Hello and thank you for joining us today for the webinar on real-time pipeline monitoring for the energy sector. I'm Grant Swanson, your host for the session, and I'd like to introduce James Stewart-Bruges, head of product for Clarion, Ben Cleary, CTO for Clarion, and Alex Mikolev, Senior Solutions Architect for Infineon. Welcome. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. So this is James Stewart-Bruges speaking. As Grant said, I lead the product at Clarion. Clarion is a British company, a young company based in the UK, and we do both data analytics and we do development of electronics and hardware that goes with it. And so what are we doing? Our main focus is around pipeline infrastructure. So pipelines, energy pipelines, oil and gas pipelines, also water pipelines. And our mission is to optimize that infrastructure, those pipelines. And so there are all sorts of different ways in which this is relevant. For example, you can think about pumps or compressors driving the fluids through pipelines, that the amount of power that those pumps or compressors use really needs to be optimized because that makes a big difference. Just a small, a small improvement in optimization can make a huge difference. We can think about flow and leak detection. These are things that we can monitor and measure and detect. We can do predictive maintenance and look at how the equipment is running and work out when is the best time to do your maintenance and your equipment with analytics that will see problems are likely to happen before they actually happen. So really optimizing that time between maintenance so that you don't do it too early and you don't do it too late. We also can support geo hazards. So around a pipeline, you have a lot of hazards from, from the hillsides or landslides or seismic activity or floods, these kind of things. Another area where our software data analytics and hardware can can really support. So what do we have, we have developed some really, really great software, which is designed from the bottom up to be really secure with the latest standards, which Ben will talk about a little bit more detail later on, probably. But the, the great thing about the system is it's, it's very modular and it's scalable. And what sets us apart from other companies that do this type of thing is that we don't just do software and data analytics. We also provide the hardware and provide our own edge device which we design ourselves. You can see on the right hand side, you know, this is a device which can go out into the field self powered work in a remote location. And do data analytics in the field in a remote location so that you don't have to send back very large volumes of data over the, you know, over a satellite link or over a low bandwidth connection. So we develop our own algorithms in-house. We integrate data from third party sources as well. So it's not just data that we capture from our own sensors, from our own hardware. It can be data that is already available in the system from sensors that currently exist. It might be sensors that are already connected to a SCADA system. If all of that kind of data can be ingested, it might be data which is manually collected and ingested, or it might be data that's a third party data source such as what the commodity price is today, or what the weather forecast is going to be, and how the temperature is likely to go up and down. All of these different sort of siloed data sets, when you combine them, pull them together, that's where we can really add value and provide some meaningful insights. It's not just about what's happening in real time here and now and monitoring real time, but also, what was the past? What was the history? What did that look like? And with the intention to be able to learn from the past trends, understand the present and being able to then predict what's going to happen in the future and can we get a better grip on being able to see what the best way of running an operation is. So that's enough on the sort of high level overview. If we start to think about how does this all work, then what we have on the right hand side there is a workflow where you start by capturing data, you record data. As soon as you've got data into a system like this, one of the biggest challenges is cleaning up that data. A very large amount of time can be spent doing this, and this is one of the areas where we really have good expertise to be able to automate that process, to be able to grab data from multiple different sources and format it, clean it, make it useful. So capturing all of the valuable insights in that data, and without losing any of the critical information because very often in data, there's some really valuable information that might not appear to be meaningful on the first glance, but when you understand it, look at it in more detail and there can be really meaningful insights there. So cleaning data is an important and big part of that. And then we go through the workflow of doing some advanced analysis, which I will talk about a bit more later on, but one of the things that's really, really key to recognize there is that we're not just doing simple analysis in real time, we're not just being able to do some machine learning, some artificial intelligence and some sophisticated data processing. In real time and on the fly as the data comes in, which is different from most systems and a really powerful way of being able to process, manipulate, understand and get value from data. As soon as it goes on, we reveal some insights, we provide the visualizations, the communication, the meaning in that data, with the objective of being able to understand how better to manage things in future, take actions, learn from it, optimize things and then go back, close the loop, going back to being able to keep looking and continuously improve. So with that, let me hand over to Ben to go into some of the more technical detail on that. Thanks, James. Hi, everybody. I'm Ben. I'm the head of technology. My role is obviously kind of building out the kind of software sides and data ingestion and I'll be continuing on from here. As James has mentioned, we ingest data from multiple kind of places. We have our primary pro-tree edge controller. We have our external APIs. As James mentioned, this could be commodity pricing or anything else. So we have also then third party data integrations to this could be existing kind of SCADA or field ops or control room or incident kind of management tools. Now, our existing architecture looked a lot like this. We were using kind of RabbitMQ, which we're able to kind of feed in a number of services. So each one of the services on the left, they have to be kind of written and maintained. And as I'm sure you're all aware, this becomes quite hard to kind of manage because at one point you don't just want to ingest the data. You also want to store it. You want to be able to stream it to a front end. You also want to perform the actions on their data in kind of transit. So the main kind of kind of challenges that we were facing was we had a lot of moving parts from protocols which are varying from OPC to Modbus to MQTT and HTTP2. We often work in a mixed environment. So we would work with on-premise and kind of cloud-based tools. The service deployments were not a simple task. There were lots of them. We had to have lots of supporting tools. All of these then required that all that kind of logging and monitoring and maintenance. And again, third-party data integrations often undocumented APIs, data formats that weren't their greatest and they required a lot of cleaning. We also found that this approach was not as flexible as we first thought. A data team spent probably 90% of their time to clean the data before they could actually get to work on it. And this is where we were introduced to E-Infinity last year. And we began to look at that open source kind of product and Alex. I don't know if you want to say a few words on this particular bit. Thank you Ben. Now, Infineon is a company behind the Fluvia open source data streaming platform. And we also provide managed services as a part of the Infineon cloud. So our data streaming platform is built from ground up using Rust, which provides low latency and high performance and programmable guarantees. We also have smart modelers which allow you to deploy data transformations and data cleaning into streams, which removes the need of moving data in and out of stream or message queue like in previous example given by Ben. We also provide immutable store so it's not a queue, it's a stream so you can read data from there up to retention period. And we provide clients native API for Java, JavaScript, Rust and Node.js clients. And we also, as a company Infineon, we support our developers. They have smart modeler development kit and connected development kit which we'll touch up later. Thank you Ben. Thank you Alex. So, yeah, so once we had been introduced, we began work on adopting this. The architecture that we now have kind of flows in this way. We have a series of connectors. These could be MQTT, HTTP. These will be managed inside the Infineon cloud service that we use. All of these then allow us to write and configure data to be transformed and streamed in. And we have an example of pipeline here where we will serialize to JSON. We may run some change point detection. And then we also want to store the data there. You may be asking what the difference is between the previous architecture and this one. That is that this is all kind of managed inside of the Infineon cloud. So our team just get around to writing the data analysis. So the real keys for us was it was a simplified architecture. There was an efficiency improvement. Our data team can add connectors, smart modules, and build out the pipelines that they want without really waiting on their dev teams. And it's extremely extensible and we'll jump into that in just a minute. The inline execution of code or these kind of modules is something that really drew us in. And we'll explain that there. We use it for our data ingestion site. So this is from our edge all the way to an existing SCADA. We use it also for real-time data visualization. And we also use it for our STL workflow. Our data team has moved away from the traditional ETL workflow and we're able to just tap into streams of data to begin the analysis. We also are beginning to explore the ability to apply AI and ML in stream. So the ability to, as James mentioned, perform that in real-time. That's a bit of a game changer for us. Now I'm just going to jump into another screen and we'll run through a demo of where it sits and how it works. Just a second. So our platform is an overview of the location. In this instance, we have a map view of the UK. We have a couple of edge nodes that we've configured for this kind of demo. We have the ability to view kind of tickets and incidents from the home screen. What we're able to do, and this is where part of the video includes, is we can actually stream kind of data straight to the map. So our kind of ops teams are able to get a snapshot of how things are performing in the field. This is just one aspect of where it sits. The other aspect of where we have focused is on our kind of dashboarding side. This is an area that we're quite kind of proud of, in that we're able to feed the data from the Infinity Unclad over web sockets into our kind of dashboards, and we can get a real-time feed, as well as a mix of historical and contextual kind of data, which provide quite a powerful view. Traditionally, our dashboards have been more based around kind of SQL and performing a query. As you can see here, the data being streamed in, and users have the ability to add their own blocks, which are made up of a query or a stream of data. Now, this is all good and fine, but I'm well aware that this kind of audience probably works more with the data, compared to other examples, which allows us to walk through how we can work with streams and data prints. So what we have is, first off, this is just a basic kind of Jupyter Labs environment, so you don't need any particular kind of tooling. All of this, we're using Python, and we're going to just basically install Fluvio, which then will allow us to begin working with the data. So it should already be installed. It's great. And we're going to look at three ways of working with this. We can work in a traditional kind of client-based way, which is where we're going to hook into the stream of data externally, work with the data and filter and parse it. We're going to look at how we can use WebAssembly as part of this. And we're also going to have a quick look at how we can apply WebAssembly kind of module, or this smart module to the actual stream itself. So we have a number of imports here. We're also going to load the environment file. This will enable us then to kind of log into the Fluvio code. Alex mentioned in Phineon how to have a cloud-managed service, and that is the service that we use. But Fluvio is an open source kind of product. So if you needed to run it locally internally, then you can do as well. So that's just kind of a sign-in to this. So we should get a message back to say it's all kind of linked in, fantastic. Now what we have is a couple of functions which we've wrote of, which allow us to grab some data from a topic inside of Fluvio, and we'll be able to set the amount of messages that we want to see. So in this instance, we're just going to grab data from the MQTT kind of topic on partition zero, and we're going to get the first 10. And then what we're going to do is just print the first one out. So that should run through, go grab the data, and then allow us to iterate through each one. And you can see at this stage their message is not that useful or friendly. We have the MQTT kind of topic and a payload, which is just a list of bytes. So what we need to do is we need to manually clean and process this. So what we have is we have a function, we wrote up that will clean the data, and then it will just spit this back out as a JSON string. And if we run this here, you can see that that message has worked. We now have all of the keys and values. And you can straight away just pop these into a data frame. And if you had more than just one in there, you'd be able to continue on working. That is all good and fine, but that is a very traditional way. And that was the way we're trying to avoid trying to work with this. And one of the reasons why Infineon and Fluvio were so attractive to us was our ability to leverage Rust to build out WebAssembly kind of modules. So I'll show you what that looks like. Here's a snippet of some Rust code.  So it allows you to kind of quickly get up and running with that and to do everything by yourself. What we have here is a basic kind of map. So every kind of record that goes through this will be mapped. What all we want to do here is we want to pass, we've taken that kind of Python code, converted it to Rust, and that is what will be sent out. Where there's an error, we'd also get that kind of an array into the queue as well. So if we jump back to this, you can see that we've just imported two extra kind of imports. One is the consumer config and then the smart module kind, which is an enum. We just built out a really basic configuration here. And then we've modified the previous function. That allows us to pass in this consumer configuration. And that then allows us to call the function here. And if we run this one now, we should get, again, a nice kind of set of records here. That means we haven't had to do any kind of processing inside of Python. It's all done as part of the WebAssembly kind of module. That also means it's portable and shareable across your team or others. And it also means that it can actually be applied then at the edge. The other areas that we were interested in is exploring how we can use WebAssembly down at the edge and our edge controller to try and help streamline the data kind of cleansing and processing before that data even hits the cloud. So, again, what we'll do, we'll take the list of records. We'll put these into a data frame. And then as you can see, it is already there. This particular way of working means that your data teams don't have to rewrite the same code. They have WebAssembly code, which is extremely fast. It also means that the security of your code goes up. WebAssembly modules can't particularly do much. It's built for a particularly safe purpose. Now, those two methods are great, but they still require you to manage, put these on and share them around your team. One of the things I mentioned in the slides prior was our ability to move this into the stream. And that was the biggest self for us in that we can empower our data teams to take their kind of cleaning and passing and basically the 90% of their work, probably into a series of modules that can move this to where the data is. And this is how this particularly looks now. So we can configure a YAML file and we can say we want the NQTT type source here. We can configure the broker. Then what we can do, we can build out a series of steps here. That will be deployed with this configuration. So every kind of message that comes in on this kind of topic will run through these steps. So for us, we've used it to clean and pass these extra bytes that unfortunately will occasionally kind of creep in on time to time. We've used it to perform some threshold analysis. All of this is done in stream, which means our data teams don't need to do all of that kind of manual work. Now, just to show you how that actually works, if we literally run this now, these two lines of code, we get a data frame back of data on there, which has been passed. There's obviously still kind of a cleanup where there's not numbers and various things. But in the general gist of being able to get your data team there, in a particular way, has been a powerful feature for us. You can also then publish this onto what Ian Finney called their smart module hub. So that means all of your team can pull it from one place. So they don't need to kind of share kind of repos or binaries or anything else. It becomes quite a powerful tool that that enables teams to work faster. So that's where that's where we'll come back. And I guess, Grant, back over to you. Excellent. Thank you so much, Ben. That was very insightful presentation there. I had messaged, we have a couple of questions coming in. The first one's asking, did you have any Rust developers prior to using Fluvia? No. One of my first experience of Rust was actually creating a pull request on the Python SDK. I was really interested in using it and I wanted to have learning it. It seemed like a good time to, well, in a good place. So no, you probably don't need to actually know too much Rust to do what you want to do. It obviously helps, but it's also relatively, it's a good skill to learn, I would say. Excellent. And anyone from the audience feel free to continue to put questions into the question window. We have quite a few more here. The next one is where you talked about data security. How do you ensure data security in the platform? So from the edge all the way up to the cloud, everything is encrypted in transit. We also kind of leverage quite sophisticated security at the edge by leveraging TPM kind of modules and various things. We also kind of ensure that data is encrypted at rest. And, you know, we ensure that all our kind of vendors that we use, such as a vignan, they take security just as seriously as we do. So yeah, we've got no concerns there. Excellent. Thank you. The next question is what sets Clary on the park from other data analytics companies. The real kind of difference is that we have the ability to go go full and to to to end. So we have edge control of which is about the size of Raspberry Pi kind of thing that could be plugged in at the field. So there are data gaps. We don't just, we don't just say we can't get that data, but actually we have an answer. We can put our edge controller in, plug in the various bits of our kit. This could be a sensor, it could be a pump, it could be anything. We get that data and securely then transmit that up into the kind of cloud. And the other kind of differences that we have is actually the infinity on cloud. It sounds a bit kind of tongue in cheek, but actually been able to do a lot of the cleaning and processing in stream. It means that our data team is relatively small, but we're actually able to do a lot of processing again by leveraging those kind of modules and workflows. James, I don't know, do you have any other kind of answers there? No, I think those are the main ones you covered there. It's the ability to perform the data analytics and really powerful transformations in real time on the fly, which is quite special, quite impressive. And as you said, the combination of not just the data analytics, but also the hardware, the provision of edge computing and local processing from the field. So for example, if the data that we're trying to acquire is a highly dense amount of data, for example, if there's a bit of rotating machinery, a pump or a compressor, and you want to know what's happening with the vibration on that. So, well, you need to sample that vibration data, perhaps from an accelerometer, you need to sample that data fast, and it's a lot of data that's being acquired. It just doesn't make sense to send all of that data over a communications medium via satellite link or a 4G or whatever. It doesn't make sense. So being able to process that data locally, apply some insights up and be able to then update, upgrade and improve that analysis in the edge and transmit the intelligent version of it, the summarized version of it. For example, the frequency spectrum, that's powerful. And that's something different from most of the companies that are doing things with digital transformation and data analytics. Excellent. Thank you. So the next question, I know the demo that you showed with the map and the dashboards is a real live project. And this next question is, do you have reference projects in the oil industry. So I'm not sure if we can disclose that information of who that is or but is there any referenceable projects in the oil industry. I guess, James, would you like to take that one? So we do, and I can't say who it is, but we do, we have some of our equipment on a pipeline monitoring flow and it is feeding into an airport. And that particular pipeline that I'm thinking of is doing real time analysis of the data that goes by in order to automatically identify the volumes and the batches that are going through. It generates a report, which, which tells you, okay, this is the amount of flow. This is the volume and then this is the price, the value of the commodity and it does this all automatically monitoring what exactly what's what's going on in that we're working with another organization where the pipeline is supplying different product types and we are supporting efficiency gain improvements on that pipeline. So in other words, how do we make sure that the pipeline is running at the most efficient manner, looking at pump operations flow rates and what you can do to optimize that. This is particularly relevant in the context of electricity prices that are variable and going high because these are electric pumps and when you pump and how much you pump and how much power you put in your pumps is all very relevant to that. So there are a couple I can, I can mention but, but yes, we're also working with a water company with a similar type of a similar type of problem is the first step of that which is looking again at pump efficiency and optimization of energy going into that. Excellent. And for the, the, the person who asked that question, we can connect offline in a meeting and get more detailed into those projects. So we'll reach out to you shortly after the webinar. The next question that just came in is, have you reached a limit yet on how many different edge sensors. You can pull into your platform. No, no, we've, we've performed some virtualize kind of testing with ridiculous amounts. So the video includes has handled it all like a champ. It's gone through it. No kind of problems. So we're really kind of happy. There's the one thing we did have to do was move our MQTT kind of broke it to a clustered environment and low balance that to ensure that. We're running to problems on the MQTT side before the actual kind of streets. Excellent. Thank you. So we have just a few more minutes here if anyone has questions, continue to type them into the chat window. The next question I think is more relevant to Alex Mikolev can we, can you write smart modules and other languages and are you, do you have the ability to chain transformations? So yes, you can chain transformations on connectors. That's where the YAML file, which been demonstrated, have a keyword div. After that, you can buy multiple transformations. We provide JSON to SQL transformations and Jolt, JSON transformation, JSON language transformations supported by Intinian. And there is a walk on the way of being able to write smart modules in Python, but currently they only supported language for smart modules is Rust. Excellent. Looks like we have one more question here. Give me just a moment. So as I think this one's more relevant to you again Alex, can you republish topics from inside a smart module? Currently no. So smart modules. So the answer to that question is actually complicated. And not the way how it's described. You can't directly republish into two separate topics. But there is an option of creating different types of records and publishing it into the same stream. So the stream isn't the queue so it can contain multiple types of records. So I think whoever is interested in discussing what is the best way of architecture and data around streams. I'm quite happy to support that conversation. Excellent. Well, thank you, Alex. Thank you, James. Thank you, Ben, for the outstanding presentation here for the audience. We will follow up with a recording of the webinar. And we appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.


Wagner members in Bakhmut responded to deputy of the Russian Duma, member of the Defense Committee, Lieutenant-General Viktor Sabolev, three soldiers, one of whom was drafted into the army and other Tuo soldiers threatened and insulted the deputy by making a video appeal.  So come here, old man. It should be recalled that the deputy called Wagner an illegal military association and said that those who join its ranks can be imprisoned for 10 to 15 years. The deputy also said that Wagner did not play a significant role in the war zone. We want to tell the deputy Sabolev, if you, Peter, will stick your nose in and the country of such peders as you lose the war, we will have to come to Red Square. So come here, Peter, with a plate.


Oh, what's up everybody once again, it's Brandon and Shawn and we got to talk about Cash Doll, why she hasn't blown up and maybe some of the things that could help her blow up at this point. Now, for starters, some people might kind of consider her as blowing up. In a sense, she does have quite a bit of views on quite a few songs and she has over a million followers on Instagram. But let's go back to the fact that since 2015, she had been listed as an up-and-coming rapper in Detroit. People really thought that she had so momentum, but one of the major reasons she hadn't really, really blown up like she probably could have since that point is the fact that she had record label troubles. It's something that a lot of fans don't understand when they're like, yo, this artist fell off or they not doing what they should be doing or could be doing. Record label troubles are a real thing. I believe I heard her mention somewhere that she might not even have been able to release an album within a certain period of time. But still, she had a real fan base, a unique fan base, we'll talk about that a little bit later, but she had a real fan base and when she was dropping music, she was at least getting 100,000 plus views on quite a few songs over the years. And then in 2017, she dropped that heat will for everybody. Now if you haven't heard it for everybody, man, that song was so dope. It's probably her biggest performing song to this date to my knowledge. And what's so great about it is it's a song that speaks to itself as a marketer. I don't love anything any more than a song, a product that speaks for itself. The whole premise was this side chick basically calling the wife and the side chick is just talking that mess. The whole song, the whole way through, she's like, yo, we don't really husband these dudes no more. But then at the end of the song, the wife comes back from her perspective and talks about how this chick ain't nobody do, don't care, this is her dude. She got ownership. Yada, yada, yada. If you listen to the song, it's dope. Just a whole premise. When I talk about the song speaking from itself, of course you got some side chick type girls who agree with that perspective. Of course you have some wife type girls that agree from that perspective and you see all throughout the comments. Side chick one, main chick one. And then you have those third parties that say, yo, both of these chicks took an L from being in this situation in the first place. If you haven't heard for everybody or seen the video, definitely go check that out. I'll put that in the link description below.  Conceptually, I put that on par with Jordan and Lucas' I'm Not Races. Of course the issue wasn't as serious, but the way they painted the picture, brought a story together, two of the perspectives that sparked conversation are right on the money. So I mentioned that song because not only is it dope, but it gave her a huge boost in her fan base and a lot more people knew her since that time. But on top of that, she has this really unique fan base and they hold her to this standard because if you don't know Cash Doll, well, all you have to do is listen to her quite a bit. You realize that she's a little bit more of a lyrical type artist and that's what her fans love about her. They love the fact that she's bringing some form of substance and the fact that her flow is kind of unique and that's important to understand because when she dropped a song called Ice Me Out, a lot of her fans were not effing with that song. They said, yo, you're usually more lyrical this, where's the substance? Usually you'll kill something like this, but this is kind of just boring. I'm not effing with the song and in my mind, whoever's on her team or her might have been trying to say, hey, we got this point. We have this great rabbit fan base. All we got to do is drop a nice single that can push past our fan base. It's catchy. Let's get it going. That song was not it, obviously, even though they're still doing challenges to the video up to the date of this. And that is probably what she needs at this point. Some song that will push her to that next level. It's catchy. So people catch on to it and they say, oh, who's this Cash Doll chicken? Then they start to fall through the funnel for all the other dope stuff she's done. But until that happens, she at least has a strong fan base. Now, last and all I want to make in terms of cash, though, is you can be lyrical and make a hit. Obviously, chorus just has to be hard. The herb base is probably going to have to be a really dope chorus, but still do her thing in the verses because her fan base seems to be really critical of her being lyrical or not. Or at least coming with that same energy that she usually does or not. You need that initial fan base to push your stuff past where you are right now. So if that regular fan base don't rock with it, it's going to be hard for her to get a song that keeps moving and keeps that same energy past the level that she's in right now and into new areas. So I want to know what you think about Cash Doll if you follow her already. If you haven't seen for everybody, check that video out. Let me know what you think about that. And as always, I'm going to be answering questions on Sundays, at least for the rest of this year. So hit me up at Brand Man's Shawn. And if you like this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, you might as well share it and if you're not subscribed, you know what to do, hit that subscribe.


I was a soccer player, okay, so I played a lot of soccer, I had probably 10 times more schools interested in me for soccer than I did for football.  So a month before signing that, I get a phone call from a guy in Florida. I answer the phone. We look up the price for the camp with the flight to Miami, with a hotel, it would end up being like it would have been like 1500 bucks or something like that. That was back in the time when the World Series of poker was really popping off. We all thought we were poker experts. We had games in garages, kitchens. There was a larger game at this Italian restaurant that I knew about.  I ended up walking out there with 1400 bucks. My dad, mom, spot the other 100 bucks. I fly down to this kicking camp. They didn't let me kick it all.   And then the last day, my flights at one, like 40 minutes away, they say my name, I'm kicking. I go, is there any way I can kick first? So I hit every kick hit from 50, 55, 60, 65, miss 70 wide right next morning. I'm hanging out. West Virginia coach walks in from the cafeteria behind me and he's holding the trophy that I had won because I won the contest, I guess. Congrats to me. And then he immediately told me they wouldn't want to offer me a scholarship to West Virginia when I was like, let's go, let's go.  I just get incredibly lucky at the most ridiculous times and it's a pretty cool thing.


Some students have so many interests and abilities that limiting choices seems troublesome. Others may not yet have found one particular thing that excites them enough to study it for four years. So others are uncertain about the relationship between majors and careers and want to sample the academic variety available at Ohio State before making a choice. The exploration track will help students fine-tune their interests while taking important core classes that ensure degree progress. Any of Ohio State's more than 200 majors, tracks and specializations can fall under general exploration. Students wanting to explore all of them are welcome to start undeclared at Ohio State. Consider starting here if you have not yet identified your interests or unsure of which path to follow but know that you want to attend Ohio State. You are truly considering all options at the university or you have multiple interests in diverse fields that can't be narrowed down to a single meta-major. Students interested in starting in general exploration should expect to take math, writing, and a combination of other general education courses that pique their interests. On occasion, these students, after consulting with an advisor, may challenge themselves by taking a course to explore a particular major.


Good afternoon chair test. I am seeing that all the commissioners who are going to be at the meeting today except for Commissioner McWhorter has not logged in yet. Yes, just just a minute or two ago, I received a text message from Commissioner McWhorter. I am not sure if I'm going to be able to make the meeting this afternoon. I have an emergency situation with my granddaughter. Okay, we do have five. And so I believe we have enough for form. Yes. With that, I'll call the meeting for order. I'd like to call the February 28 2022 housing authority regular meeting to order. Due to the provisions of the governor's executive orders. Number in dash to zero and dash to nine dash to zero, which suspend certain requirements of the Brown Act. And the order of the health officer of the county of Sonoma to shelter in place to minimize the spread of COVID-19. The housing authority commissioners will be conducting today's meeting in a virtual setting using zoom webinar. Members and staff are participating from remote locations and or practicing appropriate social distancing. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and as noted on the agenda. Members of the public wishing to speak during item six public comment or during our public hearing items will be able to do so by raising their hand and will be given the ability to address the commission. As a matter of housekeeping, I'd like to remind commissioners to keep their audio on mute unless they are speaking commissioners other than chair can mute themselves. Staff will remain muted until needing to speak as members of the public during the meeting, you will be participating as an attendee. Your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. We will be calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda. For privacy concerns the host will be renaming your reviewable phone number to resident and the last four digits of your phone number. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and are well staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully, or they will be removed. If necessary, we will also immediately end the meeting. Zoom host please explain the public comments will be heard how public comments will be heard at today's meeting. To agenda item the item is presented the chair will ask for the housing authority member comments and then open it up for public comment. The host and zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the chair has called for public comment the chair will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on a specific agenda item. We will be calling in to listen to the meeting audibly you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The host will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the commission and public to see. If you provide a live public comments have been heard, the meeting host will read email public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item, but also submitted an email, your email public comment will not be read during the meeting. Additionally, there is one public comment period on today's agenda to speak on non agenda matters item six. This is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority. Thank you. Roll call. Clerk please call. Okay. We'll go ahead and do the attendance roll call. We'll start with Commissioner Burke. Commissioner Burke. You're muted. Okay. Commissioner Downey. Commissioner McCorder is absent. Commissioner Rawhouser. Here. Commissioner LaPenna. Here. Vice Chair Owen. Here. And chair test. Here. Let the record reflect that all commissioners are present with the exception of commissioners McCorder and Commissioner Downey. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any statements of abstention today? Seeing none, I'm moving on to item number four. Staff briefing. I thought we may have an abstention today from one of the commissioners. And I have a question regarding the property that was once known as the journey's end location. As I have an outstanding conflict with them. So I'll be recusing myself from that conversation. Do you mean report item number 12.1? 575. Yes. The medicino avenue. I'm sorry. The 12.1. Thank you for joining me. So we'll move on to number four, staff briefing. Before I introduce the staff briefing, can I ask that all commissioners please have their cameras on just so that the members of the public can see commissioners during today's meeting. Thank you. Item 4.1 is a staff briefing, housing authority fiscal year 21, 22, second quarter financial report, Kate Goldbein, the administrative services officer will be making the presentation. Yes, good afternoon, chair, tasks and housing authority commissioners. I'm Kate Goldbein, administrative services officer for the housing and community services department. This memo details the first half of fiscal year 21, 22, funding and expense for the authority. The authority continues to trend well in all categories. There are two items of note, project budget and expenditures and loan repayments and funding sources. So as noted in the quarter one staff briefing, project budget remains high due to one-time pandemic related funding. That includes the CARES Act, CDBG, CB, CARES Act, Housing Choice Voucher Program administrative funding and the American Rescue Plan Act, ARP, Emergency Housing Voucher Services fee funding. Additionally, the 2.7 million of home art funding that the authority approved at its November, 2021 meeting is now also included in the project budget. Moving to funding sources, the highlight is loan repayments at over 3.8 million primarily due to Lantana loan pay downs. This is notable because this funding can be included in new loans for affordable housing through the authority's notice of funding availability process, which you'll be discussing in a few minutes. And just for some context, last year at this time, we have 410,000 of loan payments in excess of budget. This year we have 3.8 million. So this is the briefing and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Any questions of the commissioners? Commissioner Burke, let's see your hand. Yes, thank you. I reached out to Kate having had a couple of questions and they have to do with items in the budget that aren't necessarily directly in the purview of the housing authority. And Kate responded, this was all through an email communication that items that are in that category could be annotated for the future. And I think I'm fine with that. So specifically what I was interested in doing more about was why the red 10 million dollars is shown in the budget information for the housing authority. As far as I know, we've got no responsibility, no involvement with that program at all from the standpoint of the housing authority board, the policy makers for the housing authority. And similarly, the portion of the CDBG funding that goes to homeless services. At one point in time, there was a direct responsibility on the part of the housing authority, but that's no longer the case. And Kate and Megan, you may have others that are in there that I'm not aware of, but those are the ones that kind of came up that really, I'm thinking, why are those in the housing authority budget since we don't really deal with those? Kate suggested that that has been a concern of hers or an issue that she noted. And she was suggesting that perhaps those items be annotated in the future just to make that point clear. And that seems fine to me as long as it indicates that there's no policy responsibility or involvement on the part of the housing authority, that would suit my concerns. So anyway, and Kate, you may want to, hopefully I correctly communicated your response. Yes, thank you. Are there any other comments from commissioners today on this particular item? Seeing none, I will open this to public comment on item 4.1. Chair Tess, if I may before, maybe before we do that and ask the staff, what do we need to do? I mean, I'm one person of seven. What would the next step be if the idea that was discussed was something that the housing authority wanted to include in the future? What would we need to do to have that happen? Is this discussion sufficient or do we need more? I think from, this is Megan Bassinger, director. I think that from Kate, in my perspective, I think your direction is sufficient and we would just be making a notation to provide further explanation on how those funds are being handled. So it would be no change in the city's budget structure, but just a notation on that those are not within your purview and so they should not be directly included in the information that you are receiving on a quarterly basis. Okay, thank you. And I apologize for putting it in there. Thank you. Thank you. Good questions. We are now taking public comments on item 4.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand and you will have three minutes. Chair Tess, I see no hands raised at this time. Thank you. We'll move to item number five, study session. Item 5.1 is the fiscal year 22, 23, Notice of Funding Availability Priorities. Nicole Rappan, Interim Housing and Community Services Manager will be making a presentation. Good morning, Chair and commissioners. So today we have before you the fiscal year 2022 to 2023, Notice of Funding Availability Priorities. Next slide, please. So a little bit of background on the item. Notices of funding availability are issued annually and also when funding becomes available. So the city receives annual allocations from HUD for its federal funds like community development block grant and home investment partnership funds and local funds through the city's annual budget process that are typically included in our annual NOFAs. Other funding that comes in on a one-time basis has recently been CDBGBR, the Disaster Recovery Funding and permanent local housing allocation funds from the state which have resulted in additional NOFAs in the past two years because of the specific requirements and timing of those funds. So over the past three years, we've had six NOFAs issued between our normal annual NOFAs and those special one-time fund NOFAs. Five out of those NOFAs focused on new construction. And part of that is because of the requirements of the funding source. So CDBGBR and PLHA program funds had to be used for new construction. And that was two of the NOFAs out of the last six. Next slide please. So here you can see the projects that were awarded as a result of those NOFAs that have been issued those past six NOFAs. So there are those two lines here in blue indicating the two rehabilitation loans that were issued as a result of NOFAs. And then there are 11 loans that were issued for new construction. Again, this is over the past three years. Next slide please. So our upcoming NOFA, we will likely have funding sources that includes CDBG, HOME, PLHA, which is the permanent local housing allocation fund and local funds. At this point in the year though, the amounts are not yet known on how much money we will have in each source. And I've got an asterisk here by CDBG and local funds because those programs have eligible uses that include rehabilitation. If we're going down through the list, CDBG can be used for rehabilitation and preservation. It can also be used for acquisition and relocation and demolition costs, not new construction specifically for the construction part of it, but you could use acquisition related costs for a project that ended up being a new construction project. PLHA has to be used for new construction related costs. HOME is most easily used for new construction, but also has several requirements tied to it that make it a little bit more difficult to award in general, which we will get to later. And then our local funds are less restrictive and can be used for either new construction or... Next slide please. So we have a couple of options going forward, which is why we are here speaking with the Housing Authority Board today for some direction. Considering that our past six NOFAs, well, out of our past six NOFAs, five have been focusing on new construction, we wanted to come to the Housing Authority Board to get some direction on if the Housing Authority wants to continue to focus on new construction or maybe make a carve out for rehabilitation. So the first option being focus on new construction, which is what we have been for the past three years for the most part. So what that would entail would be developing a NOFA and point scoring system with the ad hoc committee that's appointed for new construction projects, similar to the fiscal year 21-22 NOFA that we did last year. There would be the potential for all funding sources to be utilized for new construction projects dependent on the applications that came in if we had applications coming in for, for example, like acquisition for the CDBG funds, which are the ones that are not typically used for the new construction. So it would also not preclude a rehabilitation or preservation project from competing and being recommended for funding, just like we had in that 21-22 NOFA last year. Next slide, please. And so the other option would be to allocate a portion of the funds in this upcoming NOFA for rehabilitation and or preservation of existing affordable housing units. So what that would look like is likely developing a NOFA with ad hoc committee with a point scoring system for new construction projects and most likely a separate point scoring system or any rehab or preservation applications that come in. Out of our funding sources, the ones that are eligible for rehabilitation and preservation would be CDBG and local funds most easily. So we would allocate the CDBG and local funds portions from our budget for rehabilitation and that would be dependent on sufficient applications. The ad hoc committee would determine the amount and further details because at this early in the year for the planning of our budget, we don't have those numbers available yet, but that would be available to the ad hoc committee that would be reviewing the NOFA and working with staff to develop the point scoring system. Next slide, please. And lastly, with this second option for setting aside some funds for rehab and preservation, it would also not preclude the available funds from being used for new construction. If for example, we didn't receive a sufficient number or adequate projects applying for the funds for rehab and preservation. It's more of guidance for staff and the ad hoc committee as they're developing the NOFA and reviewing applications that come in. Oh, next slide, please. I wanted to also say that there was outreach to the development community prior to this meeting to let them know that we were having the study session to give developers the opportunity to speak during public comment on this item and speak to you directly to advise of what needs there are in our CNOS community. Again, the intent of this study session is to receive feedback from the Housing Authority ward on which way you would like us to proceed for the upcoming NOFA to either put funds towards new construction primarily or to allocate a portion of the funds for rehab. So our recommendation today, it is recommended by the Housing and Community Services Department that the Housing Authority hold a study session to discuss funding priorities for the upcoming fiscal year 2022, 2023, notice of funding availability and provide direction to staff to either one, continue focusing on new construction projects or two, allocate portion of the funds available for rehabilitation and or preservation of affordable housing units in accordance with the applicable funding source, eligible uses. So with that, I'd like to open it up to the Housing Authority board for discussion and I am happy to answer any questions that come up. Do we have any comments from the commissioners? Commissioner Burke. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, Nicole, for your putting this together. I think it's a very important topic for the Housing Authority to discuss and also happy to hear that the applicants were notified and I'm looking forward to hearing from any of them that might be at this meeting and have suggestions for us to consider. I start off by just saying that I lean in favor of the idea of option two, which opens up a little more emphasis on rehabilitation of existing units and I say that knowing that there's a high priority in the community and by those that are, well, at the state level, the regional level, looking at communities to produce a number of new housing units. So it's not an easy topic, given the fact there's limited funds and a huge need out there for both housing preservation and rehabilitation as well as new construction. But I think that's important to consider this mainly because I believe there's a fair amount of, this is kind of subjective, but just my experience is there's a lot of housing complexes out there that are in desperate need of improvement and it's affecting the lives and kind of the wellbeing of those people that live in those complexes and also note that overcrowding is an issue and the Gen H housing report that was recently published speaks to the fact that there's a fairly large number of units in the west side of Santa Rosa that are overcrowded and this is perhaps a way to address that issue. And whatever we decide, I think it's important to communicate to the city council and to applicants and the community the reasons for our decision, whatever the decision is from the housing authority, just to make sure we have that knowledge and that buy-in from people to the degree that's possible. I'd also be interested in having staff's assessment as to maybe where the highest priority needs are in the community and I know that's probably not an easy thing to come up with, but any ideas about if you had next number of dollars to spend where are they gonna have the biggest impact on the community would be helpful. And then also the other consequences of maybe not putting all of the funds in new construction, just kind of what the prone con might be of a, for instance, if we did choose option two, what would be the pros and cons of that? Realizing that we can fund new construction or housing preservation, regardless of whether or not we pursue option one, which is what pretty much the path we've taken primarily in the past, or if we decide to move to option two. And I do think kind of one final comment is that if we do move in the direction of option two, that in addition to those that typically apply for our funds, that we do some major outreach to those that typically don't apply for our funds, because I think there's a number of complexes that are owned by private individuals, for the most part, or corporations that may have housing conditions, which need funding to improve them to make them more habitable for those in the community that are lower income. So those are my comments and I just look forward to the discussion. Thank you. Commissioner Burke in response to a couple of your points. We do know that there is need in the community for rehab from the past few no-fists that we have done. We have been receiving applications for rehabilitation to these focused no-fists. They haven't been awarded, but we do know that there is that need in the community typically the funding requests that come in for rehabilitation of units is a smaller dollar amount than the need from our new construction partners. And as far as a pro-con list, that's a little bit more difficult to provide because you're looking at either putting a larger amount of money towards new construction of units that takes a little bit longer to get through the construction phase, versus keeping our existing affordable housing stock in good condition. So both are very significant needs in our community with our current needs for affordable housing, new construction, and keeping what we have. Thank you, Nicole. Commissioner LaPana. Yeah, I agree with and would choose option number two. I agree with Commissioner Burke. I'm looking at it based on my background as a building inspector and a code enforcement officer that a lot of existing stock after a while gets run down and it needs to be inspected and it needs to be updated and brought into compliance. And without doing, when you would do rehabilitation you would probably find a lot of properties that you would not know about when someone goes in there to rehabilitate. We might find some properties that in the end we may wanna purchase also. So I think we've got another way just through the rehabilitation maybe to increase units available for people. So I would agree with Commissioner Burke and go for option two. Thank you. Commissioner Alhazer. Yes, thank you. As I'm sitting here in the middle of two new construction experiences right in front of me they're starting on the fifth story which separates me from the mountain. And so I no longer get to watch the sun break over the mountain in the morning and it takes an hour for each the sun to rise to break over each story. And so it's a lot of the new construction it's definitely affecting the mindset of our community and changing the way we can see it with the fact that we're going four and five stories which traditionally our community did not allow us to go vertically because of the mountains being important to us. And then also we have to be mindful of the new construction with the water that's being used. And we have to also think about the sustainability so maintaining the what we have going on and the rehabilitation of existing units would be a great way to really honor the sustainability mindset that we have in this community. Thank you. And a note about the rehabilitation loans also for the group. So any rehabilitation loans that would be given out would also come with a regulatory agreement restricting the units for affordability term of 55 years. So that is something to keep in mind as Commissioner LaPenna's point on bringing more units into the fold. Vice Chair Ohn. Thank you. I'm looking at the list here and Nicole the projects you have listed these are over the last three years. The project's awarded. Yes. So just doing some math on here. So that's that total is 55.3 million. It's 14 projects. And five of those projects are $38 million which are the CDBGDR fund. So that's a one time. So if I take those numbers out we're looking about $16.9 million in NOFA that was not CDBGDR funded. And then if I look at what was done for rehab the two rehab projects and then the community housing Sonoma County operating assistance, I'll put that in the rehab category. That's about 1.4, 1.5% of the 16.9 million. So then the question is posed, well, is that enough? And for the time that I've been on the housing authority and recognizing other commissioners comments on here I would state that that is not enough. Another way to look at it is that in Nicole you brought this up of the projects listed the 14 if you take out the five that are CDBGDR there's nine projects, two of them are rehab. So that's 22%. So the rehab projects take a much smaller piece, dollar wise. So just doing math on it and I would look at it and state that we would do option two and to help staff going forward that the NOFAs would have if I'm looking at 1.3% as to what's been done in the past five years if we could take that up to 5%. And that doesn't sound like a large number in terms of NOFA availability, 5% would be available for rehab. But if you look at what the dollar amounts are compared to new construction costs I think that would be adequate and you could make a case that is an improvement over what's been done over the last three years. Thank you for that feedback. I wanted to also bring up. So in that table maybe if we could have the recording secretary go back to the projects awarded table on the screen for just a moment. I believe that's slide three. There was an additional rehab loan that was approved by the housing authority last year for the West Hearn property that came in as a somewhat emergent request for rehab. So that was not in response to one of our NOFAs specifically which is why it was not on the list. But that loan was roughly in the amount of 250,000 if I'm recalling correctly. So I just wanted to bring that up that there was an additional rehab loan not in response directly to one of these NOFAs that was not on the list. But I definitely see your point about wanting to increase the amount of funding over the three to four year period. Thank you. Do we have any other questions of staff? I have a comment to make. I agree with the previous comments about option number two. What I'd like to see is if we can do more outreach for rehab projects. I look at Earl Street and Giffin Avenue. Earl Street had only eight units for rehab and Giffin Avenue was a congregate setting situation. I also added up all the new construction units which was quite amazing. 628 new construction units. We have to compliment ourselves and had ourselves on the back even though there's a lot more to go. So those would be my same comments. Option two, I'd like to see more outreach for rehab projects. Thank you. Any other comments? Okay. We are now taking public comments on item 5.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Chair Tess, our first comment is from Chris Westlake. Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and commissioners. My name is Chris Westlake. I'm a consultant for Burbank Housing Development in Santa Rosa there. And for our project in Burbank Avenue, we were successful in receiving CBGDR money from the commission. I really appreciate that. And also some PLHA funds are there this year. And I would just like to emphasize maybe priorities looking at making it a prior for the CBGDR projects or disaster projects. They're very hard to get financed through the state side of it. And with the high housing costs now coming through COVID, it continues to accelerate our housing costs and our projects and which enforces this to go out for other funding sources. So maybe seeing a priority for that and also for the new construction as new projects are coming online because the city of Santa Rosa does have a large housing rena number to meet. And unfortunately that doesn't get met with a lot of the rehab work that's been done. So I see the priorities being new construction and then maybe a priority for disaster projects that have other funding in them. Thank you. Thank you. Chair Testa see no other hands raised at this time. Thank you. So we will be moving on since this is a study session. Just a comment to staff. So with what you've heard today, how do you see us proceeding? So likely at the next housing authority meeting we would request an ad hoc committee to be appointed to review the NOFA and the next point scoring system. And then staff would begin meeting with that ad hoc committee to develop the point scoring systems for both the funding sources that require only new construction and for the funding sources allowable for rehabilitation and or preservation. And we would come out with and published in NOFA likely either this spring or early summer. For those funds. Thank you. Chair Testa I see that we do have another hand raised for the NOFA priorities. Okay. I don't see the hand. Who would that be? This is Mrs. Lemus. Hi, my name is Yesenia Lemus. I am with mid pen housing and I would also like to make a comment here. We are seeing a high need in our community for a new construction and in order to be competitive for state and federal funding, we really need some local funds for the new construction. So I would like to recommend to continue prioritizing the focus for a new construction funding. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Any other public comments? Seeing none, we'll move forward with item number seven, approval of minutes. We have minutes of the January 24th, 2022 meeting. Are there any changes? I'm sorry, Chair Testa. We're actually on public comments on non-agenda items at this point. Oh, I'm sorry. You're correct. Thank you. We're now taking public comments on item number six, non-agenda matters. This is the time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on the agenda, but which are within the subject matter section of the housing authority. If we must make a comment on via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Chair Testa, I've seen no hands raised at this time. Thank you. Item number seven, we have minutes for the January 24th, 2022 meeting. Are there any changes? Seeing none, the minutes are approved as prepared. Item eight, Chairman Commissioner reports. Do we have any commissioner reports? Seeing none, I do have a comment and a commission chairman report. I attended the February meeting with the mayor and other chairs, and it was announced that Diane McDonald is the new city council person for district number three to replace Jack Tibbets. There was also a comment from the community advisory board announcing a community improvement grant for projects up to $2,500. Those would be neighborhood type of projects and anyone interested would contact community engagement, one word, at srcity.org. Secondly, myself and the chair of the planning commission had a meet and greet virtual meeting with our new city manager, Mariskesha Smith. She is the former deputy city manager of the city of Stockton and also worked with the city of Oakland. She was very interested in the Santa Rosa housing authority issues in particular vouchers and especially emergency vouchers. I had described to her some of the financing projects in our pipeline and she requested a copy of that as she was quite amazed what we have accomplished recently here. She's well experienced in dealing with HUD and with state HCD and offered her support where we might need it. And that concludes my comments. We'll move on to, is there any other questions? And if not, I will open it to public comments on item 8.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Chair Testa see no hands raised at this time. Thank you. We will proceed with item number nine committee reports. There are no committee reports on this agenda. Item number 10, executive director reports communication items. Good afternoon. There are no written communication items this month but there are a couple of items that I would like to bring to the housing authority's attention. First, wanted to let you know that last Thursday, February 24th, the city council and the city's department heads met to have a goal setting session. So those are in the process of being refined and once they are adopted by council, I will be bringing them to the housing authority to share with you. So you are aware of the city council's goals going forward. Just to give you some updates on some items that we have talked about in past meetings, staff is in the process of setting up tours at the Herron Veterans Village site and you'll be receiving dates and times in the coming days to get on your schedules. We're gonna do those in small groups and hopefully those dates and times will work with the commissioners. Also, we staff is working on a 50th anniversary video and materials for the housing authority. So that is underway with the city's communication team. We're just in the beginning stages, but it should be a great retrospective of all the work that has been accomplished by this body over the past 50 years. And certainly commissioners will be engaged as we really get into more active steps of developing those materials. And then finally, just want to acknowledge all the hard work of our housing choice voucher team. As of today, we have 28 emergency housing voucher units released and 52 issued vouchers.  And this is the emergency housing voucher program, 131 vouchers that the city of Santa Rosa was awarded in the summer of 2021. So it's been a great lift for part of the housing choice voucher team. And it's great to see individuals who are referred to the continuum of care. So these are homeless individuals being able to find a place to live. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Do we have any questions of staff? Seeing none, we are now taking public comments on item, excuse me, did I see a hand? Commissioner Rahar, sorry, you have your hand raised. Yes, I was wondering if there were still any of the emergency vouchers available or if they've all been distributed. So the referral process that we are adhering to and this is as directed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and as agreed to with the continuum of care is they need to be referred to the housing authority to either Santa Rosa or the county's housing authority by the continuum of care. So they need to go through referral agency. So if individuals are interested, they should reach out to the continuum of care working groups to be referred. But based on the information I have, we have over 131 referrals on hand because some individuals are not either are qualifying or have not been able to complete all the steps. So we have more referrals than we have actual vouchers as of right now. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Okay, we are now taking public comments on item 10.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Chair Testa, I see no hands raised at this time. Thank you. Item 11, consent items. There are no consent items on this agenda today. We'll move forward to report items for item number 12, Nicole Rathburn. Item 12.1 is a report 3575 from Mendocino Avenue, phase two funding recommendation. Nicole Rathburn, interim housing and community services manager and Julie Guerin program specialist will be making their presentation. Thank you. Good afternoon again, Nicole Rathburn, interim housing and community services manager. And we also have Julie Guerin program specialist with us today. We're going to be doing this presentation for you jointly. So I will go ahead and present to you the background information with details from Julie. If I may interrupt for a moment. This is the point that I was going to recuse myself in the conversation. And so I'll be leaving the meeting. Thank you. Okay, so as long as that's with you and with everybody. Okay, thank you. Line off, thank you. Thank you very much. Have a lovely day. All right, if we could go to the next slide please. So I'll be going over today with you why this request is in front of you and then Julie will get into the details about the project at hand. So as you I'm sure remember our last notice of funding availability or NOFA was published on October 1st with applications due later in the month of October. Just over one and a half million dollars in home funds were available on this NOFA in addition to the permanent local housing allocation program or the PLHA program funds that were awarded by the housing authority to two different projects in December. The home funds were not awarded and remained in the housing authority budget because there were not any projects that were eligible for home funds that applied during that NOFA cycle. The home funds in general can be more difficult to find eligible projects for because all of the funding sources all of the other funding sources for the project aside from their small gap must be already committed to the project and home funds must be the last money in. The project also has to be able to start construction within 12 months of the award. So these two factors combined make it a little bit more difficult for us to award home funds by doing an annual solicitation with our funding sources. In October at the time of this NOFA from fall there was a project 3575 Mendocino Avenue phase two that was anticipated to be fully funded. So the developer did not submit an application. Can you go to the next slide please? So in late January the developer notified staff of a funding gap of about $1.5 million due to an unanticipated tax credit equity shortfall and additional construction costs that had come up that they were not aware of when our NOFA was open in October. So this project has received an allocation of over $20 million from the state disaster tax credits. And along with that funding source comes a mandatory construction commencement date of April 10th. The timeline of this construction start date does not allow for the developer to apply for funding in a future NOFA that we might put out which is why we are coming to you today with this request so that you can consider awarding funding to this project so that it does not lose the $20 million disaster tax credit award that it's received. Next slide please. So when staff was notified of this funding shortfall for the project we had the developer submit an application to us so we could assess the project and the financials for it. On January 31st the developer which is BRJE phase two Housing Partners LP submitted their funding request an application for $1.56 million in home funds for construction related costs for the Mendocino Avenue phase two project. This project meets all of those hard to hard to find and hard to develop eligibility requirements for home funds. All of its other funding sources are fully committed. 95% is committed to their project. That last 5% is what they're asking for from the Housing Authority and Construction Commencement would be in early April 2022 provided we could close the loans in that timeframe. These are the two difficult criteria for us to meet, find projects to meet to be eligible for home funds which is also why we did not award them in the last notebook. Next slide please. So the project name is probably familiar to this group because we have a prior Housing Authority investment in the project. So there is 3575 Mendocino Avenue phase one and there's now this project is 3575 Mendocino Avenue phase two. It's two different phases of the same merger project. We consider them two separate projects for the sake of Housing Authority funding and affordable housing funding in general. So the phase one project has 17 project-based vouchers that this group has awarded to the project in addition to 11.9 million dollars in CDBGDR funds that were awarded last year. Phase two, so this specific project already has 13 project-based vouchers awarded that happened in June 2021. In addition to CDBGDR that was actually awarded by the County Community Development Commission. Due to the timeline to commence construction, this unanticipated shortfall and the tax credit equity with the increased in construction costs and the existing Housing Authority investments in their projects, plus the difficulty for projects to meet the eligibility requirements of home funds are all factoring into why we are bringing this request to the Housing Authority today outside of the annual middle school. Next slide, please. So with that background on why we are bringing this request to you today and the events that led up to it, I'm going to hand the presentation over to Julie Guerin, program specialist to go over with you the details about the project and how the project would have scored had they submitted their application during the October fall of 2021 NOPA. Good afternoon, Chair and Chairs and Commissioners. My name is Julie Guerin and I'm a program specialist for Housing and Community Services. As Nicole mentioned, I will be taking over the presentation from here and reviewing the project application details and scoring. So in this slide, we see an aerial graphic of the project site for 3575 Mendocino Avenue and the site is at the former Journey's End Mobile Home Park which was burned down in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Next slide, please. So a short summary of the 3575 Mendocino Avenue phase two project. The developer is BRJE phase two housing partners which is Burbank Housing Development Company and Related, they are working together. The requested loan amount is $1,560,000. This is a new construction project and the loan funds will be used for construction related costs. The project includes 31 bedroom units targeted to seniors, 37 of those units will be affordable housing and one will be an unrestricted managers unit. And phase two of the project includes 38 of 162 affordable senior housing units on a 0.42 acre parcel. So next slide, please. A little continuation of the summary. So the affordability mix for the phase two project includes four units at 30% AMI, nine units at 40% AMI, 15 units at 50% AMI, another nine units at 60% AMI and one unrestricted managers unit. Again, the unit mix is 38 one bedroom units and for the environmental piece, the project is in compliance with CEQA. They have already completed a sustainable community's environmental assessment under the California Environmental Quality Act and this assessment was approved by the planning commission and the city council in December of 2020 and they have completed a NEPA environmental assessment in July of 2021. And this loan would be a conditional commitment on a pending RROF, which is a request for release of funds process. This is part of the process for the environmental review with HUD. We, in order to complete the loan commitment, we would need to receive a document which is called the AUGF or the authority to release grant funds from HUD. So that's a condition of this loan commitment and that is part of the environmental assessment process. Next slide, please. So on this slide, we're just gonna go over the criteria. I'm not gonna read through all of this, but the project application that we received was evaluated and ranked based on the fall 2021 NOFA selection criteria and this criteria was decided upon by an ad hoc review committee prior to the, for the 2021 fall NOFA. The categories include readiness, affordability, bedroom size, special needs set-asides, leveraging, project competitiveness, developer and management experience, on-site services, amenities and other factors and the total possible points would be 100. Next slide, please. So we will review the scoring and analysis of the application and application materials received on January 31st, 2022 for 3575 Mendocino phase two. So in the readiness category, the project received a score of six out of 10. The project has already completed ANEPA and a CEQA approved by the Planning Commission and City Council. They have submitted their building permits and the only pending item is the design review process. For the affordability category, the project received a score of 18 out of 20. This is based on the affordability table that was created for the NOFA scoring process. And based on that table, the project received 18 out of 24 affordability. For bedroom size, the project received a score out of two out of eight. All of the units are one bedroom. If you keep in mind that this project is for seniors only, then we realize that there's a reason that they're all one bedroom, but based upon the scoring matrix, they received a score of two out of eight for bedroom size. For special needs set-asides, the project received a score of 12 out of 12. 100% of the units are for a special needs set-aside for seniors. Under leveraging the project received a score of seven out of 10, the loan amount requested is 5.5% of the development cost for project competitiveness. The project received a score of 10 out of 10. So 95% of the funding is committed and the project has already received an award of $20 million of tax credit allocation committee, 9% tax credits. For the developer experience category, the project received a 15 out of 15. The developer has significant experience in the region they have over 20 developments in 20 projects in Santa Rosa, good standing. For the onsite supportive services or onsite services category, the project received a score of six out of seven. The project has significant onsite services, including a dedicated services coordinator and referrals to off-site services. Under the amenities category, the project received a score out of three out of three with multiple amenities within a half a mile. On the other factors category, the project received a score of four out of five. The project has, as Nicole stated, a previous Housing Authority Award for phase one of CDBGDR funds, 17 PVVs in phase one and 13 PVVs in phase two. And the final and total project score is 83 out of 100. And I would just mention here that if the project were to be compared to the two applications received in the fall 2021 NOFA, the project would have ranked first out of three. Next slide, please. And so with that information, it is recommended by the Housing and Community Services Department that the Housing Authority by resolution approve a conditional commitment of loan funds to BRJE phase two housing partners, LP, in the amount of $1,560,000 in home funds for construction related costs of 37 affordable housing units and one unrestricted managers unit for 3575 Mendocino Avenue phase two located at 3575 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa, California. And that concludes our presentation and Nicole and I will be available for any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioners, I see Commissioner or Vice Chair Owen, your hand is raised and you have comment to make. Yeah, so is the total project 162 units? So the total affordable housing units, sorry, the total project is 38 units. I'm sorry if that was a little bit confusing on the slide. They do have 162 units in the phase two, but that's not the affordable portion of the project. Okay, all right, so 162 is phase two of which 38 is affordable. Correct. And is that with, go ahead Megan. Sorry if I can interject, it's actually three phases. So the journeys in the 3575 Mendocino is broken down into three phases. Phase one was the 90 plus units that you previously awarded funds to. This 38 units is phase two and then the remainder is phase three and that together totals about 162 units which replaces the mobile homes that were lost from the fire. Okay, thank you. Now, phase one received CDBGDR 9% tax credits. The 9% tax credits for this project did not come from that, just came from the state allocation, is that correct? This, so are you asking for phase two? Phase two. Yes, phase two received $20 million in tax credit equity, yes. From the disaster tax credit program. It was disaster, so, but this was not part, phase two was not part of the 38 million? A part of the 38 million dollars in CDBGDR funding. Correct. Only phase one received loan funds, loan funds from the city of Santa Rosa and community development block grant disaster recovery. However, the County of Sonoma also received an allocation of CDBGDR and they put some of their CDBGDR towards phase two. Okay, so that's where their 9% tax credits is still DR funds, but it came from the county and not the city. That is correct. Megan shaken her head up and down, so thank you. And then there are project-based vouchers for both projects, but let's just talk about phase two. So has that this, my understanding is there's a subsidy layering review at HUD for those projects that receive project-based vouchers. How is that process going with HUD? So in order to complete the subsidy layering review, the project will need to have all of their funding sources committed. And so if the housing authority were to award the project this loan, then they would be able to commence with the subsidy layering review immediately. Okay, and how fast is HUD turning that around? So for this process, the subsidy layering review would be submitted to CT-CAC because there are tax credits and CT-CAC is pretty quick about turning around those subsidy layering reviews much faster than HUD. In my experience, they have turned those around within two weeks and they do take into account. If we ask them to expedite, they are really good about working with us. Thank you. That's all my questions. Thank you very much, Julia, very good presentation. Thank you. We have any other comments by commissioners? I just had a quick comment. Julie, you had mentioned design review. It has not yet gone to design review. Will that be scheduled before the April 10th deadline that we're dealing with here? Yes, and I was able to check in with Amy Nicholson in PED and she had said that she saw some pending documents submitted by the developer and was able to confirm that those were the design review documents, although they hadn't officially been accepted through their process yet. And so at the time of the scoring, that wasn't taken into account, but just as of yesterday, she let me know that she saw those documents coming through. And I would just mention as well that this particular project, I think it would have, it could have been scored a little bit higher on readiness. That particular category within the NOFA scoring rubric, it's pretty difficult to get the perfect scoring for all sort of examples. And this particular project I reached out to PED and they found it hard to score it on the existing NOFA rubric that we have. The process is very far along with, as far as readiness goes, it was just this one last piece of the design review that they were waiting on. I just thought I would mention that. Okay, good. And the larger project, because it is several phases, the larger project has gone through design review and phase one, for example, is in construction. So it makes getting this phase two, as long as it's substantially in the same form as the already improved larger project, go through that process much more quickly. Yes, I've noticed driving by that most of the construction on the site itself is all torn up and moving forward. So it looks like it's ready to go. Thank you. Any other questions of staff? Thank you, Julie and thank you, Nicole. I'll now open this to public comment. We are now taking public comments on item 12.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you were dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. You will have three minutes. Chair Tess, we do have someone with the raised hand. They are, they have speaking privileges as of now. Okay, thank you. Good afternoon, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Good afternoon, Chair Tess, honorable commissioners, director, passenger and staff. Thank you for the opportunity to speak this afternoon. My name is Efren Carrillo, vice president of housing development for Burbank Housing. And I am here this afternoon along with our development partner related California in support of the item before you and to assist in answering any questions you might have. As you are aware, Burbank and related with enormous support from the city of Santa Rosa and the Housing Authority that has been hard at work since the 2017 top fire destroyed the 162 unit mobile home park. We are here before you excited to share that the construction of phase one, which is that 94 units of senior affordable homes is well underway with your support. It truly is an indication of the partnership and collaboration necessary, not only to rebuild housing, but to chip away at our existing demand. As noted in your staff report and presentation with an increase in construction related costs, including materials and labor, as well as reduced pricing on our 9% tax credits on phase two. We're trying to close this gap on the second phase of this development. We appreciate the full consideration from the Housing Authority for these funds and also are appreciative of the significant lift undertaking by Housing Authority staff to have this item before your commission. We are available to respond to any items you may have for us today. Thank you again. Thank you. Chair, I see no other hands raised at this time. I'll ask the commissioners one more time since we did have public comment by Mr. Correa. Do you have any questions? Any further questions of Bourbon housing? Seeing none. Do we have a motion to approve? I'll move to approve the resolution of the Housing Authority of the city of Santa Rosa approving a conditional commitment of loan funds in the amount of $1,560,000 to BRJE Phase Two Housing Partners LP for construction related costs for 3575 Menesino Avenue Phase Two, 3575 Menesino Avenue, 8 p.m. 173, 030, 001, and waive the reading in text. Thank you. Do we have a second? I'll second chair test. Commissioner LaPenna. Thank you, Commissioner LaPenna. We'll take a roll call vote. Okay, we'll go ahead and proceed with the roll call vote. We'll start with Vice Chair Owen, excuse me. Aye. And then Commissioner Burke. Aye. Commissioner LaPenna. Aye. And Chair Test. Aye. We let the record show that the motion passes with four ayes with Commissioner Downey and Commissioner Reporter Absent and Commissioner Rawhouser abstaining. Thank you. I'd like to thank everyone for today's meeting and the meeting is now adjourned.