Chair Tess, I haven't seen that our interim director has joined the meeting yet. You might want to give it a moment. I will let you know when she comes into the meeting. Certainly. Thank you. She just joined the meeting right when I said that. It is 1.30, you can begin whenever you're ready. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to call this meeting of the December 13th, 2021, having a very special meeting to order. Due to the provisions of the Governor's Executive Orders N25-20 and N29-20, which suspend certain requirements of the Brown Act, and the order of the Health Officer of the County of Sonoma, who shelter in place to minimize the spread of COVID-19, the Housing Authority commissioners will be conducting today's meeting in a virtual setting using Zoom webinar. Commissioners and staff are participating from remote locations and or practicing appropriate social distancing. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and as noted on the agenda. Members of the public wishing to speak during item number 5, public comment, or during our public hearing items will be able to do so by raising their hand, and will be given the ability to address the commission. As a matter of housekeeping, I'd like to remind commissioners to keep their audio on mute unless they are speaking. Commissioners out of the community themselves, staff will remain muted until needing to speak. As member of the public joined the meeting, you will be participating as an attendee. Your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. If you are calling in from the telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda, for privacy concerns, the host will be renaming your view of the phone number to resident and 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. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and our staff to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully or they will be removed. If necessary, we will also immediately end the meeting. Host, please explain the public comments to be heard at today's meeting. At each agenda item, the item is presented. The chair will ask for housing authority member comments and then open it up for public comment. The host in Zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the chair has called for public comment, the chair will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on this specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on the public to have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the commission and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will read email public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item, but also submitted an email, your email public comment will not be read during this meeting. Additionally, there is one public comment period on today's agenda to speak on non agenda matters item five. This is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on the agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority. Thank you. I'd like to move forward on item two with a roll call. Okay, let's go ahead with a roll call. We'll start with Commissioner Burke. Yeah. Commissioner McWhorter. Here. Commissioner Rawhouser. Here. Commissioner LePenna. Here. Commissioner Downey and vice chair Owen and chair test. Here. Let the record reflect that all commissioners are present with the exception of Commissioner Downey and vice chair Owen. Thank you. We'll move on to item number three statements of abstention. Are there any commissioners wanting to make a statement of abstention hearing none will move forward with item number four study session. Today, there are no study session items on the agenda item five public comments. We are now taking public comments on item number five, not agenda matters. This is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on this agenda, which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority. If you wish to make a comment via zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine, raise your hand. Zoom host. Chair test. I see no hands raised at this time and there are no email comments. Thank you so much. Item number six item number six is draft minutes. We have minutes for the November 22 2021 meeting. Are there any changes? If none, the minutes are approved as prepared. Any comments? We will move hearing none will move forward and on to item number seven chairman commissioner reports. I would like to make a report on a meeting that occurred last week with the mayor and other chairs of various departments of the city of Santa Rosa. We each share our last month's agenda items that were covered or highlight them. At that meeting I reviewed the housing authorities monitoring monitoring procedure that we discussed last month. For low income compliance of our units. We also accepted acceptance of a grant award for $2.7 million for the home American rescue plan. I covered the Caritas lot realignment for phases one and two for Burbank housing units to be built for senior apartments. Other comments by those chairs included a notification that the Santa Rosa Creek cleanup committee has an ongoing cleanup scheduled every first Saturday of the month, which was interesting. There was a just suggestion that the new city manager be invited to this mayor and chairs meeting. And finally, there was discussion of a the pedestrian bridge has been talked about for a long time over highway one and one to accommodate East West passenger, excuse me, residents. There was a suggestion of incorporating an art feature in that yet to be designed finalized pedestrian over crossing and that completes my comment on that particular item. I'm moving forward now to committee reports. I would like to say that the ad hoc committee report, excuse me committee met a week or two ago. And the members attended were chair chairman Scott McOrder and chairman Yvonne raw house or Well, one of those, please make a comment on what occurred at that meeting. Yvonne I'll go first. You go first. Well, what we talked about was Just looking at the You know, the points and that each of them offer. I'm sorry if I'm not using my words. Well, I'm just kind of recovering from my COVID booster shot. So anyway, so I wrote some things down and one of the reasons we wanted to go with the her apartment is because we can have a 100% finance program because we'll have the The vets that have their vouchers and we can we can get the the program financed, whereas the senior project for bent for Burbank still needed a few million dollars to go into completion. And so having a completed project would be really nice to have and to also offer the This wonderful service to the vets because they're doing the onsite Services and then also their their their ability to get to transportation. And so that's what we talked about the to the the benefit and And then the benefits of each project and we felt we could best serve the community by helping the her project. Sure, testify may interject this item will be discussed further in 11.1 so if the housing authority can limit their conversation about this until we get to 11.1 that would be fantastic. Thank you. That's perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll move on now to executive director reports and communication items. Number nine. Good afternoon chair test and members of the housing authority. I'm Megan passenger interim director of the housing authority. First I'd like to introduce our newest zoom host AC chappan I believe this is her first meeting filling in as a zoom host. So thank you, Lacey. A couple items to report out on today. First, the close the funding for 3575 Mendocino Avenue which is the site formerly known as the journeys and mobile home park closed on November 24. So that is a very important step in advancing this project. And hopefully all of you have received an email from Burbank housing for the rescheduled grand open groundbreaking ceremony which will be held on Friday, January 7 at 11am. If you haven't received that in your email please reach out to Steve Brown and we can we can assist you with getting the appropriate information. Second item is you may have read in the press democrat about the grand opening of the Windsor veterans village this is a 53 unit veterans facility. This was assisted with bash vouchers that are administered by our housing authority so we had a very important role in advancing this project. And that grand opening was held on December 6. And then finally an update on our emergency housing voucher program. We have 131 emergency housing vouchers that we were allocated. And to date we have received 82 referrals from the continuum of care of those 3234 have been issued vouchers and eight have leased up. So we are making a significant progress in moving 131 individuals into housing. That concludes my update and I'd be happy to answer any questions. Are there any questions of staff on this particular item. Steve. Hi, thank you. Thanks for the presentation. So did staff attend the opening in the Windsor project. I just kind of curious if you were involved with that. The housing choice voucher staff did attend a few of the staff members who had worked on Lisa were able to attend that event. But I saw the article on the paper and I don't think I mentioned the involvement that we have and I'm glad that we had a presence there. I think that's it. Thank you. Welcome. I think the only comment that I would like to make is that is really good news about the emergency vouchers. One of the attendees at this mayor and chairs meeting had spoke briefly about a family under some sort of difficult circumstances and she was asking about can they get a voucher. And so I had referred her to Rebecca regarding the emergency vouchers. So I don't know whether that'll work out or not, but hopefully that will help that family if qualify. Thank you for that update, Megan. No problem. And just to add on to your comment, you know, certainly as members of the commission or just members of the community, if you do come in contact with individuals who are seeking information. Please refer them to us because while our waiting list may be closed. There are certainly other resources that we can direct people to. And we do receive inquiries on a regular basis. So we're happy to provide direction and assistance as we can. Thank you. Any further comments hearing none will move on item number 10 is consent items. There are no consent items on the particular agenda. So we'll move forward to item number 11 report items item number 11.1. Item number 11.1 is a report fall 2021 notice of funding availability funding recommendations and Nicole Rathbone the interim housing and community services manager will be making the presentation. And we'll just give a moment for the zoom host to get the presentation up on the screen. Thank you. All right, looks like we have our presentation up. Hi, good afternoon chair, test and commissioners Nicole Rathbone interim housing and community services manager presenting. Next slide please. There we go. So, today, before you, we have the funding recommendations for the fall 2021 notice of funding availability or no fa that was published on October 1st of this year. Applications were due on October 22nd. No fa was soliciting about $2.2 million in funds. 694,000 and change was from the permanent local housing allocation funds or PLH a as we will refer to them. And about 1.5 million were available in home investment partnership or home funds. Next slide. All right, so we had selection criteria as developed by a previous ad hoc committee that met specifically to review our point system and develop these criteria. The criteria used on this no fa included readiness for 10 points affordability for 20 points. And then we have the budget for the bedroom size for 8 points special needs set asides, which are basically how many, how much percentage of the property are set aside for special needs units at 12 points. Which is also can be considered the percentage of housing authority funds in the project versus other sources for 10 points project competitiveness and that's not necessarily project competitiveness with us. That is when we look at their other funding sources and what they are going to fund the project with completely how competitive are they going to be for those sources. And then there's development, I'm sorry, developer and manager experience, which is 15 points on site services for 7 amenities for 3 points and other factors that can be up to 5 points. So the total all these would be 100 points scored for each application. Next slide please. So from this no fa we received 2 applications, one for the herring veterans village and one for bourbon Avenue apartments. Neither one of these projects were eligible for the home funds, because for home funds you have to have already have commitment letters and commitments from all of your funding sources to develop the project. And you have to be able to get in consistent into construction to utilize the funds within 12 months. So both projects were evaluated and eligible for the PLH a program of which we had $694,325 available. Next slide please. So from the two applications received for her and veterans village that projects at 2149 Western Avenue. And we use units here as housing speak for the herring veterans village. It's for houses that are going to be developed. Each with 6 bedrooms and then there are accessory dwelling units on site also so I just want to make that clarification it's for single family houses that would have 32 bedrooms to house the veterans. They had requested $410,000 for their loan from the housing authority, and their score was 80 out of 100 so they were ranked first. Then the Burbank Avenue apartments project and that's at 1780 Burbank Avenue, also in the Southwest quadrant with 64 total units this would be more apartment style units like we typically see. And they had requested 2.2 million, which is the full amount of the NOFA, and they received a score of 78 out of 100 so they received the second scoring rank. And as we mentioned earlier and ad hoc review committee comprised of commissioners in the corner, Rahel's or and chair test met on November 18th, and they recommended the herring veterans village to receive the $410,000 that they have requested and Burbank Avenue would receive the remainder of the PLHA funds, which is $284,325. All right, next slide. And this is just an aerial we're going to go over each project with a little bit more detail for the group today and for the public. This is the herring veterans village aerial so you can see where the property lies. It's over there on Western Avenue, butting up to the houses on the other side on Park Meadow. So please. So the developer of this project is community housing Sonoma County. The recommended loan amount is $410,000. This is a new construction project with the loan funds that they have requested for acquisition of land costs and pre development related costs. So with some nomenclature we have the 32 studio units which is how we describe the units for housing funding related needs, but it would be for homes, each with an accessory dwelling unit so there'd be six bedrooms in each home, and the accessory dwelling unit would have two bedrooms. And so, adding all of those bedrooms up those are studios when we look at the funding commitments for affordable housing. And that's how we get to the 32 individual units so it would benefit 32 homeless veterans. Next slide please. So the affordability mix here. We have 31 units all at 30% am I which is typically the lowest level of affordability that we see so it's a very deep level of affordability for this project. One unrestricted managers unit. We had a bit of an environmental, we had a bit of a timing issue on this one, where the planning commission just met on December 9, which was after the date that we had drafted all of our documents. The project was approved through the planning commission on the ninth we just did not have time to incorporate that those, the results of that meeting into the agenda item that you see before you today. The project is compliant with SQL and was fully entitled as of last week. And the project is also exempt from the NEPA environmental assessment. These are pre development funds and PLHA does not trigger a NEPA environmental assessment. All right, next slide please. Okay, so if we go into the scoring for the project, their application and they received a three out of 10 in readiness, because at the time of application, the planning entitlements were still under review. For affordability they received a 20 out of 20 because 100% of the units were for households at 30% of am I or less so that's a very deep level of affordability. The bedroom size, they did receive a zero at eight because all of the units are studios and our, our categories allow more points or the larger size bedroom units. Special needs they received 12 out of 12 because all of the units are performing homeless veterans. Leveraging they received 10 points because the loan amount requested was only 3% of the total development cost. So they are expected to receive those funds because their self score on their application exceeds the minimum eligibility score required for that project. Under developer and management experience, they received a 14 out of 15. They do have completed projects in the region. We do have current compliance efforts underway on a couple of those projects to make sure that they are up to date on all the reporting requirements for onsite services. They did receive all of the points available in that service because there are significant onsite services for this formerly homeless veteran population. Amenities they received again three out of three with their within half a mile of a neighborhood perk in transit and just a little bit further to several other retail and grocery amenities in the neighborhood. Other factors they received a one out of five because they did have a prior housing authority loan of $285,000 from a few years ago. I think in the staff reports, it was listed as $235,000 but it was actually a $285,000 loan. So I just want to make that correction now while we're talking about it. Next slide please. Okay, and so for Burbank Avenue apartments, the other project application. Here's the aerial. It is relatively close to the Hearn Avenue project. You can see Hearn Avenue down there at the bottom of your screen with the Burbank Avenue apartments up towards the top. So they're at 1780 Burbank Avenue. Next slide please. The developer for this project is WSA Burbank Housing Partners 1 LP. That's a limited partnership between Burbank Housing and the Waterstone properties. The recommended loan amount is $284,325 which is the remainder of the PLHA program funds that we have available to award. This is also a new construction project with loan funds for construction related costs. And this development would be a more typical apartment style development that you would see in most of our projects with 64, I'm sorry 64 units. I'm sorry 64 units. It's a type of that should not say studio units. This is a multi-family housing development targeted to families and up to 10% of units for formerly homeless families or households. Next slide please. The affordability mix here is a little bit more varied than the other project. There are 36 units at 30% of AMI, 10 units at 40% of AMI, 9 units at 50% of AMI and 8 units at 60% of AMI plus that one unrestricted managers unit. The unit mix here is correct. The 21 bedroom units, 25 two bedroom units, 18 three bedroom units, and one two bedroom managers unit. The project is already entitled. It is exempt from sequel. And they do have a NEPA environmental assessment underway from prior federal funds in the project again the PLHA program does not trigger NEPA review. Next slide please. Okay, to go through the scoring here. The project received a four out of 10. They have submitted or I'm sorry, they are fully entitled, but they have not yet submitted an application for building permits. So that's where they fell on that scale. For affordability they received an 18 out of 20 a significant amount of the units are at 30% of AMI with the rest of the units trailing through the 40, 50 and 60% levels. For bedroom size, they received the full points here because 29% of their units are three bedroom size or larger. Special needs, they received a five out of 12 because 10% of the units are targeted to homeless or at risk households. Leveraging, they received a seven out of 10. The loan amount that they were requested of the 2.2 million was a 5.8% of the total development cost. With competitiveness, they received a 10 out of 10 with self scores for an upcoming funding application of MHP exceeding 100% of the total points possible, making them likely to receive those funds. The developer and management experience they received a 15 out of 15. They also received a 3 out of 3. They are within a half a mile of the neighborhood park in transit being in the same general location as the other project that shouldn't be surprising. They received a 5 out of 7. There are some on-site services and referrals to off-site services provided. They also received a 3 out of 3. They are within a half a mile of the neighborhood park in transit being in the same general location as the other project that shouldn't be surprising. There is also a grocery and retail amenities a little bit further in the neighborhood. And other factors, the project received a 3 out of 5. There is a prior housing authority loan in CDBG DR funds of $5 million. There are I believe 16 project-based vouchers in the project and over 30% of the development cost for this project is already committed. So they received this total score of 78 out of 100. All right, next slide please. Okay, and with that it is the recommendation is recommended by the housing authority ad hoc review committee and the housing and community services department. The housing authority by resolutions approve a conditional commitment of loan funds to community housing Sonoma County. In the amount of $410,000 for acquisition and pre-development related costs for the Hearn Veterans Village project located at 2149 Western Avenue. And a commitment of loan funds to WSA Burbank Housing Partners 1 LP in the amount of $284,325 for construction related costs for the Burbank Avenue. Project located at 1780 Burbank Avenue. Next slide. And that's one. So I just wanted to open up from any questions for the board from the board. I did want to also mention one other slight revision that came in after the time of publication on the resolution for the Hearn Veterans Project. There was a typo in the APNs and the title and in the third paragraph, the prefix for the APNs starts with the 134, not 131. So if approved today, that would be corrected to read 134 for the prefix for both APN numbers. So I'm happy to answer any questions of the board. Hi, I had one per comment. So on the scoring, if the Hearn project was given one point per bedroom or per unit, they'd have actually 88 points because they'd have eight points added to their score. Yeah, so I was just going to, I just noticed that as a, because they got no points at all per bedroom for, you know, so. Right. And with the point scoring system that was included with the NOFA. That is intentionally how the point scoring system for bedroom sizes set up with the preference for developments that include more than 25% of the units for three bedroom size units were larger. So this all studio units, yes, they do receive no points in that category as an offset though they do score better in the special needs category. Yeah, thank you. Commissioner Burke. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. And thanks to the committee for their work. I'm interested in. So, so kind of following up on commissioner browser's comments. So, would there have been an additional point for approvals given the action by the planning commission last week. So, at the time of application had the entitlements have that meeting already occurred. Yes. That project likely would have scored one or two points higher. But that wouldn't have changed the total outcome of the recommendation. Okay. Thank you for that. I had mentioned once before when the Hearn Avenue project was for the housing authority that I would like to have a site visit or a presentation by, you know, by the applicant. And I still like to see that happen. I know that, you know, part of this is new construction. But there were questions about onsite amenities and services versus offsite. And I would just be very much interested as one of the commissioners to get an update and to give a much broader presentation on what is happening currently on the site and what is proposed to happen in the future on the site. So I don't know if there's other commissioners interested in that. That would be one of my comments. And also on was it was the last Thursday night the planning commission met. I think that was the night there. I understand there was opposition to the project. And I kind of interested, Nicole, maybe if you can kind of summarize what some of the opposition was just so that we would have a better idea about what some of the concerns were that were raised by the adjacent members of the community. And then you've answered the question about the home plans. I was trying to remember what the limitations were for that. But thank you. And also interested in knowing since I worked with you, Nicole, and with Commissioner on on the on the updated application ranking system. Kind of what your views were on how it worked. And are there and this doesn't have to be today because that's probably a different topic. But what what worked well and what maybe needs to be modified for our next round. So items such as that. So those are my comments and kind of return to maybe the opposition to the project and then I'd be interested in how we might proceed on a site visit and also kind of a follow up on ways to improve our radiant ranking system. Thank you. Sure. And I believe your your comments about follow up on how this point scoring system went would probably be more appropriate when we come in the next ad hoc review to go over the point scoring system for the next effort that we go out for. But in as a general comment, you know, it every time we do this it gets better and better. And then there's always going to be room for improvement as well. On the on the bedroom size. Obviously, if you propose studios, you don't do well. Is that is there a comfort level with that going future. I don't expect an answer right now, but that would be one of the things that I would think that maybe staff and the housing authority board members might be thinking about. Okay. And your other question, Commissioner Burke about the general feedback from the neighborhood on last week's planning commission meeting. The general comments that I was I was attending that meeting in case any questions came up around the funding or the need for review. The general comments that came up from the neighborhood in opposition of the project were related to the homes that are being built those the four single family residences proposed to be built are two two-story. And the neighborhood, the neighbors were concerned that most of the other houses on that street or single story. However, that there is a height maximum of 35 feet for any houses that are built in that neighborhood and there would be nothing to say prevent a different neighbor from doing an add on or building a two story home on one of the parcels there either way. There were no, there was no opposition to the use of the site. It's a site that or the use is approved by right. And so it was mostly about the two story aspect of these four homes that are proposed to be built. Thank you. Any other comments. Seeing and I would just like to add a couple of comments. Having been on the ad hoc committee meeting for these two projects. I believe that the rating and ranking system that we used was fairly successful. You know, these two projects are quite different. We're trying to compare for favor to determine which would be funded. If multifamily housing unit or studio units for homeless veterans to totally different projects. And I believe that the rating and ranking system that was prepared for this particular ad hoc meeting certainly stood the test of balanced affordability and balanced decisions. And we both we agreed that both projects were good projects. And the scoring favored her and veterans village. And I believe our ad hoc committee fully supported both of those projects as outlined by staff. I now see commissioner LaPenna, you have a question. Yeah. I've been a veteran myself from 12 years in the National Guard. I just was wondering since we're talking about veterans housing here. What other veterans units do we have in the system currently or projected online. I'd be happy to take a shot at that. So we have a couple of projects that are distinctly for veterans. We have the Benton veterans village which is by the same developer community housing of Sonoma County. That's located on the corner of Benton Street and North and it's a reuse of a historic city fire station from the 30s. We have that vouchers which are veteran specific vouchers and the Windsor veterans village that I mentioned in my update. We have 53 vast units there or bash vouchers available to those clients, and I believe our bash pool of vouchers overall is about three to 400. So in addition to distinct projects like Benton veterans village, hopefully her and veterans village and then also there is the main component of the her insights, which the housing authority provided a rehab loan to I believe that's 12 beds, specifically as well. And then I saw Rebecca space pop up really quickly. So certainly if I misspoke jump on in Rebecca. No, you didn't misspeak at all. Thank you. Yes, you're correct. We have the 53 project based bash units in Windsor. We have 10 additional project based bash units in the town of Sonoma and another project that recently opened last summer this summer and Benton veterans village as Megan mentioned and we have other projects in the pipeline and a total of 414 hud bash vouchers currently. Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to add just one more comment. Regarding the scheduling a site visit to her and veterans village, a number of people have thought that would be a good idea. And there is going to be a site visit early on next year. And I just wanted to assure Commissioner Burke that that will be happening. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. Seeing no other comments. I'm going to move on to public comments. We're now taking public comments on item 11.1. If you wish to make a comment via zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Our first public comment comes from Craig. Craig, if you would like, you can state your name for the record and then make your public comment. Thank you very much. My name is Craig and my company is a consultant project managers for community housing Sonoma County. We are looking forward to the application cycle for the city that funding next year and this funding award would make a big difference in terms of our competitiveness. Commissioner Burke and others, we would welcome a site visit for you to see the current operations and her house owned by community housing Sonoma County and operated by nations finance. And then we'd also like to offer in response to Commissioner LePenna's comment that the community housing Sonoma County has also developed 14 units of veterans at the county administrative center. The community housing Sonoma County and nations finance and partnership have lots of experience with providing housing for homeless deaths. And we're very much looking forward to adding her next village as another opportunity for those to have a beautiful affordable and safe place to live. I would just mention that the planning commission vote to support from that village at the planning commission meeting last week was unanimous five to nothing. And again, we're appreciative of the city's support of the project, both from planning and funding perspective. Those are my comments. Chair test I see no other hands raised at this time. Thank you. So we have before us two resolutions on this particular item. The first resolution, they're going to be voted on separately. And as noted by staff today on the her veterans village, the AP numbers, which start with 131 will now be 134. So do I hear a motion in the second. Excuse me, I'm sorry commissioners I'd like to just interject for a moment I'm Ashley Crocker assistant city attorney I've met some of you before and I'm just sitting in for Jeff work this afternoon. And I wanted to follow up on something that staff had mentioned and you, you all have touched on in the presentation that the planning commission did take action on December 9 to approve the environmental documents. So I'd like to just make a clarification in the 1234 in the fifth whereas in your her veterans village resolution to clarify that on December 9, the planning commission took action to adopt the addendum to the Roseland area, the basketball road specific plan environmental environmental impact report. So that would just be to clarify the action has actually been taken, whereas it was previously written prior to the action and the action was pending so if we could also include that clarification. If that's agreeable, then whichever of you reads the resolution. You can simply just read the resolution and then state as revised by the city attorney's office to reflect the planning commissions action on December 9 or something to that effect. Thank you. Thank you Ashley that was very good. Good information. I see commissioner Burke raised his hand. Yes, I would be happy to make a motion. It would be the resolution. My motion would be to approve the resolution of the housing authority of the city of Santa Rosa, approving a conditional commitment of loan funds in the amount of $410,000 to community housing Sonoma County for acquisition and pre development related costs for the her veterans village project. I have the first one 49 western Avenue. With the AP members being corrected to have the first one read 134 and then also to. In my motion, seek approval to have the fifth whereas I think it was to indicate that the planning commission. Approved. review to make the modifications as presented by the city attorney's office. If hopefully that'll suffice. Thank you very much. Thank you. Do we have a second? Commissioner LaPenna, you're muted, unfortunately. Commissioner LaPenna, we can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Now we can, yes. Okay. For some reason, my screen froze for a second, but as a veteran, I'd like to second that. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Any other comments? Clark, can you please call the roll? I can. So we'll go ahead and do a vote on this resolution. I'd like to start with Commissioner Burke. Aye. And then Commissioner LaPenna. Aye. And then Commissioner Rawhouser. Aye. Commissioner McWhorter. Aye. And then Chair Test. Aye. Okay. Let the record show that motion passes, that resolution passes with five ayes with both Commissioner Downey and Commissioner Vice-Chair Owen Absent. Thank you. So we are going now to the second resolution, which involves the Burbank Avenue Apartments. Do we have a motion for that resolution? Commissioner LaPenna, would you like to make a motion? Not. My screen just froze again. Something's been on. I would be happy to, but I would defer to members of the committee if they prefer to do that, whichever is fine with me. Okay. I would. I just don't know the proper language to use. Would you like me to do that? I'd be happy to do that. Yeah. So I would like to propose a motion. A resolution of the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Rosa approving a commitment of loan funds in the amount of $284,325 to WSA Burbank Housing Partners 1 LP for construction-related costs for Burbank Avenue Apartments projects, 1780 Burbank Avenue, APN 126-361-003, and waive the reading of the text. We have a second. I will second the motion. Thank you. Okay, just one moment and I will do the vote. Okay, we will go ahead and do a roll call vote on this resolution. We will start with Commissioner Burke. Aye. And then Commissioner Rawhouser. Aye. Commissioner McWhorter. Commissioner LaPenna. Aye. And Chair Test. Aye. Let's make sure that that motion passes with five ayes with Commissioner Downey and Vice Chair Owen Absent. Thank you. We'll now move on to item 11.2. All right, item 11.2 is a report up to Housing and Choice Voucher Administrative Plan for the addition of emergency housing voucher program policies. Rebecca Lane, Housing and Community Services Manager will be presenting. And Zoom host, can you please bring up the presentation? Good afternoon, Chair Test and Housing Authority Commissioners. And thank you, Megan, for the introduction. My name is Rebecca Lane and I'm the Housing and Community Services Manager overseeing the Housing Choice Voucher Program for the City of Santa Rosa. Today, I'll be presenting an update to the Administrative Plan for the Housing Choice Voucher Program incorporating and formally adopting the federal rules and regulations that guide the new emergency housing voucher program. Next slide, please. The Housing Choice Voucher Program is a federally funded rental assistance program, which is administered by local jurisdictions. The program rules are codified in Chapter 24, Part 982 of the Code of Federal Regulations. These regulations allow for limited decision making at the local level as to the management of the program based on local needs and conditions. For example, the Housing Authority recently adopted a local decision to allow project-based vouchers to exceed 20% of Santa Rosa's voucher portfolio only if the excess units are designated for families who've experienced homelessness or for veterans and their families. This decision was based on local needs and adopted after review at a public meeting and incorporated into the Administrative Plan. The Administrative Plan is the major policy document that outlines these local decisions and broadly explains the federal regulations that guide the program. It is a required element for any jurisdiction administering the Housing Choice Voucher Program. To produce the document, we employ the service of a national consulting firm, NAN-McKay and Associates, for a model Administrative Plan that includes all the required elements of the Administrative Plan and allows us to clearly identify the local decision points. Next slide, please. As you are familiar, the Emergency Housing Voucher Program or EHP Program is a new special purpose voucher program that was authorized under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. On May 10th, 2021, Santa Rosa was invited to participate and accepted 131 vouchers from HUD. The County of Sonoma is also participating in the EHP program and has received 153 emergency housing vouchers. The EHP program was designed as a partnership between the Housing Authority and the Continuum of Care, which is the local agency that oversees a jurisdiction's homeless services. Eligibility for the program is limited to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, at risk of homelessness, persons who are fleeing domestic violence, and households who were recently homeless and require ongoing rental assistance to prevent them from becoming homeless again. Next slide, please. The EHP program regulations were issued under HUD's PIH notice 2021-15 and are described in the proposed Chapter 19 of the Administrative Plan. Any element where local policy decisions were allowed have been made in consultation with the Sonoma County Continuum of Care as required under the notice. And the formal adoption of the Administrative Plan policies reflect the current practices of the EHP program. Accept as identified in Chapter 19 of the Administrative Plan, the EHP program will follow the regulations of the Housing Choice Voucher Program. It is anticipated that as the program evolves, updates to the Administrative Plan may be necessary, which would be brought to you at a future date. Next slide, please. At this time, it is recommended by the Department of Housing and Community Services that the Housing Authority, by resolution, adopt the addition of Chapter 19, Emergency Housing Vouchers, to the Housing Choice Voucher Administrative Plan. This concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you, Rebecca. This is good news. Any questions of staff? Commissioner Rawhouser, you're muted. Are these 131, are they new vouchers that are being added to our inventory? They are, yeah. Oh, lovely. Commissioner Burke? Just interested if the county's allocation, are they able to be used anywhere in the county with the exception of the City of Santa Rosa, or is there more flexibility for those vouchers? That's a great question. Thank you. Yes, so our two Housing Authorities have a Memorandum of Understanding that relates to these special purpose vouchers. So we have an agreement, and it's really for the sake of simplicity for the clients as well as the staff that we will administer our special purpose vouchers throughout the county. So that's how we have bash vouchers in places like Windsor. And this also we've adopted, or we've updated rather that MOU to reflect that we will allow each Housing Authority to administer outside of their own jurisdiction if that's necessary for this program, which again is just simplifying the process and making sure it proceeds expeditiously as required by the program. So if a household is referred to Santa Rosa and we perform their initial eligibility screening and issue them the voucher, if it turns out that the unit that they find and want to rent is outside of the Santa Rosa City limits, we'll still be able to continue working with that family. And it works the same way per Sonoma County as well. Thank you for that. Is there some kind of a process of helping to ensure that the vouchers are distributed kind of proportionately throughout the county? Well, the continuum of care under the PIH notice outlining this program, it's the continuum of care policy decisions to determine the target populations for the vouchers and determine the referral process. So at this point, both Housing Authorities have referrals coming from all over the county. Roughly we started out thinking that Santa Rosa agencies, homeless service agencies that are serving Santa Rosa primarily might primarily refer to the Santa Rosa Housing Authority. But as it's gone on since the referrals started after the program began, we've noticed there is a little bit more crossover between the referrals. So we are tracking the zip code or the location based on zip code that the family has been referred from. So if they're actively homeless, then that might be based on a mailing address such as 600 Morgan Street, which is the homeless services shelter that offers mailboxes for residents to use. So we are tracking from where the referral has come and then also where the family is leasing up. So we do have that information to be able to present once more families start leasing up. That's good to hear. And could there be a process of reporting how those vouchers are utilized throughout the county at some point in time, six months intervals or whatever that would, to me, that would be very important. And I'm one of seven members of the board. So maybe not everybody agrees with that, but that would be very helpful to me. Yes, absolutely. We are providing quarterly updates to the continuum of care. Both housing authorities present that information to the continuum of care. And I'm happy to also bring that information to the housing authority on the same schedule if you prefer or whatever works best for the chair and the commission. Quarterly would be even better for my perspective. Any other questions from the commissioners? I have a question, Rebecca. What is the timeframe from the time that someone is referred for an emergency vouchers on the current ones that we have? Is it taking in general before they're actually able to get into an affordable unit? That's a very case-by-case answer. At this point, we have eight families least. And of those families, a few of them, we stop within a week of being referred to the housing authority. We currently have 34 families who are out searching. And when I say families, I mean individuals and families. So it could be individual as well. So we have 34 vouchers that are currently being, that are out on the street. So it really just depends on where the person is at at the time that they're referred. And so far as their case management is concerned with the homeless service agency that's providing services, whether they've got something lined up already or if they need to be searching from the, they're just starting their search. But we are also tracking that data. So I'll be able to report that out as well. That sounds good. And the new set of emergency vouchers, how soon will it take staff to get up and running on this? Well, the program is already well underway on many of the HUD trainings that we've participated in. I've heard the phrase building the plane while flying it. And that's a little unusual coming from the federal government. But it is program because it was authorized under the American Rescue Plan. And it's an emergency program. We have been able to work to implement the program under the PIH notice rules that are now going to be incorporated into the administrative plan. So the program is well underway. As Megan mentioned in the director's report, we have the majority or working towards having the majority of the number of referrals that we can accept. So it's going. Good, thank you. Commissioner McWhorter, you have a question or comment? Just a thought, yeah, actually a question. I was just curious, is there or, okay, is there or is there any kind of support or aftercare for the families or the individuals once they move in? Yes, absolutely. It's another great question. Thank you, Commissioner McWhorter. The program regulations, the AHV program regulations do require that the housing authority ensures that those types of services are, in fact, being provided. And so our local memorandum of understanding between the continuum of care and the housing authority identifies that the service providers who are agreeing to work with the program are going to provide ongoing housing stabilization services after a family visit is done. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Do we have any other questions or comments? Seeing none, we'll move on to public comments on item number 11.2. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Chair Testa, see no hands raised at this time. Thank you. So we have a resolution before us. Is there a motion to approve item 11.2? Any motion from any commissioner? I make a motion, we approve item 11.2. And would you like me to read the text of that motion? Yeah, please. Okay, motion to approve the resolution of the housing authority of the city of Santa Rosa updating the housing choice voucher program administrative plan for the addition of emergency housing voucher program policies. We have a second. I second that motion. Thank you. Okay, then we will go ahead and take a vote on this resolution. We will start with Commissioner LePenna and then Commissioner Rawhouser. Aye. Commissioner McWhorter, Commissioner Burke. Commissioner Burke, I commuted. Sometimes my spare works and sometimes it doesn't. Aye. And then Chair Testa. Aye. That resolution passes with five ayes with Commissioner Downey and Vice Chair Owen absent. Thank you. We're at the end of our agenda for today, item 12, adjournment. I'd like to wish everybody happy holidays and stay healthy, stay warm. And thank goodness we have rain. Thank you, same to you. Thank you. Very great. Thank you staff. Thank you everyone. Happy holidays to everyone.


TfNN, headline news update. Hi everyone, Basel Chapman here. This is the Tiger Financial News Network, noon update. We're down 373 in the Dow at 24,258. Look, he has the chart on the right. That is the monthly chart. Very strong green candle ending the month of March. The day is still young. Anything can happen. Could be a lot more selling just as we go into the close. But it's great that we've got at least a strong green candle. And we've bumped into the ninth period moving average. We're right above it at this point in the weekly chart. See the Fibonacci extensions. We're actually at the 14th period. Black line right there. That's the 40th period exponential moving average of the weekly chart. So we kind of trapped in those middle levels. And if you look at the S&P is also down quite sharply. While the Dow is down 1.5%, the S&P is down 1.3%, a little bit better. At minus 38 to 2900, it's knocked right at the door of the 200 period exponential moving average in the weekly. We've been anticipating that there'll be some kind of a digestive phase coming in right here going to this first week of May. It could even last maybe just one or two more flories upside. But I think we're in a digestive phase. Look at the QQQ. Paul, it was doing quite nicely earlier on. Now it's down 0.5%, 0.5%. At minus 1.06%, a 2.17, 0.96%. This is really a strong candle, even with this red candle for today. The Magdy's goods, the Stochastic's in 86%. Weekly chart has made a leg be like the others, but this is a little stronger than the others.  And then it gives it all back. Well, it's down 3.5%. It's down 487 at 130.57%. But still quite a nice move, still above the 15, the 9 and the 14 period moving averages. Now, this is going to be interesting because you would expect that gold would be up with the market down, but no, gold is down 8 at 17.04%. And the dollar, this is quite fascinating. The dollar is running a little bit. It is up, well, it's up from below. It's minus 51 at 99.01%. You remember we were looking at these patterns. The lowercase H can go to a lowercase M. We're watching this closely because if it starts to go into the 98.50s, that's a problem. Crude oil has come back very nicely. Crude oil is actually up 2.56 at 17.60. Well, you remember it is minus 37 just there. But that is the contract. So we'll talk a lot more about this as we come back. We're going to the Tiger Technicians Hour and also my daily newsletter is called the opening call. Check it out on the front page of TFNN. I'll be back in a few minutes for my Tiger Technicians Hour.


Hey everyone Shaber 1000 here today, we got this fire starter We're gonna be checking this thing out it's from Montana antler craft So let's see what this thing is all about looks cool. Okay guys, so friend of mine Ryan I've heard me mention his name before I've done some he gave me the prop for the boat and I done some work for him on his truck and on his Pressure washers, so Said he had one of these that he bought I think at a yard sale And it came in this bag. He brought it to me yesterday and said this is a late Christmas present And I think what he does he tries to find some camping stuff. He knows the monkey And I love to go camping so he tries to find some stuff that we can use so But This is let's talk about this thing for a second This is a magnesium flint stick.  It's got a little leather lanyard thing in it Here's your your starter There your striker Montana antler craft fire starter instructions packet included with fire starter and there it is right there This is their phone number now. I tried to look them up on on the internet and all I could find There's no website when you look that up and you click on it Says web website not found. I did find a bunch of stuff on Pinterest I did see a Facebook page, but You know, it's not The one I clicked on was not Active or something, but there is a phone number here and a PO box so That says to use rest in rest end on a firm foundation So be like that with attached scraper, that's that part right there. We'll open this up here in a second Scrape firm full length scrapes along the back The ferro seam which is this it's just a flint stick is all it is Edge to ignite dry twigs. Sorry about the noise in the background. They're working on the house across the street every day Edge to ignite dry twigs for damp locations scrape the silver magnesium shavings into a pile Light them by striking the ferro seam edge to jump start your fire So what you'll do I'll show you how to do that here in a second You'll scrape the stuff here the silver stuff into a pile and then you'll ignite that At night your fire flash your fire starter flash can be used as an emergency signal spark or light Fires morning fires dangerous not intended for children The user assumes all risk of damage or injury Okay, so There's Okay, so let's go ahead. We're gonna open this up. This will be going in my pack It's a really cool Wow, what are the chances of that happening look at that staple Right through that. What are the chances now? Let's go ahead and get our pretty nice to see that or not got a cool little design on there Okay, so Yeah, that's pretty neat Zing spark, okay Let's see if we can get this off of here Yeah, I mean, what are the chances that's a perfect shot, right? I'll probably put paracord on mine I don't know. We'll see. This is definitely going in my pack. So cool all right now, let's at a piece of wood here and My all-time favorite fire starter here Dried loot Now this won't need any of the magnesium. So let's um There it is Usually that starts up faster than that but I think I Think the last the last thing that was dried in the dryer was like bedding sheets bed sheets and stuff like that Which is fire retardant. So that's probably why that doesn't Why that won't take off like it should Let's try that again But this time Look, I'll just do this on here So you can see better Okay, so I'm going to take some of this stuff here and it's windy But this here, maybe that'll help.  I Don't use this very much. I have used the magnesium before a magnesium flint sticks usually get a dime size You know about a dime size scrape on it but It's very seldom. I have to use the magnesium When I because I always carry this dryer lint with me Except one time I couldn't find it I put it in my pack and I still haven't been able to find it, but I have another baggie of it in there So like I said, I have to pick the windiest days to film I'm going to put this on the dryer lint We'll put this up here. Let me bring you out a little bit here. Looks a little dark for some reason All right now. Let's give this a shot whoa check that out and It lit it up Awesome. So yeah, that's pretty cool. So Like I said, I'm not sponsored by these guys. They did not send it to me my friend bought this at your sale Really cheap. I think he said two or three bucks And he gave it to me So I thought I would do a review on it It's not really a review because I can't give you any information There is it like I said, there is a phone number here If you want to try to call them, I haven't tried to call them, but Phone or text<PHONE_NUMBER> Post office box 85 Shalamor, this is Shalamor, Florida Where's that at 3257 9 Shalamor, Florida, let me check that out. Okay, so it's six hours for me It's between Panama City and Pensacola, Florida. So it's up north It's up in that area So all right get that figured out Ah It's a small town of seven hundred and seven people So There you go. So there's that. All right now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get monkey out here See if we can get her To Strike this thing and see how she does. Okay. I got monkey out here. Good monkey. Give it a shot like that Yes Now start back back No start back here. Oh back here and go Like that. Yes Yeah, I Did it So monkey did it Monk burnt. Yeah, monkey did it. How hard was it? No You did better the first time ever. Yeah, you did better the first time you ever did Yeah, I did that But anyway, you got to just press down a little bit. There you go. Really it wasn't hard Yeah, just got to make sure you're doing it right side. Yeah What do you think? That thing's cool, huh? All right, thanks Monk Okay, so I just want to do a quick kind of like a review I wish I had more information for you, but you know, that's the number if you want to give them a call You know, I don't know if they're still in business But that is a real antler horn So so I don't know what they cost. I mean, I've seen similar ones. They're about 20 25 bucks So I'm not sure about this one. I Don't know maybe give them a call and see if they still have them or if they're still selling them or what? But that's um, yeah, that's pretty cool But yeah, I think I will go ahead and tie this on there I'll keep it inside my pack because I don't want this dangling out.  Make sure I get it on the right side because I'm right-handed. So I'm gonna go through the left side Of course backwards if You're left-handed I'm gonna put this on here. I'm gonna tie this in a little Just a little overhand knot here. Yeah, make sure I got enough length. Oh, yeah plenty Cool now that I burnt my camera up There it is. So yeah, check it out. Like I said, hopefully you can Find out some information get you on if you want Like I said, he found this one at a yard sale. So that's pretty cool. So thanks for watching guys I appreciate it. Shea bear the myth man a legend I'm gone for now. We'll see you guys in the next one. Bye. Bye and take care Pretty cool


hey welcome to physiology open resting membrane potential is the potential across a membrane with negativity inside the membrane and positivity outside its value we generally say as a minus 70 millivolt but does it same for all cells if it differs why is it different for different cells and how is it generated after all well generation of resting membrane potential requires three things one there should be difference in concentration of ions on two sides of the membrane so say this side we have four positive and four negative ions say potassium and chloride and this side we have these 10 positive and 10 negative ions again say potassium and negatively charged proteins but will this be sufficient see even with the difference in concentration of ions net charge on both sides is zero so actually there will be no potential difference so second requirement for generation of RMP is that membrane should be differentially permeable to ions means it should be permeable to some ions and not to others so actually membrane is permeable to potassium and impermeable to negatively charged proteins which are present inside the cell so there are actually certain channels known as leaky channels for potassium which are present on the membrane now because of this permeability and difference in concentration of ions potassium starts to move outside see potassium concentration is more inside right so concentration gradient is from inside to outside but because of its movement its concentration will start increasing outside isn't it now this movement causes an imbalance of positive and negative ions inside and outside now their numbers are not equal inside and outside so this will create a negativity inside and positivity outside so what happens despite the concentration gradient being there from inside to outside this side starts repelling the ions because of the developing positivity this is known as electrical gradient so because of concentration gradient the ion tends to move from inside to outside but due to electrical gradient they tend to move from outside to inside so with time concentration gradient keeps on decreasing due to increasing number of charges outside while electrical gradient keeps on increasing after some time a point comes when concentration gradient of the ion is balanced by the equal and opposite electrical gradient so at this point there will be no net movement of charges and due to difference in positive and negative charges on each side of the membrane there is a development of the potential across the membrane this process of development of potential due to unequal distribution of ions when membrane is differentially permeable to ions is known as Gibbs-Johnnon equilibrium which we have discussed in another video in detail I have given the link for this in description section below anyways so till now we discuss two requirements for development of potential there should be concentration difference of ions across two sides of membrane and the membrane should be selectively permeable to ions now here we are talking about single ion that is potassium whose movement is causing potential development now the potential act which ions concentration gradient is balanced by its electrical gradient so that no net movement of charges occurs is known as equilibrium potential for that ion and this equilibrium potential can be determined by Nernst equation Nernst equation states that equilibrium potential for an ion is equal to RT by Fz log concentration of ion outside divided by concentration of ion inside the membrane where R is gas constant T is absolute temperature F is Faraday number and Z is valency of ions I will not go into the maths of all these but instead we will simplify the equation we will solve this value it comes to minus 61 log concentration inside divided by the concentration outside and if you are talking about negatively charge ion we just invert this here so it becomes minus 61 log concentration outside divided by concentration inside or in some books you will see that this minus sign there removes but keep the concentration ratio as the original one so both are correct ways but we will stick to this inverted concentration ratios because this will help us in understanding another equation Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation which we will soon discuss so let's now solve the equation for potassium ion because that's the ion we have been talking about till now so for potassium ion intracellular concentration is 140 mill equivalence per liter while extracellular concentration is 4 mill equivalence per liter so let us put these values here in the equation and see how much our equilibrium potential is on solving it comes to minus 94 millivolts but our RMP which we stated in the beginning is we said the minus 70 millivolts so that means there are other things also playing a role in RMP generation well a cell does not be exactly like what we discussed till now instead there are many ions involved simultaneously so at rest membrane is more permeable to potassium but it is also permeable to sodium chloride but much lesser than potassium so that means all these ions contribute to RMP so now how to determine RMP with Nernst equation we have already said that Nernst equation is used for single ion secondly Nernst equation assumes that membrane is fully permeable to that ion but here we are saying that membrane permeability to different ion varies it's not fully permeable to all ions so what will determine the value of resting membrane potential well all ions will have some role depending on the concentration difference inside and outside and the permeability of the membrane to that ions so let's see how much will be the equilibrium potential for sodium only with the Nernst equation extracellular sodium is 140 millivolts per liter and intracellular it is 14 millivolts per liter so we'll just replace the values and it comes to plus 61 millivolts so RMP should be somewhere in between these values that is potassium and sodium equilibrium potentials depending on membrane permeability to sodium and potassium at rest so RMP cannot be determined by Nernst equation if we consider more than one ion instead for that we use Coleman-Hodgkin-Katz equation now GHK equation is something like this don't get afraid by looking at the equation in a minute I will simplify it for you see this equation is simply an extension of Nernst equation this portion if you see isn't it same as Nernst equation but here in this equation permeability of the membrane is also included so this we can say is Nernst equation with permeability of the membrane for that ion included and if we look further after plus sign it just adds this factor again for other positive ion and if it is a negative ion this concentration ratio is reversed this we have discussed in Nernst equation isn't it that's all that is GHK equation so when many ions are involved we determine RMP by GHK equation okay now can you tell that why different cells have a different RMP well different cells have a different concentration gradient for different ions and also the membrane permeability of the different cells varies for different ions so obviously if you put the values in GHK equation RMP will come different for different cells isn't it okay now apart from this one very important role is also played by sodium potassium 80 pace firstly sodium potassium 80 pace throws out three sodium ions and brings in two potassium ions so there is a movement of unequal number of ions more positive ions are going out than those are coming in so it is adding negativity inside the membrane of about minus four millivolts but that is not that much important role in RMP generation but you know that for the cells which are active that is that respond to an stimulus say suppose not with each action potential there are changes in sodium and potassium concentrations now these concentrations are brought back to normal by sodium potassium 80 pace so this pump is very essential for maintaining the concentration difference of ions if it doesn't work within no time this ion gradient will be lost which we have seen is so important for resting membrane potential so in short we can say that gives on an equilibrium generates resting membrane potential while sodium potassium 80 pace maintains it okay let's end the video with the most battling question which people have what will be the change in membrane potential if potassium concentration increases outside the membrane think about the question and put your answers and possible reason as comments below and we can discuss this question well thanks for watching the video if you liked it do like and share the video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel Physiology Open. Thank you.


Bonjour tout le monde. Bienvenue ce matin. C'est mon plaisir de vous parler à créer des sites multi-langue avec WordPress. Okay, did I just troll everyone here? I hope that's not what your customers feel like when they're visiting your site because they don't understand the language in which you've created it. And that's why it's my pleasure to be here in Miami this morning to speak to you about creating multi-lingual WordPress websites. Hi, my name is Sean. I'm the chief technology officer at Actionable Books. I'm based in Ottawa, Canada. And this is my second year here at WordCamp Miami. I've been using WordPress since 2009, both as a blogger, as a freelance developer, and now in a corporate environment. I speak English and French, and according to my friends and family, I also speak nerd. So to start talking about this topic today, there's a lot of words we're going to have to learn. Internationalization, localization, languages, locales, oh my, there's so much stuff. So let's go through a little bit of this. Languages. According to the Oxford dictionary, languages are the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. What does this mean? We're talking about English, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic. Those are languages. Then we get down to locales, which are about the parameters that define a user's language, region, or special preferences that the user might want to see in their user interface. Locales consist of a country code, usually, and a language identifier. Examples of these, if we look Canadian English, would be en-ca. US English would be en-us. If you look at Spanish, you have es-ar, es-co, and several others. These identify the differences even within a single language, and these are called locales. Internationalization, which sometimes goes by the name i18n, is the process of planning and implementing products and services so they can be easily adopted to a specific local language and culture. Then adopting that is actually called localization, the process of taking that internationalized product and making it work for a specific locale. Now, when you're creating multilingual websites, it's not just about translating the words that are on the site. There's a lot of other things you kind of have to keep in mind. For example, currencies. How do you show a money value? In English, we put a dollar sign before the numbers. Thousands are separated by commas, and the dollars and cents are separated by a period. In French, the dollar sign goes after the numbers. Thousands are separated by a space, and dollars and cents are separated by a comma, formatting dates. In US English, you usually go month, day, and then year.  French Canadian, 16h30. 24-hour time clock as well as an H separating the hours and minutes. The direction of the language. We're very used to right-to-left languages, all the languages originating in Latin or Greek, so English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin. But if you get into Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Yiddish, western Punjabi, those scripts are read from the right to the left. So this page here is a website on the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian government talking about doing business with Canada for people from Jordan. Here's the English website. If you notice in the black menu bar at the top, second link over is the language switch button that's written in Arabic. If you were to click on that, there's the Arabic version of the page. So not only is it written in Arabic, but the sidebar has flipped sides. The breadcrumbs have flipped sides. And all the text itself is also aligned to the right. The other important thing to note is that, just for a best practice in creating multilingual sites, the language switching buttons, so in this case in the top right-hand corner you see English and French. English and French, actually. The important thing here is that those buttons are in the native language that you want to switch to. If I was a French user on this page, having the word French written in Arabic wouldn't do me any good. So you always want your languages to be printed in the native language that you're switching to. Another important thing with multilingual is to consider the length of your text. This screenshot here is an actual bug from wordpress 3.9, I believe it was, where the customize your site button that would show up in your dashboard looked great in English, but loaded up in German and look what happened. The button ran off into the next column. There are languages, French is one of them, German is definitely a culprit, where phrases are typically longer than they are in English. So it's something to consider when you're designing your screens is to make sure that everything is going to fit.  And now we want to look at how you actually would do this in wordpress. So wordpress itself, the core, is translated into 160 different locales. Now, 60 of these are completely 100% up to date with the most current version of wordpress and are available when you install wordpress core. You can pick any of those 60 locales. Translations like everything else in wordpress, it's part of the open source project, it's managed by volunteers. In this case, it's the Pauley Glotts team that takes care of making sure that wordpress is available to the most number of people in the most number of countries and languages available. So when you install wordpress, you get to pick which language you want it to be installed in. These are the 60 locales I was talking about that are 100% translated. But that just takes care of the interface for wordpress' dashboard itself.  So we need to look at some different options to provide your visitors with that multilingual support. First thing that we're going to look at are a couple of plugins that could help you do this. First plugin I'm going to talk about is one called WPML. It is a premium plugin from on the go systems that allows you to manage a multilingual website and it takes care of your posts, your pages, your custom post types, taxonomies, menus, text from your themes, text from your plugins. It really covers everything off. What does that look like? So here we're looking at the screen with the list of pages that are on a website. And you'll notice there's a new column that shows up next to the page title that has the flags representing each of the locales that I have this website available in. And it will show a pencil if you want to go edit the translation of that particular page in that language or the little plus sign if you want to add a translation because there isn't one available for that particular language. Also at the top of the page, you now have a new filter to say just show me my English pages or just show me my Hindi pages and it filters it by that. Once you get into the post editor, it looks very similar to what you see in a regular WordPress installation except there's a new language box that shows up in the right hand sidebar. And this says this particular post is in French Canadian and it's a translation of an English post called Terms of Use Agreement. And it lets you switch back and forth between the translations that are available or to pull in content from the original one if you wanted to redo it. Let's say the English post had been updated and you could pull in that content and work with that. WPML allows you to choose the structure of the URLs, the permalinks that are given to your site. So the options here are put languages into different directories. So you can have example.com slash fr, example.com slash es and so on and so forth for different locales. You could do different domains. So as the screenshot here is showing, I've done subdomains with fr.wpml.dev being my French site, de.wpml.dev being the German site and so on. You can also do it as a parameter. So you can have your website's name with question mark lang equals fr at the end of the URL to get the French site. My personal preference is the first one putting the languages into subfolders. For custom post types, WPML lets you choose which ones you need to have translated and which ones you don't. So if you're using plugins that store data for you, let's say contact forms into a custom post type, you wouldn't want to translate those. So you can turn off all the translation options so it doesn't bother you. Same with custom taxonomies. You can choose which ones are translatable, which ones are not. And if they are translatable, you get a nice screen like this where you can go in and say, well, the English category in this case is called un-categorized. And in English, I'm going to translate it to something else, including picking a new slug that will appear in the URL if you want to look at the archive page for that taxonomy. One of my, just a little pro tip for you here on WPML, there is an option called make themes work multilingual. And this is an option to make some themes that are reliant on specific CSS usually to make sure that they work across all the languages. Most of the time, you do not need this option. So I would try turning it off and see if everything still works. I worked on a website last year that was very multilingual, 14 languages. And the homepage made over 700 calls to the database to check for translation options. It made the homepage load really slowly. Turning this option reduced that down to 250. It was still not great, but it was a heck of a lot better. So I would look at turning that off if you can. So one thing about WPML that I should cover is that each translation that you do, so every language that a page or a post is available in is stored as a separate post. So you manage them separately. If you were to turn off the plug-in, you would see a list of all your posts. And you would see the English one, the French one, the Hindi one, the Spanish one, they all be listed as separate items. This will, the reason I'm pointing this out is as we look at other options, you'll see there's other ways of doing that. The next plug-in I want to show is one called QTranslateX. Now QTranslate has been around for many years. I've been maintained by different authors over the years. QTranslateX is the latest version of it. And when I took a look at this while I was preparing for this talk, I was really quite impressed with the latest redesign of it. So I think it's worth looking at. It is a free plug-in. It's available on the wordpress.org repository. It supports, like WPML did, the post pages, custom post types, taxonomies, menus, and this also has general settings and widgets available in its translations. So here we are looking at another list, in this case it's a list of the categories. And notice at the top you have buttons for the different languages this site's available in. Clicking on those buttons will switch that screen so that you're looking at that language. And it's all kept within the one screen. The post editor, same thing. At the top you've got the flags for each of the locales this site is configured to use. So you can just switch back and forth between them live. As I said with WPML, managing them as separate posts, QTranslateX keeps everything in the one post. Any piece of the screen that has a, in this case it's a red border on the left-hand side. You can see it's circled in blue right now on that screenshot. Anything that has that border is managed in QTranslate so that it can be translated. The only thing on the screen you cannot set specifically by locale is the URL, the permalink, and any custom fields. Those are shared across all translations for that post. The way QTranslate does this is using short codes behind the scenes. If you were to turn off the plug-in you would see content like this on your post. You see short codes separating with the language codes between each phrase. This is what allows it to keep everything self-contained into the one post ID. QTranslateX allows translating of widget areas. So there again you have the flags at the top of your widget configuration and you can click on that to set the content in each locale. Menu structure is the exact same thing. And like WPML in QTranslateX you can set your URL structure for how you want it to be shown on the site. In the general settings this allows you to set your site name and your tag line in each language. So you can set just another WordPress site in every language. I recommend of course you change that one. The next one I'm going to look at, the next plug-in is called Babel. Now Babel is one I don't have that much experience with, but I'm starting to look at it. It's a plug-in that Automatic bought I believe it was about two years ago. And Andrew Nason who's the lead developer for WordPress has said that if they were ever to build multilingual support into WordPress's core they would probably do it the way Babel does. So there may be something to that to check out. Babel's big thing because it needs to support WordPress.com is that it doesn't create any additional tables in the database. It makes use of the structure that comes with WordPress's core. And like WPML translations are kept as separate posts. Babel supports posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies, menus, widgets, just like the other ones we talked about. But when you're editing your translation, so in this case I'm editing a French page. It's a translation of an English page. You see them side by side. So the English text is there on the right and you have the post editor on the left for the French allowing you to reference the English one as you are writing the new text. So that's, you know, we just covered three plug-ins there. There are some other ones. Paulie Lang is another one that comes to mind that you can use. I haven't tried that one, but those three are a good starting point. The other approach that I wanted to talk about was using WordPress multi-site. If you're not aware, WordPress multi-site is a different way of installing WordPress that allows you to create multiple websites in what's called a network that share themes, they share plug-ins, they share the users that can log into WordPress. So one of the ways you can use multi-site is to set up a site for each language. The reason I say you want to use multi-site to do it is it's much easier than managing installing separate WordPress installations for every language. That would be a management nightmare. So what you want to do is set up a multi-site that has one multi-site for English, one for Spanish, one for French, but then you can log in and switch between them and manage them all together. For language switching, there are a couple of plug-ins that are designed specifically for WordPress multi-site that will allow you to link posts between sites so you still have that language switching capability. Now, on the topic of language switchers, it's always, of course, worth considering if you need one at all. You know, whether you want it to link directly from post to post to get equivalent content or whether you want it just to link to the home page in the other language. That really depends on how your site is designed. If you have the same content translated in every language or if there's only some posts that are available in one language, some available in another, that will sort of determine how you want to set up your language switching. So here's a little comparison chart I made of the methods we just talked about. You know, quickly looking at it, WPML is the only paid one. The others are all free. The way content is stored, WPML is in separate posts, so it's babble. Multi-site, of course, it's in separate tables in the database and QTranslate is all managed in a single post. You know, and I'm not going to go through the whole table. This is available in my slides that are published on my website. You can go through this after if you want to sort of remind yourself of the benefits of each one. I did put that together in case you found that handy. Next thing I want to talk about is the theme and plugin translation. I wanted to talk to you about this briefly just so that you know how this process works. Themes and plugins, of course, have all sorts of text that your users see. And these are all managed with three kinds of files. .pot, .po, and .mo files. These are all part of a system called GetText that WordPress uses to manage translations. .pot files are templates. They have all the original strings, the default values that your site uses. .po files, there is one for every locale that that theme or plugin is translated into that has those translations that map to the template file. And the .mo files are compiled, machine versions of that just to make things run quicker. There are many popular themes and plugins that come with all of these files already created, shipped with it, available in your language. But if it isn't, there's tools available so that you can manage the translation of those products to suit your needs. One of those plugins is called Locotranslate. It's a managed from plugin for themes and plugins that's available in the WordPress repository for free. And it gives you a screen that looks like this. What you see up top is the source text. So those are all the original little bits of text that would show up created by themes and plugins and allows you then in the lower box to put in the translation of that. .po edit is another option for this. This is a desktop application. It's available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. It is a freemium app, and it's the one that I've used the most when working with translations. One of the nice things is it gives you statistics about the status of the translations on your site. The reason these are really important is if you're working with professional translators, they're usually charged by the word. And these statistics allow you very easily to pull up how many words need translating so that you can figure out the appropriate billing. That statistics, as well as a couple of other features, are available in the paid version, which is $20. I find that's quite worth it if you're working on a site that you need all these features for. And this is what PoEdit looks like. So very similar to Locotranslate's web interface, but as I said, this is in the desktop. So you have all the strings in the top box. You have the translation in the bottom. And on the right-hand side, if it recognizes those words, it might offer a suggested translation based on other projects that have submitted translations to their site in the past. GlotPress is a new plugin that the WordPress community is developing. It's still a work in progress, but it's looking to do the same thing, allowing you to translate from within WordPress as a plugin the strings that are appearing on your site. If you want to look more at this tool, it's available at blog.glotpress.org, all the documentation for it. And as we'll see later, it's already in use in a bigger project that's really exciting, and we'll look at that at the end of the talk. Content translation. So this is about... So we've talked about all the tools now that allow you to enter your text in multiple languages. But then there's the issue of actually getting your text translated. Well, that's easy. Google Translate, right? No, no, no, no, please don't. Automatic translation is a big no-no. It is not accurate. Please do not use it. Use a translation service. There are companies out there. You'll find them in every city that this is professionally what they do. Usually they're charged by the word. I think there's other ones that you can get on contract to give you better rates. But that is the way to do it. They will make sure that, you know, your grammar is correct. My other kind of tip that I like, I like working with the same translator in the same language all the time. I don't like, you know, sort of finding a translator, you know, one day to do a couple of pages of different translator, six months later to do different pages. The reason being, every language has different ways of saying the same thing. And if you're using the same translator, they're going to develop a lexicon of words they use for your site so that you'll have consistent wording throughout, you know, different upgrades to your site. And that's definitely something important to pay attention to. The other really neat thing is that there are a couple of translation services that integrate directly into WordPress so that, for example, you write a post, you can say, submit this post for translation and the company gets a notification that example.com has a new page ready for translation. They prepare the translation and they can push it right back to you directly in WordPress. That's kind of cool. So ICANN Localize is one of those services. That one is integrated directly into the WPML plugin. So if you're running that one, you can submit your translations through there. Lingotech is another company that will do this for you. Their plugin is an extension that runs on top of the Polylang plugin if you want to use their service. I'm sure there are other ones, but those are two that I'm aware of. Finally, WordPress is part of this wonderful community that we call open source. So as with every other piece of WordPress, there is a way of contributing in multilingual. If you know languages other than English, there are ways to get involved. The Polyglots team that I referenced earlier are responsible for making sure that WordPress is available in the dozens of languages and many more locales. It's a big job and native speakers really help to make this process easier. All the documentation about getting involved with the Polyglots team is available on the make.wordpress.org website. They're now running a tool called translate.wordpress.org and this site is running Glotpress, that new plugin that I mentioned a little bit earlier. With this website, you can provide translations to WordPress core itself to the meta projects for WordPress. So all the other websites that are on WordPress.org are included here. As well as every theme and every plugin in the repository that has been internationalized. As a user, you can log into this site and provide translations for any of those projects. Helping to eventually make WordPress plugin theme ecosystem available in as many languages as possible. Not leaving that job up to individual authors who usually know one or maybe two languages. This really helps make it a global project and is as easy as logging into a website and typing in the translation if you know it which I think is pretty fantastic. So I encourage you, if you do know another language to start going in and contributing to your favorite projects to make WordPress better for everyone. That's it for me, thank you very much. Yes, my slides as well as links to all of the tools and plugins and everything and documents are all available on my website right now. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to help you out. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of WordCat Miami. Does anyone have any questions? We have a few minutes. So the question was he was using Polylang and it manages one page at a time translation and he wanted just to have it like an on and off switch to be available in one language or the other. So are you saying that you wanted it so that some of your content was in one language, some were the other or that you were trying to build a website that was really just in a language other than English? Okay, so in that case you do have to you do have to go with a multilingual setup and you do have to manage them page by page. Just quickly translate everything. It is, as I said you don't want to use automatic translation so you do have to do the content on every side. Let's talk with the doctor I want to grab some other questions. So the question was is there a difference in the speed of your website between using some of the plugins that I spoke about or using WordPress multi-site? I believe WordPress multi-site for a large site would definitely be faster because it's not doing a whole pile of additional queries to look up the translations it's just running a WordPress site almost identically to a single installation. So, yeah, I would say WP multi-site would be the way to go for that. Most of my experience has been with WPML but they're for smaller websites with clients that didn't want to get into multi-site but if I was building anywhere performance was the serious concern I would go with multi-site. Can the what be different from each other story? So the question was if you're doing multi-lingual do they share the same theme and style and everything? Yes, they do. They are. Now, if you're using multi-site you could set up different themes for each of the sub-sites in a multi-site network that is an option available to you. With the plugins we spoke about it's a shared theme for all languages. So the question is with the URL structure either sub-domains or sub-folders what the impact is on Google's ranking of those sites. I'm not an SEO expert I couldn't tell you for sure what the impact is. My personal preference is I like the sub-folders.  So the question is how does Google know in its multi-lingual? What these plugins do is they add another tag in the code that says this page is in language X and Google will read that and it's not going to show a Spanish page on English Google if it knows that it's Spanish it's smart enough to make that association and there's also I know WPML does it it puts additional code into the page that says and there are translations available in these other languages so that any of the bots that are scanning the internet know that oh yeah this is a direct translation of this other page. So there's this comment made about a former version of QTranslate that apparently had a big bug that erased some tables in the database I'm not aware of that particular issue but I do know QTranslate X is being maintained by a different set of authors I think when I looked at it it was being used on something like 70,000 different websites now I would say it's very trustworthy I wouldn't worry about that yes so the question was asked one of my slides referenced that WPML was high on its the impact on the database and where that would come into to be a factor is with performance the way WPML works is every string back to the back to the database and look up that translation unless it's in the PO file system but there's a lot of other strings that you can just enter the translations through the WPML dashboard for example menu translations being a big one so I was working on a website that had I think five menus in the footer and then one big mega menu at the top of the page and for every menu item in there it was making a call back to the database to look up that translated string name so that's where I ended up with that home page that still had over 250 queries on it it was because it was going to look up all of those translations now you can mitigate that with caching solutions that would be one way around that but that's why I said WPML can be a bit harder on the database than some of the other options what's my favorite pick favorite I've had the most experience with WPML I think it is probably the most complete solution if you're looking for something that's all in one I think if I had my choice for a site that I was running myself I'd probably lean it really depends on what the project is different use cases different plugins are better for so I think all I can say is I have the most experience with WPML but I think all of the things I present today are valid options for doing a multilingual website and apparently we are out of time thank you very much everyone if you have any questions I'll be outside later