iving and um how the cost of living is constantly rising but um the their income is not rising so how do we protect them and offer a safety net for them so that they do not end up in our unhoused uh category um so just some things that have uh been crossing my mind are in our of concern for me thank you thank you council member let's go ahead go to public comment on this item and see if we have folks on zoom or in the chambers who would like to give comments on our federal legislative platform i'll start with mr. duit thank you my name is duane duit i'm from roseland and working with the sonoma county housing advocacy group i'm hoping that your team would look into extended stay suites single residents only approaches to providing housing and seeking federal funding for this right now what's been happening is the santa rosa housing authority has been using housing vouchers that have been awarded to veterans under the HUD vash program and saying well because they can't find a place they're not going to necessarily get the voucher we're going to put it into a project based voucher and then build something with it which then takes two to three years minimum and those homeless veterans are stuck so one of the business models that works really well and what you folks have been doing is buying hotels basically hotels are a business that can start up quickly compared to building quote housing so extended stay suites you see them all across america whenever you're on the free way you'll see hampton in and suites right over here near the herne avenue overcross what you spoke about you see extended stay america a three-story hotel with many many units there this is a way if you can get the federal funding to help to construct these things quickly you could have a model that would solve some of your problems also some communities call it public housing santa rosa has never broached that topic because almost 50 years ago the city manager at that time said well it wasn't a good idea so then your redevelopment agency director steve burk he took that to heart and said well we'll never have public housing here and all these years now that we've needed to have housing he hasn't used that model and he's still no longer working for the city but on the housing authority so maybe it's time to look at this reality the three tallest buildings in santa rosa are housing bethlehem towers and silver crest and you have people living there on limited incomes and they're happy housing works done this way and you could use this federal funding that's coming from these new initiatives under this administration to get some things done and get them done before the next president comes in it's the type of thing that with a legislative body of lobbyists that you hired they could look into this they could help you to start a new paradigm let's get past this thing of well we can't have public housing soon you're going to be a city of almost 200 000 people you could have public housing and you could do well with it and you could house many of these people who were in a crisis situation think of seniors and veterans extended stay suites there you go seniors and veterans extended stay suites thank you duane see no other hands in the chamber or on zoom i'll bring it back council member fleming could you oh hold on i just had a couple of hands pop up so i want to make sure we give them a chance we'll go to johanna followed by madonna hi can you hear me yep hi um i just um addressing the the water and the drought issue um i would love to see the water and drought issue in california addressed more directly also um it's truly a dire need and we see more drought and more fire in the future i think one of the best and easiest things is to implement youth water collection for every house why not um will it be funding for this very few residents can afford this on their own but government programs could really help care also in terms of firefighting and in terms of water for agriculture and drinking water even but especially for firefighting uh this may be a radical idea but southern california has already done it can you just put in an epsalination plant and use sea water to direct to make fresh water for firefighting i think it's a really an easy way to do this and to supplement all the irrigation that we're going to need in the future i don't think there's going to be going to be more rain i think we're getting less rain overall thank you i'm just being sure thank you for the the comments we'll go on to madonna thank you can you hear me okay thank thank you for that presentation um uh mere rogers i just want to thank you for highlighting the mental health issue um that our first responders do go through um the trauma that they have went through in just the past four years is very serious um and uh the gentleman who spoke about the extended stay america that's something that i i would like to see happen also where i work disability services and legal center are over um we have over 2000 clients annually they are all low income so that's something that they would be able to afford living you know independently with their disability on their own um and the um council member rogers i want to thank you for bringing up the um elders as well uh we serve a lot of them at my agency and um i think we need public housing too we don't have enough public housing we have a lot of people who do not make enough money to live here um and when i was 18 my first department here was at ketten court um off of herna avenue and it was about 500 a month for a two bedroom um those are almost close to three thousand dollars a month now and um they're not upgraded there there's no granite countertops there so um just something to think about um again thank you for uh letting me speak i yield my time all right thank you so much madonna so i'll bring it back council member fleming if you'd like to make a motion and we can discuss i sure would um and i wanted to take the opportunity again to thank mmo partners for your excellent work you know you guys are great to work with and effective and we're you know super grateful and thank you scott it's great to have you on board so with that i bring a resolution of the council of the city of santa rosa adopting the 2022 city of santa rosa federal legislative platform and wave further reading of the text okay so we have a motion from council member fleming and a second from council member rogers is there any additional discussion from the council okay i'm just going to say thank you once again and let's go ahead and call the vote council member schwedhelm hi council member solier hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes thank you john and karyakis and i will be talking a lot soon and thank you scott i know your uh second presentation before council here tonight we appreciate all the work that you've been putting in and we're looking forward to working with you through the legislative sessions at both the state and the local level thank you thank you right council will go to item 13 that is our public comment for non-agenda items it's the first of the night so if you're interested in providing public comment on an item that is not on tonight's agenda but within the jurisdiction or the scope of our jurisdiction go ahead and approach the podium but mr dwight hello my name is dwayne d witt i'm from roseland regarding santa rosa city government and roseland residents our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury in roseland in every stage of these transgressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms but to no avail again today a petition seeking redress from the foul treatment of many environmental injustices and social inequities we in roseland must endure and suffer daily every day drunks are at southwest community park making an outdoor latrine in the northeast corner just 100 feet from the restroom it is a cesspool where the drinkers publicly openly defecate and urinate within the site of the school children at dutton meadows elementary school so disrespectful of local roseland residents the drinkers arrive at dawn to stay after dark ignoring the rules of the city park about alcohol drinking drugs and tobacco smoking and littering so sad to the west ringing the park on silvers per avenue off of herne there are squatters with their rvs who just stay for years now with their trash strewn about over at the bare neighborhood park years after the opening the restrooms are permanently locked while porta potties are still in use imagine being handicapped and having to use cold and dirty porta potties not many local resident roseland families or females want to use the facilities as you might imagine over at old stony point road dozens of folks are trashing land next to the creek without regards to the longtime roseland residents and neighbors who try to make our area better they have been doing this for many months now and city staff let it worsen upon sabbastopol road at roberts avenue where a woman was murdered months ago a squalor returns after cleanups because the local brownfields are not a priority to the city this is just across the street from a new approved drug manufacturing business moving into the site of what could have been our roseland long-term community center and library instead the council ignored the petitions of the local residents and local youth against drugs and instead showed slavish devotion to the development and business community in every stage of these transgressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms now please take this petition seriously before the local residents seek actions from your federal funding sources to stop your discriminatory ways by the way thank you to some santa rosa police who were today on mcminne avenue they were trying to see what they could do about some of those visitors that come in with their rvs and park next to an open space and stay as long as they want pretty much without any redress so i thank you once again for the opportunity here in our land we can at least ask we can petition and i'm glad that you might listen if we have any hands on zoom seeing that on zoom i'll come back here to the chamber go ahead sir good evening my name is bruce defter and i'm a resident of the uh dutch floor neighborhood uh and representative or councilwoman roger's district we actually will be discussing that project in just a moment this is you said none i thought you'd covered all the agenda items i'm sorry oh no this is the first chance to talk about something that's not on the agenda for tonight but that item is coming up next if you want i'll just hold your comments for a few minutes yep go ahead my name is michael hillbar south west santa rosa area i share some between the widths concerns i think one of the main issues uh is the number of drug users i see around you know collecting cash and uh living in the parking lots and what have you i want to relate to you that i saw a drug overdose fatality recently it's not the first overdose i saw but it was the first fatality i watched it dispassionately you know what that means from the point of view of someone who doesn't really care to put it nicely i pulled into a parking lot very late in the evening it happened to be raining there's a parking lot that normally has a lot of drug users hanging around there but because of the rain it was relatively clear there was a black suv there and i heard some yelling coming from a woman but i was just walking through the parking lot i was going to ignore it i thought it was some sort of argument so anyway this white female yells at me says get over here ha so anyway i stayed well back and i observed standing there in the rain she pulls this black guy out of the passenger side door of her suv he looks completely limp puts him down there on the asphalt in the rain you know i never saw him move or anything from there on just laying there in the rain so that let that be a lesson to people you know if you're not smart enough to stay away from drugs that might be what happens you just end up laying on the asphalt in the parking lot in the rain dead okay i hope the other lesson for folks is if you see somebody who needs help to make sure that you help uh we'll go on to our next item it's item 15.1 item 15.1 public hearing adoption of master plan amendment for dutch floor neighborhood park tim bernard assistant park planner will be presenting the report good evening mayor rogers vice mayor alvarez and council members and attendees my name is tim bernard and i'm a park planner assistant for the parks department i'm also the park project manager for the dutch floor neighborhood park master plan amendment which i'm excited to introduce to you tonight city staff along with plural landscape architecture studio and community members including students parents and educators from the yellow elementary have been working diligently over the last 10 months to create an amended master plan the primary goal of the project are to bring the two play areas closer together for maximum supervision ensure the improvements meet the americans with disabilities act code compliance and update associated equipment and amenities i'm happy to welcome hailey waterson from plural studio who will walk you through the master plan process that was taken can you please repeat the name of the consultant hailey waterson from plural hailey has her hand up now good evening can everyone hear me yes we can great um my name is hailey waterson i'm a landscape architect i'm principal at plural we're a small landscape architecture studio in san francisco um and we call ourselves plural because we believe that great places require many different people working together to envision to build and to steward them and this project in um the way we have collaborated with the neighborhood and what the city is really emblematic of of those values the next slide tonight we're talking about the dutch floor neighborhood park which is in the northwest quadrant within the city it is located there approximately located at that red star next slide this is an aerial of the existing park it is 2.38 acres it is surrounded by single family homes the main streets fronting it are exeter drive and white chapel way and the northeast side as tim mentioned is by yellow elementary school which shares a small edge with the park next slide this is the current master plan this master plan was completed in 1983 and the park itself was completed in 1989 you can see here on the master plan white chapel way on the bottom of the screen and extra drive on the left the master plan is showing um large open turf area represented in that kind of lime green color and then two play areas the northern one which is kind of in that brownish orange color and then one down closer towards white chapel and then some paths surrounding them and this is more or less what was built there today and so this is the master plan where we've been working to update with the neighborhood next slide here's a quick diagram kind of explaining that current layout that I was just discussing on the previous slide the two pink blobs represent the two play areas they are quite a bit of ways apart you wouldn't be able to see both play grounds at the same time the upper playground is allocated for children with a between ages of five and 12 when the the lower area is between for children between ages two and five there are sitting opportunities scattered around the park there's now very mature trees beautiful mature trees on the site you can see in this photo here on the right um and there's also a small fitness uh space just northwest northeast of the five to 12 play space there in that uh blue uh oval and so um as tim mentioned we really had uh you know three main goals um and a few objectives the goals are really to create a safe and welcoming park and playground to improve the connectivity um the accessibility um and really the usability of the park and then to build on the park's beauty enhance the beauty of the existing park it's a very beautiful park um so there's a lot to work with there um and how we're doing that we're updating the two playgrounds um looking to move them closer to each other updating the adult fitness equipment updating the paths so that they're all um accessible and all of the site furnishings as well uh would be updated a lot of the park infrastructure would be updated as well um including improved drainage uh irrigation and uh furnishings next slide as tim mentioned we've been working um through a series of neighborhood meetings over the last 10 months um altogether we've had around uh over 250 uh participants throughout the three um zoom neighborhood meetings they were several months apart they were all virtual uh we also met with um the bio elementary school leadership and uh held a small kind of us school-wide brainstorm session for the play structures which i'll talk about um and a little bit more detail but we're we're really happy with the um the neighborhood meetings we were able to reach out to um the people who live right adjacent to the park 80 percent of the participants are in the northwest quadrant um 67 percent of the of the respondents visit this park weekly or daily and again the majority of the respondents are within a five to ten um walk from the park so it's it's very much a neighborhood park um and its users and um we're happy that we were able to reach out um to the majority of that group um and not without the thanks of bio elementary school community um for putting the word out there and and being involved um in the process so we um on february uh the week of february 10th we uh presented uh floral studio and um tim and jen we all had these uh presentations to the three age groups the the kindergarten group the first through third and the fourth through sixth grade uh where we talked a little bit about what's landscape architecture is um and also we uh put out some precedent images to inspire children about what their play space and new playground could be like um and then the children went away and uh within their classes either together as a class or individual students did various um styles of of um putting together ideas of what the playgrounds could be so if you go to the next slide um we got beautiful drawings from um from the students some diagrams there was a really really cool range of ways that that children were able to kind of respond to our prompts um somewhere in writing somewhere in diagrams and we put together this word claud here at the bottom which summarized the dozens of drawings that we kind of analyzed um to pull out some of the main themes and elements that um the children are really interested in next slide and if you couldn't i'd like to actually jump to the the next slide first and then back to this one thank you um so the way we uh organized the three neighborhood meetings was to work with the kind of macro scale of the master plan and then as the meetings went on we got further down into more detail so for this uh the first the first community meeting we really focused around the site organization um where the main pieces of program should go um and how they are connected to other program items so we presented these three site organization uh diagrams by community preferred option c here where both age uh play spaces are really next to each other with the um the blue dots represent the adult fitness stations and move scattered along the adjacent path and picnic areas along the south side of the play space we also asked about um the play structure the play space itself what the character and what the look and feel um should be we presented a bunch of ideas um and talked about other additional concepts the community ultimately um was drawn towards the more natural uh kind of character with also some more traditional kind of post and platform play structure elements and so like like this often goes it becomes kind of a hybrid of the elements that were uh desired by the community we also talked about specific playground components what are the the most important elements to have um within the play structures um and of course that is swings and slides and climbing um more of the kind of top priority elements for the neighborhood and in the second community meeting we presented three master plan options so if we go back now up to the previous slide we can take a look at those we had um three options that looked at um different ways we could treat picnic areas whether there's a large group picnic area versus several small group picnic areas um and with those uh the different locations of fitness equipment different location for stormwater treatment gardens which will be your requirement for the master plan um and along with that came three playground concepts um that were really based off of the feedback that we heard uh from the second neighborhood meeting people really drawn to uh master plan c but they liked the dry creek playground option that was in scheme a so it kind of took those high those two um playground option dry creek and the master one option c and merge them to together all right we could jump now to two slides forward perfect this was the draft master plan that we presented at the third neighborhood community meeting it's taking this dry creek playground concept which is really um an idea about um inspired by the adjacent santa rosa creek it's only a few blocks away from here and you know a big piece of the settlement story of santa rosa um in the upper left of the playground is the larger five to twelve play space um we heard in the community meetings a big desire for a zipline so we are working to fit that in um there's a large structure with slides and climbing elements and swings um you can see around the southwest edge of the playground there are these three picnic spaces um places to gather and watch your children um and then the lower right side of that play space is the five to twelve other sorry the two to five play space um and then along the um paths which we've relayed out to be accessible has some of the adult fitness equipment and uh this is to sit and then at the entry the corner of exeter dry the white chapel way there's a small storm water garden really access to storm water you know and welcoming um garden entry into the park and uh from in that community meeting we got more specific feedback um people had different preferences for the storm water garden talked a little bit about um a fence or some kind of barrier between the vial elementary school and the playground um it were really wanting a more natural feel to make sure that we're using native plantings and trees um that'll promote that'll be drought tolerant and promote habitat creation um looking for more shade uh there was a desire for uh games like cornhole and chess and table tennis trying to get more adult fitness stations um and then we also had a request to take a good look at the security of the park um and make sure there was clear sight lines through the park from the streets jason streets next slide these are some of the um survey results from the draft master plan we asked again more kind of detailed questions we talked a little bit about the entry monument sign whether that should be replaced we talked a bit about the type of the adult fitness equipment um should it be geared towards a certain type of fitness level um the neighborhood ultimately said it should be multi-generational equipment we talked a little bit about where the park game should be um and we heard that some should be adjacent to the playground but some should also be outside of the playground um and then we talked again in a little more detail about the adult fitness equipment the types of um either strength train or cardio type stations next slide and with that feedback through those conversations um we then revised the draft master plan and now we're looking at the proposed master plan here um and we've from this point there are really kind of detailed modifications we brought in the um table tennis and the and some chess tables they're number 10 and 11 um on the right side of the screen there um yep thank you zoom in perfect um there are benches along the uh park paths so that you are able to come and enjoy it if you're not here with a child there's bike parking that we included adjacent to the um playground um there are small there's a small um sand pit um at either playground uh we heard from the neighbors um a big desire to keep some um piece of a sand element there for that textile experience particularly for the two to five age um we have the picnic spaces that are adjacent to both age groups um there number four um again number two is the two to five play space um number one is the five to twelve play space um a lot of the trees that you're looking at that have the solid black line represent existing trees we are working very diligently to try to preserve as many trees as we can um and that has the form of the um dry creek path that surrounds the playground is really dried from the location of the existing trees it's an all accessible path that gets allows children to circulate um and get to all of the play structure equipment um it also makes for a really great loop for for tag or for scooter riding um and there's uh the cornhole number 12 that's adjacent to the picnic station um and then there's five adult fitness stations um they're number six just north of the playground and again that that boulder edge um along the northeast corner it can be a um it's actually working to provide a great change between the playground and the adjacent path but it also could be a um flight element as well next slide so we are um getting ready to get into the 30 and 60 construction documents um through the spring uh we will then spend the summer um working on the 90 to 100 construction documents and the bid set uh with bidding at the end of the year starting and in through early 2023 um and then that would have set us up to start construction after the rainy season um in April of 2023 this is a kind of conservative uh schedule from our experience of how much time these things take um and of course we will always be looking for opportunities to to shorten these timelines um when possible next slide and I just wanted to mention too that um we did present to the board of community services on October 27th um and they I've recommended um that the city council um approve this master plan thank you so much hailey so go ahead tim thanks hailey I hope you enjoyed the presentation um the recommendation by the transportation of public works department that the council conduct a public hearing and their out by resolution adopt the map that's for neighborhood park to include ADA compatible paths picnic areas children's play areas for ages two to five and five to 12 table tennis chess cornhole fitness stations monument sign and multi-use turf areas next slide thank you tim if there's any questions we'd be happy to take those now thank you great council members do we have any questions for the team I'm seeing no excuse me initial questions so we'll go ahead and open our public hearing and hear from the public on this one I'll go ahead and start in the chambers with you sir my name is Bruce Dichter and I live in the uh Dutch floor neighborhood uh I only became aware of this project uh with a recent mailing and it perked my interest uh I have no background in landscaping or uh really in gardening but in recent years I've become aware of the importance of planting to support a wide range of life and it's my concern that the flora that's selected for the park uh be native uh have a uh low water need be drought resistant but also that it be of this of the type that uh supports a wide range of insect life I have some material here that I would be happy to share with members of the council uh that goes into that in detail that I'm really not prepared to but just as an example uh in one of these documents that I have it's it's written by a man named uh Douglas Tallamy who's a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware and the local native gardeners are all aware of this but he he did studies he found that for instance oak trees support 270 different varieties of caterpillars which are basically a keystone species that birds rely upon and then other animals there's a whole chain and I'd like to see our parks support a wide range of of life certainly the people that use it but also the animals in our area just to try and maintain the diversity and perhaps even increase the numbers but then you get into other varieties um elderberry supports only 33 different varieties of caterpillars you get down into um well I don't know I would like anyway I don't need to belabor this I would like to share this information with you if you're available to receive it thank you absolutely thank you and if you go ahead give it to Julie Guzy she can have it distributed to council members to take a look all right thank you go ahead oh hi can you hear me yes we can um my name is Elizabeth and um I wondered if you had considered putting a bathroom in the park um something that all ages need to use when they go to the park especially little ones um that's just my question that's it all right thank you I think they need one yeah yeah so we don't usually get into a back and forth in the public comment but I took a note down and I'll have staff address that after we listen to the other comments if that works for you okay thank you very much yeah absolutely seeing no one else approach the podium here in the chambers we'll go to zoom we'll start with Janelle and then go to Lenny I didn't just start talking hello my name is Adam and I'm um one of I'm a neighbor to the park I would like to actually see just a grill and you know maybe a a little bit of horseshoe pit or something um I think having a grill would be a place especially with the times now COVID neighbors trying to figure out a place to hang out I think a grill would be a nice place to have somebody a nice safe spot to hang out the kids playing in the park and we can put some sausages on and stuff I think that'd be really um uh down with what's going on right now okay I appreciate that comment do you have additional comments no that's it thank you so much for your time and I appreciate you guys putting your effort into doing this we really do appreciate and I know our kids we love it isn't here a problem in the background yeah we're excited for thank you oh thank you so much for calling into the meeting we'll go to Lenny hi you can hear me okay yes we can all right beautiful so I'm Lenny Moore Santa Rosa resident so this is what I just want to point out a couple things one this is an excellent recent example of community engagement and I just want to congratulate you know the staff for how they reach out to the community how often they reached out the level of engagement from all the way down to the young kids doing drawings it's beautiful stuff so congratulations to you guys for for that effort it's really appreciated and we definitely need a lot more of that as far as developers within the city and their projects uh the second thing I want to do is I want to second the native drought resistant plantings that support diverse wildlife uh that's a really important thing uh it applies to climate change it applies to um water retention in soil of keeping you know the the plants happy keeping the animals and the wildlife around the neighborhood happy and in the whole city of Santa Rosa so those are my comments and I'll get back the rest of my time thank you all right thank you I see no other hands on zoom nobody else in the chambers we'll go ahead and close the public hearing we did have a couple of questions that I'm just hoping we can address one of them was specifically about uh drought resistant and native flora particularly as it pertains to supporting additional types of ecology and wildlife I'm just wondering if that was considered yeah yeah thanks thanks for the question and thanks for the shout out something that we um you know advocate for in all of our work and I'm glad you mentioned oak trees it's one of the main um we're looking at two different varieties to go around the playground um for the same reasons that you have outlined um and the the shrub and um plantings that will be around will will definitely be diverse and have flowers that attract wildlife um birds and butterflies it's not only great for diversity of the environment but it's also a great kind of learning teaching tool for children so um yes we will be including those excellent anything uh tim anything to add or jen great the next question was uh about the bathroom and jen I know that this is probably one of the most common questions we get about inclusion of of a restroom at certain parks versus others can you give sort of the overall context of how the city determines which parks to put a bathroom in and which one's not to of course thank you mayor uh gen sentos deputy director for parks and this is a really common question every master plan opportunity we have with the community this comes up and generally overall and you know it's hard to generalize but usually we look to include restrooms in larger community parks where we have a wide variety of people coming and staying at the park for hours and we typically do not put them in neighborhood parks where we are looking at folks coming from a half mile radius or a smaller section of the city and folks usually live close to the park although we also had this debate for the coffee recent coffee park master plan that we did and that we ended up with mixed results in this community we had a couple people mention it at our meetings but there was no significant request for restrooms at this park during our public process so they we didn't move forward with that at this time but in the future of this community would like to have restrooms or portable units we could consider that as a separate future amendment but at this time there wasn't public request for that large public request for that and it's not a common practice and very costly as well all right thank you and then the last question was about having a grill or a horseshoe pit seeing if there was still the ability to maybe include those amenities at the park yeah that's a good question um we did talk with the neighborhood and through the through the meetings about a having grills and group kind of gathering and while there was some people that were for it there were actually the majority of the respondents did not want to have a large cooking group cooking area for concern with people not being up after themselves and the you know the issues that come along with that we can certainly as probably it goes with the the bathroom was that it could potentially be a future item and then the other one was around horseshoe we can certainly take a look at that to see if we can fit it in there through the neighborhood meetings the main games that came up were cornhole table table tennis which is ping pong and chess tables great thank you so I'll bring it back to council I'll go ahead and look first for a motion to put on the table for discussion from council members and I'll look to council member rogers I would like to make a motion to adopt the resolution um with the title of the council of the city of Santa Rosa adopting a master plan amendment for the dutch floor neighborhood park to include ADA compliant paths picnic areas children play areas for ages two through five and five through 12 table tennis chess cornhole fitness stations monument sign and multi-use turf area and wait for the reading of the text second we have a motion from council member rogers and a second from council member soyer let's go ahead and see if we have any discussion or comments on the item uh I'll start all the way down here look at our council member sweat out thank you mr. mayor I just want to offer my compliments to staff this whole process I know jen mentioned the coffee park process which I thought was very successful and every time I go there you know at least on a weekly basis you're seeing some of the features that are in this park specifically bringing the two play areas together it's very well used very well thought out and I really appreciate getting the school kids involved in seeing what their vision of that future is so thank you for experiencing what went through the coffee park applying it here and I think this is a very well done project so thank you vice mayor thank you mayor well I definitely want to congratulate the the residents of of our area of district seven and really participating I was very impressed by the number of participants the participants that showed up to speak what they want their area look like and definitely want to commend staff for their work and as well as our council and rogers and district seven for for really improving the life of its residents so congratulations to them and really speaking up for themselves I love to see that out of the senate residents thank you our senate residents and council member rogers um just really would like to thank the residents I think that they really showed up and were able to voice what it is that they wanted um in the neighborhood and we appreciate it um uh really like to thank the staff for continuing to open mindedly um not only hear the feedback but receive the feedback and continually come back with you know great ideas of implementing the feedback that was provided so thank you so much um for making the vision that the residents had a reality um and I look forward to April 2023 um where we break ground and where we finally start to to see the park um becoming you know a reality so this is this is a great time so thank you very much all right madame city clerk if you could please call the roll thank you mayor council member schwedhelm hi council member soyer hi council member rogers hi council member fleming hi vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes right tim hailey jen thank you all so much for your work on this and as uh council member rogers said thank you to the public for participating and as you saw if you didn't get everything that you wanted in it there are still opportunities down the road to reconsider how it's best meeting the needs of the neighbors but I think that this is a really good first step for folks uh to provide much needed recreation space so thank you that we will move on to our next public hearing item 15.2 uh as uh just as a note for folks we'll take a dinner break after this item and then come back for the rest of our study our excuse me report items after the fact mayor rogers members of council item 15.2 public hearing redistricting of city council districts fair maps act second of four public hearings stephanie williams the city clerk will be given the presentation thank you mayor and council members I am actually going to be introducing Sophia Garcia from redistricting partners who will be making the presentation and also providing a demonstration on how the district our mapping tool works so that our residents can submit draft maps to the city and so with that Sophia hi good evening are you able to hear me yes we can what do you want to all this be saying next slide with the person instructing wonderful um so we're going to talk a little bit of uh kind of the stuff that we have to use or look at before we go into the draft maps and those criteria are under the fair map suck which is a new california-based law you can look it up if you google ab849 but these are the criteria or best practices that we use for creating any draft plans they're also the rules that we evaluate for any public plans that have been submitted and reviewed and we actually have one of our draft plans that are based on a public submission which is wonderful which is what we've loved to see uh so these are in ranked criteria order um the first one is the of the most important it's to it gives us a lot of stuff in there and the first one is to that it creates it has this due districts that relatively equal size so this means that the council is not subject to passing plans that are exactly equal size we have what's called a 10 total plan deviation and we're going to get into that with every draft plan that we review it also touches on the data that we have to use and for redistricting we utilize the 2020 decennial census file which is a point and count file and it also relates to uh people not citizens so we are looking only at that total count of uh folks who filled out that census in 2020 we look at districts that are contiguous so this means that they geographically touch one another or it could be functionally contiguous so does it make sense that a particular district looks that way whether to we can look at boundaries to not cross a freeway a highway or other specific boundaries maintaining communities of interest is a criteria that has really been elevated throughout this redistricting process this year um they we have a new process because of the fair maps act so it is a new redistricting cycle before any other and maintaining communities of interest is that criteria that allows for the public to come forward for the council to to voice their opinions and that we try to maintain communities of interest and keep them intact as much as possible we also look at following additional census designated places or government data so if there are neighborhood boundaries or if another thing that comes up a lot is looking at renter data or other socioeconomic data points that is allowable and then finally looking at districts to keep them compact so this could mean an appearance or in function so does it appear to have uh districts that look familiar to us or if there's a shape that looks a little funny uh functionally does it make sense to have the shape the way that it does again these are the criteria that we use for evaluating the draft plans and for any of the public plans that have been uplifted so we'll go to the next slide you know it's a lot of information in the upper slide so we do have some draft maps here before you this evening and how we got into this stage is that we really for redistricting and our redistricting partners believe that this is a publicly driven process and that there should be multiple ways to engage and as was mentioned your city decided to go with district which is a wonderful online mapping platform and as a just an hour ago before I reviewed you do have four public plans in there and that's great and hopefully we continue to receive them throughout the process this process is also driven by those traditional redistricting criteria and also looking at minimizing neighborhoods or additional communities of interest and then finally these maps were published prior to this meeting so they were made available to the council and the public so that they can review them and come to this meeting with any amendments feedback or any other comments that they have on the maps so we'll go to the next slide please we do have three plans here for you for review and that's draft plan a draft plan b and draft plan c so each plan does have an overview of the plan it also has a page that gives you specific data and then it continues to have a page that shows you individual individual districts with data and a closer view additionally all the plans also had a web map which is an online map so you can zoom in and look at the boundaries on street level because we know that it is a little difficult to see that detail when you are viewing the pdf and again these were made available on the website and prior to this meeting so we'll go to the next slide um so we also have your existing lines and we'll go to the next slides this is what they look like currently um and we have the data table and if we go to the next slide it should highlight what your deviation is as so under that first criteria again we have to create districts of relatively equal size so all of the districts don't have to be exactly perfect you have some room because there's all those other criteria to consider the communities of interest looking at contiguity compactness but we do have to maintain a deviation that's under 10% so currently with your existing lines with the 2020 data you are at 20.6 of a total plan deviation so regardless of whatever plan is passed by the council there will have to be some change it's so we're in compliance and how we get that 10% total plan deviation is we look at the most populated districts of the district with the highest deviation and for this instance it's district two at 7.7 and we look at the least populated district which here is district four and that deviation is negative 12.9 and we add that together to get that 20.6 so we are looking at for that total plan deviation the highest and the lowest and adding that difference together so that's how we got that number and we'll go to the next slide please we also have the citizen voting age population data which gives you the percentage for Latino Asian and Black CVAP and again this is for the residents who are over the age of 18 that's how it's called citizen voting age population not to be confused with voter or voter registration data again we are not allowed to look at that this gives you that percentage a question we get most often is why are we only highlighting these three groups that's because in California these are the three groups that would have the highest the highest amount of population to create a majority minority district or a plurality district or an influence district and so these are those three groups that have the highest population I'm looking at your data right now you don't have any of those districts that are majority minority you do here currently in district one have a Latino CVAP that's over 30% and that's what we call an influence district so that's just additional data for you to look at for the public to evaluate as well and this will be available for all the plans as well and we'll go to the next slide please so we're going to review each of them and then I'll give it back to the council and the public to hear any amendments or feedback but draft plan a was created based on the current existing line so it is our minimal change plan and what we did is we made some minimal changes in order to make that deviation be under that 10% and we'll go to the next slide please so we have the overview of your plan with again those existing lines that oh no excuse me this is your draft plan a so does his looks really similar to your existing lines but there are some minimal changes we'll go to the next slide please and the what we see here is the existing lines underneath the draft plan a so draft plan a is in the black lines and the color underneath represents what the existing lines are so you know it's a little hard to see but we can see in seven there's a little change we have a little change between four and five and then minimal changes between four two and three and again just as a repeat so the block lines represent what draft plan a is and the colors underneath represent your existing lines again this is the minimal change plan and we made those minimalist changes on there in order to make sure we're under that that 10% we'll go to the next slide please these circles highlight where we made those changes so that it's a little bit easier for the public and the council to see where those changes were made again if all the other districts and the construction of the districts do look really similar to what you have currently and we'll see that change as we go through the other drafts and we'll go to the next slide please here is your your data table and we'll go to the next slide it'll highlight that we do have a total plan deviation now of 3.7 percent as so we have our highest our most populated district which in this instance would be district two at 2.6 and our least populated district which would be district five at negative 1.1 and we add those together to get that 3.7 we'll go to the next slide please we have here your draft plan B and the basis of this is we use major highways streets and neighborhoods to divide and have your a draft plan B some of the little notable neighborhoods that are in the plans are for district one you have Bennett Valley and South Park district two you have junior college greater cherry street and Burbank gardens district three there's Kenwood district four it may pronounce this incorrectly so apologies rebel Wallace cobblestone low low meter heights district five Lincoln Manor Copperfield and Weston district six Apple Valley and district seven Roseland so again the base for drawing our draft plan B was we looked at those major highways streets and also the dividing lines of the neighborhoods and we base this off of the the map that you see on this slide to the right called the Santa Rosa neighborhood so we took this directly from your site to ensure that we were following those neighborhoods that you have and again if we think of those traditional redistricting criteria neighborhoods could be considered communities of interest and they could also be considered under those additional government lines so this is the basis for your draft plan B and we'll go to the next slide please so here's what the draft plan B overview looks like but we will have that existing lines overlay for you as well so go to the next slide please here we have the existing line so we do see that there is a pretty big change to the construction particularly on the left side of your city and so again the colors underneath represent what the current lines are and then the black lines represent what your draft plan B would look like and again just as a reminder the basis for this is those highways streets and also your neighborhood lines and we'll go to the next slide and we have your data table and if we go to the next slide please we here have a total plan deviation of 5.5 percent so we will see that there is a difference of your deviation between all of the three drafts that are available you just have to be under that 10 percent having a plan that is a lower deviation that number in and of itself doesn't really necessarily mean that it's a better plan we're just again ensuring that we're under that 10 percent and giving you the reasoning behind the base of all the plans so we'll go to the next slide please here draft plan C was based on a district or submission which is something that we love to see against and the ID number is 101628 and I will show you where that is on the district or site after the presentation and there is a lot less change of this plan from the current lines from that B but there is you know more change from the current lines than your draft plan A we did take this down we ran what we say when we base a plan off of a public submission as we take it down from the district or site we put it into our internal mapping software and then we will look at it and clean it up a little bit and that could mean that we potentially a member of the public missed a couple of blocks in the city or may have a non-contiguous area and so we make those minor changes check that it's under that 10 percent and then we give you that office again so that's what we mean when it's based on a public submission so we'll go to the next slide please we have the overview of what the draft plan C looks like so again it does look a little similar to what draft plan B looks like but there is some changes from your existing lines so go to the next slide we have the overlay of your existing lines and again those colors underneath represent what you currently have and the black lines represent what draft plan C is showing we'll go to the next slide please we have our data table and the next slide will highlight what our our deviation is for this particular plan so this plan we have a deviation of 3.8 again we take district 3 and district 4 which are our highest and lowest districts and add that difference together so we'll go to the next slide please um so what's next so again this is a draft map hearing these are not final plans and redistricting it's an iterative process so it is more of an art than a science and so we're here to listen to the council and listen to the public for any additional amendments that you would like to see how you can ask us to go back and uplift another district or plan make amendments to one of the plans that you have in front of you and we'll take that back and and look at it and make sure that we can make all those amendments that that you asked again you can suggest possible changes to a plan or provide direction for a new draft just as a note all of the draft maps that will be considered at your next hearing again must be made public prior to the meeting so we'll work with your staff in order to ensure that we we get those to you ahead of time and we'll go to the next slide please and that's all we have for the presentation and I'll give it back to staff did you want me to give that a demo right now or after after comments from the public and the council let's go ahead and do comments on the draft maps and then we can do the overview of redistrictor after that work okay wonderful all right I will see if there's questions from the council councilmember Fleming yes thank you for that presentation and the options laid out for us I have a really just simple technical question which is on some of the maps like for example on slide 28 it shows district one in draft map A and you can see some of the streets but on the same draft map for let's say district four you can't see the streets and so my question is going forward can we have maps that are consistent and clear with that granular level of detail or an option to a GIS interface where we might be able to get that level of detail yes we have a web map that should have been made available to you in the public which gives you that ability to zoom in and out we also have in other jurisdictions worked with their GIS department and given them the shapefile so that they can make a quick application which does allow you to move around have all the maps on or all the layers on a particular application but for us we have the PDF or the web the web map would be happy to work with your staff okay well nonetheless like it is not clear as to why though like on some of those slides we can see the streets and some we can't so um some some way would be helpful moving forward thank you any other questions from council council member sweat home thank you mr. mayor yeah I have a question on map B the parameters that said basically keeping neighborhoods together the first thing was the the freeway major highways and it goes at least from district six where current boundaries is one-on-one it looks like it moves it to the railroad tracks but yet that's not the railroad tracks that cuts across several different districts it stops between what's at six and five can you talk a little bit about how that came about yeah we I looked at it all those combination of factors so your major um highways other specific travel features and then in combination with your your neighborhood lines so that's it was kind of a combination of stuff in and the drawler decided to split your district four and six at that railroad line but again we are here to listen to feedback and can make amendments to those and move it back to that the highway if if you were the council would wish to see that change so I'm sorry I missed how was that decision made or who made that decision to go from one-on-one to the railroad tracks um so when we look at creating draft plans there's a number of factors that the line drawler will will look at and for the basic in of your your draft plan beat was a combination of all of those so it was looking at not only major highways but also following your division of neighborhoods so it's a it was a combination and we didn't have um we didn't look at any or there wasn't specific feedback or community feedback so that that was the base of that plan highways and also your neighborhood lines all right thanks I had a question about map a if you could pull that one up so this one is the one that is substantively similar to the existing districts but then modified uh to be in compliance and just playing around with the tool uh and and it is possible I know on the city's redistricting website you can click on redistrictor and look at each of these within it and then modify them so I was playing with district or with map a and one thing that I noticed in particular was where districts five six and seven meet those modified areas particularly that little jut out from five into seven and then I don't think it's shown on your slide but there is a little area where five meets six that there's a difference or a change proposed um if I return that to their existing district in that area the population is the population deviation deviation is still under three percent so I'm just wondering if there was a reason that those changes in that area were proposed again the ones to the right of that uh just between districts four five two and three those changes they make sense in terms of balancing the population but the ones that are made at the tips of five seven and six seem to not impact the the deviation much on district it only gives you the the district that has the highest deviation it doesn't give you that total plan deviation and so that's why we we take district or plans down and look at them in our internal software um and so that that could have been a reasoning of why we had to make all those those small changes I see so uh with this modification the difference is doing quick math math in my head about well about 1500 people difference uh between the lowest populated district and the most populated district um so I don't know I'd have to do them the math to make sure that it's within the allowable deviance but I think it is are you suggesting that we look at a specific area and make that change and come back with you within amendment to this plan or at least just an explanation if there's a reason within the fair maps act that if that doesn't throw it out of the the deviation and if this map is intended to be minor changes based on the existing maps explaining sort of for the public why we would need to make those changes to that area if it isn't within the population deviation I think is going to be important and and likewise that it doesn't actually matter because it's not population uh the the draft map on a moves the fairground property from district two into district one uh when that is not the existing case as well and I just wondering if there's any reason for doing so other than just uh map drawer's preference and when the the map drawer looks at the the plan they also look at the existing plan when we make the minimal changes based on all of those criteria so often when they're they're making small changes they'll go to follow major roads highways or um streets that look let look larger yeah I think that's why I'm asking the question is it switched but there doesn't seem to be a reason that it was switched between which district this is just the the fairgrounds down between districts two and district one it substantively it doesn't matter I'm just wondering if there was a reason or a preference for doing so okay I don't see that um change it at all we don't need to dig it into it uh now we've got a couple of other hearings where we can talk about it um but I I just noticed it and was curious I will look into that and can come back to you um with an answer okay and then for map c uh the way that it comes up west avenue comes over and then goes up Dutton Avenue uh really right through the through the roseland area uh it does that change I'm trying to figure out how to ask this question does that change the ability for underrepresented communities to be elected into that district does it cut the latino population to make it harder for folks uh or dilute their voice in the election we go to drop and see and then again I have it up on uh on district or so it looks like in this draft map you have stony point it's the starting divide between seven and one comes across herne avenue until west avenue comes up west avenue comes across south avenue and then goes back up Dutton Avenue so in creating uh new plans if there is not a population that is over 50 plus or an ability to create a minority minority district based on section two of the voting rights act uh we're disallowed from using race as a predominant factor in drawing districts as so when we don't have that we have to use the traditional criteria when creating draft plans but if there is a another way to look at those particular communities if they're a neighborhood or specific community of interest or we can look at other socioeconomic factors that that's a way to evaluate it but without legal counsel directing us to draw a district based on race to have a 50 plus district which our our line drawlers looked into it um and currently don't have that ability we have to use those other criteria if that if that makes sense okay understood I'll I'll leave I'll leave it a little bit for our district one and district seven representatives to weigh in on that if they'd like to but I I think that it would I would have a hard time uh explaining to the public how that would pass the smell test in terms of creating a district especially given the circumstances on how Santa Rosa moved into district elections so that'll be my my feedback I'll see if there are any other questions from council members about the draft maps or about the process mr vice mayor thank you mayor I definitely am interesting in the in the conversation that you just had and uh as we learn more about that I'm sure we'll be addressing it in in in the proper form uh I just wanted to reiterate council member Fleming's comment about the street recognition just for for not only our ability but also the general public's ability to know exactly where the lines are as you're not a straight line so to speak and I would definitely appreciate that in the future on the maps so at a glance anyone could look at a map and and really know exactly what the lines look like especially with the different options thank you so I think just in terms of some of that feedback and I think this is talking with the clerk if you go to the city's redistricting page and if you click on the submit a draft map now it takes you to a link that shows you all of the different submitted maps perhaps what might be easier instead of jumping through all of those hoops is to on the redistricting page have direct links to district for each of the maps because once you click on it once you can open the map it opens it in district or so that you can zoom in and you can make changes it's just not intuitive on how we get there so perhaps we can can fix that uh as we move forward through the mayor if I might um I appreciate that that is one work around I think that this is the way that most people of the through the staff presentation is the way that most people will access this and so if I couldn't figure it out I don't know how other people will and I think it needs to be in the staff presentation oh I'm suggesting both okay excellent thank you yeah no absolutely I just wanted to make sure uh for folks who between the meetings want to submit maps or see the maps that have been submitted let's try to make it as intuitive and user friendly as we can uh for folks but I completely agree let's do both I will make sure that we um also bring in our GIS staff to along with um to work with redistricting partners to get all of that information for future maps that are submitted great thank you is there any other feedback from council before we go to public comment nope all right that I will open the public comment uh public hearing Mr. DeWitt hello DeWayne DeWitt from Roseland a few years ago when district elections came I was quite happy but I was disappointed in the way the powers that be set up district one so that it was split by the freeway highway 101 and the mayor at that time was very glib and said oh well it's no big deal to go across the freeway for the candidates that's not the point the point is on the west side of the freeway are the most disadvantaged underserved and overburdened communities and this should be set up so that we help those communities if it weren't for district elections we could reasonably say that mr alvarez and miss rogers might not be here it's good that they are here I'm very glad we have people of color on the board excuse me on the city council and I don't want them to have to challenge each other's to stay on that council I believe highway 101 is a natural boundary and that there should be both district one and district seven on that western side of the freeway I'm hoping that your map draws Ms. Garcia takes us into account and understands the dynamics of Santa Rosa the other side of the tracks that's the key to this whole kingdom up here essentially the people on the east side and mostly what's called the proctor terrace district then moved on up into the northeast which is the fountain grove district and then bennett valley when it was built out 50 years ago they became the powers along with oakmont from 50 to 60 years ago that really run the city people on the other side of the tracks were just along for the ride but we could change that if we look at this from the geographic perspective as well as the population perspective and that is that the people on the other side of the tracks are historically disadvantaged they need to be represented by more representatives upon this council also the south park district which is on the east side but was the historically disadvantaged black neighborhood from the past has never had full representation so if you set it up so that district two takes in all of south park district one takes in all of roseland and moves over into district seven and then let district seven move up to the north you'll get a fair representation for the people of this community who have been historically disadvantaged and you can say quite honestly I believe it was done on purpose and that's the nature of the debate this is politics and politicians don't like to give up power but i'm trying to get more power for people like mr alvarez people like miss rogers and another representative who'll help the south park district then we finally might be able to get some parity and some social equity in one of the most discriminatory cities i've ever dealt with and i've been around quite a few blocks my friends having grown up here i know it well thank you thank you mr dwitt go ahead michael hillbar at this point i would uh voice strong support for map b i don't like the way the districts are drawn currently and i would object to any uh proposed new district it's just a minor tweak tweak of what we have currently south park is a very important uh area and deserves the best representation but i believe um they deserve somebody who was uh uh not not needing to divide their um priorities between south park and and roseland interests so mainly i would like to see rhodeland be represented continuously from uh you know highway 101 west through stony point all the way to right road where the home of shelter sam jones is and south of highway 12 for many reasons you know the commonality of the issues along sabastopol road like if you got camping on rogers avenue and then over on and then over on lombardy court you got a bunch of rvs and and that's west of stony point in a different district currently and then further west out by right road you know what happened uh san rosa removed the uh bench from the bus stop to discourage lord lordering near the homeless shelter but you know there's a lot of congregating at like even 10 p.m and drug use in spite of the fact that the um um bus stop there has no bench or anything they just uh you know squatting on the ground around there and huddling and sorting through you know what they're going to smoke and what have you so we need somebody you know continuously along the whole sabastopol road area all the way to right road who has an awareness of this issue not afraid to get out there at 10 p.m and look around what's going on at 10 p.m and has an interest in that so i think it's very important that um rosalind have continuous representation all the way west and um you know north of uh highway 12 i look at that it's quite different and there's also like like dwayne brought up an issue of you know northeast versus southwest and there's a you know uh disproportionality of political power between these two uh you know furthest apart areas and i think we need to address that in one way is to to have better representation for rosalind continuously west of highway 12 thank you we'll go to our zoom public comment we'll start with brian thank you mayor um brian laying in uh i'm a district four resident in all three of the maps uh provided um i'd like to encourage the council to support map a uh and i guess title minimal disruptions as has already been presented i have a few points uh in 2018 uh having multiple representation on the downtown core was very important and that was one of the reasons the maps are drawn as they are the downtown core as we defined it back then had has multiple representation on the council and we'd like to keep that where maps b and c do not have that any further um second to the the minimal disruption point last week at our charter review committee meeting there was a consistent tone of of let's give district elections a chance we've had two elections we're starting our fourth year of a diverse council from the district elections and before we make any big changes let's really have a two or three cycles through these current districts and again that was brought up at last week's charter review not necessarily about the redistricting but i think it's a common theme um third four years ago i think the fear if there was one was that uh elected district elected council people may get parochial and try to serve their district potentially at the expense of others in the rest of the city and i can sit here three years later and say i've never had a hint of that any way shape or form i i think the councils have done a good job the last three years and uh any significant disruption could only make that more challenging it's working right now it's improving the year after year and um again to the point of less disruption i think will be helpful my last point uh along the same lines as as previous testify in here um the whole purpose of district elections was to create diversity amongst the council that we didn't have and clearly after two elections with districts now we have accomplished a big big step towards diversity and we're better for it so again i think least disruptions are better and i thank you for considering supporting map a thank you brian there's anybody else who would like to give comment on this item hit your raise hand feature on zoom it's seeing none i will close the public hearing i'll bring it back for council are there any additional comments or questions before we go into a quick demonstration uh from redistricting partners on how to actually utilize the redistricting tool okay so fiat if you want to go ahead and show us the demonstration that'd be great okay wonderful okay okay stop okay so this is your redistricting web page and it's wonderful your staff has done a great job so you have that big button that says submit a drop map online now and if you click on that it's going to take you directly to the district or tool a district or is an online mapping software out of tufts university and there are a lot of other jurisdictions who are utilizing their tool for their redistricting so again it's really important to use this specific page there's a couple of sections at that top section it gives you just some information on the tool you have two ways that you can draw maps either using the community of interest drawing tool or you can do it by districts there's also the public gallery section and you have four maps that have been submitted so far so it gives you the date of when the maps were submitted the name and the names come directly from the author and we'll show you when we get into the tool how you save it but also every map will get a unique id number and that's how we reference the id number for draft plan c and that was id number 101 on 628 you also have a section if you scroll down a little bit more called works in progress and you can click that button load drafts I don't know if there's any draft plans so there is so these are plans that members of the public have not submitted in their final form they have them here as drafts that they are still working on and then the final section if you scroll down a little bit more it tells you a little more about the data that is in the the mapping platform so we work directly with district to ensure that you have for your specific tool the city layers of it and the correct data that we have to use in California so we'll scroll back up and would you like me to go through both the community of interest drawing tool or just the district based tool go ahead do the district based tool I think we've already gone over the communities of interest okay wonderful so we'll click on the purple button and it says Santa Rosa seven city council districts built out of census blocks and so the community of interest tool and the district based tool do look really similar there are some notable differences just from the imagery you have a grayed out background instead of the street layer but you still have the city limits and then also on the left of the image you might be asking what are those gray sections and those are the census blocks so again for redistricting we have to use the decennial census file and when we're talking about data we're also synonymously talking about that census geography which will be your census blocks on the top left hand corner you have a plus and minus button which will allow you to zoom in and zoom out of the map and then that button on the bottom will orient your map pointing north and so those are just the small stuff that you have on the left side but on the right side of your screen is the bulk of your the work that you're going to be doing so you can see that the hand button or the pan tool has already been clicked on so that allows you to move the map around and to also zoom in and zoom out of the map so that will automatically be the button that you are on as you open your tool the button to the direct right of it is the brush stroke tool and we click on that we'll see here and again there's a difference here from the community interest tool you will only be able to draw a specific number of districts for the district based tool you can you can submit a plan that only has one district or less than seven but you can only draw seven districts so that is a difference from the community tool you do have the ability to change your your brush stroke size which is that the toggle button right under the the blue color as it says brush size and if you can move that to the right you're going to be able to grab a large portion of census box or if you toggle that to the left you can do one by one or have a smaller amount of census box that you'll draw um you also have the ability to lock already drawn districts um so if you have that's that space right there um so if you have districts that you've drawn and you are really happy with how it looks then you won't be able to make those changes the final two buttons and we'll come back to this brush stroke size is the erase tool directly to the right up at the top um this here is is similar to the community of interest tool so it allows you to erase and like the brush stroke tool you can make it a huge eraser or um do one by one and the final button on the right and then we'll get back to the the brush stroke tool is your um your search tool so if you if you zoom in a little bit on your map it will allow you to have information by census blocks so give you the total count of the census block the ethnic breakdown for that inspection tool um so those are all the buttons that you have but if we can go back and click on the that brush stroke tool and you can pick a color now um if you want to start drawing a district so just click any area of your map and start clicking away so you can create a district by moving your map and clicking one by one or if you click an area and then drag your your tool then you'll be able to pick up a large portion you are going to see simultaneously what's happening on the right side of your screen is there's going to be a bar that is moving to the right this is going to give you in real time the amount of um total count that you have in a particular district if you want to change the color then you go back to the just go back to the brush stroke you have a really wonderful staff member who is is familiar with district it's great but you can click on another color and then you can go ahead um and draw another district so if you don't have that lock already drawn districts you can go you can move your uh yellow district into the blue one so if we want to take up portions uh so we're able to do that but again if you're really happy with what your district looked like you're going to want to click on that lock already drawn districts button some of the other numbers that are important here is if we go to the bottom right of the screen we see the ideal so that is if you had districts of exactly perfect size the ideal size of a district would be 25,502.14 people so that that's also what the line represents in that middle of that box um so we can see that we have the blue district and the yellow district are above that ideal population and it also gives us the unassigned population so if a member of the public is interested in submitting a full district plan you're going to want to try to get that as close to zero there is something called highlight unassigned units at that bottom left and if you click on that it's going to highlight all of the areas that are not currently in a district and you can click that off as you're going your plan it also gives you the max population deviation so as I noted it doesn't give you the total population deviation but it will give you the max deviation of your district so currently the 80.5 is representing the yellow district so we do have a lot of members of the public um who do do their deviation that's under 10% but again if the council would like we can take the public submissions down put them in our internal software and then have an atlas produced for you um so um yeah you can continue to make uh make a district and again this is just a demo myself and the staff member who's uh using this tool this is not a plan that we're submitting this is purely for example purposes uh so we can go to the the tab that says data layers which is right to the right of that population um and there's a we can see right now we have the thing clicked on called show painted districts so that allows us to see the districts that we just drew um if you'd like you can also click on the one directly beneath that called show numbering for painted districts um if you want to number your districts you also have boundaries for your current district so if you'd like to kind of see where you are in reference to your current boundaries you can click on that and they will appear and again you can click on and off on on all of these and then the final one if you click on population by race you will have some more information that shows up so you can click on show population and then go to variable um to the right of where it says variable i'll go a little bit to the top um under show population there is a tab directly yes and here if you click on any one of those it's going to show you the total population of just your area or by a specific ethnic group again if we are creating a district based on race that would be under come from your legal counsel to direct us to do so but if we were directed to do so we would be utilizing the citizen voting age population data set so we can click off the show population and then we'll go to the bottom and click show citizen voting age population and this also gives us the CVAP so it's really similar to what we just did but now we can look at the total CVAP and we have a couple of different groups and and areas that we do on our specific data tables the final tab is the evaluation tab which if we go back up to where it says data layers and if we click on evaluation tab we can click on population by race and this will show us a comparison of your districts based on different groups so here for compare you can change that to again we have a tab to white population Hispanic Asian Black Asian American Islander and Native Hawaiian and you can compare those different groups per district it'll give you the percentage in the table below similar to your top for data layers it also gives you this the same amount of information for your citizen voting age population by race as well so those are all the tabs and the if we go up to the top above the colors where it says save so we're going to click on that button so once you're done or you're done with your session and you want to save it as a draft you'll click on that blue button we won't be adding it to our district or page right now but we'll go ahead and click on that save button and up will pop a window so here is where you will save your map and when you do save it on the bottom where it says shared a gallery we won't be clicking that now again because it's a demo but you can click on that and it will automatically appear in the home page that we viewed at the beginning of this demo above where it says shared a gallery there's that box that allows you to add a oh just write a bunch shared a gallery right there that's the space where you can name your map so it gives you the ability to name it if you realize another difference between the district or tool and the community of interest tool is that you don't have the ability on the map to add any additional text so if a member of the public would like to give additional information on their map that they submitted we urge you to send an email to attend one of these meetings to uplift your map and let us know the basis behind your plan but again you do have that ability to name it if you don't want to share it directly to the gallery you can click on right below share now you can click on work in progress and we'll click on that and now the button on the bottom says save as draft so now you can save it as a draft directly to the gallery you do have a ability up at the top of this window where it says copy to clipboard so you can copy your specific URL to your map on on the web and be able to look at it there but again the best way to ensure that the council and the public can view the map that you have worked so hard on to review is to share it directly to the gallery and we'll exit out of this window and we have one last button and then we'll be we'll be done at the very top right there's three lines and if we click on that you also have the ability to print your map as a PDF or if you have another mapping software that you would like to look at this plan in you can download it as a CSV a Geo JSON or a shape file and then you can add it to your software such as map to tutor Esri to look at it more in detail in that way and that's that's all the the buttons and functionality for district it is a pretty user friendly tool and again we already have four plans and we're still accepting them for the council to look at and that's the the district or demo all right thank you so much Sophia are there any questions from council okay let's see if we have any questions from the public before we officially close this item okay seeing none uh Sophia can you or uh or Stephanie can you walk through for the public one more time what the process looks like in terms of the timeline from here on out and when our next meetings are going to be on this I can talk through kind of what's coming next and then and then staff oh wonderful your staff is great and on it so today we're on January 25th so we're here at your first draft map hearing so this is the initial draft map hearing and so we will continue to receive public feedback and council amendments and we will have the another hearing on um February 17th it'll be a community outreach hearing and then on March 1st will be another draft map hearing and for any amendments if the council would like to send us them we ask that you send an email to staff and your staff can forward us forward us that email directly just a note though for the up or down vote for a final plan that plan must be made available to the public seven days prior to the meeting so if there are any changes to a plan um and you want to vote on it as the final plan and if there are substantial changes to that you will have to have another hearing so if and let's say when we come back on the first and there are substantial changes we're going to have to have that next hearing and post the map seven days prior that's under the the fair maps act but you do have until um April 12th again if we do have additional changes that the council would like to see to have our meetings finalized or a map finalized excuse me okay council member Fleming yes um just one last clarifying question how do you define substantial change um so sometimes there might be a map where you want to just there might be an error with a census block and you make you move one line over an area that would be a minimal change but if there is a major change where we're for example moving the boundary from the rearwoods to the highway or making changes throughout the map that would be that would count as a substantial change okay thank you okay thank you so much we look forward to the completion of the process uh but we'll finish this item for tonight and just thank you for joining us uh council is going to take a dinner break so we will come back in a half hour so just before eight o'clock and we'll talk then welcome back Adam city clerk could you please call the roll yes thank you mayor council member schwetham here council member soyer here council member rogers president council member fleming here vice mayor alvarez president mayor rogers here let the record show that all council members are present all right thank you let's go on to item 14.2 please item 14.2 is a report city bus temporary transit service modification to address staffing shortages the report will be given by rachel e deputy director of transit thank you so much and good evening mayor rogers and members of council i'm here this evening to discuss with you some of the current challenges facing city bus as it has to do with our staffing levels and also to seek council's approval to implement a minor temporary service reduction in the city bus system to enable us to ensure system reliability as we work to rebuild our bus operator staffing next slide please so by way of background as you all know we had to cut service quite significantly in the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic back in April um april may 2020 and then over the next several months we gradually added service until by august 2021 we were back to about 85 percent of our pre-pandemic service level at that time we felt that was a sustainable service level based on our staffing levels we were already struggling with bus operator recruitment but we were still in a good place um however as we move forward into the fall and had some significant attrition including a number of bus operator retirements we found that our recruitment efforts were not able to keep up with the level of attrition we were experiencing with the result that we're currently carrying more vacant positions now than we were back in august and have in fact 15 vacancies and only about 74 percent of our current budgeted positions filled for bus operators coming into the holiday period we were maintaining our service with a pretty unsustainable level of overtime and have to thank our dedicated staff for doing everything they can to cover service but it got harder and harder and in fact as we got into late december early january we did experience as you know some instances of having to drop some service on on some specific days because we were unable to cover all of the scheduled work as you all know service reliability is fundamental to the transit rider experience i think it's probably second only to safety in terms of the level of importance if there's a bus on the schedule you want to know that that bus is going to be there at the time it says on the schedule so in light of this deteriorating system reliability our staff huddled up and came up with a proposal that's before you today to slightly reduce our baseline scheduled service to a slightly lower staffing level to give us a chance to keep the system reliable as we as we bring on higher trained new bus operators next slide please so that said between the time that we prepared this council item and today we of course have experienced some unanticipated significant impacts from the omicron surge in fact about a week and a half ago we ended up with so many staff quarantine that we had to implement an emergency service reduction well below the proposal that will be before you today due to the the level of people we had out on quarantine so we are currently as of today operating a saturday level service with some additions to address some of the differences between the weekday and the saturday routes to make sure that we don't leave anyone stranded for example on group 10 on the weekends we don't go up to round barn boulevard we are doing that and this current saturday level service so that people can get up to the community health center to kaiser and the jobs in that area route 15 we're running on a weekday span as opposed to a saturday span and we are operating some supplemental school service particularly on route six because we have some very very high school demand to comstock and to piner high school as staff begin to come back over the next days and weeks we will be able to add to that saturday service so we're working on plans to begin to augment that but it's a little hard to crystal ball right at this moment exactly how quickly we'll be able to step step back up to something closer to our pre omicron service level so the proposal that i'm i'm going to focus on tonight would be that that proposed endpoint that we wouldn't necessarily go right back up to where we were as of august but a slightly lower service level but still significantly more robust than what we're operating today based on the omicron emergency service reduction so that's been been challenging to message to writers but i wanted to just take a minute to clarify that we are looking to to step significantly back up from where we are today next slide please so in putting together the proposal i'll review with you today staff had two goals the first was to reduce service by the equivalent of two weekly driver rosters so essentially two driver positions we felt that that was conservative in the sense that it preserved as much service out on the street for passengers who really have kind of a post pandemic or late pandemic level of service need at this point while giving us just a little bit of buffer and breathing room to accommodate the regular things that come up with people being out sick it certainly you know didn't anticipate the level of impact from omicron but sort of on a normal day-to-day basis as we go through the rest of this pandemic the second goal was to minimize impacts on riders by preserving span of service and avoiding reductions on routes that are already operating at lower service levels so for example we did look at some scenarios that would require saturday service to reflect more of a sunday service model so much shorter service day we felt that we didn't want to do that to writers we have a lot of writers that really depend on our system for the basic trips didn't want to leave anybody stranded in the early morning hours or in the evening hours and then we also didn't want to further impact routes that are still in that you know 15 percent we haven't fully restored from before the pandemic you know some routes that used to operate every 30 minutes are still operating hourly and we didn't want to further disadvantage those routes so after going through about a dozen different iterations of how we could achieve this goal of reducing by the two weekly driver rosters we came upon a solution that we think is the best in terms of minimizing the impact on riders which is to implement a modest service reduction on route one mendicino avenue which would reduce the weekday frequency from every 15 minutes to every 20 minutes it's a relatively modest frequency adjustment but it does actually let us take advantage of a lot more efficiency in the system and achieve the goal of where we want to be in terms of the sustainable service level there is a weird scheduling artifact with this proposal which would mean that we do have some additional hours on sunday that need to be uh need to be scheduled to make 40-hour rosters for our drivers and so we did have the opportunity to actually add some service back on some additional service on sundays as a little bit of a consolation with this proposal next slide please so route one just so everyone is familiar is primarily on mendicino avenue on this map it starts at the transit mall which is the blue circle with the big t it follows oh thank you for whoever's running the pointer it follows the blue dotted line up mendicino avenue all the way up to bicentennial up by kaiser turns left on bicentennial and then comes down to codding town the arrange avenue so it serves a large number of pretty key destinations in our system including the santa rosa junior college santa rosa high school the county center and kaiser medical center so you know we don't take an adjustment to this route lightly based on those number of destinations it is one of the two highest frequency routes in the city bus system and it is just defined as one of santa rosa's high frequency transit corridors next slide please so this is a lot of detail but the intent here is just given idea a preliminary look at at how this schedule could play out in terms of the number of trips operated on route one to the left of this table is the current service and this would be current meaning august 2021 not current as of today with with the emergency reduction and then the proposed services on the right so you'll see on route one we would have a reduction from 57 trips on weekdays to 41 trips on weekdays and then you also see on sundays we would temporarily go from 11 trips up to 20 trips so there'd be a little bit more opportunity and frequency for riders on sundays on route one there are a couple other small changes that that we wanted to include for example there's an additional trip on route six to deal with some very very high passenger loads we have at peiner high school so route six would go from 28 weekday trips to 29 couple additional trips also on route 12 to deal with some demand issues we have on that route and route six is a long route that travels sort of throughout the western side of the city via peiner and folton road and then back via third street and route 12 is our route that goes to the heart of roseland so the overall impact on the number of trips operated it's you know a decrease from 301 weekday trips in total to 289 weekday trips but even with that relatively modest decrease in the number of trips it does actually let us achieve what we need to at the staffing level next slide please so we we did want to get some rider feedback about this even though this is kind of an emergency action we we definitely wanted to try to get some input from riders about the approach we should be taking the level of impact this proposal would have i'm going to be honest our ability to connect with riders and really focus on this outreach ended up being inhibited somewhat by the omicron related emergency we had because we had to pivot in the middle of this outreach to really communicating with riders about this emergency service reduction and making sure people were aware of this change that we had to implement so quickly so it hasn't been a perfect process but we were able to implement a rider survey both online and with hard copies in person we received about 120 surveys back we had social media notices a gov delivery email to our large rider email list notices posted in the transit facilities with information about how to comment we also reached out to our stakeholders including the santa rosa junior college and santa rosa city schools to let them know what was going on see if they had any major concerns we did we got acknowledgments but no expression of significant concern i think they're they understand the the the issues that we're all facing as it relates to um COVID related staffing impacts we also reached out internally to our colleagues in planning and economic development because the medicino avenue high frequency corridor is important for some of the development initiatives going on in the city we wanted to make sure that you know even this temporary reduction we're proposing in the level of service on route one wouldn't have an unintended consequence in the planning and economic development world and the feedback we got was you know in light of the fact that this is a temporary COVID related reduction that there wasn't a concern there and then finally we've been working very closely with the sci su leadership representing our bus operators um they understand this proposal um they're supportive of it um they see the need to give our our bus operators who've been stretched very thin covering service a break in some and breathing room and for us to be able to get back on our feet next slide please so for the writer survey we asked two main questions we wanted to just get a sense of what is the the preferred approach to service reduction recognizing that there really isn't an option not to reduce service to some extent but we could either have the scheduled planned reduction the temporary reduction in the route one frequency um that people would could plan for on a day-to-day basis or we could continue to do what we had been doing which was as we couldn't come cover service on a certain day we were messaging out to riders which trips would be affected um overwhelmingly riders picked the the the route one reduction is like it's better for us to know and have that sense of of what the service is going to be from day-to-day as opposed to like waiting to hear that certain trips may not operate um that percentage was slightly lower for um Spanish speaking respondents so about 82 percent overall but 74 percent for Spanish speakers but still a large majority of riders indicating that they preferred us to just bake in a little bit of a reduction um that they could rely on from day-to-day next slide please the other question we asked was about the level of impact this route one change would have on riders um and in that question 86 percent of riders indicate indicated that they would either experience no impact or be somewhat impacted meaning their trip might take a little bit longer but it wasn't really a big deal um 10 percent of riders said they would be impacted meaning it might cause a more significant change in their travel or highly impacted which meant it might affect their ability to make their trip at all um and this was all based on not being able to give the riders exact schedules to sort of describe what would happen but this is the feedback we received and in this case um the the the feedback from the Spanish language survey was very consistent with the English um they they were right in line in terms of the percentages of riders um indicating these different categories um the other category that four percent of the bottom those are people who didn't elect to answer in any of the categories above but had other comments and those all tended to say things like please don't cut service in Roseland please make sure you keep um service to Pioneer High School and we aren't planning to adjust or change any of those other services so I think that um that we're we're meeting those riders um with what they've requested uh next slide please so based on this rider feedback and where we find ourselves today we do feel comfortable bringing forward this recommendation to council that we proceed with this temporary reduction of route one frequency um and recommend implementation of this service change as soon as possible likely in early March that will give us enough time to print new schedules to reach out to riders so that riders have advanced warning they can see the schedules planned for any adjustments they need to make to their trips in advance and not have to just respond in the moment um we would plan also as part of this recommendation to restore the 15 minute service on route one as soon as staffing levels increase and stabilize with the target of this summer hopefully early summer uh and I will say that there is good news on this front it's I you know hopefully can end on a little bit of an optimistic note which is that you know after struggling with recruitment and to get any applicants in the door for bus operator positions um we um you know in December I think we only had two applicants um and we just pulled applications we had 12 and we're interviewing all 12 of those folks today and tomorrow and so hopefully we'll be forming a pretty good size bus operated training class um within the next few weeks so that's really positive and and I want to thank everyone who's helping us with that outreach in the community to try to get the word out about this position um it's a great opportunity um to come work for the city uh so with that I'll wrap up my presentation and I'd be happy to answer any questions the council has thank you so much Rachel council member Fleming thank you Missy this is um is a really good solution to a really difficult problem and I'm heartened to hear that we have people interested in driving our fantastic city buses I do have one question about the sunday change because how I look at it for route one um that travels so much through district four is that that we're gonna have this wonderful increase in sunday service and I'm wondering if this means that we're gonna have instead of hourly service service on the half hour yeah it would mean it's right now it's 45 minutes um every 45 minutes on sunday oil right now pre pre omicron 45 minutes on sundays it would go to every half an hour on sundays okay under this proposal so the only concern I have is is probably a good concern is just that you know if people start using becoming more transit dependent as a result of that increased level of service you know um I could see they're being down the road you know when we do have more transit operators them they're being some frustration about our reduction in service on sundays because I think it's going to be overall a significant benefit to people who ride route one so just wanted to put that out there otherwise well done thank you and I'll just comment I I I appreciate that comment about you know it's very difficult to take something away from people once that they've gone thrown accustomed to it and adjusted their travel around it and so um you know at this point when we revert back we would plan to go back to the the service level um that we had implemented in august on sundays on route one that said if we see a response in in the hopefully small number of months we have this service level implemented and we're really hearing from people that they like it you know we can certainly look at and see if it's possible um and it's indicated by the data to sustain that service level so I wouldn't rule that out and I completely understand the the concern that you're expressing because adding five minutes to the weekday well seems like inconvenient but not like the end of the world like pretty pretty doable but a 15 minute change I think might might get people so hopefully it will be wildly popular and and you'll be compelled to make that change permanent thank you thanks I appreciate that comment councilmember and that that would be a good problem to have I think from from my perspective if more people are relying on public transit councilmember rogers um thank you for the the presentation I was just going to say um that in while on council I have been relying on the bus more because it has been convenient um and due to some personal circumstances um so and I've noticed that the ridership has increased so I'm hoping that this does not decrease the ridership uh for climate in a lot of other reasons I'm hoping that we can maintain our ridership and that people can just find a way to continue to take public transportation but also I wanted to to thank you for uh reaching out to um the ridership and asking their opinion and also for engaging uh the seiu leadership um to allow our operators the um so their opinions and what they their needs to be heard so I just wanted to thank you and your uh management for doing that so thank you any other questions from council all right let's go to public comment on this item if you're interested in providing comment on 14.2 hit the raise hand feature on zoom all right seeing none I'll go ahead and bring this back councilmember Sawyer do you want to put a motion on the table sure thank you mayor I could introduce a resolution of the council the city center Rosa approving a temporary reduction of city bus service due to a staffing shortage and wait for the reading of the text second we have a motion from councilmember Sawyer and a second from councilmember Fleming are there any additional comments let's go ahead and call the vote councilmember schwedhelm hi councilmember Sawyer hi councilmember Rogers hi councilmember Fleming yes vice mayor alvarez hi mayor rogers hi that motion passes with six eyes okay let's move on to item 14.3 item 14.3 is a report the roseland creek community park master plan rescission of mitigated neg mitigated negative declaration and project approvals and direction for preparation of environmental impact report this report will be given by sue gallagher city attorney thank you actually the report will be given by gen centos deputy director of parks thank you thank you sue and uh good evening now not afternoon in her mayor rogers vice mayor alvarez and council members and gen santos with the city of Santa Rosa parks and we are here tonight to talk about rosin creek community park master plan again to talk about rescinding recent approvals of the plan and directing staff to prepare an environmental impact report next slide so just taking a step back to remind ourselves where rosin creek community park is it is located in roseland and the southwest quadrant of the city and south of highway 12 and west of highway 101 and in this map it's outlined in yellow you can kind of see it there the closest nearby park with an outline with a green outline around it is bare neighborhood park a reference next slide please zooming in a little bit closer to an aerial view of rosin creek community park we can see that it's bordered on the west and east by burbank avenue and nickman avenue and across burbank avenue is rosin creek elementary school directly across the street from the park otherwise the park is generally surrounded by single family homes and open farm land and the you can see the park is has a lot of trees in the middle of the park it's also bisected on the middle and southern parts by rosin creek and you can see some pre-existing or you know pre-existing farm dwellings and houses and pout buildings etc still on this plan the above ground buildings have been removed but nothing below ground has been touched on this park so it's generally in the shape of this area as you see today next slide so we're reducing the massive amount of community engagement that we have done with this community over the last 12 years to one slide but know that it has been a enormous outreach effort for 12 years now since 2009 with more than 17 public meetings and seven community meetings between 2009 and 2018 in 2019 we held six additional public meetings and in 2021 we held one more public meeting and joined into council member alvoret or vice mayor alvoret as listening sessions he had six listening sessions and then a final seventh listening session was held combining all the previous listening session um participants to meet with each other in the community to provide the city with what their ultimate request was for the master plan going forward and that happened in 2021 next slide please we also began a very in-depth environmental review of the potential future master plan and the rosin creek community park site this started in 2018 this it was a really in-depth study called an initial study and they we analyze all the potential environmental impacts that the future master plan for rosin creek community park could have on the park and the surrounding neighborhood there are a variety of things analyzed including aesthetics agricultural and forestry resources air quality biological resources cultural resources geology and soils and on and on and on lots of environmental review of the site uh next slide please and so here's what was reviewed this was the master plan that was presented to council in 2021 and we won't go into all the finer details here but just to do a quick overview of the site you can see that generally most of the site is left in its natural state more than 80 of this park is proposed to be remaining as it is right now with the addition of some of a playground and a couple picnic areas in a lawn etc on the southern portion of the park with a nature center is a little white box in the middle associated parking lot and a potential community garden and a picnic area we also have a bike lane um transacting from the let's see the northeast side of the park all the way down through the southwest part of the park it's a really exciting plan it really preserves a lot of the park as it is but it also allows for those requested community amenities such as playgrounds and picnic areas a sport court lawn and a nature center as well as our trails we also have a requirement with the ag and open space district to install the upper pathway that you can see there it's in brown connecting McMinn Avenue to Burbank Avenue and then crossing over to Rosa Creek Elementary School that's a particular interest to the city to get this done as soon as possible because we do have school children using cutting cutting across right now there is no crossing there so it's very unsafe or they're walking all the way around the park throughout the neighborhood to get to their school site next slide please so the master plan I just mentioned was at city council on September 28th uh 2021 and council heard a in-depth presentation documenting all of the community feedback received since 2009 and heard a thorough review of the environmental review process that review process is called a ultimately leads to a mitigated negative declaration it's essentially declaring that the park has negative environmental impacts with some mitigation measures in place and so council also approved the mitigated negative declaration that evening at council and staff shortly thereafter filed an environmental declaration with the state clearinghouse next slide please and a month later on October 28th 2021 Rosalind action and Dwayne DeWitt filed a lawsuit against the city challenging the city's ability to adopt the uh MND the mitigated negative declaration along with the master plan in review of this lawsuit we recognize that it could significantly delay the project and add a pretty significant amount of cost well over a hundred you know much over well over $150,000 an increased cost to litigate this lawsuit so we also recognize that there would be a potential three-year delay to get through the litigation process with this lawsuit as planned meanwhile the park would remain undeveloped and not be available to the community to to use in an improved manner next slide so it really left this it really leaves the city in the unenviable way of having two options that are not neither one of them are are something we want to do we are excited to approve this plan and move forward but looking at what our options were we have two options we can litigate and defend the master plan and the mitigated negative declaration the way in which it was approved as i've mentioned previously this would add a significant delay to the project and well over $150,000 in attorney's fees etc or we could decide to rescind the recent approvals of the master plan and mitigated negative declaration and prepare an environmental impact report those are uh that at a reduced delay we could finish an EIR an environmental review uh in about seven months so that would put us into fall of this year 2022 and the estimate is $100,000 or less to get us to this point and this is enticing because again we really the community has been waiting a long time for this park and we really think that this is going to be our best bet uh moving forward so that we can expedite the opening of this park to this community who's worked so hard this is a community that struggles to agree about what should be in this park but nevertheless we did we did make some great progress over the last 12 years and we were able to approve that in 2021 and the recension of the approvals of the master plan and and directing staff to prepare an environmental impact report would get us to the point where we could open the park sooner it does mean that we would have to take that time to prepare the environmental report and come back with the current master plan in the fall for council's adoption and at that point we could move forward with um the necessary steps towards construction next slide please so again we've been at 12 years um talking about rose and creek community park plus a lot of community members have been talking about this park for much longer than 12 years but officially the city's been meeting with the community for about 12 years we are recommending uh to resend the recent approvals so that we can reduce the amount of delay the community has to wait yet again to have their park and EIR as I mentioned could be developed in about seven months at that time staff would return to council to adopt the EIR it's a higher level of review than the mitigated negative declaration with the current master plan this fall again emphasizing we really want to get this back to the community they've been waiting a long time next slide so with that i'll re-heart recommendation it's recommended by the city attorney's office and the transportation and public works department parks division that in order to to avoid this significant expense and delays associated with engaging in litigation filed against the city by rose on action and dwayne dwitt challenging the council's prior approval of the rose and creek we need to park master plan the council by resolution rescind resolution number res 2021 uh dash 162 which adopted the mitigation negative declaration for the rose and creek community park master plan and approved the rose and creek community park master plan and two direct staff to prepare an environmental impact report for the rose and creek community park master plan as drafted next slide and of course the city attorney and i are available for questions madam city attorney uh thank you and and yes i'm i'm also available for answering any questions and i just wanted to note one thing um mentioning the cost of the litigation the 150 000 that is representing the city's attorney's fees what we would be paying to an outside council to defend the lawsuit and we really are confident um that we would prevail if we pursued it it's really simply and i know we've said this in the staff report it's really simply from a perspective of time and money um that we are recommending let's get that just just go through the process and get the park uh developed and open to the public as quickly as we can just wanted to clarify um that we are confident if we pursued the litigation we would prevail but boy the time and money that it would take is just not worth it thank you thank you council are there any questions you know questions let's go to public comment on this item if you're interested in providing comment hit the raise hand feature on your zoom we'll go to lenny followed by madonna that was quick all right um my name is lenny more i live in southwest center rose and near the rosland creek community park i support rosaline actions efforts to have the city rescind the mnd and repair an eir for this project this is a really sensitive ecological area and eir is most appropriate and in this situation uh there's only two areas in the entire world that are oak woodland savannahs there's a little tiny tiny spot in texas and here in sonoma county and that's it this park's perfect example of this oak woodland savannah ecosystem and it must be protected under sequestria argument standard the city must prepare an eir whenever substantial evidence in the whole record before the city supports a fair argument that a project may have significant effect on the environment i asked that the city scrub the mnd prepare an eir and work with the rosaline action towards a positive resolution and i thank you and i uh give back to rest of my time all right we'll go to madonna thank you can you hear me yes we can thank you so much uh you guys are doing a great job tonight um and uh so i'm a community member close to the finley area but i do do all of my shopping in the roseland area um and the bair park is a park that i visit frequently um at a time my daughter would be astik dancing in bair park with her group um and my recommendation is please move forward and open the park i yield my time all right thank you we'll go to susan thank you um susan kerks here president of the madron out of on society in sonoma county and a naturalist with over 20 years of experience specializing in american badger and i'm speaking um wearing both caps tonight i am pleased to see this item on your agenda i actually anticipated seeing it and i think that the recommendation to move forward with the ea eir is the appropriate recommendation i would like to see the city of senorosa identified lands in southwest senorosa that are appropriate for a variety of public access and recreational types of activities this property as many of us has shared with you for years and years and years is not one of those properties you have an opportunity here um to have some vision especially in our climate emergency with the multiple schools in the area of the students who visit this property who likely will have career paths in environmental studies conservation park rangers a variety of environmental openings for our young people who are in schools in the southwest senorosa area to connect to this property as a world-class nature preserve of 30 acres in your senorosa area and i would like to say that i was so impressed in the last meeting when the community park plan was approved by you that so many so many of the residents who live in the area came forward in public comment and literally begged you to save this land for the nature for the ecology those were the exact words that i heard used spoken in both english and spanish so i also would like to share that i i met with uh vice mayor alvarez and it really enjoyed a walk and a talk with him because madrone autobahn has been very dedicated to this property for years supporting the roseland community action group because we know the value of this property to the city and to your citizens the fresh air the health benefits the nature that will be part of these children's lives in southwest senorosa so i encourage you to move forward with the er and then also to come to the table and revise the plan so that you have the best 30 acre preserve that literally will gain attention for you nationally and that is not an exaggeration and we are devoted to helping thank you and i do i see one more hand johanna uh hi can you hear me okay great um yes i'm johanna greenberg i lived in southwest santa rosa i'm a doctor of veterinary medicine with further education in wildlife ecology and regenerative agriculture why do cities feel they need to destroy every beautiful place by building on it okay being a giant parking lot the 30 acres question on burbank ad is one of the most beautiful christian pieces of native oak woodland environment within the city boundaries this is rare and really worth preserving as is putting parking lots and roads on this property is the prosperous there are tons of roads in and around burbank ad there's the city community park with all the pavement and traditional park facilities directly down the street on herm ad the last thing this area needs is more roads and parking lots there is no question that the proposed parking lots and paving will have huge impacts on local wildlife on pollution levels and the quality of life for local residents a confident e ir will show this trees grasslands and shrubbery are literally the earth's lungs and moisturizers these trees create moisture and help create rain we depend on native green space locally and throughout california to keep the air we breathe the soil we grow food on the water we drink healthy critically the more paving a city has the less rainwater infiltration and groundwater replenishment this means more drought less available water lower water tables and more fires more paving and less green growth and trees contribute to higher levels of co2 pollution drought and climate change let's keep paving and city-style building for the city center leave these natural wild areas and edges intact that support this ecosystem health and our health um this preserve and burbank is a perfect example and is also a critically needed sink for winter flood waters and summer drought mitigation guarding the integrity of this preserve is one of the easiest decisions the city of center rosa can make it is clearly what the constituents want preserve it out of this no paving needed no roads needed it will be a real testament to the city of center rosa and couldn't be more perfect or productive this will be a beautiful piece of rare golden woodland in years to come keep the southwest and the city of center rosa healthy and beautiful for all thanks thank you no more hands on zoom i'll come to the chambers is there anyone who wants to give public comment in the chamber my name is dwayne de witt i'm from roseland parking lot construction and road building projects need to have environmental impacts known before the projects are undertaken therefore an environmental impact report will be helpful to local residents near such large construction projects as this the best environmental alternative needs to be chosen studied and implemented for the benefit of nature and local residents not businesses asphalt and concrete paving of impermeable surface being laid down over raw earth has an undeniable negative effect upon the environment where this happens paved parking lots built for automobiles trucks and motor vehicles undeniably changes the patterns of water recharge into the ground and stormwater runoff such water becomes polluted from vehicle fluids and also particles from brakes and tires roadways are notorious for stormwater pollution of local waterways the rainbow sheen you see in standing water on parking lots and roadways is poison to fish humans and wildlife the parking lot construction project for two separate spots with a total of 36 parking spaces now proposed by santa rosa city staff is unnecessary the sites proposed have gravel rock covered driveways for close to 80 years without problems many vehicles have parked there over the years without problems the 14-foot wide roadway proposed for new construction across the natural land area locals know as roseland neighborhood does not need to be paved good permeable surfaces can make a nice unpaved path and trail across the site usable by both pedestrians bicycles and folks using wheelchairs and baby carriages there is a local man who often enters the neighborhood now with his motorized wheelchair his name is dylan and says no city staff have ever talked with him about his view to not pave over any of the area for the over 100 years motor vehicles have been using burbank avenue there has not been any problem with fire trucks and emergency vehicles accessing the sites at 1370 and 1400 burbank avenue the house at 1027 mcminn avenue was accessible from its construction in the mid 20th century until it was destroyed by the city a few years ago an honest design process with the community before the scoping of the err will allow for an accurate and helpful evaluation of our impacts upon nature one more sentence also this your time is up mr do it thank you thank you for the err i'm gonna go ahead bring it uh back for our voicemail public comments yeah hello my name is ryan schwaab and and my comment is related to 14.3 the roseland creek community park uh i agree that the mitigated negative declaration and approval of the park should be rescinded until a comprehensive site specific err is performed i also would like to say that the parking lots and roads within the park do not need to be paved we should keep this park in its most natural state and limit the destruction to this area as much as possible um the city should see site specific errs as a necessary protective benefit rather than a nuisance which should be completed instead of trying to sidestep them whenever possible that's all i had uh thank you city council for hearing my comments thank you and i would uh like to comment on the roseland neighborhood plan we believe that the parking is unnecessary uh and should be eliminated from the plan um we don't need to add the greenhouse gases with more parking we don't need more cars coming there and there's plenty of parking across the street at the school across the street please let's do a legitimate greenhouse gas assessment for a change and uh protect this woke woodland uh and natural park in his uh natural state thank you hi my name is mary go and i'm calling about the agenda item the proposed er for the roseland creek community park and i feel like the the parking spaces that they're wanting to put in is just too much and that it seems like they're going to pave over 20 of the park which is a small park anyway so i think that the parking is too much and i would jus