there he is. Thank you. Yes, great. Thanks. Chair Owen, it looks like it is 130. I do not see Commissioner Downey in attendance yet, but we do have a quorum if you'd like to go ahead and start the meeting. Okay, will you be tracking to see if Commissioner Downey joins? Yes, we will. Okay, thank you. So with having the quorum, I'll go ahead and call the meeting to order. Has housekeeping is to remind commissioners to keep their audio on mute unless they are speaking? Commissioners other than the chair can mute themselves. Staff will remain muted until needing to speak. As members of the public join the meeting, you'll be participating as an attendee. Your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panels will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda for privacy concerns, the host will be renaming your viewable phone number to residents in the last four digits of your phone number. As a reminder, the City of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and are well staffed and monitored. Everyone is participating respectively or they will be removed if necessary. We'll also immediately end the meeting. Clerk, can you please explain how the public comments will be heard in today's meeting? At the end, at each agenda item, the item is presented. The chair will ask for housing authority member 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 chair has called for public comment, the chair 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 host will then call on the public who have raised their hand. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the commission and public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will read email public comment. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email, your email public comment will not be read during the meeting. Additionally, there's one public comment period on today's agenda item to speak on non-agenda item five. This is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on this agenda but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority. Thank you. Can you please ask the clerk for a roll call? Commissioner Burke. Here. Commissioner Test. Vice Chair Test. Excuse me. Here. Chair Owen. Here. Commissioner Downey. Commissioner Burke. Commissioner Olson. Excuse me. Here. All right. Let the record reflect that all commissioners are present with the exception of Commissioner Downey. Thank you, Steve. I'd like to move ahead and call item three and ask any commissioners for statements of extension of any items today. Hearing none, I'll call on item four, part one and Megan, you can introduce the staff presenter on this item. Thank you. Good afternoon. Item 4.1 is review of the fiscal year 2021-2022 administrative budget, including overhead. Kate Goldfein, administrative services officer, and J. Brad Wilkes from MGT Consultant Group will be presenting. Sorry, Megan. Hang on one moment. We're promoting them right now. I have promoted Kate to a panelist and I have Brad Wilkes here. Our consultant, Brad Wilkes, permission to speak. Kate, you're muted. There we go. Now, can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Thanks. Hello. Chair and Authority Commission. I'm Kate Goldfein, the administrative services officer for the Housing and Community Services Department. Per your request at the last housing authority meeting, I'm here with the city's overhead consultant, Brad Wilkes, with the MGT Consulting Group. So I'll review the department charges and then I'll turn it over to Mr. Wilkes to discuss overhead and IT rates. And can the secretary please start the presentation? Yes, it'll be up momentarily. Thank you. Kate, can you hear me? This is Brad Wilkes. Yeah, hey, Brad. I can't hear Kate. I could hear Megan, but I can't hear Kate now. This is Kate. Can you hear me? Brad, this is Megan. Can you hear me? Brad, are you still there? Well, the first three slides are mine, so we may be able to go through those. Kate, I can hear you. Ah, fantastic. Okay. Thank you. No, no problem. Next slide, please. All right, this slide represents the administrative costs for the entire Housing and Community Services Department. Their budgeted and fund $2120 costs are expected to be around $1.4 million in this year, $2122, and all of the programs that utilize these resources pay for a portion of the costs based on their percentage of salaries. The Housing Trust and Housing Choice Voucher programs are budgeting to pay 96% of these costs. Their portion equals housing staff salaries as a percent of total salaries of staff who utilize these services and supplies. And the Homeless Services Program has been moved out of Housing and Community Services this year into the City Manager's Office. Code enforcement and the Neighborhood Revitalization Program have also been moved out of HCS into the Planning and Economic Development Department, so the majority of the department at this point is Housing and Housing is a Voucher program in Housing Trust. So, of this budget, 95% is uncontrollable costs, meaning that the department is informed of their share of these costs as a part of the larger city organization. They include the largest overhead at 68% of the budget, which Mr. Wilkes will discuss in detail shortly. Information technology is 17% of the budget. Mr. Wilkes will discuss that as well. We pay approximately $44,000 for the department's share of city liability insurance. Salaries and benefits for admin staff who support the authority are about $100,000. City employees are unionized and our salaries and benefits are negotiated with city management. Once those are agreed upon, we're required to pay at that amount. The controllable costs represent about $27,000, 2% of the admin budget. They include things such as professional organization, memberships and dues, meeting costs, conferences and training, and subscriptions for the directorate and administrative staff, and things like general office supplies that are used by the whole department, such as paper pens, paperclips, staples, staplers, that kind of thing. And then shared services are about 3% of the budget at $45,000, and they include things such as the housing authority share of the annual audit costs. The housing authority must have its own annual audit. It includes copier costs, which are shared by the department, vehicle expenses such as maintenance, gas, replacement for the department car, admin staff, telephone and iPad costs, and shredding services for the disposal of confidential documents. Next slide, please. Okay, this slide represents the housing choice voucher program admin at about $2.5 million. It is 100% funded by HUD, and as such, it must be used to support the housing choice voucher program. We are not allowed to use this funding for any other purpose. The largest source of funds we receive is the per unit admin fee, also called an admin allowance, we use those interchangeably, that we receive for Santa Rosa clients. We have about 1,900 of those right now. We also receive a reduced portion of the admin fee from other jurisdictions whose clients port into Santa Rosa. We have approximately 250 of those monthly give or take. And finally, we receive a small grant to administer the family self-sufficiency program. So we take those funding sources and we need to cover costs for salaries and benefits, which as I noted are determined by the city's agreement with employee unions, allocated costs, which are the share of the fund 2120 costs that I just discussed that are paid by the housing choice voucher program. And any admin fee that is left after salaries, benefits, and allocated costs is budgeted for services and supplies. We always want to budget to use the full amount of admin allowance available so that we can use it through the year. Anything we do not use is held by HUD and reserve. And our largest expense from the housing choice voucher program services and supplies category is the admin fee that we pay to other jurisdictions for our clients to port into their area. That is around 30 clients a month. Other expenses are maintenance, gas, and replacement for the Section 8 vehicles, conferences and training, office supplies specific to the program, dues specific to the program, cell phone and iPad charges for staff, printed materials and forms and subscriptions. In 2021, admin is projected about 2.5 million. You see that here and rental assistance is projected at about 32 million. Next slide, please. All right. And here we have the housing trust proposed admin for fiscal year 2122 at about 1.8 million, just under 1.9 million. This is funded by 10 different funds, which are broadly categorized into the five sources noted on the slide. So first, we start with three federal sources. Each federal source allows an annual admin allowance. We get 20% of the annual allowance, annual allotment, we get 20% for CDBG, 10% for home, and 3% for HOPLA. So collectively, those provide about $400,000, which is not enough to run any one of those programs. So we have to supplement with local funding. We are also allowed to use a portion of federal funds for specific projects. This is called Project Admin. It reduces the amount that we can loan or spend on actual projects so we don't often use it. The local sources of funding for trust admin are compliance fees, the annual city real property transfer tax transfer, impact fees, and loan repayments. We use those to cover the balance of admin costs. Just as with the voucher program, salaries and benefits are determined by the city agreements with employee unions, and allocated costs are the share of Fund 2120 costs that I discussed a few slides ago. Then annually, Megan and I meet to determine the services and supplies needed by the trust, and we budget accordingly. They include the required printing, noticing, advertising for the mandated public participants, participation processes for federal programs, conferences and training to stay up to date with those programs, outside legal assistance, occasionally to review complex technical financial real estate transactions, and currently in agreement with other local jurisdictions for a countywide plan to affirmatively further fair housing, which is required by HUD, and a small amount for office supplies specific to the program. So we cover all those costs, cover all those requirements, and the remaining budget is used for loans for development, conversion, preservation, sub recipient funding for HOPLA and community development, CBBG public services programs, or tenant-based rental assistance for home. And then if we don't use any of that admin budget in one year, it rolls over to the next year and is budgeted for loan product. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions or I can turn it over to Brock Wilkes to discuss overhead and IT rates. The question from the commissioners, Commissioner Olson. Yes, I was wondering, is the executive director's salary negotiated or is that set by the union? That's negotiated. Yeah, I thought so. Thank you. Thank you. But I would just expand on that. There is a range that is established by the city, so it's not a free-for-all negotiation. There is a range in which it is negotiated. So there's a cap and then it has to be basically negotiated for something under that cap. Is that what you're telling me? There's a floor and a ceiling, so it could range from like 140 to 160. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. I have a question. I was curious with staff, how are you being divided between housing and other administrative responsibilities? In other words, is staff covering four different agencies, three different agencies in addition to housing? And is this, this appears to be strictly for housing, but by piggybacking off of using multiple programs, is there any way to stretch dollars any further with administrative costs? Yeah, good question. So we already do that to an extent. So staff, so I can use myself for an example. I charge into the housing authority for the budget work that I do for them. And then I also charge into the planning and economic development department because I do budget work for them. And each program pays their fair share of the time spent in those. And we try to divide it truly based on the time that we are spending on those divisions. So to the extent we can maximize staff across divisions, we do that. Okay, so for an example, if you have three different programs, can you use the three different programs to buy, let's say a case of paper as a bulk item and then divide the case of paper between three different programs, or do you have to buy one specific item for each different service that you provide? Yeah, great question again. So in general, it's the former. And that's what that first slide, the fund 2120 slide is. That's the shared administrative cost for items like paper or pens or things that we're all using all the time that would be difficult to charge one off to each program. Those are charged to the administrative fund and then allocated out through the allocated cost to each of the program areas. Okay. So if you buy a pen and you're writing something for housing and you're writing something for a different agency, I'm sure you can't parse the ink between the different agencies that you're using the pen to fill out a piece of paper with. I know that sounds silly, but no, you're right. But this all has to come out in the audit where they want to know exactly how every cent is being spent. Right. And one of the costs that we pay for out of that fund, 2120 is the annual audit. Okay. Thank you, Keith. Commissioner Burr, you have a question? Yeah. Thanks, Chair. One is I know in the past there have been funds available for housing authority commissioner training. And as I recall the language in this budget is that it's for staff only. It seems to me like it would be a good idea to make sure that there's some funds set aside for training of staff on those opportunities arise over the course of the year. So that's my first question. I have one more. Sure. I can't tell you yes. In that fund, 2120, there is, and I should have mentioned this, I apologize, there is funding for housing authority commissioners as well. Thanks, Keith. That answers that. And then I'm assuming that the overhead costs have been adjusted based upon the different responsibilities that the department has this year compared to previous years. I think that that is a great segue into Brad's portion of the presentation where he can answer that and then go in a little more depth about overhead. So I think we can go to the next slide and Brad, if you're ready. Yes, I am ready. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me today. I remember that we did this a couple of years ago. And so this will be a similar process. I have about 10 slides just real quickly as an introduction. My name is Brad Wilkes and I work with the firm MGT consulting group. And we are a group of consultants that focus on the indirect costs of city and county governments. And some of our largest and longest term clients are California cities, Santa Rosa being one of them. So next slide, please. We do a couple things for the city of Santa Rosa and two of them have application to housing. We prepare what's called the citywide cost allocation plan and an information technology cost allocation plan. Plan is an interesting term that comes from the federal government. Most of these documents are documents that look forward. And so it's called the plan. Really, there are a series of formulas and calculations and numbers, hundreds of pages of each that work together to spread the indirect costs or support costs of a city to departments that benefit from those services. So we do two separate documents for the city and we're going to spend a few minutes today and talk about them. I'm happy to slow down or speed up. I don't want to take your whole afternoon on this scintillating topic, but I do want to at least provide some overview so you can feel comfortable that the process we use in Santa Rosa is a well thought out and detailed process. One thing that you would like you to keep in mind is the work that I do is an art. It's not a science. This isn't CPA accounting where we find every penny. In fact, if you look at our document, there's nothing to the right of a decimal. That would imply an accuracy that is just not possible in our line of work. So our presentation today is what is a cost allocation plan? Why do cities do them? Is it a common approach? Or is this something unique to Santa Rosa? And then just this brief overview or introduction to both of the documents. Next slide. Okay, why do cities and counties prepare cost allocation plans? There's a variety of reasons and I've listed about a half a dozen here. These documents help us city and a county identify potential reimbursements from federal programs. In other words, a lot of what Kate just described overhead administrative costs, those have to be documented in a certain way or a certain structure. And if the city or the county proceeds with that structure, the federal government will reimburse those indirect costs. So recover costs from federal programs, recover costs from internal service funds. So for example, the cost allocation plan will allocate to the internal service funds within the city. So if the city has a fleet department, the cost allocation plan allocates to the fleet department. So the fleet department will have a true identification of their full costs, their direct costs and their indirect costs. Then the fleet department will use that number to strike their fleet rates and they're able to recover their full cost from their fleet customers. Part of that full cost will go back to the general fund for the support cost that fleet required to operate. Similar, the cost allocation plan identifies the allocations to enterprise funds. So again, the general fund provides general fund support to enterprise funds. The enterprise funds have rates. Those rates recover both the direct costs of the enterprise fund and those citywide indirect costs. Once the enterprise fund receives the rate revenue, they then extend part of that revenue to the general fund, if you will, as a reimbursement for the support they received. Similar to user fees, if the city has a planning department or a building department and they provide services to the citizens of the city, those services are costed at full cost, which includes an allocation from the citywide cost allocation plan. So when one permit fees are charged, they can be charged at a full cost if that's what the city council chooses to do. But the cost allocation plan will help the city identify the ceiling they can charge and that's another purpose of the cost plan. The city also may provide certain services that the state mandates. Some of these services are reimbursable by the state and the full cost can be recovered by the state if a cost allocation plan is done. And then finally, it just provides the city an opportunity to understand the full cost of their services. Whether they recover all of those service costs or not, at least they are starting at a point where they know the full cost of service. And this is especially applicable to, let's say, recreation programs. So for example, you may have a youth soccer league, youth flag football, youth basketball. Cost allocation plan helps the city understand the full cost of those youth sports. And the cost allocation plan and the analysis of the full cost of those sports may be too high to actually charge, but the city at least understands what the full cost is. So these are a few reasons why a city does a cost plan. And in Santa Rosa, as I look over this, I can see Santa Rosa using the cost plan in all six of those areas. Next slide. Just to give you a sense for, I guess, a comfort level in having a sense that you're not the only city that does this. I've been doing this work about 30 years, and I've probably worked for 29 of the 30th, 30 largest cities in California, and then of course, many, many small, medium sized cities. The cost allocation plan process is a process that's adopted throughout the state of California. Here's just a quick slide of some of the cities in a similar population size as Santa Rosa. Just like the population might be a little bit low, because I used this slide a couple years ago, but it will give you a sense that most of the cities your size, we have provided this same service to. And then to the right, similarly to some of your neighbors in the Sonoma County area, we provide this same service to. And another interesting note, all 58 counties in the state of California prepare cost allocation plans, county-wide cost allocation plans, for the same six reasons as the previous slide indicated. So this should just give you a sense that this isn't something unique to Santa Rosa, that you're following the same process that other cities and counties follow within the state. Next slide. This is just a quick illustration that helped you, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is the illustration of what the cost plan does. The boxes on top just kind of identify some of the general administrative services or departments within the city, accounting, payroll, accounts receivable, facilities management, city manager, city council, the legal department, building maintenance, purchasing, the warehouse can go on and on and on. The goal of the cost plan is to take these costs and allocate them down to the departments in the city that benefit from those services. So we allocate down to police, to park and rec, to housing, to enterprise funds, to library, to public works, to water, to sewer and so forth. So the cost allocation plan is a series of formulas, assumptions, statistics that allow us to spread these costs as accurately as we can to those who benefit. Next slide. I wanted to give you a sense for, I started this conversation by saying what I do as an art, not a science, but I wanted to show two polar extremes of how you might do a cost allocation plan. It is possible and sometimes I'll joke with my clients that I can do your cost plan on one piece of paper. This would be a very simple cost allocation plan, one I wouldn't recommend, but I've seen done and there is some validity to this idea. A simple cost allocation plan would simply be lining up all of the departments in a city and I've kind of done that in our example on the right. Then I would take the administrative departments, which in this particular case of the 23,500,000. That would form a numerator. So the cost of all of those administrative departments become the numerator of a simple formula. Then the denominator would be the total cost of all of the direct departments. So our formula would be 23,500,000 divided by about 180 million. That produces an indirect cost rate of 13%. It's possible for the city then to take that 13% and charge if you will or allocate to each department 13% based on their total expenses. So public safety would get 13% of their total expenses would be added on as administrative costs. Public works 13%, transportation 13%, so forth and so on. This is a simple cost allocation plan. The administrative cost divided by the direct cost. I wouldn't recommend this, but this gives you a feel for the idea of spreading administrative costs. In this particular case, there's nothing unique. There's no unique allocation base. There's no base that is related to the service that is provided. It's just simply how big is your budget. Next slide. This then would be a detailed cost allocation plan. I just extracted a few pieces of the Santa Rosa plan just to give you a feel for the detail in your plan versus what I called the simple plan. In this particular case, rather than one department called administrative, and that is the numerator, we have 16 departments. So we look at each administrative department on its own. So we have a accounting department. We have a finance administrative department. We have a city manager department. We have HR departments, so forth and so on. That's important because we want to segregate the cost into like services. Because once we have the cost segregated into like services, we can work to find an allocation base that is reflective of that service. So of those 16 departments, we then take those departments and we break them into functions or cost pools. So if we have an accounting department, we could spread all the accounting costs based on a ratio of total expenses. That would be acceptable. We try to do a little bit better though in Santa Rosa. We'll take accounting and we'll spread, we'll break accounting into smaller pieces. Perhaps we'll have a cost bucket called payroll, one called accounts receivable, one called accounts payable, one perhaps called fixed assets. So we'll take the department called accounting and we'll put it into smaller cost pools. The reason we want to do that is if we have payroll, we would rather allocate payroll using a ratio of the number of paychecks issued per department. If we have a fixed asset cost pool, we want to spread that with some allocation base related to fixed assets. So you can see this effort produces a much more accurate document. Rather than taking accounting in a simple approach, the whole accounting department spread over a ratio of expenses, which means payroll is being spread by expenses, which means fixed asset is being spread by expenses. We prefer to do a little more work than that, break them into the cost pools, identify a unique allocation base that's related, and spread it that way. So you can see on the right, there are, here's some examples of what I just described. So central stores, which is mainly a cost center for postage costs. Well, we don't want to spread that related to the total expenses of every department in the city, especially if we have the allocation or we have the history of postage costs by department that use that cost center. Similar to purchasing. We don't want to allocate the cost of the purchasing effort in the city based on expenses, because there may be a city that never purchased anything. I mean, there may be a department that never purchased anything. We would rather use something related to member purchase orders. Now, this is not a perfect, perfect system because you could say even in purchasing, well, not every purchase order is the same as every other purchase order. That's where this becomes an arc, not a science. At least we didn't allocate purchase based on an expenditure ratio or an FTE ratio. We were at least able to get it to something similar to purchasing, which is purchase orders. A great one, which I really like is in payroll. I alluded to it a little bit earlier. We could allocate payroll based on ratio of salaries per department in the city. But as you might think about that, a large salary, a particular position in the city, let's say the police chief, receives a paycheck. There may be many, many clerks within the police department that don't even add up to the salary of a police chief. So if you're a payroll clerk, it really doesn't matter the size of the paycheck. It just matters how many paychecks. So rather than using a salary ratio, the city is able to tell us how many paychecks per department. So we use paychecks as our allocation base versus anything else. And this is just a really, really good allocation base. So I wanted to just let you have a sense for the simple effort and a more detailed effort. Next slide. Now, unique to Santa Rosa. These are the particular departments we allocate. And to the right would be, again, some of the examples of allocation bases. And we've kind of reviewed this already. You see we have accounting, which has payroll. We use number of paychecks. We use expenditures. We use counterfeit assets. We use square footages, insurance claims, purchase orders. We use all of these kinds of pieces of data or allocation bases that reflect the service rendered and then provide us with a pretty good allocation of those particular costs. Next slide. Now, we also prepare in the city of Santa Rosa. We call the information technology cost allocation plan. This in effect is the charging mechanism for the information technology department. The IT department is an internal service fund in the city. That means they must recover the costs through their customers for them to exist in the city. There's a whole bunch of different ways to allocate information technology. The way that Santa Rosa does it is a very, very good, detailed, dependable way to allocate information technology. There are some IT departments, particularly in very large cities or state departments that purchased very expensive software that keep track of CPU minutes, keep track of printer lines printed, keep track of megabytes of storage. This is the A plus method of allocating an information technology department. It's very expensive and it's very time consuming for staff to maintain. But if you're the city of Los Angeles or if you're the state of Nevada or the state of Oregon and perhaps the state of California, you invest in this software to spread those IT costs. In the city of Santa Rosa, what the city has chosen to do is to model the city-wide cost allocation plan, which is an excellent way to do it. Again, we could do a simple IT plan. We could create an enumerator and a denominator and everybody pays the same percent of their expenditures or we could put in a little bit of work. And in Santa Rosa, we create 13 different departments. The document's about 170 pages. It has 70 functions of IT-related costs and services. We put this together, the 13 departments, the 70 functions and tens and tens and tens of allocation bases and we produce an IT cost allocation plan that spreads the IT costs to those who use it. Next slide. So here's an example. I just wanted to kind of identify this. You'll see on this particular slide a couple things I wanted to point out. You'll see on there something called fleet management. This is on the blue on the left. The city has the IT department manages some fleet software. This is software unique to the fleet. Kind of go down a little bit more. You'll see some software called Hansen software. I wanted to point these two out because fleet is very unique and very specific to the fleet department. Hansen is related to development. Perhaps fire might use it, police might use it, planning building might use it. The reason I point this out is if we were to do a simple cost allocation plan, the numerator and denominator, housing would get a portion of the fleet management software. Whether you have fleet vehicles or not, you would get a portion of the fleet management software cost. The same with Hansen. Whether you use the Hansen software or not, if we did the simple method, you would be receiving a bit of that Hansen software. I had a great conversation with HUD state officials in Los Angeles and preparing a similar document for the city of Inglewood for their housing department. And I used the example that the way we allocated the cost of the city, we split out IT costs and one example I used was we identified some library software. Software unique to the library. And then talking about the process to HUD, I used that as an example. In our effort, the housing department in Inglewood will receive no allocation of the library software. HUD really keyed into that and understood what I was talking about. So our effort then takes each of these costs, employee costs, software costs, equipment costs. And we identify either a percentage of use or the number of computers or the expenditure ratio. And we identify who uses what as best we can. And then we spread those costs. So similar to the city plan as it is to the IT plan, it could be simple or it could be complex. And there's a variety of shades even in between. Next slide. Now, why would we do this every year? Well, it depends on the receiver of the cost, I suppose. If I was going to pay, if you will, the allocation from the city, I would prefer it to be done more often than less often. Things change. Things change in the city. The number of computers change. Every year we ask the city IT department tell us how many computers are in the city. And so we've used kind of an example here. One of the large software costs is the Microsoft software. We happen to allocate it using the number of computers per department. Well, a few years ago that cost was $227,000 and there were 1,318 computers. Housing had 31 of them. Housing's allocated cost was $5,300. Well, a few years later, the cost changed to about $100,000 more, $150,000 more for that Microsoft software, and the number of computers changed. Instead of 2.35% of the total PCs, housing has 2.56%. So the allocation of that particular piece of software, that particular example, means that the cost of Microsoft went up, you have a fractionally a few more computers in terms of a ratio, and the allocation of Microsoft to housing would go up or down based on that data. So the city and the federal government prefer, in fact, the federal government requires that these kinds of plans to receive federal funding must be done each year. And this is a pretty good example of why you would want to do that. Next slide. Okay, conclusion. The cost allocation plan that we do for Santa Rosa and we do for our other clients in most all cities of any size in California follow, they follow state and federal guidelines. The reason we do that is because it produces a standard. Standard makes us and you feel a little bit more comfortable that you're not out on either pole or extreme. Doing this simple cost allocation plan that I've used as our extreme example of something simple would make me and probably should make you feel very uncomfortable. But a detailed effort pushes you toward that zone where you feel more comfortable in its accuracy. Is the document perfect? No. But the federal government has said they didn't have to be perfect. You just have to put in enough effort and work that is equal to the cost that you're going to put in and make sure that that's reasonable. And that's what we've done in Santa Rosa. The costs are calculated each year. So you only pay the actual expenditures of that particular year. We go to great effort to create cost pools and match those cost pools with related allocation bases. We update those allocation bases each year. Where a staff member is going to allocate their time, we ask them to keep as best as they can records about what percent of time they spend with which department. And we use that as well. And we even analyze supplies and services to make sure those supplies and services are also allocated in a way that's reflective of where they're used. So I appreciate your bearing with me. This is a topic I obviously love and have spent a lot of years of my life doing. I do also recognize that anything related to accounting may cause some people to their eyes glaze over. And perhaps they're not as enthusiastic about it as I am. So I appreciate your attention. And with that, I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you for your presentations. Any commissioners have any questions? Thank you. Brad, I'm aware that all cities have different needs. I'm also aware that Santa Rosa has been hit by a natural disaster. It seems like every year since 2017. So with that said, in developing a cost allocation plan or budget, is there a way to build in mass from flexibility given the expensive catastrophes that we've had to incur so that going forward where we're better prepared financially, God forbid if something should happen next year. Okay. Okay. Let me think about that. I have two thoughts. And let's see if they're related to you. If these will help with your question. When I go through the allocation plan process and I get the expenditure report from the city, the city does a good job in identifying things that are called disaster related costs. I owe double check that as my memory, if my memory serves me correctly, we've segregated those unique costs that are related to the disaster and we have not allocated them. So let's say that the city manager has spent an important amount of time related to disasters within the city. They can segregate that in their expenditures. We will exclude that from allocation. So the water department in their allocation, they won't have to pay those unique disaster related costs. The fleet department, they're segregated before allocation, housing, and so forth. If my memory serves me correctly, that's what we've done in the city of Santa Rosa. We've excluded those costs from allocation, trying to make the cost plan not have gigantic spikes and gigantic valleys with unique things that just don't happen every year. Does that help answer the question? It does, but it seems like we've consistently had something happen every year for the past three years, which makes me a little nervous going forward as far as being ready. Yeah, so I think the way I would circle back around and maybe paraphrase what I was trying to say is where the city can segregate costs that are unique to an unusual effort, we typically will not allocate them. So your cost plan should not have these spikes. Housing should not have to pay a unique cost in accounting or the city manager's office that's related to disaster for the citizens in the neighborhoods of Santa Rosa. So the reason I'm not going to say I'm 100% perfect in my explanation is I can't remember for sure, but if my memory serves me correctly, that's what we've done in Santa Rosa. We've excluded those costs. You should not receive those costs if the city segregated them and I saw them. Okay, thank you. That's true. We do have special time codes and charge is where we charge disaster related costs for two reasons. One to keep them out of cost allocation plans such as this and then also to be able to receive federal or state reimbursement for them. We do try to segregate those costs from our normal day to day operational costs. Yes. Okay. So Kate made a good point. The cost allocation plan. Another purpose for the plan is there's no double dipping. In other words, if the city recovers costs from the enterprise funds, they can't then turn around and kind of ignore that they just receive that reimbursement and then allocate those costs again to some other department. So yes, Kate is Kate phrase that correctly. Any other questions from commissioners? Point if I may. And it has to do with the you mentioned HUD's kind of a discussion you had with HUD in a different jurisdiction. So to what degree does HUD audit the cost allocation plans or any other organization? Is there an auditing process like this is the question? Yeah, well, good question. Let me answer it this way. When I started in this business 25, 30 years ago, the audits were much more common than they are now. There were certain rules that dictated that the cost allocation plans must be sent to a particular federal or state office for receiving. About 15 years ago, the federal government and state government changed that to where they said, you keep your document on file. And if we need it, then we'll know where to look for it and you can you can give it to us and we can walk through an audit. I am not familiar in the last few years really participating in a full audit of a cost allocation plan. The example I used was to solve a particular problem in the city and the work solved that problem. And so it was a unique case. It wasn't a case of HUD coming out to audit. It was more of a specific question. So to answer your question, my impression is they don't audit these very often. Last year, did I ask you a question? I did. With regard to the detailed cost allocation plan for the overall city, what percentage in 2021 was allocated to our department versus what's now being planned for 2021-22? Okay. I didn't quite hear the first part of your question. Did you have a specific administrative department in mind? Yes. I was talking about a percentage of the overall city's detailed cost allocation plan. Okay. Overall. The percentage is is allocated to housing. Yeah. So that that number is fairly easy to find. I would have to pull out my document and find it. I don't know. Percentage. Just a percentage would be fine. Boy, I don't I don't know off the top of my head. Kate, are you? Yeah. So a percentage is difficult vice chair test. I know the dollar amounts that we that specifically went to HCS and the housing authority. And I can tell you the year over year difference, but I have at my fingertips the entire amount for the city. So in in general, the cost plan for housing was $796,796 thousand dollars last year and is going up to $884,000 this year, an increase of about 87,000. Good. Thank you. And I will discuss the nuances of that in detail next month when we have our study session, what's driving those increases. Okay. Thank you. Any of the commissioners have a question? I do have a question and follow up to vice chair's question. So basically, if you looked at your one page approach to allocation versus the multiple page approach of allocation. And I think vice chair test question was if we did the one one page approach, here's the total number, here's what your your figure was. How how does the allocation of cost doing that one page approach versus the multiple page approach different? Well, I don't know because we haven't done we haven't really done the one page approach could be done. And for for curiosity's sake, we could do that. In practicality, it would be difficult for the city to have two different cost plans floating around kind of going back to Kate's quick comment that we can't double dip. So I'll give you an extreme example. When I come into a city, I can't sway the results to try to get as high an allocation to the water department as I could and sway the results to get a really, really small allocation to the library.  Here it is for your department. Here's for your department. Everybody was treated equally. So whatever method the city chooses, they would have to choose that one method.  Any of the commissioners want to have that done? I'm not not hearing that. That's that's something we don't have to have done, but thank you for your answer. Yeah, you bet. It's a good question. There any other questions for Mr. Wilkes? Kate, did you have an addition for this item? No, we can conclude this item if there are no further questions. Well, one of the things I wanted to do for clarity's sake is that if we're looking at this and it's stating how the item is reviewed the administrative budget including overhead. So this is we're only talking about the administrative budget of the overall housing in community services. So we're not talking about the cost of the plan, correct? We vouchers on program expenses. We're only talking about administrative costs for the programs. We so the first few slides I went through the first slide was the administrative costs for the entire department and then the next two were how those broke down for the voucher program and the housing trust. I understand but that what we're not discussing here and just to be clear is that we're not discussing the expense that goes out for the exact for the vouchers for it for example. Oh, like the actual rental assistance? Correct. Ah, yes, no, correct. My understanding from what you had asked for last month was a review of overhead and admin and then next month we'll do the larger study session where we review every expense including half and loans and Tebra and all that. Perfect because when we come back next month we'll we've done the deep dive on the administrative costs and then and how those are allocated and appreciate the presentation because it's not always clear as to how locations are done and and it's it's a complicated process. The next piece with what are the overall expenses not only admin costs but program costs and match that up with the revenue associated with that and what would like to see how that compares with the prior years and and the mean and the I want to focus in on something Megan that you discussed which is what the housing authority is and is not doing this year as compared to prior years primarily homeless services can you go into that a little bit further discuss what's being or make I think Kate you discussed this what's being done and taken under the city managers and and and what's what's no longer in their purview of your department and chair and I think this may be a better conversation to have next month when we're looking at the budget as a whole and then Kate I have time to provide the the appropriate information for you so you can look at the current fiscal year and see how it compares to fiscal year 21-22. From a detailed standpoint I completely agree but just an overall process what's what's not in the management not on a number standpoint but just what is not being done by the department this time versus versus last year what is being transferred what services can you reiterate again what what services are being transferred and Kate you're not in your head so I think you have that answer. Yeah and this is just because there is so much work budgetarily because of this so code enforcement in the neighborhood revitalization program are no longer in the department and neither is homeless services those have been moved out of the department so we are primarily a housing authority department at this time with a few other very small program areas still being managed by the department. And how long were those services with done within the department has that been going on for a long time? Code enforcement moved in in 2015 and moved out in 2020 homeless services has been in the department since the inception of that program but has grown huge you know gosh I'm thinking its budget you know five years ago was probably around 800,000 now it's 3.5 million so that's moved out of the city that's moved to the city manager's office and out of housing right now. Okay thank you that's that was my question I wasn't looking for detail but just 30,000 foot level as to what what was what's going on thank you. So I'd like to move on to a public comment on item 4.1. We are now taking public comments on item 4.1 review of fiscal year 2021-22 administrative budget including overhead. If you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand you'll have three minutes to make your comment. A countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and views the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or the conclusion of your comment. Chair Owen at this time I do not see any hands raised and we have not received any email public comment. Thank you I'd like to go ahead and move on to item 4.2 Megan if you want to introduce the staff presenter please. Yes item 4.2 is the home investment partnerships program tenant-based rental assistance overview I will be presenting this item along with Rebecca Lane housing and community services manager and zoom host if you could promote Rebecca as a panelist and bring up the presentation please. Bear with us one moment while we bring the presentation up. All right next slide please. Sorry Megan bear with me here a moment this is the correct one right Megan. Correct I have it up on two screens all right so we're going to start with an overview of the home funding so on an annual basis the city of Santa Rosa which is then delegated to the housing authority for administration receives approximately $750,000 in home investment partnership act funding known as home. The home funding identifies certain percentages which Kate touched on that can be used for administration that's 10% and community housing development organizations and that generally is 15%. When you take out those two allocations we're left with about $560,000 which we have traditionally put towards affordable housing production. Home in recent years has changed the regulations and has required the funds to be used as the last in for development projects which has provided some limitations in applying these to affordable housing projects through our solicitation process. Next slide please. The home regulations do allow the funds to be used as tenant-based rental assistance which is often known as TEBRA. This can provide direct rental assistance to households for up to 24 months and we can assist households up to 60% of area median income versus the 30% that the housing choice voucher or section 8 program targets. Rebecca Lane and I have done some preliminary math and determined that we can likely assist 33 households a year based on our current rent contributions to eligible households. Next slide please. And Rebecca will touch on the administration of the program. Thank you Megan and good afternoon commissioners. This is Rebecca Lane and the manager of the housing choice voucher program and we have in this department since the pandemic began we started with an emergency keeper program which has provided us some insight as to the program overall. So if we do that that's a different that different rules set of rules that came along with the emergency keeper program so I'll just be focusing on going forward if we decide if you decide commissioners to adopt an ongoing keeper program what that might look like. So the department of housing community services will administer the program as mentioned in the previous slide. It's similar in concept to the housing choice voucher program in so far as the rental calculation is what we can do as a jurisdiction is that we can adopt the existing rental calculation that is used for the housing choice voucher program and that is what we've done for the emergency keeper program and that has allowed us to utilize the existing infrastructure of the housing choice voucher program software as well as the you know staff training and other other infrastructure and needs for getting the the rental assistance out the door. It is paid similarly to the voucher program paid directly to the owner so again we're utilizing and would be utilizing going forward the existing processes that we have to make payments directly to two owners through our accounts available department. So the keeper program is different in in many ways too from the housing choice voucher program. So one of them is that it is time limited and it provides up to two years of assistance and the the participating jurisdiction which would be the department is required to examine the income of the family at least annually. In the keeper program that we can also establish a preference for people who have been experiencing homelessness people who are elderly or people with disabilities and this is a written policy that would need to be adopted if we were going forward with setting preferences for the keeper program but it is just an option it is not a requirement. HUD does require that the participating jurisdiction oversee the day-to-day operations of the program and that's whether we're administering it internally or whether it's being contracted out so that is a requirement of the program as well. Megan mentioned that we are able to assist approximately 33 households per year that's what we are projecting based on the information that we have on our current housing choice voucher for unit costs and next slide please. So the purpose of the study session today is just to present this information regarding the home zebra program as an option and for to have the commissioners present us with any input and direction going forward. We're happy to answer any questions. Thank you commissioners have any questions? Rebecca is this just a another way of helping people get into housing or is it a is it taking place a part of the existing? It would be another resource that we could offer to families in Santa Rosa they would need to be at or below 90 percent of the participants would need to be at or below 60 percent of the area median income we would have the option to offer assistance of the remaining 10 percent to go up to income levels as high as 80 percent so that's a that's very different than the housing choice voucher program and that would be therefore an offer to a different population than is currently being served by the voucher program which as Megan mentioned is the requirement there is that 75 percent and the assistance is targeted to households after below 30 percent of AMI and we can go as high in the voucher program to 50 percent of AMI so this income targeting is different. Okay thank you. Thank you. Yes I think I was reading in the press democrat that there is some funding that's going to be sent to local jurisdictions specifically Santa Rosa to help with tenants who've not been able to pay their rent because of COVID and landlords who have not been able to receive rent because their tenants have been furloughed can you verify is there any federal funds coming to to help with that particular shortage? Yes so this is Megan I'm happy to answer that and certainly if there's additional questions I can come back in April with more information it's actually coming to the county of Sonoma so the U.S. Treasury and then the Department of Housing and Urban Development have allocated two tranches of funds to jurisdictions with a population over 200,000 so the city of Santa Rosa was not eligible because our population is under 200,000 but the county of Sonoma will be receiving approximately 15 million directly from the treasury and then through funds that will be flowing to the state and then to back to the county another 15 million so a total of 31 million dollars will be coming to the county of Sonoma to be administered countywide to assist with rental payments and either they can be either to tenants or to landlords and also can be applied to utilities that are in arrears for people who have been impacted by COVID we are still receiving additional information on the implementation of this program so I don't have details on how it's going to be administered and an outreach that'll be available to the public but I can certainly come back in April with those facts once they are further developed and then also just for your information the city attorney and I will be conducting a study session for the city council in April on rental assistance and then also the county's recent eviction ordinance. Thank you Megan. Any other questions? Yes chairman on I have a question can either Kate or Megan explain how similar this program proposal is to what the county is doing with the use of home funds? And Rebecca certainly can chime in as well because she does have a relationship with the county's housing authority but the county does use their home funds to provide tenant-based rental assistance and so we have been in conversation with their housing choice voucher staff on how they administer the program. Rebecca? Yes the county, Sonoma County Housing Authority also has a home allocation and as Megan said they do use that for tenant-based rental assistance or TEBRA so those are I don't know in terms of how many families per year but it is a much smaller program than the voucher program similar as we would have established if that's what we're going to do going forward so we're estimating we'd be able to help about 33 families per month per year. Thanks Kate I was just you know I'm thinking you know if it makes sense to the city the more similar the program in the county is to the city of Santa Rosa's program the easier it is for those recipients that might be pursuing use of the programs so that's my idea. Right so this would also be limited to the jurisdiction so county of Sonoma residents would have access to the existing Sonoma County Housing Authority TEBRA program and if we establish one going forward it will be available only to the city of Santa Rosa. Any other questions? So I have if you Megan or Rebecca the home funds that were used in the past what was the last used of home funds in the prior fiscal year your prior not specifically just in general did these funds have to go in last on a project is that correct? That is correct and so we've had some difficulty finding projects where given the small amount of resource that's available that we have a project that'll have a gap that's about you know less than 600,000 so as Rebecca mentioned we um did a reprogramming with home funds that we had available at the end of last fiscal year and provided the emergency rental assistance for COVID and we were able to launch that in June and off the top of my head I unfortunately cannot recall the last project where we provided construction assistance through home it may have been the crossroads but I'm I can't confirm that right now. So it's been a little while? Correct. So as we go through the numbers and look at costs coming in with NOPA requests either the CDBGR or knowledge of other projects coming in per unit costs or anywhere from 400 to 600,000 a unit so 560,000 doesn't even really get one unit built so keeping it in the current home the way the home funds are being used to our building projects is very difficult versus this can be adding up to 33 vouchers coming in for people to come in and Rebecca I have a question if the current housing choice voucher is 33 percent 30 percent of the area of median income and someone is doing better but not quite great yet meaning that they if their income goes up and they no longer qualify I know there's a process to go through being not losing your voucher right away but would that type of resident be able to then use this type of voucher for two years and then free up a housing choice voucher for somebody using that would qualify at 30 percent is that a possibility for this? I can look into whether or not that would how how that could be an allowable preference I'm not sure if that would be an allowable preference for Tebra but I can certainly look that up and find out and get back to you in terms of how it works with the housing choice voucher program is the income limits don't apply as soon as a person leases with a voucher so what that means is you have to be at or below either 30 percent or 50 percent of AMI and again it's the majority of our assistance is targeted to households out of out of below 30 percent so once you're established on the program then you are considered over income not once your household income reaches a different threshold on the income level but when 30 percent of your monthly adjusted income is equivalent to the entire rent and your utilities so basically when you can afford to pay your entire rent that's when you graduate off the program and there is a 180 day window a cushion that someone that is automatically built in so that if an income change or income loss happens during that 180 day window the family can come back and request to be reinstated on the program and if that doesn't work they could qualify under this program because it's at a higher income approach uh income level it's possible so right so we'll we would um i'll be doing so i'll i'll look into the the waiting list and um the uh tenant preference policies and whether or not we could set that as a preference or if we could just refer people to that resource if they felt that they needed um you know ongoing assistance they they would be though paying their entire rent at at that point so in the in the unit that they currently occupy okay so they may not need the assistance at that point that's thank you for the clarification because it's always i've never quite ruled fully understood well what if you actually get that pay raise you've been hoping for now are you lose your voucher means there's no you don't you just pay more of your rent toward that voucher program until you're paying right right exactly until you're paying the full rent and your utilities because the utilities are calculated into that as well your out of pocket utility costs so it's when you can cover your housing costs with 30 percent of your monthly adjusted income that you are weaned off the program you do have that 180 day um uh cushion for a readjustment so this would help on the demand side providing up to approximately 33 more voucher residents how are we doing on the supply side with the parking units available for these types of um that would have the market rate considered market rate rents available versus luxury apartments or something that would not qualify because the rents are too high for that type of unit sure yeah that's a great question the the t-bra program does follow the same rent reasonable nest rules as the housing choice voucher program so we would be advising families utilizing this resource to essentially look you know kind of the middle middle of the market not as you say luxury housing necessarily but um we the vacancy rate if you're if you're asking about that as well we have seen a little bit of uh softening in the rental market um not not anything spectacular it's still difficult out there but but it is uh improving over the last few years in terms of our participants being able to find housing and then I if anybody can answer this maybe Jeff Burke if you if you might know there was discussion about having um you cannot discriminate based upon somebody wanting to Rebecca's shaking head I think she knows what I'm asking um you can't discriminate somebody coming in from a voucher you can't turn away somebody because their rent's going to be that is in play right now is that correct that's correct that is a statewide ordinance and then we also have established a city ordinance to that effect and that's a source of income discrimination ordinance which means that a landlord has to consider a voucher holder they can't make a blanket statement that they will not rent uh two tenants utilizing voucher okay Rebecca is there any teeth in that law in other words it's pretty easy for one to say that they're not going to give somebody an apartment uh for some up for some reason when the true reason is that they don't want to take a voucher recipient is there any teeth to uh find them or whatever if they're found to be uh not complying with the law and Jeff might Jeff Burke might remember the the local um enforcement policy but we do refer if tenants um we know that property owners and managers have established policies in compliance with the state um in terms of their tenant screening so how they how they need to adjust their tenant screening procedures so there's um new requirements about that that that owners are adopting and if we have we receive any um concerns from our participants about whether or not they feel that they have that this has not been followed um then we refer them to our um legal resources including fair housing summing county legal aid california rural legal assistance and others there's not up to you no we're not the enforcement agency okay thank you Rebecca i got a question for you uh and this is a carry over from a conversation we had with uh uh one of the other student attorneys is hard to prove that you've been discriminated against because a lot of people aren't gonna come out and write you a letter saying you know we don't take section eight housing but at the same time to how do you protect tenants who are suddenly being not taken seriously because they're they have a section eight voucher and i think sues this is sue gallagher i think her response was it's very difficult it can be very difficult to prove and i propose if there was a way to educate potential landlords you know about this program and some of the quote unquote stigmas associated in the past with this program that it's guaranteed what will not guarantee but it's it's guaranteed rent in a sense if that's an appropriate word in this context if i may just step in through the chair so um i think you're raising good questions um but i want to be mindful that we're kind of moving away from the uh topic on the agenda i will share briefly that what i do recall and this is going back over a year so my memory is a little fuzzy but commissioner downy i think you're right i think one of the concerns that was raised was the ability to prove up your case and and that's true with any form of discrimination so yeah it sometimes it may be difficult but you know there's there's different ways that that that you could try to prove up that discrimination and and if this is a topic that the the housing authority if the commissioners want you know to have a discussion another day on a special special agenda item then then you can do that thank you thank you Jeff for one of one of the things i would like to have discussed in the future just for everybody's understanding is and rebecca you brought up the term rent reasonableness so that process and how it works in terms of just as simple we can put that on the agenda in a future meeting to explain okay so here's what the rent is market rent this is how the rent reasonableness comes into what's considered rent in the voucher system and how that works because it's not i haven't been doing this that long and it's not quite understood you know hud comes out with figures that this is what the fair market rent is but that's not necessarily what city san rosa uses as the rent reasonableness and if we can put that on agenda in the future to just have a brief presentation of how that works so you could walk through and say okay here's the numbers on the programs for housing choice it's 30 so this is a person making a household one to four would make this income this is what the rent would be this is utilities and have a discussion as to when that information is released each year we can start i think that would be helpful for future discussions it's just a future nothing nothing longer complicated just another presentation of how the numbers work because we talk about these issues all the time but i'm not sure if there's a complete understanding of how that works okay commissioner berg yeah i i um well my first question i guess is related to uh the presentation uh where it says home funds for affordable housing production need to be the last funds the affordable housing production so i guess my question is going to be used for rehabilitation of affordable housing i would need to review the home rigs um because i don't know off the top of my head thanks thanks and then um my only reservation about going this direction is that if you do have a very tight market and people are having a very difficult time using their vouchers you know for the regular program the housing choice voucher program and this adds more people searching for units that are scarce may not be able to be found then it would be preferable to use the funds for housing production or rehabilitation so i guess that's that's my only reservation i don't know that i i know that um uh rebecca has kind of commented on the fact that the market has gotten softer softer and it's improving in terms of people's ability to find units but maybe some more specifics on that when you do return or now if you have time well and certainly in our next study session um i think it's 4.3 we're going to be talking about the upcoming NOFA so we'll have a review of the funding that we'll have for production um in the very near future rebecca if you have any input on the amount of time that it's taking tenants to secure housing presently there yeah just in general right now i can comment on you know the voucher program and the performance there um our success rate um is it's pretty high and the success rate is the number of vouchers and the issue of those how many find housing um and we're hovering at about 80 to high 80 percent um in that arena so there's not very many people who who need to ultimately give their vouchers back to the housing authority um we have also as we said you know we've seen um definite uh improvement in terms of the number of units that uh are advertised to our department that's sort of an anecdotal uh sign uh but we definitely see more property managers now reaching out to us to say hey i have a vacancy and i'd like to participate in your program and i want to to advertise directly to voucher holders um and uh some data that i don't have up the top of my head but that we do track and i can bring back is um for example like how long it takes for a new voucher holder to find housing um those are some those are some pieces of information that might inform going forward uh with uh tbra um and you know sort of taking that as a as a model um as that were and to give us a little bit more information on some of those things um and also considering um that the um tbra the potential tbra participants would also potentially have a higher income level um and and i'm not sure you know how that might interplay with um some of those uh data points thank you again any other commissioner questions so from going forward um what would happen now would this be a permanent change is this because this is a study session and there's not a resolution to vote for what what happens now well if there's direction and support to proceed with implementing tbra in the upcoming fiscal year we would incorporate it into the budget and action plan so we would we would need to understand that it's supported before we return with the budget at the next meeting um and then certainly if you uh if the housing authority was inclined in the future to reprogram home funds for production we could look at pivoting the funding in future fiscal years and it's a 24-month commitment so we could scale it back if that was the direction so we're not we're not taking a vote um the commissioners have uh discussion or recommendations on indirection can i ask a quick question can somebody quickly explain the difference between tbra and a project-based voucher yeah i can take that um question thank you um commissioner downey so the project-based vouchers are part of the housing choice voucher program so the funding is uh that's part of the voucher program so this is a different funding source and this is only tenant-based rental assistance that's what we're that's that's what this uh resource could be used as so it would just be direct rental assistance to uh uh for on behalf of families to landlords it would not be tied to the particular project well i have a question mr johnson uh as of right now what is that medium uh sonoma county income that that they're 30 percent you know what that number is for a family of four yes so for a family of four 30 percent is 34,100 and just for the point of comparison 60 percent is 68,160 this again is for a family of four so below that i'm below that number you're the 34,100 is a gross income that they can have and i'm sorry would you rephrase it for me please yeah so under the current housing choice voucher program your traditional section eight program a household the majority of the households cannot earn more than 34,100 again this is for a family of four yes and then under the tipper program that we're discussing right now the um income limit for a family of four would be 68,160 oh that's okay i got it thank you very much you're welcome and again these um income levels are adjusted annually so this is the 2020 limits the 2021 will be released in june thank you mr chair yes i just uh i i do support going forward to with this i am interested in having a response from staff line if it can be used for rehabilitation then does that change your opinion about how to use these funds i mean if if there's some projects out there that are really in dire straits and could use that money for rehabilitating existing units we always have a hard time finding funds to put into preservation of housing rehabilitation of housing so i'm just i'm just wanting to make sure that that you are comfortable with making the recommendation if these funds can also be used for rehabilitation again i need to go back to the rags but i would say the other limitation that um i am aware of off the top of my head with the use of these federal funds for rehab would be the borrower would then need to prepare an environmental assessment pursuant to HUD requirements so that would be an additional step in order to rehabilitate and i believe that home regulations prevent us from putting additional home funds into a project so for instance if we had an older project from the year 2000 that is suddenly in need of rehab and it originally had a home investment we could not put additional funds into it home funds so there are some limitations oh it's so likely that it would change your recommendation but i would like to you know have you give some thought to that when when you come back thank you we'll do okay i'd like to um listening i'm hearing that what we want to do is is look into whether or not the funds can be used for rehabilitation of the home funds and this would come back make it next month is part of the budget process so the budget next month i believe is just a study session we can have a separate if you would like to take formal action we can put it on the agenda as report item so i would want to put it yeah our city attorney is shaking his head yes it's so we we can do this with is formal action i'd like to look at it as as a a two-year trial and assessed after that point in time and that would match up with how long people can stay on it i don't know if that's possible because if you put people on after after the initial of that works that if you're looking at that it looking into possibility as to whether if we can put it on a temporary basis of a couple years well i think one thing we could certainly do is um we can look at a two-year trial we can come back after a year and review the implementation and see if that's meeting the desires of the housing authority and how we are assisting the community see if the assumptions actually are playing out to what we thought they would be any other questions from commissioners so we essentially put in the language of a sunset clause if we were to approve this to give us an opportunity to get out of it if it's not doing what we expected it to do the question was could we put in a sunset clause is that what you're asking commissioner downy yes if it turns out that it's not working could there be the language of a sunset clause that will enable us to get out of it and try something else if it's not meeting our expectations for the local jurisdiction and just for clarifications commissioner downy what do you consider not meeting expectations not meeting the population that we anticipated to me getting back to not being able to use any funds for for rehab if that becomes blatantly clear since rehab tends to become is becoming more of a common discussion in our in our meetings and just any other idiosyncratic means that we may need to use this funding for would we be able to do that or would the restrictions prohibit us from addressing issues that are coming for this housing authority yes yeah if i may step in so it sounds like this is the staff is getting direction today to bring an item back and that item i'm not quite sure the form but it's not going to be in the form of an ordinance when you say sunset clause that's my thinking is that it's like an ordinance that requires a more formal process so i think that the your board will have more flexibility if upon review after it's a year of whatever stage to to make whatever changes i mean it sounds like it's more of a budget item or perhaps a resolution so the ability to make changes will be uh uh you'll have a lot more flexibility i believe so jeff would you call it a trial period would that be more of an accurate characterization as opposed to a sunset clause yes okay megan does that provide the direction yes we will return i'll return in april with a resolution and we'll um work on addressing the items that have been discussed okay thank you um any other discussion from commissioners um um we'll open it up for public comment on this on this item we are now taking public comments on item 4.2 home investment partnerships program tenant-based rental assist overview if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you are dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand you will have three minutes to make your comment a countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of the countdown or at the conclusion of your comments chairown at this time i see no hands raised and we have not received any email public comments thank you very much moving on to item 4.3 and megan if you want to go ahead and introduce the staff presenter yes thank you item 4.3 is the fiscal year 2021 2022 notice of funding availability process i will be presenting this item and if nicole rathbun can also be promoted as a panelist to assist with any questions and if you could get the presentation up thank you all right next slide please so in fiscal year 2021-22 we anticipate having approximately eight million dollars in federal and local funds available to use for affordable housing production purposes similar to what we have done with our last few rounds of notices of funding availability often known as NOFAS we like to position projects for upcoming state funding opportunities and these include the california debt limit allocation committee applications which are going to be due in may 2021 the nine percent tax credits and this is the second round of 21 it'll be due july 1st and then the multifamily housing program which will be available in summer 2021 and all three of these are important resources in order to fully fund affordable housing projects and advance them towards construction next slide please so the priorities that we have used over the past few years have been new construction targeted to large families seniors workforce or special needs which can be veterans people experiencing homelessness next slide please the priorities that we have again applied to projects within the last few funding rounds are the readiness to start construction we're looking for projects that can start as quickly as possible projects that are in priority development areas opportunity areas station area plans and then high resource areas which are areas of Santa Rosa that have a high level of services and they can score better in state funding rounds we also look for projects that provide deeper affordability so these would be units a larger percentage of units that are targeted to households at 30 and 50 percent of area median income and if there are significant benefits so if it is in an area that we have been looking to revitalize if it's an asset that has been identified by the city as something that we would like to redevelop in the near future or if there are other attributes associated with the project that we can identify with when we're reviewing the project next slide please what the other areas we look at are feasibility so tied back to readiness can it start construction in the very near future what are the self scores that the applicant has provided in the application materials that make it a competitive project what are the developer's qualifications and capacity are they able to carry out this project and do so in a timely fashion and provide us with a high quality product and then to what extent can they maximize other funding sources next slide please so in response to our NOFA processes in an effort to constantly improve the way we administer our NOFA process we are proposing to incorporate a point system into the fiscal year 21-22 process and this would provide up to 100 points for projects and so it would create an immediate metric for reviewing a project when we have the committee take a look at it and then when we bring it to the housing authority so the points and this the font does get a little small the first area would be readiness so again can the project start construction quickly has it received its planning approvals our building permits ready to issue and it would be arranged from zero to ten zero being there's no application submitted for planning ten being it's fully entitled second would be affordability this being identified as a priority can be awarded up to 20 points so what percentage of the project is restricted and how many of the units fall within 30, 50, 60 and as we've been seeing lately 80 percent of AMI and having points awarded within the zero to 20 point scale bedroom sizes are also an important factor are they all studio units or do we have a range up to three bedroom which can serve large families special needs set asides so this would go back to are there units for veterans are they identifying formerly homeless individuals or is there another segment of the population that the developer is proposing to set aside units for and this can tie back to other funding sources too if you're looking at some of the competitive programs at the state this may play into that leveraging so to what extent are you seeking other funding sources are you looking for tax credits bonds applying to HCD's program or are you pursuing other funding opportunities such as private loans and donations and then we want to take a look at how competitive the project might be in the state funding rounds whether that's SIDLAC, TCAC or MHP and so this would be based on the applicants submittal of the application to that various those bodies and this is something we have required in prior rounds as well as provide us with a copy of the application you're submitting so we can see what you're presenting to the state as I mentioned on a prior slide the developer and manager experience is very important so up to 15 points depending on the the experience have you developed units locally how many units have you developed or are you developing throughout the state and as we've done before if you are new a new applicant to Santa Rosa we will reach out to other jurisdictions that you've worked with and obtain references for your performance and management of the of the development services in amenities so what is the proximity to grocery libraries parks schools and this also will tie back to the project's competitiveness in other funding rounds and then finally other factors and these would be has the housing authority assisted you in the past if we're already financially invested in a project that may be something that we certainly want to see proceed to construction if you are on a site that has been identified by the city as being an important redevelopment opportunity that could be another factor that we provide points to next slide please we also like to continue with having a subcommittee and the subcommittee has been comprised of two housing authority commissioners that meet with staff to review the funding recommendations after the applications have been reviewed and provide us with their input and direction on how we will make the recommendation to the housing authority or recommendations next slide please so staff is seeking direction on the priorities that were presented and the appointment of a subcommittee that will help us with the focus NOFA for 21 22 and then for the housing authorities information as a result of the May 2021 sidlack application deadline we're hoping to release our NOFA next week in order to receive projects and review the applications in advance of that deadline and hopefully have a special meeting in early May if we have competitive projects that will be proceeding with those those funding sources so that concludes my presentation Nicole and I would be happy to answer any questions that the housing authority may have Megan I think this is fabulous I think this is great you should be congratulated it'll do three things first of all it will help your staff number two it'll help us number three it will help the developer so if he gets a copy of the saying they can add you know they they don't so I think it's great and it also makes it so much simpler for uh to sit down now the parameters you develop to who gets how many in other words how those points are determined is maybe up for grab but I think it's a I think it's a great great program so in response thank you Commissioner Wilson in response to your comments I'd like to say that Nicole has been instrumental in developing the point system and what I um we intend to do is include the point scale in the NOFA so a developer can understand the ranges within those particular areas and can quickly identify where they'll be able to fall and the the intent is to provide more transparency in our review process and we're constantly trying to improve this so we'll take a look at it after this this next funding round and see how we can revise it further okay congratulations Nicole for me she's right there thank you for your comments the intent of the point scale is also to have smaller scales within each category for example if there's a category worth 10 points we would establish ahead of time the criteria for meeting a score between seven and ten for example and then the next tear down what is the criteria for meeting a score between say four and six and have sub categories within the total amounts of points available so it's very clear to applicants to the housing authority staff the public and staff as to where these projects are falling and the reasoning for their scoring so we will have it tied down even tighter than the overall points available as shown in the PowerPoints great thank you the other comments from commissioners yes the only comment I have I thank you Nicole um I do appreciate the scoring it's just looking at the larger picture of being able to build ourselves out of or put a dent in low income housing just kind of as a big existential question um and then looking at um how much creativity can we employ to use more high density housing um as a way of providing more housing opportunities for people with even though I think it was um Rebecca that said the house the realm market is softening it's still extremely expensive and I see more people needing uh some sort of subsidy which is so eloquently laid out in your point scale and I'm just curious um you know looking forward you know as you're granting novice how much of a dent are you projecting us being able to put a dent how much dent are you projecting us being able to put into our housing need uh within San Rosa I think and Nicole jump in and correct me if I'm wrong we've been seeing project contributions about 150 000 per unit and so if we're looking at about eight million dollars in this upcoming round um that's probably about 53 units that we would be able to assist but we won't know until we receive the applications and we're seeing where those projects are positioned financially uh with the cdbg dr that the housing authority acted on in january we had 38 million available and I believe we're able to assist uh over 300 units that's your task do you have a question yes um yes um a question for Nicole Nicole um on the uh january uh meeting and the evaluation that you put forward for the NOFA for the dr funds um did you use a similar point system but and and now you've honed it down to what were is before us today or was the reason for putting the point system which is great because of any issues that you ran into into the dr NOFA with the dr NOFA what our constraints were we're operating through hcds required priorities um so many of their required metrics to meet in these applications were a simple yes and no um so a scoring factor on those were not necessary and there were I believe four other categories that could have been graded on a point scale um but instead with the applications that we did receive it didn't warrant breaking them down to that degree it was things like is the project entitled yes or no um or in process so it didn't necessitate the detailed level of point scoring that we are trying to establish for future funding rounds but if I can interject I'd say that based on some of the feedback we received following the dr NOFA having an established point system will certainly help us in communicating with the applicants on how and why they were ranked the way they were and so it'll be an objective criteria that we can apply across all projects and help improve our communications with those developers and let them know yes yeah that that's a very good point I'm glad to hear that um I did have a comment regarding the subcommittee I think it was uh I was part of the last subject subcommittee uh which included two of the city council persons and I found that really valuable and I think it's also an opportunity to have the council members get to know more detailed things about how the housing authority operates commissioner test are you um requesting or suggesting that we include uh city council member in the upcoming review I think it would be valuable from a point of view of informing the city council as to what we do I'm not really sure that they know all of the details that we always discuss at our meetings and all it can do is help elevate uh the council's opinion of the housing authority and how important some of these things that we take on is is is valuable for the city overall if that is the direction of the housing authority I'm more than happy to reach out to the mayor and and ask for a council member to assist us in the review um for these upcoming applications so I'll wait for further direction on that yeah um now that's my opinion I I'd like to know if there's other commissioners who feel the same way to follow on that for the cdb gdr funds that was was reviewed by two housing authority members as well two two members from the city council as vice chair test alluded to and then there was also a last one that was done and I'm not remembering which one it was this was the senior center project on benna valley road what was the instance of that where we also had two members from city council review the projects was that a NOFA specific or I don't remember what that came through sure so that was uh because the former benna valley senior center site is a city owned facility that was a request for proposals to develop the site so an rfp which is different than our NOFA process uh an rfp is basically saying to the community to the development community we have this site that we would like to have developed for this purpose um but there were no funds attached to it and because it's a city owned site that is why there were city council members included in that review okay thank you that's that's clarifies the the differences any other comments yes if I may um so if I understand this uh which since the NOFA is supposed to be released next week I think is what I heard um this this and there won't be time for any kind of um this is kind of a beta test you see that as it being kind of a an experimental test for modifying the NOFA yes we would like to implement these this point system and then probably june so following review of the applications and action will come back and kind of do a debrief on on how we think it went and where we can improve for the next funding cycle and try and get it ahead of of this process that would definitely be be helpful you know for a committee to kind of get an idea also to what degree you know I I mean you you don't really know how well a system a point system is going to work until you kind of had some experience with it um so I would hope that there would be some latitude in in the process but I also wonder if you've had any well there's probably no opportunity to have any reaction from the applicants in the community because they're probably hearing about this for the first time right now if they're tuned in is that correct correct I think there are some developers that are listening in this afternoon and in formulating this point system I did research other jurisdictions and so there are there just some don't have point systems like we had previously been operating and some do have point systems so it's it's kind of all over the board and so it would certainly be great to to try it see how it works and then we have the other factors category which gives us a little wiggle room to identify things that are important to us or not so important and then return in June and and do a debrief and and get your feedback okay thanks so do these tend to align with the other funding sources for instance tkac and any other funding source that applicants are likely to be seeking the general criteria does follow the tkac and sidlack and then also as I touched on the point scale there is a section for competitiveness so if a project is scoring and based on what the developer or applicant has provided us if it's scoring very well then they have the potential to receive the full 10 points in that particular category that will just to note that will be a disadvantage for projects that aren't going to be seeking bonds or tax credits or other hcd funding sources it would be interesting to hear the input on that the on on your points system I think when it got to amenities you mentioned groceries and some some offsite kinds of things I would I would really suggest onsite amenities be included in that review and you know for an example you know you have a family development and you have lots of kids and what are they doing in terms of recreational opportunities for kids and where they located kind of that that part of it I like to see people put a lot of thought into what they can do to support those folks that are going to be living there that are on very low income and have fewer opportunities and I think the only other thing is that I don't recall that our other know is I mean obviously the CDBGDR was focused on new production but have our others excluded applicants for rehabilitation we have not excluded and my intention wasn't to exclude and certainly if it's the inclination of the housing authority we could set aside 100,000 or so we do have a fairly robust pot of money for the upcoming fiscal year for rehab but last last year for 2021 it went towards new production and the prior year which was 1920 the funds went towards new production and that was a project that was able to receive a 9% allocation from TCAC so for the last few years this has been how the the NOFAs have kind of been geared so so the intent isn't to exclude applications for rehabilitation no and actually now that I'm thinking about it we did provide a couple small rehab loans and Nicole if you remember what year it was they were for community action partnership I think altogether they needed about 200,000 in rehab funding and we were able to carve that out of the NOFA and still make awards for new production and I believe those awards were made at the tail end of 2019 with the loan underwriting occurring in the beginning part of 2020 I guess I'm I'm recalling I'm not sure when it was it goes back probably a few years and well I know there were two applicants that were seeking funds one for Apple Valley of Papago for the units there and the other was North Point Apartments I think that was Bridge Housing that was in 2017 and that was yes Apple Papago and then Chelsea Gardens and that was specifically for CDBG funds because CDBG can be used for rehab yeah North Point was was in there they're mixed there at one time as well but yeah so as long as those applications aren't excluded because sometimes preservation can be really important if you know there's no other options for properties that are in need of repair now hopefully they can find other sources and we'll have more funds for new production but that's not always the case thank you correct and I think we we did see that in February when we had the rehab loan for the her and veterans village so we'll make sure we could rehab as an intelligible source if that's the the wish of the entire that's my view and and that obviously and also I think the vice chair just suggestion that a member of the city council be invited to participate in the committee I think that's a good idea so Megan if an application scores low will they have an opportunity to resubmit it for a higher scoring or is it just rejected and moved on to the next one depending on the applications we receive the number of applications and the funding sources that they are pursuing I anticipate we would advance the highest scoring once the review committee has has taken a look at what staff has initially reviewed and ranked it really depends on the number of applications and the amount of money that's being requested but it may be difficult for a project without completely redesigning their their project and the structure that they're presenting to come back and be more competitive a Megan in Rebecca I mean Nicole sorry it's congratulations on putting this together I mean for the short time I've been on the housing authority I've always thought that a point system was necessary for transparency and objectivity to and also to be able to leverage the process that applicants go through already which is your project competitiveness either going through SIDLAC now this is going to be when you're looking at this the 2021 TCAC and SIDLAC application is that what we're going to be reviewing and so just because an applicant is not going through that process they can still fill out that application for those 10 points is that correct they can they can still fill out the application and in our prior funding rounds we still make them submit the application it certainly may affect their competitiveness in our review because they're not seeking those funding those that funding source but again it depends on the applications that we receive and there are other areas where they they may excel compared to another application and Megan um one other piece of information um Megan correct me if I'm wrong here but the intent of this no fit is to put forward projects and position projects who are who are applying for the upcoming TCAC and SIDLAC and MHP state programs so for this specific NOPA having the rating criteria from their self scores would be appropriate but that may be a category that is looked at at future NOPAs to determine if we're going to keep it there depending on the intent this is the focus NOPA where we're specifically trying to position programs for those other funding sources is I I've gone through the the scoring system for the SIDLAC and TCAC application and there's a lot of overlap in terms of affordability bedroom size service and amenities and to follow up with uh one of the commissioners points that the commissioner berks point about if you have child care services on there that would qualify under the services and amenities for 10 points is that correct the following yeah I'm going to call her Megan yes and I made a note to make sure that we revise that in the the draft NOPA language and in our point system to include onsite services and amenities and one of the things we have highlighted in prior NOPAs and the application review is what are the services that are being provided to the tenants are there you know after school programs counseling so there's a there's a wide variety of opportunities that some developers provide onsite and so we'll make sure that that's included in that point category and if I'm not mistaken I believe those services that you just discussed would have made them score higher on their SIDLAC and TCAC application I believe so well um congratulations this is really good I think it moves forward um it provides a lot of clarity or as uh Commissioner Olson stated it's helps staff and it helps applicants to have more clarity in terms of what's how their projects will be scored are there any other questions from commissioners so Megan before I open this up for public comment what is the recommendation if this needs to go out the NOPA in a week what are you looking for direction from housing authority commissioners to be able to approve this structure and go forward because there's nothing to vote on correct there's no action it's just direction so what we're looking for is is the housing authority supportive of this concept and then as we discussed we'll return for a debrief after we've we've given it this run with the 21-22 NOPA process and evaluate was this successful how can we improve it for future funding rounds so again just is this something that you are in support of us proceeding with I'm hearing support unless one of the commissioners wants to all the comments have I had been supportive of this process I'd be interested in hearing from the public just I mean before I suggest maybe we listen to the public and then kind of conclude okay so with that I'll open up for public comment we are now taking public comments on item 4.3 fiscal year 21-22 notice of funding availability process do you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you are dialing in via telephone please dial star 9 to raise your hand you'll have three minutes to make your account down timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and the viewers please make sure the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comment our first speaker is mary stomp mary I have given you speaking permission can you confirm that you see the timer I see the timer okay your your time starts now thank you mary stomp I'm executive director of pep housing first I applaud you for coming up with a scoring system it will allow you to be much more transparent as a developer I didn't think that the cdb gdr process was transparent I had asked for to review the scoring and there wasn't any so I really applaud you in doing that but I do want to talk to you about your criteria bedroom size will be a huge disadvantage to senior projects and the state funding sources have moved away from giving bedroom size points so I I encourage you to remove that as a criteria last year was also a focus NOFA so those of us that weren't seeking tkak or hcd funds were unable to apply so I I encourage you to rethink about the disadvantage for you for saying if you're not seeking tkak or hcd funds like for example the re our project where we were building 26 studios we were I raised like 3.5 million dollars you should encourage that kind of that kind of that kind of funding because it takes less public funding for projects so I don't agree with the the I think it's a real disadvantage for you to remove basically remove projects they're not going to be competitive for those seeking not seeking tkak and and hcd funds and then finally I encourage you to set aside some funds for rehabilitation I think this is a really important area and I think that there should be an opportunity with the funding to to put some funds aside for rehabilitation but again I applaud you for for setting up a point system but I ask that you relook at your categories because it's a real disadvantage to senior projects those projects that are trying to be more creative and you know raising funds from the community should not be penalized under this process and to include rehab funding thank you thank you our next speaker is apron career apron I have enabled your speaking permission can you confirm that you can see the timer for me please confirm okay your time starts now good afternoon chair Owen housing authority members thank you for the opportunity to comment this afternoon effort career director housing with urban housing please allow me just a quick moment to state the obvious that the housing staff of the city has been exemplary through through the better part of the last few years looking at prior nofas and your interim director messenger has not missed one beat in tandem with your staff and I do appreciate the housing authority members acknowledging that and seeing the amount of work that goes into putting these nofas together and working through the various complicated matters that come in the affordable housing development world I also appreciate housing authority member Burke's comments around including some component of rehabilitation as far as you know also having you know new production and having that option for for applications that come through we do think that there will be oversubscription as there generally is with with funds available but we do appreciate a scoring rubric or scoring matrix that at least gives you an opportunity to prioritize projects through through that framework so we are certainly supportive of that process and look forward to this feedback coming forward to the housing authority so we're here to support your process and look forward to the release of the nofa and would agree with board member Burke and also with executive director Mary Stomp we just heard from that rehab funding should be incorporated for this nofa thank you thank you Efren our next speaker is going to be Devin Neary Devin I've enabled your speaking permission can you please confirm that you can see the countdown timer yes I can see it okay thank you your time starts now thank you hi my name is Devin Neary and I'm a project manager with the nonprofit affordable housing developer mid-pen housing in our north bay office thank you so much for the presentation today and your work on this we're working to assemble you know local financing needed to like you said apply for bonds and tax credits for two projects in Santa Rosa right now and as you mentioned in the past these local funding options haven't always been aligned with the competitive state funding programs both timing and the scoring criteria so to bring the housing authority funds you know into alignment with these state programs we definitely support the commission adopting this objective point scoring criteria for the applications as you stated you know we agree this will ensure that the proposed projects are fitting within the housing authority's goals and we'll streamline the review and selection process we also really support including high resource areas as one of the scoring criteria to align with the state funding programs and other criteria we support include giving local preference to local developers and giving points to incentivize robust community engagement thank you so much thank you Devin our next speaker is going to be Yosemia Lemus Yosemia I've enabled your speaking commission can you please confirm that you can see the countdown timer yes I can see it okay your time starts now first off I just wanted to thank the commissioners for all the work that you do my name is Yosemia Lemus and I'm an associate project manager with non-profit affordable housing developer mid-pen housing also in the north bay office as Devin as you know affordable housing financing programs are very competitive in order to submit a competitive tax credit and bond application our projects need local soft local soft financing um so we agree and thank the Santa Rosa housing authority to release the housing trust and CDBG NOPA next week where I can align with the second round of competitive bond applications from SIDLAC that is due May 13th of this year this would allow our project to be eligible to submit SIDLAC application and be competitive not only do we agree with the housing authority to release the NOPA next week but we also recommend the housing authority to release their funding recommendations prior to the SIDLAC deadline as earlier this year the first round of bond applications we were not able to submit our application due to our project not being awarded the SIDLIA Santa Rosa CDBG DR local fund if the housing authority can make recommendations prior to the SIDLAC deadline that would allow the developer to include the local funding and the financing strategies that for the application and to be competitive we think if these changes were implemented it would help the housing authority with your housing goals and help the developer position our projects to move forward in a timely manner thank you for your time thank you yesenia chair Owen at this time I do not see any more hands raised and we have not received any email public comment thank you um I'm going to follow up with some of the questions here in comments um so one of the questions that came up from from Mary Stomp was if a project is not going in for SIDLAC or TCAC the application as we look at these with the leveraging of the 10 points or project competitiveness of the 10 points if if the applicant fills out the 2021 SIDLAC slash TCAC MHP scoring even though they're not being going in through that round but they fill out that application which is available off the state's website would that be able to be used in terms of that category uh chairman Owen I'm not I'm not sure how valuable that would be because I think it would kind of take away the intent of seeing whether or not a project's actually competitive in that funding round so if you're just taking a look at the scoring even though they're not going to be an applicant that may defeat the purpose of including that in our in our review process so if I look at that in some project scores and I don't remember what the score in criteria is one scores 90 points and one scores 80 points um how how would you take that that difference into calculating the 10 points on that project competitiveness category I'm not sure I understood your question if you if a project in that filling out the application scored 90 points a project that scored 80 not taking your account whether or not they that was enough to put them over receiving uh nine percent tax credits or or tax exempt bonds how would that score on that 10 point category Nicole if you can weigh in so Nicole was key in developing the scale and identifying the the category ranges um how we would take a look at it would it still be eligible for a couple points if it was not there's a couple ways that we could look at the scoring um for the NOFAs again it's my understanding that this NOFA is intended to position projects that are applying for those state funds so they would have an application for a SIDBAC or TCAC or MHP in which they would have a self-scoring rubric the smaller categories within the their self-scoring 10 point category are written such that if you your self scores within for example like the top 10 or 20 percent of a total available points then you would score for example a 10 I'm just throwing these numbers out here these are examples so that if the self scoring numbers total numbers possible for each of the varying applications are different down the road we're not seeing results that aren't consistent one option would be for projects that are not eligible to apply for um tax credits for example the smaller projects to rate all of the projects as a percentage of total points so for example if there's a smaller project that Ken is not applying for tax credits their total number of points would be 90 say they got a perfect score they would get 90 out of 90 which is still 100 percent um and we would look at the percentages compared to other project applications for example if somebody was going for a tax credit and they received 97 points out of 100 they would be at a 97 percentage compared to these smaller projects 100 so that could be an option that we would look at but again none of these scoring options are going to be perfect and make everybody happy um so that may be something that we need to look to the housing authority for direction along with what to do in that situation and in looking at as Nicole was explaining that and in looking at the the categories we've laid out if there was a specific interest of the housing authority to make sure that projects such as senior rental housing are competitive we could um make that special needs and senior set aside so that way it's competitive in that category um versus just uh units that were set aside for formerly homeless individuals or another population i have a question the commissioners are coming on now i have a question for Nicole she mentioned the term rubric um which is something i use all the time in teaching so that if i'm ranking a homework assignment and somebody gets a two uh the person can go over and look at the rubric and figure out what criteria uh let them to get a two as opposed to just getting a two with no particular explanation i'm wondering how detailed your rubric is so an applicant would know uh why they got school or the way that they did so thank you for your question commissioner downy each different category um well has a different number of points available to it and in the in most cases there are a set number of possible answers so that would determine the point scale um for example if um project readiness for example if we're looking at if the project is entitled does it have all of its building permits in hand the possible answers are yes it's fully entitled pending payment of fees uh it's in the process of obtaining the permits or no permits have been applied for so there's really only three options on how to answer that question so in that situation there would be three different categories within that 10 point scale so they would for example either get a score between a seven and a ten for building permits that are ready to be picked up pending payment of fees um and so on down the list so they might not like the score but they would suddenly understand that you know their funding was not quite um to the level that would get them a higher score for an example right and our our goal is to make the scoring method uh transparent and um digestible to the applicants um but again none of none of the scoring methods are going to make every project applicant happy every time yes there are always cranky people if i just if i just may add a point through the chair so it's great that as you've mentioned that staff has come up with this point scoring system and it is just a recommendation to your board and so there'll still be an opportunity for developers or folks who submit proposals to make their pitch and say why they disagree with with the scoring or to look at it differently so uh you know it's an it's an initial step and you know can be fine tuned as it moves forward this is an initial um well i think that what we're talking about here i i appreciate your comments about uh the degree to which we can give any specific direction on this because i think it's it's going to be an administrative decision given the time that we have there's no time to do anything else so whatever it is it has to be up to uh Nicole and again to make a decision on that but you know and but i guess this may be what can be considered on on the funding part unless i'm missing something if you have a 10 million dollar hole to fill to fund a project does it make any difference if it comes from tax credits or uh you know donations from some very wealthy entity in terms of the leveraging category that we're um putting forward no it doesn't identify the funding source it um provides points based on the percentage of project funding that is from the housing authority okay so so so the so the source of the funds yeah so it's not a disadvantage on the source of the funds and then i guess on the senior versus other type of housing you know it's been my experience that uh it's just more difficult to get family housing and particularly for large families it's just hard hard to do that but i don't know to what degree that's changed i don't you know thinking about what is santa rosa need what are the residents of the city of santa rosa need right now is there a high priority for for family housing is there a high priority for senior housing and um unless we know that it's really hard to think about for the future or give any input right now on the degree to which a senior project should be advantaged or disadvantaged i think it's based upon the community needs and i don't know to a degree that can be determined quickly but i think it's something that we need to pick up in the future and talk more about and that's certainly um a factor that we could take a look at in the other factors category and something that the housing authority when recommendations are presented to them in the public meeting we can take a look at past funding recommendations because with the cdvg dr the housing authority supported five projects i believe and two of those were specifically senior projects so we can incorporate additional data and then we can also look at what our recent actions have been and and whether there's a balance in either comments from commissioners we've made some really good progress i mean the staff has made a really good amount of progress and it's a big step forward and we're hearing that from the applicants you know always going to need to be refinements and that's one thing that happens in government you have to be as nimble as possible and that's not always easy to do so i think it's a it's a process that you just consider to can continue to monitor and adapt as best you can so megan on timing on this you would put this out in enopa this coming week next week if if we would like to be able to review applications prior to the may 13th sit black deadline we need to push this out next week in order to give adequate time for applicants to prepare and submit their applications and then for staff to review those applications and convene the review committee um also chair owen if you would like to identify two commissioners to serve as the review committee that would be helpful as well so point one what i'd like to do is um provide direction listening to commissioners and also to um to call ins which were very helpful to have that input and have the feedback to make sure that what we're trying to do is is functional is going to work with the understanding that this is the first time that i know that the housing authority has done a point system and it can always be tweaked this is we've seen at the state level the application for sivlak or tkac has been a point system for close to 20 years and it's constantly being tweaked to try and get better so that is the mindset of the housing authority and staff to be able to have this put in place um i'd like to recommend to go ahead with providing um putting the enopa out next week with this criteria um for the point system as presented with the understanding that uh seniors projects would score high in the services and amenities in other well other factors category that the that the uh city is looking for and to the point that for project competitiveness um that's a that in the subcommittee that we will put together we can review uh nicole's very accurate and and useful recommendation that if you are not presenting my understanding with let me back up when i was reading this to say even if you're not going to go into sivlak or tkac or mhp that application is there and you would look at it and fill out that application get your score off of it present it and for here even though you're not going to the state level to get those funding sources that would allow you to get project competitive points we can either look at that and all that staff figure out they want to do it that way or is nicole recommended there's 10 criteria if you did not do that because you're not going in for that funding source um you would get nine out of nine or 90 out of 90 points and i'll i'll let the subcommittee work on that point and um i think the subcommittee that did the cdb gr um did very well commissioner olson get a point uh no i would just like to be at that subcommittee of balsam i need the other volunteers to be on the subcommittee i'm on i'm going to appoint somebody how about you mr olin sir olin um i in the past have had to recuse myself in case there's a possibility a client of mine having to step in and i'd rather not put my name out there and then have a applicant come in it just happens to be a client and i'd have to recuse myself um vice chair testings and commissioner berg you were on the last one would either of you like to join uh commissioner olson i would defer to uh vice chair tell us certainly i might be um i would welcome participation oh thank you so i'd recommend that uh commissioner olson and commissioner task vice chair test be on the subcommittee and there's been discussion about whether or not we would have somebody with city council on there make them what do you think about that point i think it's a good point um i can certainly reach out to the mayor and see if he can appoint someone if that's the direction of of the housing authority i think that's a good opportunity but if the if the idea is that it's the mayor doesn't see that point or doesn't there isn't well i don't want it to slow us down so we'd welcome i give them recommendation that we welcome that to add one person from from city council city council member but if that doesn't seem to work out um and um megan would you like to give a timeline as to get feedback to know for to hear back yeah i will reach out to him later this evening and see um but then it can also proceed with your direction that if if we don't have someone who can participate on our timeline we we still proceed with our two housing authority commissioners what time limit would you give on that feedback if they're when they're not uh within a week within a week it is and then if i can um if you just indulge me if i can just repeat back what i heard to make sure that we are capturing your direct the housing authority's direction in enova that would be appreciated i heard that you would like to have rehab included as an eligible activity yes uh we are going to include on-site amenities and services in the um services and amenities point category that's correct add seniors to the special needs category uh yes is there anything i am missing the only thing that is is being brought up is whether or not parodic competitiveness for applicants they're not going to state sidlok tkacker mhp as to whether or not they would be um that would be kicked out in terms of their score unless i'm wrong i look at it you can still fill out that application and get a scoring on that that that category versus you don't have to turn it into state it just helps our process and it provides continuity um and consistency with the other applicants that's how i would review that and it it's certainly something that once the applications come in and we're reviewing and ranking them uh we can isolate that particular category and rent it by the the review committee and see how that alters um a project's competitiveness within our process i i like that recommendation i think that's a valid way to look at it because we're not going to know until the applicants applications actually come in nicol do you have comment on that um i just wanted to throw out there that it may not um change the ranking the overall places that the applications come in um and it would not be any significant amount of work by staff to run the projects um both ways and bring that to the subcommittee to see if it does change the scoring i think that's a valid way to look at it thank you any other comments from commissioners uh hearing none um thank you very much nicol a lot of great work on this and and megan as well um i think we're doing well in terms of something that started when i since i've been on the commission which is to work with the applicants to make sure that as they're going into bigger and state funds that we they have their their local match figure figured out or understood to help them and the sooner we can and work with those time schedules the sooner we can get units built and continue to knock down the numbers that we need to have for affordable units in in san rosa so um and again with the transparency with this process and and far more objectivity that can be seen um i think it's a good process so thank you very much um with that we'll go on to item number five which is public comments mr sheriff i may interrupt and i apologize to all the commissioners but um unfortunately i have a conflict and another matter that i was supposed to have attended starting at four o'clock so um megan has the ability to reach out to me and i can jump back into the meeting if there are any issues so i apologize for that but i'm not going to have to step out for now thank you jepher thank you we are now taking public comments on agenda item number five on comments on non agenda items if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you're dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand we'll have three minutes to make your comment countdown timer will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown or at the conclusion of your comment this is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on this agenda but are but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority chair oh and at this time i do not see any hands raised and we have not received any email public comment thank you uh move on to item six which is the approval of minutes we don't need to take a vote on this but i do want to see if there's any comments on the minutes from my last meeting are any objections to those those minutes fine to me thank you some um so we'll uh for the record show there was unanimous consent to approve the minutes of our last meeting moved on to item seven which is uh chairman commissioner reports and um there is a comment that we have uh this is on item 7.1 which is the housing authority may provide the chair direction or whether to send a letter to the city manager requesting participation the executive director of treatment there was um let me go back here just for a moment so one of the things we want to talk about i like to talk about for uh for this item seven is that the housing authority is in fact is uh separate in district legal entity of the city santa rosa and it's long and old has is a long staying formal contractual contractual odds of contractual relationship directly with HUD for the housing choice voucher program in additional housing related policy responsibilities have been dedicated to housing authority by the city council including allo