All right, hi everyone. So yeah, welcome today to this AWS and PagerDuty session on how to take data and turn it into actionable information using AI and ML. And it's great to meet you all today. My name is Julian Alcer. I am a product manager in our AI ops group here at PagerDuty. And today's agenda first, we'll cover how PagerDuty and AWS partner to deliver relevant insights in the incident response lifecycle to help drive your teams to action. Then we'll talk about how to reduce noise across an entire organization's technical ecosystem using AI. Next, we'll talk about how to use AI and ML for more efficient triage in order to drive faster resolution times. And then finally throughout this session we'll be sprinkling in some interactive polls so we can hear from you and we'll finish with about 10 minutes of Q&A. All right, so before diving into the world of data, AI and ML let's take a step back and ask the question why are we looking at AI and ML to help us? Well, I'm sure it's not news to you that operational complexity has reached a breaking point. And despite macroeconomic woes that are driving the need to do more with less digital transformation initiatives aren't slowing down. And so issues have become more difficult to manage in an even less forgiving environment than we found ourselves let's say three to six months ago. And when disruption hits consumers or customers customers feel it and they wanna know why can't this vendor fix this faster? Why am I paying this price for this experience? And the answer to us usually as well it's not that simple and complex problems can't fix themselves in a matter of seconds. But when incidents impact customers customers don't care about excuses they want results and we all remember the moments you see captured on the right hand side major airline disruptions, infrastructure failures but what is on the other side of that for those companies involved? Well, on the other side that probably includes time strap teams like many of you listening in today sifting through those complex systems and large data volumes to deliver the best experience possible. And what we see here at PagerDuty when we look across all of our customer data is that customer data volumes are growing at an exponential rate around 70% year over year. And as a result, the business suffers from too much noise and too much toil while sifting and manually going through those processes. This results in longer time to resolution and more customer impact. So dev leaders are focused now more than ever on reducing the cost of operations by streamlining processes, consolidating tooling and leveraging automation. And so organizations today will thrive or decline based on the experience you deliver. Those that consistently serve up outstanding experiences will earn and re-earn customer loyalty while those that don't will struggle to meet their customer needs. And so the vision of the PagerDuty operations cloud is to enable teams to automate and accelerate your critical work. How do we do this? Well, first this means being able to plug in your entire ecosystem into PagerDuty leveraging over 700 plus integrations. And with PagerDuty AAPS along with sending all of that data you will be able to do things like noise reduction as well as data normalization and enrichment as well as use machine learning that recognizes patterns in both your data and key human actions. So we can surface the right information to you at the right time. And then you can use incident response to organize and mobilize your team combined with process automation. You can do that automation of those redundant tasks. And finally, ensuring seamless collaboration with your support counterparts in your tool of choice. And so out of those 700 plus integrations that I just mentioned, one of our top integrations is AWS. AWS is a key partner for many of our customers who are either lifting and shifting into the cloud or maybe already native and growing in the cloud. And with AWS's over 250 services they make it easier for teams to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. And together PagerDuty enables AWS customers to operate more efficiently and effectively by improving their processes and operations. For the purpose of this webinar we'll examine on how we leverage AWS data to reduce noise, identify the root cause of a problem and then automate incident response all in real time so your teams can transform your massive and ever-growing data volume into actionable insights. And so PagerDuty Aops solves for some key pain points that we see across all customers no matter their industry or size. So first what we're seeing is that everyone is drowning in noise and we don't need more data. I don't think any of us would say we need more data. What we need is the right data and we need data that is actionable. What we're also seeing is that once you have the right data it's becoming increasingly difficult to gain situational awareness to know what other critical information are you missing so you need actionable information to help you triage effectively when those seconds count. And finally, tedious and manual processes are hampering productivity. It's a trade-off between innovation and firefighting. So for today's webinar we are going to focus on these first two problems or boxes that you see here but for any of you interested in the third category of toil and automation we had a fantastic webinar about a month or so ago that I'll link out towards the end. Okay, so let's go ahead and start with noise reduction. And because separating signal from noise is that first step in creating a strong foundation to improve metrics like MTTA and MTTR this is normally the first area our customers focus on in AIOps because if you're drowning in noise you can't think about how to drive those metrics down for your team. And how do you know if you're drowning in noise? Well, here are a few indicators. First, do you hear your teams often complaining about getting notified over and over again with low priority incidents? One thing we also hear from customers is an issue with flapping alerts. These are alerts that come in from AWS they notify you and distract you only to quickly auto resolve minutes later. And what we also hear is once you start seeing a lot of these false positives you might start responding in a couple of minutes later which is pretty natural and it works for those transient alerts but what about the alerts that aren't transient? So we wanna always focus on driving down those metrics like meantime to acknowledge. Another huge issue we hear from customers is that similar or duplicate alerts coming in from monitoring tools are also distracting them. And so they're having to perform manual correlation or manual actions like merging which is another pain point. And then finally, the last huge pain point is cascading incidents or alert storms which is basically alerts firing off within the same system or across systems. Okay, so I have talked a great deal but now I'd love to hear from everyone here what kind of noise is impeding your teams? Is it you're being bombarded with low priority incidents or incidents that are not high priority? Is it flapping alerts or those transient alerts, duplicate or similar incidents, alert storms or all of the above? And we'll give everyone just a minute to respond and then we'll look at the results. All right, so the results are in. So we have 29% are bombarded with low priority incidents. That's good to know. Flapping alerts, 24%. We have duplicate and similar as 18. Alert storms, 18% and all of the above 12%. Okay, so good news. We're gonna cover each one of these today and I'll try to kind of highlight that. We'll actually start with those low priority incidents. Okay, so real quick, before diving into each one of those areas and how we reduce noise for each of those answers that you went through, let's take a step back and look at how do we think about, when we talk about noise reduction at PagerDuty, it actually goes through multiple stages of our event funnel. So how do we think about noise reduction? Well, when you think about things like, okay, how would I reduce noise? What would I actually realize? What we see is that customers can receive up to 87% of noise reduction by adopting one or ideally multiple ways to reduce noise. So how do you get to that 87%? Well, first, deduplication. So this is when multiple incidents are triggered for the same issue. So your team can use things like a dedupe key to go ahead and group those into the same incident. Suppression, which is front of pipe rules known to suppress no non-actual events. So think about those low priority incidents that was the first choice a minute ago. Service routing, which ensures that the events coming in are actionable and they map to a service in PagerDuty. And then finally, this circle we have here, this is where we use machine learning to help with issues like flopping alerts or duplicate alerts. And we're gonna actually focus in this area a lot today because things like suppression and deduplication are pretty well known and leveraged in the industry. But where we do see customers missing out is in things like machine learning techniques to reduce noise, mostly because they're worried about things like missing a critical incident or maybe don't understand the exact value that it can drive for this organization. So what I'm gonna do is spend a few minutes actually opening up that black box of the ML and talk a little bit more about how we use ML and how exactly it works to solve some of these problems. Okay, but the first piece I'll cover quickly are those low priority alerts that are bombarding your team. So typically these are known events that you can easily suppress via a rule and you can use things like rejects based on the whole field or part of a field. And then you can create those rules and suppress those known non-actionable events in just a couple clicks of a button. So it's very simple but very powerful front of pipe technique. Okay, and now back to those pesky, flapping or transient alerts. Again, so this is where an alert arrives, it notifies you and then it quickly resolves itself. For those of you who've been woken up by 2 a.m. by one of these, I'm sure you can probably attest to how truly annoying these are. And I do wanna point out here that we do support a rules-based approach similar to what you saw a minute ago to suppress these flapping alerts. However, we've actually created a capability called auto-pause incident notification. So what it does is it automatically identifies those flapping alerts for you. So what we do is we apply machine learning to automatically detect and pause transient alerts that historically auto-resolve themselves within a specific time period. So the way it works is you select your desired pause time when the model identifies an incoming alert as transient, it will pause it for that specified time. If we get the resolve event, it will go ahead and resolve on its own without ever waking you up. And if it does not, it'll go ahead and go on to trigger a notification. So what I wanna point out here is this is not permanent suppression. This is just pausing of that event to allow it time to heal on its own. So let's go a bit deeper on this one because if you're like me, I don't trust when someone says, hey, our ML just automatically works and it fixes the issue. So yes, we use ML, but let me walk you step by step of how this model works. So the following workflow defines the high level view of our prediction process. The main input for our prediction model is the alert title. So we don't use additional information such as time to acknowledge or number of responder because that information lives on the incident. And we wanna identify an alert as transient when it's incoming before it ever creates that notification. And the main logic for identifying transient alerts resides in the two components in the middle, what we call the alert title pre-processing module and of course the prediction model. So the top area of the workflow here represents the online pipeline. And it shows that when a new alert arrives from AWS, we do some textual pre-processing to create the template for that alert. And then that template is used as an input into that prediction model, that brain that you see there in the middle. And what happens is that the alert template is then compared to a minimum threshold that we use to predict when that alert is transient. And if the prediction score is higher than the threshold, then we predict that the alert is transient and we pause the notification for the specified pause period. In the case we don't get the resolve event, then that alert will go on to trigger a notification to the on-call responder. Whether or not we get that resolve event for that alert will influence the threshold. And that threshold that I keep mentioning, it's calculated using the process on the bottom, this retrain offline process that you see. So what happens there is that threshold is recalculated every day. And so it's a dynamic process to make sure that the way that we're classifying an alert as transient or not is dynamic, it's changing and it's relevant. Okay. So I wanna go ahead and pause here and just make a quick note for those of you who may have data science teams or you're thinking about how to leverage this. Obviously this is a proprietary model, but it would definitely be possible for you to build your own ML to solve transient noise or some other unique problem that you're facing. The only thing I would say is that in these economic times where resources are strapped, these are capabilities you have to build, you have to own, maintain. And to some degree, you probably also have to understand the data models across your different teams in your organization. So the nice thing about vendors like Pedro is we go ahead and we do that heavy lifting for you and you don't have to build, maintain and have all of that domain knowledge. And this is just an overview of how we solve transient noise. I hope that this did help open the ML black box for you a bit when it comes to these pesky flopping alerts. And so next we'll go on to discuss another problem. So we had that third problem of similar or duplicate noise. And it's one, this is one of our oldest but most use ML techniques, which is what we call intelligent alert grouping. So this is something we hear all the time from customers is that alert may not be exactly identical to another alert, but it's very close. So think of an AWS server down 500 error followed by another AWS server alert with a close but slightly different title. It's one of the most frequent types of noise, but it's also not something you can easily write rules for because there's so many small variations of that data. And in the spirit of opening up the ML black box, the way intelligent alert grouping works is by comparing incoming textual summaries of the alerts. So this is textual similarity. So what we do is we go ahead, we identify those alerts that are textually similar. We cluster them together into the same incident. We also have a grouping time window parameter, which is a rolling time window that is flexible from five minutes to one hour. And it's also used to determine if an alert is eligible to be grouped. In addition to the textual similarity, there's also a background learner that will adapt to certain user feedback, such as if an alert was missed or grouped incorrectly. And that ML learner will adjust future grouping activities based on those user behaviors. And here's a hands-on example of how that works. Here you see a sequence of alerts. There's actually three unique alert templates here, namely permissions host fail, no data stale email, and Splunk alert follow up 500. Now you can expect intelligent alert grouping to group these into three distinct alerts, three distinct textual alerts. However, because the user had previously indicated that no data stale emails is actually related to permissions host fail, the learner was able to remember that over time and grouped these alerts into the same incident. So all in all, what you see here is that it was able to group them into two separate incidents, not three because of that user feedback. Okay, so we talked a lot about how the model works. We gave an example, but we understand that still teams are nervous about adopting ML, mainly because they're worried about the risk of missing an alert and also maybe don't exactly understand the savings that are possible. So for this reason at PagerDuty we're big believers in explainable ML and we've invested heavily in reporting that shows you as soon as you start sending us data how exactly would the model group those alerts and the savings you would see? So think of this as a simulator but it's using the same model that will run when it's live. So as you saw a minute ago, our ML works out of the box based on textual similarity and it will start doing this analysis as start as soon as you start sending us alerts. So what this means is we start grouping on day one and then your users are really just fine-tuning the model. You don't have to do upfront training before adopting the feature. And so what most of our customers see as a result is noise reduction in days to weeks. Okay, so that's the process before you adopt the feature, right? Understanding how it would group, understanding the savings you would see but what about once you adopt the feature? When it's live, we also have multiple ways that we show you when the alert is grouping. So first we show you how many alerts are grouped in areas such as the incident list page. So users are able to very quickly see which alerts and how many alerts were grouped into that incident. The incident itself will also provide counts of the number of alerts in the alerts table area. We also have a grouping now pill that is active when the model is clustering and doing that grouping. And then finally, we also output the reason the alert was grouped in the incident timeline to ensure that your users don't miss any alerts when grouping's happening. So again, you could build all of this but resources are crunched right now. And here's a story from an actual Page of Duty customer. Chicago Trading Company or CTC is a derivatives trading firm that specializes in market trading across a variety of products and services. And CTC had a few challenges before implementing Page of Duty ranging from a legacy dashboard cluttered with unactionable events and alerts which created delays and incident acknowledgement and resolution times, alert storms that reduce the ability for teams to understand the makeup of and effectively respond to incidents. And they also had a lack of automation embedded into their incident response process which led to more manual work for on-call responders. So when CTC used Page of Duty to kickstart their automation processes they were able to do that because first they did that noise reduction saw great results. And then we're able to automate and all in all saw faster acknowledge times and faster time to resolution. Okay. So I think the last area we had in our poll was about alert storms or cascading alerts. So I want to transition to an exciting noise reduction capability being launched this year. You may have, now you may have noticed that everything I have discussed so far in terms of noise reduction is was within one service in Page of Duty. And so for many customers that might be enough maybe one service is receiving all your relevant alerts and applying noise reduction there is going to do what you need. But what we tend to see in DevOps teams or central IT teams is that you usually own a few or many services. And what may also happen is that you see noise that is co-occurring or cascading across those services. And so we have a few goals for upcoming release which we're calling global alert grouping. The first is to enable grouping across services. Think of a time where you would one database service go down and then cascading alerts on more of those database or infrastructure services. Or what about a backend service that tends to trigger a related front-end service like a payments UI service or some customer facing service. So reducing noise and correlating in these scenarios is our first goal. Then our second goal is to deliver a holistic experience when it comes to grouping whether on a single or multiple services. So that means allowing our users to combine different alert grouping methods. So for example, we have a capability called content-based alert grouping which is more of a rules-based approach that allows you to group on a specific field or fields to do that alert grouping. But maybe you wanna use that in conjunction with the ML. So maybe you want us to check region or source or a specific part of the payload before applying the machine learning. So with this release, all of these capabilities will work in harmony with one another to give you maximum performance and control. So let's take a look at what this will actually look like. So first you'll notice that you enter here on this noise reduction homepage. This is gonna be a new area where you can see all your noise reduction settings in one place. Also at the bottom kind of going back to that preview and being able to understand the savings you're gonna see. We also have an area here at the bottom that's gonna identify some areas with the highest impact that you may wanna consider enabling. All right. So remember that problem I gave you of if you have multiple services with co-occurring noise, maybe those infrastructure noise or other related services, here's where you could specify those services and select the type of grouping you'd like to perform when an issue comes up. So you can correlate those alerts for those services. So here is where you'd be able to specify exact fields if you'd like. You can use that on its own. You could use that with the intelligence or just the intelligence by itself. It'll really be up to you based on your use case. And then finally, you'll also have the option to tailor the time window, which is that grouping parameter that determines whether an alert qualifies to be grouped based on that time parameter. Okay, so that covers noise reduction. Now let's dive into our last area for this session, which is how to use data to create actionable insights during triage. So triage is probably one of the most complex jobs for a responder. It's almost like the holy grail of incident response. But here are some indicators that there's probably room for improvement in your triage process. So first, you have difficulty finding the right SME or trouble onboarding junior employees. Do you have difficulty knowing what other incidents may have contributed to your incident or understanding potential related incidents on other services mean? What other incidents are ongoing at the time of your incident? And then finally, we always hear that an incident was due to a recent change or recent deployment. So understanding what changes have happened. Okay, so it's that time again, this is the last poll for this session. So which one of these pain points when it comes to triage, do you experience the most? Is it that difficulty finding the right SME, understanding what recent changes have been deployed, unknown related problems or other incidents that are ongoing or finding potential origin points for that incident or all of the above? Okay, polls are in. Okay, difficulty finding the right SME, 16% of you replied with that. 11% can't see what recent changes have been deployed, unknown related problems, about 5%. Problem finding potential origin points, 47% and 21% all of the above. So some good responses there. Yeah, we'll cover each of these areas in the next few minutes. So thanks for submitting that poll. Okay, so let's go ahead and start with kind of getting immediate contextual awareness. So understanding how often an incident occurs. So all of your incident gives quick context. So when your responders look at an incident, being able to classify the frequency of an incident into three main categories based on your historical data. So first are anomalous incidents, which are incidents that have not been seen on a service within the past 30 days. Rare incidents, which are incidents that occur less than 5% of the time or frequent incidents. So these are incidents that occur more than 20% of the time. And so probably a lot of your incidents are gonna fall into this category. And what this means is that your responders can immediately, as soon as you look at the incident, get quick context on what category it falls into. And in the case of a lot of these frequent incidents, take a look at what was done previously. So this is where past incidents can help because it can quickly tell you information, such as when an issue happened, how often it's happened, and who resolved it. And the responder, so you can see what's done, learn from that and take immediate action. This is a specially useful tool for onboarding employees or when you have more junior employees. And it also can help alleviate always reaching out to that same SME over and over. So think of this as a quick catalog that you can take a look at, understand what was previously done and take action. All right, and what about understanding other incidents that are ongoing that might be related to your incident? So we often hear about a responder working in a silo, troubleshooting an issue for minutes, sometimes hours, only to later find out that there was another issue related to their incident would have been good to know about that when they first started responding to the issue. So here with this, you can actually see multiple related incidents that might be related to your incidents. We show things like the responders that are on those incidents, the business services, the technical services. So it gives you a full view of the blast radius based on those service relationships and other ongoing incidents. Okay, and once you understand the blast radius of your incidents, there might be cases where you suspect that your issue was not the root cause, but maybe there was some other incident that might have preceded your incident that maybe was the cause. So here we use machine learning to point to some potential origin points for your incidents with information such as service information, the incident, its status and what time it happened as well as a confidence score. All right, and finally, we always hear that incidents are frequently caused by recent changes or deployment. So instead of manually having to correlate changes to your incident or having to ping someone to understand what was recently deployed or digging into some tool to review recent changes, we're able to surface that for you. And we have three ways that we correlate recent changes to your incident. So the first is based on time. Did this change happen in close time in relation to the incident you're looking at? What about if a change event occurred on a service related to your service? So you may know all of your changes, but what about maybe another service that's related that might not be under your ownership? It would be good to know what changes have occurred there as well. And then finally, we use ML to detect similar incidents and changes that have occurred that might have caused your incident. Okay, so that wraps up the triage portion. So with that, we'll go ahead and we're gonna move to Q&A. We're gonna take some questions from the audience. Okay, and I'll give everyone, I don't see any questions in the Q&A yet, but I will give everyone a minute to go ahead and drop those questions in there. Okay, so I do see that we have our first question that's come in. So for change correlation, does PagerD integrate with other services like PagerD, like ServiceNow? So we actually support a number of change event tools, GitHub, GitLab. We have multiple others. We also have a really great and powerful feature called Custom Change Event Transformer. So what this does is we actually, by using this, it can integrate with any change tool of your choice. It can be proprietary even. So what we do is we, with that, we take the JSON payload from that tool of choice, can be ServiceNow, can be proprietary, it can be any tool and we transform it into a JSON payload that PagerDuty recognizes as a change event. So you can take a look. We have multiple supported change tools and we also have the Custom Change Event Transformer as well that you can leverage. Great question. Okay, we'll give a minute for any other questions. I'll give one more minute for Q and A. All right. Oh, one came in right before we're about to move on. So here's a question. How much data do we need to quote learn models correctly? Let me go ahead and choose to answer that live. So that's a great question. So, you know, what we see, so first what I would say is as long as you're sending data, so once you start sending, let's say alert data, right? I would say there has to be at least assuming it's a healthy service. So sometimes what we have are test services or services that are very low data volume. So think about if you have, you know, five alerts in a month, there's not really a lot of opportunity for any alert grouping, right? With five per month, right? So assuming this is a healthy service with, you know, normal data volumes, our ML actually starts grouping immediately because the model is looking for textual similarity. So what'll happen is it'll start grouping immediately. What we see is our customers tend to be very happy with that. I mean, we kind of saw some of the examples earlier with those no permissions host fail, right? So we're grouping based on textually similar alerts that have a very high likelihood of probably being the same issue. And if we see those coming in within minutes, those probably should be grouped together. So that happens immediately. And then in terms of the learning, in terms of the user behavior, that's more of you can almost think of it by exception, right? So, you know, if in that, again, in that case where they had very different alerts to be grouped together, something like what was it? No permissions host fail with, you know, Splunk Alert 500, two very different emails. As soon as we start getting those signals that you also want those grouped, then we can start learning from that pretty quickly. And so what I would say is that the model tends to work. We always say that it works out of the box. We see compression rates happening within days to weeks. And then your users at that point are really fine tuning the model. Okay, all right. So we'll go ahead and move on now to a few resources. So what we have is noise reduction and auto remediation with AWS. So this was that previous session that was done about a month or so ago that really focused on that third box, if you remember, of auto remediation, reducing toil and those manual tasks. We also have a link here to an AIOps interactive product tour. So that's gonna show you a lot of what you saw today. And then there's also a blog post, if you wanna take a look on the top three incident response problems in AIOps. Okay, so with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Today, I appreciate it. I will go ahead and hand off to Candace. Thank you so much, Julia, for your time today. And thank you everyone for joining us. As a reminder, this recording will be on the Linux Foundation's YouTube page later today. We hope you join us for future webinars and have a wonderful day.


Thank you board members and staff liaison for joining us for the board's commissions and committee outreach meeting it will start shortly. I would ask if you can please rename yourselves with your, your name and the board that you are that you serve on. Maybe for example, Terry Griffin Board of Community Services. If you can rename yourselves in zoom that would be much appreciated. The meeting will start shortly. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody thanks for joining us. I am going to get started right on time out of respect for everybody's time. We will be ending at 630 hard stop time because I have a few people who have some time constraints. So with that said, thank you and welcome. I just want to just say a couple things. We do have interpreter services for this meeting and our zoom host will explain how that works. So, Dana, can you please explain to everybody. Thank you, Stephanie live interpretation can be heard on the Spanish Channel. You can join the Spanish Channel by clicking on the interpretation icon and zoom on the toolbar it looks like a little globe. Ziomara is the interpreter currently on our panelists side of zoom and Pablo is interpreting on the Spanish Channel. Approximately 45 minutes into this meeting will we take a brief break for the interpreters to switch roles. Ziomara would you please interpret what I just stated so those participating who have not jumped onto the Spanish Channel know how to do so. Of course, thank you. We are sending interpreters so that you can understand in your national language, Spanish, what is being said in this meeting of the city of Santa Rosa. We want you to know that there is a place where you can enter, where it looks like it is an old place where you can choose the channel to listen to what you need to listen to in Spanish. We have two interpreters Pablo and Mara, one will be interpreting for questions and the other will be interpreting what is being said in this meeting. Okay, thank you, Ziomara. You can mute your microphone and take this as your rest period while Pablo interprets on the Spanish Channel. At the end of the workshop, and as much time allows, City Clerk Stephanie Williams will open a question and answer session. And the interpreter on the panel panelists, I will be prepared to assist anyone meeting interpretation. And now I'm going to turn it over to Mayor Schwedhelm for a welcome greeting. Great. Thank you so much, Nina. And thank you all for attending this. A lot of folks don't realize the amount of services that the city Santa Rosa provides, which you'll hear from tonight is the 13 different boards commissions and committees that help make up and help us us being the Santa Rosa City Council. Accomplish our goals. That's a crucial role that these boards commissions and committees play, because it's just not the seven of us on the Santa Rosa City Council. What we do is create the goals for each two year session. And each member and representative on the boards and commissions, more of which what it will, you learn more about from the folks today. So I appreciate your interest in them. You will learn things you never knew you never knew about the city of Santa Rosa. Should you be selected to participate on this. It's a great way to big give back to the community. I will be honest with you. The pay is not that great, but the rewards for making a difference in your community are significant. So I appreciate your interest in the city of Santa Rosa. Thank you for attending this session. And I hope you learn a lot and you do fill out that application and do want to become part of the city of Santa Rosa. Thank you. And I'll hand it back to Stephanie or Nina. Thank you, Mayor. So Dina next slide please. So we're, I'm just going to go over really quickly the application process. Next slide. So, applicants need to be residents of the city of Santa Rosa and you must be a registered voter in the city. You need to be registered voters and reside in the city during the term of your appointment to a board and you will apply online at srcity.org forward slash board. There's a application there that you fill in and once that is submitted. We get an email and we will save it to our files so that when council members are ready to make appointments and newly elected council members are ready to make appointments in January, we have a pool of applicants. We also use those applications on file for when a vacancy comes up if anybody needs to resign due to whatever reason, and we also will go back to that pool of applicants to for council members to make their appointments. Next slide please. So we're going to cover some roles and responsibilities really quickly. So you may be next slide please. So you may be asking what your role is as a board member, and your role as a board members to assist governing bodies in the decision making process. Some of these boards will make decisions and recommendations to council to planning commission to adopt resolutions legislation general plans. So your role on a board is very important. Some bodies are mandated by federal or state statute or by the city ordinance or resolution. The board of public utilities and the community advisory board are mandated by our city charter and most boards have a forming resolution and they do adopt their own bylaws. Ultimately, the city council has the final responsibility and authority for making policy decisions, but they do make those decisions. Taking into consideration recommend recommendations by some of the boards that bring something forward to them. Next slide please. So what do you do as a body member. As I mentioned, each body has a set of bylaws outlining the mission purpose and details of the functions that they do and some include annual lists of goals and objectives. As a board member, you will serve as advisory bodies and especially if it's an authority, you work programs and you have a relationship with the city council as a governing body or a board. You are also committed to fulfilling the mission and goals of the advisory body that you are sitting on, but also the goals and missions of the city council. So you have, you know, a lot of responsibility to accomplish annual priorities and to help serve in the accomplishment of the goals of the city council. Next slide please. So as a member of a board, you represent the community at large. You, we don't work in silos. You're not it's not exclusive to one point of view while you may have your view you share those on your board. But you always try and come to a consensus when you're trying to move something forward for recommendation, and you always want to take the community or the city as a whole into consideration when you are making those decisions. Next slide please. So as mentioned before there are some legal requirements you need to be a resident of city Santa Rosa and you need to be a registered voter and that is, you must maintain that registration and residency during the term of your appointment. And then there's the Brown act, which is the open public meetings law, the political reform act, ethics and conflict of interest requirements and the public records act, which we receive a lot of requests for records, and you will get training if appointed you will get a grant and what the political reform act means and also public records and some advisory bodies are designated in the city's a conflict of interest code, and are required to file statements of economic interest, your statement of economic interest is a form 700 it is a public document. And this is where you would disclose anything so that we can see or the public can see that if you have something on an agenda, and are making a decision on something in Santa Rosa that you don't have a vested interest in it, and therefore creating a conflict for you to vote on that. So, those are all very really important things that we make sure that all of our board members do not violate that conflict of interest code. Next slide please. Yes, you will be provided with training with the city attorney's office and with myself the city clerk on Brown act political reform act and public records act. We also will provide ethics training, and then you will also have some specialized training and orientation by the staff liaisons and chair of the board who will be making presentation shortly. And then ethics training and anti sexual harassment trainings are required by the city in the spring time and, like I said, we will provide some ethics training but if you can't make it. The Fair Political Practices Commission also has an online training that you can complete. And the anti sexual harassment training is done through our HR department and we can coordinate that training with new board members. So this is just a great quote from Martin Luther King. Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of their thermodynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love. So serving your community is a very important job. In fact, it's probably one of the most important positions that helps the city run and makes the city run without the service of our community members. We couldn't get most of the work done that the city does. So I thank you. The city thanks you for your interest in serving and if you do get appointed in your service. Next slide please. And again, you can apply at srcity.org forward slash boards. And if you have any questions about applying or have any issues about applying, you can certainly email me at swilliams at srcity.org, or the deputy city clerk dean and manis at dmanis at srcity.org. And that's spelled dmanis at srcity.org. And now I think I'll turn it over to staff presentations, each of the staff liaisons and possibly board chairs will be making presentations and giving information on each of their boards. Thank you. Hi, thank you, Stephanie. My name is Tara Thompson. I'm the city's art and culture manager. I oversee the public art program for the city of Santa Rosa and staff, the art and public places committee. The art and public places committee is the governing body that oversees the city's public art program. The committee advises public art program staff, the city manager and the city council on matters related to the program and advises on policies and goals for the placement and selection of public art, as well as ongoing maintenance. The committee members also participate in the selection and approval of public art project. Right now is an exciting time for the public art program because we're undergoing some strategic planning as well as some crisis response planning in response to our current state of crisis here in the community, including COVID. So our original mission that we're continuing to work under but now revising through this planning process is that the public art program is intended to enrich civic life, give voice to the unique creative spirit of Santa Rosa, and to galvanize the city's reputation as an arts destination. The program integrates a wide range of public art into public space, creating a livable community and contributing to economic development. In addition to some strategic planning and crisis planning that we're currently doing the committee is also working on the selection of the permanent artwork for Courthouse Square, the Imagine Art and Old Courthouse Square project, as well as we have also been assisting with the open and out program on 4th Street and Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa to install temporary art within the footprint of that program. The membership is made up of seven members that are appointed by each council member and members should possess professional experience in the field of visual or public art, but could also have experience including environmental design, placemaking, economic development, tourism, or just a background and general interest in the arts. I encourage you to submit an application. We'd love to have some new members express interest. There's a lot of exciting things that you could be involved with on this committee so thank you very much. Thank you Tara. Thank you Tara we're going to move along to bicycle and pedestrian advisory board we do have Nancy Adams on the line along with Sean Ralston the board chair for BPAP. So, Dana, can you hear me. Yes, I can thank you very much. This is Nancy Adams and I, my video saying that's not, I can't access it so I don't know. Nancy, we can hear you loud and clear. Okay, perfectly. So, so thank you. I am happy to be here this afternoon to share a little bit with with those participating in the zoom meeting about the bicycle and pedestrian advisory board. So, kind of like Tara it's it's a real exciting time for our advisory board for the city. We just had the city council approve the an update of the bicycle and pedestrian master plan all a year ago back in March of 2019 and that is a policy document that's really going to provide a lot of guidance to how we, we are mobile to the city rather than using our vehicles. So, that's, that's, that's a very exciting time for us to kick off some new policies and some new bike and pedestrian network recommendations that came out of that plan. And I'll say that the, the board's responsibility one of them is is was a was a huge commitment to to see in this plan to the finish line, getting it to the city council so it was a it was a very focused effort and as you can see on the slide, basically, the board beats every other month the third Thursday and four to six, when we are in, in an actual meeting place where we're at at the municipal service center south building which is out office Tony Point Road by the fire station. And during the process of the plan. It was so it was such a huge lift. The board was actually meeting every month for about a year and a half so it really took a commitment of the board members to, to help, you know, shepherd this through. So, as a result of that plan, we actually established some some policies that are and some goals that are, we're new to Santa Rosa, you know, such as looking at our mode share how many people actually do walking bike in the city and really trying to get that for for our community, and looking at a vision zero which is trying to reduce the number of crashes involving pedestrians and and cyclists. So we're actually participating in a countywide effort. That and then there's other initiatives such as bike share, which actually is going to launch in 2021 and that's a two county effort with Marine County and Sonoma County and that will put some bike share hubs, about four of them within the city, probably two in the downtown area and associated with the smart station in downtown and then the smart station up at the the North end by Connie town mall. So that's another exciting initiative that the city hasn't really experienced yet so there's there's a there's a lot in the offing and one of the responsibilities that also the board does is they, there's a some state funding that comes to the city, and we use that money every year to look at where we would build construct or design and start building bicycle and pedestrian projects and so you know that the board has a strong track record of identifying projects for us to work on. And so that's always exciting for them to get their input on where we actually put this money and where it goes within our community to construct bicycle and pedestrian projects. So, and then lastly, I would just say, some of the, some of the other infrastructure projects that are really not too far off is is a is a very significant bicycle and pedestrian over crossing right in the vicinity of the junior college and Connie town mall and, and that just went to the city council, I guess it was in July now. As part of the environmental review process so we are anticipating getting our California environmental clearance and our federal environmental clearance by the end of this year. We're already starting the design on that process. And we'll certainly kick that off. And next year and that's a, that's a really monumental leadership project for for Santa Rosa in terms of bike and pet infrastructure so that's that's real exciting. And we also have some corridor studies that we are working on and this is this is also something new for us that came out of the plan and and it was a result of trying to identify some further design options for some of the heavy crash corridors for pedestrians and and right now we're evaluating stony point road where there was some significant crashes involving bikes and and pedestrian so so we have an engineering team that's working on that and so a lot of exciting things. And I guess I will close with a couple of things that the board structure is is actually there are nine members and two of the members are at large one represents our, our community of elderly residents and the second one is our disabled representative and those two are selected at large by the council as as a whole. And then the other seven members are council member appointees. So, and then I'll add one more thing and then I think Sean our chairs on so he may add some other things just to tell you how exciting it is. So we do the council do approve an active transportation planner position, which will be helping me with all the bicycle and pedestrian planning and construction activities throughout the city so we are just in the phases of that recruitment and we hope to, to have the commission filled by the first of next year so a lot of exciting things for us so I will stop there and and handed off to Sean most in the chair. Thank you. Thanks Nancy Dina can you hear me. Yes I can loud and clear thank you very much on. Thank you. I just wanted to add and thank you so much Nancy we're just, I'm so grateful that we have an incredible city staff for people who are considering the bike pad advisory board. I really want to throw in a pitch. If you are at all concerned about health collision reduction in our in our city equity of how we can get more people in on our roads, improving kind of the life quality and helping the environment, the bike pedestrian advisory board is really cool. It's just incredibly gratifying that we get to work with the master plan that Nancy just mentioned, and it kind of converges with the city's plan so we work together, and you know I guess I'm kind of a closet, a closet transportation planner want to I'm not smart enough to be a transportation planner, but I, but I really want to be and and being a part of the bike pedestrian advisory board really lets you do some outreach to get your fingers involved in an actual planning, and then with a great supportive it's terrific. We were instrumental in being able to get the city designated as a bike friendly city from the League of American Cyclists, based on a lot of the work that the city staff has done, you know, and our goal at the end, if you just take a look back at the big picture is just, you know, if we can increase access for site for cyclists and for pedestrians, maintain the network we have and expand it, and just support a cultural change. It's one of the most gratifying things to do. We've actually made recommendations to the Santa Rosa City Council on the bike lanes, and it's just fascinating to be part of government to see that you can actually make a suggestion, get something implemented, and then it really happens. So, I'm just grateful for the incredible staff and and we're looking for some good people, and we're really a friendly bunch so the invitation is open, and I hope you apply. Thank you, Sean. We are going to move along to the Board of Community Services, and we will be having Jen Santos come on for making that presentation. Let me just promote her to a panelist. And Terry Griffin, the Board of Community Services chair. Hi, Deena, can you hear me? I can. Thank you, Jen. Thank you so much. I'm Jen Santos, Deputy Director for Parks, and I am also the liaison to our fantastic Board of Community Services. They're a seven member advisory board appointed by Council, and we meet the fourth Wednesday of every month at four o'clock. And I'm really excited that we'll be starting our first virtual meeting next Wednesday, the 28th of October at four o'clock. I also wanted to note that I am joined tonight by our chair, Terry Griffin, and potentially was supposed to be joining also Vice Chair Kwant, so they are available for questions as well. They use city recreational and cultural policies, facilities and programs. They advise the city council on their adequacy and effectiveness. They advise council on matters relating to community beautification and many of these things intersect with what Rec and Parks does. The board also assists staff in the formulation of rules and regulations for the use of city parks and recreational facilities. One really great thing about this board is they're very active in the community and they get out and attend community meetings we have, park dedications. They're very active in our parks and they're very knowledgeable about the park system, which is really great when they are hearing things that come before the board. It's really great to have that background. I wanted to highlight some of the things that they've worked on over the most the last couple of years. In our recreation field they have assisted with the decision making about whether or not to convert a tennis court at Findlay Park to four pickleball courts and the striping of one pickleball court or one tennis court to be both pickle and tennis. This was really controversial and if any of you know anything about pickleball it's a really popular sport nationwide and it's no different here in Santa Rosa. Ultimately this board heard both sides and a lot of information was presented to them they visited the park. They got to know all about pickleball, and they ultimately recommended the conversions. The board also has provided feedback on golf course and greens fees, recreation fees such as pool entrance fees. They provide recommendations for council approval park master plans and improvement plans and provide feedback regarding operations for recreation and park related projects. They are very active in our community as I mentioned. There's a lot of things going on in recreation and parks and the associated projects with those. We often have art projects in our projects and they are heavily involved. It's a great board to be part of. We do currently have one vacancy so I hope that we get some interest tonight. And I also yeah so I just wanted to also remind everyone that the chair and vice chair also here tonight. Thank you. Chair vice chair did you have anything to add for the board of community services. Terrific thank you, Jen, Carol and Terry. We're going to move along to the board of building regulation appeals. Joining us for the board of building regulation appeals is Jesse Oswald our chief building inspector. Good evening can you hear me. Yes I can thank you Jesse. Hi this is Jesse Oswald, chief building official with the city of Santa Rosa. The board of building regulation appeals with the acronym Bobra is made up of seven members and their qualifications range from the potential of being a contractor structural or civil engineer. For an architect, electrical engineer, electrical contractor, mechanical engineer or mechanical contractor or plumbing contractor. And the purpose of the board of building regulations appeals is to provide the opportunity for any decisions made by the building official or the deputies. And with regard to orders decisions or determinations made by the division, as well as additional implications from the property maintenance code, which is enforced by the code enforcement division. So it holds a really important feature for allowing public process and any any orders or interpretations or notices by the division. We currently do have two vacancies so it'd be wonderful to have community members with an interest in the code regulation arena to serve and provide their, their knowledge and input into the processes as they move forward. We're a very fortunate board in that the members all take the codes very seriously and enjoy rendering interpretations fair and equitable interpretations for for the good of the community and the safety of the community is really what is based upon. So with that I hope to gain some interest, and we are required to have at least one meeting per per year annually, and we are scheduled quarterly to have meetings on the second Thursday and a quarterly basis. And so with that I hope to gain some interest from folks in the community. Thank you. Thank you, Jesse. We're going to move along to the Board of Public Utilities. Joining us for the Board of Public Utilities is Jennifer Burke and BPU chair Dan Galvin. It's just a reminder if you'd like to apply for any of these boards that we're discussing tonight please go to SRCity.org forward slash board. Thank you Jen for Jennifer. Good evening. I'm here to talk about the Board of Public Utilities or BPU. My name is Jennifer Burke and I'm the director of the city's water department. The Board of Public Utilities is a seven member board that is appointed by city council members. The Board is an exciting and hardworking board with a lot of authority that provides general policy direction and guidance over the operation and management of the city's water and sewer utilities, as well as the Laguna wastewater treatment plant. The Board reviews and approves policies and procedures for the department establishes and recommends the approval of rates fees and the annual budget for the department awards capital improvement projects and contracts for the department and can also negotiate property acquisitions, rents and leases for property needed for the business of the city utility. An exciting current and prospective projects that the Board is currently working on includes our four year rate setting process so we're in the middle of starting that. Our upcoming budget, long range water planning, a recommendation for a sale of $70 million worth of bonds that the council will be considering soon to replace our UV disinfection system. We have a few of the exciting projects that they're working on the BPU members meet on the first and third Thursday of the month at 130. Typically we would meet in the city council chambers during this time we've been meeting virtually, and it is very consistent that we meet every first and third Thursday of the month as there's a lot of business for the water department. If you are at all interested in the water sewer or wastewater treatment, please consider joining the Board of Public Utilities and Dan Galvin our chair is also on and available for questions when the time comes for questions. Thank you so much. Thank you Jennifer. The next board we're going to hear from is our Community Advisory Board. And that staff liaison is Danielle gardenio. Hi everyone, my name is Danielle gardenio and I'm the Community Engagement Coordinator for the city of Santa Rosa and the staff liaison to the Community Advisory Board also known as the cab. The cab is a 14 member board with seven area seats and seven at large seats we currently have to at large seats open. And the mission of the cab is to connect city government and residents so that the public can have a voice in the decisions that impact their lives to build a stronger community. In 2018 the cab passed a strategic plan or adopted a strategic plan and their work focuses in two areas one is the capacity building and training area which our expertise subcommittee. They are currently working on developing an orientation process for the cab training areas for the cab, and they also recently developed some recruitment materials that are useful for city council members when they're looking at interested applicants. Our empowerment subcommittee is our community engagement arm of the cab. And they have been working on implementing our neighbor fest program and a variety of different neighborhoods throughout the city. They are working on developing a citizen engagement academy, and also currently assisting the community engagement office in developing a series of civic engagement one on one videos. They're also actively engaging with our neighborhood groups throughout the city, although right now during COVID. They haven't been able to do so as many of our neighborhood groups are not meeting in person, although if you are meeting virtually we'd like to know about that so that we can continue relationship building with our neighborhoods. In addition to that work, the cab during non COVID times also attends meeting community events, such as the Wednesday at Market Cinco de Mayo the MLK Juneteenth event, and they table at those events, providing information to our residents about various community or, I'm sorry, city projects, as well as community engagement opportunities that are available to our residents. We meet the fourth Wednesday of every month at 6pm. Usually we meet at our, at our first street location at 637 first street, however, due to the pandemic we're meeting virtually the next meeting is on October 28 next Wednesday, 6pm. We invite everyone to attend and participate. And if you want more information about the cab we have information such as our current members and additional information on the strategic planet srcity.org slash cab, and I will be around for questions should you have any. Thank you. Thank you Danielle. Next, we're going to move to the cultural heritage board and our staff liaison is Susie Murray. Hi everybody, can you hear me. We can hear you thank you Susie. Yay. My name is Susie Murray, and I've worked for the city since 2006. I'm now a senior planner for the planning and economic development division, and I'm also recently appointed as the CHP board liaison. Actually that happened just before the pandemic so we haven't had a whole lot of activity until just recently. Unfortunately it looks like we lost Susie. So, let me see if I can get her back one moment.  It happened earlier too so I'm going to try and just cruise through this as fast as I can. Thank you. Thank you, Susie. What I wanted to say is that it's always interesting. It's sometimes challenging and board members on the CHP are a group of really great people. I also am going to throw in a plug we're looking for a seventh person right now so submit your applications. So far, I'll say that I am for the most part loving it. Part of the staff I want to let you know that you know when you're when you're up there and you're looking at projects, you're not alone. We have not only do you have me the board liaison but you'd also have the staff planner who can answer most of the questions but there are some complex projects. So in those cases we keep, we'll have a city attorney present to answer your questions. We'll also have other relevant staff as needed transportation, traffic, gosh, engineering and development services water, you name it. Part of the board is really balancing the preservation of our historic resources and citywide goals with a focus primarily on the preservation of those historic resources. Before a project comes to the board staff conducts a complete analysis, and you'll get to review their work, along with along with the project materials. The staff will make a presentation at each one of the meetings, and you'll hear phrases like pursuant to an in compliance with, but then your conversations begin and that's when it gets really interesting. Reviewing projects against the secretary of the interior standards and those are that's kind of a, I guess it's a federal document actually and then comparing those to some city documents like our zoning code and historic processing procedures for the owners of historic properties. Again, staff will do an analysis so you'll get to see all that. From my perspective, what is probably the most important thing is your commitment your time commitment. The cultural heritage board meets two days a month, typically. Okay, let's say, I say typically because we do have some special meetings. Typically, it's the first and third Wednesday of every month. Sometimes we have to conduct other joint public meetings or hearings. And we, we team up with our design radio board. Those meetings can happen in addition to your Wednesday night meetings. The other thing is sometimes you'll have a real complex project. You'll have a night meeting that are the Wednesday meeting actually starts at 230 in the afternoon, but those nighttime meetings, sometimes begin at five, and they've been known to go into the wee hours of the morning. That's not the normal, but it does happen. So you need to be prepared for that. The other thing that would be nice is to have some some related professional or personal association with preservation, whether it's, you know, a historic architect or I don't want to throw words like architect out but some sort of understanding of preservation is real important. So as far as trainings concerned, well, I'm going to say it's a lot of it's on the job, other than some of those trainings that Stephanie mentioned earlier. And I'm going to defer now to the board chair Brian Muser, who's also, I'm hoping he's been elevated as well. Are you are you all able to see Brian Muser. I just promoted him under the name of Lisa crayons. Got it. So Lisa, Brian, if you can meet yourself there is a familiar face. If you have anything to add to Susie's presentation that would be wonderful. Okay, yeah, I won't repeat to Susie kind of covered a lot of the notes that I had. I will say that we have the city of Santa Rosa has eight historic districts and additionally some landmarks, and it also has a future of potential other historic districts and other landmarks. And the challenge of the cultural heritage board is basically kind of in a nutshell to act on the public's behalf to identify and support the preservation districts and but it can be kind of a gray line in that each of these districts at one time or another are going to have an alteration, a development, a demolition, a rehabilitation, or a restoration. And sometimes those can be viewed as good and sometimes they can be viewed as as not good. From the historic neighborhoods perspective, it could be either way and from the city's perspective it could be either way. So that's why we have a seven member board. And if it was just so cut and dry if we were just going to follow the secretary the interior standards for rehabilitation. If we were just going to follow the zoning code, then the planners could could do that without having a board, but it's a it's it's it's it's gray it's dynamic. We have to weigh the needs of historic preservation with the needs of the city with taking into consideration what what policy what codes are, and in what the general public feels about the item that that we're dealing with. So, this is my second go around on the cultural heritage board I was on a cluster of heritage board in the late 90s. I'm a new chair to the cultural heritage board actually as well as a new new member. I'm enjoying it very much. I do want to though. I already said this but I do want to reemphasize that how important it is though for you if you choose to be on the board to make the commitment to attendance to being prepared for agenda items. Staff is wonderful. They will spend time with you prior to a meeting if you have questions because sometimes these things can be complicated. I'm fortunate I'm married to a city planner so I can get a lot of information from her, but Yeah, so anyway, I know you got a lot of board school so we do have a vacancy and and we're looking forward to some special person come in filling it. Thank you. Thank you, Susie and Brian. We're going to take a brief moment to do the transition for the interpreters to swap roles so bear with us that has to happen live. We cannot throw up an intermission slide. So, one moment please. Just real quick while we take this break. I just want to say that if anybody has any questions that we can't get through to tonight. You can always email me at s Williams at SR city.org and I can forward those questions to the appropriate staff liaison to get an answer for you. So I'm just going to ask you to turn on your camera briefly and give me a thumbs up that you are now participating on the Spanish Channel. Thank you, Xiomara, and Pablo can you just do a quick mic check and confirm you are on the panel aside. This is Pablo interpreter. Thank you very much Pablo. We are going to move along with the next board. I'm going to turn over to the design review board joining us from the giant. The design review board is Bill Rose, and the design review board chair. Thank you Dina and good evening everybody my name is Bill rose I am the interim deputy director of planning and also the staff liaison to the design review board. I'm going to give a quick overview of the designer view board its composition and its purpose and then I'll turn it over to Scott Kincaid he's the current chairman of the designer view board. So the designer view board or commonly it's referred to as the DRB. It's made up of seven members, each appointed by a city council member. The chair of the designer view board is appointed by the mayor and the vice chair is selected amongst the design review board itself. The board meets on the first and third Thursday of every month. It's had a fairly full slate of projects for some time now. We don't see any lead up the pipeline of projects has been pretty full, and it continues to be that way in the, in the future. The board is typically made up of professionals from the design and development community so often we will have one or more licensed architects, we also could have draft person professionals on the board landscape architects. It is somehow related to as I said the designer the development community, but it's not just architects or landscape professionals we can have engineers we've had civil engineers we've had structural engineers. And we've had real estate professionals real estate finance professionals and we've even had the benefit of public safety professionals on the board. So it's a pretty diverse mix. Design review board agendas, as I mentioned they're pretty full. And each item is pretty detailed so the staff planner will bring forward a project with the staff report a presentation and a full analysis. And it will culminate with a staff recommendation and the board then takes action and as chairman user mentioned a moment ago with the cultural heritage board. The presentation with the designer view board and the cultural heritage board you'll hear momentarily the planning commission is the exercise of discretion. So the that's often the gray area it's where there's not necessarily a specific provision, but it's where the board looks for things like compatibility or the appropriateness of a project. The design review board does is it's exactly what it says it's the board in charge with reviewing the design of projects, the architecture, the site plan the layout, and it's appropriateness. One thing I also wanted to mention is the commitment of time so there are two meetings per month there can be special meetings. It's fairly infrequent, but the packets themselves as I mentioned earlier can be fairly detailed so there is a time commitment that each board member definitely puts into this and I think you'll hear more from the chairman in just a second. The staff is definitely involved so you will always have a liaison that's usually me or somebody on my behalf. We also have an administrative staff that can help out and we're very accessible. We want to make sure that the meetings are meaningful that you understand all the information. And all your questions are answered, hopefully ahead of time so there's no surprises at the meetings the meetings right now are virtual, they're typically held at City Hall but right now it's in the virtual environment. They are also televised as well. The board members often do site visits in advance of the meetings as well to better understand understand the project before them. So, we're always looking for diversity on the board, the city is also is now governed by district elections. So we have different geographic political districts. So we seek to have people from all over the city. And as I mentioned from a range of different professional disciplines. So with that I think I'll turn it over to Scott Kincaid to give a little feedback from his role, a longstanding board member and also as our current chairman. Thank you bill. And everybody hear me alright. Okay. I'm Scott Kincaid current board chair of the designer review board as bill mentioned. I am a commercial general contractor, which was one of the areas that bill did not mention but still a real estate professional. And I think we all bring our unique perspectives to those gray areas those design guideline interpretations. And really it's a collaborative approach to achieving what is boiled down to superior design. So the city of Santa Rosa requires superior design and in all of its projects that are reviewed by the design review board. And really, when I say it's a collaborative approach, we are all appointed by various counts city council members. And those city council members come up with collective priorities, and we are seated to make sure that those priorities are seen through in the development process. And as has been previously mentioned by several other board chairs, the city staff is absolutely fantastic. They do offer a tremendous amount of support in all areas so that you're making informed decisions. The applicant team and their design team are part of the collaborative process, along with the board. And the public also gets to provide input, and you'd be surprised that the public comes out for things that are on the docket in their neighborhood. So it's always good to hear what they want. And you weigh all those things against lots of different documents that give you insight on how the city wants to develop and see its future so you really do get to have an impact on the development of the city, what it looks like in the future, and collaborate with other individuals with similar interests. I'd really recommend that you apply for the design review board if you are interested in seeing the city develop. It is a very exciting time, lots of mid-rise developments in the downtown area. And we continue to see some unique projects that really haven't been seen too much in the city of Santa Rosa in general. So here to answer any questions you might have along the way. Thank you. Well, thank you, Scott. We're going to move along to the Housing Authority with the Health and Community Services Director David Gwine on the line. Yes, hi everybody. It shows I'm unmuted so I think I'm good. I can hear you loud and clear. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Dina. If you're out there and you're interested in helping people obtain affordable housing, then you may want to consider applying for a seat to the Santa Rosa Housing Authority. The Housing Authority's vision is that we believe that all people, regardless of income level, have the right to live in affordable, safe and healthy homes. There's only a seven member commission, two of which are tenant commissioners that is their recipients of our program to comprise the full seven member body. We look for members who have knowledge or an interest of residential finance, the development process with its many challenges, and the rental housing business basically housing authority meets once a month in council chambers recorded. And so the last few meetings have been virtual but you may want to go back and look at past meetings to get a flavor of the business that comes before this body which is along these following two primary lines so housing authority focuses on first, the housing choice voucher program. That's also known as section eight. We have a federal resource where we act as the federal contractor for Santa Rosa. We assist 2000 families staying here in Santa Rosa with help, providing assistance with their rent payment. And it's it there's several products in the voucher program there's a portable voucher that is where the vouchers assigned to the low income family, and they can go live anywhere they can find a place and we help them with the rent. And we project base of voucher. This is then a voucher assigned to a particular development that assists and it's a, it's financing to get built. And then there's a slew of products for veterans homeless veterans, low income veterans things of that nature. So that's the housing choice voucher program that that's one big focus of the housing authority. The second big focus is the Santa Rosa housing trust. And this is where we take any resource we can obtain from federal state or local, including our city council. And we put it towards affordable housing production, rehabilitation home ownership programs and what we call special needs facilities such as homeless shelters. The Santa Rosa housing trust has a portfolio size of over 120 million dollars. There's over 4000 units in the portfolio, and roughly $5 million annually we distribute through a notice of funding availability process. Notice of funding availability or NOFA. So this is where you would help us decide and partner with us, and how we allocate this resource to developers to get housing built or rehabilitated as soon as possible. And it would be an exciting time to consider joining the housing authority we are currently in the process of soliciting proposals for roughly $38.5 million in disaster recovery to help Santa Rosa get recover from the 2017 tubs fire. And that process is underway it will be vetted into the early part of the calendar year 2020 2021 excuse me. And so if you're interested in being part of that discussion I would urge you to apply as well. So that's a quick review of the housing authority and maybe later on, if there's questions and answers I can be a resource. Thank you. Thank you, David. We are going to move along to the measure oh citizens oversight board joining us finance department, definitely a fun Shelly Riley and Ellen Bailey the measure oh chairs available. Shelly calls her up. Shelly to you. The measure oh citizens oversight committee is made up of seven members appointed by city council. The purpose of the committee is to annually review the expenditures and appropriations of the measure oh sales tax to ensure that all the revenues are spent in accordance with the ordinance. The tax revenue generated is allocated to the police department 20% fire department 20% and oh I'm sorry, police department 40% fire department 40% and violence prevention 20%. We have meetings twice a year so not as much as most committees. They're usually in the afternoons. The first meeting is in the fall to review and approve the measure oh and a report. And the second meeting is in the spring to go over the proposed measure oh budget. Both of these items are approved by the oversight committee before going to city council for final approval. If a measure oh department determines that they want to change their implementation plan, or also known as their spending plan, then we could meet again and review and approve any changes. Usually we like to do this with the budget but it does happen every now and again that we will have an occasional extra meeting. And that plan is approved also before it goes to the city council. So our next meeting is on Monday, November 2 at four o'clock, it will be virtual. Currently we are filled with all seven members, but that can change at any time so if you're interested, I encourage anyone to attend the meeting it will be virtual. That is all I had. Thank you Shelly I think you've covered it if anyone has any questions I'll be here to try to help answer them. Thank you Shelly thank you Ellen. We are going to move on to the personnel board. Human Resources Director Amy Reeve is on the line. Hi Amy thank you. Good evening. Good evening. I'm Amy Reeve the director of Human Resources for the city of Santa Rosa and the staff liaison to the personnel board. The personnel board meets as needed to hear employee grievances and employee discipline that is appealed. There are five members on the board, two are recommended by employee union groups, and three are at large. They serve staggered four year terms. Board members must live in this city and cannot be a signatory of a current employment contract or memorandum of understanding. There are two terms ending December 31 2020 and those two seats will be up for reappointment with incumbents who may elect a second term. And with that I'm happy to answer any questions at the end of the presentation. Thank you. Thank you Amy. I'm going to move right along into the planning commission joining us for the planning commission is chair Patty Cisco and vice chair Karen week. Patty I'm just bringing Karen right now. Okay I believe Andrew triple is present also as the staff liaison. Thank you he's coming right up. Okay great. All right Andrew Karen patty please take it away. I'm not. Okay there we go. Is that better. Yeah thank you Andrew. Good to see you. Great. Thank you. Well, it's great to be here this evening and I just have a few brief comments and then I'll turn it over to chair Cisco. I'm the acting supervising planner for current planning at the city of Santa Rosa and I serve as staff liaison to the planning commission, which is a seven member board that meets twice a month. So I support the planning staff through supervising daily work activities and project assignments. I interact with community members and land use professionals, and then I coordinate with other planning managers and board liaisons, including Susie at the cultural heritage board bill at the design review board and Amy with the waterways advisory committee. I've been presenting to planning commission since I joined the city in 2016, but I've only recently began to serve the board as its staff liaison. And Quaintance has said why are they building a shopping center on that corner. That's an egregious mistake who approved that land use. You might be talking about a planning commission land use decision that was made by planning commissioners. And I'm sure Patty will have some great examples of some of those decisions that she can share with you this evening. For discretionary decisions and recommendations to city council, the planning commission implements the city's zoning code and city council council policies related to land use planning matters for commissioners. There can be a bit of reading site visits. And I think from my impression, considerable reflection, but it's also fascinating to learn how the land use patterns that shape our communities and shape us are not arbitrary or capricious. In fact, they're governed by policies and regulations that support how we want to live as a community in Santa Rosa. I think it's important to be a good and effective planning commissioner that you do believe that through meaningful effective land use planning, we can create opportunities for sustainable thriving and equitable community development throughout our city. So now I want to go ahead and turn it over to chair Cisco. I have the great honor of introducing her in December. Patty will complete 19 years of service on the planning commission. That is an incredible amount of dedication and time that's been given to our city. And I believe me she is a passionate chair and planning commissioner. I've been chair of the commission for the last nine years and I think in that role as chair of the commission has really led the planning commission to be one of our most dynamic and important boards in the city. That does a tremendous job of exercising its decision making responsibilities. So with that Patty, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you and Karen. I think I'm on, but thank you Andrew. That's, that's so lovely. And I'll try not to repeat too much of what Andrew has said here but the role of the planning commission generally is to review our city development projects and conduct public hearings to obtain input from the public. There are certain instances where the planning commission is the final decision maker. And then there are most instances where we're recommending approval or denial up to the city council. Our documents are primarily the general plan. Our specific plans, the zoning code, although we do take information from our master plans like the bike and pen master plan the waterways master plan. We get input from both the design review board and cultural heritage board for particular projects. It's the responsibility is to really become familiar with those documents and really familiar with council goals because our role is to review these whatever projects come along potential ordinances potential amendments to our zoning code or general plan. And to review them and interpret them and in terms of their compatibility with existing policies and primer primarily how these types of projects might be furthering the council goals. And with that in mind, my obviously the meeting information is up there we do meet twice a month. The attendance is critical as both Bill Rose and Susie Murray have indicated for the boards. There are no unimportant meetings. We really need that commitment for attendance. At times we have special meetings or meetings, joint meetings with the city council that can occur at different times in the afternoon. It's really important if you want to be on the planning commission that you're prepared to make the kind of commitment that is necessary in terms of time. It's really helpful to love to read because you will be reading a lot. We have our packet with our agenda items and extensive staff report analyzing and making a recommendation. There are environmental documents traffic studies parking studies. There's a lot of reading. And it, although you don't have to be an attorney. It does help to have some comfort level with legal ease. The learning curve is a bit steep, but it's obviously it's very satisfying work. We have an amazing staff here. It is so satisfying to see how the city takes shape. When I began, I never heard of a general plan with what brought me to the planning commission was a project in my own neighborhood. From there I got completely fascinated with that document and how the city takes shape or plans for a future some 20 years out. So to me it's it's a wonderful experience to see the pieces of the puzzle go together shift change. Again, a really primary role is to conduct these public hearings and public education is is a really critical piece of what we do at during the hearings. No comment is left to be unimportant they're all addressed. What we really want to do is hear from the public have the public understand our thinking in interpreting the policies that exist. We don't make policy on the fly. And to make sure that their their questions are fully answered and attended to during our hearings. So definitely some meetings are more controversial than others that can be challenging but again for me it's just been so fun to to see both sides of a situation in the controversy to meet with the public. Sometimes, in addition to your conducting the public hearing or being present in the public hearing you may be asked to meet with a developer so that he can further, he or she can further explain their project you might be asked to meet with members of the public. It's hard to make site visits because there's nothing like really on the ground, seeing what a project looks like and where it may fit as opposed to a math that you would get with with your packet. Again, I think there's just an amazing staff in planning and economic development and the opportunity to interact with them and to interact with other board members. We have the planning commission as well as all of these boards here. I'm just so impressed whenever we do this as to how much work is getting done in the city by so many really committed volunteers. I would recommend that if you are interested that you, you watch a current planning commission meeting or you go back and watch some of the videos. You can pick some of the more controversial ones like SA why, for instance, and see how, how the commission looks in the room of the council chambers, the virtual method. I don't think we're, it's got quite the same feeling to it. It's, it's a wonderful opportunity to be a part of how this city grows and develops. And so if you're interested, please buy. Thank you Patty and Andrew. We are going to move along to the final board of the evening the waterways advisory committee. I mean, that's from the waterways advisory committee is Amy Lyle from our planning and economic development department and art by key with the board. Good evening. Thanks all for being here. My name is Amy Lyle, and I'm staff liaison to the waterways advisory committee, commonly referred to as whack. And I'll let our talk more. I think you guys have heard a lot about how our boards and commissions operate and the waterways committee operates in a very similar fashion. At this time we do not have any vacancies but of course that can change anytime. But the waterways advisory committee is an interesting mix because it is looking at development and policies and both design but also there's a lot of environmental science included. So you get to work a lot with our water department with parks. So it's very multidisciplinary. And so I think that's a really key factor in this committee. And it's been really exciting to kind of watch the committee function. There's really great support from our admin team and we will train anyone to be successful on any of our committees. So, with that I'll just turn it over to art to talk about his experience on this committee. Thank you, can, can you guys hear me. Okay, as, as Amy said we're kind of an exciting board because of our focus is really on our city creeks and waterways. We have a master plan. It's called the Santa Rosa Citywide Creek master plan.  It's got a lot of pictures and graphs and stuff like that. But it, but it really provides our main guidance document for how we look at projects that come across us. Our vision is kind of, I don't know if any of the other boards have a vision. That's kind of like ours, but I'm going to read it, because I think it's so cool. The main rule of the creeks are a vital central focus of the community a place where fish plants, animals thrive, a place where children can play safely, and we're busy adults relax a place where people walk jog and ride bicycles and horses a place where recreation shopping and dining merge and a place where residents gather for celebrations entertainment and to learn about their environment. So, so our, our committee is tasked with protecting that. So, if sometimes a project will be developed that's close to the creek or within approximately the creek where our policies of the master plan will dig in, and then we'll take a look at that. Well, we'll do not like the planning commission as Patty told you where there's a whole bunch of documents that we reviewed, we'll get a tailored package from the staff that's focused mainly on the impacts or potential impacts to the creek and then we'll get that before we meet and then, and then sometimes a lot of us will make us site visits so we can get familiar with the areas that are being changed or modified or planned to be changed. And some are simply they want to put a fence in that's going to be in the setback of the waterway. Sometimes it's a parking lot. Sometimes it's a microwave tower, or some various things that are going to be impacted on our, our goal is to preserve the creek, but also to find ways to allow the development and so we interact with the developer we interact with staff. So, in the advisory committee, we collaborate amongst ourselves we provide recommendations to staff for staff to examine those and look at those and then sometimes the developer will see, Okay, well, maybe we do need to change the fencing to make it more accessible. Maybe we do need to pull back a little bit and there's changes that we made in the sometimes these projects will come back to us. The goals of this committee. I've got the master plan in front of me and I'm just scrolling to it is we, we look at the habitat of the creeks we look at how stormwater flows, we look at the economic value of, of the, of the property in the creek. We, we look at the open space we look at the recreational aspects of it, like trail corridors. There's a lot of opportunities, aesthetics, the water quality property rights, private property rights are important health and safety and cultural resources so there's a lot of really wonderful things that this committee looks at to to achieve the goals to make the city of Santa Rosa, a much better place to live and to work in and to visit. Add that everybody lives in Santa Rosa lives in a creek watershed. And so creeks are really part of our community. And we're really fortunate that we have a lot of signage out there. So when you're driving on the road you'll see a sign and tells you what the name of the creek is. And that gives you an idea what the watershed is, and, you know, which is part of your community part of your neighborhood. And that really makes it nice. So we're, we're a seven member committee. We have four at large citizens, I'm one of the at large citizens. And then we have members that are from the design review board the planning commission and the board of community services. We meet quarterly or once a month depending on when the projects come through. So we have we sometimes have fun field trips to go look at things like the Colgan Creek restoration that's going on, or, or we'll go out to look at something that's very specific to a project that we're having a hard time visualizing understanding. So that's, that's kind of it as Amy said we don't have any vacancies right now but there, there are vacancies that are coming up on the design review board planning commission and board of community services. But if you actually went on those and then you might be able to move into this community you're interested otherwise we're here until December 2021 so welcome anyone that wants to join to be part of or just come out as a community to our all our meetings for public and come out and and join in the discussion. All right, thank you very much. Thank you staff liaisons board chairs board code chairs and everybody who presented. I do want to say that, and while some boards may not have current vacancies. There will be significant vacancies with the board meeting on December 31, 2020. And so we encourage you to apply so that we can create a pool for the new elected council members to make appointments and a sitting council members to make reappointments or appoint new boards. So we have a few minutes left for questions to the boards and commissions chairs. So if you have a question, please raise your hand using zoom by hitting star nine, and the meeting host will call on you if you have any questions. Again, you can apply for a board at by going to our website at srcity.org forward slash boards and you will see a link to the online application to submit to the city of Santa Rosa. We have anybody who has their hand raised. No, Stephanie know there are no hands raised although there was one question posed in the Q&A earlier did you want to read the response from city attorney on that. We did have a question asked at the city indemnifies the board members, and they do in the scope and business of their work on the board. So if that was a question or concern for anybody, the city doesn't indemnify members just in the scope and work that they do for the board. All right Stephanie I'm not seeing any additional hands being raised from the attendee side. Well thank you again everybody for participating. And we hope you apply and we hope to get a great pool and again if there are any questions that you have you can email me the city clerk at s williams at srcity.org, and I will be happy to forward your questions on to the appropriate board chair and staff liaison to get you an answer. Thank you for attending.