All righty, Stephanie, are we ready to go? Yes, I'm ready to go. Excellent, let's call this meeting to order. Do you want to call the roll? Council member Tibbetts, Council member Schwedhelm. Here. Council member Sawyer. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Council member Tibbetts, have you joined us? Okay, let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of council member Tibbetts. All right, thank you so much, Stephanie. Everybody welcome to our February 2nd city council meeting. Quick housekeeping reminder for council members to keep your audio on mute unless you are speaking. Council members can unmute themselves and mute themselves as they see fit. So let's try to do it orderly as members of the public join the meeting they will be participating as attendees. Their microphones and cameras will be muted and only today's panelists will be viewed during each of the different discussions. If you're calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda on each item for privacy concerns the host will be renaming your viewable phone number to resident with the last four digits of your phone number. That's so that the vice mayor can't call you and talk to you about your comments if she disagrees with you at 10 p.m. tonight. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hate speech or actions and we're well staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully otherwise they will be removed from the Zoom. If we need to we also will end the meeting if there's a big enough disruption. Madam city clerk could you please explain for the public how they can participate in tonight's meeting. Yes after each agenda item is presented the mayor will ask for council members comments and then open it up for public comment. The host in Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the mayor has called for public comment the mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the council and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email e-comment or recorded voice message public comment your email e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or played during the meeting. Additionally there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters. Item 13 and 17. This is the time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on the agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council. Thank you so much Stephanie. So we did not have any closed session items today. We will start our meeting at item number three that's our study session. Mr. City Manager, do you want to introduce the item? Certainly 3.1, Bennett Valley golf course complex study session. I believe we have Jill Scott, the real estate manager for the city of Santa Rosa leading us off or maybe Jen Santos, the deputy director of parks. Take it away. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Jill Scott, the city's real estate manager. And with me today as well is Jen Santos, deputy director of parks as well as Brian Hutchison and Doug Maine from our real estate consulting team, CBRD. Next slide please. We're here with council today to discuss and receive feedback and direction from council on the future of the Bennett Valley golf course. The golf course complex itself is 175 acre city asset. It's really one of the largest assets the city has within the city limits. It currently has an 18 hole golf complex as well as a restaurant club and Galvin Park with all of its amenities. Back in December of 2020, legends who was the restaurant operator for a long time at the complex itself requested a early lease termination leaving the restaurant vacant. Currently the golf operating contract has about two years left on it. The city owes approximately 4.5 million in bond debt and there is considerable deferred maintenance and upgrades needed to the restaurant as well as the golf course itself. This has left the complex itself out a bit of a crossroads. So staff as staff would with any city assets in this condition, took a moment to analyze the programs and the asset itself. We looked at if reimagining or modernization of the complex would benefit the city and the community. Does it meet council goals and objectives? Is it fiscally sustainable? And what we concluded from that is that there was room for improvement. So staff brought on CBRE real estate expert, Brian Hutchinson, as well as national golf expert, Doug Maine to really do a high level analysis for council. And today they're gonna present to council a few options for what could potentially be possible at this complex, at this large city asset. I want to highly express to council and the community that these are not all of the options by any means. These are just a few we are bringing forward for consideration and for purposes of discussion. If council does decide at the end of the presentation to direct staff to move forward with a feasibility analysis, that analysis would really give council and staff much more information on what is realistically the highest and best use of that area. Alternatively, if council decides to move forward and tell staff to stick with the status quo, staff is prepared to go over some options later in the presentation for that as well. So with that, I'd like to turn over the next slide to Jen Santos, deputy director of parks who manages the golf course complex and the enterprise fund. Thanks, Jill. Good afternoon council members. I'm Jen Santos, deputy director for parks. And before we look ahead, we wanted to take a look back and a look at what we're doing currently to kind of give you a framework to start with of the golf enterprise. For the last couple of years, I've been the liaison to the golf enterprise operators and have learned a lot in the last two years about this enterprise by taking a look back at our financials and just the overall operations of the golf enterprise. We did manage to recognize that we have records going back to 1984 of some sort of city enterprise with the golf to 1984, knowing that the golf course itself was there before 1984, but we have records back that far. And the golf enterprise was working well and in 2005, council approved funds to be borrowed from to be used to update the existing pro shop on site as well as install a brand new restaurant building and below the restaurant building, if any of you have been there is a golf garage underneath that restaurant. And so the city borrowed a little over $6 million to upgrade the construction there and add that asset to the city. We refund, we return, we repay that debt at around $460,000 a year. And in 2008 or prior to 2008, we recognized that the golf course was, the enterprise itself was working as planned. There were some ups and downs in there, but generally it's doing well. And like a lot of stories after 2008, we start to see a decline. And what we start to see is funds being taken from the reserve account that came with the borrowing of the funds. And that reserve account requires us to keep $200,000 as well as a certain percentage of income in that reserve fund to keep that operating at a good level. And so we start to recognize that the enterprise is not bringing in enough funds to cover the entire debt that the city has to pay each year. And so we start dipping into our reserves. And by 2014 and 15, there are general funds being moved over to the enterprise once in 2014. And again, in 2015, a little under a million dollars is moved over to the enterprise to pay the bond debt and to keep things rolling, so to speak. And from there, we're still seeing, it's still an up and down, but generally we're seeing that we are still needing to dip into reserves, especially as we get closer to 2016-17. And then I'll best describe the next bullet points as a series of climatic issues that have impacted the golf course from fires and flooding and lately, of course, the global pandemic. And ultimately the pandemic closed the golf course and the restaurant for 48 days in 2020. And as you all are aware, the restaurant permanently closed in winter 2020 and we allowed them to end their lease at their request. And so we're at this point where, as Jill mentioned earlier, we recognize that this is a good point to stop for a minute and take a look at what our options are. Do we continue as we have been with this model, which isn't entirely sustainable as it is right now, that could change if we wanna look at that. But we also wanted to look at what else could we do with that 175 acres that is on site out there? As Jill mentioned, we do have some deferred maintenance out there and you're gonna hear about that in the next slides, but it's a pretty big need out there, especially on the golf course itself. And just as a matter of point, we have about four and a half million dollars left in bond debt if we looked at paying that off as of January, 2031, it'll be paid off. And so I'm gonna turn it over to our consultants who are our amazing team that have looked at what our options are in addition to keeping things as they are, they've looked at what other options we could think of out there as a re-imagining of that 175 and five acres. So I'm gonna turn it over to our consultants. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for allowing us to be here today, myself and Doug. My name's Brian Hutcherson. I work with CVE and I work in a specialty practice within our organization called PYS, Public Institutions and Education Solution. And our sole focus is servicing state local governments with the real estate assets. So although I'm not necessarily in government anymore, I'm very familiar with government, it's been 21 years in the federal government. And our sole purpose in life is helping, like I said, state local governments figuring out how to best use their real estate assets. With me today is Doug Main and he's a golf expert within CVE and I'll pass it over to Doug at this point. Thank you very much, Hutch, I appreciate it. Good evening and good afternoon, council members. I appreciate the time. I would like, I think it's appropriate that I just take a few minutes to give you some background about myself. Well, I love the game of golf. I'm basically trained as an economist, got a master's degree in applied economics and investment analysis. I've been involved with about 2,500 golf courses, several hundred about 500 in California and I've done about four or 500 municipal golf course related engagements. I've been engaged by obviously the owners, memberships, as well as municipalities. Some of them you would recognize the city of Los Angeles, Nassau County, city of San Diego, Ventura, and a variety of others. And part of our program is to look at what potentially could happen, what potentially is available. And because the industry has changed a lot, we wanna just highlight some of the opportunities. We talked about re-imagining that's going on. What you're looking at, what you're doing today is no different. So we're looking to just share with you at a little bit of this preliminary level of revenue opportunities, revenue generating opportunities that we see. Next slide. And what the industry is doing is that it's changing, and partly because golf is changing. And so what we're looking at is just potential re-uses that other municipalities and actually other private owners of golf courses are looking at, and that is a partial redesign by downsizing the golf course or repurposing the entire facility, given market conditions. Now we realize, and this is just preliminary, that there are gonna be traffic impacts through our surrounding land use considerations. And we have to look at the overall viability and feasibility of what the, if they're in line with what the city's objectives are. So in this preliminary analysis, this preliminary discussion today, we're not saying there is a right or wrong way, we're just offering some opportunities to you. You might have heard us think both Jen and Joe mentioned that the golf course has a number of deferred maintenance items. And again, in the industry, that's not uncommon. It's just a capital independence. And unless you're able to raise revenue significantly, these are always a challenge and how you're gonna capitalize and how you're gonna fund those. As you heard before, the clubhouse has a fair amount of deferred maintenance, could exceed over 200,000. And the irrigation system, while it works, it is rather old. And for example, the golf course has coverage that are older heads that are not efficient. And so it uses more water than it should. And it doesn't cover certain areas the way it should. And the golf course irrigation will leak at times and they have to repair it. Eventually, golf course irrigation systems to be replaced probably every 20 to 30 years. And I think this one is probably approaching that situation. Next slide. It's important that we recognize that this golf course is in a great location and it offers, we're not commenting about the service or the reputation or anything. We're just indicating that its market position is more of what we call affordable and moderately priced. And as a result, there are certain limitations on capital expenditures, certain limitations on where the market will take it, so to speak. It's unlikely, and especially with most golf courses, and I've worked at Forry Pines and others, it's challenging to find a green fee in matrix. So the matrix is the number of rounds and the number of green fees at the price of it. And you wanna find that good mix. Obviously the lower the green fee, the higher the volume. However, if you have resistance in the marketplace to raise the green fees, it makes it difficult to capitalize. And we're just gonna look for opportunities that again, give that revenue, generate opportunity to both the city and the residents. Capital improvements, as I mentioned before, golf courses are very capital intense. You could continue with the existing agreements where there's two, but we have found traditionally that that's suboptimal. You're not an advantage of all the opportunities and potentially a lot of the cross marketing and what we call cross staffing. Next. Here, this slide is really just to share some ideas that we have seen directly with other municipalities and with other golf courses. So oftentimes the driving range is a very suitable candidate potentially for reuse, depending on the size of it, its location. And this slide really just kind of explores and shares with you some of the things that we see. This driving range is considered short, doesn't have a high volume. And you'll notice in the photograph there that towards the end of the driving range, it really narrows. So it's kind of problematic and that's why there's so much netting there with a driver or something of that nature. That driving range and its location could be a very suitable site for potential reuse for multifamily. Even affordable housing could be a component. So that's something you'd want to explore. Clearly you could redesign it so that it's a more full-time driving range. It's not just a compliment to the golf course, but it also brings in golfers that want to hit a ball throughout the evening even with lights. Next slide. So this is one of the great reasons why we're probably talking today. The industry has changed dramatically. The number of golfers, the participation has been declining. The golf course markets a lot of them are saturated and the cost of it continued to increase. And so it's difficult to look at golf as a growing sport, but rather a declining sport and there's an oversupply. However, I should mention that this year COVID has actually caused the number of rounds to increase, but the problem with that is it's not generally viewed as sustainable long-term. As the economies open up, it's likely that a lot of these potential players will go out and continue their activities that they were doing previously. And so golf participation, golf rounds will probably fall back in line with historical levels, as well as what we call the ancillary revenue sources have also been challenged. Food and beverage, community, meeting space and special events and venues and stuff, they've all been challenged. Tournaments. So those have affected the various food and beverage and the various golf departments outside of the growth in what's called COVID. It's estimated that over the next 10 years, another 1,500 to 2,000 golf course will close. A vast majority of those plan to be redeveloped depending on the location and the opportunities to take advantage of revenue sources. Next slide. I wanted to share with you just three examples of where re-imagining has occurred. It's going to be in California, but this is occurring across the country. Now that doesn't mean that this is a statement that this is what's going to happen at Bennett Valley, but this is just to share with you some specifics. The city of San Diego has been actively involved in reusing potentially a number of golf courses. The Victoria Municipal Golf Course, very similar to Bennett Valley in the sense the location, the demand and the characteristics as a municipal golf course is going to be redeveloped. When we look at this, we look at what the goals are for the municipality, its residents, but also financially, how can we get them opportunities to create revenue sources and revenue opportunities. Next slide. So on this preliminary analysis, both Brian and I looked at the options and you can see about line here, options one, options two and options three. Option one, I think both Jen and Jill mentioned this is basically renegotiating the existing lease maybe take it more in line. The problem is the golf industry is again, a little weak. And so it's not the best time to be looking for good management contracts and operators that are willing to pay the top dollars for a facility of this nature. Also you have to worry about the capital improvements and how is that going to impact the lease obligations for the management of opportunities. As I mentioned before, we think option two on a high level is some opportunity to bring in some real dollars up right up front. And that is an opportunity to either lease or even sell outright the driving range and make it a compliment use to the existing multifamily that's in the area and adjacent to the driving range and maybe even consider potential low-income housing. The third option would be to look at redesigning the golf course. Now we're sharing with you some ideas that the industry does do and looks at. We're not saying exactly that it should be a six-hole, a nine-hole or a 12-hole, but they can all provide an opportunity for acres to be available for redevelopment to give you real opportunities for revenue generating asset, as well as potentially reducing the cost of the operations but still providing a golf opportunity for the residents and those visitors that come into the market. Next. What's interesting too is while golf is declining, there are a number of other outdoor sports and recreation that are actually increasing. Statistics show that soccer and even baseball, at least youth baseball in particular or organized baseball is growing and growing rapidly. Those are the two largest sources of outdoor sports and recreation that have been occurring over the last 10 years. So it's a possibility that this becomes more of a sports complex with the compliments of potentially some additional housing, maybe some additional golf through a driving range, but it's a real opportunity for you to look at some specifics. And because the amount of acreage you have and the asset base that you have there, you have some opportunities to really invest in what might be a very interesting and dynamic recreational aspect that is not just outdoor, not just golf, but other aspects including potentially housing. Next slide. This one is probably the more broad-based, if I could. This one is probably more in line with some of the examples that we've provided to you before with the city of San Diego, with the city of Los Angeles. This is an opportunity to really take advantage of the location of this golf course and what we call infill development potentially. Potentially it could be commercial neighborhood uses. There could be restaurants. There could be some multifamily housing. And this also could be then complimented by a sports and recreation complex. Again, giving opportunities to provide the recreation but just allow an opportunity by reducing some of it on the golf side to take advantage of the revenue that you could generate by selling or putting on the long-term lease, the opportunity for commercial mixed use development, which would also include potentially single family, excuse me, not single family, but primarily probably multifamily, even affordable housing. Interesting too is that because of the location of the golf course, you do have surrounding land uses, including the Gavin Community Park that you could integrate into it. You could reposition some of the assets and then just take advantage again of the revenue generating opportunities that could unfold by redesigning or retaking a look at the entire acreage itself. Next slide. So we'd like to just do an overview of some of what CBRE is just presented to us. So what's available to council right now is if they decide to move forward with the feasibility study of the highest and best use analysis that we can look at is revenue generation, potential sports complex, hotel, restaurants, revenue-based areas, different configurations of the golf course as Doug just went through. Next slide, please. So at this point, staff is happy to and our consultants to answer any questions that council may have. Staff is hoping to get direction from council on either one, continuing with the status quo, which would be maybe issuing a request for reposals for a new restaurant operator and event coordinator at the site. If staff has received interest from folks in operations of the restaurant in the future, considering a single operator golf and restaurant request for reposals or hiring a consultant to perform a further analysis, a more in-depth, highest and best use feasibility study, this would take approximately 90 days and it would cost somewhere around $150,000. In the meantime, staff could coordinate food solutions such as food trucks or other scenarios during the interim and staff would need to return to council for appropriations of funds and of contract for this. And with that, we are all here and happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much, Jill. Council, do you have any questions for staff? Looking for hands, if anybody has any questions. Council member Schwedhelm. Hey, Mr. Mayor, thank you for the presentation. Yeah, I've got a couple. First of all, I know you mentioned back and I think it was in 2020, we added maintenance fee to some of that, I think it's two bucks per 18, $1 per every nine. What has been the impact of that? Cause I know that was one of the intents of addressing some of the maintenance costs that we heard in this presentation. This is Jen Santas. I can take a stab at answering that. We do have, it's a dollar for a nine hole round and $2 is added on to an 18 hole round to our regular fees. And those fees are collected annually and held looking at funding our currently unfunded maintenance responsibilities we have. And we've collected about $271,000 since inception. We haven't spent anything from it yet. We do have a pretty hefty amount of maintenance to do with that, but as far as an impact on the golfers, it's part of the fee set. It's not really impacting the operator itself. So as far as the enterprise itself, it doesn't have, it's kind of neutral, it has a neutral effect on it, but we do collect this additional fee that we could use for funding future larger maintenance issues. We are looking at funding the purchase of equipment for the golf operator with those funds, but we're going to take a look at that. So I hope that answers your question and we can go a little deeper if I didn't quite capture it there. Again, more of a general comment question because I know the intent was to help with the numbers that were shown in the beginning of this presentation. And so it sounds like we do have money there, but we just haven't spent it yet. So I guess I'd be another conversation about how we're prioritizing the use of those funds and are we saving it for a overall maintenance, whether it be the sprinkler system or whatever, but the other question kind of tied into that. And I know during the presentation, either Brian or Doug talked about some nationwide impacts of golf and it's my understanding that here locally, we've seen a significant increase in the rounds of golf being played year to year. Do you have any of that data or those numbers about what the increase has been here at Benna Valley? And so I, we don't have anything specifically today for you, but we can come back with you with more of a detailed analysis and I'll look to Doug if he has anything currently about the local areas as far as increasing round. Definitely the golf course operators are doing better this year than a lot of other previous years. As Doug mentioned, it's following the national trend in COVID and doing much better. If I could real quick, hopefully everyone can hear me. The overall trend, especially in Northern California over the last couple of years has been a slight increase. Now municipal golf courses have enjoyed it a little bit more participation in rounds, but the costs themselves are generally what's offsetting. The round count is important, but also the average green fee. And unless you can increase that dramatically, it's difficult to fund the large capital costs, which would include potentially the irrigation, golf course maintenance equipment, the cart fleet and everything else too, but it has improved. But this year is I think will somewhat unique. It's actually increased nationally about 10 to 11% round counts. The problem is the other revenue sources have declined dramatically, food and beverage, driving range and other elements. And it's not anticipated that that spike that we see now because of the lockdowns and stuff will continue and they'll probably fall back in line with the historical rate or historical levels. And what data points are you using to make that conclusion? It's almost like, are we taking a pessimistic or an optimistic view of the rounds that people are now enjoying the sport and using the facility? I get we're in this pandemic, but we also don't have youth sport, high school golf teams are not there either. With safe social distancing, the driving range, they've spaced it out. So it's kind of like, are we taking an optimistic or a pessimistic viewpoint of it? Do you have any data points or studies that would indicate one way to go? Well, on the interim basis with COVID and the lockdowns, the general sense in the industry and the data that's showing from NGF and golf tech is that that's a temporary situation in terms of the number of rounds. However, it's been at the expense also of the other revenue departments. It's likely it's anticipated over the next 12 months that while participation will go up slightly because it's been introduced, you have to understand there's also phenomenal with golf being a entertainment aspect now too. If you're familiar with facilities like Topgolf, Topgolf has actually increased participation of golf overall, but it's a different type and it competes directly in some cases with golf courses. And once the lockdowns changed there, it's anticipated that Topgolf and others like it will continue to increase. And but they have a food and beverage aspect and a social aspect. It's a little different from the traditional golf. But overall, the golf Doug really fast if I can jump in here. Can you explain what Topgolf is for those of us who don't know? I apologize. Yes, that's a problem when you end the business so much. Think of Topgolf as a David Buster's just happens to be attached to a driving range. It's an amazing facility. Most of them cost about 25 million to build and they have amazing revenue sources. Cowboy Golf actually just bought the company Topgolf and essentially they are food and beverage kind of lounge bars and stuff that provide a driving range atmosphere that's usually anywhere from one to three levels. And it's a real point of contact and a meeting place for corporations for them to have audience for families to get together as well as singles and stuff. But it's kind of like a lucky strikes for in the bowling industry or David Buster's for the food and beverage. They have just took a golf twist to it and they're actually usually located along a major interstate or highway and you can see them for miles away. They are pretty dramatic food and beverage operations. Council Member, did you set up questions? Oh, yeah, I wasn't sure if you were done. Yeah. I just, I wanted to make sure that we had that clear for folks who were watching at home. Yeah. The closest one to Santa Rosa is in Sacramento area. So there's some comments about the driving range here in Santa Rosa, Benton Valley. What are our current operator talk about with those options? And is it his belief it's too short? I don't know, Doug, if you want to try to look at it from that perspective, certainly it's a popular location but as far as our operator thinking is too short, I'm not sure if I've received that opinion from him but I'll turn to Doug as far as an expert opinion. With the existing operator, obviously who I'm familiar with, I don't know, I can't really say with the existing operator. We're just taking a perspective of it's a driving range that allows primarily a warm up before you go on the golf course. It's not a heavily used driving range and obviously it doesn't have opportunities for night driving. And it's a short one in the sense, typically there are 300 yards or longer, this one is shorter than that and it narrows down towards the end. So while many of us might be able to hit the ball nice and straight, myself I have a slice. So it really doesn't give much opportunity to showcase that. And then lastly, the t-line is that's where they actually hit the ball off of the mat or the grass. The way that it's supposed to be designed is not a straight line, but rather kind of a curve so that the outer points are pointing more towards the middle of it. It's a golf driving range that's not uncommon for a municipal golf course. It's just underutilized given your location and the opportunities there. Yeah, was our operator contacted? Because, and I'm asking from the standpoint, I would consider him a subject matter expert. I think he's been in Valley for almost 40 years to hear what his thoughts are about the transition of golf. Now, we haven't had the opportunity to sit down and have an extensive discussion about it at this point. I know that the operator is keen to keep things generally the way they are in past conversations and he feels that the driving range itself is a really key feature of the golf course. But we were hoping to have a more in-depth discussion with him after this meeting. Okay, and then the presentation showed a couple of different municipalities who've gone the direction of redevelopment. And I know locally here in the Bay Area, doing some research, both Palo Alto and Alameda repurposed their golf courses and kept them as golf courses just did some other improvements. Did you do any investigation or take a look at why Palo Alto and Alameda chose to go the route that they did versus the redevelopment like Santa Clara did? I have a great question and a fair one. I'm familiar with those projects just like in Orange County at Mile Square Park. They expanded the park and added additional amenities. Not every redevelopment or redesign or repurpose excludes golf. It can be a reinforcement of the golf. It could be maybe a right sizing it. We have not at this point in time, this is because it's preliminary, we haven't investigated but that would be part of the options that we would look at as well. Yeah, so my interest would be just saying, okay, why did they choose to go in this direction? What are their financing? And why did they think that was a viable option versus others? So again, that'll maybe be further down the road. If I could just add to that then part of it sometimes is just the goal of the Miss Palo. Quite frankly, will we work with them? And their goal maybe to specifically provide affordable golf. Regardless of the cost, it's just one of the things they wanna do. So it's really dependent upon what the Miss Cali and the city council and others would like to do. So you just wanna mess those up as well. What we wanna do is explore and share with you other revenue-generating opportunities to consider. Right, and the last question I had is when we specifically mentioned top golf or other things, I know other jurisdictions in Sonoma County have been exploring this and potentially other sites as you described closer to the freeway, namely the fairground sites potentially repurposing parts of that. Are we aware of any ongoing discussions of other municipalities or the county looking at repurposing other facilities that they're in possession of? You mean specifically for top golf? Top golf or anything else because what I heard some options about either more all-weather fields and especially if we use top golf as the example, if another, you know, let's say the county is looking to repurpose in a portion, let's say the fairgrounds bring top golf. Well, I would hate to compete against that if we potentially wanna go in that direction to Bennett Valley. So taking that regional approach, what else is out there? Did you, has anyone taken a look at any other municipalities or the county that may be having these same discussions that we are? I think Council Member Schwedhelm, that that would be the next step in this phase. This was just to see if Council and to follow the direction and that would be one of the elements that we would be adding to a deeper dive. This was just, we're at a specific point and unique point in this conversation, not something that we expected to be in and do we want, we need to make some strategic decisions including investing some dollars to get these deeper answers for you. And we wanna make sure we didn't miss the opportunity to say, is this something we want to explore? These are exactly the types of questions we would need to do a further analysis on to bring back to the Council. Great. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Those are all the questions I had. My pleasure. Thank you. Any other questions from Council? All right, I had a couple. Do we have a breakdown? One of the options that you presented here is repurposing some of the land going with potentially a nine hole course instead. Do we have a breakdown of the amount of nine hole golfers we have versus 18 hole golfers? We can get, we can look at that. We overall get a spreadsheet from the operator on how many rounds and things like that. We can see if we can dive a little deeper and look at that information to help guide us. But generally it's a pretty simple spreadsheet but we'll work with him, we'll work with the operator to see what we can dig out. Yeah, I'd appreciate that. Part of this conversation, I think is looking at what the needs of the community are for the next 15, 20, 30 years. And it's helpful for me to see how people actually utilize the asset in how we are going to have it designed. The other question that I have, and it was mentioned a little bit in the presentation that there is potentially more need for soccer fields. And in particular, all purpose, all weather fields for soccer fields. I know that there's some discussion about repurposing part of the tennis courts for Bennett Valley, as well as there's that field that's there as well. How, when we look at the youth in our community coming up over the next 15, 20 years, is there a higher demand for soccer facilities at the moment, or is there a higher demand for golf? And how do we quantify that, I guess is the second part of this. That's a fair question. So that's one of the things that we would look into in more depth, but I can tell you from experience and what we have done so far is when we look at either standalone recreation and sports venues, which would be soccer, potentially baseball or both, and then golf, there are a few that are combined, but the golf industry is trying very hard to get more participation involved. And it hasn't increased on the top golf side, for example, or what they call, you may, the simulators, right? You can go into and you pretend that you're playing a golf course at Augusta National, right? Or Pebble Beach. And those are increasing those opportunities, but the industry hasn't seen a transition from that to the actual golf course. And that's partly because the amount of time it takes typical round can be anywhere from three to five hours. And so there's still that hurdle that the industry is trying to get over. And so they're trying to work with youth on that and they are getting more involved in educated about golf, but it's more on a video screen or it's more on a top golf type of atmosphere versus the sports. They are a great funnel for recreation activity for communities for the youth. And unless that changes, there's no demographics or indicators currently that would say that that's changing. Participation by youths between seven and 13 is almost at an all-time high in baseball. And it's dropped a little in soccer, but rebounded over the last two years. So the overall trend is that unless municipalities or local agencies or just schools and whatnot, if there's a desire not to get the kids involved in outdoor activities, the view is that that will continue to move forward, whereas golf is kind of one stagnant and there's a problem of trying to figure out how to get youth actually onto the course and actually participate on a regular basis. It's one thing to play golf once a year or twice a year. What you're looking to do is get that youth to be what's called a core golfer or they're playing numerous times throughout the year. Hopefully I answered that. Specifically, those are the general friends. Yeah, no, I definitely, I appreciate that. And if you play golf with me, it will take you five hours. And I know that that's a big hanging up as well. Jen, just as a quick follow-up, and I mentioned the tennis courts, I am also a tennis player. And I know that that is one of the primary spots for folks who do not have a private membership for a tennis club as well. It's mentioned in the staff report that this would impact tennis operations there in the park. Has there been any outreach that's been done to that community as well? Or are we still not at that point? And we're really not at that point. And I've been really clear with our consultants and Jill that that is well-loved and well-used and it will need to be part of our city moving forward. So it's not, we're not quite there yet though. Okay. And Mayor, if I can chime in for just a second. Go ahead. My apologies for chiming in, but I wanted to make sure that I helped answer the question that Doug was helping respond to. Doug was talking about national and regional statistics relating to which, the fact that youth sports is growing in leaps and bounds by comparison to golf and some of the other sports that have been around. We're actually seeing similar trends here in Santa Rosa specifically, as Jen has been going out to the community members in an effort to gain feedback on how best to spend the measure in parks for all funds. The volume of individuals that are coming out speaking heavily for the need for additional ball fields, whether it's soccer or baseball, all weather, lighted is pretty astounding. We're getting a substantial amount of feedback from them. The conversations that we've had with the golf course operator who's doing a great job to try to operate this, is that rounds have gone down pretty significantly over the course of the last several years. And it's been a constant conversation with the proprietor to figure out how best to keep that facility operational floating so that he can continue to make it worthwhile for him to be the operator. This last year actually provided some level of benefit because of COVID. But when we try to balance the community groups that are coming out that are asking resoundingly for additional golf support versus the youth and adult sports, whether it's soccer, baseball, softball, pickleball, we're hearing more and more of that as the primary voice in the community. And that's really what's showing up in these Measure M community meetings. So I apologize for stepping in, but I wanted to make sure that I incorporated that information into this discussion. No, no, I really appreciate that. Last kind of question slash comment that I have is, I have played around the area and I did in preparation for this look again at the rate structure for the different courses. And so one of the things that I'll be looking for in public comment and as I get back to folks who are interested in this topic, is the question of which you would prefer if you had to choose, would you prefer that we move towards a nine-hole course that has other elements or would you want to pay a little bit more? Because Bennett Valley is substantially cheaper than many of the other courses. I'm a Windsor on a weekend is $62 to play, Bennett Valley's 45. And so that is something that I'd want to hear from the public as well. Just really thank you, Doug, Brian, Jason, for your willingness to look at this holistically. I think that that's going to be really important. Councilwoman Fleming. My pleasure. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for the presentation. I was curious to know when you talk about the demographics of who uses our golf course and also the demographics around the increasing interest in baseball and soccer. Do any of these reflect these demographics more closely reflect the residents of the city of Santa Rosa? Specifically, I'm asking like who is using the course as it stands and where is the demand for other recreational activities coming from? Well, and I'm going to attempt to jump in here and let you know from, as Jason mentioned, we're going out and getting feedback from the community citywide about soccer and all of the sports and uses of the Measure M funds. And we're doing that quadrant by quadrant. So we're going, if you took Highway 101 and Highway 12 and you kind of make an intersection there, we're looking at it quadrant by quadrant. We're also having an all Spanish meeting coming up to make sure that we're collecting a wide variety of feedback or meeting. We had a specific sports meeting specifically to ask the sports community how they would like us to spend, not just Measure M funds, but where are the interests lies? And we hope to collect a lot of feedback from those and turning back to our golf, we don't necessarily collect that from the vendor himself, but we could potentially look at folks who sign up for golf. I'm not sure how he collects that information as far as demographic, but you know, Doug might have some more larger sweeping demographics that he can point to at a larger level. And there's that data that is available on a more general or regional basis. And part of the second part of this, if we were have the opportunity to help you is we would actually look at other golf course specifically. I would interview a number of people. And one of the things that we would probably recommend as well, we've seen it before is your current operator, we would ask them to collect some of that information, the zip code, ask them where the zip code, you know, where are they coming from? And if we can get an approximate age, those kind of characteristics will tell us how they compare both nationally and regionally as well. Typically with this type of golf course in municipal, what we call a local community municipal golf course, the drive time is generally within 30 to 40 minutes max. Okay. I'm not saying that there's always exceptions, but the vast majority of rounds generally are within that 30 or 40 mile and most of them are closer, but generally three or four miles. Right. So, you know, what I'm trying to get at here is our equal amounts of men and women playing golf, playing baseball and playing soccer. And golf, there's a, there's a big, large difference. Soccer, it's actually more balanced. When we go back to what on a regional or a national level, what is the difference? Is it, you know, 60, 40, 70, 30? For golf, it's actually probably 70, almost 80 for men versus women. That's, and they've tried to work with for years and try to improve on that. But it hasn't made a lot of inroads. Soccer, it's, it's quite different. It's actually relatively balanced. Baseball though, it's probably closer. It depends on the market, actually. In the softball and the early years, it's pretty good. It's almost 50-50. But as they, as they get older, the dropout rate for girls is much higher than boys. And so it dramatically shifts. Right. Well, thank you very much. And I look forward to listening to public comment and hearing about, you know, what the highest and best use of this is, but also how we can apply our commitment to equity in our land use decisions. Thank you for your thoughtful presentation. For your time. All right, council member Alvarez. I appreciate the presentation. Doug, could you describe to me or to us what a modern golf facility would look like? That's a great question. So there's two types of golf courses really. There are what we call 18-hole regulation or championship. And then there's what we call alternative golf facilities. And they could be golf course, nine-hole, 12-hole, six-hole, they can be par threes, or they can be a driving range combination where it's high volume. The modern golf course today is generally more challenging that you would probably find at Benavalan. And it generally has more, what we call hazards. It might be a waterscape. It might be more bunkers and stuff. So those generally are cost more to operate. And they're typically longer. This course is what we refer to as a relatively playable course.  Hopefully I answered your question. Do you have any other questions, Council Member? No, sir. Great. Seeing no other hands from the council, we'll go ahead and go to public comment. All right, we'll start with Steve. And Steve will be followed by Luke. Good afternoon. My name's Steve Urbanic and I'm here to support the existing operations of the Benavalan golf course. I guess I view the golf course as a significant community asset. And back in 2005, the council and the community thought so as well, but there are significant investment in the new clubhouse and golf facilities, the banquet facilities that the community invested in and I would like to see those assets continued and supported by the city of Santa Rosa. A couple of things I would like to ask, we're comparing these amenities to other amenities within the city of Santa Rosa, Howard Park, the Finlay Park Center, are they self-supporting enterprises that the public enjoys are the baseball fields and tennis courts that the city manages and provides to the public, are they self-supporting and from this perspective? And I guess I would ask that we get a lot more information from the current operator. Sounds from the presentation that many of us or at least from the perspective of this meeting is that this is probably a liability versus an asset to the community and the perspective of this presentation has taken that tone and I would appreciate a different perspective being taken by the council that this actually is an asset to the community. Your Doug Main noted that the golf course is relatively short compared to other facilities and I think that really is something that helps the youth learn golf and as well as other folks who are just taking up the game and one thing that I was looking at on some of the stats that you're talking about and the National Golf Foundation actually says that 36% of the golfers out there are youth, they're kids who are learning the game and I think that's a great benefit to our community as well as soccer and baseball and all those things. So I wholeheartedly support the existing golf course and if anybody's been out besides in COVID during regular operating hours at the driving facility, you'll know it's sometimes hard to get out there to find a place to practice from. That facility is a moneymaker from my perspective.  So I appreciate your time. I support the existing operations and the city continuing its investment in that golf course. Thank you. Great, thank you so much, Steve. Luke followed by Dan. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Rogers and Santa Rosa City Council. My name is Luke Lindenbush with Generation Housing. We support the process to identify the future of Benefali golf course. We encourage the city to continue a holistic approach that leverages public lands to achieve strategic goals, including housing affordability. This is embedded in our broader support for identifying the highest and best uses for public assets and land. Generation housing is committed to more housing, especially more affordable housing in Sonoma County and we're impressed here by the staff's efforts to maximize this site in a way that reworks but, and this is important, has the potential to maintain much of the existing use while maintaining and improving recreation options and building desperately needed housing. Housing at this site would be of benefit to the community and support a vibrant redevelopment of this community. This kind of major project will bring jobs to Santa Rosa and provide homes for the families, workers and seniors of Benefali, Santa Rosa and Sonoma County as a whole. This sounds like a sustainable, equitable win-win for the community. Please keep up the good work and let us know how Generation Housing can be of help as this work unfolds in the coming years. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Luke. Dan, and he'll be followed by Gregory. Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council members. My name is Dan Galvin and I live in Benefali. I'm making these comments as an individual citizen and member of the Benefali Golf Club and not as chairman of the city's board of public utilities nor as an attorney, although in the interest of full disclosure, I have represented the current golf operator in the past. When Benefali Golf Course opened in 1969, I was 15 years old and the first employee hired by the Golf Pro. I was working in the Pro Shop, collecting green fees on opening day. I spent five to six years working in the Pro Shop and running the industrial golf leads that played each weekday afternoon and that are still active today. I've been playing golf regularly there for over 50 years. When the course opened, except for a few mature oak trees, all the trees on the course were newly planted six to eight foot tall trees. Now those trees have grown to 50 feet and more. The course was wide open back then, but it is now a true test with fairways lined with large trees on both sides. The greens are some of the best greens in the county. The course is one of the most popular courses in the North Bay. It used to be that golfers were lined up at dawn waiting for the gates to be unlocked so that not only could they play, but also so they can make a tee time for the following week. Play at the course has been affected over time by recessions, fires, rains, and now the pandemic that has always bounced back and is now no different. I play on Fridays and over the past few months, the number of players has dramatically increased. It is now harder to get a tee time and the length of play has unfortunately increased, but those are good problems to have. I know that there have been a lot of discussions over the years about whether the city should have invested all the money it did to build the new pro shop and clubhouse, but that is water under the bridge. The fact remains that the city has a beautiful and functional facility. The golf and course maintenance staff do an excellent job collecting fees, selling merchandise, running the driving range and keeping the course in great shape. There's obviously been a lot of deferred maintenance on the course and the infrastructure is now 50 plus years old. The money you are talking about spending for studies could be better spent on the golf course. Raise the golf rates if you must, but the fact remains that the number of rounds played continues to increase. One positive impact of the pandemic is that it's generated a real surge in the number of people taking up the game or returning to the game and your consultants have talked about the 10 or 11% increase. Golf is one of the few outdoor sports that virtually anyone can do and do it by being socially distanced to get exercise. The number of rounds played at Bennett Valley is likely to increase and continue to do so, generating more revenue for the city. The time and expense to change or eliminate the golf course makes no sense to me. You have a viable, popular, and excellent golf course and facility. The restaurant should be a gold mine. It was supported not just by the golfers, but by the community, especially those of us who live in Bennett Valley. I see my time as a Bennett Valley golf course truly is a city treasure. So I urge you not to commission a study, but rather to devote the time, money, and attention necessary to improve the existing facilities, budget for necessary infrastructure improvements and find a competent restaurant operator. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Gregory, followed by Jim. I'm here. I just had to unmute myself. Thanks, Dan, but I've got to really remind the council as to how we got here. My name is Gregory Farron, I'm the treasurer of the Bennett Valley Golf Club. I will speak for the club. We just learned about this and I'm sure there'll be lots of others who will do with their opinions. The seeds of this fiscal dilemma were planted long ago when a city council subcommittee convinced your predecessors against the wishes and advice of the golfing community that offers in Sonoma County would continually pay that sweet spot fee level just low, not tall in order to retire city bondedness that overbuilt a golfing complex on the eastern edge of Bennett Valley. Setting up a separate enterprise fund and requiring bond principle and interest payments and maintenance costs to be paid from user fees and enterprise reserves meant that someday the general fund would be vulnerable to any errors in the subcommittee's beliefs, planning, formulas and execution. The Bennett Valley Golf Club has cautioned you every single year that continually raising fees and avoiding maintenance in the face of ever increasing barriers to our use of the course would lead us down a road to frustration and insolvency. Well, we're here, but you chose every year to believe that the golfing community was rich enough to keep the money flowing, fanatic enough about playing and that we wouldn't worry about the condition of the course. Well, we aren't and we do. The subcommittee sold you an inadequately financially planned dream that's now turned into a nightmare. And we're not at all surprised that you have to view the complex now as a resource belonging to the whole city. You have to face serious choices and must take responsibility for fixing it with all of your capabilities. What convinced you that isolating us from the same support provided to all other sports would work? It's just too bad you couldn't see this coming and had begun to see the complex sooner as more than a distant enterprise fund. Thank you, Gregory. Jim, followed by Brennan. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Jim. Sorry. I'm going to veer from what I was originally going to say because I'm somewhat appalled by the presentation and how focused it is on everything but trying to realize how we could make the Bennett Valley golf course and the restaurant complex be more profitable because it's already paying approximately $300,000 every year that could otherwise be considered profit towards the bond debt. The question was, ask how many golfers have been using the golf course? 60,000 rounds, a jump of well over 40% from previous years because primarily because of COVID, but also there is a trend among golfing communities, particularly the affordability aspect of it. Bennett Valley is a very affordable local golf course. It's a gem of our community. If we were to take it away and put it into housing or redevelopment or whatever, I saw it in one comment as part of the presentation that it was even suggested that they might knock down these buildings for some type of further usage, undetermined. The buildings aren't even 20 years old. A ridiculous idea. I just think that the most important thing for the council to consider is how to protect this invaluable resource and by doing so, if you're gonna use any money at all to hire a consultant, look at how you can improve the profitability of the two ventures that occupy this real estate at the moment rather than going up because you could save $150,000. Give me $50,000 and I'll tell you, sell all the land. You could find a developer who'll put a million dollar houses on it. Everybody's talking about affordable housing. What about all the parks in the city? Why don't you do an inventory of all the parks in the city and turn those into affordable housing? I mean, it's a ludicrous question. I know it's a rhetorical question. You don't because things like the golf course, things like parks, recreational facilities of any sort have intrinsic value in terms of our community and why people wanna live in Santa Rosa. And as I pointed out in my written comments, Santa Rosa was named one of the most livable cities in the country and I'm sure that the consultants that came to this conclusion weren't unaware of the fact that we have the Benedale Golf Course, Galvin Park, number of other parks and recreation outlets around the city. Why did the city commit money to have a unified town square? Because it was valuable for the intrinsic value behind having a community place to gather, whether it be the weekly market, whatever the case be. I would highly recommend that you look at option one, look at how you can improve the profitability of both the golf course and the restaurant community center that you can continue to pay off the bond debt and continue it being an 18-hole golf course. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim. Brennan followed by President 2123. Hi, thank you guys. I'd just like to, I guess put my support for maintaining the current use of this golf course. It's one of those invaluable assets that once it's gone, I think you will completely regret getting rid of it. I hear the numbers were on the decline pre-COVID, but I would argue that after COVID, you've seen that the numbers have improved and I'd argue that they're likely to continue to improve. Throughout the future of the golf course. Anyways, I really don't think that this is a good idea to turn this into a new development. I'd argue that you should definitely try to come up with the revenue necessary or whatever needs to get done in order to make this a more usable and cost-effective thing, I guess. Anyways, maintain, I guess, the current use. Anyways, thanks for your time. Thank you so much. Resident followed by Lewis. Good evening. This is former council member, Doud, and I have to say to you, I miss you all and my biggest regret about having been on the council is that so much of it was done through Zoom meetings, I would have liked to have a lot more personal in-person meetings. At any rate, in regards to this particular item, I look at the Benne Valley Golf Course as a true community treasure and I have been for now 23-something years a member of the Fountain Grove Club and our play in this past year has increased there by about 40%. I also have to point out to the council if you're not aware of it, but that the driving range at the Fountain Grove Club kind of services about 12 stations and it's mostly a warm-up place and other than later in the afternoon when there's not so much people waiting to get out on their tea times. So I think you have to envision that as the way the Benne Valley Golf Course is designed. Yes. I'm sorry, Ms. former council member Dowd, I do want to note that actually under the Political Reform Act, you're not eligible to advocate in front of the council for a year after you have left the council. So I just wanted to alert you to that and I apologize. All right. Well, it seems like it's been a year, but I guess it's not, so... But we miss you. We miss you on council. Thank you. Okay. All right, I'll sign off. Thank you so much, Dick and thank you, Sue, for stepping in. Lewis, you're up next. Hello. Can you hear me? Yep. Hello ahead. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay. My name's Lewis Capiano. I'm the president of the Benne Valley Golf Club at Benne Valley Golf Course. We are an NCGA-recognized club with average about 300 members annually that join our club. We hold about one to two tournaments per month at Benne Valley Golf Course and average anywhere from 50 to sometimes 100 people per tournament. So our membership makes up a lot of the rounds played at Benne Valley throughout the course of a year. I grew up on this course playing since the 1980s. I've gotten to know everybody out there and the course itself. As Dan said earlier, the course has really tightened up over the years and become a quite a challenging course in the area and a difficult for those to come outside and play because of its challenge. It also prepares those that play at Benne Valley to play other courses and excel at other courses because we are used to high challenge or a high challenging course at Benne Valley. I wanna remind the committee or the council that the course is often voted in several Sonoma County publications as one of the best, if not the best golf course in the county. Even though the funds are not incredible for its maintenance and upkeep and repair, the course is in excellent condition. The groundskeepers, the superintendent, all of the staff do an excellent job at keeping this course in such a great shape. It has, as the presentation says, it has some things that need to be repaired as every course does. This is an older course and there hasn't been very major changes in the course in over 20 years, if not further than that and when they changed all the greens.  We'll lose accreditation with those organizations that give us our membership as a recognized club and as a recognized golf course. So I'm against turning it into anything less than what it is right now in 18 hole course. There may be some changes that could happen with a driving range improvements for golf facilities but I am against changing it. And if any of the council members would like to reach out to me as the president of Benavali Golf Club, I'd be more than happy to discuss any of these things with them. So thank you for giving me my time and I appreciate it and thank you. Thank you so much, Lewis. So seeing no other hands, Madam City Clerk, do we have any voicemail public comments? Yes, we do, Mayor. William Brooks of Santa Rosa. Closing Benavali Golf course is insanity. What is wrong with you? Just that it's impossible to even find out where your thinking is coming from. It's an icon of the city. It is the best-maintained municipal course in the state and you want to close it throughout your minds. This will never happen and believe me, there are enough of us. We will not let it happen. Thank you. This is Ed Taterian calling in regards to Agenda Number 3.1 of the meeting, the handicapped chairman of the North Bay Golf Club. We've had tournaments there for the last 25 years or so and I'm hoping you keep the course open if you're thinking about closing it, please don't. Thank you. Yes, my name is Kenneth Ford. The Agenda Number is 3.1 and my comment is I do not wish to have Benavali Golf course closed. This is the course I love to play the most and I think it's the most popular one in the county. Thank you, final. Hello, this is Paul Berdeer and I'm talking about Agenda Item Number 3.1, 3.1 and my take on that is do not do anything to the 18-hole course, but you could get rid of that restaurant. Thank you. My name is Tom Krabowski. I live in Santa Rosa and I'm commenting on the possible closure of the Benavali Golf course, which I believe is Agenda Item 3.1 for February 2nd. I strongly urge you to adopt option one, which is a status quo for many reasons, period. As a regular golfer at Benavali for 30 years, it's one of the nicest courses around. Unfortunately, the city approved the building of a restaurant and pro shop two years back that I understand costs $13 million and that is the whole problem with trying to fund the debt bond. Thank you. Mayor, that concludes the voice message, public comments received. Great, thank you so much. I'll bring it back to council for any additional questions and then we'll do comments afterwards. First, Mr. Assistant City Manager, I just wanted to make sure when I was doing my prep for this, I pulled up the general plan. I just wanted to make sure this falls within the urban growth boundary, but it's the southeastern edge, correct? That is correct. It runs along that southeastern edge and the area adjacent to the fly fishing pond, that fence line is the urban growth boundary for that area. Okay, great, thank you so much. Councilor, are there any additional questions? Madam City Attorney, did you still have a comment or a question? No, I'm sorry, I will take down my hand, thank you. All good, we'll start with Madam Vice Mayor. Okay, so I just had a quick question and maybe Jen can answer this and why weren't the fees that were collected for maintenance, why weren't they used along the way to maintain? It seems that when you defer maintenance, it only costs you more as you go further out. So I was just curious about that. I appreciate that, Council Member. I think I didn't really elaborate on the extra fee collected for capital improvements and the capital improvements are really high. We're looking at $3 million in capital improvements. So the intent was to try, if I can remember everything correctly, the intent at the time it was developed was to save money for future improvements and construction costs have grown really exponentially in the last few years. So my original cost estimate back in the day, I think 2015 or 16 to update the irrigation system was much less. And so now we're looking at close to $3 million worth of really needed repairs. The golf course is operating on an infrastructure over 50 years old and the golf course operator is strained trying to move folks from doing regular ordinary operations to fixing things that are broken or having to spend staff time of the city's park maintenance staff time to go out there and assist for larger problems that come along with that. And then on the day-to-day maintenance, we do use the funds that are collected annually for just regular day-to-day maintenance. We do use actually some of those funds. We use about 60 to $80,000 a year to maintain annually on average, just basic things that are broken and need repair. That's between the restaurant building as well as the golf course. Most of those going to the restaurant itself. I hope that helps. Thank you so much. And vice mayor, if I could just chime in, I will say that we have been working very closely with the operator there on specific projects. And over the last two years, we have done work where we resurfaced one of the golf cart bridges. We spent money to redo all of the teas throughout. We also replaced some of the signage that demonstrates what the fairway looks like. So the money has been invested. The challenge, as Jen mentioned, is that the biggest ticket item is the one that we're most concerned about. And so we've tried to be judicious in the way we use those funds, knowing that we're really struggling for that big prize. And of course, the operator really wants to see it spent and we've been trying our best to come to a mutual agreement. And I think in general, we've done a pretty good job of working with them to spend funds in wise ways. I think I just didn't hear earlier when Jen was going over. It was the lump sum that we had, but not that we weren't just courting the money that we were actually spending the money as we went. This was just what was left over for big improvements. Council Member Tibbets. Thank you, Mayor. I guess we're in the direction path forward to stage if I'm not mistaken. So I was reading the presentation and it does concern me that there's, I read 2,200,000 in the staff report. That was about 2 million for the irrigation upgrades and 200,000 for fixing the driver on the HVAC system in the legends and the pro shop. But it sounds like there's more of the needs to be done. And the fact of the matter is, is the money does have to come from somewhere. The redevelopment idea, I think it's a good last ditch effort to, I guess kind of do something with the land, but it does strike me that there, that we really do have kind of a wonderful asset there, whether it's a golf course or a park, but just right now it's space. And I saw, you know, where I'm going to be coming from is I really like to go the consultant direction and figure out the highest and best use. I think there's actually a lot of evolutions happening in golf right now, where we can create something that is actually an asset. Watch it, I shouldn't say an asset. What we have now is an asset, but create something that actually is going to have demand and bring in money. And I, this is, I'm going to say, and I mean, no disrespect to the golf club members who are here, but what we have now is not creating any demand. It is a course that if you are not a serious avid golfer, feels like any other course in the city. And I'm saying that as somebody who enjoys golf, but is not an avid golfer. And I think for golf as a sport to be successful, that sport needs a lot of people like me participating in pain. So I'm hoping that the consultant can help us figure out how to differentiate ourselves from these other courses like Oakmont, you know, Found Grove, Santa Rosa Golf and Country Club, Rooster Run and Windsor. And I remember too, thinking, you know, last year or two years ago, now we looked at the fees. I think we were even becoming more expensive than some of these other places, which a number of us made comments to the effect of, well, how's this going to help get us out of the hole when, you know, somebody, it's now cheaper to go play golf at Oakmont. So taking all those factors into consideration, I'd love to see a redesign of the course. Maybe it's something new that can get us out of there. I don't think it's going to be a situation where we're not going to have to sell some part of the course for redevelopment, whether it's the driving range and then using that money to fund the redesign. And I was going to throw out something that I'm partial to. I had the chance a while back to go play band and dunes. And I'm not saying we're going to create band and dunes here, but there are a lot of cool things about that course that made me really get interested in golf where I wasn't before. And that was the concept of some of these 13 hole part threes that Tiger Woods is now playing. And then also these punch bowl type courses that I think would really attract to a younger audience and hopefully be something fun for the more diehard golf for who's been around a long time. But whatever we come up with, I think we owe it to the community and to this asset to really figure out how we could redesign it to make it better. One last solution or possible solution I'll throw out is if we get to a point in the road where it doesn't seem that we can determine a high and best use that is golf, I think we need to work with the golf club membership to try to come up with a solution that gives them the chance to help us solve the problem. And specifically right now, I'm thinking of enhanced infrastructure finance districts. We talk about those a lot here at the council on the renewal enterprise district. And I actually don't see those as great vehicles for housing to be abundantly honest, but I do see them as great vehicles for helping some of these parks and other types of things get off the ground. And the citizenry gets to help mobilize with that effort and be the solution themselves. So I just say that out there for the golf members who are listening to this because I know it's pretty concerning. I know how passionate golfers can be about golf courses. And as one out of seven, I wanna try to see that we get the best outcome for the people who are passionate about that course. And council member just to respond, I wanna let you know that we fully intend to be reaching out to the communities who are using these spaces, the golf, all of the golf clubs, because we do wanna find out some more information that concept right now is we're bringing this to council because we have one tenant who has already left. We have another tenant who has 18 months left on his lease. And we needed to understand from council which direction we wanna go, but we needed that information before we started going and talking to the community. Cause without that, we would be all over the board. And we'd rather have some focal point to be able to have those directed discussions to try to help them, to work with them to help resolve the problem that's mutually agreeable. Sure, I appreciate that assistant city manager and I'm gonna throw it with you. Council member Alvarez. Thank you. And I do appreciate that common assistant manager. And to add to that fact, I do wanna appreciate president Lewis for having called in and make his concerns known as well. What worries me is the staying power after COVID. If our, the surge that we've seen, we'll go back to other activities or business, whatever they may be doing. When we take into account the $150,000 for the study, I would hope that it would also include how to make the uses now profitable, how to increase profit at the restaurant as well as the sports. Having said that, I think it would be a disservice to Senator Rosa if we didn't explore the different options and hire the consultant to see what it is that we're looking at, especially after hearing that we have deferred a lot of the cost to the golf center. So I am definitely leaning towards the consultant on this one. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Jen, just a quick question. The four and a half million dollars that's left on the bond debt, I know it's supposed to be done and paid off by January of 2031. Would the fiscal outlook for the golf course be substantially different if they were not paying the bond debt? The answer would be yes with the caveat that we would still also be returning to you with regard to the deferred maintenance. But for the question for just the ongoing support and care of the golf course and restaurant, whatever version that looks like, yes, it could be more sustainable but it's been a point that the golf operator has brought up many times that the debt that we have is high compared to what we can do with what we have out there right now. Okay. Council member Fleming. Thank you, mayor. I do want to acknowledge that the golf community is passionate about the sport that is enjoyed and I come from a big golfing family and I have a lot of respect for the sport. However, in this role on the council, my job is to steward public funds as effectively as possible for the highest and best use of both public funds and land for the majority of Santa Rosas. And what I'm not hearing in this presentation is that the golf course at present is accomplishing those tasks, which I'm set here to execute. And so I will be going in the direction of hiring a consultant to determine the highest and best use of this facility. I do hope that we are able to find a way to keep golf as part of our portfolio of parks but that we can also use the land to promote activities that are more equitable and inclusive as is our goal in the city we want. Something that is not just gonna serve a small portion of our community but that it's gonna be accessible and perhaps even a draw, which might be the case with top golf or a sports complex and something that might also include housing though. I'm not sure that it would be transit oriented over there and that I'm not sure that that would necessarily be the most effective use of implementing housing in the way that the council has looked for it but I'm very interested to hear the report from the consultant and to also hear solutions and have our golfing community brought into the conversation to make sure that your voices are heard and part of the execution of our next steps. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Council member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. Very interesting conversation. It's clear that the golf course is a major asset for the city of Santa Rosa and I think what I might be looking for and I had a meeting recently about this topic and I was convinced that what I was gonna be looking what I was looking for was highest and best use and I'm still looking for that but I'm wondering if we can expand the kind of our look into the future and our research to not only look at highest and best which we don't know which will create a list of options but also how we might take our current asset and what it would take both cost to players and cost to the city to maintain the and to do the reparations necessary to maintain the quality of the asset and what it might cost players in the long run. I've been around long enough to know that when we want to increase cost at that golf course by what many would consider a very small amount of money and we get pushback and we have an obligation to use that asset and it is indeed an enterprise fund. It is supposed to pay for itself not everyone plays golf and so my hope is that it is indeed self-sustaining. What would it take to make itself sustaining? What would it take to not only the self-sustaining nature of the golf course itself but also the infrastructure because I think that we have an opportunity and this is one of those rare opportunities to look at and I know the cost of the building was very, very high. I believe it was lead that might even have been gold and in its day, I'm not sure if it was silver or gold and I'm sure that Mr. Nutt or one of our recreation parks directors can tell us exactly how high we went with that building. It was, we were all very proud of it at the time and now it's many years later. And so I think that what I'm looking for is perhaps an expansion of the consultants work. It might not be a bad idea to have a list of their scope of service, a list of those issues that they may be looking for and kind of in essence, look at both sides of the equation and not just taking it and completely changing the nature of the site but telling us how we might improve the site as an option. And again, this is not where I was seven days ago when I was meeting with individuals talking about where we might go with this golf course but we do have an obligation. This is the people's money and if the golfers themselves are not, and we haven't asked the question, this is part of what would be done in the research done by the consultants. What is the sweet spot as far as cost? What are the most necessary improvements that have to take place to make the golf course function well? And what, and in opposite that, how might we use that site in other ways? Which is kind of a way of saying I'm looking for a hybrid. I'm looking for best in use and also the status quo in a sense. I hate to increase the cost of the consultants but one of the speakers said once it's gone, it's gone. And so I'm looking for a little, I'm looking for some compromise in broadening our options so that we do indeed make the best choice possible not only for our current users but for future users as well. And I've been very much, as I had said before, look forward to having a restaurant that the city of Santa Rosa can be proud of as opposed to when we have to make excuses for. So I will stop there and look forward to the comments of my colleagues. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Schwedhelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So cut to the chase, I'm supportive of option one. And what's really, I think what we have control of is going in an RFP process. So I know several of folks who've been on this call actually met with a local restaurant tour about the site and the possibilities there because I think the Bennett Valley golf course complex is a jewel of Santa Rosa, just needs some polishing, right? And as Mr. Soria was just mentioning, I didn't know anyone that would go to that former restaurant because of the, what was being served there. So I think I would love to see that be a destination and that I think is a key part of it. Now we go the route of pairing it, have the same operator run the restaurant and the golf operations, that's open for discussions. But I think in the RFP process, we can outline what we as a city would want. And also, including that being a short term, because as we've had some discussions here, people are trying to predict the future. And it's a challenging time now. The path that we saw was some of the different challenges going back to the Tubbs fire, a whole bunch of other things that weren't necessarily in our control. We can put language in there to protect our assets in that RFP process. And if there's no one willing to accept the deliverables that we as a city are asking for, bring it back to council and we'll go in a different direction. But I think it's really an opportunity to make this a destination, location, a real jewel of Santa Rosa, something that all Santa Rosas can be proud of, not just the golf course, but the entire complex. Thank you, Council Member, Vice Mayor. I wanted to thank you guys for the presentation. I don't think that I was able to see that earlier. I didn't do it earlier. So I'm looking at the highest and best use analysis. I think that is the best route to go, leaning towards option two, mostly three at this point, but I'm not opposed to two. So yeah, I'm really just wanting to look at figures to see if the golf course can be self-sustaining and we can get some revenue generated would be good for me. The sports complex doesn't sound too bad since I have eight children and most of them like sports. I do know that that is definitely a need here in Santa Rosa and Sanoma County as a whole. So if we could get that, that would be awesome. But definitely looking for options and the cost analysis to the options that are brought for. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. I think for me, I think we're always gonna be looking for the highest and best use. I actually come up with this, I think a little bit different than most of the council members. I don't wanna spend the $150,000 and that's because I'm looking at some of the other things that we have coming before us, including $3 million in asks for homeless services a week from now, when we have 5 million in our reserves and when we are understaffed in our parks and when we understand that we have an enterprise fund that is not keeping up with the cost that it has. So I'm open for looking for options that are different for the golf course, but I would prefer that we do it in-house and have that conversation in two weeks, three weeks when we have our goal setting and see if that is something that the staff actually wants to prioritize and if the council actually wants to prioritize. Again, I'm totally fine with if the council wants to go in a different direction. I just, I think that it's something that we can do as a community discussion as well. And clearly we, I know you wanted to have this to daylight it to get the consultant that's on board so that then you can go out and have conversations with the golf club with our youth sports teams to see what the best use is. I'd prefer that we get this ball a little bit further down the road before we actually spend that money on a consultant. I see council member Tibbetts raised his hand. Yeah, real quick, Mayor, I'd say that I actually support that idea a lot. I mean, I think that what I heard from the council there was a lot of similarities in that people wanted to see, okay, how much would the cost have to increase in order to break even? Somebody brought up the question between the difference between the debt service on legends versus the actual cost of operating the course and it'd be good to look at it from that perspective. You know, I don't know if we should entirely expect the cost of, you know, green speeds to cover the entire cost of legends because I think that was a bad decision by a prior council that we may want to discuss kind of the pros and cons of whose responsibility is that? But yeah, long and short of it is, is I think we could do some basic investigatory work into this without going to the full 150,000 just yet. It may be that what we did is insufficient but I support you. Council Member Alvarez? Pretty much echoing Councilman Tibbet's statement. My question to you, Mayor, in regards to the interim use, is there anything in mind that comes to mind including the food trucks or other scenarios? I think that's a question for Jen or for Jason. Yeah, we are looking at, we're working with planning and economic development to develop a temporary food truck option for golfers and they're pretty far along with that. So it looks like they're gonna look at next week at reaching out to the various food trucks to make that happen and permit it through our parks permit option. And so that would be no cost to the city.  But we are looking into that as an option and plan to move forward. Hopefully we'll get some really good interest from the food truck operators. Vice Mayor? Sorry, still learning my options here. I would much rather keep the $150,000. I think we could spend that somewhere else if we could do some of the preliminary work. Also knowing that our staff are very taxed in a lot of the things and our goals already and we do have goals setting coming up. So not wanting to burden them with extras if we can, cannot. So finding a compromise on how we would do that would be great, but I would be interested in saving the $100,000. And I do see the city manager and the assistant city manager have put up their hands. So I suspect we're about to get a clarification. I'm gonna turn it over to the assistant city manager, but I will point out that one of the public comments pointed to when we tried to do this in-house last time, the solution set may have not been as fully considered as and was part of the conundrum we find ourselves in today. So I would defer to the assistant city manager, but I think we're at one of those crossroads where the council is going to have to invest to get the answers you're looking for, but I will defer to the assistant city manager. Thank you, city manager McGlynn. Yeah, mayor, council members, I like to see our staff have the skill and experience to be able to come forward and bring things to council that have really well thought out structure to them as fantastic as our staff is. The scope and scale of the study that we really think needs to be done exceeds the skill set that we have in-house. I'm happy to discuss that a little bit further, but that's exactly the reason why CVE is part of the team that brought this to and helped us develop it. That's why Doug is such a great asset to have on the team as a nationwide expert in golf and how you re-imagine golf products. It's really helped open our, it's expanded our mind even in the course of the last few weeks that we've been working on developing this presentation. So there is definitely more out there that we believe we need to bring as part of the team in an effort to really be able to properly engage the community, the stakeholders and be able to provide you the decision makers with the best possible series of options for us to consider moving forward when we get closer to the least termination of our current operator. So I'm happy to discuss this further at a later date if you would like to at goal setting, but I did wanna at least chime in. We can have some initial conversations, but we really can't dig into any of the legitimate detail without having outside expertise. Okay, thank you so much for that. Council Member Fleming and then Council Member Sawyer. Yeah, basically what Assistant City Manager Nutt said was where I was going with this, which is one of my favorite questions is always, well, what does saving money or delaying or deferring a decision cost us? And it seems to me that given that our staff, wonderful staff, it's not subject matter experts in golf economy. I mean, whose job is it to be a golf economist? It's Doug's job to be a golf economist. I mean, that's cool. That's an interesting job. I might like to do that. But I think that we owe it to our golfing community and we owe it to our taxpayers to invest in making wise decisions. And while there is a price tag associated with it, that's the cost of protecting public assets and public funds. And I'm much more comfortable not deferring decisions to goal setting where we're gonna have many, many things on our plate and inevitably our beloved city manager will tell us that we'll have to pick this or something else and that if they can, we'll get kicked. The maintenance will be deferred. The highest and best use will not be necessarily implemented unless we decide we wanna put this above things like, you know, I won't list them because it's not agenda I say, but our traditional panel of issues that really just cannot be deferred in favor of sending staff time out to assess a golf course. So that's where I stand. I'm in favor of moving forward with contract today. So I heard from the council member as our staff has not necessarily on par with Doug. All right, council member Sawyer. Thank you, mayor. And I thank you, mayor. One of the questions I wanna be able to ask and it speaks to an echo chamber concept is why is our golf course popular and is it truly popular? I mean, we don't ask a golfer whether our golf course is an asset. I think we all know that it's an asset, but if you play golf on a regular basis, it's gonna be more of an asset. So I would love to have answered the question, what is the reality of our popularity of all our golf course? Is it because it's cheap or because it's a beautiful course and challenging and exactly what we want to have in the city. So that's one of those questions. It seems obvious, but it's not an easy question to answer is why is it popular? And so I would hope that if we move forward with a status core or the blend thereof, I would wanna know why and is it as popular as those that use on a regular basis would say that it is? So I would want that question answered. Thank you, council member. So I don't wanna leave staff with any type of muddled direction as to the question about moving forward with the contract to get this ball rolling. So Sue, would it be appropriate for me to just ask for a straw poll from the council on whether or not to move forward on the contract piece? Yes, because this actually is a study session so you cannot take any official action. So what staff is looking for is direction and I think if you do that kind of a straw poll that would be fine to do it that way. Okay, I thought I heard at least four but we'll go ahead and we'll do a thumbs up from folks if they are comfortable with staff pursuing the contract aspect and bringing this back as a full discussion with a vote and more community input in the future. Can you clarify what the practical implication of the yes vote or the yes straw poll, the thumbs up means? Staff will execute, as I understand it, the contract for $150,000 and bring this back once that report is done. Thank you for the clarification. Yes, and actually the contract itself will have to come back to council for approval because it's over the 100,000. So you will have an opportunity at that time as well. Great, thank you, Sue. So we'll just go around the horn really fast. Council Member Alvarez, thumbs up, Fleming. Sawyer, that's three thumbs up. Tibbets, thumbs up, Schwedhelm. Sorry, can't support spending $150,000 at this time. Okay, Vice Mayor. Okay, so I see five thumbs up. I agree with council member Schwedhelm but we'll bring this back at a future date for the contract to be approved officially by the council. And with that, we'll end that item and we will go to our actual city council full meeting. I don't believe we have to do a roll call, Madam City Clerk, since we didn't take a break, or do we? No, you're fine without a roll call. I'll just note that all council members are present since council member Tibbets was not at the initial roll call. Okay, thank you so much. We have no report out for closed session. We just did our study session. We have no proclamations tonight. Let's go on to staff briefings, Mr. City Manager. So the sole staff briefing this evening is 7.3, glass fire recovery update and I will turn it over to Assistant Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal for the briefing. One moment as he promotes to panelists. Thank you. Good evening Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Rogers and member of the council. My name is Paul Lowenthal, Assistant Fire Marshal with the Santa's Department on behalf of the glass fire task forces. Been a couple of weeks since we've been before you, so catching up on a couple items. The deadline for the right of entries for the debris removal for both structures and trees within the glass fire has been extended again. Cal OES indicated that it would not extend that yesterday would have been the final deadline. However, late last night we received word that it's now been extended to February 15th. So that gives us time to get more of our trees into the program. We're still juggling with less than about five or so homes in between the right of entry program and the private program. And that primarily is a result of the more than one wall appeal process that we're going through with FEMA and Cal OES. We're down to now advocating for five total APNs on three parcels. So it's the triplex and Oakmont as well as two residents up in Mountain Hawks area that we're working through the appeal process to try and get them into the state's program. PG&E notified us this week that they are now moving back forward with their phase two, their P2 tree removal process and they're 54% complete in the glass fire footprint. We are working feverishly to get PG&E in coordination with Cal Recycle and Cal OES so that we do not lose a different additional residence ability to participate in the program with PG&E's tree removal. We have also followed up on the request that you were made aware of earlier in the year regarding the meeting that they offered regarding their wood management program. We have put PG&E on notice through email that we requested dates to reconvene that group with dates requested by the end of this week. So hoping to keep that process moving forward. Shifting over to the watershed side, our watershed task force reported no significant issues within the glass fire footprint following the two inches of rain that we had from the atmospheric river obviously less rain than we anticipated. So that was a beneficial storm and hopefully we'll continue to promote growth that will stabilize our burn scar area. The three C's will likely be seen California Conservation Crew will likely be seen in Santa Rosa doing some work on behalf of Cal OES on state debris removal sites helping with the watershed, best manager practices and soil stabilization. Also the fire department and stormwater will be working with Oakmont residents regarding some of the concerns with the creeks that were affected by the glass fire and pass forward to help mitigate some of the concerns. And that should do it for our update as of right now. Let's see if there's any questions. Thank you so much, Paul. Council, do you have any questions? All right, seeing none. We'll, Mr. Chief Manager, you said this was the only update tonight, correct? Great, we'll go to the public to see if there are any public comments on the staff updates. And I am not seeing any hands jump up. Madam City Clerk, did we have any voicemail public comments for this item? Yes, we did, Mayor. We had one, I'll be right back. Perfect. Item 7.1 and two staff briefing, Dwayne Dewitt from Roseland. Regarding the COVID response as well as the community empowerment plan, these seem to be falling short at least in my area of Roseland, a neighborhood that has at least 7,000 people right around that general. Sebastopol Road, Roseland Village type of city center. Hopefully you can work with the county and begin putting notices up into the bulletin boards. And now on the windows of the Roseland Library, which the county has used for a vaccination site at times. There are many people in the community who do not have internet access and are not linked in with smartphones. So they're zoomed out, virtual exclusion. The news isn't getting to them, but those bulletin boards at Roseland Village are there. The windows of the county-owned building are available. Please share information with us so we could truly be empowered in this governmental system, which seems to be more exclusionary than inclusionary. Thank you. That concludes voice message public comment, Dan. All right, thank you so much, Dina. I'll bring it back to the council for a quick check-in. Any additional comments or questions for Paul? All right, then we'll move on to our next item, the city managers and city attorneys reports. Sue, do you wanna kick us off today? Sure, I'm happy to do that. And Mr. Mayor and council members, I do wanna give two updates, one on recent developments on eviction protections as a result of COVID. And then the second, I'll give you a brief update on our litigation concerning our all-electric reach code. So first on evictions, as you may recall, existing state law puts places a moratorium on eviction proceedings that are based on non-payment of rent due to financial hardship caused by the COVID pandemic. And that state law, which was adopted late last summer, breaks it into two phases. If the unpaid rent accrued during the first six months of the pandemic, March 1st, 2020 to August 31st, 2020, then that unpaid rent has been converted to consumer debt. And as consumer debt, that unpaid rent can never be used as a basis for eviction. The rent though is still owed in the landlord unpaid rents in a small claims court. But again, it cannot for that six month period, unpaid rents cannot be used as a basis for eviction. Phase two, this is existing state law. Phase two, if the unpaid rent accrued during the second six months of the pandemic, and I know there was a time where we didn't think there was gonna be a second six months of the pandemic, but here we are. So if the unpaid rent accrued from September 1st, 2020 through January 31st, 2021, then the unpaid rent was converted to consumer debt, but only if the tenants submitted a declaration that the failure to pay rent was due to COVID related financial stress. And second, the tenant paid at least 25% of the rent that was due by January 31st. It did require the existing law required that the landlord provide certain notices to the tenant. And it allowed the existing law allowed for eviction for causes other than non-payment of rent due to the impacts of COVID. And all those protections again, went just through January 31st. Late last week, the legislature passed and the governor signed SB 91. And that extends those protections from January 1st through June 30th, 2021. So it continues the protections against eviction for non-payment of rent due to financial hardship caused by the COVID pandemic, provided that the tenant submits the declaration that the failure to pay rent was due to impacts of COVID. And second that the tenant pays at least 25% of the rent due now by June 30th rather than January 31st. Some minor adjustments continues the requirements for notice. It provides a standard form for a declaration for the tenant to verify that the failure to pay rent was due to COVID impacts. And it continues to allow for evictions for causes other than non-payment of rent due to impacts of COVID. And those other grounds for eviction would include at fault cause under existing state law. That includes things like a tenant's breach of material provisions of the rental agreement, creating a nuisance, damaging the property, using the property for an unlawful purpose. Those are all at fault, just cause. It also allows for evictions for no fault, just cause as defined under existing state law. And that includes things like the owner wanting to move into the property or a relative moving into the property or the owner taking the unit off of the rental market entirely. And there's a whole set of state laws that govern those two provisions. So again, stands the time for payment of that 25%, extends those eviction protections through the end of June, continues to allow evictions for other purposes. The other big piece of that legislation, excuse me, was that it establishes the state rental assistance program. It takes $2.6 billion in federal assistance and federal rental assistance and it directs to these two categories. It provides aid for low income, income qualified tenants that are most at risk with unpaid back rent. Tenants qualify if their income is 80% of AMI or lower. So it's aid to income qualified tenants. And then second, it's aid to the landlords and property owners under this program, property owners who agree to accept 80% of the unpaid rent as in full satisfaction of rent owed, they will be eligible for reimbursement of that 80%. And again, for rents owed from April 1st of last year through March 31st of this year. So again, but they would have to agree to waive that other 20% in order to get the 80% through the state program. So that's the existing state law, the existing and the new state law. The current, we also have regulations at the county level. The county ordinance currently similar to state law prohibits landlords from terminating a tenancy for failure to pay rent. If the tenant demonstrates that the failure to pay rent is a result of the impacts of COVID-19. And that can be illness of the individual. It can be quarantine requirements. It can be caring for others. It could be caring for minor children in the absence of in-person school or daycare. It operates a little bit differently than the state law. It creates an affirmative defense that tenants can use, creates a private right of action against landlords for any violation of the ordinance. It provides for damages three times in that private action. Tenant can recoup three times their actual damages. They can also recoup damages for mental or emotional distress. County ordinance does not relieve tenants of the obligation to pay rent. And it does not currently address any other grounds for eviction. So as other grounds for evictions remain in place under the county's current ordinance. That ordinance was adopted under the county's emergency powers and it was directed that the ordinance would apply throughout the county in both the incorporated and the unincorporated areas. So it's consistent across the county unless a city specifically pulls itself out. The county is now looking at amending their existing ordinance. Again, their existing ordinance really kind of parallels existing state law. What they are looking to potentially consider is expansion of the limitation on evictions. Again, currently it only addresses evictions for failure to pay rent due to COVID. The proposal that the board supervisor will be considering would expand that and have broader regulations of evictions. We understand from the board's discussion last week and some other discussions with the county staff is that we're anticipating that the board of supervisors will be offered two options, two alternatives to expand eviction protections. One option would be that the county ordinance would prohibit all evictions other than those that are necessary to protect public health or safety. I'll note that that standard and that prohibition had been in a rule that had been adopted by the judicial council last spring and it was in place for several months that judicial council order has been since repealed so it's not in place. So that's one option, no evictions other than for health or safety. The other kind of at the other side would be that it would prohibit all evictions other than public health and safety or specify no fault evictions. These are the ones where the landlord wants to move into the property or have members of his family, his or her family move into the property or wish to take the unit off of the rental market entirely. We don't know the specifics of those alternatives because they have not yet been published. They have not been released publicly. They will be published this Friday and the board of supervisors will then consider those alternatives at their meeting next Tuesday on February 9th. It is our understanding that the board of supervisors does intend that these amendments as well would be issued under their emergency powers and it would be their intent that those new restrictions would apply throughout the county in both incorporated and unincorporated areas. We won't know their final decision, what action, if any, they take until next week. So we would, we are proposing that we will come back to council at your next meeting, the next following meeting, which would be on February 23rd to report back what actions the county takes again, if any, and then depending on the actions that the county takes, the county will have options to consider whether to weigh in on the matter or to leave that ordinance operable within city limits as well. I'm happy to answer any questions on that update. Thank you, Sue. Appreciate how easily you were able to break down the complex machinations that are going on there. Council Member Sawyer and then Council Member Tibbets. Thank you, Mayor and thank you, Madam City Attorney. So I'm curious, so one a mentor could decide according to what the county is looking to embrace, not to pay rent for any reason, unless it has to do with a health and safety issue. That is a very good question. And I would say at this point, it's unclear until we see what the actual draft language is and we will see that on Friday. I look forward to that. I see on the horizon, if that is the case, a large number of landlords giving notices to tenants saying that they are pulling their homes off the market and leaving them empty because due to that kind of decision by the county, it really does. The whole, that whole issue around our housing stock, I think could be drastically affected by that kind of decision. I'm very disappointed by them even considering it. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Tibbets. Yeah, let me follow up a little bit more. I will say that I did not listen to the entirety of the council meeting last week. So I don't know whether that question was raised or addressed at that council meeting, but in my discussions with staff, that question has not come up. So again, we'll know more on Friday and perhaps the answer is already embedded in their discussion from last week. But again, I have not had the chance to review that in its entirety. Thank you very much. Jack? Thanks, Mayor. Sue, following up on that, I was actually under the impression based on the supervisors meeting last week that landlords wouldn't be able to do what John is saying they might do. And that is that they would be precluded from doing any evictions. And here's what concerned me. And this was in the Tyler Sylvie article was even a landlord opting to sell their house, put their house on the market, couldn't evict somebody. And to me, my concern really came in there. I mean, I hope that I've been pretty fair to tenants in my tenure on the council. I think we definitely need to have added protections right now, but my concern there is there seems to be a logical break between, and maybe it's just because I was reading a newspaper article and I wasn't getting the full facts. That's why I'm asking you. But are these mortgage deferrals still even in effect for landlords right now? I know that a lot of landlords set this up so that their investment property is getting paid off by the rent. If the rent's not coming in or at all, they're not making their mortgage. And then it's a lost property through foreclosure or now two parties have been harmed, the tenant and the landlord. And it's probably gotten purchased by somebody who may not use it as a rental property again. So that's when we've lost through a market, but through a much more vicious way, and that's through foreclosure, where the only winner there is to got the damn bank. So, I'm just curious what your thoughts are there? Yeah, and again, having not listened to the full council meeting, I don't know the exact direction that was given to staff. And I would, and I'm not familiar enough with the mortgage regulations that have been put in place, but it was certainly when I come back on, we'll see what the Board of Supervisors does next week. And then depending on what they do, we'll come back on the 23rd as an report item for council and I will have that full background ready for you at that time. Yeah, that would be really super because I, again, I'm supportive of increasing protections for tenants temporarily during COVID, because we don't want homelessness, but I don't want a situation created where the only winner emerging is the banks. So that's my two cents. And I hope that, Mayor, if you're talking to the supervisors at all that, you can raise that point with them and try to find a worker one. Great, thanks, council member. Council member Alvarez. Yes, thank you. Sue, I have a question and I don't know if you're able to answer this one for me at this point and it's okay if you can. In a situation where a landlord hasn't provided a contract to a tenant, how would the law determine a violation of set agreement, especially during the COVID times, where it will be a violation that would merit the vision of a tenant that would violate the contract? In terms of a at fault eviction. Correct, correct. Rental agreements are supposed to be in writing and I don't know what a court, how a court responds when there is no written agreement. I'm not familiar enough with the landlord tenant law to be able to respond to that at this point. I'm happy to look at, I'll note that down as well as unwritten agreements, so. I appreciate that because the situation that we see a lot in Roseland is that sometimes the tenant is an offer to contract. Right. Thank you, sir. Yeah, so council, I'm hearing a lot of interest in some further dive into this. Let's Sue get through Friday to see what the contract actually looks like. And then I think at the next meeting, where it's possible for us to have this discussion about what the county did and what it actually means for our community, I think we can have a much deeper conversation at that point, if that works for everybody. Seeing nodding heads. So Sue, I know you had one other update that you wanted to give us as well. Yes, and thank you for that feedback on evictions as well. I appreciate that. And then the second update is a shorter and quicker one is just an update on our litigation concerning our all-electric reach code. And for the benefit of the public in particular that may not be familiar with that code, that code was adopted by the council last November, I'm sorry, November in 2019. So a year ago last November. And it requires that all new low-rise residential construction, so residential construction, three stores and lower, utilize electricity rather than fossil fuels as for all primary energy needs. And it was adopted, as I said, in November 2019 after extensive research, after a tremendous amount of public participation and very thorough environmental and cost considerations that was adopted. And then local developer William Gallagher subsequently filed suit alleging that the city council's adoption of the code violated provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act, that's CEQA, as well as alleging violations of the state reach code law. We've been engaged in that litigation. The case was very thoroughly briefed on both sides. And our oral argument was heard last Wednesday before Superior Court Judge Patrick Broderick. That was last Wednesday, the 27th, January 27th. Prior to that hearing, Judge Broderick issued a very lengthy 25-page tentative ruling. And a tentative ruling of that length and that extent is unusual. The tentative ruling walked through each of the elements of the petitioner's claims, and again, as a tentative on a tentative basis, found in the city's favor on each of those elements. The oral argument took place on Wednesday. It was almost two-hour hearing after which Judge Broderick took the matter under submission. He did not indicate when he will issue his final ruling, but we do anticipate that we will receive it before too long. And we'll certainly alert the council when that is received. We do remain optimistic. Again, the tentative ruling is just that. It's a tentative ruling, but we do remain optimistic that the city's all-electric reach code will be upheld in full, and we trust that the judge will stand by his tentative ruling. And happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Sue. Are there any questions? Council Member Sawyer?  You can hear me then. Sorry about that. So is there a... When the judge is finished with his ruling, is this a final ruling, or is there a secondary hanging out there that could be before us? Yes, the Judge Broderick's decision will be the final decision in the Superior Court. There will be no further proceedings after he issues his final order. There is, of course, always a potential for an appeal. And in fact, Mr. Gallagher's attorneys did take some procedural steps that would indicate that they are at least considering appeal. There's been, we've heard no communications as to whether they would intend to appeal or not, but that is a possibility. And obviously I would alert the council if an appeal is filed. Thank you very much. Sure. Any other questions, Council? Great. Mr. City Manager, your report. Nothing to report. Okay. We will go ahead and go to public comment. We have one hand up. That's Gregory. Yeah, I just want to report that the Board of Supervisors today announced something that may help you on the first item of the city attorney's report. For the first time, the county administrator announced that they had achieved their goal of publishing the staff reports to their agenda eight days before the meeting. So right now you can see the full agenda with all of the staff reports of the county Board of Supervisors on their website. And I just looked and there's nothing of what she's talking about on their agenda. As you know, we've been trying to get both you guys and them to publish it as early as possible. And this is actually the first time where you'll know what the staff reports are for the Board of Supervisors at this meeting. So unless I've missed it, there's nothing on the Board of Supervisors agenda on the ninth that has anything to do with the ordinance or the changes she's suggesting they're gonna take. All right, thank you, Gregory. We'll keep an eye on that one. We are of course very supportive of the county continuing to move in the direction that Santa Rosa went with the advance noticing. So we'll keep working on that one. Councilor, are there any final questions or comments before we move on to our next item? And just so you all know, we'll get through item 10. That's the council member reports. And then we're gonna take a quick break so that folks can use the restroom, grab water, do whatever you need to do since we've been going at this for a couple of hours. First, item nine, do we have any statements of abstentia from the council? All right, saying none. We'll go on to item 10, mayors and council members reports. Let's start with our specific reports and then we'll go on to item 10.2 which we sort of alluded to a little bit last time. So first, council members, is there anybody who has a report for item 10? Council members, what on? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, there's two things I want to report out on. First, yesterday we had our water advisory committee meeting and several water related items that I want to share with the council. So we received an update on water supply conditions due to the dry conditions. Sonoma water filed a temporary urgency change petition with the state of California in January. If granted, Sonoma water would be able to temporarily reduce flows to better managed storage in Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma and preserve critical water supply. To assist in reducing water use, the Sonoma Marin Water Saving Partnership launched a region wide dry year outreach campaign. The tagline, it's a dry year, save water with us. Messaging is going out on various digital and social media platforms in Spanish and in English. We also received a brief update on the Sonoma water budget, the technical advisory committee finance subcommittee is working with Sonoma water on their preparation of the Sonoma water fiscal year 21-22 budget and rates. This will be presented to this city council on March 23rd prior to the WAC considering this at their April meeting. I'll be receiving direction from this body for that. Potter Valley Project, something that people are getting more and more educated on Sonoma water and the partner agencies working on the re-licensing of Potter Valley Project submitted their plan to FERC for completing the required financial, technical, environmental studies required to re-license the project. The next step is for FERC to make a formal determination of the sufficiency of that plan. And I don't have a timeline as to when FERC will be doing that. And then we had emergency training in coordination subcommittee, which is comprised of representatives from Sonoma water and the water contractors was created in response to the 2019 Sonoma County civil grand jury report. The committee is working on a coordinated emergency alert notification system to establish rapid communication between Sonoma water and the contractors and a mutual aid assistance program model for emergency response and recovery. And finally, the WAC also elected Mike Healy from Petaluma to be the WAC vice chair for the remainder of this session. And on the second note, I might have made a mention to this last week, but on the 27th of violence prevention partnership hosted a presentation by Dr. Sharon Washington titled Tipping the Scale, Deconstructing Race and Racism. We had over 360 people signed up for that. And I'd really encourage anyone to find some time to view it. The video is now on the Violence Prevention Partnership website. And if you are going to watch the video, I'd encourage you to download a single sheet of paper that's also on the website because a lot of it is on the self reflection and how you identify. And Dr. Washington does a superb job and it's about I think a two and a half hour presentation, but I think everyone would get something out of it. So I strongly encourage everyone if you have the time to look at the video. It was a wonderful presentation. I appreciate the voters who supported Measure O which made this presentation possible at no cost to the attendees. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. And I'll probably follow up with you offline with a couple of additional questions that I have about the WAC. Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. I would like to take this time to appoint, make some appointments. Sure, the staff are excited about that. I would like to appoint Jeffrey Holton to the Planning Commission. Michael Birch to the Design Review Board and Alvin Hamilton to the Cultural Heritage Board. I would like to thank all of my appointees thus far for their willingness to serve our community. And I would also like to encourage others who may want to learn more or may want to also serve to go to the city website and check out the different board and commissions we have and the vacancies we have. A goal of mine when I was running for council was to diversify not only our leadership on the council but also our boards and commissions. But we need residents to get out there and learn a little bit more, call us if you have any questions and we'll be happy to assist you and support you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. And thanks for setting a great example for the council. With that, I'll go on to council member Tibbetts. Thanks, Mayor. I'd just like to appoint Kristen Kiefer to the Art and Public Places Committee. That's all. Thank you. See Vice Mayor, you're already setting a trend. Councilwoman Fleming. Thank you. I don't have any appointments to make today but I'm doing pretty good on keeping my board staffed and diverse. So I wanted to report out on last week's public safety subcommittee. We had a long and engaging meeting of four and a half hours and we covered an update from the school resource officer program as well as the Kahootz program which was featured in the press democrat and more unanimously looking forward to that being an additional service that the city offers. I speak on, I believe I speak on behalf of all three of us from the subcommittee that we think that this is gonna be a fantastic addition to our city. And then because of the robust community engagement we were unable to finish our meeting. So we will be continuing at 1 p.m. on February 8th and the most notable item that we'll be taking up there will be the police auditor position. So we look forward to public comment. Hopefully we can get the business of that item taken care of. Thank you so much. Thank you. Council Member, Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. And this question is for Council Member Schwedermann and if you need to get back to be offline, that's fine. And curious about the Ponter Valley project and the licensing thereof. Is this with PGD wanting to get out of that game? Is the licensing, who would be looking for a license or am I misunderstanding the concept? It'd be a better offline conversation because there are some confidential communications involving that project. And also there's still some challenges with Lake County not being represented there and there's a congressman representing that area that's of interest. So we can further dialogue and quite frankly, Sarah's water might be the better person to answer that question because nothing is easy involving the federal government or the Ponter Valley project. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. And thank you for your service and water. Well, thank you so much. I am also gonna follow the Vice Mayor's lead. I will be appointing Anna Stevens to the General Planned Community Advisory Committee. For those of you who've been tracking council members each get to appoint one individual, typically from their district who is interested in serving on that committee. And it kicks off I believe tomorrow night. So I am just in time with that one. The other appointment that I have is a correction from staff. I originally appointed two individuals to our BPU liaison committee and missed that we actually had a third vacant position but I get to fill as well. So council member Sawyer has agreed to fill in on that and continue the work both working with the BPU as well as the critical work around the compost facility which he's been integral in. So thank you so much for that council member. The last comment that I'll make for council is I did have a chance last Thursday to represent on the MTC blue ribbon commission for small transit operators as well as Rachel E from Santa Rosa. It was an interesting conversation if for no other reason that MTC was very complimentary of the work that we're doing in Sonoma County to focus on better coordination and communication between our transit agencies. And in fact, announced to the group that we are a little bit further along than we actually are or were supportive of us going further than we actually have gone so far. And so I just want to let you all know I took that as an opportunity to ask them for more money to continue to do that work. And we'll be continuing to report out to this group periodically as that ball moves down the path. We have our next task force meeting on coordination and consolidation coming up later this week. I think it's on Thursday and we'll have more conversations to go at that point. But where we sit right now was asking the three primary transit operators, Sonoma County, Sonoma County Transit, Santa Rosa City bus and Petaluma Transit to come up with a punch list on how to better coordinate and communicate and what they would need to have in place coming out of COVID to have the appearance of a more seamless system from a writer's perspective. Whether it was shared marketing, whether it was a shared app that they were able to utilize and push out together or even better, more coordinated routes going forward. So hopefully I'll be able to report back to you all next week on what that punch list looks like and an expected timeline for some of these conversations. With that, we'll move on to item 10.2. Madam city attorney, do you want to introduce this? I am happy to introduce it. This is for the mayors and council members of the associations, the selection committee. And this had to do with two, this was a, we need to correct some things that we did at our last meeting, our meeting previously. And so this is to give guidance to the mayor, direction to the mayor as to appointments to association of the area government's executive board. Yeah, I appreciate that. Is that suffice or? And I'll just remind the council, when we voted on this, it had been put out there that there were two seats without a delineation between primary and alternate. So this council supported, as I have in my notes, we supported both Susan Adams from runner park as well as Arielle Kelly from Healdsburg. And what I'm looking for from council is now corrected direction fr