For those of you just joining the meeting, the meeting will start shortly. Council is meeting in closed session at this time. If you wish to listen to the meeting in Spanish, translation services are being provided today. To do so, click on the interpretation icon on your Zoom toolbar. And once you do so, you can click on the Spanish channel and then you can shut off the main audio so you can only hear the Spanish transitions. Charles. Para los recién llegados, este, la interpretación es en español está disponible. Ahora va a comenzar pronto la reunión. Ahorita están en la sesión. La dispa... Esta la interpretación está disponible hoy para unirse al canal de español. Pueden hacer clic en el icono de la interpretación ubicado en la barra de herramientas de Zoom. Ahora es un globo terráqueo. Ya que según al canal de español, recomendamos que pagan el audio principal para poder escuchar la interpretación claramente. All right, Madam City Clerk, I'm seeing a quorum of city council members. Let's go ahead and call the roll and call the meeting to order. Thank you. Council Member Givet, Council Member Schwethelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Alvarez. President. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Council Member Tibbets, have you joined us? Council Member Fleming, have you joined us? Okay, let the record show that all council members are present with the exception of Council Member Fleming and Council Member Tibbets. And I do see that Council Member Tibbets has logged on as an attendee. If we could get him promoted and confirm for the meeting, that would be great. Council Member Tibbets, are you on the meeting now? Yes, hello. Thank you. And I also do see Council Member Fleming as well now. Council Member Fleming, have you joined us? I am here. Great, so let the record show that all council members are present now. Great, thank you so much, Stephanie. For the public, we do have interpreter services that are available for today's meeting. Madam Zoom host, can you please explain how folks will access the Spanish Channel? Thank you, Mayor. To join the Spanish Channel, you can click on the interpretation icon on your Zoom toolbar. It may look like a globe. Going to join the Spanish Channel, we recommend that you shut off the main audio so you can clearly hear the Spanish translation. Charles, would you be able to repeat that for us in Spanish? Para unirse al canal de español, pueden cambiar el canal por medio de hacer clic en el icono de interpretación ubicado en la barra de herramientas de Zoom para eso un globo de raqueo. Recomendamos que apagan el audio principal para poder escuchar la interpretación claramente. Thank you, Charles, back to you, Mayor. Great, thank you so much. We'll start off with a few housekeeping reminders for council members. Please remember to keep your audio on mute unless you're speaking. Council members, other than myself, can unmute themselves as well. Staff will remain muted until they need to speak. And as members of the public join the meeting, they'll be able to participate as attendees today with their cameras and microphones muted as well. Only today's panelists 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 or on any of the individual items, for privacy reasons, your name will be renamed as your viewable phone number as resident with the last four digits of your phone number. The City of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption and will not tolerate any hate speech or actions and are monitoring to make sure that everybody is participating respectfully. Now, Madam City Clerk, can you please go through how folks can better engage in today's meeting on the different items? Yes, I'd be happy to. After each agenda item is presented, the mayor will ask for council members' comments and then open it up for public comment. The host and Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the mayor has called for public comment, the mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the council and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email, e-comment or recorded a voice message public comment, your email, e-comment or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or played during the meeting. Additionally, there are two public comment periods on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters at items 13 and 17. This is the time when any person may address the council on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the council. Throughout today's agenda, when the mayor calls for public comment an interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the Brown Act. We ask that those listening on the Spanish channel but wishing to make a public comment to turn off or leave interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called so you can join the main channel to make your public comment heard and translated into English. This icon may now look like a circle with an E-S in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening to the meeting in Spanish. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. And with that, Mr. City Manager, let's go on to item 3.1. Item 3.1, General Fund Long Range Financial Forecasts, Jan Mazek, Chief Financial Officer Presenting. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. I'd like to introduce Bob Leland, who you know from management partners to give and just to receive the presentation of the updated general law fund, Long Range Financial Forecast and to provide an opportunity for the council to ask questions and give us any feedback or direction that you would like. And with that, I'll call Andy Belknap and Bob Leland. Thank you, Jan. I'm Andy Belknap with management partners and I'm here with my colleague, Bob Leland. We're gonna present an updated Long Range Financial Forecast. Could we have the next slide? Just management partners, we provide services for cities throughout the United States and very much present here in the market in California where we've served the vast majority of cities of over 100,000 population. We do a lot of this development of financial forecasting, Bob. Next slide, Bob. We've been working with Santa Rosa on a long range financial model since 2019. The first one was developed in the fall of 2019. And we at that time presented the results and showed a pretty significant structural deficit. I think the two biggest drivers were the rebuild, well, it modeled the rebuilding impacts from the fire and also modeled the pension costs and what we thought was happening was that when COVID hit, the city brought us in to update the fiscal model based on anticipated COVID-19 impacts. And we did that in the early part of last year and we estimated the impact based on what we knew then about COVID and developed some budget strategies that we presented to the city council in the fall of that year. And now we updated the model in 2021 and we revised the COVID-19 impacts and this should provide some good context for your upcoming budget process. The long and short of it is that the scenarios or the forecast has gotten better. The impact from COVID was not as severe as we originally thought it would be and there has been federal aid that came in last year but more is coming in this current fiscal year. Could we have the next slide, Bob? This would just put really kind of the need for a long range fiscal modeling to some context. We've been plotting significant events that have occurred involved for the city of Santa Rosa on this timeline and you can see that one of the things that we talked about when we presented our earliest fiscal modeling was the need to extend measures OMP which were temporary sales tax measures. That was accomplished in November of 2020 with Measure Q which was a very good thing for Santa Rosa. And the other thing that's happened was the the settlement with PG&E which is given the city some significant one-time monies but this timeline shows other significant events that are gonna be occurring for the city over the next several years. And one of the reasons that a long-term model like this is important is you can keep your eye on the ball of things like expiring sales tax measures and also I think very importantly, see when pension costs finally begin to level off and then drop. That happens in the 2030s and pension costs don't, unless you look at a long way, you don't see the pension costs eventually stabilizing and then dropping. Bob, you wanna pick it up with the model? Yeah, I guess the clerk's got control of this. Next slide, please. And actually the next one. Okay, we're gonna walk you through just to the same presentation that we gave to the subcommittee on long range fiscal planning and audit a few weeks ago. And get a touch on the key revenue assumptions and rationale do the same thing on the expense side, show you graphically what revenue and expense projections look like. And then we're gonna conclude with the baseline forecasted balance and shortfall and then a number of scenarios under which you can wind up with a balanced budget. As Andy suggested, there are a lot of options that you have available, more options than most cities. And on the chart in front of you are the three main areas of revenue assumptions. And the area where you've got the most flexibility is that box at the right one time funding. Now, there are certain things that the forecast includes and certain things that it excludes. In terms of the PG&E settlement, we've initially excluded it, the theory being that the best practices to use one time revenue for one time rather than ongoing expenses. However, the council has discussed in its goal setting session using up to $40 million of the $95 million settlement to support operations to buy time to restructure expenses as may be needed. So we're going to show you as we get on in the slides what happens with and without, including that $40 million of settlement. Andy talked about the ARPA federal aid. We've excluded that. There's about $36 million that the city would look to be receiving this year and next. But really only the amounts that are going to replace lost general fund revenues or reimbursing past or budgeted expenses really should be counted in the forecast. Otherwise, if you use it for new types of spending, then that's not going to help the bottom line of the forecast. And it hasn't been determined yet how that money is going to be spent. So for the time being, we have excluded that. And then there's the FEMA reimbursements, which are significant. There are some amounts assumed in the current year budget. Staff has identified a total of almost $41 million in potential outstanding reimbursements due to the general fund as opposed to water or some other fund. The timing of the receipt of that is somewhat uncertain. And there are always negotiations with FEMA over amounts that the city believes it is due. So we have excluded that. But later on in the slides, I'm going to show you what happens if that $40 million is brought into the forecast. Now in terms of the other areas, economic cycles, we're in the middle of the pandemic, but definitely in the recovery period. And we're recovering faster than we had thought before. The recovery period, we believe before would run through fiscal year 24, which would mean by fiscal 25, we would be back to where revenues would have been absent the recession. Now we've moved that up by a year. Largely that's due to stronger sales tax, Avenue Insights, third quarter forecast for 2020 is the basis for the numbers that we have in the forecast. Like all cities, the transient occupancy tax revenue and revenue from park and recreation fees have been slower to recover. Now, the forecast does build in the recession starting in fiscal 27 and 34. Historically, recessions have occurred about every six to seven years. And it's important to include that in the forecast as a stress test for the sustainability of reserves over time. The big question regarding local sales taxes are they renewed or not? Now measure O, the quarter cent public safety tax expires in 2025. The assumption in the forecast is that the general fund backfills that revenue loss to avoid loss of staff. But there's obviously the cost to that. Without a two thirds vote to extend the tax it will sunset at that time. Measure Q took the two quarter cent general taxes, combined them and extended them to 2031. So that's less of an immediate concern, but come 2031, the same question arises as to whether that tax will be renewed or not. So now I'm gonna walk you through quickly an overview of the individual revenue sources. So if we go to the next slide, we will see these are the three largest general fund revenues and they're relatively stable. And this is the property tax, sales tax and utility users tax on each one of these slides. What you see is the dark blue line is the historical amount up until fiscal 21. And then going forward, that's the forecast. The red line is a linear trend from fiscal year 05 through fiscal year 20. So the extension of that trend is the red line. The green line is a shorter term trend of just the last four years, fiscal year 17 through 20.  And then in addition, there is an orange dot which is the year to date which in this case is through the end of January and then the year to date trend based on the percent of the year elapsed. So that gives you a little context specifically for fiscal year 21. And the last comparison is the magenta line with the diamonds and that is the budget from prior years. And so you can compare budget to actual historically and then that brings you right up to the fiscal year 21. So you can see in the property tax the impact from the great recession as it dipped then recovered pretty much along that short-term trend line. And then growing in the last couple of years with the restoration of value from the fire rebuilds. And then you see the continuation of that trend pretty much paralleling the short-term trend line. The one thing to note there is that the property tax inflator which is typically 2% under Prop 13 will only be 1.036% in fiscal 22. That's a loss of revenue unfortunately that can't be made up in future years. You look over to the upper right is the sales tax. Similarly, you can see the dip from the great recession. You can see a little dip in fiscal 20 and 21. We'd expected that to be bigger but based on the current forecast from Avenue Insights it's looking like a minor slowdown in fiscal 21 as many people shifted from brick and mortar store purchases to online purchases. And fortunately the state was well situated as it had resolved its issues with Amazon and other out of state retailers. And so money has been coming in and cities have been getting credit for that through the county pool and also the Wayfair decision wound up boosting amounts received from online sources as well. So sales tax is looking to be pretty stable when we're seeing that continuing more along the long-term trend. And then you can see a little dip in 27 when we assume the next recession occurs. Down in the lower left is the utility user tax. Again, relatively stable not too much of an impact from the great recession except to the extent that there were foreclosures and homes not occupied but it's been pretty stable in recent years and we see the trend splitting the difference between the short and long-term trend. Next slide. Now other taxes have varying impacts. The franchise payments you can see how stable those have been over time. There was a garbage franchise increase in fiscal year 19 but we're seeing that being pretty stable over time. The real property transfer tax on the other hand fairly volatile source and you can see it's also difficult in terms of the budget to actual to match up with that. It's a moving target. However, we see the year to date trend being at about $4 million which is significantly higher than the original budget for this year. So that's where the forecast ends up this year and then we continue growth from there with a dip in the future due to the next recession. In the lower left corner is the business tax estimate. The anticipated budget for this year was significantly lower than our current projection. Staff has taken a look at that and believes that there will be some dip from the compared to the prior year but not nearly as much as what was originally budgeted. And last year when we were in the early throws of the pandemic there was a sense that with businesses shut down that the come the next year the impact on the business tax would be significant but so far that's looking like it'll be on an ongoing basis pretty much at that long-term trend line. Next slide. Now these are the three revenue areas that are most severely impacted by the pandemic. In the upper left you've got the transient occupancy tax which we're showing coming in a little bit below the budget which itself was a significant decline from fiscal year 20. We're seeing a recovery over the next few years. The transient occupancy tax it's a question not only of business travel but personal travel. It's a lot of cities are looking at the TOT as being really the last major revenue source to recover from the pandemic. In the upper right-hand corner recreation and park revenues you've seen quite a dip which we're projecting to be worse than the budget which again itself was a big decline from the prior year but with so many programs really completely shut down through a major part of this year even as those are beginning to start up now we should see a significant rebound over the next two years but this year is still gonna be a pretty low level. And then finally in the lower left-hand corner other fees, charges and fines. There was a major impact after the great recession which was largely the lack of new construction and building fees that built its way back up only to see a major decline in 20 and 21 but we're seeing a rebound the next year and then a trend pretty much in between the short and long-term trends. Next slide. Okay, this is the last one on the revenues. Just the other categories the thing that characterizes each of these is that they experienced a peak for different reasons and it's not something that's going to be replicated. So in the upper left-hand corner with licenses and permits that peak is really from the height of the rebuild permits with hundreds of additional permits in a given year really about 3000 over a few year period. Those amounts in fiscal 18, 19 and 20 even 21 are significantly higher than they're going to be in future years. In the upper right-hand corner the intergovernmental peak in 20 and 21 is due to CARES Act and FEMA reimbursements that have already been received. It doesn't include potential new federal aid so that might spike again depending on how much of that revenue gets brought into the general fund but on an ongoing basis we see a continuation of the trend more from what it was like 2005 to 2017 and 18. And then in the lower left-hand corner all other revenue there's a peak in 18 and 19 due to insurance reimbursements from the fire and back in 0910 from transfers in which was part of the budget strategy of dealing with the Great Recession at that time. Now this chart does not include PG&E settlement and so to the extent that is brought in obviously that category is going to change significantly. Okay, next slide. We're gonna switch to the expense side of the equation. Three major issues there. General issues of sustainability, cost inflation and pensions. So in terms of sustainability positions have been frozen. The question is how long they're going to stay frozen. The forecast assumes five years and then restoring the position starting in fiscal 26. Now there's a lot of uncertainty over the public safety sales tax and that is going to require the city to conserve fund balance in order to better position itself for the potential loss of those funds. And so you're in a more prudent position if the position stay frozen until the point when that uncertainty is removed. If it turns out that the measure is renewed then that's one problem out of the way. If however, since it requires a two thirds vote if it does not secure that vote then you need to have reserves be at as a higher level as possible to position yourself in the loss of those funds. Now, even though we're saying positions are frozen we are making a small allowance for adding back to FTE a year starting in fiscal 23. Position and workload growth are going to create pressure to unfreeze positions over time or add new ones. And while this doesn't deal with a significant amount of workload needs all at once it does respond to it in a graduated fashion over time. And then we do have an allowance of $4 million a year for transfers to the capital improvement project fund. And the ongoing needs obviously for preventative maintenance and other projects are there. These amounts vary from year to year but $4 million is the average of the last 15 years. So even though those amounts go up and down we think $4 million a year ongoing is a reasonable assumption. Now, moving to the center with cost inflation we do have 2% COLA's starting fiscal 21. The MOUs of expired negotiations are ongoing and we're not trying to prejudge how those turn out but labor is your largest expense and inflationary pressure really has to be included in the forecast over time for it to be a realistic assessment. And then in terms of non-personnel costs for operations and maintenance also part-time and overtime expenses the initial budget direction to departments is to hold these costs. We're assuming to the lesser of either last year's actual or the projected increase from the fiscal 21 budget in either case whichever is less. Growth would then resume in fiscal 23 based on that restricted fiscal 22 level. Now that's going to reduce fiscal 22 expenses by about $6 million or 3% compared to just letting the forecast model growth for fiscal 22 occur. So the question is whether the city follows up on that direction to hold this O&M costs to a lower level. It will be it's prudent if you're going to have to cut the sooner you start cutting the better. And so we have built this in as a another measure along with the position freeze of trying to hold costs down especially in these years before you know whether your public safety sales tax is renewed. And in terms of pensions, the current discount rate CalPERS imposes is 7%. That is there also their assumption for long range investment returns. We have a more conservative assumption 6.2% in average returns and then the discount rate dropping from the current 7% to 6% over the next 20 years. The next slide shows you the rationale for those pension decisions. So let's go to that. On the left hand side of the chart is the actual CalPERS return from 1992 through 2020. The red line is just the linear trend over that period. Generally speaking, returns have been dropping. This is volatile. You can see how much they can jump around from year to year. And even the last few years, last three years, even though there are positive returns, they're lower overall than the discount rate which is currently 7%. So the box there shows the average returns for the last three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years and 29 years. Timing is everything here. The last three years, the average is 6.67% and over the last five years, actually 6.36%. There are times over the last 29 years when there have been enough high levels of return that you can get the average up to, for instance, about 8.7% over the last 10 years and 8.4% over the last 29. But over the last 20 years, it drops down to about 6.07%. Now the chart on the right is what the pension discount rate has actually been from actually 1981 through 2022. At one point, the discount rate was as high as eight and three quarters percent. In kind of a stair step fashion, it has dropped down to its current 7%. If you extend that trend over 40 years and extend it out another 20 years, you basically hit 6% and that's our rationale for a reduction in the discount rate over time. CalPERS is currently reviewing its strategic asset allocation and discount rate. Any change they make will be enacted in November of this year to take effect in July of the next year. But clearly we're on a downward trend in terms of returns. CalPERS wants more stable rates and to do that, they're gonna have to have less volatility in returns. That means lower yield. One out of five of the nation's largest pension plans are already below a 7% discount rate. So that's the direction we're headed. Next slide. Okay, so these are the same type of charts as you saw before, but just looking at the expense side. On the upper left is salaries, part-time benefits, expense credits and vacancy savings. So by combining all those together, you can see that over time, the budget including vacancy savings has been pretty close to what the actual has been. The last few years, the budget for these items has been significantly higher than actual. In part, that's due to the position freeze. It's been due to higher vacancy rates. We are assuming a five-year period of vacancy freeze. So that's the reason why the line dips down close to the long-term trend line. And then finally in fiscal 26, pops back up to the short-term trend line. That's reflective of the impact of the five-year position freeze. Now over on the upper right is the retirement. Again, those costs have been relatively stable over time. The increase in the past several years has been due to planned increases that CalPERS has had in the impact of a lower discount rate. We're seeing continuation along that short-term trend up until fiscal 25, which is the last year of the pension obligation bond debt service. And then you see total pension costs drop and then continue from there. And then in the lower left-hand corner, health costs for the past several years have come in significantly under the original budget, which is conservative. So what we've done is assume 90% of the city's costs is projected by their position control system. And then we're continuing on with that. And then you see in fiscal 26, it jumps up a little bit. That would be from the end of the position freeze. And so we have health costs going pretty much on the long-term trend line until the position freeze has ended. And you can see from that green triangle, the year-to-date trend is pretty close to that red long-term trend line. Next slide is the rest of the personnel costs. For overtime, you were like almost every other city we've seen, which is overtime tends to be budgeted in a bit of an optimistic fashion. And then for various reasons, overtime tends to be higher, partly due to vacancies, partly due to circumstances beyond anybody's control, partly due to wildfire response where you also get an offsetting revenue reimbursement. For this year, you can see as of the end of January, the year-to-date amount was actually about what had been budgeted for the year. What we've done is assume that in the latter part of the year that it's corrected. And so we have projected overtime for this year and into the future right on that red long-term trend line. In the upper right for retiree medical, that has been over, we're basically going to approach and then finally touch the long-term trend line by about fiscal 29. Short of an actuarial analysis to get a more refined estimate, we're seeing that is the most likely outcome for retiree medical expenses. And then in the lower left corner is just all personnel. So salary, retirement, health, et cetera. And again, you can see that budget, overall budget to actual has been very close except for the last three years. And then the composite of all those factors puts you pretty much at the short-term trend line going forward. Okay, next slide. So on the non-personnel side, operations and maintenance in the upper left-hand corner, those costs have been significantly higher than budget over the last three years. We're assuming that the amount spent this year is equal to the budget. Also the year-to-date trend indicator is right at that budget amount as well. Over the last couple of years, there have been some carryover amounts from prior years. The reason why there's a drop in fiscal 22 is partly due to the assumed reduction in the level of O&M costs by holding them to the lesser of fiscal 20 or growth in the fiscal 21 budget. And then going forward, that's parallel to the long-term trend line. In the upper right-hand corner is capital outlay, project budget, CIP transfers. Again, that kind of goes up and down over time. We're assuming $4 million CIP contribution going forward, $2 million project budget, 100,000 for capital outlay. And the lower left corner transfers out and actually pretty stable over time, but they jump significantly starting in fiscal 25 with the assumption that the public safety sales tax expires and that the general fund transfers money out to that fund to keep it afloat without given the loss of sales tax that would occur. The next slide. This simply recaps total revenues and total expenses. They're both on the same scale, so you can compare those pretty readily. The long-term trend is pretty much what revenues will follow over time. Expenditures are pretty much splitting the difference between long and short-term trend. And again, you see that fairly market impact from the position freeze if it's continued over the five-year period. Okay, next slide. Right, so this is how you wrap it up. You've got two sets of slides here. On the upper level is a 10-year forecast of shortfall on the left, fund balance in the middle, and any use of PG&E on the right. And since the baseline forecast excludes it, there's nothing to see in the right-hand chart. But you can see that in the middle chart with the fund balance, that it's pretty stable for several years. Now, it's below where you'd like it to be. It's below the 17% level, and it's also below a 15% level, but it's pretty stable between 20 and $30 million. That will fall off starting after fiscal 25 for two reasons. One is the exploration of the public safety tax and secondly is the startup of the next recession in fiscal 27. And so there would actually be a deficit by fiscal 27 without any further budgetary corrections. Now, that's more of a close-up look if you back up and sort of look at it from a 20-year perspective. That's the set of charts on the bottom. And basically you can see that the, what is a $40 million deficit in fiscal 29 would grow to over 400 million by fiscal 39. Again, these are without budget corrections and there will be budget corrections. So this is just to show you for comparison purposes what it looks like if the trends continue as they are now. Okay, so that's the overall baseline forecast. Now switch to the next slide. So what are the major variables here? What's likely to change? Vacancies are in almost every case for every eight local agency are going to be the most likely reason for lower expenses in the near term. And lower expenses, all things being equal will result in higher balances. Now, we have to say though that we do have the assumption of a five-year freeze built in. So we've got all of those vacancies already accounted for. Now in terms of paying benefits, the wage adjustments are all subject to meet and confer that's going to change potentially from year to year. We do have 2% in the forecast. So if adjustments exceed that level, obviously that works the other direction that's going to push costs up. In terms of pension, as I covered earlier, our assumptions are more conservative than CalPERS's current 7% returns and discount rate, but we do think that's a realistic outcome given past history and how they want to get the system to be better funded in the future. In terms of workload increases, assuming that two positions a year are either unfrozen or added and that $4 million are spent for CIP, those are budgetary decisions. That's up to you. Those can be eliminated or revised at city discretion, but we've built them in again for a long-term sustainability of city services and infrastructure. We wanted to make an allocation for that. And then again, here's the one-time funding. ARPA adds $36 million, but you're only going to count it for purposes of this forecast if it comes into the general fund, not associated with an increase in spending. And also for FEMA, again, perhaps up to $41 million, over the next few years, the timing to be determined, and while not all of that goes to the general fund, about $40 million has been calculated, that would be a reimbursement of general fund costs or advances to capital project funds. So those are the major variables. So there are other scenarios one can create and the forecast model is very adept at doing that. You can instantaneously create new scenarios. And we've done that here. If we go to the next slide, oh, one more thing, I forgot, in terms of the FEMA, yeah, and I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead to the next slide, there you go, stay there on 19. Something that we didn't show the subcommittee, but with that $40 million in potential FEMA money, what does it look like if you include it or not include it? So on top is what you've just looked at, the 10-year forecast where it ends in a $40 million deficit, that excludes FEMA. But if you include FEMA, if you assume that it is brought in over the next three years, then you see the change in fund balance. If there is no increase in general fund spending associated with that FEMA money, then you see how the fund balance jumps considerably, but then again falls off just as considerably when the public safety sales tax is lost and the next recession starts, but you would still end in positive territory. The deficit, while it will occur, is pushed beyond fiscal year 29. So that is, if you change only one assumption, which is that the $40 million of FEMA money come in over the next three years, you get a significantly different outlook, but it's not ongoing funding, as significant as it is, it will end, it's finite. Okay, so now in terms of other scenarios beyond including or excluding FEMA, let's go to the next slide. Actually the next slide after that, there you go. So this is a summary of some alternative scenarios and there are hundreds, thousands of scenarios one could easily come up with here, but what I've done is taken some key variables and done some different combinations of those and all of these scenarios A through F are balanced based on the assumptions that you see here. And so here are the basic criteria that we're going through. The PG&E settlement is first. Now on that line, we have a simple binary choice, either nothing or 40 million. And the reality of course is that it can be anything in between or even higher. So, but for purposes of trying to keep it fairly simple here, we've shown just with no PG&E settlement for operations. In other words, the 95 million is used for other purposes completely versus 40 million of the 95 coming into the general fund. The baseline forecast assumes not using it, but of the other six scenarios, three use it and three do not. The next line down is this issue with fiscal 22 O&M expense. Do you restrict it to fiscal year, 20 levels or not? Yes or no? And we're assuming that we do in the baseline forecast and in the other forecasts, some do and some don't. Obviously, with if it's yes, you're saving roughly $6 million a year. And so that's significant. If you then no simply means that we take the fiscal 21 budget and we just grow it with no restrictions. The third category is the frozen FTE issue. It's currently for the one year freeze, but if you extend it for five, that's the assumption in the baseline forecast here. Of course, again, there are many different numbers of years that you could freeze it. You could also unfreeze certain portions. These are all going to have different financial effects that we've assumed for simplicity here that it's either five years or 10 years. And then the two FTE growth, we do have that allowance built in in the baseline forecast and it's either yes or no in the other scenarios. The safety sales tax and the measure Q sales taxes in the baseline forecast, we're assuming they both expire. Now the measure O that's coming up in fiscal 25, Q doesn't expire until 31, but we're assuming they both expire, but you can either have both expire, you can have both of them renewed or you can have Q renewed and the safety expired. And so we have different combinations in these scenarios. Now, based on the net impact of those first five categories, there are two more that are adjusted in order to hit the reserve level. The next category there is the ongoing expense decreases or revenue increases. Now, we're not assuming any additional cuts or revenue increases in the baseline forecast. And in scenarios A and D, the combination of the assumptions above that are sufficient so that similarly, no changes are needed in order to have a balanced budget. But in scenarios B, C, E and F, that combination of factors above are inadequate to keep the general fund balance at the your reserve goal. And so it would take the cuts as indicated on that row for scenario B, $11 million starting in fiscal 26, a scenario C, $5 million starting in fiscal 27, scenario E, $12 million, but not until fiscal 36, and scenario F, a combination over a couple of year period totaling $18 million. Now, in several cases, in fact, really every case scenarios A through F, there will come a point at which you can roll those expenses back. So really there's expense cuts. So there's a period that you have to bridge where the resources are inadequate. But by the time you get to the mid and later 2030s, you will have some reduction in pension costs due to the payoff of unfunded liability amounts. And as those costs level off and then start declining, then that is going to create fiscal capacity. And the very last row there indicates the amount of spending increase that can happen. Most of it in around the period of fiscal 36 to 38. And at that point, the general fund will have significant capacity either to restore prior cuts or to augment services. Now, the last slides, I'll go through one to just give you an example. Next slide, please. Each of scenarios A through F, they're in your packet. So you've had a chance to look at these. Each one tells you, again, the revised assumption from baseline. And then in this case, it's that both taxes are renewed. And then what future budget actions are required. And it would be that with $40 million of PG&E set aside. And then ultimately in fiscal 37, you can have a $10 million annual increase, or I should say an ongoing increase, starting in fiscal 37 for restored or augmented services. So the charts show you the shortfall in the upper left, the fund balance in the middle, which meets the reserve goal. And then the PG&E use at the right. And this is use of the $40 million. The other $55 million, we're not tracking here. That's available for other purposes. But you can see the orange bars, the $40 million of PG&E money slowly is brought down to you're basically out of it in fiscal 35. And the blue bars above it show you the annual uses of that. So we're only bringing into the general fund, the PG&E money as it is needed in order to maintain your reserve goal. And each of the other slides is like that. Just quickly go through the next slide. I won't go through all the specifics, but you can see in the PG&E money at this point, it's used up by fiscal 31. And there is a portion in time if you look at the middle chart where you don't meet the reserve goal, but you're within striking distance. This one does involve an $11 million budget reduction starting in 26, but then you can add money back starting in fiscal 38. Next slide. This combination uses up the $40 million even quicker. It would be gone by fiscal 27. And you can see the specific changes from the baseline forecast and the budget actions required. Next slide, scenario D, doesn't use the PG&E approach at all. It does assume that both of the sales taxes are renewed. And if you froze the FTE for 10 years, didn't have any FTE growth, then there would never be a need for cut. You would be pretty much at your reserve over that whole period. And starting in fiscal 36, you can significantly augment spending as the pension costs decline. Next slide. Similarly, PG&E money isn't used. This does assume that the public safety sales tax expires. It does keep the FTE there for 10 years. And but in order to make things balance out, there would need to be a $12 million ongoing budget decrease in fiscal 26. And then you can pretty much give that back starting in fiscal 36. So again, this 10-year period that you need to get through. And then the next slide, the scenario F also doesn't use the PG&E. And because it assumes that the O&M costs are not held to fiscal 20 levels and you lose the public safety tax, even if you freeze FTE for 10 years, there's going to be a higher level of expenditure reduction, a total of $18 million between fiscal 22 and 25. And then ultimately 10 million of that can be restored starting in 36. So this is just a sort of a static way of showing you what the live model can do as you make different assumptions. It can sort of plot your course and what you're ultimately going to need to decide is the amount of PG&E money to be used, settle on the use of the ARPA money and determine what you're going to do both in terms of the O&M costs, whether to start holding that to a lower level, starting next budget year and for how long to continue the position freeze. You actually have a lot of choices compared to most cities we've been working on lately. The, both in terms of one time expenses and things that you've already started, such as the position freeze, you've got a combination of choices and the model gives you a nice tool that you can constantly keep updated and used to show you what the implications are of any particular policy decisions and going down the line. So next slide, that is the end of our presentation. And so we're open to questions. Great, thank you so much, Bob and Andy. Really appreciate the work that the two of you do. It's pretty exhausting. And I know the long-term finance committee, as you mentioned, already saw this presentation a couple of different times and every single time it gets more full with more flexibility, I think, for the council to consider. So I really appreciate that. We'll start with council member Tibbets. Thanks, Mayor. And thank you guys for this presentation. Wow, I can't even imagine how you piece all of those layers of finance together. One of the questions I had had to do with the 2027 recession and what factors and assumptions or how are you making that kind of assertion? Going back to really the turn of the last century, there has been a recession of larger or smaller magnitude every six to seven years. So we're going with seven years and assuming that the pandemic started in fiscal 20. And so seven years from then is fiscal 27. And we're assuming it's a moderate recession, but in the model, you can pick a level of severity. You can pick the number of years over which the loss occurs. You can pick the recovery period and the percent of the loss that's recovered. And you can show impacts by individual revenue categories. So there's a lot of flexibility in there. But I think it is good to have a stress test just knowing if you have a recession come up, independent of any other changes, are your reserves enough to handle that kind of a loss so that you're not pressured into making cuts in a very short time period when you have less flexibility even if the reserves are higher and it buys you some time. So that's the rationale for the recession in 27. And then it would be seven years after that as well. Okay, great. Yeah, I'm not in disagreement. I think we're on what a 14 year, 15 year bull run right now as far as I can tell. And it would seem like it's coming around the corner. Who knows when, but I agree. I was just curious what assumptions you were making or how you were basing that. You know, I think sales tax revenue is obviously the big threat to our organization when recessions do come. We experienced it severely in 2008. I think we lost over 30% of our revenues as a result. So I just throw this out here to council again and mayor, I don't know if you have the long-term financial subcommittee looking at this, there was some discussion about it but completely presenting to the voters that basically a net neutral tax increase but restructuring the way in which we collect them to try to avoid having a significant hit in the next recession as well. But thanks. Great, just as a point of clarity for taking that back to the council, are you meaning basically swapping out sales tax for property taxes? Yeah, we had some discussion going into goal setting and then we didn't actually touch on it too much in goal setting. But it was one point we discussed, yeah, looking at doing kind of a parcel tax across the board, just looking at re-upping or increasing our cell phone tax and some of those lesser utilized taxes that are not as vulnerable to recessions and sales tax. Okay, we'll make sure that we're talking about that. Let's go to council member Fleming. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you to your team, Mr. Leland. It's always impressive the work that you do. And thank you to the long-term financial and audit subcommittee for listening to this presentation twice. I'll say that once was quite enough. So you guys are our heroes. But let me first start by, most of my comments are similar to Mr. Tibbet's comments with a couple of different twists. One is that I'm wondering if you factored in to the recession, the fact that we had a very slow and measured recovery from the great recession, meaning that some economists and financial leaders I've spoken to had felt that had it not been for the pandemic, we might have stretched a little longer than seven years on that. And then what impacts you might have factored in based on the infusion of cash from the CARES and American Recovery Act monies, you think that might, I'm asking you to speculate on that. Well, the CARES and ARPA money, there was a recovery act after the great recession as well. And then a new recovery. But the impact in terms of how long it lasts, the pandemic, when it started out with people having to stay at home, the thought was sales tax and then with people not traveling, that that would be a really prolonged impact. And one of the things that differs in the sales tax between the great recession and now is the extent to which online sales are covered within the system. So with the pandemic, even though people were home, they did a lot of online ordering and the city can get credit for that through the county pool. And so even though some of your brick and mortar stores were suffering, restaurants especially were suffering, there was a lot of spending occurring that caused sales taxes to come up. And we started seeing that by the fall. It was pretty clear that we weren't gonna have the same impact as during the great recession in terms of sales tax. So in terms of future recessions, we don't have assumptions that there will be bailouts for those, we're assuming that it would be a more moderate level of recession. And just like a normal economic cycle, you would see some dip in revenues and then for a year or two, and then it would come back over the next couple of years. And short of a major economic catastrophe, that's what a sort of typical quote unquote recession looks like is it's moderate in nature, sort of a five to 7% loss of revenue over a few years. Thank you for all of that. And I do find it really interesting around the sales tax issues in that people were at home buying more stuff, but it was not everybody at home. There are a lot of people without internet access who are buying things in person, more exposed to COVID, spending a much higher percentage of their income on sales taxes than people like myself who are frustrated that it's gonna take until August to get that chair sent to them that they so badly want now. But so the pain has not been spread evenly, which brings me to Mr. Tibbets's point, which both would potentially benefit the city and making us less vulnerable to sales tax fluctuations, but also spread out fairness. Every time we put a sales tax measure on the ballot, I hold my nose. And this year has been so difficult on the lowest income earners. And I would like us to the financial, long-term financial and stuff.  You guys, Tom, John and Chris, for you guys to really dig in and see what kinds of taxes that would be more equitable and sustainable, not just for the city's finances, but also for the residents that we strive to serve in the most equitable manner, what types of things could be passed. I know it's harder to pass specific taxes and so forth, but it would be really wonderful if we could transition or have a broader portfolio that was fairer and more predictable. So thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member, Council Member Splethelm. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have a couple of questions. One for you, Bob, regarding the key expense assumptions and rationales on slide 11 about the positions being frozen, how do you calculate that? Because we froze them at a point in time. And how do you factor that out because the demands of the community changed over time? And so how do you factor that because not all positions obviously pay the same? Well, that's true. In terms of the assumption of the impact of the freeze that staff has provided that, and that's based on the specific positions that were affected, the city may well decide to keep a bit of a rolling freeze whereas some positions are unfrozen that maybe others take their place. You can certainly have an average cost of a position and come up with the impact from that, but any given position will cost more or less. Also, the demand for positions changes over time. A position freeze is an expedient way to go because it's dealing with positions that are already vacant, it doesn't involve layoffs. But over time, it may not be the most adaptable approach because priorities change, workload changes. And five or 10 years is a long time to keep positions frozen or just playing. It's like you could either choose to eliminate them completely and only restore positions in the future when you think the financial situation is improved or you could keep them sort of on the books but frozen and make some adaptations over time as priorities change in certain areas. But the overall magnitude of the impact that that's been identified by staff. So to your point, Council Member Schwet-Helman and to follow up on what Bob, that is gonna be one of the critical conversations that we're gonna have in the budget process is what to do with those positions because again, I think holding them is creating a whole series of issues. I think we need to sort of get to start over and become adaptable to the concerns of the community and concerns of the Council. So I think you're identifying one of the critical conversations that's gonna unfold in the budget process. Holding vacant positions doesn't help the organization move forward. We need to restart some of these conversations. Because part of the argument too is this, well, if you kept that position vacant for five years, do you really need it? And so now I'm not a proponent of a zero-based budget every year, but so my same question would be when you did the one scenario of adding two FTEs starting fiscal year 23, did you just average the number of vacant positions now and that's how we came up with it? Just based on an average. Okay, so we're not being strategic and Mr. City Manager, those more, whether we add or continue to freeze, we'll be having those discussion in the coming weeks for this next fiscal year budget. Right, and the priorities of the city's the set. We're looking at the overall numbers and in this case, based on an average, but the priority of where such a restoration should go, that presumably is part of a larger scheme that Sean's talking about. Okay, thank you. Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. I'm curious, Bob, and thank you for this presentation again. I know it's, you get better at it every time you present it. So I just, I'm curious what population growth plays into your model and whether or not it does at all play into the model. And of course, that's a very difficult thing to assume, but it speaks to me when thinking about the increase in FTEs and the demand for positions based purely on service delivery and due to an increased population. Is there, is that part of your model? It is. We have an assumption of once we get through the rebuilds and there's a little over 3,000 of those, we're assuming 500 units a year of what we'd call new construction as opposed to rebuild. And that's below the regional housing needs allowance levels. And of course, that's not news either because virtually everybody has difficulty getting those numbers, but there will be growth. And so we have that growth factored in to the property tax and it's factored into other revenues such as the sales tax. So we do have that kind of population growth factored in. Thank you. And I share Council Member Fleming's concern and frustration over the use of sales tax to get us out of the hole because it just, it makes me nervous depending on that so much. And it is difficult to get those property taxes increased, but I wish there was a way to get the community to understand the value as far as the provision of city services to depend more fully on property tax than sales tax and maybe with the markets moving away they are, maybe as people get more comfortable with their financial condition, maybe there could be some movement in the future with the property taxes, but it is a tough nut to crack. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? All right, seeing none, we'll go ahead and go to public comment for this item, for item 3.1. If you have a comment today, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on Zoom. All right, Madam City Clerk, I'm not seeing any hands. Did we have any prerecorded voicemail public comments? We do, come in right now. This is item three, Dwayne DeWitt from Roseland. Thank you for looking into the long range financial forecast. It would be a really good thing if you folks would work together with the community on public participation budgeting. Participatory budgeting can actually be something that helps each of the seven districts if each council member is given a specific amount in which he can work with the community, he or she, excuse me, can work with the community within their district to make sure that some community priorities are being met rather than the top-down approach that has guided the city for centuries. It'd be much better if, in this day and age, with diverse communities and people of color, wanting to have more various in the system, you can have an approach in which the city council members work with their voters that put them in office to get done what the residents need done. This could also be helpful for the functions of the graduate system and some of the community region. There's going to be difficulties in this next few years due to the pandemic and people who are owners wanting to essentially evict people who might not be able to pay as much as owners want. It's important that you work together with the community. The community has elected you to represent them, not the business of the city in a sense, which is a corporation, a municipal corporation that doesn't really care about the residents a lot of times. So please work together, especially now as you'll be looking towards new management. This is the time when the council can take control of the city and do the best for the residents by working with the residents to plan ahead and have participatory budgeting based on resident input for the long-range financial forecast and residential assistance, eviction defense. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. That concludes Voice Message Public Comment received on item 3.1. Great, thank you so much. I'll go ahead and bring it back to the council. Are there any additional comments or questions for Bob and Andy? All right, seeing none. Just again, a huge thank you, Bob. And I know that we'll be talking more particularly through our ad hoc committee or excuse me, our long-term financial policy and audit committee. I'm looking forward to working with you. Okay, great. Thank you very much. All right, Mr. City Manager, let's do item 3.2. Item 3.2, tenant protections, rental assistance in Sonoma County's eviction defense ordinance, Sue Gallagher, city attorney presenting. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. We'll be presenting today on a number of current tenant protections related to COVID-19. We'll talk about rental assistance programs first and then we'll go over what the current regulations are on eviction defense and eviction protections. We'll start though with Megan Bassinger who is the interim director of housing and community services to update us on rental assistance programs. So I'll hand it over to Megan and we can move to the next slide. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of council. To give you a quick background on our current rental assistance environment, as you're well aware, the COVID-19 pandemic started in March, 2020 when we had the shelter in place order. As a result of that shelter in place order and the applications nationwide, the CARES Act was signed into law at the end of March, 2020. As a result of that initial allocation of funding, the city was awarded CDBG-CV, which is our community development block grant money, as well as additional HOPWA funds that we immediately deployed to providing additional homeless assistance and to providing additional funding for individuals who have AIDS, which is what HOPWA stands for. Next slide, please. In addition to the immediate infusion of resources that we received, our existing Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, which provides assistance to over 2000 households on a monthly basis, continued to provide assistance and provided over 700 client tenant adjustments. So as individuals who received Section 8 were suffering from loss of income, the Housing Choice Voucher Program was able to adjust their contribution and make those clients rent payment whole and provide for the rental payment to the landlords. Additionally, you may remember in May of 2020, we launched Weaving the City of Santa Rosa, launched a COVID-19 rental assistance program. This was achieved by reprogramming federal funds, which come to us through the Home Investment Partnership Act. It was approximately $600,000. We opened the waiting list in June of 2020 and had about 500 households that applied. We are still working through that waiting list. We have gone through about 50% of those individuals and are providing monthly assistance to eligible households. And again, these are people who have either lost or suffered a significant wage decrease as a result of the pandemic. They need to be at or below 60% of area median income and just for reference for a family of four, that's $68,000 roughly. And they're still required to pay based on their income, 30% of their rent. Next slide, please. The city was provided a third infusion of the CDBG-CV funds. And this is based on rental assistance needs identified through HUD. We are working through HUD on deploying these funds and we'll be using them in the future to continue to address the needs of residents within our community. And then finally, the most notable rental assistance program that is in front of the county as a whole currently is the emergency rental assistance program which is in excess of $31 million. These funds were allocated to Sonoma County by the US Treasury and then there's a supplemental tranche that's coming through the state of California. The County Board of Supervisors met this morning to review the program. The County has opted to self-administer this program and they will be rolling it out through contracts with community-based organizations. There should be about 10 of those that will be administering them. And the County will be putting out a website in the near future, it was not up as of earlier this morning. And it will be the emergency rental assistance program website. And staff will be providing additional updates as that details become available through the County on how these funds can be accessed but they will be available for residents throughout Sonoma County. And again, it's gonna be about $32 million. And that includes my component at the presentation. Thank you, Megan. And we'll now move to do a quick review of existing eviction defense provisions. And I wanna note that we're coming here today in part simply to give you an update of where we are on both the rental assistance and eviction defense, but also bringing forward this presentation in light of the County's amendment of its eviction defense ordinance in early February. You'll recall that I came to you on February 23rd, gave you a general update on where the County, how the County had amended its ordinance, the council expressed interest in hearing a little bit more and having the opportunity to discuss, particularly the County amendments, but in the context of what assistance is available in terms of rental financial assistance and what other protections are in place generally for evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. So I'm gonna go through very quickly the current status at three levels. Of course, due to the financial hardships that have been caused by COVID-19 and the significant health risks that are posed by residential evictions in the time of pandemic, both the federal government, the state government and local jurisdictions have all taken actions to protect tenants against evictions. When I reported to you back in February, I gave you a more general history of defense eviction protections over time since last March through till now, but today we'll really focus on the restrictions that are currently in effect. So we'll take a quick look at the order that was been issued by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. We'll then look more closely at the current status of state law and then finally we'll look at the county's newest amendments to its eviction defense ordinance. So next slide. With respect to the federal eviction protections, you'll see as I go through this, at the end of the day, the state and local regulations are gonna be more important to our day-to-day operations. But I think it's helpful to understand what the background is, what the federal background is. So when the CARES Act was signed into law a year ago last March, it did contain a 120-day moratorium on eviction for tenants in certain rental properties that had the benefit of federal assistance or federal funding. When those limited eviction protections expired in the late summer, the CDC stepped in and its first order was issued on September 4th last fall. It was a lengthy order and really focused very strongly on public health protections. The order placed a temporary halt on residential evictions in the specific interest of avoiding further spread of COVID-19. Again, it went through a lot of detail and statistics on the spread of COVID at the time. So the order identified three key risks, public health risks, looking to avoid movement into concrete or shared living situations that eviction could push people into those situations, increasing the risk of infections, the risk of pushing people into unsheltered homelessness, increasing their vulnerability to the disease and then the risk of moving people across state lines, widening the spread of the disease. The order was originally set to expire and on December 31st, but it's been extended twice, most recently to June 30th, 2021. Next slide. The CDC's order does prohibit evictions, but it does not relieve the tenant of the obligation to pay rent. It does not preclude the landlord from charging late fees, penalties or interests. And again, the protections apply only for the duration of the order, again, currently through June 30th, 2021. Next slide. To be eligible for protection, the tenant has to meet five criteria. The first is income limits. Tenant is eligible for federal protection if you've earned no more than 99,000 in 2020 or anticipated in 2021, 188,000 if a couple of filing jointly. A couple of other provisions that are essentially to get at that same issue. Next slide. The tenant must also have used best efforts to obtain all available government assistance for rented house rent or housing. Again, government assistant at the federal, state or local levels. The tenant must be unable to pay the full rent due to a substantial loss of household income, a loss of compensable hours or wages, a layoff or extraordinary out-of-pocket medical expenses. I would note that the loss of income or loss of wages does not necessarily have to be tied to the pandemic itself. Next slide. Fourth, the tenant must be using the best efforts to make timely partial payments as close to the full payment as possible. And the tenant must have no other housing options available. That is that the eviction would in fact likely force the individual into homelessness or into a congregate or shared living space. Next slide. Each adult listed on the lease or rental agreement must sign a declaration of eligibility under penalty of perjury and the signed declaration must be provided to the landlord. Next slide. There are several exceptions to the order. The order does not preclude evictions based on criminal activity, threatening the health or safety of other residents, causing damage or a risk of damage to the property, any violation of building codes or health or safety codes, and any violation of the contract obligation other than the payment of rent. Next slide. The other exception is that the CDC's order does not apply in any state or local area that has the same or greater level of public health protections with respect to residential evictions. Governor Newsom has determined that California eviction regulations should be deemed to provide the same or greater protections negating application of the CDC's order in California. I'm not aware of any court order with respect to whether the state regulations would exempt us from the federal CDC order, but I think it is likely that a court would confirm the governor's declaration. It is clear also when we get to it that the county's ordinance would meet the standard for exception from the CDC order. Again, I do think it's helpful, nevertheless, to understand that federal background, federal protections as background. Next slide, so now we'll move to the state and the county's regulations. State eviction protections were set in place through two legislative actions. The first was AB 3088. It was signed into law on August 31st, 2020. You may recall that the governor and the California Judicial Council had earlier imposed strict limitations on evictions, but by the end of last August, 2020, those protections had expired. And indeed at the urging of the judicial council, the governor and of course the public, the legislature did step in with the adoption of AB 3088. AB 3088 prohibits residential evictions for non-payment of rent due to financial hardship caused by the COVID pandemic. So in this way it is tied to the financial hardship caused by COVID. It does not relieve the tenant of the obligation to pay rent, but it does provide additional time to pay. And it does not allow for fines during that period of time. And I would note that while the CDC order focused very strongly on public health concerns, the state law gives equal focus to addressing the financial burdens that our communities have suffered as a result of COVID-19. Next slide. AB 33, I'm sorry, AB 3088 established two phases. Phase one is if unpaid rent accrued during the first six months of the pandemic, the unpaid rent is converted to consumer debt and can never be used as a basis for eviction. Second phase is if the unpaid rent accrued during the second six months of the pandemic, and now we're moving beyond that, that the unpaid rent is converted to consumer debt only if the tenant submits a declaration that the failure to pay rent was due to financial hardship due to COVID-19 and the tenant pays 25% of the rent due originally by January 1st. And that has now been extended through June as we'll see below. Next slide. AB 3088 does authorize a landlord to seek recovery of unpaid rents, those consumer debt through small claims court beginning March 1st, 2021. That has now been pushed back to beginning August 1st, 2021. It allows eviction for causes allowable under law other than non-payment of rent due to the impacts of COVID. So it does allow evictions for just cause and for no fault evictions as well. The protection protections against evictions were scheduled to expire as of February 1st, 2021, but again, they have been extended. So if we can go on to the next slide. SB 91 was signed into law at the end of January and it extended the phase two protections, those protections that require the declaration and the payment of 25% rent through June 30th, 2021 and with the same requirements. Again, prohibits eviction for non-payment of rent due to financial hardship caused by the COVID pandemic provided that the tenant submits the declaration that the failure to pay rent was due to COVID related financial hardship and the tenant pays 25% of the rent due by June 30th, 2021. Next slide. Small claims actions, small claims collection actions, as I mentioned, were postponed until August 1st, 2021. So all claims for past due rent under the state laws go to small claims court rather than to superior court that expands the jurisdiction of a small claims court and it is for a period of time for several years. SB 91 does continue, as I mentioned, to allow for evictions for causes other than non-payment of rent due to the impacts of COVID-19 including at fault, just cause and no fault, just cause. And it expressly allows for additional local eviction protections. Next slide. SB 91 also established the state rental assistance program. Megan's talked about that a little bit and just want to point out aid to income qualified tenants most at risk. And then it also provides aid to landlords, property owners who agreed to waive 20% of the unpaid rent will be eligible for reimbursement of 80% of the rent amounts owed between April 1st, 2020 and March 31st, 2021. Next slide, moving to the county level. This is very similar initially to the state standards. County Board of Supervisors adopted the urgency ordinance on March 4th, 2020. So we're almost a year into it. And it prohibits residential evictions for failure to pay rent if that failure to pay rent was the result of a substantial loss of income or out of pocket medical expenses associated with COVID-19. The actual ordinance lists a whole series of criteria, but essentially that those are the two categories as substantial loss of income or out of pocket medical expenses. Like the state law, it does not relieve the tenant of obligation to pay rent, but instead allows additional time to make that payment. Next slide, the county ordinance though operates in a slightly different way. It creates an affirmative defense, which may be asserted in the tenant's answer to an unlawful detainer action. That's probably similar to how the state law would operate. And then it also creates a private right of action for any violation of the ordinance by a landlord. The tenant believes there has been a violation of the ordinance may file a civil action for injunctive relief to prevent the eviction from moving forward and or they can file the civil action for damages. Actual damages can be troubled. The and the damages may also include claims for mental or emotional distress, although those damages will not be troubled. Next slide, the ordinance was adopted under the county's emergency powers and it was expressly intended to apply within both the incorporated and unincorporated areas. So to apply throughout the county. It does not preclude additional or alternative action by cities, although the county really urged consistency. The only city that I'm aware of that did at that time, take alternative action was the city of Sonoma. We came to city council back at the end of last March, last year to give you a report on that new ordinance and the council's direction was to allow it to move forward to be in effect within the city of Santa Rosa and the council took no alternative action under the ordinance. I have reached out to the county but have not yet heard back. I just reached out to them very recently as to whether they have any data or information as to how that original county ordinance has played out. Of course, the state laws came in over the county ordinance after its adoption. And so really, I think the state laws have been the primary focus. And really the primary operating regulations to date. Next slide. On February 9th, however, the Board of Supervisors adopted amendments to expand the protections of ordinance 6301. And the board really emphasized the public health risks in making these new amendments really emphasize the public health risks caused by evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I have the quote here, housing displacement and evictions during public health emergency would hinder individuals from implying with state and local directives to shelter in place and would lead to increased spread of COVID-19 overburdening our healthcare system and potentially resulting in loss of life. So again, a focus more on the public health side than the financial burdens of the pandemic. Next slide. So the new amendments very significantly expand eviction protections. The new amendments prohibit all evictions except in three categories. First, if an eviction is necessary due to violence, threats of violence, or when a tenant imposes an imminent threat to the health or safety of another, the ordinance does clarify that having COVID does not qualify for evictions. I would certainly undermine the whole purpose of the new amendments. Second, evictions are allowed when sought for the purpose of immediately removing the unit from the rental market in compliance with state law. And then third, the amendment in compliance with state law when based allows for an eviction based on non-payment of rent between March 1st, 2020, and June 30th, 2020, if that non-payment of rent is unrelated to the financial hardships resulting from COVID-19. So these amendments move away from the tenant's inability to pay rent due to COVID-19 and into a broader moratorium on evictions during the penance of the pandemic. Next slide. Other than the change in the scope of the protections themselves, all other provisions of the original ordinance remain the same. So it is expressly intended to apply in both incorporated and unincorporated areas to apply throughout the county. It is self-executing. It is based on private actions between the landlord and tenants. So no further action is required by cities. But again, it does not preclude additional or alternative actions by city should the city's so desire. I'm not aware at this point of any other city taking action, but I will keep my ears out for that. I also would note that the remedies also remain the same. So again, it's a affirmative defense to an eviction filing. It also creates the private right of action against the landlord who attempts to initiate an unlawful eviction against civil action for injunctive relief or damages, treble damages may be awarded and damages for mental or emotional distress may also be included. By its own terms, by the way it's written that ordinance is, it was originally intended to remain in effect until 60 days after the public health emergency and local emergency orders were no longer in effect. But that has been superseded by state law with the adoption of SB 91. Under SB 91, the protections will extend to August 31st. The payback period for payment of unpaid rents would begin, would begin no later than August 1st and the payments would have to be made by August 31st. That's the summary of the county ordinance.  So I wanted to just mention a couple of others that I think may have come up when we talked back in late February. Price gouging, yes, price gouging does remain in effect in Sonoma County. That is under state law under penal code 396. The district attorney has a very strong enforcement action for that. That precludes any rise in rent by more than 10% for the duration of the order. And this goes back to 2017. This particular, the governor has extended it specifically for those counties that have been, that were affected by fires from 17 through the 20. The landlord cannot evict and then re-rent at a higher rate and violations of the price gouging statute can result in a one year in jail for a fine of up to $10,000 plus civil penalties up to $2,500 per violation. And the governor has extended those protections to the end of this calendar year, to December 31st, 2021. And the other protection that I wanted to mention is AB 1482, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019. That limits annual rental increases to no more than 5% plus CPI or 10%, whichever is less. It does allow for increases in rents with a new tenancy. It includes a just cause provision and a no fault termination provision and covers most rentals, although there are a number of significant exceptions to the Tenant Protection Act, including properties that were built in the last 15 years. Owner occupied single family residences, single family residents or condominiums unless owned by a corporation or other entity and short-term tenancies of less than one year are not subject to the Tenant Protection Act of 2019. And next slide. Happy to answer questions, both Megan and I are here and available to any questions you might have. Great, thank you so much, Sue and Megan. A lot of moving parts I know over the last year. Councilor, are there any questions? Let's go ahead and start off with Council Member Tibbets. Thank you, Mayor. The first question I have is for you, Megan or anyone in your office or council members for that matter. When the county was developing their plan for the 31 million dollars and going out to 10 different community-based organizations, were we involved in those conversations at all? The reason why I ask is what's striking to me about that number is, one, it's a significant number, 31 million dollars. But two, it's insufficient comparing that to the research that reporter Guy Kovner did in his piece where I believe he determined through doing his research that 36 million was said to be the cumulative need in Sonoma County. And I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for us to collaborate with the county to try to make sure that all that need is covered. So I'm gonna speak a little bit on Megan's behalf. We were invited to informational sessions. The county told us what the program would look like. The funding is federal funding. So the cities have requested several times to be more actively involved. You're gonna hear more about the program as we learn more about the program. But this was a county program and county choices in the development of the program. Okay, well, I've said it here before and I'll say it again. I think that if we have determined collectively as a community that 36 million is the number and we're short by about five million, I hope that we can start having conversations with our colleagues at the county about what are we gonna do when we run out of 31 million and there is still a significant gap. And I'd be happy to be part of those conversations if we decide to go that way. Okay, any other questions from council members? All right, let's go ahead and go to our public comment. For folks interested in giving live public comment, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. So first we have Ananda. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and council members. Ananda Sweet with the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber of Commerce. First I wanna thank you for your work to tackle our housing crisis and efforts to take a data-driven approach to both our rebuild and the work to increase our housing stock. I can't state strongly enough that housing affordability is a priority that we share. And there's absolutely a need for safety net to keep people who are unable to work because of COVID-19 from being evicted. This protection as you know already exists at a state and federal level so that without any local ordinance, tenants are protected from eviction for COVID-related non-payment up rent and late fees and interest are already prohibited. We urge you in looking for additional support for tenants that you maintain a data-driven approach and that you consider the impact of additional restrictions on our long-term housing infrastructure and housing affordability. Additional layers of local protection that remove a rental housing provider's ability to evict a tenant and her reasons unrelated to COVID impact or ability to pay rent represent an enormous burden and risk for rental housing providers. Without complete public funding, expanded eviction restrictions add to the financial uncertainty and dispense for the entire housing industry and will magnify as our housing shortage. The most immediate damage is further harm to struggling rental housing providers who are already doing all they can to help tenants will desperately trying to continue to cover mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance premiums, maintenance, and repairs. The majority of these are small private rental housing providers who will not be able to continue to cover these expenses while forgoing the rental income they depend on for their own livelihoods. Add layers of local ordinance that offer no protection or assistance to rental housing providers and actively add to their liability and risk will discourage housing providers from keeping units in the rental housing market, reducing our rental housing availability and increasing rents in the long-term, adding to the housing cost burden for many. There was a rental housing shortage prior to COVID-19 and burdensome ordinances and lack of assistance for rental housing provider to further damage our housing infrastructure and housing affordability. Your leadership and continued focus on healthy housing market are critical to our economic recovery. Thank you. Thanks, Ananda. So I'm looking to see if there are any other hands. We have Roevee. Good afternoon. Mayor and City Council, Roevee Lynn Antonio with the California Apartment Association. Thank you so much for the opportunity to provide some feedback and appreciate staff going over the current eviction protections that's already afforded from the federal to the local level. The one thing that I'd like to emphasize about the current state laws and all the eviction protection that was outlined is that it allows contracts to be upheld. As you know, these contracts commonly referred to as lease agreements are put in place to enforce and allow peace, quiet and enjoyment of the building and the neighbors. Simply put, they are there to maintain health and safety. The number one concern that CAE had with the county's enhanced eviction ordinance is that it would nullify lease agreements and render contracts useless. They become unenforceable. This, thus, is creating health and safety hazards. For example, under current state laws, a landlord may recover possession of their unit if their app attendant sublets without permission, thus bringing in unauthorized occupants that may pose danger to other residents. They're also, especially when I'm entering unit to inspect smoke detectors and unlawful use of the property. With the current ordinance that the county adopted, it would allow for these actions to take place without any consequences. So thus, you know, creating a health and safety concerns. The current state protections on rent and evictions has significantly evolved over the years through AB 1482, 3088 and SB 91. Under currents, there are no current scenarios that state would allow for evictions to take place, especially when it comes to minor lease violations. Currently right now, in order for a landlord to even evict a tenant on a lease agreement, it would have to be a material breach of agreement. What it's looking like here is that we have a real problem that we need to solve and that is not the issue of evictions. The issue here is what to do with the growing rent that tenants are accruing, especially for those who are not going to be afforded the benefits of SB 91 since they fall over the 80% AMI threshold. I believe that the city would be helpful in entering a conversations on how to deal with those renters and how to help them and make sure that the obligations of the housing providers are also met to make sure that they do not lose the housing that they're providing for current city renters. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Roevee. All right, last call for live public comments. That's what I thought. All right, Suzie, last one and then we'll go to our recorded public comments. Hi there, my name is Suzie Dershowitz I'm the housing policy attorney from Legal Aid of Sonoma County. I'm calling to say thank you so much for the excellent presentation and just provide a little bit more background. Legal Aid worked really closely with grassroots tenant leaders and organizers to advance the strength and protections that were adopted by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. We advocated for a ban on evictions except those necessary for public health and safety because our clients and community members were being evicted for minor lease violations and bogus nuisance allegations during a deadly pandemic. For example, parking in a handicapped parking spot was landing our clients and community members in court. So we really appreciate the bold leadership and action taken by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and would be happy to answer any questions or speak with any of the city council members about the protections that are currently in place and ways to strengthen those protections going forward. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Suzie. All right, we'll bring it back and we'll hear, do we have any pre-recorded voicemail public comments? Yes, we do. I'm a local real estate broker. I have one retired client that has a tenant that works for the San Rosa School District as a teacher who claimed COVID impacted April the 1st of last year. According to the school district, there were no layoffs of school personnel. Tennis lease was up February the 1st, but failed to vacate. Owner has been unable to continue to carry this property from the over $22,000 in past rents not received and now approaching $5,000 in attorney fees so far has chosen to get out of the rental business and sell this home. The tenants are continuing to go through court using legal aid that continues to file motions to prolong the property being delivered back to the owners. A walkthrough was done last month and there are substantial damages in cause of this home which will only add to the cost of the owner preparing this home to sell. This is wrong. What happened to acknowledging both tenants and landlords are victims of this pandemic? Government only has assisted tenants. The landlords have totally been ignored. Shame on not addressing all parties as victims. Please align your decision with state law. Thank you. My name is Carol, Lexa. I am a local realtor and would like to speak to the housing issue being addressed today. The devastating impacts of our supply crisis coupled with the unprecedented losses due to wildfires and the pandemic are very real. As you consider adding another layer of regulation onto rental housing suppliers in San Rosa, remember that landlords are under enormous pressure and suffering from losses already. Additional regulation may destroy the basis for our rental housing by driving small housing suppliers out of business and out of the area. Please consider the layers of federal, state and county ordinances and mandates already in place to protect tenants. In large part, rentals in Santa Rosa, whether single family homes, condos, ADUs or small multifamily units are primarily owned by individuals or families. These small locally owned rentals are the core of our rental housing stock, not the faceless investor corporations. Owners of housing were not responsible for the pandemic, yet they are asked to bear the financial burden either in part or in full. Many of tenants and owners don't fit within the income levels for assistance and those who do are still asked to forgive 20%. For many of the mom and pop owners, the losses are crushing. Small landlords get no unemployment assistance, no PPP and have had no mortgage assistance programs. Rental contracts are vital for equity. They protect both tenants and landlords. Overlapping and burdensome ordinances seriously impair the rights that tenants and landlords have under legal contracts and hurt our entire rental housing economy. Measures are in place to protect the fundamental right to housing for those suffering from the pandemic. Please don't place all the burden on small landlords, align with state provisions and find a way to support tenants and landlords as we emerge from this crisis. Thank you very much. All right, Mayor, that concludes voice message, public comments on item 3.2. Great, I'll bring the discussion back to the full council then. Sue, can you frame for the council what type of direction you need from us today? Certainly, if I can get my video back on. Yes, as it currently stands, the county ordinance is, the new amendments to the county ordinance are effective within the city of Santa Rosa. If the council desires to take any alternative path, we would ask that they give staff direction and we would come back at a later time with the report item with an option for action. If the council is comfortable with moving forward and allowing the current county ordinance to remain effective within the city limits, we simply would ask for that direction and there'll be no further action necessary. Okay, so we'll go ahead and we'll start with council member Sawyer. You've got your hand up. Thank you, Mayor. I'm just gonna refer to my notes. First of all, I just wanted to bring to the attention of the council that since early last year that the legislature has worked its darned just to really come up with a comprehensive list of important protections for tenants that has evolved. They are truly comprehensive and I think that if you were to hear those protections as mentioned by our city attorney, you would, you could agree that they are comprehensive and offer the kind of protection so vital to our tenants but also balanced with some of the more important protections that are needed by our landlords as well. And because they, but that rental housing needs to be protected because it's used by so many of our residents. And if those protections are not in place, we could start to lose as we already have some of the housing stock, some of the rental housing stock that is so important to our residents. I think also it's important to note that the state model is one that is primarily, I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Madam City Attorney, is the model that is embraced by most of the cities in the state, it's not your knowledge that it is, it tends to be because of the way it has evolved. The model that is embraced by most cities in the state currently. That's true. There are a number of cities that have taken further action. There are several cities that have taken action similar to what the County of Sonoma has done. But it is my sense that overall the majority of the cities have are operating under the state, state protections. Thank you. And I think that's due in no small part to the effort of the legislature to create those protections. And contrary to the comments made by Legal Aid, the state also offers protections from frivolous what actions on the heart on behalf of landlords to say that if someone were parked in a handicap zone that would be considered a frivolous action and protected under state law in some of the finer language if I'm not mistaken. So the use of these minor infractions are really prevented or the tenants are prevented from those kinds of actions by landlords. So I'm really in favor of moving forward with the state law. I think it's come a long way. And in addition, if I'm not mistaken and Madam City Attorney, if you can weigh in here as well we would actually not need to take any action as we would not be coming up with our own ordinance. We would just be willing to adhere to the state's provisions. Is that true? The council would have to take action to confirm that we are taking the city out of the county ordinance. Otherwise the county ordinance is drafted in such a way as to apply throughout uniformly throughout the county and both the incorporated and unincorporated areas. So the council would need to take action to remove the city of Santa Rosa from the operation of those provisions. Okay, thank you. And that's really what, that is my hope and it's the hope that I have that the council sees clear to embracing the state protections and not moving forward with an ordinance of our own or embracing the ordinance of the county as well. Thank you. Thank you, council member, council member Alvarez. Thank you, mayor. For myself, I'm wondering more of what could a tenant possibly do to a home and still avoid being evicted? Could they fight dogs in the backyard, cook crack in the kitchen, grow weed in the garage and would that still absolve them of eviction? Or we just heard the example of parking in the handicap but we understand that that's not due cost. Also, when it comes to the affirmative defense to place the tenant or the landlord at the risk of being sued for an infraction that might be a way of defending themselves against a lawsuit. So I see that almost as a possible abuse of the tenant in this case. So I too do echo council member Sawyer's hopes that we do move towards the state opposed to the county. And I would love to hear the examples of what a tenant could actually get away with. Okay, Sue, I think that was a question directed at you. If you can try to answer that. Sure, under the current county ordinance unless there is violence or a threat of violence or an imminent threat to the health or safety of another. Again, I guess we'll take out if you're gonna take the unit off market and either you're gonna move into it or your family's gonna move into it. That's one exception. If it's for failure to pay rent during that time period, March 1st, 2020 on June 30th, 2021, that also is exempted. But otherwise, aside from those two, you are subject to eviction only if it's necessary due to violence or threats of violence or when the tenant poses an imminent threat to the health or safety of another. So I literally could remove all the shoe rock from my home and would avoid those instances. Right, what you'd avoid is eviction. You could still be sued by the landlord for recovery of the damages that you've caused, but you could not be evicted from the home. So there are remedies that are available to the landlord, but not eviction. Eviction would be taken off the table until the end of August. And at the end of August, then we could seek the help of code enforcement. No, that would likely be a private matter between the tenant and the landlord. So that would be a private right of action. Thanks. Sure. Council Member Tibbets, do you have your hand up? Yeah, thank you, Mayor. You know, I have a lot of thoughts on this, so if you all bear with me, back in 2017, 2016, when rent control was the hot topic, Chris, when you and I were getting elected to council, if my memory serves, we were both supporters of rent control. And I was at the time because we were seeing pretty commonly rents in excess of 30, 40, even sometimes 50%. And that's where I saw our community falling out of balance. And that's where I felt that it was really important to side with tenants and make sure that they're paying $2,000 this year. They're not gonna be surprised a year later and have their housing put in jeopardy amidst a housing crisis because their rent was increased to 3,000, 3,500, just because the market would bear it. I always was a big proponent of some, I mean, I remember I explicitly used to cite Oregon's legislation when they were the first to bring it forward. It was to me a very reasonable approach. It allowed landlords, property owners, to be able to recover some of their investments and be able to kind of march forward, but it also gave some sense of predictability to tenants who needed to budget for their own futures. What I'm seeing today feels like the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction where we, well, it's not swinging, but I guess that's my fear, is that if we keep loading up all of these government ordinances, and right now with the price gouging ordinance being 2.5% a year based on 10% over the last four years beginning in 2017, then we're gonna start seeing people leave the rental market space and those units will get replaced by owner occupied units, which does no favors to the efforts of this council to create rental housing and certainly affordable housing. I heard recently that 42 units of rental housing last year were sold as investment properties and went turned into owner occupancy units. That's 42 units we lost off the rental market. And I only think we created a hundred and so affordable housing rental units. And the other problem that I'm having right now with the county's ordinance is we have not seen, well, at least I have not seen data on evictions. And I know that that's because there are protections in place and that there is potentially a cliff looming out there, but that's why I think it's so important that we have $31 million at our disposal at the county and hopefully the city can cover any gaps that have been empirically determined because when we talk about balance in the community, the way I see it is my job is always to protect somebody who's vulnerable to losing their housing. That's first and foremost in my priorities matrix, but I also have to look out for people that own investment properties as well to the best of my ability and balance those interests. And I'd like, so I guess what I'm trying to say is I think that we should stick with the state ordinance for now. I think that we should actively work with the county and a lot of these community benefit organizations to keep our fingers tightly on the pulse of what's going on in terms of evictions or pending evictions. But my concerns are similar to council member Alvarez's. There's just so much in this county ordinance that I think could be problematic. And one of the biggest problems that I don't think we're talking about that we have to have a conversation about pretty soon is what is this gonna do to the functionality of the courts? And how are we funding the courts to take on the caseload that they're probably gonna experience? So, that having been said, I expect that we'll be acting together in unison as a community to be strong and work together and take care of one another. And if I get any sense that that's not happening that people are getting taken advantage of that people are losing their housing, I'm gonna change my tone really quick. And I'm here going on the record saying that. But I think right now, I think the state law is pretty comprehensive. And I think we should give it a shot. Thank you, council member, council member Fleming. You know, it is my role to diverge with our council a bit here and suggest that we do what the board has done and adopt their policy as our own. Because while things are really difficult for renters or landlords, things are also really difficult for tenants. And the major difference here, I think is in the false equivocation here that it is a choice to be a landlord and it is a service that we provide to the community. However, it does remain an investment and the risk to folks becoming homeless or having a housing instability, not just for adults, but the long-term adverse childhood experiences have long-term economic impacts as well. And so there are certain costs and certain risks with going with more regulation and I fully accept that. And I am not unsympathetic to the landlords in our communities and the challenges that this presents. However, the vulnerabilities of the tenant population are just of a significant magnitude larger than the vulnerabilities of the landlord population, which is not to say that the landlord population doesn't have some vulnerabilities at all. And I know that landlords are really, really going through it. So I in no way mean to diminish their experience whatsoever, but I just think that if you take the average individual of familial wealth, intergenerational wealth of the average renter and compare that with average landlord, you would see something in an order of like 10 to one, 20 to one, probably much, that's probably a very conservative estimate of the safety net differential between the two groups. But having been said, landlords, if they pull out of the market and providing quality rentals, and I may be the only renter on the council here, so I'm not unbiased, I have a great landlord, it's a mom and pop and they're really wonderful people. And I do everything I can to never bother them. And at the same time, as I wanna protect tenants, I am very interested in exploring ways that we can support the rental market, are not only our mom and pop landlords, and I wish there were a way to differentiate here between the mom and pop landlords and the large out of town Chicago based, you know, the apartment association folks who are predatory and provide a greater level of protection and support for our local folks. I know in my district, the vast majority of renters like myself rent from people who own their homes who also live in district four. And so, you know, it really is a community and we get pretty good service from those mom and pops, but I'm not certain that that's the case across this city. And so I will be supporting the county's measures. The other thing that I wanna keep in mind is that the county tends to be a more conservative body and much less interested in diving into these matters. And I think it really says something that they stepped out on this limb and were willing to go the extra mile for tenants in light of the public health disaster. Without the public health disaster, I'm not sure that they would have done it. And they are frankly responsible for maintaining public health in our county. And if they believe that this is necessary for public health, we in the city have very little to do with protecting our residents from COVID-19 beyond the enforcement measures that we have instituted. And I find it hard to believe that a slightly more conservative body would have put this forward if they didn't believe it was absolutely necessary. Thank you for hearing my comments. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Svethel. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Not reiterating, I thought Mr. Sawyer framed the information as I would. And I'm like, I like looking at the data. So we've been provided with the data. The one kind of disappointing thing with what the county has done, I'm not sure if they asked for our opinion. And I don't know other than anecdotal information about what led them to do the restrictions which are more restrictive or beneficial for one party or another and what the state has. I think the state guidelines are very effective. In fact, the situation is proving as we're hearing that County of Sonoma is actually moving the orange tier effective tomorrow. So situation is getting better for more even kill approach with the data that I've seen. I'm supportive of just staying with the state standard and not go with the county standard. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member, Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. I believe that, well, one, I think that if we had data that really showed the eviction rates and people that have a loss of income because my fear, which I believe is occurring are that people are taking advantage of the fact that they don't have to pay right now or that they can't get evicted. Therefore, really not looking at the long-term effects that these ordinance aren't gonna stay in effect forever. And there's definitely going to be some not so great outcomes once they are not in place. But with that being said, I agree with Councilwoman Fleming about protecting our tenants. I don't think August is that far off. And I do think that the economy is recovering. Speaking on what Councilman Alvarez said about someone destroying a home, I really feel like if they weren't destroying a home a year and a half ago, that probably would not be the case now. That would be an extreme case. And I do understand that there are gonna be cases that are extreme, but they're also, for the majority of the people that have been renting homes for a really long time that have fallen on hard times, it's gonna be consistent. And they're gonna be consistent. It's just financially they're falling on really hard times. So I'm going to say that I would like to go with the county ordinance for right now that we don't need to adopt our own. And just knowing that we can always come back to this if we need to. All right, thank you, Vice Mayor. So for me, I will say I am technically also a tenant and I do live in my fiance's home. And I'll tell you right now, if she had said no when I proposed, it would have been really awkward that she couldn't evict me. For me, the county ordinance is a bridge just a little bit too far. The idea that somebody could breach their lease repeatedly without a remedy for the landlord, to me really smacks up one of the issues that we have when we make public policy, which is that if everybody just wasn't a jerk, then we wouldn't have to make most of these rules. And unfortunately, we have heard stories and seen data from folks who have taken advantage of the system who have now put other folks who have their entire investments, many people's retirements at risk because the rules that are in place are making it too difficult to get rid of the folks who are taking advantage of the system. I think that the state has done a pretty good job of trying to navigate those waters to put in place reasonable protections so that we can make sure that our vulnerable community stays in their homes. But unfortunately for me, with how broad the county's ordinance is and to Council Member Alvarez's point, removing all the sheetrock, I think the other thing that you used was cooking crack in the kitchen, things of that nature, I know it's just a little bit too difficult as we have these conversations. So I am in favor of us going with the state's law as well. I've heard direction from five Council Members to do that. So Sue, I suppose at a future Council agenda, you'll bring to us what we need to opt out of the county's ordinance and to go with the state's existing law. Yes, we'll do that and we'll get it scheduled onto the upcoming meeting's calendar, which is already pretty full, but we will do our best to get it back in a timely manner. All right, I appreciate that. Thank you, Spudgeon. With that, we're gonna take a five minute break before we come back for our regularly scheduled Council meeting. Just hanging out on Victoria. All right, Madam City Clerk, I recognize a quorum of Council Members are back. Let's go ahead and take the roll and resume the meeting. Okay, Council Member Tibbets. Here. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Council Member Fleming. Present. Thank you. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all Council Members are present. All right, thank you so much, Stephanie. For those of you who are just joining us, we just completed item 3.2, our study session. We're now going to move into our regular session starting with a report from our closed session earlier today. The City Council did meet to discuss what the process is going to be for moving forward with an interim City Manager as well as a more long-term permanent recruitment. The Council did give direction to our HR director to begin reaching out to a number of different firms that we've worked with before on candidate searches to bring to us a list of retired annuitants that may be able to step in in the interim role here over the next couple of weeks. It's anticipated that an ad hoc committee will begin to meet next week to start to vet some of those candidates and to make a final selection to provide ample time for both the City Manager and that individual to get on the same page moving forward. Simultaneously, that ad hoc committee will work with our HR director to create an RFP, a request for proposals for a executive search team to begin the recruitment process for our next City Manager. And that ad hoc committee is gonna be myself, Vice Mayor Rogers and Council Member Schwethelm. So we will discuss more fully as we flesh out that process. Once we have that candidate search team in place, we'll definitely reach back out to the community and provide a number of different community engagement and participatory elements for folks in selecting our next City Manager. Madam City Attorney, did I miss anything? No, you provided a very good summary. Thank you. Great. We'll move on then. We do not have any proclamations or presentations today. Mr. City Manager, do we have any staff briefings? Yes, we do. 7.1 COVID response update. After just three weeks in the red tier within California's blueprint for a safer economy, Sonoma County will move into the less restrictive orange tier beginning on Wednesday, April 7th. Moving from the red tier into the orange tier means among other things that restaurants, including wineries, breweries, distilleries that serve meals are allowed to operate indoors with 50% capacity or a maximum of 200 people. Retail establishments are allowed to operate indoors at normal capacity. Places of worship and movie theaters are allowed to operate indoors with 50% capacity or a maximum of 200 people. Gyms, health clubs, including yoga studios are allowed to operate indoors with 25% capacity. Museums, zoos, aquariums can offer indoor activities at 50% capacity. Breweries, wineries and distilleries that do not serve meals may open indoors with modifications. Bars that do not serve meals may open outdoors with modifications. Not essential offices can open indoors with modifications. However, telework is strongly encouraged. And finally, graduation and commencement ceremonies can be held outdoors at 33% capacity with assigned seating. More details are being disseminated and we are adjusting our website to reflect the details into the new tier. Also, I believe this afternoon, the governor also announced that we are heading towards a full reopening in mid June and the city is on a similar track to provide opening and more details will be following in the upcoming weeks. And then if there are no questions, we'll go to the second update. Council, any questions on the COVID-19 update?  Is that from the last item or is that on this one? All right, we'll keep moving. So 7.2, community empowerment plan, Magali Teyes to present. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers, members of the council. Thank you all so much for this opportunity to provide a quick briefs on the community empowerment plan update. So we have a couple of projects we wanna update the community on. So with the Santa Rosa Police Department, lowrider patrol car, the retired patrol car is now available for the product to begin. We've developed a plan to work with all the individual car clubs represented by the Sonoma County Lowrider Council, who will have a specified project within the work needed to complete the vehicle. We're hoping to be able to have a completed vehicle by this fall. We secured a stereo donation from Enterprise Rental Car. We are currently working with the Marin Latino Peace Officers Association to secure additional funding. The Sonoma County Lowrider Council would like to name the vehicle, the Mary Lou after SRPD officer Mary Lou Armour who passed away last year. Her family has given us permission to move forward with the dedication. So with the Multicultural Roots Project, during the month of March in honor of Women's History Month, we highlighted women from our BIPOC communities. The team is working on developing themes for upcoming months, including youth community leaders and leaders from our LGBTQ plus community for digital engagement platform. The Office of Community Engagement secured a contract with bang the table for their engagement HQ digital platform. And this platform will especially assist our engagement efforts with community members that have mobility or transportation constraints, lack of childcare or other factors that prohibited them from participating in some of our events. Post pandemic, this tool in tandem with our in-person events and activities will allow us to engage with a larger portion of our community. The platform is composed of a variety of tools such as digital mapping, virtual post-it notes, storytelling, surveys, polling and more. So one example of an upcoming program is the social justice mapping project which will allow residents to assist us in identifying and sharing historic spaces and stories that took place locally. The site is currently being developed and the name of the site will be Let's Connect SR. We are developing an outreach strategy to let community members know about this resource and how to navigate it. Staff training will take place this month and the site will be up and running by early to mid-May. And that is the end of my report. Thank you. Great, thank you so much. Councilor, are there any questions on that update? All right, saying done. Is there another update, Mr. City Manager? For the final update, 7.3 glass fire recovery update Mr. Paul Lowenthal. Good evening, Mayor Rogers, Vice Mayor Rogers, members of the Council of Paul Lowenthal, Assistant Fire Marshal of the Santa Rosa Fire Department with a quick glass fire update. Following yesterday's joint city, county and state debris task force meeting and then yesterday's city-wide recovery task force with the watershed and debris. We feel that we're now at a good point where we can start decreasing staff activity as it relates to recovery. Things are progressing pretty smoothly. A number of the repairs to city infrastructure, projects have been completed. The debris removal is progressing nicely and rebuild is underway. It's unfortunate we've gone through this now a couple of times but the city staff that are on these teams have really done a great job of helping move our community through the recovery process quickly. So a number of staff will be pulling back. There will still be our core group that will continue to meet with the state regularly on both their inland branch meetings, the joint city, county, state meeting and then we will continue to hold our weekly small check-in meetings to provide the updates to the city manager and assistant city managers as necessary and to counsel on a more less frequent basis. So again, things are progressing nicely and hopefully outcome would will not have to activate our full teams for quite some time into the future. Great, thank you so much, Paul. Any questions for Paul? All right, I'm not seeing any. So let's go ahead and go to public comment for item seven, our staff briefings. If you're interested in commenting, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature. Okay, I'm not seeing any. Madam city clerk, were there any prerecorded voice bails? Would be an excellent situation in which you folks, the elected officials could actually get some community comment by working with the COVID problems that have been arisen, arising. The dilemma in the Southwest district one at least, maybe district seven has been that a lot of people don't get the news to use as quickly as folks might think and what you want to see which is connected to the internet and to people over these people. People of different language groups out in that Southwest and maybe the Western areas, district seven who aren't getting the updates, aren't being as aware of what's coming. Money that comes from the first part of the chapter could actually help to make that happen.  Save $14 to $15 million and then apply it to community empowerment and working to overcome the 19 pandemic locally get our local businesses going and positive things happen. Now it's the time of district 10 and it will only happen if you, the elected officials push forward and say this is what we want to see happen for our community and our residents, our voters, the people that this community is supposed to be about, not to bureaucracy. Thank you kind of before your time. Mayor, that concludes public comment on item seven. Great, thank you so much. We'll go on to item number eight, the city manager and city attorneys reports. Sue, do you want to start today? Sure, I do not have anything to report this afternoon. Nor do I. All right, item nine, are there any statements of abstentia from the council members? All right, saying that we'll go on to item number 10, mayors and council members reports. Does anybody have a report for us today? Let's go ahead and start with council member Alvarez. Thank you, mayor. I'm happy to report that I've appointed Madonna Feather-Cruz to our board of community services at a large position to be effective immediately. Thank you. Thank you, council member Tibbets. Yep, in that same vein, I'd like to reappoint Doug McKenzie to the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board and Ellen Bailey to the Mezzurro Advisory Committee. Thank you. All right, thank you, council members, what help? Thank you, mayor Rogers. Yesterday we had our water advisory committee meeting and unfortunately didn't have a lot of positive information, but I do want to share with council. First, the fiscal year 2021-2022 Sonoma Water Transmission System budget, the WAC unanimously recommended approval of that fiscal year budget rate collaboration between the TAC members and Sonoma water staff resulted in a wholesale rate increase of 3.47% significantly less than what was originally proposed. And then Ian or Stephanie, could you put up slide one about some of our water supply conditions? Thank you. Sonoma water staff provided a water supply update and discussed their response to a second year of significantly below normal rainfall. So this slide shows what the rainfall to date and then 40% if we've been averaging, let's just 30 in Santa Rosa 36 inches we're down at 12.77 inches. If you could go to slide two, which will show our reservoir storage is very important for Lake Sonoma and Lake Mendocino. The situation especially concerning in the upper Russian river where reduced reservoir releases from Lake Mendocino have been in place since February. It is likely that Sonoma water will expand their request to the state water resources control board to include a reduction in flows in the lower Russian river preserving supply in Lake Sonoma where we derive our water supply. And if we can go to slide three, so without additional rainfall it'll be our driest year on record. The two reservoirs are the lowest levels for this time of year in the history of the operation. So the state would also include a or another request to the state would also include a recommendation for reduction of Sonoma waters diversion from the Russian river which would result in a request for water contractors to reduce water use. And lastly, what are we trying to do proactively besides conserved you can go to slide four. Sonoma water saving partnership has been implementing a robust multimedia dry year campaign. This is some of the examples of the various ads. So I would hope that all of us would join in whatever we can do to conserve our water and let our constituents know this is a very significant challenge for all of Sonoma County. And there's so many people working to get us through this very challenging situation and let's hope for rain in our future. Thank you. All right, thank you, council member. And I know we have a number of items coming related to that conversation topic for the council as well. Council member Fleming. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you to Mr. Schwedhelm for his commitment to dealing with our water issues. That is oftentimes one of the more challenging tasks to get somebody to commit as deeply as he has. And for my part, I will be showering as infrequently as possible. And so you can all be very grateful for the Zoom situation that we are in at present. Now, if we don't have water and we return to in-person meetings, you may not like that as much, but we'll have to see how that goes. So, but at any rate, it's a very serious situation. And there's a lot that can be done. And I implore you to check out the resources on our city website. I have two announcements today. One is that if you don't already know that Mr. Tibbets has been appointed the chair of the Rural Enterprise District. It was an honor that I had last year and one that in spite of having a brand new baby and being a little bit tired, just based on, you know, that he looks a little haggard. He has been carrying off quite well as well as leading us through the downtown subcommittee expertly only missing one meeting because his wife was in labor. So I think we can let that go. So at any rate, I wanna thank Mr. Tibbets for stepping up in a time that must be really busy for you. And that dovetails on my next point, which is Mr. Tibbets did suggest and encouraged me to pursue the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. And I am very pleased to announce that this morning the board of supervisors of the San Sonoma County unanimously appointed me to be the newest commissioner. And so henceforth, you must call me commissioner Fleming. Also, I probably should get back to doing some standup because clearly I'm really enjoying this. But at any rate, I cannot wait to see you all in person and save water, buckle up. Well, thank you council member Fleming and congratulations on the appointment. I hope that the public understands how big of a job that is and how important it is. I think we're very proud to have you and the rest of our Santa Rosa team helping to lead the charge on that front. Thank you. And with that, we'll open up for public comment for city council member updates. I'm not seeing any hands. Do we have any prerecorded voicemails? Yes. Under 10.2.1, Dwayne D. Witt from Roseland. Item two on this matter involves two new positions apparently for this committee. And the agenda, the bulletin board doesn't state how these got started and who's to fill them in the sense are they specifically from an organization or an agency or is it something where members of the community could participate? It's very important for the community to understand that these unelected positions control quite a large budget. As taxpayers money, the thing gets funded in typically to programs that have an impact upon the community. If you folks would share with the community if these positions could be opened to the community and community members would know to apply for these positions, the disadvantaged overburdened underserved communities in the city such as Roseland and South Park who get some representatives perhaps on measure O. As it stands now, there's not many people actually living in Roseland or South Park on any city boards or commissions or committees process here. And that concludes public comment on item 10, mayor. And I do apologize. That item voice message was miscategorized and it should have been played under public comment for 10.2.1. It's all good. We'll let Dwayne sort of kick it off for us. We will go on to that item 10.2.1. Madam city attorney, do you want to walk us through it? I'm happy to. The 10.2.1 is for the council to provide direction to the mayor regarding letters of interest to receive per appointment to several vacancies which are listed. And so it includes the local agency formation commission, LAFCO for an alternate position, measure O oversight committee for two positions, remote access network ran board to replace Tom Schwethelm and the fourth, the Sonoma County oversight board for one position, an alternate to fill a vacated term of David Cook and Sonoma. I am not aware whether there are any late nominations have been received, but we're also looking for the council to authorize the mayor to vote on these late nominations or recommendations at the city selection committee meeting or the mayor's and council members association board meeting. I do believe that that voting will take place this coming Thursday. Okay, let's take these one by one. Let's start with item number one, the local agency formation. Actually, let's do public comment on all of these first. We already heard from Dwayne. Let's see if there's any live public comment and then I'll come back and council let's go through them one at a time if that works. I'm looking for any hands for folks on this one. I don't see any. All right, let's go and bring it back to council then. So item number one, the local agency formation commission. There's the one letter from council member Slater from Spassful, is anybody willing to make a motion? Council member Spadam. I'll make the motion to support Mr. Landon for the Lafko position or I mean, Mr. Slater. Second. All right, motion from council member Sweatham. Second from council member Sawyer. Let's go ahead call the roll. Council member Tibbetts. Aye. Council member Sweatham. Aye. Council member Sawyer. Aye. Council member Fleming. Aye. Council member Alvarez. Aye. Vice Mayor Rogers. Aye. Mayor Rogers. Aye. That motion passes with seven ayes. Great, there were no letters that were received for items two, three, or four. So if anybody has a motion for how they'd like for me to proceed in the meeting on Thursday, I'm all ears. Council member Sweatham. I believe didn't we measure al