent process, let's do this. Give us some examples of specifically what you want to change And in the end, what you will find is that most of the conflict that the staff undergoes is the fact that eight years ago, 10 years ago. The city council was demanding that all descriptions discretionary authority was removed from staff. that it all went up to the Planning Commission. And yet the big problem we actually now realize is that we have not given staff enough authority to make discretionary approvals for things. to stop it all being bogged down. The staff are frightened. of the council that has not given direction to go and actually make decisions. That's the fundamental problem with issue number one. Issue number two, of course, that's what we've been talking about for the last six years, encouraging business development. That's what we're going. adding hotel rooms, we got a problem here. The lack of hotel rooms is actually going to stimulate our recovery. We already have in our general plan unmodified. Bed and breakfast, did any bed and breakfast emerge in the last 20 years? I don't think so, why not? because they're not economically viable. So if we're, let's not let this, and a number of residents have raised this issue, let's not have this as being, people are worried now, this is a code word for short-term rentals. Well, let's dissipate that. but consider that perhaps as a long-term strategy, increasing the number of hotel rooms, as Cosmo actually indicated, would be beneficial in the short term Let's use our competitive advantage. to actually maximize the acceleration of the recovery because we have limited. number of groups. Formula retail. Number four. Madam Mayor, let me go two more. Number four. Look. You do not need to change our formula retail. What you need to do is come up with actual projects That makes sense. Bring it forward. The council can always give an a, of variance, it's probably the wrong term. I'm not a land use person, an exception. Let's come up with that one, an exception. to a particular formula retail if you come up with a good project. My God, if you came up with a boutique CVS pharmacy, do you think anybody in the city is going to have any objection to that change of formula retail? Come up with the idea, not the abstract concept. of trying to redesign formula retail, come up with the projects. City councils have grown up. They can actually decide them. Oh. Residential uses on Caledonia, we already allow residential uses on Caledonia. The issue is going to be whether you allow them on the ground floor. whether you actually displace businesses that need to be displaced because there's too much retail and allow residential on the ground. That's the issue in Caledonia. We already allow residential on the upper part. within certain limits. And then finally, the Marin ship, Well, of course you need an engineer to study. but you need multiple engineering studies. You need multiple layers of engineering studies. You need engineering studies, you need economic studies, and you need to cut off chunks that make sense, again, We got the north, the south and the middle. The North is particularly vulnerable. Adaptation and plans and Um, amelioration plans are going to be specific. There is no one plan for the whole of the area. therefore let's narrow down on where the most risk is |
| 02:55:52.25 | Ray Wendell | get the studies done that we need to do and collaborate with our partners in the county to where we are the most vulnerable is in the north. Guess what? That's where the county boundary is. Guess what? that's where the county is worrying about sea level rise. Duh, why aren't you going to actually collaborate with the county to figure out an amelioration plan for the north end of town? Come on, guys. It makes sense, right? So there's a lot of infrastructure needs, subsidence, ground level and concept options for what we need to do. With that, Madam Mayor, I will shut up. |
| 02:56:34.66 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. Okay, I'm gonna try to, instead of making my own comments, try to pull together and add my comments on top so that we can provide a cogent recommendation back to the EDAC if that's okay. So I'll just add my comments on as we go through one through six. I think what I'm hearing is that we all agree. So I think there's two questions. One is, Are these priority issues and are these best suited for the EDAC to move forward in some way? So I think in terms of revamping the city permit process, number one, especially in terms of business uses, Number two, encourage business development activities. And number six, a marineship engineering analysis. I think all three of those, we all agree are priorities and we all see some role for the EDAC in those. So does anybody disagree with me on that statement? |
| 02:57:35.99 | Susan Rowe | Okay. |
| 02:57:36.26 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So I think we'd like to send I would like, I agree with some of the comments made previously that revamping the city permit process We need to kind of guide EDAC in that and that we would want them to be strategic. I'm thinking that through. I've heard two concepts. One is kind of the level of discretion given to staff versus planning zoning administrator planning commission. We would ask the EDAC to look at that issue within the various business permits. And then I think the second issue, which also has come up in other land use contexts that I haven't heard yet tonight is What about our city codes needs to be more objective and kind of clear cut so that in whether it's the staff or the planning commission or who applying those criteria both the permit applicant and either the staff or the planning commission are clearer on, what is allowed and what's not allowed or what's required or what's not required. I think my recommendation would be that we send this back to the EDAC to look at those two elements of the permit process and to both make recommendations that they can make on their own And then come up with a list of what we might need staff or other resources to further. and then we'll see how and if we can accommodate that. But I think council member Burns had a very good point that we can't just throw this topic back at staff with a lot of requests from, from the EDAC or, or other commissions without thinking strategically about whether that's something we can do. So is that a fair summary of our direction on number one? |
| 02:59:44.66 | Joe Burns | Yeah, I think really find, like the vice mayor said, find out what are the issues. Most of the times when I've heard from businesses, the issues are ADA requirements. They come down to statewide building codes. We just happen to be enforcing them, so we're the bad guy. You know, a lot of that stuff that I hear is, you know, I think again, every community has that issue. So really what is standing in the way of businesses opening in Sausalito? Right. |
| 03:00:10.19 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right, but it's under our control that we can affect. Right, is that what you're saying? |
| 03:00:15.56 | Joe Burns | Is that what you're saying? I determine those because if it comes down to ADA requirements or elevator requirements, of ramps. |
| 03:00:24.52 | Joan Cox | I do think the vice mayor made a very valid point that we have to encourage the good work that our planning department has been doing in COVID-19. They've really been a leader. in the electronic permit processing I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE et cetera. So I think that EDAC you know, we'll want to wait, we'll want to balance their recommendations with an acknowledgement of many of the things that we're also doing right. |
| 03:00:51.87 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, with those additions, is that, fair summary of our direction. Okay. And I'm hoping somebody's taking some notes here. Brian or |
| 03:01:04.38 | Adrian Brinton | I'm taking notes. |
| 03:01:05.54 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, great. Okay, second, encourage business development activities. I think, that we all are on board with that and that, We would just encourage EDAC to give a little more, put a little more meat on the bone. about what they can do on their own without additional city resources and what would go into the, if we need to put staff time, energy funds into our strategic plan, what they're asking. or that. And then I'm just gonna skip to number six because this also seemed like an area that we all agree that the marine ship engineering analysis of infrastructure needs is critical. I think this is an area for me that the EDAC can gather some more information on But it seems like to put this in our strategic plan, we need some kind of scope. and perhaps examples from other jurisdictions about what they what this might entail, how expensive it would be. I mean, I have no idea if an engineering analysis would cost you know. half a million dollars a million dollars or 20 million dollars like i did |
| 03:02:21.21 | Ray Wendell | I don't know. |
| 03:02:22.08 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I don't even know. |
| 03:02:23.57 | Ray Wendell | Madam Mayor, |
| 03:02:24.02 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I |
| 03:02:26.24 | Ray Wendell | Go ahead. We will be talking about an engineering analysis in the decade. heads. In other words, this is going to be an ongoing thing. that is going to be needed of different levels of engineering analysis, the whole the whole of the waterfront. that is gonna go on for the next decade. The question now is where do we begin? Where is the small start that we would get? |
| 03:02:53.61 | Ray Withy | Thank you. |
| 03:02:53.62 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right. Yes, I understand that. That's why I'm talking about scope. And scope in our strategic plan, we have a six year timeline so we need to break it down and I think the EDAC can help us do that. But I also think they may need the Department of Public Works |
| 03:03:15.06 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 03:03:15.88 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | or other assistance. in doing that. |
| 03:03:18.21 | Jill Hoffman | In doing. |
| 03:03:19.31 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So, That one is a, it's kind of a bigger task, I think. And we need to have a discussion about how much staff resources we have, but for me, I would put this at the top of the list in terms of what we would want staff to assist EDAC with. |
| 03:03:38.23 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. Totally agree. |
| 03:03:39.95 | Joe Burns | And I, this is an area, you know, this is where I really think we need an association of owners and property owners to be controlling this, not the city, because |
| 03:03:46.07 | Ray Wendell | Yep. |
| 03:03:46.41 | Bill Hines | Thank you. |
| 03:03:49.31 | Joe Burns | Most, you know, Every property owner should, if they're going to be doing a project, they're going to do an engineering analysis. They, you know, we know that some of the people have done them. We know Clipper's done them. Um, But if we're going to control the engineering analysis of the entire Marine ship, that's, that really has to be with all property owners. Otherwise we're going to be doing our streets in a couple of little areas. Um, It's more than just to say we're going to do an engineering analysis of the marine ship. There's, you know, it's kind of like we're going to do sewer lateral checks for our entire city. You know, that's the type of thing we're looking at. We have a lot of private land. These guys are going to be able to develop their property. They're going to do an engineering analysis. If they're never going to develop their property, they're not going to do an engineering analysis. Are we going to do an engineer analysis for them, though they're never going to develop their property? That's the type of questions would come before an engineering analysis. So Um, but I, |
| 03:04:39.97 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | So I think, yeah, right. I mean, just to get back, I think what we really want to is more of a work plan scope, you know, does Ray, does the vice mayor's idea to do it north, middle, south, make the most sense? Does doing it in some other manner? at some point we will probably need to get some professional expertise. |
| 03:04:59.34 | Jill Hoffman | Yes. |
| 03:04:59.44 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | forward that's even beyond you know our public works but i think we need to to kind of start mapping it out. And I would welcome EDAC and staff's recommendations on that. So I think that's as far as we can get on that tonight. All right, I'm going to go back to the list. So those are the three that I would prioritize. And I think I'm hearing unanimity. on the council in that. And The number three, the hotel room, I think there's My personal view on this I think some other council members said it as well. I think the first and most important thing that we need to focus on right now is recovery. and retention of the hotel rooms that we actually have. I think. that the hotels are really struggling, some more than others. some more Um, recover more easily than others. We don't know what the rest of this year is going to look like. So I would put the focus of, I would direct the focus of EDAC to be on retention and recovery. And then secondly, on partnerships with nearby hotels, such as Cavallo Point, we have kind of a captive audience there. I think that could bring a lot of economic activity, more economic activity to Sausalito than it does currently. So I would kind of put this lower on my list of priorities. And then as someone mentioned, in year five or six of our strategic plan, looking at whether at that point in time, more hotel rooms is something that Sausalito wants to focus on. Is there anything to add to that? |
| 03:06:43.07 | Joe Burns | Well, you know. |
| 03:06:43.76 | Jill Hoffman | I'm not sure. |
| 03:06:43.97 | Joe Burns | THE END OF THE END OF THE Yeah, I'd say we absolutely are going to need more hotel rooms and |
| 03:06:45.81 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. |
| 03:06:49.67 | Joe Burns | by the time we can get them built. I would take some of the other day boating locations and bed and breakfast on houseboats out. But I would add that the committee looks at transient moorage opportunities across our marinas. We have two that do it, Clipper and Schoonwalker. And that is a huge economic development opportunity. If one big 100 foot yacht comes in, they spend a lot more sales tax revenue than a thousand people coming in on bikes or day-use tourists. |
| 03:07:21.73 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, thanks for adding that. |
| 03:07:22.10 | Joe Burns | Yes. |
| 03:07:23.27 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 03:07:23.78 | Joe Burns | Yeah, so let's put transient mortgage as kind of that Yeah. |
| 03:07:27.00 | Joan Cox | Yeah. I agree about the economic opportunity, but we have to carefully, we're about to get an enforcement letter from BCDC insisting on no Bay Fill. we have to balance our interests. moorings with our requirement to comport with the Richardson Bay Special Area Plan. with that proviso, absolutely, I think it's something to explore. |
| 03:07:56.99 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Mm-hmm. |
| 03:07:57.20 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 03:07:59.28 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Is that, I think? Steph, is that clear enough? |
| 03:08:04.38 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 03:08:05.34 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. for the formula retail requirements in downtown in Caledonia. I actually disagree with Ray on this. I think our formula retail requirements are not clear. I think there's Thank you. THE FAMILY. They are in desperate need of reform. We already allow formula retail in Sausalito, but it's the ordinance that does allow it. is a mess. So I would strongly encourage any input from EDAC they have on reforming our formula retail, not extending it. We have certain areas of town I mean, they could recommend that we extend it, but that's I don't think the priority, but to make it workable. Again, to make it understandable, to make it objective. And then to Ray's point, Um, to potentially allow exceptions if that's something that we can legally do without getting into hot water. I think that would also be a good idea. or to adopt standards such as over concentration standards that would allow a very limited number of formula retail. but not more than a couple in a certain zone, for example. |
| 03:09:27.32 | Joan Cox | Yeah, those are already in the ordinance. We, but the ordinance right now is just not at all a model of clarity. So it desperately needs revamping. |
| 03:09:36.57 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah, and just for the public, though, I don't think this necessarily for the EDAC needs to be a charge of increased formula retail. I think we would probably get more applications if we were just, if we had an ordinance that was workable and clear. So that would be my focus of that. |
| 03:09:57.42 | Christy | um, |
| 03:09:58.32 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | look. Is there anything anyone else wants to add on that? |
| 03:10:03.08 | Ray Wendell | Well, Madam Mayor, I'm all for clarifying, Nathan. that, um, you know, don't misunderstand my comments that, um, . to indicate that we shouldn't have clarity, we should. Um, But the fact remains, the whole concept of a formula retail ordinance. an anti-big box order. is outdated. It needs much more nuanced clarification. in today's world. with the way in which the market is working on various in the streets. just needs clarity. Now, the ordinance itself may need clarity, but we need to rethink some of the operating principles behind them. |
| 03:10:55.52 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so, but I still think So the direction to eat actually. |
| 03:10:58.43 | Ray Wendell | the news. I'm agreeing with you. I'm agreeing with you. |
| 03:11:00.62 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I agree. All right. So to look at the existing ordinances and either and I think that's a good question. type of approach, which I don't know if there is one out there, but if there is, great. and if not, to at least clarify and tighten up our existing standards. |
| 03:11:14.41 | Carolyn Revell | and I'm going to go ahead and get a little bit of a Thank you. I'm sorry. |
| 03:11:20.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, and then the last one, number five, is the residential use on Caledonia. And personally, I think, Maybe the biggest help that the EDAC could be kind of goes to the vice mayor's last point, is confirming or or not, Cosmont's premise that we are over, we have an over concentration of retail. um, in town and then on particular in Caledonia. So I would kind of turn the question around, not about should there be more residential on Caledonia, but from an EDAC perspective, what level of retail can Caledonia support? And then when we have the answer, because it is a neighborhood commercial district and I think it is a great combination of of neighborhood commercial plus residential. So I think the question for me, the first question would be, how much retail can be sustained. And then the question is, I think really more for our housing element about how do we encourage or promote more residential if the answer to the first question was yes, more residential. So I would be fine with EDAC exploring the first question. or my first question, which is what level of commercial and retail on Caledonia can reasonably we expect to sustain. And I think that was an interesting question posed by Cosmox. So that's how I would prioritize time on that question. |
| 03:13:00.52 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, so those are my thoughts. Are there any last concluding items? I think we've hit all of that. And then I think, Brian, we were all interested in more information on the geo zones, more fine grained analysis. I guess my only question there is kind of how much does that cost us? you know, and, Um, Anyway, but I think there is an appetite for more data and more nuanced data. to the extent that we can get it in a reasonable manner. |
| 03:13:32.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, I think those were all the questions that were in front of us tonight. Brian, does that, I don't have your last slide, but does that address the issues that you wanted us to give you input on? |
| 03:13:43.67 | Adrian Brinton | Yeah, I think so. |
| 03:13:45.61 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay. Great. Well, thanks to you both. Thanks for hanging in here with us. Great discussion. Thank you to EDEC. And thank you to Brian. All right. Thank you. |
| 03:13:54.36 | Jill Hoffman | All right, thank you. |
| 03:13:55.19 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Also thank our, Um, firefighters and staff who have been patiently waiting for this long discussion. We'll move on to item 7C. which is the introduction of Mark Brown, Executive Officer for the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority. and a presentation on I'm WPA's goals and Southern Marin Fire Department. We have Chief Tubbs with us here tonight to kick us off. We really appreciate your being here so late. We know you guys have other stuff to do. Sorry to have you a little bit late in the agenda and welcome to Mr. Brown as well. So I'll let you kick it off, Chief. |
| 03:14:46.68 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Thank you, Madam Mayor, and good evening, Council. And on behalf of the district, We would like to welcome back Council Member Hoffman. We're glad you're home safe and thank you for your service. So we have a brief presentation tonight that has three elements. I'm going to provide the council with a very brief update on the fire season. We'll then have Mark Brown come on. We'll introduce him and talk a little bit about the goals and objectives of the MWPA. Finally, then we'll have Todd Lando present the report on the assessment of the hazards and risks in the WUI area within the city and the district. Excuse me. Sorry, it's been a very long day. So I wanted to start off with about the fire season. So this year has been a very, very busy season. To date, we have had over 8,800 fires across the state burning in excess of 4 million acres. Five of the fires we've had this year have made it into the top 20 of the largest fires in California history, including the August complex, which burned in excess of a million acres. and we lost 935 homes. Sadly, this year we have lost over two dozen of our fellow Californians to wildfire. so the official predictive services outlooks uh calls for drier and warmer than average conditions over northern california through december but we're we're expecting to go back to normal conditions in january at least that's the current prediction southern california has a grim outlook as well for the continuation of fire season in most portions of the South all the way through December as well. And so with that, I think that's really a great point to sort of pivot into introducing MARC and the MWPA and the important work that we're doing across the county as part of this JPA and helping reducing the risks from wildland fire and preparing our citizens for this. And so with that, it's my pleasure to introduce Mark. |
| 03:16:46.94 | Mark Brown | Good evening, Madam Mayor, Council members. Like Chief Tubbs said, my name is Mark Brown, and I have the honor and privilege of being appointed as the first executive officers of the Marine Wildfire Prevention Authority. And, um, Listening to the council meeting today, I want to thank you and commend you for your public service. um i i have a servant's heart and especially for council member hoffman um you you double dip you you are a council member and in the military i remember reading that article and i was impressed for your service. So first, real quick a little bit about myself. I was one of those kids that found his career early. I've been a firefighter since I was 16 years old, and I was hired at the Marin County Fire Department in 1991 and have worked through the ranks to Deputy Chief where I have recently retired to accept the position at the Marine Wildfire Prevention Authority. And through those 35 years or so of firefighting, I have seen the changes in the wildland fire environment. Chief Tubbs talked about the August complex. I was assigned to the August complex for 25 days this year and worked in three different counties throughout that complex. and unfortunately managed my third firefighter fatality that I've been in command of. So it's just a tremendous impact on the California Fire Service and quite frankly we can't keep at that pace any longer. And that's really what has been drawing me towards what the mission of the MWPA is about. And then I have some personal experiences during the Tubbs fire. My home was the Tubbs and the Nuns fire. My home was evacuated. And during the glass fire just a few weeks ago, my home was evacuated again. and I actively fought fire in my own neighborhood and a home that was five doors down from my home was destroyed and 10 other homes in my neighborhood. So I have some very personal experiences that make this such a passion for me. And it's been obvious for quite some time that we need to do something different than what we're doing. And this fire season has really changed. Put an exclamation point on that. And it's time for us to act in a holistic and coordinated fashion to increase the safety of the residents in Marin. And the MWPA is poised to do that. We must act together. And that's what I love about the MWPA. It's so many different agencies that are coming together with a single mission and it's going to connect the different town councils and special district boards across the county into one organization in a way for the fire service that's never been done. So we need to come together as fire agencies, law enforcement, local government, land management agencies, environmental stakeholders, I think most importantly, the community members themselves. It can't be done without the community members being involved. And, Some of you may have heard this before. It's a it's kind of a mantra that I've taken on. And that is, it's so easy to focus on the mega fires right now. That's what we see in the media all the time. And the glass fire I just mentioned is an example of a mega fire, right? I think, those are, I know that those are less than 1% of the fires that we experience. And I think we need to focus on the 99% of the fires. And the reason why I say that is that a three acre fire. on a moderate weather day, can destroy a home just as easily as a megafire can. Three acre fires can get to a home faster than a fire engine can. So we need our homeowners to focus on making their homes defendable from that three acre fire before a fire engine can get there. And if all of our community members do that, then the strength of our communities is the sum of its whole. If everyone makes their home defendable, And everyone thinks about the mega fires is this big giant wave of fire going through the community reality that's not what it is it sees embers from a mile away landing up in front of the main fire. And then it's igniting things near homes, getting those homes burning. And then those homes become the majority of the Ember production. And we get home to home spread. So if everybody makes their home defendable from that three acre fire, When that mega fire comes in, that ember production decreases because we're not burning as many homes down And then South Salado is a perfect example of a community that has one way in, one way out escape routes, right? And so if, uh, if everyone has done their part and we as the MWPA, you as a city of South Salido has done their part for evacuation route clearing, as people go out down these one way in, one way out evacuations, and they get cut off by fire. Normally they'll be only cut off for 10 to 20 minutes. And we need to provide for them to have a space to be safe. While that road is cut off, they hold a little bit, wait for the fire to pass through, and then they move through. And they'll be able to do that because their neighbors have made their property fire safe. We, as the local governments, have made the evacuation route clear. So if we focus on the 99%, It makes us much more viable for the 1%. really need to focus on vegetation management projects in and around our community communities improve the safety of our evacuation routes and increase community awareness improve our notification systems we need our community members be aware what's going on around them as a fire weather forecast comes through like the red flag warning that just expired a little bit ago came through we need our community members to know about those and then when a fire does ignite in the local communities they need to know about that so they can take the proper actions And they need to be active participants in making their homes defendable as I've already discussed. And then one of the things that is built into the MWPA is that each member agency is able to use 20% of the funding from MWPA, their share of it based on population for local projects. And we do that because Those are the subject matter experts. Nobody knows their community, like the local fire department and local government agencies. So we have that 20% funding. And this voters spoke loud and clear when 70.8% voted yes on measure C, that's a loud and clear message. And so the message was, we want you to do something and we want you to do something now. So we already have a great start. We have a very successful start to our chipper days. And that's been a program in partnership with FireSafe Marin. Another partnership with FireSafe Marin has been a public education program that has been well received. They started in June. It's the last Tuesday of each month. And the guest speakers they've been putting on it have been phenomenal. The top notch scientists of wildfire safety right now have been the last couple of months. And then notification we have a pilot program for the NOAA weather radios. We know that our cell phones are a great messaging device when our infrastructure's in perfect shape. But when our infrastructure is not in perfect shape, whether it's because of a power shutdown or power lines have been blown down during a wildfire or whatever, we need different ways to notify people. And the NOAA radios is a tried and true system that has a battery backup. So even if there's no power, we can still send messages through the NOAA radios. Red flag signage to help increase the awareness. We are working on a program that Firewise communities will actually manage and local government agencies will manage red flag warning signs that will get put up in the communities. during red flag morning so everyone knows what's going on and speaking of red flags and we just went through one we are fortunate to have the leadership in the fire service in mcwinn county that we do and in support from cal fire and in support from California Office of Emergency Services, we receive funding during red flag warnings to increase our staffing. So in this last red flag warning, 12 additional fire engines staffed, extra dispatchers staffed, and extra fire crews staffed. And the funding comes from the state in order to provide that. And so that increases the safety of our residents here in Moran. Environmental compliance is another important piece is that as much damage as a wildfire can do, sometimes wildfire prevention measures can cause even more damage. So we need to make sure that we are environmentally sensitive and that we follow all the California Environmental Quality Act regulations. So we are putting money towards that. And then the last big project that MWPA is putting money towards this fiscal year is an evacuation study. The Marine Fire Service and law enforcement have a great program to actually to identify where we want to evacuate, how we're going to notify people, Thank you. |
| 03:26:07.85 | Jesse Taylor-Vermont | Thank you. |
| 03:26:07.95 | Mark Brown | Thank you. that they have to evacuate but we've already talked about we need to increase prove that. But where we're lacking right now is how we're actually gonna get people out of the areas of danger to safe areas. So the evacuation study is gonna establish what routes can carry how many people. how fast we can actually empty a neighborhood. and the routes that we have established as escape routes how safe are they are they in a geographically advantageous location where it's going to be safe for people to go through or is that route in a real fire prone area so once we do this study we're really going to have a quantified analysis of what our evacuation routes are and what we need to do to improve them And then Southern Marin Fire, Fortunately for your community, Southern Wind Fire has been ahead of the curve in a lot of things. And your recent tax measure prior to Measure C has improved your wildfire preparedness. And so MWPA is just going to leverage off of that. Southern Wind Fire has added through Measure C funds some wildfire mitigation specialists and long-range acoustical devices that will be positioned in order to provide yet another form of notification to our residents they need to evacuate And the last thing I'll mention, and that is just I always have the – strategy that I don't want people to be surprised, especially the elected officials. We had a senior, a low income senior tax exemption that was part of measure C. And after the tax bills went out, MWPA and our consultant that we were using to manage the exemption, our phone started ringing off the hook. And some people did not notice that they were, they could qualify for the low income exemption. So we are working through a process to make sure that those that do qualify and have an appeals process in order and we can get that. back to them and I know that elected officials are often the ones that received the message hey I thought I was available for that and all of a sudden I didn't get it. We sent 22,000 mailers out to residents across the county in order to get people notified. but Not everyone reads those mailings. That's all I have for you folks tonight, and I'm completely open to any questions. |
| 03:28:31.14 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you both so much. So Chief Tubbs, did you say we had one more part to this, or should we have questions for Mr. Brown and then move on to the? |
| 03:28:44.22 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Yeah, if the council doesn't mind, I think it'd be a great time to ask Mark his questions. Todd Lando had a power issue. He is currently off the call trying to get to a place where he can be back online. So if we could buy a little bit of time, that might help. |
| 03:29:00.86 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, well, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope he can without too much trouble get to some power. So I just want to thank you both and thank Mark Brown for your comments. It would be great to get that information about the low income exemption. for seniors to our director of communications so we can to get that out on our city channels to maybe |
| 03:29:30.62 | Mark Brown | Absolutely. Thank you. |
| 03:29:31.87 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. |
| 03:29:32.08 | Mark Brown | Our next board or our next board of directors meeting in November, they'll we have a staff report recommending an appeals process. So once that gets finalized, I can forward that to chief Tubbs. We've been forwarded along to you. |
| 03:29:45.84 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thanks. And then I also want to thank you. I see posted earlier today, the evacuation routes for fire So we have Just for members of the public who are here, we've got three different or four different evacuation maps posted under this agenda item and I just want to thank you for providing those today. |
| 03:30:09.50 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | And then Madam Mayor, my apologies. I meant to announce that earlier, it was late breaking news. We were able to get those posted as you noted, both on the city's website and the district's website and for the council and the community's update. |
| 03:30:09.71 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | AND MASSIVE. |
| 03:30:22.21 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Thank you. These are going to the printer this week. And as soon as we receive those back, they'll be going out to every residence in the city for them hopefully to put up on the refrigerator. That's the goal. So that's a good piece of information. |
| 03:30:27.76 | Carolyn Revell | . |
| 03:30:37.89 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | I did just receive an update from our other guest. He is unable to get back on. We're trying to see if he can call in, but perhaps in the meantime, I can at least try and introduce a little bit of information about this report and what it is and what its intent is. We were hoping Todd could be here to explain a little bit more of the science behind it. But in short, this report was a result of a CAL FIRE grant that we received, a planning grant. And in many ways, it's very similar to the county CWPP. And what this assessment does is it's gone out and looked at the Southern Marin and the Sausalito-Wooey area. And it has assessed our risks and our hazards relative to wildfire. the intent of the Sir question. |
| 03:31:31.70 | Joan Cox | I'm so sorry, Chief. The assessment that you're talking about is not actually attached to our staff report. So for members of the public who are listening, I want them to know that the assessment that you're talking about is the 163-page WUI assessment that was attached to our consent item on September 22. And that's where members of the public can identify and review this report, but it wasn't actually attached to this evening's staff report. So for members of the public listening, I wanted them to know what assessment you're talking about and how to access it. |
| 03:32:10.48 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Thank you for that. So again, the assessment is merely that, is it's built off much of the same methodology used in the CWPP, where we're looking at various factors that affect fire, fire growth, size of fire, fire spread, those kinds of things. And we have gathered that information to have a much more accurate picture of the risks in our community. This is not a plan. I've heard some communication in the community and concern that this is a plan. It is not a plan, it is a report. It's designed to inform decisions that we may make. And those decisions go through our regular adopted processes, whether that's through the WUI ordinance or the fire code ordinance. But... As you know, especially with the recent passage of Measure C and of Measure U, we want to ensure that we're using our taxpayers' dollars not only wisely but effectively. And we see that this report is a tool that will help us identify where our greatest risks are and where our dollars can be spent effectively, where we can minimize those risks. And so that's the intent of this report. We will be bringing it to the community safety disaster preparedness committee in the coming months. Actually this Thursday, we have a new team coming aboard. We're gonna introduce it to them, but actually do a presentation once they're fully on board. And I think that's probably a great place for me to stop and see if the fire marshal would like to add any additional information. |
| 03:33:51.97 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | Good evening, everyone. Thank you. Sorry again for Todd, we're trying to get him on the line. Heidi, if you happen to see somebody trying to get in on a phone, that might be Todd. Not exactly sure, he texted me saying he was trying to dial in from the fire station where he's at. But getting to this assessment, if you recall a while back when measure u was adopted we talked we discussed with the city council that we were looking at putting together an assessment of the whole district and tart we wanted to target areas of the highest hazards and mitigate those and and kind of work in some sort of a chronological order in order to do the best and the most for the district. And so that's what this is. This is really an assessment. It was The same company, STI, out of Sonoma County that did a lot of the fire fuel modeling for the CWPP also did the fuel modeling for this assessment. This was a grant. It was a CAL FIRE grant that we got. So that was an extra bonus for us that the grant paid for this assessment. That's why it was so detailed. We were able to hire a third party XMR fire to do the assessment for us. But as the chief mentioned, this is really what that is. You know, this makes suggestions on things that we could do or that we might want to consider doing as far as, you know, fire fuel mitigation and evacuation. And so our plan from this point is to digest the information because we just got this assessment. We're going to formulate a summary so that it's very, scientific um so it's a little bit harder for most to digest so we're going to have we're going to build a summary off of this and then we're also going to develop a working plan from this and at that stage where we come up with the working plan that's when we're going to invite the community to get feedback because that's really the time where you know we would formulate projects from this assessment right now we have no projects assessed off of this we're using measure you funding right now like we do through the entire district including Sausalito by doing local chipper days and roadway widening for fire engine and emergency access we've had a couple of projects around but those projects have been kind of in line for many years and haven't had funding. And so we've been able to utilize some of the Measure U money for that. And now with the Measure C funding, as we reported a while ago, Measure C funding for this year and possibly next year in the local mitigation is gonna go to the LRAD sites. you know we do have we are hiring the defensible space inspectors we're moving forward with that Mill Valley's hired one Southern Marin is going to hire two one will be assigned to the city of Sausalito so there's going to be a person that's going to be doing specifically defensible space inspections throughout the area and as the chief said recently literally, we were able to post the newest evacuation maps, which were very challenging to develop because Sausalito at the time didn't have what was called an MTZ map, which is what we use with evacuations. And so we wanted to make sure that the maps that we developed were accurate and were true and could be used not just as something that, you know, we just print out and give to people, but it's actually a map that will be used in the event of an evacuation where all parties, police, fire, DPW, is on board with those areas and those routes that we're speaking about. So, so it was a, a, a very, um, Thank you. hard project, but we're glad to see that we're very happy with what the end product is right now. And again, as the chief was saying, brochures should be coming out shortly. We're, we're sending them to the printer this week. And as soon as the printer prints them, then we'll be getting them. They'll be mailed to everybody in this, in the city. |
| 03:38:18.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, we really appreciate it. appreciate that and thank you so much and thanks for getting them posted today so that members of the public |
| 03:38:25.17 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Thank you. |
| 03:38:25.21 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | Thank you. |
| 03:38:25.33 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Thank you. |
| 03:38:27.20 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I can at least see them online, even if they're not in their mailboxes yet. |
| 03:38:32.50 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | Yeah, you can download their PDFs. |
| 03:38:35.72 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Perfect. All right, so do council members have questions for any of our three guests, we really appreciate you guys being here, we know what a busy fire season that's been already. and how hard you've all been working. Thanks for your time. Excuse me. Thanks for your time. Questions? Anyone? Councilmember Cox? |
| 03:38:58.13 | Joan Cox | Thank you and thank you to the chief and to our other speakers this evening. We greatly appreciate your work. We also appreciate your efforts to digest and analyze this 163 page risk, assessment. really happy to hear that you'll be presenting an overview and summary to our community disaster committee at which the public will have an opportunity to participate and to better understand Um, a lot of this data. I gave some examples back on September 22 and I'd like to just include those examples here as questions for you to address in detail at those presentations and at the presentation that you bring back to the Council so for example page 88 lists a map of priority risk parcels but the map is just literally a map with a bunch of red on it that shows that there are a whole bunch of parcels in Sausalito that are priority risk parcels. parcels. but it's impossible to identify which parcels those are. You can look at it and say, oh, this looks like the area of town where I live, but it would be really helpful for residents to understand if their area is in this high risk priority parcel. Similarly, page 114 identifies with little specs and dots, temporary community refuge areas. But again, it's impossible from looking at that map to identify what, each parcels community temporary community refuge area is. page 104 identifies priority fuel treatment parcels. Again, as a resident, I'd like to know if I live on a parcel that is a priority field treatment parcel. So if in your reports, my question to you, I guess my request or question of you is, can you please in your briefing to our disaster preparedness committee and our residents translate these maps into data that our residents can actually absorb and understand and take advantage of this really good work that was done using the grant money in creating this risk assessment so that it actually becomes a useful tool for our residents. |
| 03:41:26.87 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Yes, Council Member Cox, of course. I mean, and that's very reasonable. And I think that's exactly what we want to do when we get into this report as well. I will add sort of as an addendum to that, that the evacuation maps that went out today have the community or the temporary refuge areas on them. And I think it's easier for the community to actually identify now through that map where they would go. But, you know, we recognize in addition to that, you know, that we still have a lot of continued outreach and education on these community refuge areas. This is a new concept, as the council is well aware of, and we've had a number of outreach meetings, but we still have more work to do to inform the folks of, well, great. I know where it is, but how does it work? What does it mean to me? When am I gonna go there? Those kinds of questions. So as we work through this report and we're able to not only extract the information, but translate it into a digestible way and present it in a way that's meaningful, not only to us, but to the community as well, we will be bringing that forward for everyone. |
| 03:42:31.78 | Joan Cox | Thank you. And then the only other thing that I've heard from other residents is our warning system. I know that we have various warning systems available to us online through the telephone But I believe we're also considering the installation of one or two sirens similar to those in Mill Valley that, you know, if someone's asleep and their phone is turned off, they could still be awakened by this piercing screaming. Sirens. to ensure that there are lots of redundancies for our residents in being notified of fire hazard in these challenging times. |
| 03:43:12.50 | Chris Tubbs (Fire Chief) | Yes, so you're speaking to the long range acoustical device, which is the fire marshal mentioned a little bit earlier with measure C funds this year, we're using the local mitigation portion to begin that phased in approach. As you might imagine, it's not an inexpensive system, but our intent is really to build off of the mill valley system so that we can saturate the Southern Marin area. As council member Cox noted, redundancy is a very important part of this solution. Not one communication system is foolproof. Even LRAD, LRAD has its limitations, doesn't penetrate buildings very well. But the more of these systems that we put in place, the more that we educate people and encourage and train them to use those systems, the higher the likelihood of early notification will be. |
| 03:44:03.85 | Joan Cox | Thank you so much, and thank you again for the efforts of you and everybody on your team to ensuring our safety. |
| 03:44:11.65 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, any other questions before we open it up for public comment, Council Member Burns? |
| 03:44:16.49 | Joe Burns | Thank you, gentlemen, for being here or there tonight. I have a question related to kind of the property mitigation efforts. And I understand that there'll be somebody on the ground, you know, identifying a fuel management risks on property, but there's still, there's still that gap on how do we get really into the home? around the home. Is there a conversation, and maybe this goes to Mark, through the JPA. Where is the conversation on enforcement opportunities or whether it be point of sale through real estate or what type of inspections is the district or the JPA looking at that might become a little |
| 03:45:01.79 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | So I mean, I can answer a little bit to that. Right now, the engine companies have been doing the assessments, the defensible space inspection assessments But we are actually, through the MWPA, we are actually hiring two inspectors. That's their job, full-time job, that's what they're gonna be doing. We're still gonna be using the engine companies to do some of these inspections in some and around the areas of Sausalito and within the district. And what you were mentioning, which is the presale inspections, there's a possibility it was mentioned in the assessment as well. We're looking into if that's a possibility to do that. We, public education, honestly, has been really good. We have had a lot of interest, obviously, because we've had a lot of wild end fires, but within the community of Sausalito specifically, myself and Deputy Chief Welch have been doing these evacuation community meetings, Zoom meetings, and we've seen quite a few people in there where we used to see just a couple tens, teens. Now we're seeing 30s and 40s and 50 people. So we're going through public education for private properties, but we're also using the defensible space inspectors and engine companies for enforcement as well. So the combination of the two, and then with the MWPA and Fire Safe Marin, which is going to take an active role in the education, well, I think we're going to be seeing in the future here quite a bit on the private and residential side of fire fuel mitigation defensible space. |
| 03:46:57.04 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thanks. um council member halfman did you raise your hand or i couldn't tell okay great All right, so we will open it up to public comment. Are there any members of the public who would like to comment? Wendy Richards. Welcome back. |
| 03:47:25.39 | Wendy Richards | Thank you. I couldn't leave when I saw this on the agenda. So gentlemen, thank you. Seriously. Two years ago, You jumped onto that fire above my house. between Rodeo and Spencer. You diverted aircraft. You got it out. My neighbors and I were on the phone calling everybody, making sure people were getting out. I'm calling people high up on the hill. I had the privilege of having boarded the ferry at that moment to go to the city, looking up, seeing the smoke, And, I didn't move from standing next to the ferry guys because they had you on their walkie-talkies. So I know what you were doing, and thank you. Really, I thought of you earlier a few weeks ago, I was at Point Reyes on Limit Tower Beach when the Woodward fire started. and I evacuated from there. And I came home and then you named it the Woodward Fire and I live on Woodward Avenue. So thank you. Now, counsel. Please make this a priority. Don't spend a penny on resurfacing sports fields or basketball courts or whatever until we as a city make this a priority. I got an email from a neighbor. this week earlier this week or last that says copied me on uh email There are two dead or dying pines that I and other neighbors have been trying to get PG or the city to remove for the last year. These Monterey pines are on city easement land between number six and number 20 Woodward Avenue, blah, blah, blah. This was sent to the fire department because these neighbors couldn't get any action from the city. And it's not this fire team's job to remove trees on city property. I had one tree that died above my house and I reported it. A year ago, around tax day in April, and the city staff were very helpful and they jumped on it and they got somebody to check it and yes, it's really dead and we will remove it immediately. Labor Day, it was still standing. And finally I got action from, I don't know, it's not the staff, because the staff were very responsive. I don't know where those priorities are set, but hopefully our new city interim manager can do something because by the time the city removed that tree, five more trees died from sudden oak death and the city, thank God, removed all six trees above the house on the street, six trees. because it went on and I don't know what the priorities were and the staff were helpful. They kept saying, we're going to get to it immediately. It didn't happen. And thank God it finally did. And then I got my tree guy because my tree guy was telling me, so I'm spending my money as a homeowner to take care of my trees. We need to make it a priority. because we have to do our part. Chief Tubbs and Mr. Hillard and Brown, I mean, come on, these people are fighting fires in their own neighborhoods. They're all in their neighborhoods. So please, I urge you to make this a priority on our budget. Let's find out why we can't get these trees removed Let me be able to say to my neighbor who sent me that email, that those trees at the end of my street can come out because they're on that corner. They're threatening multiple homes on that corner. |
| 03:51:01.98 | Heidi Scoble | Your three minutes has elapsed. Thank you. |
| 03:51:03.67 | Wendy Richards | Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen, and thank you, council members, for your service. |
| 03:51:09.54 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, I've got one additional member of the public who would like to comment. Sandra Bushmaker, and we'll close public comment. Welcome back. Oh, we've got Bill Hines. If you'd like to comment on this item, please raise your hand now. Dr. Sandra, welcome. |
| 03:51:27.97 | Sandra Bushmaker | All right. I'd like to thank Chief Tubbs, Mr. Brown, Fred, good to see you again. And thank you very much for your presentation. It's very important that Sausalito get its act together, and we need to do our best. I am still passing out. Uh, the disaster preparedness guide that we updated and printed for 2020. Unfortunately, we were unable to get more than 1,000 printed. So I have taken care of all the neighbors in my neighborhood. I requested that the city print enough to send every household in Sausalito. And I have a question for the chief. and Mr. Brown and Mr. Fred Hilliard. Uh... As to the Measure U vegetation management, we had your contract people come through Sausalito in July of 2019. and we have not seen them in our neighborhood since. And of course, with the rapid, growth of vegetation, we're right back where we started from. And so I wanted to know, What the plan is for Sausalito's a re-cut, if you will, of the vegetation. Thank you. |
| 03:53:00.58 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Okay, Bill Hines, welcome. |
| 03:53:13.39 | Bill Hines | Perfect, just waiting to be unmuted. |
| 03:53:16.29 | Ray Withy | You are. |
| 03:53:18.23 | Bill Hines | Thank you. I'm Bill Hines, landscape architect and president of South Native Beautiful. In my profession, we're acutely aware of the challenges of managing landscapes. And as you know, Sausalito Beautiful is definitely an advocate for trees. We're definitely advocates for tree pruning and tree maintenance and taking care of all of these things that comprise a healthy landscape. In some cases, we have seen where some of these contract outfits doing tree pruning have not necessarily conformed with what would you know, we might see as an ideal pruning of a tree and it can greatly impact the landscape. point here is that we figure out a way to work collaboratively so that there is some oversight to tree pruning that critical limbs and large limbs of heritage trees aren't taken out unnecessarily. and that Tree maintenance is done proactively. and is not done in some sort of broad brush fashion when maintenance has been deferred over the long term. and I think everybody wants the same thing. And I think it's very difficult for trees to regrow giant limbs. Sauselita Beautiful has definitely done a lot of work recently in terms of planting new trees. And we'd just like to make sure that our investment is, you know, sort of looked after and that we're working collaboratively towards managing vegetation, especially in the wildland urban interface. |
| 03:55:19.09 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Thank you, Bill. Okay, are there any other members of the public who would like to comment? I am seeing none. So I'll bring it back up to the council. There was a question from the public about the vegetation management Um. visits to Sausalito. Is there any update on that? I had thought there was some activity here more recently than 2000. 19, but I may be wrong. |
| 03:55:60.00 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Me either. |
| 03:56:00.13 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | either of you. Yeah, I can just comment. Yeah, we actively have the chipping program working within the city. As a matter of fact, we've done probably, we've done quite a bit of work in the city of Sausalito as opposed to the rest of the district this last year. Most of it is chipper days where the chipper goes through the neighborhoods and picks up vegetation that homeowners have cut from their yards and placed on the street and then we pick it up. We've also done quite a bit of roadway widening, meaning that we just cut vegetation back so that the roads are wider so that we can get fire engines up. And then as far as projects, and I think what Ms. Bushmaker was referring to was there was a project in 2019 that was done |
| 03:56:00.67 | Ray Withy | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 03:56:50.15 | Fred Hilliard (Fire Marshal) | just off of Rodale. there that where we where we trimmed up a whole bunch of it was a land area that had a lot of broom and grass and stuff like that. And then we limbed up some of the eucalyptus trees in that area and removed, I think a couple of smaller ones. And it is growing back. We are planning to go back and maintenance that, but we have other priority areas that we haven't been treated yet. So we're trying to get to those as well. what we're trying to do now is we're putting together areas where we're gonna treat it. And then we have a plan to revisit those within two to three years afterwards, because we feel that that's about the timeframe of growth where we need to maintain them and cut them back down. |
| 03:57:36.54 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. That's very helpful. Okay, so this is an informational item tonight and I really appreciate you being here so late again. Are there any final... I would like to just note that the clerk did post the WUI report on the our website now for today, as well as our prior meeting. So those, the evacuation plans, that report, are all on our agenda posted for tonight for easy reference. And I also just wanted to thank you for agreeing to come back to our disaster preparedness committee in the near future to have a more fulsome discussion and take additional public input and comment at that point so thank you in advance for that Council member Cox, it looks like you wanted to say something. |
| 03:58:28.97 | Joan Cox | Thank you. I just wanted to respond to some of the public comment and comment from my personal experience. My HOA is the first fire safe community in Sausalito. We accomplished that through reaching out and interfacing with Southern Marine Fire. So I have found that any neighborhood or HOA or group that reaches out to Southern Marine Fire, they are extraordinarily responsive. And so I think each of us, can be proactive in the protection of our own neighborhood. And by alerting Southern Marine Fire to issues that we observe can give them the opportunity prioritize those areas that need their most close and urgent attention. I also think it's important and I think Sausalito Beautiful is in the exact same boat. I think if Sausalito Beautiful wants to shepherd the care of various trees that it has planted in town, Sausalito Beautiful should reach out and ensure that those trees are trimmed in accordance with whatever Sausalito Beautiful's standards are, but I don't think we can delay vegetation management throughout town by having another layer of oversight by Sausalito Beautiful. We absolutely have to urgently move forward neighborhood by neighborhood as necessary. to ensure vegetation management that protects that creates defensible space around each and every household in Sausalito. So again, gentlemen, thank you. for your efforts for utilizing grant monies Um, in the most effective and efficient way that you can and I look forward to hearing and learning more as you sort through, analyze and make more sense of this WUI hazard and risk assessment. |
| 04:00:24.21 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | She's. Okay, anyone else? Yes. |
| 04:00:28.53 | Jill Hoffman | Thanks to the fire, to Fred and Chris and Mark for coming in and supporting us in Sausalito. the work that you do for us and getting the evacuation route maps done. I know that was a matter of concern and I'm happy that we got are posting them on our website. So thanks very much for your efforts for us. Appreciate it. |
| 04:00:49.25 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Okay. With that, we will bid you good night and thank you again. And we'll move on to our Next item, our last business item, which is thank you, chief, which is the South Park Construction Project update. And we have our Department of Public Works Here, Kevin McGowan and Andy Davidson. Thanks for asking. |
| 04:01:18.82 | Kevin McGowan | All right. you |
| 04:01:19.47 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Hanging with us. |
| 04:01:20.69 | Kevin McGowan | Thank you. Hey, thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Members. It's nice to be here this evening. We have an item before this evening about an update for Southview Park and its construction. Andy Davidson is going to help us out with that. He's our senior civil engineer. And he's got a short presentation, which I'm hoping he will bring up while I'm kind of chit chatting with you here. So he's going to share his screen. One of the things I do want to recognize is that Andy has put a heck of a lot of time into this project. And he's done a really good job with this as far as communicating well with the public. He's had several meetings with adjacent property owners, as well as helping with the construction management team that's out there already doing their jobs. So Andy's been doing a great job coordinating all this type of stuff. The project was originally started and we were hoping to have the project completed by the end of December. But there have been some changes in the field. for unexpected items. And Andy's going to talk a little bit about those. But I think our schedule is kind of getting pushed a little bit. We may end up kind of completing this work closer to January or mid-January compared to the original date that we had suggested to council, which was at the end of December. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Andy to lead us through this short little presentation. |
| 04:02:47.61 | Andrew Davidson | Thank you, Kelly. |
| 04:02:47.68 | Kevin McGowan | Thank you, Kilian. |
| 04:02:48.67 | Andrew Davidson | Thanks Kevin. Thank you Mayor, Council members. Adam. It's been nice working with you and I wanted to thank you personally. My name is Andrew Davidson, city's senior engineer in your Department of Public Works. And I'm going to give you, as Kevin mentioned, a pretty brief go through of the construction here at your South you part. So just an aerial overview quick as a reminder of where it is. On the right side of your screen, which is the east is Third Street. |
| 04:03:12.55 | Carolyn Revell | So just to know, |
| 04:03:20.09 | Andrew Davidson | top sides North Street and the left side is is 4th Street of course the west and of course right smack dab in the middle is is Southview Park Um, What we look at here is pretty much what you're going to get back at the end of the project. There's going to be a landscape, grassy area, a new tennis court. New playground area and yes, a new basketball court area as well. I'm going to switch on to one of the construction drawings. give you a little more detail So lower left is going to be the location of the new concrete tennis court. This is the base project that you're seeing here. So we've got the concrete tennis court, new retaining walls, interior, New terrace walls. new landing area. This landing area is probably the sort of the linchpin for the park in terms of accessibility, all the other features here. the playground and the basketball court as well are available at other parks. What's unique really at this park is the view you have, |
| 04:04:12.48 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 04:04:12.49 | Carolyn Revell | Thank you. |
| 04:04:18.04 | Andrew Davidson | And so we're making it accessible for folks. There'll be an accessible entrance here at North Street. So people, all people will be able to come out and enjoy that view. We're also putting on an outside the park perimeter a new ADA stall with a curb ramp that will allow folks to get here. It's, as you know, North Street, all these streets here are very steep. This is sort of the flattest spot THE END OF that there is on the streets. Close to the park. Now, the basketball court, this was the ad alt for the project. Um, It's a full reconstruction of the basketball court. The original base project only had some minor work done for it related to utility installation. So it was very minor. The ad alternate, full replacement which includes lowering the grades along the basketball court so that the cross slope is a lot less. In order to do that, we had the lower, basically the northern portion of the basketball court And to accomplish that, we had to install a new retaining wall over on the west side, which I'm tracing out. and also extend new stairs. These are all new stairs, but we had to extend them further because the elevation is actually gonna be lower. |
| 04:05:38.49 | Andrew Davidson | So the bid opening May 19th, CF Contracting was awarded the bid and got started on August 10th. So getting started here are the pictures. contractor came in from North street and started breaking things. That's part of the demolition process. You can see they've got a breaker. breaking concrete and doing damage to a picnic table. days later we're moving into the park so on the left you can see the the piece of the backhoe with a breaker on the end of it it's tearing down knocking down this northerly tennis court wall so that wall was the one you always when you were standing on the tennis court wondering why it was standing But it's down now. And if you look off to the right, you'll see this gentleman standing in the excavation for the new footing for the new tennis court wall. That's smoke. This is a very smoky day as you can tell it's not. upper left this is the pouring of the footing for the very same wall we were talking about along the tennis court. This boom is from the concrete pumper staged up on North Street along with concrete trucks pouring concrete down into the footing, which you can see here on the lower right. The new footing has been poured the contractor and his folks. have started placing rebar for the vertical portion of the wall, the stem. and also placing wood around it so and pour concrete there as well. |
| 04:07:11.17 | Andrew Davidson | So this is demolition at the basketball court. So this is the adult. Just after the project was awarded, we were asked to contact the contractor to see how long we could postpone authorizing work on this ad at all. and And back and forth conversation with the contractor, it was about 15 days, which was pretty short, but the reasoning makes sense. The contractor accesses, primarily accesses the site from the west, from 4th Street, where the grade of 4th Street is very close to the entrance to the park. coming in from 4th street going to the east end of the park and then doing the demolition, pulling that material out, and then start reconstructing the park pretty much from the east back towards the west. So for them to have postponed doing the basketball court work would have involved them doing the demolition outside the basketball court and then also starting improvements. They wouldn't be able to access this basketball court cleanly from 4th Street. They damaged stuff. So the really only opportunity at that point would have been to access from 3rd Street, which on the lower right you can see 3rd Street. And I'm sure you realize how, I'm sure you know how steep Third Street is. Also, there's a pretty good vertical difference in elevation between the basketball court and Third Street. So getting access back onto the basketball court after construction had really gotten started was not going to be possible. with the bid price. So we came up with 15 days from the contractor and we got authorization to include reconstruction of the basketball court um, in the project, that's the add alternate. It was a nice A nice thing that happened when we were tearing back the basketball court Um, The contractor encountered cement treated base below it, And that material was able to be recycled. So here we see the cement treated base being crushed into smaller and smaller pieces. up on the tennis courts and the beauty of this is the contractor didn't have to haul out material and then truck back in new material, the material is here. So we reduced truck traffic in the neighborhood. and the environmental impacts of that truck traffic. So that was a nice thing to be able to recycle this material back into the basketball court. More work at the basketball court, you can see how smoke On the upper left, they're pulling out one of the basket hoops The basketball hoops did not have caps on the tops of the posts. So they were at the bottom of the post where they met the concrete, they were rotting away. They were rusting away. The new basketball hoops that go in will have those caps, so we don't have to run into |
| 04:09:58.21 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. |
| 04:10:00.39 | Andrew Davidson | On the right, lower right, you can see the work going on down to the basketball court, and getting ready to put the cement treated base material back in. Upper left a little more grading, reaching sub base with dirt. And then the lower right, you can see the cement treated base is back in the light color here on the basketball court. Thank you. And you can also see the wall I mentioned earlier in front of the two walls that were already existing. This is looking westward. So this little wall was constructed so that we could make grade and flatten out the basketball court. Off to the right is a construction ramp that will eventually become a stairway. Um, It's scheduled right now that on this Thursday, the basketball court will get paid with asphalt. and the contractor will also be coming and doing some additional concrete pours on Thursday. busy day there. That's the schedule. Some interesting things we've run into through this construction process, back up on the playground area, which was the, |
| 04:10:54.52 | Jill Hoffman | I'm interested in that. |
| 04:10:54.88 | Carolyn Revell | Thank you. |
| 04:11:01.66 | Andrew Davidson | upper right portion of the park. from the original picture. To the left here is a spring or subsurface water that was encountered during excavation. Um, the ground soft so we had to have a perforated pipe drainage system installed the drain drain the water away, perf pipe, drainage rock, filter fabric material. The lower right picture, we're still up on the in the playground area. but we're looking basically southeast this wall is on the southerly side of the playground. It's a high wall. And as excavation was occurring, ran into tiebacks, concrete tiebacks, below grade, fairly a little bit below grade. And it was determined that we had to replace those. They were high, just high enough so that they were in, they were going to be inside the port in place, protective material, fall protection, and we can't have concrete in that area. So we had to remove those and install three new tiebacks at a lower elevation. So they'll be out of the way. and they'll be clear. of the poured in place protective material. for the playground. still up on the playground area. This is the North Street wall. You can see a car parked, a truck parked up on North Street. The buttresses for the wall. This is roughly subgrade. We'll be building up from here. below this low wall high curb will have exposed earth. So what we have to do is put in a seat wall or what we decided to do was to put in a seat wall to protect the earth here and protect this curb as much as possible so this area wouldn't just dump into the finished playground. So we'll have a little bit of a seat wall for folks who to watch as kids are playing or for whatever reason. And as we come around the corner here towards the east we're going to just go to a vertical wall So we have a question. in line with this curb. If you can imagine the playground and where my cursor is, that's basically a swing. and we have to make sure that an area. away from this wall is clear of any material. Just it's again, it's a fall protection issue. |
| 04:13:16.41 | Andrew Davidson | This slide. he puts together the items that I described We've got the tiebacks here up in the playground area, location of the subterranean spring or piping it out over to the south and east corner. tying into new drainage system. We've had some undermining of the walls up here on the playground. had the revised construction of the seat wall here at the northern portion of the basketball court and, uh, And we also encountered a tie back at the tennis court wall, this Easterly tennis court wall. I've lost my cursor right here. We encountered a tie back. Um, And we're going to have to add Three more tie backs to secure this wall. That will also help prevent any further or any undermining of the space between to existing walls, we're gonna be putting in a bioretention system in here. Another thing we're doing, you may recall there were a lot of trees in this park and they're mostly gone. We've got a couple of oaks left. and we're looking at protecting these oaks. We always have been. And we've revised the design of a retaining wall here from a footing that was fairly wide that would have gotten into the roots substantially. We've revised that to a pile supported wall. So we're hoping that we'll be able to minimize any damage that occurs to those roots. So we're about halfway through the project, as Kevin mentioned. contractors made reasonably good progress. We've had some good weather. As time goes on, I know the chief said, we're looking dry for a while and hopefully for construction that's a good thing, not necessarily a good thing for everything else. but we continue to make progress here. I did want to say before I basically end my presentation that we've been working, we as in city staff have met through Zoom with a number of local residents. They've sponsored Zoom meetings. We meet basically every couple of weeks. Your director of, your Parks and Rec director, Mike, Mike and Lankford, sorry. And Lauren Umbertis, your public works division manager, myself and our contract construction manager Karen child we meet with that group and get feedback from them try and get them information um, And it's been pretty good. I think we have a meeting on Thursday. So that basically wraps up my short presentation on the construction so far. And if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer those. |
| 04:15:56.99 | Kevin McGowan | A couple of clarifications if that's all right. Hopefully you can hear me. One thing that Andy and I have been talking about is an alternate, and we're just going back to the original bid. That was the language used in it. In reality, I believe that was approved on June 23rd with the budget. So it's kind of an entire project at this point in time. So that includes the basketball court as well. So with that, again, thanks to Andy and all his hard work in the field. I do want to recognize that it is difficult during these times to be on site as many times as Andy is for this project. So I appreciate that. So with that, if you do have questions, Andy and I are here for you. |
| 04:16:45.71 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Thank you. And thank you both. And Andy, it's good to see you again. And also good to know you are still. carrying on your former sustainability Duties in recycling the concrete base from from this project. So thanks for calling that out. Awesome. Okay, Council members, do you have questions for staff at this point? |
| 04:17:14.43 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I will just start with one question. Can we share the screen so we can see? Folks, great. Thank you. So I just wanted to ask about the contingency on the project and whether we've expended a any or all of that, kind of where we are with that, since we're being asked to add funds to the project at this point? |
| 04:17:42.22 | Andrew Davidson | So hi, this is, we've not expanded. |
| 04:17:42.76 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 04:17:42.80 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. THE END OF THE END OF THE |
| 04:17:44.55 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 04:17:45.55 | Andrew Davidson | We feel that Where we are right now, we'll stay within the contingency. Um, We've got some more underground construction, which is always what's dicey. but, We spent around. $40,000 of the contingency. And I think there's $130,000 of contingency available. So right now it feels okay, but We're halfway through the project, like I said, and we still have a fair amount of underground. That's why we have contingency. |
| 04:18:17.17 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. And the project as it stands now also already includes the playground structure, correct? |
| 04:18:30.65 | Andrew Davidson | The playground structure is not going to be part of CF Contracting's construction project, but of the project that's a separate contractor. |
| 04:18:41.07 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, but it's in the budget. |
| 04:18:42.84 | Andrew Davidson | Yes. |
| 04:18:43.55 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 04:18:43.68 | Andrew Davidson | Thank you. |
| 04:18:43.70 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Okay, I will open it. Oh, sorry, Ray. |
| 04:18:52.52 | Ray Wendell | Um, Andy, thank you for that presentation. I may have missed this. When is the final completion date? So when will this park be? sort of like open for use so that we can all celebrate. |
| 04:19:10.23 | Andrew Davidson | Thank you. So CF contracting's completion date without extensions, I believe it's January 7th. After they're done, we'll go in. Then we come in with the playground structure. So I'm not sure when they will be done because we have to get them on site. there were we think January, February time to get their work done. |
| 04:19:37.80 | Ray Wendell | So this is going to be something where You know, the last phase is going to be sort of rolling it all out, getting it wrapped up. It's going to take some months. So we're looking at the spring by the sound of it. |
| 04:19:53.00 | Andrew Davidson | That's correct. Yeah, and let me point out that The pavement marking on the basketball court and the tennis court, you may recall what we had to do at MLK where we temporarily striped those play facilities until the weather warmed. down the final payment marking. we may be doing something similar here we can't install that final pavement markings when the weather is too cool to do so. |
| 04:20:21.61 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. Mm-hmm. |
| 04:20:24.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. I'm going to open it up to public comments. |
| 04:20:32.58 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And I'm not seeing any hands raised. |
| 04:20:35.75 | Joan Cox | I think we have about eight members of the public left. |
| 04:20:38.55 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | you I see a couple more than that. Okay, anyway, but yes. All right, so I don't see any hands raised, so we'll close public comments. |
| 04:20:47.76 | Ray Wendell | But we still have five council members. Thank you. |
| 04:20:52.45 | Joe Burns | perspective Council members. |
| 04:20:53.92 | Ray Wendell | Thank you. |
| 04:20:55.31 | Ray Withy | Yeah. |
| 04:20:56.93 | Joe Burns | Thank you. |
| 04:20:56.94 | Ray Wendell | that's the first time. |
| 04:20:56.98 | Joe Burns | And, uh, |
| 04:20:57.03 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. |
| 04:20:57.36 | Joe Burns | Yeah. Yeah. |
| 04:20:58.66 | Ray Withy | And perspective, council members. |
| 04:21:00.15 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. Not the members. And a basketball team. Five perspectives. |
| 04:21:04.60 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | on. |
| 04:21:04.76 | Jill Hoffman | Bye. |
| 04:21:04.77 | Jill Hoffman | There you go. |
| 04:21:04.79 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Okay. I am closing public comments. and bringing it back to the council. Sorry. |
| 04:21:10.78 | Jill Hoffman | Sorry. |
| 04:21:11.47 | Ray Withy | Thank you. |
| 04:21:13.30 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I think everyone is a little bunchy so we will try to wrap this up. Thank you again to Andy and Kevin. I also want to thank the Blue Ribbon Committee who have been working really hard on getting a fundraising plan for the park together. and very excited to fundraise for the remaining elements, including some great landscaping. So I'm supportive of this and open it up for other council member questions or comments. |
| 04:21:49.56 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 04:21:49.59 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 04:21:49.66 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. Thank you. |
| 04:21:50.60 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I support going forward at this time. And I also wanna call out too that, you know, that I believe you, Mayor and Tom Riley and some of the other people are gonna be starting a concerted fundraising effort on November 9th, I think is what the staff report said. I appreciate that effort too and look forward to finishing up our final Thank you. |
| 04:22:14.45 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. |
| 04:22:14.48 | Jill Hoffman | All right. |
| 04:22:14.64 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. in this. Yes, which will be a huge thing to celebrate, definitely. I agree with the vice mayor on that. Yes, thanks to Tom Riley, Carolyn Rebell, Bill Hines, Brandy Vouse on the Blue Ribbon Committee and Ken Shores for all their hard work on this. It's been great. |
| 04:22:22.33 | Carolyn Revell | Thank you. |
| 04:22:22.36 | Jill Hoffman | Yes. |
| 04:22:42.60 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, do I have a motion? |
| 04:22:45.03 | Joe Burns | move that we receive the south view park construction project update and authorize the additional measure of funds in the amount of 100 000 to relieve the blue ribbon committee Yeah. |
| 04:22:54.09 | Ray Wendell | And I will second that. |
| 04:22:56.33 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great. Heidi, could you please call the roll? |
| 04:23:01.58 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Hoffman. Yes. Councilmember Burns? |
| 04:23:08.23 | Marcia Raines | Yes. |
| 04:23:09.33 | Heidi Scoble | Councilmember Cox. |
| 04:23:10.69 | Marcia Raines | Yes. |
| 04:23:12.09 | Heidi Scoble | Vice Mayor Whithey? Thank you. |
| 04:23:13.33 | Marcia Raines | Thank you. |
| 04:23:13.34 | Heidi Scoble | Yes. |
| 04:23:13.38 | Marcia Raines | Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. |
| 04:23:13.83 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. Mayor Cleveland Knowles. Thank you. |
| 04:23:15.98 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. |
| 04:23:16.26 | Heidi Scoble | Thank you. |
| 04:23:16.30 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Thank you. That motion carries five zero and Thank you for having me. |
| 04:23:21.12 | Joan Cox | Thank you. |
| 04:23:23.50 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Good night, Kevin. Good night, Andy. Okay. |
| 04:23:27.00 | Joan Cox | Good night, Tom Riley, thank you for attending. and for your fundraising. |
| 04:23:29.81 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | for your fundraising. Thanks for hanging in here. |
| 04:23:35.89 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Sarah Silver, Right, we are on to item eight city manager reports to the Council appointments and other Council business personal take public comment on all of the items under number eight is there any public comment. |
| 04:23:54.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | We are seeing none, so we will close public comment. I manager report. Good evening, Adam. |
| 04:24:03.02 | Marcia Raines | Good evening, Adam. Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor and council members. I won't go into a great report this evening. other than to respond to any questions that you may all have. The last couple of meetings have been robust. with lots of important items and obviously lots of committee activity that was reported on earlier. So I'm happy to answer any questions. questions of the Council. Thank you for a good meeting this evening. |
| 04:24:33.36 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, thank you. Any questions for the city manager? |
| 04:24:40.39 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I think you reported last week on the Halloween that we are doing in cooperation with performing stars and Marin City, correct? And do we have any clarification on whether there will be any Sassolito? activity. Um, Very kind. |
| 04:25:03.57 | Marcia Raines | Not at this time. It's still kind of a day-by-day action, but to the point of the mayor's comments there, we are one of the co-sponsors with the South Carolina Marin City School District, and Performing Stars are obviously there doing the heavy lifting here. There'll be a drive-in movie on Halloween night in Marin City at the ball field there. Mike Langford's working very closely with Felicia Gessen from the Performing Stars. And right now that's the extent of the event based on you have really no ability to do any event gathering, people gathering. We are looking at trying to do a smaller kickoff event at the MLK field. but right now we do not have the support from the county to do a small event there to kind of kick off the event. The other idea that does not yet seem to have the support because it's competing a little bit with the activities in Marin City as we wanted to have a unified parade. from the MLK field to the drive-in movie theater, but there's some other community events in Marin City that we don't wanna compete with. So right now, that idea, which I think everyone thought was a great idea and loved the idea and it even ballooned up into a decorate your car event. Right now we are just holding off on that. But that may change. There will be There'll be another announcement in the Currents this Friday. There was an announcement in last week's Currents. But again, I really appreciate Mike Langford and Felicia working together. I think it will be a great event and a lot of fun in our neighboring community in Marin City. |
| 04:26:57.14 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Right. Thank you. I also found out today that the Tam High student leadership group is putting on a drive-through event at Tam High for younger kids on Friday evening from five to 8 p.m. So that'll be. kind of a fun event for the local kids as well. Okay, looks like we've got no other questions. Appointments to board, commissions and committees. I have on the agenda that we are Um, thanking Councilmember Hoffman for her prior work on the machine shop working group and adding Joan Cox to that group to end. since Jill will no longer be serving. So thank you, Joan, for agreeing to do that. |
| 04:27:49.49 | Joan Cox | Thank you, my pleasure. |
| 04:27:51.16 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | I also just wanted to note that we have received a number of planning commission applications. So we will be scheduling interviews for that slot shortly. That's all I have on that. Any future agenda items? |
| 04:28:10.56 | Joan Cox | Mayor, I had one possible one, which is I've received, and I know the chief of police has received a number of inquiries regarding blue the blue, the thin blue line. |
| 04:28:23.69 | Ray Withy | Yeah. |
| 04:28:23.83 | Joan Cox | And I'm not very well versed on this issue, although the chief has provided quite a cogent explanation But the last time that we met on our Black Lives Resolution Black Lives Matter resolution was July. It's now October. And I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to schedule a follow-up items. in which we could also perhaps address the thin blue line and any other current issues of interest for us and the community. |
| 04:28:55.96 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Great, well, I think we had talked about having kind of a quarterly check in. So I think that's probably due at this point. So I think that's a good A good item. I know the chief had also discussed forming a committee to review the use policies around body worn cameras, and the body worn cameras. So that may also be something we, I'm not sure if we need to take action on that, but I will check in with the city manager and the chief. |
| 04:29:29.32 | Joe Burns | and we'll be... They'll be talking about that at our first community safety development. |
| 04:29:33.94 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Yeah. |
| 04:29:34.18 | Joe Burns | Thank you. committee. Okay. |
| 04:29:35.04 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, well, great. Maybe we can just, we can see. |
| 04:29:39.27 | Joe Burns | And it'll probably go up there. |
| 04:29:40.88 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | Okay, good. Okay, thank you. Yes, I think that's something that would be helpful. All right, thank you. |
| 04:29:46.75 | Joe Burns | I think. |
| 04:29:47.29 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
| 04:29:49.37 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And then we've got the led, we've referred the matter to the legislative committee on the ADUs. Um, And then I know we have an upcoming item to follow up on the sustainability commission's outstanding action that will be coming up in November. Anything else? Okay, well. At least it's still today. |
| 04:30:15.00 | Jill Hoffman | Yeah. |
| 04:30:15.76 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | We've exceeded our... our last meetings expectations, so that's good. We are still in Tuesday. So with that, Good night, everyone. You did well. |
| 04:30:26.47 | Ray Wendell | You did well, Madam Mayor. |
| 04:30:29.29 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | It was a good discussion. Thank you, everyone. |
| 04:30:30.91 | Ray Wendell | Yeah. |
| 04:30:31.72 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | And thanks for those of you who are still with us and wish everyone good night. So we'll adjourn our meeting. |
| 04:30:37.81 | Ray Wendell | See you, folks. |
| 04:30:39.01 | Mayor Cleveland Knowles | All right. |
| 04:30:50.50 | Jill Hoffman | Thank you. |
Holly Holderman — Against: Supported the Fourth and North Neighborhood Association, mentioned hiring an attorney due to distress over the PG&E power pole situation. ▶ 📄
Bill Hines — Neutral: Attempted to comment on vegetation management but was redirected to a later agenda item. ▶ 📄
Alice Merrill — In Favor: Praised Susan Rowe for organizing a memorable all-city potluck event honoring sister cities. ▶ 📄