Are we ready, Mary Lou? We are ready. Great, thank you. Happy New Year everyone. Welcome to the board and members of the public. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Terry Griffin, I'm the chair of the board of community services. And with us today, we have board members, Carol Kwant, Carolina Spence, Pamela Van Halsema and Sandra Wendell. I'd also like to introduce our meeting hosts, Mary Lou Nichols and Emily Ander. The hosts will coordinate comments from the public and assist during the meeting and take notes for any follow-up. Panelists and presenters, please silence your cell phones and keep microphones muted, if not speaking. Members of the public joining this meeting will have webcams and microphones muted. If you're phoning in to join the meeting and you choose to speak during the public comment portion of the agenda for privacy concerns, the host will rename you to caller and only show the last four digits of your phone number. Additionally, the city of Santa Rosa is committed to providing a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption and will not tolerate hateful speech or actions. Everyone's expected to participate respectfully or if necessary, the meeting will end. Madam host, before we get to public comments or how they're held, I just want to make one quick housekeeping mention. We are at our quorum today of five members. And while I don't think this will be an issue today given the weather, changing the weather, if we were to lose a board member, either due to a power outage or technical difficulties, we no longer will be able to continue with the meeting. So at that point, assuming we can't get that board member back up and running relatively quickly, we will adjourn the meeting and any unfinished business at that point will automatically be continued to the next meeting. So with Madam host with that, will you please explain how public comments will be heard at today's meeting? Chair Griffin, if we could just pause for one moment, I'm having a little technical difficulty on my end and it'll just take a moment. Okay, no problem. Can you hear me? Thank you. At each agenda item, the item will be presented. The chair will ask for board comments or questions and at the appropriate time, open the floor for public comments. The host will lower all hands until the public comments item is open. Once the chair has called for public comment, the chair will ask the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. Those joining by phone may dial star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on those who have raised their hands. Public comment is limited to three minutes and a courtesy timer will appear on the screen. No email comments were received by the posted deadline for this meeting. Thank you. With that, I will call to order the meeting of the Board of Community Services for January 27th, 2021. It is 4.05 PM. I have a brief statement before we begin. Due to the provisions of the governor's executive orders in dash 25 dash 20 and in dash 29 dash 20, which suspend certain requirements of the Brown Act and the order of the health officer of the County of Sonoma to shelter in place to minimize the spread of COVID-19, the Board of Community Service members will be conducting today's meeting in a virtual setting using Zoom webinar. Board members and staff are participating from remote locations and or practicing appropriate social distancing. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and as noted on the agenda. Madam host, may we please have roll call? Yes. Please respond when I call your name. Chair Griffin. Here. Carolina Spence. Please unmute your microphones. Thank you. Here. Kathy Hayes. Carol Quant. Here. Pamela Van Helsima. Here. Sandra Wandel. Here. Thank you. Thank you. At this time, we will hear public comments for non-agenda items. This is the time when any person may address the Board on matters not listed on the agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the Board of Community Services. Madam host, do we have any public comments for item three? Madam Chair, I do not see any hands. Okay, thank you. That takes us on to item four, approval of minutes. We are approving the minutes for December 9th, 2020. Are there any edits or corrections to the minutes? And seeing no hands, the minutes are approved for December 9th, 2020. Item five, upcoming events and reports on accomplished events, Deputy Director Santos. Thank you, Chair Griffin. And I agree, happy 2021. Nice to be here in the new year, meeting with you all. You all have your attached upcoming events and accomplished events information. Just wanted to highlight a few things that on February 1st, permits for baseball and softball fields will begin again. And it does serve over 500 youth and we will be operating for practices only in accordance with the health orders and restrictions thereof. And so we'll be, we're happy to move forward with that. I know we had a question about why are the lights on at certain places and nobody should be out there. It's some of our sports teams are still out there only practicing in cohorts of 12 or less. And then under accomplished events, I wanted to just give you a little update on the Creekside Open Space renaming that we talked about last year. There's a little bit of data there in that sheet about what's been happening and what's been happening behind the scenes with the community. We've had a lot of strong community interest after our meeting. So there's some updated information there and we'll be bringing that topic to you back in the future. And that's the end of my updates. Thank you. That takes us to item six, Director Updates, Deputy Director Santos. Hello again. So I just, I have a few updates. I just wanted to remind the board and everyone that the council goal setting is coming up on February 17th through the 19th. So if you're interested in learning more, you can check out the council's website. There's information there. And I'll be paying attention to that as well. We are preparing for budgets. It seems like this whole first half of the year between now and June is really all about budgets. But we are gearing up for that and council does have a preliminary preview of the budget review on February 9th. Let's bring that up for you. And then a little tiny update on what's happening with Roseland. So we're hoping to bring that back. We keep hoping to bring it back every month, but I was able to meet with council member Alvarez and along with assistant city manager Jason Net. And we have developed a plan for getting back out to the community to work with community members and council member Alvarez would like to have a listening session. So we are working with him to make that happen. And we're hoping then that we can come back to you. It would be almost impossible, but it would be great if we could come back to you in February, but the likelihood is that it's the first available time we'll be able to do that is in March. Although virtual meetings are kind of nice, you can go from one to the other, setting them up is a lot of work. So I'm working with the community engagement department to set that up with council member Alvarez. And we're also working with our consultant from Q consultants to seal, if you remember her from the last meeting, if any of you attended, she's also going to be working with us behind the scenes to get that rolling forward. So hopefully we'll have something for you soon. And by soon I mean months, but in our world, right? That's soon. So a little mini update that that's rolling forward. And I also wanted to update you and let you know we are working with the clerk's office about what sort of, we're working out the, I guess the discrepancy between who's in district council seats now and which board members report to who. And there's a little bit of confusion there. And we are not the only, there's boards and commissions all across the city they're having the same kind of stretch your head who's on first. So we are working with the clerk's office and we hope to have something updated from them soon that we can share with you all. And that is the end of my updates. Thank you. Any questions for deputy director on either of those? That takes us on to scheduled items. Our first scheduled item is item 7.1, park planning, 2021 projects, tasks overview. Deputy director Santos. Thank you. And why our host is getting that together. Oh, there she's already got it up. I wanted to let you know that essentially what we're looking at is trying to give you, give the board and the community a big picture overview of what we're doing. And the timelines that we have for doing the work we have, we recognize that this is something we have never done actually from a parks section standpoint. Certainly you hear from recreation often and what they're doing, what they're planning to do. But we tend to only bring you the big picture stuff that we're working on as it's time to talk about it in relation to some sort of actionable item. But we thought it would be nice to bring you kind of just a big picture overview of what we've got going on, especially since Tim and Emily have been able to join our parks team. We've been able to really expand what we're doing. So we thought it'd be a great time to provide the update and I'm going to do my best to try to succinctly update you in a few slides everything about everything we do here. So stay with me and hopefully we can work through it pretty quickly. Next slide please. So one way to introduce you to what we do is to look at the perspective of our staff work plans. All of us set annual work plans for the work we intend to do for the year even if some of our projects are multi-year. But we do describe what we think we can do on a certain project or a task within a year's time. And it kind of helps us understand what we can and can't get done in a year and helps us really get our estimates out there because everyone wants to know what are we doing and when can we get it done pertaining to a certain project. So each staff member puts together a work plan. It's got not only the projects that you're familiar with us bringing capital projects but also just tasks and regular things that we do and I'm also a liaison to the Luther Burbank home and gardens groups. So I'm attending their meetings. There's all kinds of things that are going on not necessarily related to a project. And this section about park projects are often multiple year projects is not inclusive just for our section. But just as a reminder for those of you that have been watching what we've been doing over the years, a master plan is we're lucky to get it done in three years. We strive to get it done ASAP but usually they just simply take that long to make sure we're doing everything correctly. Our environmental CEQA documents that we do that are related to that depending on what needs to be done with an evaluation of a site can take a couple of years and sometimes they can take even longer. We're also in the background working on notice of exemptions related to CEQA. We do those for smaller projects but the big ones are the ones that come to you. So you'll see that it takes a couple of years and we try to do that at the same time we're doing the master plan but sometimes it doesn't always work out that way. When we put together requests for proposal for instance, we're working on the Finlay Aquatic Center. So we had to put a request for proposal to receive proposals from qualified landscape architects to help us redesign it. That takes us about three or four months on average. That's just the staff time we're taking to put it together and get it out to bid on the street. So it takes a little bit of time to do some of these things. Construction although usually our team is turning over construction now to the public works engineering team to get things constructed. It's usually an average of 180 days. And for Coffee Park for example, is something where we were involved all the way through the end of the construction. And that's something that we believe is necessary and valuable for the residents. And so we are gonna stay with those. They do take up some of our time even though the bulk of the work is being handled through the engineering team. And grant applications, which we do at least twice a year. Right now as we're trying to get budgets ready and things moving on, we're rushing around trying to get grant applications together and figure out what we can and can't apply for. And we'll do it again in the fall. So we've got a couple of times per year where we try to get grant applications in. And those typically take four to six months on average. We usually don't get that much time from the granting agency. So it's usually rush, rush, rush, rush to try to get those to counsel to be approved before we can submit. And so one thing that's impacted our timeline with grant applications is the new open government ordinance. It's coming on board. So you start to see that if you're attending council meetings to start to see some of those things that requires us in the background to get things to the court's office in advance, much more in advance than we had in the past. And it does take a little bit extra time for us to put those together. So as part of the open government ordinance the council has left a caveat in that so that we could ask council to vote to place a grant application on their agenda because these state and federal grants often, we barely get four months sometimes once we hear about it to actually submit something. Especially if we have to work with community meetings which is a real big trend in state grant applications to make sure we're out there meeting with the community before we even ask council if we can apply. So there's a lot of heavy lifting as these grants become more and more competitive statewide. So it requires us to do a lot more work in the background on those. So they are taking four to six months to get done. And if you want to have a bottom line this next statement is it. There are definitely more park projects and tasks than we simply have the staffing available to do which is not unique to this section whatsoever. This is relatively common in business and especially with our section we have seen a lot of changes in recreation and parks in the last few years. And with those we've had to make adjustments to who we're working with, how we're working with them. It takes extra time out of our day to figure those things out with every new change. And we definitely are moving with those changes as they come towards us. But what we are looking at now is the way we think about things is by priority. We just, we have so much going on that we do have to give things a priority level. And the other thing that's been affecting our work plans is our emergency operations. So some of you know that I am also the chief of logistics for the emergency operations center. And I get called in, I just sent an email to our chair and vice chair last night letting them know that I was on standby for our wind and rain event. So this happens, this happens frequently but it's just one of those things where I'm really proud to be part of that team and happy to do the important work when we have emergencies. And so that is pulling time away from us that we wouldn't normally, we normally have that time to do our regular work. And especially if you look at 2020 is a significant amount of staff time placed towards emergency responses with COVID. Staff member Terry Blado and myself spent an enormous amount of time learning all about PPEs and how to distribute it and hand it out internally. We spent months doing that. And again, we were really proud to be part of that process. And then we worked again in the glass fire and several various PS, electrical outages we call them PS PS events, but essentially these things take time away from our regular work but we are very proud to do it and happy to be available to make that happen. Next slide, please. So as I talked about the prioritization we ask ourselves how can we prioritize the work we have? How should we prioritize the work we have? And certainly council goals are one of the places council's interests and their goals are something that along with our business and strategic plan are things that we place at the higher priority. Things were automatically supposed to be doing. And so council goals have been pretty consistent over the years with some changes here and there but we do pay heavy attention to what is important. And now that we are looking at council districts we are all ears and eyes to see what's gonna happen with that and what sort of priorities come out of those districts. We also organize our time associated with projects related to safety and just basic requirements for playground safety requirements in the state. And so projects that have playground replacements or any ADA updates that are related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. We tend to place those at a higher level that we need to make sure that those are moving forward in a timely manner. We also have mandated reports. You know, the other thing it might be interesting to know I know I've seen some interested looks from other departments early on to know that we also manage three dams in our section. So there's a lot of reporting just as an example of what has to happen. We also have regular FEMA reporting that is happening and it is an enormous task to put together the information that FEMA requires to make sure that we are spending the funding in the way that they expected us to spend it. So a lot of tracking, a lot of reporting that's going on in the background outside of our regular projects. And of course our grant projects are a really high priority for us as they have extreme deadlines as you just heard and extreme is just extreme for us.  Is there a project that's gonna work for it? Do we have something that's ready? These grant federal and state, you know, I'm granting agencies are finding more unique ways to have the agencies compete with each other for these funds because they also do not have enough funds to respond to all the requests they receive. However, since we have a new administration in office now, presidential administration, I'm hopeful that we'll see more funding for parks and more specific funding for the things we need. I am working on the state and federal level with our partner that the city has hired MMO partners to try to leverage the things we need here in Sonoma County. So I'm gonna say I could go off forever on that topic, but there's a lot. So those are the projects we try to prioritize there. We also have our local Ag and Open Space District that we can apply to too. And the other thing that some of you may be aware of is we do a lot of development reviews and we negotiate with developers that want to do work in or near a park or that want some sort of credit for the park fees that they're supposed to pay by doing work instead. So we do a lot of negotiations with these folks that come forward and it does take time, but those are things that have a timeline associated with them because a developer needs to have the ability to have make bank loans and move forward on their project and they don't have time for us to scratch our heads on how to get the park part of it worked out. We have to get that done right away. Also, I think last summer, I sent you all an email about an email update about what we were doing and there's a new state law SB 35 that has come out which is requiring us to respond within 30 days to an development application, which is a lot of work. And so we have to stop some of the things we're working on in order to focus on those development review applications. Also anything related to community engagement, we are right there on top of and that's a real huge priority for us. And then last but not least, we also look at the quadrants, between Highway 12 and 101, are we addressing the needs equally throughout the city? Have we been able to do that or is there something we're missing? So those are, sorry, long wind. And I could talk forever, all know I love parks, but that's how we think about prioritization and that certainly these are not the only things we think of, but hopefully this gives you some basic parameters of how we think about prioritization. Next slide, please. And so if you look at it by the numbers, right, we've done parks by the numbers before myself and the resource and program coordinator are the only full-time staff for our section. We have one part-time staff, GIS person, I call them part-time, but, you know, their hours vary, 25 hours are under a week. Their official title, office and program aid, really this person, Beth, our staff member, is doing a great job to make sure that our parks data is captured in GIS the way it is actually out there in the city. We are moving to a new model for how we organize maintenance work and how we organize our assets on our assets, our picnic tables, irrigation systems, swimming pools, those are all assets. And so this person is working feverishly in the background to get all of that done as we roll into this new program to update ourselves and better organize ourselves to understand what do we have? How many trees do we have in the city? How many picnic tables do we have there? How many parking spaces do we have? And also organizing in a manner that can be easily put into a work order. I need you to fix this picnic table at this park. Here it is. So that's just the way my brain organizes what she does. So she's very dedicated to that task. We don't usually bring her and do other things, but she does a lot of mapping for us and a lot of mapping analysis type projects for us as well. And then, you know, our two new temporary staff, Tim and Emily, might surprise you to know that they are temporary staff, which means they can work 10 to 20 hours a week and not 52 weeks a year either. It needs to be less than 1,000 hours a year in addition to 10 to 20 hours. So it really restricts what we can get done, but they are amazing. And I'm super excited to have them on my team. They're doing amazing work and we've been able to move things forward that have been sitting for years, frankly. Until we had the staffing to move forward.  She's a shared resource. She's reports to staff in the public works section. And we still, she still does all the works that she was doing before for recreation and parks, that she's not singly devoted to recreation and parks like she was before. She does do a little bit of other stuff as well. So I think I did a total, hopefully that adds up, but essentially it's a pretty reduced staff from what the city used to have prior to 2008, which again, it is not a new story. That story can be shared among almost every department in the city. It's pretty common for us to have a reduced staff. But with that, we still are able to get quite a bit of work done. And we have really talented staff on board. And this is how the hours break out. And that's just simply just, you know, how it works. So let's look at the next slide. Kind of look a little deeper into our actual projects and tasks. And I'm not going to go through all of these. I'm just going to touch on some of the highlights. So we'll go really quickly through these. So I just took park planner Emily Anders task list. And this is definitely not everything on her task list. It's just the highlights. One of the things that's come up is a grant application with a potential community partner for MLK grants. So that's just come up. And we've had to bump that to the top of her list because in order to get that done by the March 12th deadline, we have to negotiate with this potential partner right now. So all of those things are happening in the background. We haven't even brought this to your attention yet, but this happens all the time to us. We always get something that has some big deadline to it, but it's so exciting. We have to address it. You know, this could be huge for the community if we could do some sort of major improvement to MLK. So that's something that has come up. It's bumped other things down the list. And this is not necessarily an order. Just try to get as good as we could. One of the other things we haven't been able to bring to entirely is the grant application for South Davis Park. And so we're working heavily on that. It has a deadline only in the sense that you have a certain amount of years to get it done and the clock has been taking for a year or so. So we've got to move forward on that. Emily is also working on the Measure M, Parks for All, Outreach and the Deferred Maintenance Project. Those all have timelines that we have long surpassed. All of this stuff was supposed to be done last year. So it's on her plan this year because of all of the EOC activity that we had last year. She's also working on Rosen Creek Master Plan and the conservation easements associated with that. There's also a Parkway Pathway Project associated with that. So all of those things have been waiting to be done and on her list, since she started working for us. And then the council policy was on there as well as the Creekside Renaming Request as it probably should be flipped because we obviously heard about the Creekside Renaming Request and then started digging into the policy and realized it needs an update. And then so here are some of the other things that are on her list, the general plan updates. We're spending a lot of time working with the planning and economic development to update our general plan sections which need a really hefty update this time around. We also wanna get your ordinance updates so that we know there's supposed to be seven members but right now it's saying eight members. So that's been on our list for a while to do but because there's not a date associated with necessarily it does drop a little bit lower down. And we've had the community garden policy on her work plans that she started haven't been able to start it yet because it's just not enough time to get it done but it's there. And then of course the Oak Lake Renaming Request is on her plan as well. And Park Planner Bernard, it's gonna be a similar story. We're working on Colgan Creek neighborhood playground update, the Dutch floor park improvement playground which has community engagement involved into it. He's working on the Corona Springs garden improvement which is a fantastic project. I'm super excited about that. And then the Finlay Aquatic Center. That is that project I talked about has been in the Rec and Parks list of things to get done for seven years. And there's just nobody here. We just simply haven't been able to get to it because there's always something else that bumps it out of the way. So I am so excited to have our new park planners to help us move these things forward. Rincon Valley Community Park Playground, the Rinconada Park improvements which we started and had to stop because we have so much other work that's taking priority. We had to stop work on it. Next slide. And so here's another full list of things that are on his things that you probably haven't even heard us bring forward to yet. Things have been waiting for years. And then we also have the Skyhawk Fire Damage Recovery. We're still analyzing what's gonna happen with FEMA.  We have Luther Burbank. I haven't even been able to talk to Tim Bernard about this project, the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens Project which has been on the list for eight years to get done. And because it's not really, it doesn't have an intentional grant deadline or anything like that. It does tend to get moved down to the bottom of the list. So there's lots going on there. Monument signs, the park standard specifications we've been needing to update for at least 10 years. So we'll go to the next slide. And if you look at some of Terry Bladow's projects, I'm not gonna go through all of these but the biggest, if you look at the top, it's all about FEMA. Those are things that have grant deadlines related to them. She's also doing all kinds of public records requests 26 on average. And there's a lot of research involved in going to look for what somebody's asked for. We'll go to the next slide. Just kind of touch on a few of these. There's also a lot of detailed works she's doing about tax districts. So our roadway landscaping sometimes have special tax districts where the neighbors pay into a special tax district to have more maintenance performed on that roadway landscaping. And those require ongoing management of what's happening with them, inclusion into our GIS system and just a whole host of things that go on behind the scenes. Terry is also actively constantly searching for grant opportunities and providing a report to all of us in recreation and parks on what can and can't be done. And I won't go into all the details there but the way it's prioritized is all about FEMA's at the top because FEMA is not gonna wait for us to get them their information. And the city needs to recuperate the funds that we've expended on those projects. We need to recuperate some of that. Let's go to the next slide. And then what I wanna say here is I did not include my work plan because it's eight pages long. I spared you all of that. But I hope that you can kind of see, we try to prioritize what we're doing on an annual basis based on those categories that we have, not exclusively, but we try to look to those categories to help us understand what's happening. Certainly every project you saw on everybody's sheet is also on my list to do. I oversee everything that's happening in the section and all the budgets and all the special projects. I'm working to set the goals of the section of course and I have all my liaison responsibilities and the annual, the CIP task list that gets set up every year that's something I'm doing as well as working with staff to prioritize things based on what we're hearing from council, what we're hearing from our board and what we're hearing from our community. We try to keep all those things in mind and we do often get unscheduled projects, tasks and things that rise to the top and move other things down from time to time. We always update these things and we have an ongoing list of things that we do. And I know that was a lot and hopefully when I come back next year to do this we'll have a better way, a more succinct way of explaining this to you all. But hopefully that gives you a little flavor of some of the things that we're up to in parks and how we look at how we prioritize our projects. And I thank you, I know that was a lot because I could talk forever about parks but I'm going to stop and turn it over to see if you have any questions and we'll roll to the next slide. Thank you, Deputy Director Santos. Before we get to public comments do any members of the board have questions for staff? Vice Chair Cuant. Thank you, Jen. Wow, what a lot of stuff. And of the 11 slides, more than I could process I will not remember all my questions from the first half because of the second. I will tell you for my six years on this board this is the first time I can remember one of these and it is overwhelming. And if I was a new board member I would be even more overwhelmed. As an existing board member I keep flipping back to thoughts from six years ago. And I have so many questions. How does this relate to six years ago? Six years ago there was different money. There were fewer fires. My questions you would probably agree are worth asking, but they're not realistic to ask. So in summation, you have more work, fewer dollars, fewer staff and more parks than you did six years ago. Would that be a fairly accurate assessment? Yes, that's a correct statement. Okay, so now I have a good story to tell and that is that Terry Bladow is a personal friend of mine and I got a text message from her Saturday afternoon that said there's a plant sale next door to my house exclamation point, you have to go now exclamation point. And I said, Terry, take a picture and show me, right? Before I put clothes on and run across town and she texted back, I can't, I'm at work. So this is it's Saturday afternoon. She runs out of her door, sends me a text message, does not go get her plants for herself because she was working extra hours. So this is city staff and I bet it's not unusual that you have parks people above and beyond just scrambling to keep their head above water or even with water. So I applaud you on that question, random question. Do you think it's gonna get any better? And that is if we stopped with the floods and the fires and the COVID, do you think there is a normal to return to or is this a level of scrambling just the new reality? Yeah, it's a good speculative question. I mean, there's a couple of ways to look at that. We know that council priorities have been not necessarily focused around parks. So staff and staffing levels have absolutely not returned to what we used to have before 2008. So that's a trend we can look at as pretty predictable. As far as us trying to get staffing, we are trying, I'm trying desperately to get a full-time park planner here but with the city's economic outlook, it's a question right now I have. And so I'm holding out hope that we can have a full-time park planner because as you can see, there's plenty to do and it's all fantastic, wonderful work and we wanna do it, but we also need to not work on Saturdays. So with all of that and the enormity of what you've presented and having six years on this board, I was able to keep up with some of it. I'm hoping that as this board reconfigures because it will be over the coming months that you will present this information again as we have more board members, especially when we actually have a full board and that you will present it in a way that new people on the board can process it. I can still remember the first several meetings that I was totally overwhelmed and uncomfortable and it was a lighter load then. So I'm hoping that this will come into bite-size bits as new board members come on so that people who are on this board can respond from a position of knowledge rather than being dear in the headlights because there is so much involved. And that's what, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate it. And if you have any wanna email me comments on how to better do this in the future, this was a stab at it. I know it's a lot, it's really hard to make it interesting and keep it succinct. So I appreciate any feedback you all have for updates in the future. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, board member Van Halsema. I was just, hi everyone. I was just going to underscore a little bit of what Carol was saying and I was trying to envision more graphically in kind of like ant chart kind of way how you can fit all these tasks in for your team or how you, I don't know if you use those kind of project management tools in-house, but it would be actually kind of cool. I mean, and I don't wanna give you another task. Not God forbid, but maybe you already have this to show how these timelines work side by side and where the bottlenecks have occurred and perhaps what's getting in the way. I got a feeling it's disasters are falling, are getting to be the barriers to accomplishing a lot of these things. But I don't think the general public has any idea of the backlog. Maybe they do, but I don't think so. And it may be worth sharing that sometimes. I appreciate that. And I actually think that's a great idea for a visual way of looking at this. So we can look into that. I mean, I can certainly look into that. I think I would be really interested to see what it would look like visually. Thank you. Even including when things entered the list, eight years ago, 10 years ago, okay, where we are and then the different disasters. I'm one of these big whiteboard people I had to draw all those things out. I have a question, Jen. When the budget's prepared, and I know that it goes to council for a study session, typically in early May, will you be bringing your proposed budget to the board at some point? And the reason I ask is, if you're going to be seeking additional resources or staffing, we would love, I'm sure, to help advocate for that in advance of the council's consideration of budget. I really appreciate that. I usually look to our assistant city manager for requests for additional services because they would have to come from the general fund, theoretically, and I have some ideas about how to do that. But I appreciate the offer. I'll be coming back to the board as I usually do with a capital improvement budget update because our division budget is relatively small compared to the city. And so I'll circle back when I come back with the capital budget about our regular budget and what we might be asking for so that you have advanced notice. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Okay, perfect. Any other questions for staff before we move to public comment? Okay, seeing no hands. Madam host, do we have any members of the public that wish to speak on this item? I do not currently see any hands. Is there anyone who would like to speak on this item? I do not see any hands, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you. So with that, we will move to our next scheduled item, item 7.2, Park renaming requests for Creekside Open Space and Oak Lake Green Neighborhood Park and Renaming Policy Progress Update. Deputy Dr. St. Post. Thank you, Chair Griffin. And while that's being loaded, I know that these topics have come to us in the last couple of years and been on our minds and we've been working to move them forward. So I thought it'd be great to bring them back and talk to them as a unit. It's really just gonna be about the schedule. I don't wanna dive into the details of each project because we will come back to you for that discussion at a future agenda meeting. But for now, at least we can have the conversation about from a schedule perspective, what does it look like? And how should we move forward with that? So next slide. I'm just gonna do a quick reminder, Creekside, where it is, the park is named next to the Creekside road there. Next slide. And just here's a little bit of information as a reminder since we're bringing it up and to talk about our scheduling. It was brought forth on April 25th, 2018 and the Board of Community Service discussed this request in May at the next meeting. And we had a lot of things going on at that time. We had fire season and we had the staff member that was working on this retire. So we had some staffing hiccups there. Next slide. And so it came back to the Board on the 20th of last January. And there was a recommendation from this Board that we seek additional community input on the suggested renaming. And so we did, we have a delay with our pandemic and not knowing how to operate in that pandemic. And again, myself and Terri Bledo were working for months and months in the logistics section to hand out PPEs and organize that. So we were able to come back in November and have our virtual community meeting. And you all, some of you were able to participate and you have heard the outcome of that some of the information during that meeting. And we've also done some online surveys. And during my updates earlier, you heard that we have still done some additional surveys out there. And I'll be super excited to bring that back because we did receive quite a bit of responses on the online survey. There seem to be really popular lately, which is great. And so we brought it back before you on the 9th and there was a recommendation to go back out to the community and seek the level of acceptance in the community and then return to you. And so we plan to do that. Next slide. So just this to give you a simple idea of how much time we spent on it between the staff member that started, our current staff members and just different people that have touched this project 320 hours. And if you think of the person that's working on it now has a thousand hours or less, usually by the time I get to 950 hours, I start getting emails every other day to make sure this person is no longer is waiting until the next budget period to start working again. And we have an estimate of 105 hours. These are just, we're trying to think of everything. Hopefully it won't take that long, especially given the fact that we didn't realize we were gonna receive so much fantastic survey responses. So we'll be looking at that and may be able to reduce those hours but that's the estimate worst case scenario. And we anticipate that we can start working on this in spring of 2021. Once we get done with the MLK grant application as well as the measure M meetings that need to happen in the next couple of months in order to return to council in time, we anticipate that we can circle back with you hopefully in March or April, depending on, we try, we're trying to get everything in there. And there is really not a huge cost to update this because as we discussed in the meeting, there is no monument sign at this park and there's no, we're not, we haven't discussed the possibility of doing that yet. So if we're only talking about marketing of changes, changes, they're pretty nominal. So we'll just do that at the next round. So just a reminder, next slide please. And this is one we haven't had the joy of talking about in detail yet. And I don't plan to talk about it in detail today. We just wanted to give you an overview of it. And so for those of you that are curious, the yellow outline is Oak Lake Green Park. It's right next to Tanglewood Park, which is across the park there. When I first started working here, I thought it was all one park until I went around to the other side on Garfield Avenue and you could see the name of the park. And so this is Afakalastoga and it's a nice little community park and there is a playground and a few things there. And then the Austin Creek runs through the middle of it. And next slide. And so this request came in from the parks in August of 2018. And on the 28th of the same month, it was also requested at the board to change the name to Tim Gillespie Memorial Park. And there was a recognition that this request wouldn't meet the minimum current request on the policy until July of 2020. And so the Board of Community Services didn't meet last year until the very end due to our pandemic and other emergencies and just trying to get the staff here back up to working in a virtual scenario. And when we came back to you with the Creek side renaming, there was also the request to rename Oak Lake Green again from our citizen. And we, this board requested that be placed on the future agenda to have staff come back and discuss it with you all. And we do plan to do that. Next slide, please. So this is the same thing based on the time we've spent with Creek side renaming, we can probably reduce the time we're spending to go back out again with Creek side and look at 350 hours. And again, that might be reduced if we can find some efficiencies, not really sure. So we only have what we know we've done in the past to use, so it's about 350 hours. If we tried to place it in our current workload, the first time we could get it there is realistically in fall of 2021 of this year. And just a reminder to the board that because there is a monument sign there and we want one on both entries, $25,000 is the regular cost update a monument sign at the park, that's if the proper electricity is there. So park monument signs are permitted entities, they have wind loads and footings and if you go by a coffee park or finale park or some of these other parks, you can see some of the signs there. They're actually quite expensive, especially when you do it by itself. So I just wanted to remind you there that it's a difference between Creek side. And that's another project that if all this goes through we'd have to look at it being installed the first time we'd be able to touch this is in 2024 or 2025 with our current workload. Next slide. And so just a reminder about the policy. Let's roll to the next slide. One of the things I wanted to remind you all is when our former superintendent who is here, Lisa Grant was working on this, we started looking at the policy. And then again, when Emily joined us and recognizing the policy doesn't really provide the decision makers, staff or citizens with a lot of detail on how we're supposed to do this and how we're supposed to judge what to do with this with all these name requests. And certainly these two name requests are not gonna be the only ones that come forward. This is something that's common throughout the nation now especially with the changing of names that are no longer considered appropriate. So it's actually something we would like to roll forward with right away. We wanted to roll forward with this right away but our workloads, this changing the policy is gonna require city-wide outreach. And so it's gonna take a while to get that. Again, once you get the meetings on it's pretty easy to go to one to the next but the preparation time for all of those and the notification time, it takes a while and to get it all set up. So just a reminder of this slide is of the current policy. This is it, this is really it for us. And you start digging into it you can pull out a few other nuggets but essentially these are the two requirements. If you want to name something after somebody they need to be have passed for two years or you can change the name if it becomes inappropriate which is not entirely helpful for all of us that are trying to think about this. So in speaking with the assistant city manager today there is a huge emphasis to move this forward right away not only because of we already have two naming requests in the queue, so to speak but we also have a lot of we know that there's a lot of talk about what should do not just park naming but also names of different things throughout the city. So just something to keep in mind. So let's jump to our last recommendations and this is a loose recommendation is just in order to stoke the conversation and discussion and we hope we receive your input. We can't do all three things this year. We just simply can't, I wish we could I really wish we could. Oh, did we miss a slide in there? Oh, we did, we did. Okay, I'm so sorry. So if you look at the policy questions thank you Mary Lou I think I did lose this in my presentation but one of the things we wanted to back up just a second and remind you that part of the board's request when we went out for Creekside renaming was or maybe it wasn't board requests but we snuck in a few questions about the policy just to see what we would get back related to Creekside. So we would have some indication of what the community had interest in. And so these are some of the questions from that and these are some of the questions we have and I'm sure the board has as well. What do you think Santa Rosa Park should be named after? Should the community be involved in the naming and renaming of parks? How should significant service contributions to the city, country or field of recreation parks be measured under the current naming policy next week somebody could propose a new name for the same park and the city would have to start this process all over again. And so that would ring true for both Creekside and Oak Lake if those changed including the names we could be looking at another more staff time for that as well as funding additional funding to change the name which if a name of a park became appropriate the same process would happen. So just a reminder should the monument sign be installed as part of the renaming process? You know, does it have to happen right then? How should the cost of the change to the change of the name be funded? This was a big question mark for us mostly because we don't necessarily have funding for this type of work in the city. So we have the only way, the only funding we have here in parks is park development impact fees. And it's a bit of a stretch but it can be used for those purposes. And then we had what percentage of the community should support the naming and renaming of an existing park. And we recognize through the updated surveys response we've received as well as the in-person meeting we had for Creekside that there is somewhere between 50 and 75% or more required community approvals so to speak of the request. And what does that mean? We really don't know. And so we really find it hard to present something to you all as decision makers that fits something when we don't have a policy that helps us get there. How many requests per year? So if we get two or three more, where do they fall in line? And it's gonna take the city staff the way it is organized now years to get to those. And then should memorials be considered in lieu of a name change? Is that something that we can do? So the policy allows it in one section and denies it in another. So that's something that really needs to be updated as part of the policy. And it's something we could think about is this another way to do something amazing for somebody to honor them without going through the entire process of, it's a huge thing to change the name of a park. So it's just a thought process and we don't have answers to those yet. Next slide. Okay, so this is where we, I think we talked about the policy timeline again. Like I said, we can't work on all three of these. So we need to decide what to do, how to do it. If we're happy to move forward on the creek side, we're happy to move forward with Oak Lake or the policy. I would love to say we could do all three of those at the same time. And we will try our best to do that. But at the end of the day, we need some help prioritizing this. So the staff estimate for outreach and research, et cetera for this is 490 hours. And we've only spent about 30 hours so far. We recognize the problems related to the policy pretty quickly. Obviously we'd need about five city-wide public meetings, one in each quadrant and a Spanish only meeting. And then we want to come back to this board, maybe once or twice, depending on what sort of things we all needed to discuss. And then of course, to counsel hopefully once to get it updated. So hopefully that gives you a little bit better information. I'm so sorry I forgot to put these slides in here. Next slide please. And so now we're back where we were before I'm sorry about that. So when we talk about this today, think about our work plans and the proposals we have for how to get this done. And we can look at completing the Creekside renaming request. There's not much left to do there as you requested. And we certainly are moving forward with that. We want to begin the council policy outreach. We would love to do that, especially assistant city manager, NET would very much like us to move forward with that because there are so many unanswered questions and we will still be in the same place that we are now when Oak Lake Green comes back to us. And that's fine on one hand, but also it does make all of our jobs a little bit harder when we look to the policy for guidance. And so we could begin the policy update either in the fall or next year, depending on how we look at prioritizing things. We can begin the Oak Lake Green renaming request this fall or we can do it after the council update. And it's frustrating to me to have to prioritize these things, I just want to qualify that we want to move forward with all of these things. They're so important to us and we value each one of these things greatly. And it's tough, it's really tough. And so I like to come with you with some recommendations, but at the end of the day, it's tough when we have to look at prioritizing things, which we would just love to move forward with everything on our list ASAP and we are, but we do have some time constraints. So it doesn't mean these timelines are kind of the worst case scenario. This is like, if something, not if it, this does not include PSPS or any other emergency event, this is just staff working regularly on our regular work, but this is looking at our timelines, this is a conservative estimate. We really hope we can get these things rolled out sooner, but this is our reality. So we wanted to come to you and talk to you about that and give you that opportunity to look at it in the framework of prioritization, which is not fun. I do it all the time. It's no fun. So I'll leave it with that. Let's roll to the next slide. I think it's just questions. Is our next slide, is that right, Mary Lou? There is not a next slide. I forgot a question slide. So my apologies. I'll stop talking there because I could keep talking forever and I'll turn it back over to the chair. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. So we'll take questions from the board at this time and then I would like to take public comment if it's okay with the board and then we'll circle back to staff with our feedback and recommendations. Is that sound good with everyone? Starting with questions. Do any members of the board have questions? Vice Chair Kwan? Oh, you're muted. Sorry about that. If it's all right with the chair, I would like to go last and see if other people ask some of my questions before me. Okay. Yes, board member Van Halsema. Hi, thank you. I'm curious about the policy. I know we listened to the proposals for new names and we consulted the policy and then there was an argument that, well, you have to consider our request in light of the current policy. And I'm wondering if we could, as we consider to have a prioritize these at the same time make some kind of public, I don't know if this is allowed, make a public pause on any new naming requests will not be considered until the policy has been redrafted. And then at that time, once we have revised the policy, then we will consider any new requests because the last thing we wanna do is get inundated with 17 more. I'm just not sure if that's possible or if that makes sense. Yeah, from a staffing perspective, we can certainly take that into consideration. Absolutely. I mean, it's something that at a staff level we were looking at. So I'm glad to hear you all discussing it here. So absolutely, we can move forward with that if the board chooses. I have a couple of questions, Jen. I have done a little bit of legislative history research on the policy and have looked in the past for other park renamings. And I think you had mentioned in your research, you weren't able to discover any as well. And I also went back to see if there was any council discussion about in terms of renaming, what they would consider to be a significant event. And I was unable to find any discussion. And so my question is do you have any, additional information about what the council intended? Our research was very scant as well to what the intent was per se. We can look at some of our other renamings that have happened, but even within those renamings there's really just not a lot of information on the guidance that the staff or elected officials use to make those decisions. So that's kind of some of the stumbling blocks we're facing here is it's a lot more subjective than certainly staff is comfortable with. We'd very much like to have a solid procedure to follow or even a solid intent, but we were not able to find any of that internally. Certainly one of the processes that would happen if we take on that is to look at other agencies and districts and find out what they do and what sort of policies intent and that's part of that 30 hours that you saw being spent by staff. We have done some of that research already and been able to use that. Obviously, well, it'll be a larger conversation with the community to hear. I mean, that should be any sort of response we could have especially from folks who aren't necessarily thinking of a renaming and be really interesting to hear what they get a wide variety of comments across the city from folks and use that for our understanding. That's what we would like to do, but yeah, sorry, long answer but the short answer is we really don't have a lot of information on intent. And so that kind of leads to my second question which is if we are to go forward and consider these two current requests under the existing policy, will the community engagement, the survey that you do in the community ask that question of the community? Do they consider this to be a significant event such that it would justify the renaming of the park? Yes, absolutely. And so that's one of the things we collectively have come up with for Creekside is this looks like it's meeting the policy but it could have an effect on the community. So absolutely we will seek feedback if we're doing the right thing from the community for anybody that comes forward. We can also consider what we've learned so far about the policy questions. It's all related to Creekside but we could ask the same question about what sort of percentages does this particular community feel we should be reaching to look at something significant to change the name? So we can certainly do that and use it as part of our overall policy meetings and changes and we can present those findings when we talk about the policy as well. And then my other question was actually the same that board member Halisma had in terms of whether we could put any additional requests and abeyance until we have a revised policy. So and you've answered that. I will just quickly mention and doing my research for a number of years, the waiting period was five and it was changed to two years because there was a new park that was coming online that there was a strong interest in the community to name it after somebody who had passed away. And so they needed to lower it to two years in order to do that. So I thought that was interesting. And then I will also just comment on the memorial piece in the legislative history. The reason there are two conflict would appear to be two conflicting sections is because the one that prohibits them is referring to parks or excuse me, plaques and signs that are not attached to an asset. Whereas the other section that allows them it must be attached to an asset like a meadow or a tree or a bench. But the plaque just for the sake of a plaque is not permitted. That's at least my understanding from having reviewed the history of that change. So just wanted to mention that. Any other questions for staff? Yes, vice chair Clark. First Terry, thank you for doing that research that provides a lot of additional information. And a point of clarification. It sounds like Oak Lake will potentially be considered under the existing naming standards not subject to the changed and revised standards that have yet to been form created. Is that an accurate assessment? That is something that came up for discussion at the last council, at last board meeting. And we can bring it, we'll bring the item back before you and that can be discussed at that time. So what I'm hearing is that's yet to be determined. Right, that was a desire of the board. But yeah, we haven't brought it back as an item yet but we, so because we wanted to talk about priorities first. So yes, we can still make those decisions. Great, the next thing I wanted to say was in the surveying of the community in participating in the Creekside survey, I noted that a number of respondents did not live in Santa Rosa. The family is widespread across the country and they were very organized. And like the PG&E settlement money that was awarded to Santa Rosa, I sincerely hope that Santa Rosa residents will be the one weighing in on any and all changes to the naming policy for city of Santa Rosa parks. Right, I appreciate that. And we, that's one of the pulling that information apart is time consuming with the technology we're currently using, we're looking at different options but we are taking that extra step so that we can provide that information to you all when we come back to you with items. It is just a little bit time consuming right now. So that's, we have a lot of data on things that we've asked the community about right now but we wanna make sure we analyze it in that manner. So I appreciate that. So this might be a little simplistic of me but a simple yes or no question, do you live in Santa Rosa and what's your zip code? That wouldn't work? It absolutely does, it absolutely does. We just have to pull out in the questioning because we ask them which quadrant they live in. And so in order to pull out the quadrant we have to physically do that. So it is a little bit time consuming. We're looking for and considering alternative ways. And either way, we have no problems pulling that information from there to bring it back to you because we completely understand how that is entirely relevant and we did hear the board and we will be doing that for things we bring back to you when we're asking the survey questions. I'm hoping that there's some technology that can help us around that right now in Zoom when you do online, when you do those online pollings there might be a better way to do it when we are on the website versus in an actual Zoom meeting. So we're gonna look into that. There might be some better technology to help us out there. It's possible that simply requesting with the word please fill this survey out if you are a resident of the city of Santa Rosa. And a number of people may not know if they're technically a resident of Santa Rosa. Maybe there is a link to put in where you put your address in and it tells you whether or not you're a resident of Santa Rosa just like you can find district information. So sorry, Jen, I have a number of four questions. My apologies. No problem, that's right over here. Going back to the slide five. Hey, that's not bad. Not all the way the beginning. For Creekside Open Space staff has already dedicated well over 320 hours. So fourth grade math at 40 hours a week that's eight hours of equivalent to eight hours one person working full time for four weeks. Can you just quickly elaborate? I'm sure there's so much going on. I don't realize, but give some examples of. Right, and so yeah, that's if you, you know, the way I presented it was the folks that are working on it are our thousand hour employees. So to help you give you a perspective on that and I've put time into it as well. And for Creekside in particular because we had a staff member that worked on it before Emily did we could pull time cards and that's what we did. We looked at how much time folks are spending on this but essentially, yeah, if you do the math really quick I think that's pretty close. So when I say a thousand hours a year that is usually 10 to 20 hours a week. So it can actually come out to quite a few weeks when you look at it from a weekly perspective. So I'm just bringing my calculator out here because I haven't had to do these things in a long time. But if you look at that, so yeah, that's like 16 weeks, 16 weeks of work. It's a lot of work for one particular person. And that's not straight, you know, the 320 hours. I'm sorry, it's not straight work. It's having to stop and restart it again later and bring it back. And so all we could do is look back at the time cards don't really know exactly what was happening on some of those things, especially from staff that aren't here, but that helps inform us how long we are taking on things, if that helps. But yeah. No, it actually doesn't. What I'm looking for is some visual aids here. 320 hours is a lot of hours. Did somebody spend 50 hours knocking on doors? Did somebody spend 30 hours in Zoom meetings? Did five staff members spend five hours in Zoom meetings? And that's 25 hours. If you could just throw some things against the wall that stick for me, I will have a better capacity to understand 320 hours. Yeah, I think your ladder, five people in different meetings and stuff like that, talking about it, that's more likely because we weren't, when a lot of these hours were taking place, weren't looking at a Zoom platform. So this is actual physical meetings, meeting with doing site work. So going out and evaluating the site, this is researching the site, understanding what's happening from there, conversations with the applicants and different folks in the city about potential conflicts or different things. So it's actually just research and basic data work on the project, not so much of a Zoom meeting. But it is several staff members, not just one person. Hopefully that helps answer your question. Because. Not just one person working on it. This is accumulation of all of us. And as I mentioned before, I'm party to anything that was on anybody else's list. I get involved at some point. Obviously my hours spent on it would be far less than the staff working on it from time to time. So it's starting and stopping and doing all of the fieldwork necessary and it's multiple staff members. And that would explain why none of those hours can be not duplicated for say Oak Lake Green, that it is parcel specific. None of these hours are the policy review. These are all specific to a particular parcel. That's correct, right. And so because there was some time where the person working on it was no longer, was retired and somebody had to pick it up new. So you've got some extra hours in there. And that's why I mentioned that this is what we can look back and see, we can recognize that we probably won't need to spend this much time, but we aren't sure. We just aren't sure because in the staff that are working here before you, none of us have worked on one of these here at the city before. So we only have this one to help inform us. When I look at that number, I want to gasp and think how could we have possibly spent that much time but our staff is very thorough when they're doing their research and it's digging into department-wide conversations. When you look at changing the name, you want to look at, is it going to impact the planning and economic development department? Do they have something going on that we're not aware of that we need to, so it's a lot of different conversations that have to happen. It's not just a simple someone sitting down at their desk. It's a lot of staff members, different staff members looking at it from time to time. And when something new comes up, and new conversations need to happen. So it ends up being a lot of time. Certainly as we go into a virtual world, it's kind of there's a, it's fantastic because once you're in a virtual meeting, it's nice, it's quick, it's easy to get to because you don't have to drive anywhere. But the setup for that is the alternative factor. There's a lot of setup time for those versus an in-person meeting which is not so much setup time but a lot of time at the meeting. So I hope that helps, it's not super clear because our time cards aren't, don't tell us exactly what someone was doing, they only tell us what project they were working on. But having worked with Lisa Grant, who was here prior to Emily and working with Emily and both of them, those are the types of things that they were doing related to processing this application. It does, the start and stop time, I find part of overhead and shouldn't be put on, I wouldn't want it on my job ticket, shall we say, but I know it has to be accounted for. Now, a couple of specific questions on Oak Lake Green. First of all, I had not realized there was two signs. I thought there was one and I know those new signs are expensive but knowing that there are two is a bit of an awakening and knowing that there has to be electricity added again that 60 to $80,000, which is, you can buy two Teslas for that. Suddenly, that makes a little bit more sense knowing that there's two signs that potentially would need cutting, installing and electrifying. I truly appreciate that additional knowledge. The last question I wanted to ask about Oak Lake is... I just wanted to interrupt you for one second and there is only one sign at Oak Lake Green but because there's two entrances, this is what we do when we update a park name, we try to make sure there's a park monument sign at both entrances because we recognize that not everybody is entering. It's not a requirement. So theoretically we could only put one back in and then you're only looking at 30K but our preference is to make sure that both sides of parks or at least main entries have some sort of monumentation. So folks understand where they're at. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt but I wanted to... No problem. I'm almost done. It's so exciting. I'm sure you're happy. You said that Oak Lake could come onto the schedule for review as early as this fall but there wouldn't be, I think this is what you're implying, there wouldn't be the finances available potentially until 2024, 2025. Am I doing okay so far? Yeah, and I would clarify that it's not, it's not the funding necessarily is not the thing that's holding us up. It's the time because if it moves forward and we ultimately end up changing the sign and placing another sign in and bringing those back up to code, it's going to take, it's going to require a landscape architect slash engineer to do that work. And right now it takes us a while to get those processed through the attorney's office and onto council for approval. So knowing that timeline, that's why we're looking at there more than just the funding itself. So those two dates being so far apart would the decision about the renaming of the park potentially be able to proceed before the 20, 25, 24, 25 timeframe or would it be put off until then? I wanna make sure I'm understanding, but- And it didn't ask that very well, did I? Well, just to be sure, I think I get it. So the policy that the, I'm so sorry, the decision about whether to rename the park is a little bit independent of the, of the actual monument sign project. So it happened after the decision to change the name. Did I get that right or was it different? So it could be, there could be a couple of years between the ink drawing on the paper and the monument sign that is the visual took place. But the renaming process is not being forestalled until that physical signage, great. That's what I wanted to hear. Perfect. Thank you. And I'm done. Board member Van Helser. Thank you. I just had a couple of follow-up questions about the cost. And because I'm wondering if, and when you do the surveys, if any of those numbers are before people's eyes, the number of hours and the cost of renaming, because I don't think people in generally understand how much a decision like that costs, even if it's just kind of a ballpark figure, and it may change the way they answer to know that their city's dollars are gonna be spent that way, even if it was given as an example. And secondly, I was curious, I love our monument signs and I think they're really cool and great looking. And I'm wondering if there's, you know how like some people have a big logo and then they have a tiny social media logo? Do we have smaller versions of that fantastic looking thing? If we wanted to put a secondary sign, you could say there's a primary sign and a secondary sign perhaps, just a way of managing costs. And if that is acceptable within the standards that you're trying to follow. And I guess the third thing I wasn't sure is, when we go after a new policy and you said about a memorial, would it ever be that a park would retain its geographical name, but then have like a subheading? Is that, could that possibly be in the Oak Lake Green Park in memory of so-and-so? Could that be an alternative that perhaps could be lower cost? I don't know if it actually is lower cost. Just something throughout there that occurred to me. Okay, thanks. I'm making sure I get to all your questions. So the cost for renaming for any of you who attended is not part of the discussion because we're looking at that to be brought forward when we have the actual policy discussion with the community. Certainly we would give examples and show the cost estimates for things and look at alternatives for how that could be accomplished. And a lot of that is, if there's already a great electrical source in the park, it's not such a high cost. If there's not, and we have to drag electricity from somewhere, that's where you're seeing your extra costs potentially. The fire department requires a certain size lettering as well as a certain lighting requirement. We actually make our signs smaller than the fire department requires. We have negotiated with them for this because otherwise they would be huge. The lettering you see that's lighted on a building is the size we were supposed to have. And we've been able to negotiate a smaller size with them because most parks are well known by the fire department as far as location. So versus somebody's house number or a building house number that's a little more obscure. So we were able to negotiate that with them but the size you see at coffee is generally the smallest size that can happen if you want it to be considered a monument sign. Otherwise we'd wanna look at some other title sign or something, I'm not really sure if we could go much smaller than we have. Certainly we put in the smallest sign we could at coffee. As an example, and if you look at Finale Park, it's probably just a tiny bit bigger than coffee. We're trying to reduce it as much as possible to reduce the cost of those signs. And then the other thing we consider when it comes to signage, if it's a really obvious that there's a back entrance we can do something more petite, smaller over there. But at Oak Lake Green, we wouldn't want to discount either side of that park and do something big and small on the other side. We wanna make sure that there's equality. And it just happens to be that's the shape of that park. Those other smaller signs could be potentially considered just more of some different sign that's not a monument sign and maybe we could get something smaller. And then as far as a subheading, any change to the monument sign would trigger this if it was some other signage in the park that was more of a considered a memorial but it looked like a sign that could be something that is complimentary and providing that recognition if it is for somebody who's diseased or who knows what other folks wanna rename their parks but I would say that that can be accomplished but maybe not as a monument sign if that helps. Hope that answers everything but let me know if I missed something. Thank you, Jen. Any additional questions for staff before we go to public comment? Okay, seeing none. Members of the public would like to comment on this item and you're participating by Zoom, please raise your hand. If you are phoning in, please dial star nine. Madam host, do we have any members of the public wishing to speak on this item? Yes, Madam Chair, we have two raised hands. The first is Travis Burding. Travis, I haven't able to do your speaking permissions. You'll have three minutes after which time your microphone will be muted and I'll move on to the next comment. Please provide your name for the record if you so choose and provide your comment. Can you please confirm that you can see the timer? Good evening. Yes, I can see the timer hasn't started yet so that'd be a good thing. Nope, should have started earlier. Thank you, Emily and hello board. Hello again. Thank you for allowing me to speak on this topic. I just wanted to kind of share with you some comments that I've had from some recent surveys that I've gotten back. I have a couple here but because we've been on this call for so long I just wanna get to a couple. So one comment I received from the public from the app or the website next door was someone just sent back and said I couldn't think of anyone more deserving. And then obviously in terms of a Creekside renaming and another one which was very passionate that I almost was taken by was COVID and lockdown of ruin life, naming a park after a real human who not only enjoyed life but contribute her time over decades would restore hope, faith and community involvement moving forward. It's what we need. This is for the community. Thank you. And these are from people from Santa Rosa that I've gotten comments back. And as I mentioned in a prior statement that this is just to help give some hope and kind of give some good news to the community. And I really wish that this Creekside can get renamed and pushed forward and we can move on because I think as we all know we need some good and some positivity. And I really hope you guys can approve it. And there's been a lot of hard work not just on the staff front, which I appreciate but a lot of hard work has been on the other side of the citizens and it's been a long time almost over two and a half years and wanna get this push forward. And obviously from the feedback and getting from the community people I don't even know you people I've even asked the family members if they knew and but everyone very warm and positive comments and feedbacks from this and I hope they present the survey results that it shows what type of person Mary was. So that's all I have to say for now I really appreciate your guys's time and thank you again and hope we can get this push forward in the coming months. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Birding and our next public comment. The next public comment will come from Jeremy. Jeremy and enabling your speaking permissions you have three minutes after which time your microphone will be muted and I'll move on to the next comment. Please provide your name for the record if you so choose and provide your comment. Your time Jeremy. Jeremy Dillatory, my unmuted, thank you. Board, thank you for the time. Deputy Director Santos, thank you for the time and energy putting this together. You've heard the story you've heard why it's so important to me and the rest of the community to put this request forward to rename Oak Lake Green Park to Tim Glass Memorial Park. We do not need to continue to go over the details. The park specifically has currently one wooden sign on the Garfield Drive entrance with no electricity. So when this request was made almost two years ago it was made with the intent of replacing that wooden sign with a new wooden sign. And seeing the 60 to $80,000 seems pretty cost prohibitive for this type of request. It's quite an astounding number. It's not something that the team making this proposal had anticipated nor something as a tax-paying citizen. You really look towards that amount of money. Why would we need two new lighted monument signs going forward to replace one dilapidated old wooden sign that's currently there? I have over 20 years of advocating and work experience with nonprofits and the movie theme seems forward. So help me help you make this decision. What can me and my team do to be a better resource to your office to try and figure this out? Is it community outreach? Is it a digital platform? Is it community combing? What can we do to be a part of the decision process to bring the community a better understanding of what we're requesting and why? And how do we make this request affordable and not put such a cost burden attached to something like this? For one, to sacrifice their own life to protect and save others, there can be no more significant of an event when looking at this type of request. We check the two boxes that are there as to why this request is made and why it would be such an honor to such an amazing man and his family and the community he helped protect. So as we move forward with this, let's continue to look for ways to make this work. Please look for ways to allow me to be of service and bring my years of experience to the table and reach out to the community to help these decisions be made. So we can find some common ground and do what is right for Mr. Golaspie, his family and the community that he so dearly loved and that continues to support and want to find a way to honor him justly so. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Nealatory. Madam Post, do we have any additional comments? Madam Chair, there are no additional hands. Does anyone else wanna make a comment before we end the public comment session? I see no hands, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you. So I'll bring it back to the board then. Comments from the board and direction for staff. Vice Chair Kwan. I really respect both of the public comments. The two gentlemen who just spoke are each quite invested and quite personally involved in these two parcels. The two parcels came up for renaming at approximately the same time and that's really all they have in common. One didn't meet the time requirements is a much larger park, has a much larger area, has much greater signage and financial requirements. And I really appreciate the fact that that was outlined today with more facts than in any of the previous meetings. In any of the previous meetings and I think the requester for Oak Lake Park renaming also can really appreciate the details that were given today. I truly wish they hadn't come up at the same time. I truly wish that the events that caused the gentlemen who wants to have Oak Lake Green Park renamed had never occurred. I admire everything that Mary Traverso did. I wish there were more similarities or there was some way to really highlight if one moves forward quicker than the other that it's moving forward because of the different paths these are taking that one is not being streamlined while the other is being left behind. That's just my sense of empathy, I guess would be the proper word to use here. And on that note, I've thought it would be nice for people who are passionate about things like this to perhaps have an ombudsman available from this board to help them understand and navigate the waters moving forward. If we're all representing a district, perhaps we could extend a hand to people who are passionate about things like this moving forward. That's what we as board members, I feel are partly here for. Sorry, thank you. Any other comments from members of the board? I have a couple of thoughts. I am supportive of the timeframe that staff has presented given all of the other demands and priorities. I think it's reasonable. I do think that it, I agree with Vice Chair Kwan, it's challenging to consider both of these requests simultaneously, particularly under a policy that gives us very, very little direction on criteria. I think for me personally, I'm really going to be looking at community support if these requests are to move forward under the existing policy as one means of trying to determine whether they meet the criteria of the policy for renaming. Because remember, the renaming policy is very specific in terms of naming or at least more specific, but when it comes to renaming, it's down to those one of two criteria with really no guidance. So I think it is a higher hurdle to meet, but what that looks like, I'm not quite sure. So for me personally, I'm going to be looking at community support, especially within the neighborhood because these are both neighborhood parks, neighborhood assets. That's the way I probably will look at it. One idea I had in terms of the park policy, park naming policy is to perhaps form a subcommittee of this board. With three members, maybe two, if that's the availability of board members, but ideally three board members to help do sort of the legwork on looking at best practices in park naming policies, communicating with other communities about what works, what doesn't, helping to do the community outreach in our own community about what Santa Rosa would like in their park naming policy. So I wanted to see if there's interest in the board and we could probably agendize that for a future meeting because ideally we would like to have that formed when we have full board membership. So I wanted to bring up that idea for the board's consideration. So any other comments from board members? Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Deputy director, you're looking for direction in terms of prioritization on this. Yeah, my opinion is and I can't remember and I think it was board member Van Helsing that said maybe tabling any other requests until the policy is revamped and revised. But in that respect, I think that we do need to somehow address the two requests that are in front of us and then do the policy. So anything beyond that, we'll have to wait until that policy is done and we understand that that could be quite some time. But I think that it's only fair, those two came under this policy, albeit that it's not much direction, but it did. And so then we can somehow move forward on those. I think that that's how now, in terms of prioritizing other projects, I'm not in the game for that one, but I'm just saying that for these three items, I think that the two requests should go first. We table the policy until those are handled, then deal with the policy. That's just my suggestion. That's where I'm kind of feeling should probably happen in terms of prioritization. Any other comments? Oh, yes, board member Spence. I agree with Sandra. I would like to see that happen. I would like to see these two move ahead and then obviously make the decisions. And after I think these two individuals obviously are very worthy of a park being named after them. They are totally unlike each other, which is like Santa Rosa. One district in Santa Rosa is not like the other district in Santa Rosa. So I kind of like that part of it. And I'd like us to not hold back any more than we have to and move these two ahead. I completely agree with the chair's suggestion about doing an ad hoc committee and finding out some information, what other cities do. Because I'm sure that information is all over the map and that would be very helpful for us. So that would be my suggestions on both of that, on this item on both sides of that. I hope that's of some assistance. Thank you, board member Spence. Any other thoughts from the board? Deputy Director Santos, do you have any questions or do you have what you need from us? I would just remind the board that the staff will not be able to assist with any sort of outreach for the policy until next year, likely. So subcommittee work is much appreciated. But if that is the direction, I just wanted to remind the board. Okay, thank you all very much. And thank you, Mr. Birding and Mr. Deilatory for your comments. We appreciate them very much in your patience as well. So that takes us on to committee reports. There was no mayor's lunch in January. Those will resume with Mayor Rogers in February. Vice Chair Kwant, Santa Rosa Waterways. I believe you did not meet as well, correct? Correct, there was no waterways meeting in the last month and there will be no waterways meeting this month. Typically we do not meet every month if there is no item before the board to discuss. So I assume there is no current new measure for us to, a project for us to review. Okay, thank you. Any written and or electronic communications? There were no communications received, thank you. Okay, thank you. And item 10, future agenda items. As I mentioned, I would like to discuss formation of an ad hoc subcommittee for the Park renaming policy. I do have a question. Oh, sorry. Yes. No, it's okay. I was just going to mention that and then, but I do have a question on that. Is that something that we can pull together prior to the decision on districts and people and all of that, or is that something we should wait for that decision to happen first? In terms of people being on the actual, we can decide if we should have one, but should we decide people until that's decided? That's a great question. No, my thought was we would hopefully wait until we have a fully reconstituted board and then seek interest from any members that would like to participate. Then of course, if anyone's interested now, please let staff know or let me know. But yeah, my thought was we would wait until we have vacancies filled before we start subcommittee work. And on that topic, I also wanted to talk on a future agenda about forming an ad hoc subcommittee to talk about the board's ordinance and updates to it. I think that's going to be a relatively short timeframe for that subcommittee that work. It's really just doing an update to our ordinance, primarily to make our quorum requirement in accordance with all the other boards and commissions, which is four and not five and take our membership back to seven officially. But there could be some other clarifying language added to the ordinance that better describes what we do because it's kind of ambiguous the way it's worded right now, it's very broad. So the ordinance could probably be updated a little bit. So I'd like to mention, I don't talk about whether we would like to maybe have a subcommittee to talk about updating our own ordinance as well. Any other future agenda? Yes, vice chair Kwant. I wrote a note at least a week ago that said an overview of safety in the parks, COVID, the homelessness, the violence, the delayed maintenance and questioning whose responsibility it was, the parks, the police, the combination. And there was a very interesting article on the front page of the press democrat today addressing the homeless issue in, I think, Olive Park, which had the input from a county advisory board weighing in. Jen, did you read this article? I did not, but I have heard of this, yes. So being the inquiring mind that I am, I looked up this county advisory committee and I'm truly hoping that the board membership is out of date because each county supervisor appoints three people and the only county supervisor who had three people on the board was Linda Hopkins. So we have at least two other county supervisors for the city of Santa Rosa. Chris Corasy and Susan Goran who have potentially vacancies on this county oversight board. I'm hoping, as I said, that it's out of date that these positions have been filled, but a very small, at least on paper board weighed in on how Santa Rosa City Park was dealing with its homeless contingency. And I've participated in enough meetings to know that the city kind of follows the county guidelines that the city's part of the county and my silly question about safety in the parks now seems kind of irrelevant or at least a subsidiary to a larger issue. And Jen, I'm sure you have way more information on this than I ever will, but I'm thinking this board needs to work in harmony with a county board perhaps since we're part of Sonoma County's church. Jen, can you help me out here? Yeah, we do check in with the county but we really are looking to our district and council members to provide the guidance. And then we also have community groups throughout the city that we turn to when we want to engage. We do work with the county. I meet with them every Monday, not with this particular group, but nevertheless the protocols that are out there and such are shared between both county and city regularly, weekly, and we do all face similar challenges. And as far as the, as a reaction to what we are doing to that, I would say what we could do is invite the deputy director for park maintenance back in to meet with you all and give you an update if you'd like to provide a little bit more details since that section is no longer under my care. I don't really completely know all the details of what they're doing. We certainly meet and I hear that it would be much more appropriate to have that group come back and provide you with an update. And I'm not sure if an update before the COVID situation is completely dealt with is really worth doing, but perhaps just a short overview to be continued after COVID as what, as so many things unfortunately need to be. Thank you. Any other items for future agenda? Okay, then with that, we are adjourned and we will meet next on Wednesday, February 24th, 2021 at 4 p.m. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great evening.


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