City Council Apr 1, 2025

Apr 1

City Council Meeting Summary

Time	Item	Item Summary	Motion Summary	Comment Summary
00:00:33	None: None	The meeting is called to order and the location and broadcast methods are announced. The meeting is held at City Hall Council at 420 Ditho Street, cable TV channel 27, Zoom, and the city's website.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:00:54	I: CALL TO ORDER AND ROLL CALL - 5:15 PM	Mayor Cox called the meeting to order at 5:15 PM on April 1st, 2025. The City Clerk called the roll. Councilmember Hoffman and Sobieski were present, as were Vice Mayor Woodside and Mayor Cox. Councilmember Blaustein was expected to be late due to a prior engagement (00:01:21).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:01:33	II: INTERVIEWS FOR THE PLANNING COMMISSION AND PEDESTRIAN & BICYCLE ADVISORY COMMITTEE	Mayor Cox announced the interviews for the Planning Commission and Pedestrian & Bicycle Advisory Committee would commence. She noted that all existing members of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee had resigned, and the council is considering reconstituting the committee, possibly bringing back bicycle ambassadors (00:01:33). The council interviewed four candidates: Ron Olson, Fred Moore, Laurie Vio, and Bob Mitchell. Patti Urbanik was scheduled for an interview but did not attend. Ron Olson expressed his desire to improve Sausalito and criticized the current state of downtown, suggesting the Planning Commission could help correct past mistakes. He also criticized the quality of presentations from vendors and suggested site visits for Planning Commissioners (00:03:21). Fred Moore highlighted his experience in city and regional planning, real estate law, and community involvement, emphasizing his commitment to ensuring all voices are heard and decisions are thoroughly vetted (00:07:41). Laurie Vio discussed her background as a program manager in tech, her love for Sausalito, and her experience as a cyclist and survivor of a hit-and-run, expressing interest in improving cyclist safety and signage (00:13:09). Bob Mitchell, noting the difficulty in getting members for the bicycle committee, stated his understanding of the issues and his willingness to help, suggesting slowing down bikes as a safety measure (00:18:55). Councilmembers asked questions about the candidates' experience, familiarity with objective design standards, and ideas for improving pedestrian and cyclist safety. Mayor Cox said that the council would break for 10 minutes before the closed session announcement (00:22:02).	No Motion	1 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 1 Neutral
00:16:15 Unknown was Neutral: A councilmember relayed a question from former Mayor Kallman regarding Sausalito's potential as a hub for outdoor activities and asked Laurie Vio for her thoughts.
00:22:16	III: CLOSED SESSION - 5:45 PM	Mayor Cox announced the council would adjourn to a closed session at 5:45 PM. Councilmember Blaustein joined. The session will cover three items: labor negotiations with the Saucydo Police Association, real property negotiations regarding 750 Bridgeway with Verizon Wireless, and two instances of conference with legal counsel regarding anticipated and existing litigation. The council will reconvene at 7 p.m.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:23:41	IV: RECONVENE TO OPEN SESSION - 7:00 PM	The meeting reconvened to open session at 7:07 PM after a closed session. Mayor Cox announced there were no announcements from the closed session. Mayor Cox stated that Item 3D would be pulled from the agenda due to staff needing additional time to consider public feedback, but public comment on the item would still be allowed.	Motion to approve the agenda as amended, pulling item 3D. Moved by Mayor Cox, seconded by Vice President. All in favor. (00:25:27)	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:25:50	1: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS/MAYOR'S ANNOUNCEMENTS - 7:02 PM	Mayor Cox welcomed Jesus Nava, the interim finance director, highlighting his extensive experience as a general manager and finance director for the city of Burlingame, expressing enthusiasm for a collaborative and productive working relationship (00:26:01).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:26:37	1.A: PG&E Presentation	Mark Van Gorder, the local government affairs representative for PG&E for Marin and Napa counties, provided a presentation on PG&E's wildfire safety program, recent projects in Sausalito, and a review of outages. The presentation covered gas line replacement on Woodward and Bridgeway, an overview of four circuits serving Sausalito with outage details for each, and the completion of substation and circuitry upgrades to meet future growth and climate goals (00:32:48). Van Gorder addressed why PG&E isn't undergrounding power lines in Sausalito, explaining the company is focusing on stronger poles, covered tree wire, fault indicators, and enhanced power safety settings (00:35:35). He also detailed vegetation management practices, including encroachment permits for work in public right-of-way and notifications for private property owners (00:39:19). He highlighted resources like the progress map for sectionalizing devices and customer assistance programs (00:41:21), residential storage initiative for low-income customers needing backup power (00:43:08), and the Report It app for reporting concerns (00:44:20). Mayor Cox inquired about steps PG&E is taking to avoid challenges like the power outage during the lighted boat parade (00:46:44). Van Gorder emphasized improved communication and coordination with the city, noting that the company was unaware of the parade until 2 p.m. on the day of the event and highlighting the prioritization of 911 calls for public safety (00:47:22). Vice President asked about coordinating with Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Southern Marin Fire to address non-native trees in high fire areas (00:51:53), and Van Gorder responded that PG&E does work with Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority and would follow up on existing connections (00:52:43).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

00:53:21	1.B: National Park Service Presentation	Dave Smith, the park superintendent over at Golden Gate, gave a presentation about the park. He addressed a question from the vice mayor about collaboration between agencies like PG&E and Southern Marin Fire for vegetation management and fire prevention, emphasizing the ongoing dialogue and the Park Service's commitment to ensuring right-of-ways are maintained to prevent fires. Smith mentioned his two main focuses are ensuring access to the park for everyone and addressing climate change by reducing the park's carbon footprint and managing invasive species like eucalyptus and French broom (00:56:33). He discussed the park's size (82,000 acres) and visitation numbers (over 17 million visitors last year) (00:58:53), its budget challenges, and its economic impact ( billion and a half of economic benefit) (00:59:56). He then provided a tour of Southern Marin projects, including climate change adaptations at Stinson Beach (01:00:37), the Redwood Creek restoration and bridge replacements at Muir Woods (01:01:35), dam removal at Tennessee Valley (01:02:56), restoration work at Hawk Hill (01:03:35), Point Bonita lighthouse repairs (01:04:20), and the Vista Point Trail and Travis Marina at Fort Baker (01:05:14). Smith also highlighted the park's limited fire staff (three people) (01:06:37), the reliance on partners for wildland fire management, and ongoing fuel reduction efforts targeting scotch broom and eucalyptus (01:07:55). He concluded by emphasizing the importance of community partnerships and encouraging residents to apply for permits to create defensible spaces around their properties (01:09:51). Chief Barnes spoke about the collaboration between the Southern Marin Fire District and the parks (01:11:58). Councilmember Hoffman inquired about the special use permits (01:14:57). Councilmember Blaske inquired about ways that the public can directly support the park (01:18:08).	No Motion	5 Total: 1 In Favor 0 Against 4 Neutral
00:57:34 Unknown was Neutral: The speaker says thank you. 00:57:34 Catie Thow Garcia was Neutral: The speaker says thank you. 01:11:50 Unknown was Neutral: The speaker says thank you. 01:11:50 Babette McDougall was Neutral: The speaker asks if Chief Barnes wants to talk a little bit. 01:11:57 Chief Barnes was In Favor: Chief Barnes discusses the collaboration between Southern Marin Fire District and the parks. He notes that he has the fire protection members on his cell phone and they speak weekly. He also says that they assist with fuel reduction activities in partnership with the park and the district is developing a hand crew program to help with those fuel reduction measures.
01:19:35	1.C): Sausalito Police Department Budget Presentation	Chief Stacey Gregory, Lieutenant Mather, and Parking Manager Wayne Kwan presented the Sausalito Police Department's budget considerations and updates to the City Council. The presentation covered the department's mission, staffing, and 2024 statistics, including calls for service and arrests (01:20:39). Key budget requests included renewing the Axon service contract for tasers and body-worn cameras (01:24:18), transitioning a lieutenant position to a captain for succession planning (01:25:20), unfreezing two police officer positions (01:25:50), and a wish list item of acquiring a patrol boat (01:26:29). Lieutenant Mather discussed RIPA data compliance and the department's efforts to enhance transparency and accountability (01:31:19). He also highlighted waterfront management achievements, reducing the number of boats in the city's waters from 90 to 2 (01:36:28), and emergency management preparedness in collaboration with county agencies (01:40:15). Parking Manager Wayne Kwan presented parking revenue data and priorities, including upgrading pay stations (01:46:41), transitioning to license plate recognition (LPR) systems (01:47:42), developing a virtual permit management system (01:48:18), integrating real-time parking guidance systems (01:49:24), and expanding paid parking to Lot 5 (01:50:01). Kwan announced that the city was awarded a partial grant of $500,000 from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (01:51:02). During council discussion, a question arose about the department's philosophy on issuing warnings versus citations (01:53:35). Chief Gregory explained that the philosophy has shifted since 2008, and the department is bringing back warning citations to hold officers accountable (01:54:51).	No Motion	7 Total: 1 In Favor 2 Against 4 Neutral
01:57:33 Tammy Edmondson was Neutral: Tammy Edmondson from MV Free, discussed their work analyzing Marin County RIPA data and collaborating with the Mill Valley Police Department on equitable policing strategies. She highlighted the success of the "bias by proxy" campaign in reducing race-based calls for service. Edmondson offered MV Free's services to Sausalito to advance safe and equitable policing and suggested a meeting with council members and the police department (01:57:33). 01:59:56 Frank Shinderman was Neutral: Frank Shinderman, also with MV Free, discussed this year's RIPA report and its implications for addressing racial stop disparities in Marin County (01:59:56). He emphasized the pervasive nature of policing disparities for Black and Latinx people and suggested focusing on eliminating the harms to communities of color (02:00:02). 02:01:50 Damian Morgan was Against: Damian Morgan criticized the Sausalito Police Department's "bias by proxy" program, alleging harassment by Chief Stacey Gregory and a history of harassment towards Black drivers from Marin City (02:01:50). He cited data from the DA's office and referenced a past shooting by the department. Morgan encouraged others to file complaints against the police department (02:01:50). 02:04:00 Eva Cresanti was Against: Eva Cresanti criticized the police department, stating that Travis White was shot in the back of the leg (02:04:00). She questioned the body cam usage, claiming officers don't turn them on per guidelines. She added that she was violently ejected for civilly exercising her first amendment rights. (02:04:00) 02:06:17 Babette McDougall was Neutral: Babette MacDougall thanked the council for opening the public comment for these three presentations because they were very instructive (02:06:17). She spoke about PG&E and a need to think about the relationship with PG&E (02:06:17). 02:08:34 Linda Pfeiffer was In Favor: Linda Pfeiffer, a Sausalito resident, thanked the police department for their service and advocated for greater investment in the police force and hiring more officers (02:08:34). She praised Chief Stacey Gregory's experience and understanding of the challenges unique to Sausalito. 02:09:37 Pat Zook was Neutral: Pat Zook commented on upgrading the parking equipment and suggested that any analysis should include a calculation of the payback they can expect, and the impact on recent changes in parking capacity will have on budgetary generation (02:09:37).
02:11:06	2: COMMUNICATIONS - 8:30 PM	The Communications section of the meeting allows citizens to address the City Council on matters within their jurisdiction that are not already on the agenda. Mayor Cox noted that Council Member Blaustein would not be able to attend the rest of the meeting (02:11:09). Several residents spoke on a range of issues, including local democracy, the Bridgeway median lane, and international events. Mayor Cox announced that the existing members of the PBAC tendered their resignations (02:20:18).	No Motion	5 Total: 0 In Favor 2 Against 3 Neutral
02:12:01 Babette McDougall was Neutral: Babette McDougall spoke about the importance of elected officials upholding their oath to defend the Constitution, likening them to the bricks in a wall that protects the community. 02:14:22 Bob Middlestead was Neutral: Bob Middlestead, a retired lawyer and cyclist, shared observations about the Bridgeway redesign, emphasizing the benefits of separate bike lanes and questioning the rationale for potentially rejecting funding that would enhance safety for both cyclists and pedestrians. He felt the focus was on response time and that the council should consider safety for bikes and cars. 02:16:42 Eva Cresanti was Against: Eva Cresanti spoke about the suffering in Gaza and criticized the use of tax dollars for it. She recounted being removed from a candidate forum for raising the issue of war costs and expressed concern over the lack of support following the incident. 02:18:56 Pat Zook was Neutral: Pat Zook suggested re-examining the mission of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee (PBAC), if retained, to include cost, benefit, and impacts on businesses and residents, in addition to bike issues. They felt the committee had become advocates for a 'one size fits all' configuration. 02:20:42 Linda Pfeiffer was Against: Linda Pfeiffer called for an independent investigation into the Bridgeway median lane issue, questioning the amount of staff time and money spent on the project, discrepancies in data, and the need for a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain relevant city memos.
02:22:23	3: CONSENT CALENDAR - 8:40 PM	Mayor Cox introduces the consent calendar, which includes items 3A (adoption of meeting minutes from February 25, March 4, and March 7, 2025), 3B (reappointment of Nicholas Stevenson and Kimmery Wiltshire to the Sustainability Commission), and 3C (resolution to declare a recreation vehicle as surplus and authorize its disposal at auction). Item 3D was removed. During public comment, Babette McDougall expressed concerns about the March 7th meeting minutes, claiming the meeting was illegally run and called. Mayor Cox responded, clarifying that the March 7th meeting was a special meeting called after adjourning a previous public hearing due to internet issues and that the actions taken were later ratified at a properly noticed meeting on March 18th. Councilmember Hoffman initially expressed concern about the March 7th meeting but was reassured by the city attorney that the meeting followed Brown Act requirements for special meetings with 24-hour notice and that any issues were cured by subsequent ratification. The council then moved to vote on the consent calendar.	Motion to approve items 3A through 3C of the consent calendar by Vice President, seconded by an unknown councilmember. (02:26:21)	1 Total: 0 In Favor 1 Against 0 Neutral
02:23:26 Babette McDougall was Against: Babette McDougall objects to the March 7th minutes, calling the meeting illegally run and not appropriately noticed. She finds the minutes unacceptable and not reflective of reality.
02:28:48	4.A: Introduction by Title Only and Waiver of First Reading of Ordinance No. 03-2025, An Ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito Amending Chapter 10.44.240 “Formula Retail”, Table 10.24-1 “Land Uses in Commercial Districts”, and Chap	Senior Planner Matthew Mandich presented an ordinance to amend the city's regulations on formula retail businesses. The existing ordinance, adopted in 2003 and amended in 2007, requires a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) for formula retail, includes specific findings, limits formula retail to certain commercial districts, and has a vague definition. The proposed changes include removing the CUP requirement and adopting a formula retail zoning clearance, allocating clearances by zoning district, clearly defining formula retail (six or more locations worldwide and two or more standard elements), granting zoning clearances to existing formula retail, exempting certain uses (grocery stores, etc.), including the commercial waterfront district, and prohibiting fast food drive-throughs. (02:30:51) City Attorney Sergio noted that the CUP requirement for formula retail was in violation of California land use law due to the regulation of users instead of uses. Concerns were raised about delegating approval authority to staff and the combining of CN1 and CN2 districts. Councilmember Hoffman expressed concerns about removing discretionary approval and the potential impact on neighborhoods and consolidating districts. (02:43:22) The city attorney recommended adopting the ordinance in its present form but was open to the planning commission being the issuing body. He also clarified that a decision from the Second District Court of Appeal is persuasive but not binding. (02:51:33) The Mayor suggested changes, including splitting the CN district and modifying standardization measures. (02:53:53)	Motion to introduce by title only and waive first reading of ordinance number 03-2025, amending Chapter 10.44.240, Formula Retail, Table 10.24-1, Land Uses in Commercial Districts, and Chapter 10.24.040, Special Requirements, with changes to Ordinance No. 03-2025: deleting numbers 2, 3, and 7 on the second page; revising number four to say standardized facade or exterior color scheme; replacing "community and economic development director or his/her designee" with "planning commission" on the next page; and splitting the neighborhood commercial CN on page four into neighborhood commercial CN1 with three formula retail establishments and CN2 with two formula retail establishments. (03:14:05)	5 Total: 0 In Favor 5 Against 0 Neutral
02:57:41 Vicki Nichols was Against: Vicki Nichols agreed with the Mayor's initial points. Concerned about delegating authority to staff, especially contract or non-local staff. Suggests the Planning Commission should handle this. Expressed concerns about the removal of the ability to modify elements of formula retail and referenced previous conditions for businesses on Caledonia Street. 02:59:55 Babette McDougall was Against: Babette McDougall stated that they agreed with Vicki Nichols. Concerned about the structure in disrepair. Criticized the public hearing being "sandwiched" into the agenda. Claimed the residents care deeply about what happens in their immediate vicinity and fear big boxes will become food deserts. 03:02:00 Alice Merrill was Against: Alice Merrill stated support for Planning Commission involvement and agrees with Vicki and Babette. Concerned about lack of notice and the process being rushed. 03:09:32 Pat Zook was Against: Pat Zook urged the council to take this back for further discussion. Expressed concerns about non-discretionary approval. Mentioned past controversies with formula retail (Pete's Coffee, Subway, McDonald's) and is wary of non-discretionary approval by either staff or the planning commission. Noted conflicting advice from the city attorney and questions the urgency. 03:10:57 Unknown was Against: Questioned the timing and applicability of the Malibu case. Supports the Planning Commission's involvement and is concerned about the consolidation of CN1 and CN2 and the potential impact on neighborhoods. Stated that a community will have no input. Suggested continuing the matter for further analysis.
03:21:46	4.B: Public Hearing on Annual Status of Vacancies, Recruitment, and Retention Efforts as Required by AB 2561 (GC 3502.3)	Mayor Cox opened the public hearing, noting it's a new requirement (03:21:51). Kathy Nikitas, HR Manager, presented the annual status of vacancies, recruitment, and retention efforts as required by AB 2561 (03:22:17). The city has three main employee groups: SEIU, Sausalito Police Association, and non-represented management and professional/technical employees (03:23:29). There are 79 total approved positions. Vacancies exist in SEIU (2), Sausalito Police Association (5), and non-represented groups (4) (03:24:15). Recruitment is paused for SEIU vacancies due to discussions about transferring services to the Sausalito Marin City Sanitary District (03:24:25). The Sausalito Police Association has 5 vacancies, but 2 are frozen, leaving 3 that could be filled (03:25:16). Recruitment efforts are ongoing, but background investigations are lengthy, and the city has high standards (03:25:59). A lateral police officer was recently hired, along with a $10,000 hiring bonus (03:26:57). Non-represented positions are being filled temporarily. The risk manager position has been difficult to fill, and a contractor is being used (03:27:45). The Chief Building Official position has never been filled by an employee and is currently contracted (03:28:38). The Principal Planner position is filled by two retired annuitants due to ongoing complex processes (03:28:59). The city aims for a mid-Marin market philosophy for compensation and benefits (03:29:27). Flexible work schedules are offered, and growth opportunities are provided (03:30:22). Nikitas stated that the city values its employees and strives to maintain its current practices (03:30:58).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:35:17	5.A: Receive Report and Adopt a Resolution Approving the Marin County Building Electrification Roadmap	Catie Thow Garcia introduced the Marin County Building Electrification Roadmap, a result of a nearly two-year process spurred by a 2022 Marin Grand Jury report (03:35:17). The roadmap development involved public engagement and input from various stakeholders, including sustainability commissioners (03:35:36). Christine O'Rourke then presented the roadmap, highlighting that the primary reason for electrification is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the use of natural gas (03:37:42). She noted co-benefits such as improved health due to reduced indoor air pollutants and enhanced resilience of the electrical grid after major earthquakes (03:37:54). O'Rourke presented a chart showing countywide emissions from 2005 to 2022, illustrating the need to address natural gas emissions to meet 2030 and 2045 targets (03:38:43). She also mentioned the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's zero NOx appliance rules that will effectively eliminate the sale and installation of natural gas water heaters and heating systems (03:39:55). Due to technical difficulties with Christine O'Rourke's audio, Catie Thow Garcia summarized the California Air Resources Board appliance rules (03:42:44). Garcia also discussed the extensive public outreach conducted during the roadmap's development, including workshops with community-based organizations, building community members, and government representatives (03:43:13). She outlined the 10 non-binding recommended actions in the roadmap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through electrification (03:44:01). Mayor Cox raised concerns about the feasibility and cost of the roadmap's goals, particularly regarding the potential for increased PG&E costs to consumers (03:46:10). She suggested "accepting" rather than "approving" the roadmap to reflect these concerns. Garcia clarified that the roadmap is non-binding and that the city attorney presented the words as reflection of a lot of comments (03:48:20). She also added that while climate goals seem unfeasible we need to do something now to avoid bigger cost in the future (03:48:47).	Motion to receive the report and adopt a resolution accepting the Marin County Building Electrification Roadmap (03:54:05). Seconded (03:54:19). Motion carries 4-0 with 1 absent (03:54:26).	2 Total: 2 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral
03:49:37 Mark Palmer was In Favor: Mark Palmer, Chair of the Sustainability Commission, supported the roadmap as an advisory document to navigate the transition away from natural gas (03:49:37). He argued that building electrification will require less electricity than AI server farms (03:50:34), and that gas prices are predicted to increase faster than electricity prices due to PG&E's wildfire liability and undergrounding costs (03:51:11). He noted that Fairfax, Hennon-Selmo, Mill Valley, Tiburon, Larkspur and Marin County have adopted the roadmap (03:51:49). 03:52:23 Babette McDougall was In Favor: Babette McDougall, a local resident, supported Katie's work and thanked Janelle Kelman for initial funding (03:52:23). She emphasized the need to pressure PG&E to be a better partner and stop passing costs onto residents, given the company's consistently exceeding market expectations (03:52:52). She pointed out that community members have had their rates raised 12 times in the last 10 months (03:53:28).
03:54:30	6: CITY MANAGER REPORTS, COUNCILMEMBER REPORTS, CITY COUNCIL APPOINTMENTS, OTHER COUNCIL BUSINESS - 10:40 PM	The meeting is moving on to Item 6, which encompasses City Manager Reports, Councilmember Reports, City Council Appointments, and other Council Business.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:54:31	6A: City Manager Information for Council	The City Manager provided updates on two items. First, regarding the council's request from last month, the City Manager and Chief Gregory met with the Southern Marin Fire District Chief to discuss wildfire and emergency preparation, specifically related to the Spencer Station firehouse. The meeting was productive, and everyone understands the urgency created by past fires and new fire maps. They discussed interim steps in partnership with Southern Marin Fire and committed to exploring long-term solutions. The city approved a facilities assessment by Bureau Veritas, which included the Spencer Station facility. This will be part of a capital improvement program to prepare the facility for partnering with Southern Marin to create more fire resources and fire prevention resources in the area. Second, the City Manager sent a letter to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and liaison Thomas Art regarding the city's refusal of a grant for a bridgeway. The letter included comments about the extensive public participation process and the city's commitment to using local funds for safety improvements, which will be brought forward.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:56:59.60	6B: City Attorney Information for Council	Mayor Cox introduces the agenda item regarding city attorney information for the council. (03:56:59.60)	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

03:57:06	6C: Councilmember Committee Reports	This agenda item is for councilmember committee reports. Councilmember Sergio had no report. Mayor Cox reports on a Cal Cities action alert regarding SB 79, a bill concerning transit-oriented development, and requests consensus to oppose it, stating it would allow higher-density residential projects near public transit, undermining local control (03:58:03). Councilmember Hoffman and Councilmember Sergio express concern because the item was not on the agenda (03:58:47). Councilmember Sergio suggests preparing a resolution or letter for the next meeting (03:58:58). Councilmember Hoffman notes the bill will be heard in the next few weeks (03:59:13). Mayor Cox agrees to add the item to the April 15 agenda (03:59:23). Mayor Cox also shares a list of wildfire bills and has provided a copy to the Disaster Preparedness Committee (03:59:33). Councilmember Hoffman mentions a request from the Marine Mammal Center to send letters to Congressman Huffman and Senator Padilla for fisheries funding to protect whales from fishing gear impacts (04:00:11).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

04:01:17	6D: Appointments and Removals from Boards and Commissions	The council briefly considered item 6D, Appointments and Removals from Boards and Commissions. There was no presentation or discussion. Councilmember Hoffman and Mayor Cox asked if anyone had any comments. The Vice President said they didn't think so.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

04:01:20	21: Make Appointments to the Sewer MOU Ad Hoc Committee	Mayor Cox is requesting the appointment of a Sewer MOU Ad Hoc Committee to finalize negotiations with the Sausalito Marin City Sanitary District regarding the transfer of the collection system from the city's jurisdiction to theirs. She is asking Vice Mayor and Councilmember Hoffman to serve on this committee, which will likely involve two meetings with the Sanitary District board members to finalize negotiations before bringing the agreement to the council for final approval.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

04:02:20	22: City Council Consideration of Removing Angela Weber from the City of Sausalito Historic Preservation Commission	Mayor Cox introduced the item regarding the consideration of removing Angela Weber from the Historic Preservation Commission. She opened the floor for public comment, and then closed it to make a motion to remove Angela Weber from the Historic Preservation Commission for the reasons stated in the staff report (04:03:40). The motion was seconded and passed.	Motion to remove Angela Weber from the Historic Preservation Commission, seconded and passed (04:03:40).	1 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 1 Neutral
04:02:58 Vicki Nichols was Neutral: Vicki Nichols, the Vice Chair of the Historic Preservation Commission, noted that the commission currently has six members, including Ms. Weber, and with the recent appointment of Mr. Wayne Bonet, the commission would still have a complement of five members regardless of the action taken on Ms. Weber's position.
04:04:12	23: Consider Making Appointments to Planning Commission, Pedestrian & Bicycle Advisory Committee, and Historic Preservation Commission	Mayor Cox stated that she would not be proposing any appointments this evening. They interviewed a planning commissioner candidate but have at least two other qualified candidates. Regarding the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee, they will be retooling and re-imagining the committee's constitution and purpose, so they will pause on appointments. For the Historic Preservation Commission, they are down to five members and have interviewed two possible candidates, which they can consider another evening. (04:04:40) There are two other applications pending for the Planning Commission, and the current member who will be termed out will remain a member until the end of April. (04:05:21) Mayor Cox will take public comment on appointments. (04:05:28)	No Motion	1 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 1 Neutral
04:05:37 Unknown was Neutral: Noted that the Historic Preservation Commission needs to fill a vacancy for a full-term member starting tomorrow and ending on April 13, 2026, to serve the remaining three-year term for Angela Weber. Suggested the city council could appoint David J. Kornmeyer, who is the alternate commissioner.
04:06:25	6E: Future Agenda Items	Councilmember Hoffman raised the issue of several inquiries and suggestions regarding investigations into the bicycle grant and the hearing on Saturday concerning how the city got there. She asked the city manager for input on this matter, referencing prior discussions and public comments. The City Manager responded that the payments in question were from grant funds and that he would act according to the council's direction. Mayor Cox stated that there was no need for further action because grant funds had been applied for without council direction, and the council directed the actions taken, and further investigation would be a waste of funds. (04:08:40) She also said that the recourse for unhappy residents is to not re-elect a majority of the council.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

04:10:04	6F: Other reports of significance	Mayor Cox opened the floor for public comment on future agenda items.	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

04:10:09	7: ADJOURNMENT	Mayor Cox adjourned the meeting in honor of Ann Teller, a longtime resident of Sausalito and treasurer of many community organizations, including the Sister City organization, Rotary (where she was Rotarian of the Year in 2018), and the community boating organization. She also served as treasurer for many council members. She moved to Santa Barbara to be closer to her family and will be missed by many who valued her counsel (04:10:14).	No Motion	0 Total: 0 In Favor 0 Against 0 Neutral

City Council Meeting Transcript

Adrian Brinton

City Council Apr 15, 2025

Time	Speaker	Text
00:00:33.53	Unknown	Mayor City Council. The City Council meeting for tonight is being held at City Hall Council at 420 Ditho Street. We are also on cable TV channel 27 and this meeting is also live on Zoom and on the city's website.
00:00:54.03	Mayor Cox	Thank you, City Clerk. Good evening and welcome to Sausalito's special meeting at 515 p.m. on April 1st, 2025. I will call the meeting to order and ask the City Clerk to call roll.
00:01:07.40	Unknown	Councilmember Blalstein has not arrived yet. Councilmember Hoffman?
00:01:12.20	Councilmember Hoffman	Here.
00:01:12.97	Unknown	Councilmember Sobieski? Here. Vice Mayor Cox?
00:01:17.02	Unknown	No, Woodside. Sorry, Vice Mayor Woodside. I'm sorry, Vice Mayor Woodside and Mayor Cox.
00:01:17.47	Vice President	Sorry, Vice President.
00:01:18.13	Unknown	Sure.
00:01:18.26	Unknown	Thank you.
00:01:21.81	Mayor Cox	Here. And Councilmember Blaustein announced, advised us ahead of time that she would be running slightly late for today's meeting due to a matter that she's handling.
00:01:33.62	Mayor Cox	All right, so we are going to move right into interviews for the Planning Commission and for the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee. Regarding the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee, I need to advise those of you who are here that the existing members have all resigned. And so and for those of you who attended our meeting on Saturday, we did talk about possibly reconstituting the role of that committee to bring back some of our bicycle ambassadors, perhaps. And so while we are happy to interview you tonight, there will be a hiatus while we strategize how best to utilize the important talents that you have to forward the mission of Sausalito safety for its pedestrians and bicyclists and motorists.
00:02:28.31	Mayor Cox	All right, and with that, we will start off. The first one I have is Ron Olson.
00:02:34.59	Mayor Cox	Yes, please step forward.
00:02:36.78	Mayor Cox	over to the podium. Hopefully the microphone is on for you.
00:02:41.17	Unknown	We've been in 10 o'clock.
00:02:42.50	Mayor Cox	Excuse me. How many minutes on the clock? We're going to do five minutes and.
00:02:47.19	Ron Olson	Hello?
00:02:48.12	Ron Olson	So?
00:02:49.30	Mayor Cox	Yes, well, one of our applicants has advised that he will not be available today due to a personal conflict, and so we have fewer applications than we anticipated to interview. So these are typically five minutes. We don't need to use all of the five minutes.
00:02:49.37	Ron Olson	Yes.
00:03:04.02	Ron Olson	I certainly won't use all the five minutes.
00:03:06.37	Mayor Cox	So for each applicant, I offer you the opportunity to share with us the reason for your interest in this important body, any experience that you may have, and what you think is relevant to our consideration.
00:03:21.89	Ron Olson	Thank you very much. My name is Ron Olson. I've, excuse me, I've lived in Sausalito for 25 years and I have absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever. I was an IT project manager for 25 years, big projects, Vista Schwab, that kind of stuff. But the reason I'm here is I don't want to waste your time, but I really think that Sausalito is a wasted opportunity. We have a...
00:03:51.22	Ron Olson	A highly intelligent, very vocal, very articulate community. We have world class opportunities for views. We have.
00:04:03.22	Ron Olson	Really, everything in the world is right in front of us, and we've trashed it. We've turned downtown into Coney Island North, or Fisherman's Wharf North, if you prefer. We've created this huge parking lot in what could be a beautiful park for downtown. The stretch that runs out to the Spinnaker. And we've done other things just to take away what really is a natural gift we have here. I think that
00:04:34.91	Ron Olson	It's hard to pin the blame on any one person or anyone.
00:04:39.60	Ron Olson	anyone commission, but I think the planning commission is an opportunity to contribute to writing that wrong and putting things right again. Um, I have to say that I have been to a lot of city council meetings, planning commission meetings this last year and,
00:04:57.89	Ron Olson	If I ran a meeting like any of those or presented like any of those people that have in the, over the past year that I've seen, I would have been fired on the spot. I don't think we demand enough of the vendors who come to us. I think we let them ramble and be incincise and unclear and.
00:05:16.93	Ron Olson	Overwrought. Saturday is a perfect example. They spent two hours in what could have been a 20 minute presentation.
00:05:25.01	Ron Olson	So I think there are these opportunities for change, and there's a tremendous opportunity to make the community better. And that's why I applied for the Planning Commission. I have a small voice in that. So if you have any questions, I'm glad to answer them.
00:05:40.16	Mayor Cox	Sure. Have you attended planning commission meetings?
00:05:42.98	Ron Olson	Yes, I have. And I'm coming, and I'll be coming to the one tomorrow as well.
00:05:47.33	Mayor Cox	Okay, and I heard your criticism of the way that the City Council runs its meetings.
00:05:52.48	Ron Olson	Well, thanks so much to the city council, I...
00:05:54.96	Ron Olson	I look at it at...
00:05:56.72	Ron Olson	The vendors community presents a lot of materials to you.
00:06:00.02	Ron Olson	And yet nobody says, you know,
00:06:02.17	Ron Olson	You've got buckets and buckets and buckets of material, or you're reading slides to me, or I can read this myself. I don't need you to read this slide. I need you to give me a clear, concise recommendation or description of what you have to offer. I sold and purchased a lot of services, $50 million, $60 million worth of services.
00:06:20.87	Mayor Cox	So my question.
00:06:23.77	Mayor Cox	My question to you was how does that translate to planning commission, which I think the planning commission, my question.
00:06:27.95	Ron Olson	I think, Commissioner, you can...
00:06:29.83	Ron Olson	The Planning Commission can.
00:06:31.31	Mayor Cox	Can I finish my question to you, sir?
00:06:32.68	Ron Olson	Thank you.
00:06:33.00	Ron Olson	Thank you.
00:06:33.03	Mayor Cox	Okay. So my question was, how does that translate to the Planning Commission, which does not hear typically from vendors, hears from architects explaining the particular design or plan that the Planning Commission is to consider?
00:06:44.95	Ron Olson	We did hear from a vendor about what they proposed to do to meet the requirement for housing. And that was an example.
00:06:53.64	Ron Olson	I think that when it comes to architects or builders who want to make improvements,
00:07:01.08	Ron Olson	I think it's important to question them
00:07:03.58	Ron Olson	But more importantly, I think it's important to get out and take a look yourself.
00:07:07.56	Ron Olson	to do site visits and say, okay, now I can understand because I've been to the site and I can see what the issues are.
00:07:14.85	Ron Olson	and not be passive at all.
00:07:18.31	Ron Olson	Does that answer your question?
00:07:19.46	Mayor Cox	Absolutely. Are you aware of the site visit policy for the Planning Commission? I'm done.
00:07:22.90	Ron Olson	I know.
00:07:23.03	Vice President	and
00:07:24.38	Mayor Cox	All right, I have no more.
00:07:25.19	Vice President	questions.
00:07:28.20	Vice President	No question.
00:07:29.60	Mayor Cox	All right, thank you so much for applying and for your time this evening. Thanks.
00:07:30.93	Vice President	Thank you.
00:07:34.81	Mayor Cox	Okay, the next applicant is Fred Moore.
00:07:38.80	Mayor Cox	A familiar face welcome Mr Moore.
00:07:41.39	Fred Moore	Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council members. My name is Fred Moore, homeowner and sauce leader for over four years. I thank you for considering me as a candidate for the Planning Commission.
00:07:52.06	Fred Moore	I bring the Planning Commission a combination of academic study, professional real property experience, a prior Planning Commission appointment in Southern California,
00:08:01.22	Fred Moore	and an unwavering dedication to our city.
00:08:03.90	Fred Moore	Since moving to Sausalito, my wife and I have embraced our town and have become involved with a number of board members for volunteer organizations. And we're very active in giving our time to various groups better in our town. For example, Sausalito Village, Sausalito Foundation, Save Our Stairs, Friends of the Library, Sausalito Historical Society, Sausalito Center for the Arts, Green Thumb, Sausalito Beautiful, and the Setup Crew for Toast of Sausalito. My bachelor's degree in city and regional planning from SLO is my foundation for planning principles and practices. As assistant director of a planning and engineering firm, I work with Medi City and county planning departments on projects, residential, commercial, and mixed use. I have a law degree from Hastings, even though they changed their name, and I've spent my 40-year legal career as a real estate lawyer. I have capacity and expertise in reading site plans, architectural drawings, grading plans, condominium plans, zoning codes, and I've drafted development agreements, subdivision agreements, easements, and covenants. I believe this blend of planning and legal experience equips me to evaluate the types of projects and applications presented to the Planning Commission.
00:09:16.01	Fred Moore	Beyond these technical qualifications, I bring to the planning commission my commitment to ensure all voices are heard. All applications thoroughly evaluated and all critical questions asked to provide a fair and informed decision making process. My hope is that when a planning commission matter comes before you, each of you will be confident that all the issues have been properly vetted and considered.
00:09:40.77	Fred Moore	If appointing as a member of the planning Commission, my goal is to ensure that sauce Alito follows the laws with decisions that enhance our artistic cultural historic heritage, while safeguarding the values of what makes our town special. Thank you for considering my application, I consider the honor and privilege to serve sauce Lito as a member of the planning Commission i'm all yours for questions and.
00:10:05.51	Fred Moore	I do own a pair of long pants.
00:10:07.87	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:10:08.21	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:10:08.95	Mayor Cox	Thank you, Mr. Moore. I'm going to lead off only because I was eight years on the planning commission myself. So I wanted to find out if you're aware of the movement by the state of California towards more objective design standards and Sausalito's efforts in that regard with respect to drafting and adopting an odds program.
00:10:31.97	Fred Moore	I am somewhat familiar with the state mandates and have been to a number of the meetings on the odd standards. So I have a familiarity with it. I'm by no means an expert.
00:10:44.47	Mayor Cox	And has your firm worked with any applicants who are
00:10:53.35	Mayor Cox	looking to figure out how to present things in a more objective way, less, you know, to comport with the more objective standards that are being enunciated.
00:11:02.29	Fred Moore	whether it's by happenstance or good luck. Most of my clients have been able to sail through projects. There's a number of projects in Northern California, Santa Rosa, San Ramon, Diablo down in Southern California as well. And they actually have been, all their projects have been encouraged by the various local jurisdictions to increase densities. So they haven't run into the design objective standards for their projects. A lot of them are infill and majority of the residential projects are three story condominium projects with a fort within a four will component, whether we 10% or 15%. So they haven't run into that as an obstacle or or helpful tool.
00:11:28.43	Catie Thow Garcia	Mm-hmm.
00:11:42.55	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:11:43.75	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Anyone else have questions for Mr. Moore?
00:11:46.35	Mayor Cox	Yes.
00:12:00.54	Fred Moore	Sure. I support the amendment. I was concerned about some of the criteria that were laid out. I thought that some of them may create a more difficult to make that decision of whether or not the particular use complies with the formula retail or not. So I thought some of those items could apply to anybody, whether there's a formula retail or not, whether you have a restaurant with black shirts and white,
00:12:26.75	Fred Moore	black pants and white shirts, whether that's a uniform or not a uniform.
00:12:29.99	Fred Moore	So I was suggesting that we consider that. I also didn't think it was necessarily something you wanted to take away jurisdiction of the planning commission to look at design to be able to make sure that the use comports with the design and style in Sausalito.
00:12:50.05	Mayor Cox	Our time is up. If you have something, go ahead. I have no questions. Oh, okay.
00:12:52.45	Fred Moore	I have no question.
00:12:52.97	Vice President	Question?
00:12:53.12	Fred Moore	question.
00:12:53.24	Fred Moore	Thank you.
00:12:53.28	Vice President	Oh.
00:12:53.95	Mayor Cox	All right. Mr. Moore, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for your volunteers and for the city as well.
00:12:59.66	Mayor Cox	All right, next on the list, we have Laurie Vio.
00:13:03.13	Mayor Cox	I recognize that name, I think, from Saturday.
00:13:08.70	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:13:08.72	Laurie Vio	Thank you.
00:13:08.77	Mayor Cox	I,
00:13:09.04	Laurie Vio	Okay.
00:13:09.54	Mayor Cox	Welcome.
00:13:09.95	Laurie Vio	Thank you. I'm sad to hear the news that you shared, but honestly, after being here on Saturday, I guess I can't say I'm surprised with what I witnessed. Just to give you some background on myself, I am in business program management in the tech industry.
00:13:29.73	Laurie Vio	I am a Sausalito residence for just over two years, and I absolutely love it here. I am an active member of the Sausalito Presbyterian Church, the Sausalito Yacht Club,
00:13:42.60	Laurie Vio	I am captain of my bocce team.
00:13:45.67	Laurie Vio	And I'm also a member of the Modern Sailing Club.
00:13:49.64	Laurie Vio	I am a very active hiker.
00:13:52.00	Laurie Vio	And I have hiked many mountains, including a couple of 14,000 footers and most recently Mount Fuji.
00:13:59.24	Laurie Vio	Um,
00:14:00.52	Laurie Vio	And I am very active and I'm an active trail runner and I am a former member of the Palo Alto Run Club where I lived down there just prior to moving up here to Sausalito.
00:14:12.12	Laurie Vio	I am also a former Ironman triathlete, and I would bike over 100 miles in a day in my training and in the races. So I am very familiar with cyclist safety and with the rules of the road. And I'm also a survivor of a hit and run. When I was riding my bike out in the roads of Texas. I was run off the road by a truck, and I had 30 staples in the back of my head and a concussion, and I'm
00:14:44.63	Laurie Vio	lucky to be alive. Thank God to my bicycle helmet. Um, so one of the reasons I'm interested in being on the, uh, pedestrian and bicyclist, uh, committee is that I, I see a lot of improvements that we can make with signage and with helping cyclists to behave better. Um, there's a lot of behavior from cyclists that I've seen here in California that I would never dream of attempting or doing. And I come from Texas, which is even less cycle friendly. So that was part of the reasons why I am interested in the role. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. I'd love to be more involved with the city of Sausalito.
00:15:32.44	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:15:33.39	Councilmember Hoffman	Anyone have questions? Yes.
00:15:38.25	Councilmember Hoffman	Lori, given that trauma that you suffered, are you still a cyclist or are you?
00:15:44.64	Laurie Vio	I still have my time trial bike. I did pick it up briefly during the pandemic when we were all on lockdown. I did cycle a bit. I'm not doing it so much anymore. Most of my time is spent trail running, hiking. Uh, oh, I also walk to the ferry three days, four days a week too. So I'm walking a minimum of two miles a day, but I do still cycle, just not competitively. I don't do races or triathlons anymore.
00:16:13.08	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you for sharing that with us. I appreciate it.
00:16:15.47	Unknown	I do have a question, given your wide-ranging outdoorsy vibe, I want to channel a question from the woman who was sitting here before me, former Mayor Kallman, who is also an ultra runner.
00:16:27.91	Unknown	outdoorsy person. And she always lamented that Sausalito has this incredible placement, but we're actually not a hub for
00:16:34.56	Unknown	outdoor activities. You don't really have those things here. They start other places. And I'm just wondering if you had any ideas. She had this notion and I agree. I think it's exciting to be branded with stuff in the hills, whether it's running,
00:16:48.43	Unknown	or biking, mountain biking, uh,
00:16:51.25	Unknown	A base for trips out the point raise from here that kind of thing so any thoughts about that as a resident and
00:16:56.77	Laurie Vio	Well, yeah, and I've actually, I did the Dipsy race last year for my first year, and I've signed up again this year. I haven't found out if I'm in yet, but I think there are tons of opportunities to run. I actually did a trail for the Hash House Harriers that I started down at Cavallo Point, and we ran through Sausalito up the pathway over by Wolfback Ridge up there and down. So having meetup groups or creating maybe a trail running group that's central to Sausalito could start grassroots with meetup and gain the membership to do active weekly runs up to the headlands.
00:17:42.14	Vice President	Do you have a view or thought about what you see as perhaps the most challenging part of our city for cyclists and pedestrians?
00:17:55.14	Laurie Vio	Probably the most challenging is that, you know, it's inconsistent with whether there's bike lanes or not. Um, and we're, we don't have as many crosswalks as, as, especially on that section of bridgeway.
00:18:11.30	Vice President	Thank you.
00:18:11.78	Mayor Cox	We'll be right back.
00:18:11.81	Laurie Vio	Mm-hmm.
00:18:13.82	Laurie Vio	Thank you.
00:18:13.97	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much.
00:18:17.21	Mayor Cox	All right, next up is Patty Urbanic.
00:18:20.60	Mayor Cox	Is she online, Walford?
00:18:23.03	Unknown	No, she's not.
00:18:24.43	Mayor Cox	Did she confirm if she was?
00:18:25.80	Unknown	Yeah, from what I remember, I think I got an email back.
00:18:38.56	Mayor Cox	Okay, well, we only have one more applicant. He's here in the room. Let's invite Bob Mitchell up.
00:18:46.72	Mayor Cox	Welcome.
00:18:47.84	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:18:48.04	Bob Mitchell	Thank you.
00:18:49.04	Bob Mitchell	I don't have a
00:18:51.33	Bob Mitchell	Package speech for you. Um, the reason I'm here is because, uh,
00:18:55.84	Bob Mitchell	You are having a hard time getting members of the community onto the bicycle and peg committee.
00:19:00.93	Bob Mitchell	I've known Ed Fotch for a long time.
00:19:03.52	Bob Mitchell	And I've...
00:19:05.27	Bob Mitchell	Bicycled around Sausalito many times with my son.
00:19:09.00	Bob Mitchell	Many times by myself.
00:19:11.08	Bob Mitchell	I understand what the issues are.
00:19:13.08	Bob Mitchell	Generally.
00:19:14.32	Bob Mitchell	And I understand that, uh,
00:19:16.96	Bob Mitchell	some
00:19:17.94	Bob Mitchell	lubricant needs to be applied in various places to make it work better.
00:19:22.97	Bob Mitchell	But I don't have any preconceived notion of how to proceed.
00:19:28.24	Mayor Cox	So you were here, I know, when we started the bicycle safety program for all of the tourist bikes and we had the bicycle ambassadors.
00:19:38.26	Unknown	Yes.
00:19:38.58	Mayor Cox	And during our hearing on Friday, on Saturday that you attended,
00:19:44.64	Mayor Cox	we heard
00:19:46.09	Mayor Cox	suggestions that we consider resurrecting that program. Do you have any thoughts about that?
00:19:52.06	Bob Mitchell	Yeah, it seemed like a good program. It seemed like it was helpful.
00:19:57.26	Bob Mitchell	but
00:19:58.48	Bob Mitchell	in
00:19:59.84	Bob Mitchell	In the abstract, without something to compare it to, I mean, what are the alternatives?
00:20:05.04	Bob Mitchell	Um,
00:20:06.22	Bob Mitchell	everything costs money and you know, money or time,
00:20:10.63	Bob Mitchell	And so I don't know that that's the best way to approach it, but that seemed to be a good way to approach it.
00:20:17.26	Mayor Cox	And, you know, the name of the committee is the
00:20:21.07	Mayor Cox	pedestrian and bicycle advisory committee one of their great accomplishments over the years has been in advancing obtaining grant funding and advancing safe walks to school for children do you have any thoughts about other advances that we could make to protect the safety of our pedestrians
00:20:42.77	Bob Mitchell	I think there's a lot of things we could do to protect the safety of the pedestrians. And one of them is probably to slow down the bikes.
00:20:52.46	Mayor Cox	Any other questions of Bob?
00:20:54.10	Vice President	Just the same question I asked earlier of the other applicant that's here, and that is, is there a place or a, use the word lubricant, is there a spot that you think is the most challenging for cyclists and pedestrians?
00:21:09.77	Vice President	Thank you.
00:21:09.79	Bob Mitchell	not any one specific spot. I mean, it's challenging from South Street to
00:21:17.79	Bob Mitchell	to the north end of town.
00:21:20.83	Bob Mitchell	You know, the bicyclists are coming down South Street, just flying along.
00:21:25.13	Bob Mitchell	Sometimes they're in
00:21:26.77	Bob Mitchell	in the lane of oncoming traffic. And there's just issues from the beginning to the end.
00:21:40.33	Mayor Cox	Thank you, Bob. Thank you for all of your service to Sausalito over the years as well.
00:21:44.13	Bob Mitchell	Thank you.
00:21:44.54	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:21:44.77	Bob Mitchell	Bye.
00:21:46.66	Mayor Cox	Any sign of Patti Urbanik?
00:21:54.32	Unknown	Seeing that.
00:21:55.37	Mayor Cox	All right. Well, that concludes our interviews for this afternoon. So, um,
00:22:02.24	Mayor Cox	I'm going to pause for 10 minutes before I make the closed session announcement. So we'll take a break until we'll resume at 545 p.m.
00:22:16.85	Mayor Cox	All right. It is, are we on Wolf? It is 5 45 PM. We are back.
00:22:22.79	Mayor Cox	um,
00:22:24.55	Mayor Cox	Councilmember Blaustein has joined us and we will now adjourn to closed session we have three things we will be.
00:22:33.76	Mayor Cox	discussing in closed session, conference with labor negotiator, agency designated representative Kathy Nikitas, human resources manager, and Charles Sakai, Sloan Sakai, employee organization, Saucydo Police Association. Conference with real property negotiator, property 750 Bridgeway, negotiating parties, Verizon Wireless, city negotiator, Chris Zapata, under negotiation, price, and terms. Then Conference with Legal Counsel Anticipated Litigation and Initiation of Litigation, Government Code Section 54956.9D21 case. And finally, Conference with Legal Counsel Regarding Existing Litigation, Sullivan v. City of Sausalito, Government Code Section 54956.9D21. Are there any public comments on the closed session items?
00:23:23.96	Unknown	See you then.
00:23:25.82	Mayor Cox	Okay, with that, we will adjourn to closed session.
00:23:28.89	Mayor Cox	And we will reconvene at 7 p.m.
00:23:41.85	Laurie Vio	Yes, I've already discussed it in the chat.
00:23:43.29	Unknown	Thank you.
00:23:45.44	Unknown	Thank you.
00:23:45.46	Laurie Vio	Thank you.
00:23:45.48	Unknown	It's a little bit.
00:23:47.83	Mayor Cox	Wilfred, will you let me know when we're ready? We're up. Okay.
00:23:47.84	Unknown	No.
00:23:48.16	Unknown	Could we?
00:23:52.97	Unknown	Thank you.
00:23:53.02	Unknown	Thank you.
00:23:56.65	Unknown	Thank you.
00:23:58.52	Unknown	You better know.
00:24:00.41	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:01.06	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:08.97	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:11.16	Mayor Cox	All right, folks, we are going to reconvene. We are returning from closed session. It's a little bit after 7 at 7.07 PM. We have no announcements from closed session. Sergio, we are sorry. City Clerk, will you take the role, Sergio?
00:24:29.62	Unknown	Councilmember Blaustein.
00:24:30.84	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:30.86	Mayor Cox	Yes.
00:24:31.18	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:31.65	Unknown	Councilmember Hoffman.
00:24:33.61	Mayor Cox	Here.
00:24:33.93	Unknown	Thank you.
00:24:34.03	Unknown	Councilmember Sobieski, Vice Mayor Woodside. Here. And Mayor Cox.
00:24:38.77	Mayor Cox	Here. Next is Pledge of Allegiance.
00:24:45.05	Unknown	I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
00:24:48.96	Babette McDougall	and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
00:25:00.37	Mayor Cox	All right, as I mentioned, we have no closed session announcements. Is there any comment on closed session.
00:25:07.17	Unknown	See none.
00:25:08.54	Mayor Cox	All right, I'm going to ask for approval of the agenda, but I'm going to pull one of the items from the agenda, which is item 3D. So staff has received some public feedback and once additional time to consider that, and so we're going to not consider
00:25:25.09	Mayor Cox	3D tonight, although I will take public comment
00:25:27.62	Mayor Cox	If anyone would like to provide it so may I have a motion approving the agenda as amended.
00:25:33.97	Mayor Cox	So moved.
00:25:35.30	Vice President	Second.
00:25:35.93	Mayor Cox	All in favor?
00:25:37.34	Mayor Cox	Aye.
00:25:38.91	Mayor Cox	Aye. Councilmember Sobieski?
00:25:44.57	Mayor Cox	Yes, okay. That motion carries five zero. Okay.
00:25:50.05	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:25:50.17	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
00:25:50.35	Mayor Cox	special presentations and mayor's announcements. I would like to take the opportunity to extend a warm welcome to our interim finance director, Jesus Nava.
00:26:01.81	Mayor Cox	Welcome. Thank you so much for jumping into the fray with us. And we look forward to a very collaborative and productive working relationship. You all saw his CV. He has lots and lots of experience, both as a general manager, but also as a finance director for 10 years for the city of Burlingame with a hundred million dollar budget. So look forward to doing some really good work with you. And thank you so much for stepping up to the plate.
00:26:37.50	Mayor Cox	Okay, we will move on to special presentations. The first is from PG&E.
00:26:45.76	Mayor Cox	And Mark Gorder.
00:26:47.59	Mayor Cox	Welcome.
00:26:51.78	Unknown	I think.
00:26:51.93	Mayor Cox	I will just say that all three of our special presentations tonight you will see have a public safety theme. And so we are looking at fire protection. We are looking at safety. And there's a nice nexus. We have National Park Service here, but we also have Southern Maroon Fire here as well to discuss their collaborative effort to protect the city and manage vegetation. So I'm looking forward to all three of these presentations. So thank you for being here, Mark.
00:26:51.96	Unknown	I will.
00:27:21.28	Mark Van Gorder	It is a great time to be...
00:27:24.16	Mark Van Gorder	preparing again.
00:27:25.92	Mark Van Gorder	So thank you, Mayor, Councilmembers, and Manager Zapata for inviting me here tonight.
00:27:33.56	Mark Van Gorder	do my best to keep this somewhat brief. We've got a lot of ground to cover, and I know there may be questions afterwards. And again, you already noted the other presenters here and
00:27:44.38	Mark Van Gorder	I also know better than to stand in the way of our heroic firefighters and first responders. So again, for those who don't know me or may be watching online, my name is Mark Van Gorder. I'm the local government affairs representative for Pacific Gas and Electric for Marin and Napa counties.
00:28:03.82	Mark Van Gorder	Um,
00:28:05.22	Mark Van Gorder	You know, we'll be sharing some information tonight about our wildfire safety program. Some of the projects we've had in the community recently, a quick review of the, um,
00:28:14.84	Mark Van Gorder	outage outages that we've had some of the things that we're doing to try and keep the lights on in the community.
00:28:21.94	Mark Van Gorder	if you could advance
00:28:24.44	Mark Van Gorder	The next slide.
00:28:26.31	Mark Van Gorder	And that's, those are the things we'll be covering the next.
00:28:31.58	Mark Van Gorder	Really quick gas projects just to note that we've replaced about 460 feet of gas line in the area of Woodward and Bridgeway that project started this year and should be done by now.
00:28:45.99	Mark Van Gorder	Our folks in public works could tell us if there may be some remaining restoration, but that project should be complete.
00:28:52.08	Mark Van Gorder	And that's just, again, part of our safety inspections and maintenance to bring it up to code or up to our regulations. If you could go to the next slide. Okay.
00:29:07.62	Mark Van Gorder	And that's, again, the location of it.
00:29:10.66	Mark Van Gorder	next
00:29:14.14	Mark Van Gorder	All right. I think this is probably the most of interest to council and community residents and business owners. So I was asked to perform a review of the outages that we've had. There are four different circuits serving the city of Sausalito, and we'll go through each of them. but you can see them mapped out here. And so the transmission line comes down through the Golden Gate National Recreation Area into the substation. And from the substation, these circuits serve the city and areas just outside of the city.
00:29:56.48	Mark Van Gorder	on this circuit, which we call the Sausalito 1101.
00:30:00.66	Mark Van Gorder	In 2024, we had seven outages, 23, six outages, 22, six outages. And, you know, the reasons for these outages are listed here. Um.
00:30:14.58	Mark Van Gorder	We are working to find ways to install animal guards where we have animal impacts. We have a vegetation management program, which I'll go into in more depth to help us remove branches and trees and other vegetation material that may be impacting it.
00:30:31.53	Mark Van Gorder	In many cases, you may see this larger section here that says undetermined. Often we can go out and inspect the lines and simply can't determine what the cause might have been. So it could be an animal that impacted it or a branch or something, but it's just not evident to us exactly what it was. But nonetheless, here's the report for this particular circuit in this part of the community. If we go to the next slide.
00:30:56.77	Mark Van Gorder	And this is really more for reference for those who may want to either pull this report out from the.
00:31:04.18	Mark Van Gorder	public records, or if they want to look at this again on the video.
00:31:08.73	Mark Van Gorder	Um, but a number of various outages, um,
00:31:14.05	Mark Van Gorder	You'll note here that a lot of these are outages are due to system improvements. So.
00:31:19.69	Mark Van Gorder	On the circuit, you say that's a lot of outages. In these cases, we are notifying the customers 10 days in advance. If there are businesses or schools, we make every effort to work with them to find the best possible time. It's really difficult to find a time that works for everyone, especially on such a long area of the community. But the good news is that those planned out know, intended to sort of be one time only for these improvements. Again, it's to improve the system, to improve the reliability, and so that shouldn't continue. If we can go to the next slide.
00:31:58.06	Mark Van Gorder	Um, not too much here, uh, outages are going down over time. Um, and in this particular case, frequently vegetation related. And finally, the last circuit.
00:32:11.95	Mark Van Gorder	Do we...
00:32:14.45	Mark Van Gorder	Get to the last circuit.
00:32:15.88	Mark Van Gorder	The next slide.
00:32:17.48	Mark Van Gorder	There we go. So just, just a couple outages in this area. Um, and again, system improvements. So next.
00:32:26.66	Mark Van Gorder	Okay.
00:32:27.51	Mark Van Gorder	One of the largest projects that we had in the community that we've talked about for a long time and we've now completed is is the work that we've done to improve both the substation, excuse me, and and the circuitry if we can go to the map here.
00:32:39.47	Matthew Mandich	.
00:32:45.14	Mark Van Gorder	um,
00:32:46.83	Mark Van Gorder	This system
00:32:48.43	Mark Van Gorder	The substation here was built in 1929, was upgraded in 1946, and was due for another upgrade. And so this is the work that you've been seeing ongoing throughout the city, and it was completed in six different phases, which are noted here on the map. That work is now complete and done but the objective here was to uh ensure that we could meet the future growth business demands uh increased charging that we're expecting any future construction that you may have in the way of business and or accessory dwelling units or other construction so that project work is now complete it helps to meet climate goals and such um
00:33:38.53	Mark Van Gorder	So anyway, that, that was our larger project and we do get asked a lot. What, what is PG need doing to improve the reliability of the system?
00:33:46.53	Mark Van Gorder	This is a multimillion dollar project that we invested into to do that over the next, well, over the past year and a half. Next slide.
00:33:56.79	Mark Van Gorder	Um, there will be some people who can talk in more detail about this. I see in their presentations after me, but this is the high fire risk area map that PG is developed. Um, there's a California public utilities, uh, map that has fire threat district areas, um, and then communities have their own high fire risk maps. And so those I'm often asked the question, why don't these maps sync up? They look at things from slightly different perspectives. I think generally, if you.
00:34:18.16	Chief Barnes	MATTER.
00:34:18.26	Catie Thow Garcia	maps.
00:34:25.67	Mark Van Gorder	you'll see that there is, there is a lot of similarity. So here's the high fire risk area.
00:34:31.08	Mark Van Gorder	Most people will note that
00:34:33.75	Mark Van Gorder	the majority of the city, not all of it, uh, it is, um,
00:34:38.56	Mark Van Gorder	is outside of the high fire risk area. And of course, a vast amount of the city that is inside the high fair risk areas just to the
00:34:48.06	Mark Van Gorder	Um, to the west of one Oh one. And if we go back to this circuit maps, a number of those outages that occurred with, we looked at them, those are the areas where having a lot of vegetation impacts and animal impacts as well. Next slide, please.
00:35:03.95	Mark Van Gorder	So a question that we had certainly from this council and that is frequently asked in many communities is, why are we not doing anything
00:35:13.32	Mark Van Gorder	to improve the reliability and protect, you know, and add layers of safety with the high fire risk areas. I'll start by saying that
00:35:24.59	Mark Van Gorder	you know, in our service territory, we are looking at undergrounding
00:35:29.57	Mark Van Gorder	10,000 miles out of about 102,000
00:35:33.98	Mark Van Gorder	total distribution lines.
00:35:35.85	Mark Van Gorder	And we're performing risk assessments throughout our entire service territory to determine where that undergrounding should go. So, you know, 10% of those distribution lines are going to be undergrounded, and the remaining will be system-hearted overhead. So Sausalito isn't currently in the list of that 10%. What we're trying to do is, um, is create stronger poles, covered tree wire. Uh, we're adding fault indicators and we have, um, enhanced power safety settings. So that the, uh, power is turned off in these vegetated areas within a 10th of a second.
00:36:20.40	Mark Van Gorder	If a branch, an animal, something contacts the lines, the power is turned off to prevent
00:36:26.78	Mark Van Gorder	Ignition?
00:36:27.82	Mark Van Gorder	And then we've adding these new tools that we have, the switches, the fault indicators that we can more quickly patrol, determine where the outages occurred and restore power quickly.
00:36:39.86	Mark Van Gorder	Um,
00:36:40.67	Mark Van Gorder	So while we may not be undergrounding the power lines in the city,
00:36:45.14	Mark Van Gorder	We're certainly performing this work to add layers of safety and help us find the faults when they occur and restore the power quickly.
00:36:55.72	Mark Van Gorder	Next slide, please.
00:36:59.95	Mark Van Gorder	We are performing some work just to the north and west. So here you can see we're going to be performing some work. I call this out only.
00:37:12.71	Mark Van Gorder	I was on the fence about including this slide. It doesn't show benefits immediately to the city of Sausalito, but I think we can all agree that preventing wildfire in and around our counties is important. Fire spreads depending on where the winds are blowing. And so this is the most recent upcoming work that we have planned. We're miles completed in 24. And of course we have more coming in 2025.
00:37:39.39	Mark Van Gorder	There's a website here. That's great to check in on our, on our, uh, pg.com forward slash system hardening. If people want to look at this area or, or other counties, um, where they may have family. Next slide, please.
00:37:54.63	Mark Van Gorder	So I mentioned the enhanced power safety settings. In the areas where we have circuits running through high fire threat areas, we are adjusting settings.
00:38:06.20	Mark Van Gorder	They're very sensitive. And again, I mentioned something hits the line. It doesn't matter what it is, car, bird, branch, mylar balloons. The power will turn off in one-tenth of a second. And we'll go. We'll patrol the line. We have more automated systems. We have fault indicators.
00:38:27.55	Mark Van Gorder	that can help us determine where they are
00:38:30.67	Mark Van Gorder	In cases where we need to, we will send up drones or helicopters to help us make sure that there's nothing on the lines that might cause ignition when we restore the power, and we are able to get the power more quickly restored. Usually, we try and get it done within four hours or less. Next slide.
00:38:51.60	Mark Van Gorder	Vegetation management. It's another question we often get. Why are we cutting trees in the city right of way? Why are we cutting trees on private property? Well, those are the reasons I already mentioned is that we're having animals and branch or other vegetation contact, and, um, we are required by law to, and regulation from the CPC to remove that vegetation.
00:39:13.60	Mark Van Gorder	And
00:39:14.75	Mark Van Gorder	So that's what we're doing.
00:39:17.70	Mark Van Gorder	with the city.
00:39:19.44	Mark Van Gorder	If we're working the public right of way, we will file an application for an encroachment permit.
00:39:24.99	Mark Van Gorder	Thank you.
00:39:25.10	Mark Van Gorder	We'll notify the public works department.
00:39:27.85	Mark Van Gorder	And we will wait until that permit's approved.
00:39:31.19	Mark Van Gorder	We'll go out and we'll perform the work that's if it's in the public right way. So city parks sidewalks roadways. We're going to make sure we do that. And if we don't, I am sure to get a phone call from your public works director Kevin. Unfortunately, we haven't had any issues with that that I'm aware of so far. Next slide.
00:39:53.14	Mark Van Gorder	So here's, you can see that I mentioned that we manage ballpark about a million trees over 100,000 miles of electric distribution lines. So here's the rough sketch of the lines that we patrol within the city. We do this every year. Again, we're required to inspect and ensure that the lines are keeping a good clearance away from the sorry, the trees are a good clearance away from the lines. If we're working on private property with private property owners, next slide.
00:40:28.90	Mark Van Gorder	This is what they can expect. Um, we are going to notify them. We're going to contact them when we're on their property.
00:40:37.76	Mark Van Gorder	And we're going to work with them to answer any questions that they may have.
00:40:42.30	Mark Van Gorder	If we can't reach them.
00:40:43.95	Mark Van Gorder	While they're at home, we will leave a door hanger where they may get a letter.
00:40:47.78	Mark Van Gorder	But anyone with questions, if you have constituents,
00:40:51.77	Mark Van Gorder	that say,
00:40:52.74	Mark Van Gorder	PG&E was on my property. I don't know what's going on.
00:40:55.33	Mark Van Gorder	This is a great way to find out. I encourage people to both call and email if they are able. So this number, 800-564-5080. And I'd suggest emailing so that there's a written record to treesafetyatpg.com.
00:41:10.06	Mark Van Gorder	If they have questions, I've tried it. They are very responsive. I've always received a phone call or an email back within 24 hours.
00:41:18.36	Mark Van Gorder	Next slide.
00:41:21.92	Mark Van Gorder	I'm just going to put this here so that people know they're available. I won't go over them unless you have specific questions. So if we can go to the next slide. There are a number of helpful resources. This progress map has a dropdown menu that you can see in the image here. Lots of good information. Where are our sectionalizing devices?
00:41:47.25	Mark Van Gorder	Uh, you can put in your address and find out where we have enhanced power safety settings. Uh, if your power is going off frequently, it's a good way to find out if that's, you know, if you're in one of those zones, um, and again, customer assistance programs.
00:42:03.43	Mark Van Gorder	if, if,
00:42:04.55	Mark Van Gorder	customers want to find out about system upgrades, I can tell you that you won't find anything on undergrounding, but you can find out by address or by county or by city, you just type it in in that search bar and you can find out where we're installing those stronger poles or cover tree wire and such. So a lot of great information here. I use this frequently. Next slide.
00:42:26.74	Mark Van Gorder	Um...
00:42:27.97	Mark Van Gorder	Thank you.
00:42:28.39	Mark Van Gorder	for customers who
00:42:33.00	Mark Van Gorder	want to have some assurance
00:42:35.97	Mark Van Gorder	Uh, that they, that their power will not go out if they, if they need to have continuous 24, seven power, uh, here are some options.
00:42:45.18	Mark Van Gorder	We do have rebates.
00:42:47.93	Mark Van Gorder	and grant programs. There are a number of customers who we've identified as being
00:42:56.34	Mark Van Gorder	very low to low income,
00:42:58.67	Mark Van Gorder	who have had multiple outages
00:43:02.43	Mark Van Gorder	due to these enhanced power safety settings who may be on our medical baseline programs who may have medical needs.
00:43:08.18	Mark Van Gorder	And we are trying to make sure that they are getting a battery powered backup. But again, it's a, it's not for all customers, but there are those opportunities for, for people who, who need it. And that's our residential storage initiative. So if people.
00:43:21.77	Mark Van Gorder	feel that they qualify.
00:43:24.23	Mark Van Gorder	They can go to this PG.com residential storage initiative. And then there's these other programs here. I won't spend too much time on them. Next slide, please.
00:43:38.29	Mark Van Gorder	These are great and helpful links. Probably too much information, but maybe you can never have too much when you're preparing for...
00:43:47.91	Mark Van Gorder	emergencies when you need to have power consistently.
00:43:51.80	Mark Van Gorder	And especially if you have some medical needs, if you have family members that have medical needs, it is really important to to be prepared for having power out for two hours, four hours, and in some cases, 24 hours. And these links all have helpful information to to be prepared for that. And we partner also with, you know, folks can call California 211 if they need immediate support.
00:44:20.32	Mark Van Gorder	I would encourage the public to download an app called Report It.
00:44:26.05	Mark Van Gorder	It's a great app, super easy to use. If a constituent business owner resident sees
00:44:33.69	Mark Van Gorder	something that concerns them.
00:44:36.09	Mark Van Gorder	And I want to really distinguish here between concern
00:44:38.72	Mark Van Gorder	and emergency.
00:44:40.36	Mark Van Gorder	If somebody sees something, arcing of wires, smells gas, whatever.
00:44:45.25	Mark Van Gorder	Leave the area immediately and call nine one one. That's for an emergency. If you're suspicious, if you think something just doesn't look right, that's a great time to use this reported app. You can take a picture of the area.
00:44:57.25	Mark Van Gorder	It'll note the, it'll geolocate. You can type in the comments or concerns that you have. It submits it. It basically creates a work ticket.
00:45:04.18	Mark Van Gorder	And, um,
00:45:05.36	Mark Van Gorder	And it's viewable. You can take a look and see whether or not your, your, um,
00:45:09.53	Mark Van Gorder	issue has been addressed or what the updates are and,
00:45:12.26	Mark Van Gorder	THE FAMILY IS THE FAMILY
00:45:12.77	Mark Van Gorder	whether or not it's vegetation or gas lines or something, you just want to know about it. Maybe it's, um,
00:45:18.47	Mark Van Gorder	Sometimes we have vaults that are broken in ground and they they're concerned. It's a tripping hazard. Great, great tool to use right here. It's called report it. Next slide, please.
00:45:31.15	Mark Van Gorder	Um, we can skip through the appendix really quick, but there are, you know, this is just some of the numbers that I mentioned, right? This is our service territory. Uh, the, the square miles that we have and we serve next slide.
00:45:48.63	Mark Van Gorder	And again, this just talks about our wildfire vegetation program and all the trees that we need to manage. It is a major question.
00:45:57.91	Mark Van Gorder	The second question next to why is my power off?
00:46:01.41	Mark Van Gorder	I get two other questions, which is why are you cutting our trees down?
00:46:05.27	Mark Van Gorder	and then the last question i get asked is why aren't you cutting our trees down
00:46:08.97	Mark Van Gorder	So those are the questions we often get. I think this is a wrap. If you want to go to the next slide.
00:46:17.66	Mark Van Gorder	I think Andy.
00:46:20.09	Mark Van Gorder	Yep. Yep. Um,
00:46:21.98	Mark Van Gorder	you
00:46:22.06	Mark Van Gorder	I know you have a full agenda, so if you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. I may not have all the answers, but if I don't, I will get them for you.
00:46:30.57	Mayor Cox	I'm going to thank you so much for the presentation and for all of the resources that are available. Have you provided your presentation to the city clerk so he can attach it to our agenda? Yes. So then anyone who wants to look can see what resources are available.
00:46:39.58	Unknown	Yes.
00:46:44.17	Mayor Cox	I did want you to just briefly recount for the council some of the steps that you discussed with the business community that you are taking to avoid the kind of challenge that occurred on the evening of the lighted boat parade when we had 2,000 residents without power and the businesses could not really function unless they did so by candlelight and generators during the lighted boat parade. So you've implemented some...
00:47:11.52	Mayor Cox	an approach so that
00:47:14.27	Mayor Cox	to prioritize such calls for service in the event something like that happens in the future, and to give you a heads up when we're having a big event like that.
00:47:22.91	Mark Van Gorder	Sure. I would say that that is probably the number one, uh, ish thing that we all need to work together to do is, is communicate better. So,
00:47:35.13	Mark Van Gorder	Just a quick recap on that 24 hour period. Um,
00:47:41.53	Mark Van Gorder	That was a substantial storm. We saw it coming three days in advance, and I began notifying –
00:47:50.43	Mark Van Gorder	virtually every elected official and city manager public works director and in some cases uh
00:47:58.11	Mark Van Gorder	Office of Emergency Services personnel that we really anticipated a very substantial storm coming.
00:48:04.66	Mark Van Gorder	Not only was it a significant storm that was coming, but it was, it was virtually territory wide. I can't say, I can't recall how far north and south that reached, but, um,
00:48:16.86	Mark Van Gorder	It was territory wide. And the reason I mentioned that is.
00:48:20.62	Mark Van Gorder	If we have an isolated storm that's coming in mostly into the Bay Area or the North Coast area, we can call upon other crews to travel.
00:48:32.17	Mark Van Gorder	whether it's coming from the Sierras or from the Central Valley, they will come in and support us. And then we have the added crews, the added resources, and we can more quickly patrol and restore power and make safe.
00:48:44.23	Mark Van Gorder	That day, it hit hard. It hit fast. There was at one point 37,000 electric meters without power in Marin County,
00:48:56.75	Mark Van Gorder	We frequently will call that customers, but I don't like to call it customers because that's meters. It's electric meters. So whether you have two people in the household or it's 10, you might have had anywhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 people without power. And we were scrambling to restore power as quickly as we could. So back to the communications component, I was notifying as many people as possible well in advance, three days ahead. Then I updated twice a day.
00:49:27.75	Mark Van Gorder	And we did not know about the lighted boat parade until 2 p.m. the afternoon that –
00:49:37.09	Mark Van Gorder	you know,
00:49:38.72	Mark Van Gorder	that there was that event going on. We had multiple 911 calls. That's the other challenge that we faced. And for us, the 911 calls,
00:49:48.74	Mark Van Gorder	it's a little different. Um,
00:49:51.50	Mark Van Gorder	you all have your local dispatch and office emergency services or maybe you've activated your local emergency operation center
00:49:58.75	Mark Van Gorder	As the fire department or police department other first responders get out to a site. If they see trees down electric wires or whatnot. Maybe they're going to close the road or put up barricades or something. And then they'll make a phone call to us and we're going to prioritize those calls above all else. If we have first responders saying please get out here for public safety. That's the priority. Um.
00:50:26.48	Mark Van Gorder	I'm not aware of a public safety incident in getting a little echo back here, but I'm not aware of a public safety incident.
00:50:31.36	Catie Thow Garcia	I know.
00:50:34.41	Mark Van Gorder	issue in Sausalito.
00:50:37.31	Mark Van Gorder	That is not making light of the impact in the city, but just calling it as it was. The winds were severe.
00:50:44.53	Mark Van Gorder	And there was a lot of trees down. So that's the situation that we faced. We have reviewed the process. I think we met with our regional vice president. We've talked with the incident commanders. When we activate our operational emergency center locally, I'm the liaison.
00:51:04.85	Mark Van Gorder	Um, you know, city council members of city manager can contact me.
00:51:09.85	Mark Van Gorder	We also have a public safety specialist.
00:51:12.55	Mark Van Gorder	And we talked about that as well, that we make sure those lines of communication are wide open. If the fire department or police need to, they can reach out to our public safety specialist will escalate the issue through the Office of Emergency Services, it's need be and will respond quickly but yeah opportunities for us to do better.
00:51:34.65	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much. I know that the initial estimate was 48 hours, and then through working with then-Mayor Sobieski, you narrowed that down to about 24 hours. So we're grateful, and I think we all are better informed about how best to manage something like that moving forward. So thank you.
00:51:50.95	Mayor Cox	I had no other questions. Are there other questions?
00:51:53.92	Vice President	Just briefly, and this could take a long time to resolve and discuss, but the question is, are you aware of a way that your company can get together with Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Southern Marine Fire, and take a good hard look at the
00:52:11.14	Vice President	at the non-native trees that tower above us that weren't there in 1945 or whenever the substation was improved.
00:52:18.44	Vice President	That's the question. I don't expect you to answer it now, but I think that's very foremost on many people's minds who live either in or adjacent to the high fire area, and they know that in a strong wind with the fire up there, it's very likely to rain down on us. And that's the concern, and I just would ask you if you know of a mechanism to really get together and see if that can be addressed.
00:52:43.74	Mark Van Gorder	The quick answer to your question is yes.
00:52:47.10	Mark Van Gorder	We can do it. We do work with Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority.
00:52:53.39	Mark Van Gorder	and so...
00:52:56.45	Mark Van Gorder	I think, and then the follow up question. So, uh, council member, which I'll, I'll get back to you and I'll certainly get back to city manager about this. But, um, the first question I'd ask is, are we already connecting?
00:53:08.31	Mark Van Gorder	That I don't know. I'm not in on those conversations. I would imagine that we probably are. But nonetheless, let me get an answer for you and get back to you.
00:53:18.64	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much. So appreciate you being here.
00:53:21.03	Mark Van Gorder	Thank you.
00:53:21.59	Mayor Cox	I hope you'll stick around to hear from the National Park Service and the Southern Marine Fire.
00:53:26.20	Mark Van Gorder	I'm interested. Thank you very much.
00:53:27.14	Mayor Cox	All right.
00:53:28.17	Mayor Cox	So with that, I'll welcome David Smith from the National Park Service.
00:53:40.96	Dave Smith	Thank you so much for letting me address the council. It's an honor to be here, Jill. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you today. I know you're trying to get a hold.
00:53:48.34	Dave Smith	to me.
00:53:49.42	Dave Smith	So no problem at all. You know, since you were just up here, I will answer the question that you had, vice mayor. It is a continual dialog that happens between all of these agencies. It's it's crucial for us to work really closely with PG&E. You know, we're we're kind of in the forever business of making sure parks last forever.
00:54:09.43	Dave Smith	And I will say that for the Park Service, we've always, from a compliance standpoint, been really tough on our friends at PGE, you know, making sure that as we take down vegetation, we do it in a way that's appropriate. You know, the last decade has been an amazing education for all of us. And I think we are totally the other way right now. We are making it as easy as possible to make sure that right-of-ways are maintained in a way that we are doing our darndest basically to make sure that we don't have fires in those areas so there's lots of collaboration going on with them with uh southern run fire same thing it's constant collaboration you know across the park so we we can do better we can do a heck of a lot better but we are doing it now and we are going to continue to build on that
00:54:58.42	Dave Smith	So I'm Dave Smith. I'm the park superintendent over at Golden Gate. I'm going to talk a little bit about the park tonight, just for folks that may not be familiar with the entirety of it. As I'm looking behind the mayor's head, I'm seeing Fort Baker there, which makes me so happy to see one of the special portions of the park highlighted right there. I've been in the National Park Service for 33 years. I spent the last 10 years down in the desert, down at Joshua Tree, dealing with fires down in that area. It's something I'm very familiar with.
00:55:28.17	Dave Smith	um,
00:55:29.62	Dave Smith	I told our staff here at the park, you know, my mission right now,
00:55:34.11	Dave Smith	I have two big focuses that I'm looking at. I'm looking at ensuring that we continue to have access to everyone inside the park. That means a lot of different things. Sometimes it's something as simple as making sure that we have trails where someone who does have a disability can actually get in and experience those places.
00:55:53.95	Dave Smith	But sometimes it means making sure that our places are safe and fire ties into that as well as does crime. Making sure that the car clouding that we've seen in the southern portion of the park on Consulman Road, you know, some of the –
00:56:08.03	Dave Smith	Every one of my Rangers right now has a, has a portable vacuum in their car.
00:56:14.10	Dave Smith	They don't have it to keep their car clean. They have it to vacuum out the glass that gets broken in people's cars. So we work really hard on that right now to make sure that people feel safe inside the park. And partnering with SFPD, with CHP, with Sausalito, with Marin County Sheriff's Department.
00:56:33.66	Dave Smith	And it's a constant collaboration. So one thing is making sure everyone has access to their park. The other thing is recognizing that climate change is happening, and it is a threat to the existence of this park, and it's a threat to our lives in California. And it's making sure that we can reduce our carbon footprint at the National Park Service down to zero. And also recognizing that the exotics that you were talking about, Vice Mayor, you know, the eucalyptus, the French broom, the scotch broom, you know, the cheatgrass, the fine fuels and the heavy fuels, that is not part of the history of California's fire regime. It's part of a historical change that we've seen in the last century, and it's something that we have to address. And I'll talk about that at the end of my program today.
00:57:15.88	Dave Smith	First, just a little bit about our park. Typically, Golden Gate has about 300 to 320 folks working inside of it. As the government tries to reform and find efficiencies, we're down to about 257 right now. So it's a significant change in the workforce that we've traditionally had inside the park. We manage about 82,000 acres of public land, and that stretches from pretty far down in San Mateo County at the Rancho property in the Flager Estates all the way up to the border of Point Reyes National Seashore. In San Francisco, we manage pretty much all the beachfront on the western portion of the park and stretching all the way over to Fort Mason. The Presidio is part of the park, but it is managed separately by the Presidio Trust, and we are very thankful to have them as partners as well.
00:57:34.61	Unknown	to be able to get a
00:57:34.66	Unknown	Thank you.
00:57:34.68	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
00:58:00.36	Dave Smith	Inside the park, we have about 70 miles of road over 100 miles of trail inside the park. Next slide, please.
00:58:09.11	Dave Smith	This is one of my happiest challenges, you know, over 1400 historic structures inside the park. So every time we do anything, every time we replace a light switch, that means working with the State Historic Preservation Office to make sure it goes. If we could go back one slide.
00:58:25.36	Dave Smith	We have five historic landmarks inside the park. We work closely with the Federated Indians, the Grattan Rancheria, as well as the Ohlone tribes down in the peninsula, as well as in San Francisco.
00:58:36.78	Dave Smith	There are five lighthouses inside the park. We have close to 4000 different plant animal species and more than any other national park outside of Hawaii. We have 38 threatened and endangered species which dictate how we do business inside the park. Next slide, please.
00:58:53.69	Dave Smith	I am excited to say and share with you that of the 440 national park sites across the United States, Golden Gate National Recreation Area has the largest visitation of any of them. We had over 17 million people that chose to recreate at least one day inside the park last year, which is, you know, fantastic. That's a it's a it's a joy, but it means that we have a lot of issues we have to deal with. Next slide, please.
00:59:22.07	Dave Smith	So with that 17 million people coming year, our budget has stayed relatively stagnant right around the 27 to 28 million dollar level over the last five years. So when we've seen about a 20 percent increase in our inflation during that time period, our budget has stayed relatively stagnant during that time. So a lot of our workforce challenges right now stem from that. We rely on our partner organizations to help us out as much as possible. We rely on the conservancy at Golden Gate Conservancy and the Presidio Trust to help us out as well. Next slide, please.
00:59:56.89	Dave Smith	So where's the money coming in that comes into the park? We bring in about a billion and a half of economic benefit to Golden Gate. So it's a weird tabulation, but we spent the last 30 years figuring out how to do this best. You know, the money's coming into a lot of different things. In most national parks, a lot of it goes into camping, but not here at Golden Gate. Most of it is going into the secondary effects that affect the supermarkets, the gas stations and things like that folks that are coming specifically up here. So we're the economic engine for Southern Marin as well as for portions of San Francisco and San Mateo counties. Next slide please.
01:00:37.94	Dave Smith	So I'm going to take you for a little tour of Southern Marin until we finally end up in Sausalito. One of our biggest projects we're working on right now is at Stinson Beach. Stinson Beach is dealing with climate change. It is the canary in the coal mine at Golden Gate National Rec Area. The parking lots flood repeatedly. We lose lots of our infrastructure there. As soon as I got the job, the bathroom, half of it took off into the ocean, as well as all the accessible trails that we built along the beach. So we are currently in the process of redesigning that in a way that allows for flooding in the parking lots, but still lets us maximize parking potential in that area. We recognize that the creek there will flood. That's part of what this earth is going to look like over the next 50 years. And the money that we're investing in it now will not be wasted. It will be allowed to create a infrastructure system that is made to be flood resilient. Next slide, please.
01:01:35.94	Dave Smith	Muir Woods is an exciting, exciting time at Muir Woods. If you've been out there the last two years, you saw the reconstruction of Redwood Creek. It was done specifically to allow for better habitat for the salmon species that we have inside there. The next phase is being done with our partners from the Conservancy. I'm very excited about this because they're they're good at raising money and they're also good at managing projects for us as well.
01:02:01.90	Dave Smith	which will be the complete replacement of all the bridges along the trail system there, as well as the new Dipsy Bridge. So for those of you who are running the Dipsy this year, like I will, we usually go across the plank across the river. Hopefully in a couple years we'll have a nice bridge there as well. We're also looking at a complete redesign of the plaza to allow a much more pleasant experience for people coming into the park. Next slide, please.
01:02:26.86	Dave Smith	Uh, if you get a chance to hike the Ben Johnson trail going out of Muir woods, we just finished about seven years of work on that. It is a civilian conservation trail. We have reconstructed it. Basically they went the way they did back in the 1930s. It's beautifully done. The woodworkmanship there is outstanding and it is a, it is a delightful way to spend your afternoon. And that can be accepted, uh, accessed either from the Mount Tam side or from the Muir wood side. Next slide.
01:02:56.77	Dave Smith	You probably, I may have heard down at Tennessee Valley, the dam that was constructed there is not designed to be a dam. It is designed to eventually crack and flood the area below it. So we're in the process of removing that dam. It is a significant financial endeavor for the park. We're looking at work beginning on that probably in the next two years or so. The way it works right now, if you do go for a hike down at Tennessee Valley, if it's raining, we're probably going to close the portion below the dam so folks don't potentially get flooded by a breaking dam. Otherwise, the trail is open year-round.
01:03:33.92	Dave Smith	Next slide, please.
01:03:35.50	Dave Smith	I think we're getting close to Sausalito now. Yes, hallelujah. Okay, this is exciting. We're in the third stage of the Hawk Hill restoration. Hawk Hill, in case you don't know, is the portion of the park that's right above Sausalito looking down over the Bay Area. We've done some really good work there, rebuilding the trails, putting in restrooms in the location, making it accessible as possible. Now the work comes on the very top where Hawk Watch does their work.
01:04:01.29	Dave Smith	uh, restoring the World War II bunkers that are there as well as the railing. Um, construction started about two months ago. It is looking fantastic and I'm super excited about the restoration project. And that'll be finishing up hopefully in the next six months or so. Next slide, please.
01:04:20.07	Dave Smith	Point Bonita lighthouse, one of the most iconic images inside the park. It has been closed on and off, uh, for the last four or five months. We've had some challenges with the bridge. The bridge needs some major structural repairs. We're sending out a crew every six months to reassess it, to make sure that it's still safe, the road that's going out there. That was my big challenge right now. It was built on top of a Ridge and, um.
01:04:48.71	Dave Smith	it was not designed to last forever. So underneath the road, it is slowly eroding away right now to the point that I'm concerned about the structural safety of that. So...
01:04:59.42	Dave Smith	Stay tuned on the final solution to the Point Bonita Lighthouse, our most beautiful and iconic lighthouse in the park. It may be impossible to access soon, and I'm going to have to figure out a solution to going over there.
01:05:11.76	Dave Smith	Next slide.
01:05:14.17	Dave Smith	So in the Fort Baker area, one of the things we've been waiting for for years is the completion of the Vista Point Trail. So the Vista Point Trail will get people off of Alexander and get them going down directly to Fort Baker. If you've ever ridden your bike down Alexander Avenue, it's just awful. It's terrifying when you're on the side of the road. There's not much of a bikeway there. This will get everyone off that and down to Fort Baker that way. And so construction is beginning on that now. And I think we're looking at about an eight month timeline until that is totally opened.
01:05:49.84	Dave Smith	The Travis Marina, which is the marina that's located down at Fort Baker. As you probably know, Travis Air Force Base maintains a lease with the National Park Service. It is the last remnant of the military still in Golden Gate National Rec Area. We just signed a 30-year lease with them, which will allow an infusion of more money from the Air Force to help build up the marina, as well as the facilities at the Presidio Yacht Club, which continues to be the cheapest place to get a beer in all of them.
01:06:18.70	Dave Smith	all of Southern Marin. So I'm delightful that that's moving forward.
01:06:23.17	Dave Smith	Okay, next slide, please.
01:06:26.75	Dave Smith	So I wanted, I wish I had realized that this was mostly gonna be about public safety and fuel reduction, cause I really would have dived into this a little bit more.
01:06:37.35	Dave Smith	Fuel reduction is a big issue for our park. We have our entire fire staff. I'm glad everyone's sitting down. We have three people that work at Golden Gate National Rec Area and Muir Woods and Fort Point that are involved in our fire staff. We're delighted that this June we're getting one other person. So we will increase our work.
01:06:57.36	Dave Smith	By 33% and we get that person, we rely heavily on our partners and Southern Marin to help us with wildland fire when there are fires and point raise or inside of golden gate national wreck area because we're part of the national park system we rely on our partners from the national park service from the forest service from the Bureau of land management from.
01:07:18.71	Dave Smith	Cal fire, that's the way fires are typically managed in California on public lands. I would love to beef up our system right now.
01:07:28.21	Dave Smith	You know, we've got an engine.
01:07:30.54	Dave Smith	Bay, we've got an engine down at Fort Cronkite. We just do not have the money to staff that right now. We rely heavily on contracting to help us with fine fuel reduction and heavy fuel reduction, and that has paid off in some of those areas that you see up there. So the areas that are outlined in and Southern Marin next to Sausalito, those are our primary target areas where we're doing fuel reduction right now.
01:07:55.61	Dave Smith	In some of the areas, you know, we've been doing it for the last five years, which has paid off really well by really concentrating on the scotch broom populations and removing the eucalyptus as well. We're now to the point where it is an annual, you go out there with a weed whacker kind of a thing. So we will be weed whacking next week with some of our crews. We contract out with Mount Tamalpais, the conservation crew out from there to work as well in those areas. So it's, it's maintaining those areas that are the urban wildland interface. For the most part, we've done heavy fuel reduction and expanding into other areas as well. So, uh, you know, the vice mayor was, was noticing the, the tree populations. My, my staff would love to get rid of all the eucalyptus having grown up here and in california i love eucalyptus but as a park manager i hate eucalyptus because of the fire potential and what it actually does to the wildlife that is adjacent to those areas so it is a a long-term process but it's one that i'm cognizant of and we're going to continue to work on
01:09:00.58	Dave Smith	So that's kind of a, I think that's my last slide. Let me see, is there anything else? Thank you. Okay.
01:09:06.02	Dave Smith	That's a wrap-up of things that are going on in the park right now. I will address...
01:09:11.92	Dave Smith	The last 10 weeks have been a challenge for many of us. There's been a lot of new ideas coming out of Washington that have impacted national parks. I have, like I told you, worked for the National Park Service for 33 years, and I love being a park ranger. It has been the joy of my life. I raised my children in five different parks across the United States with my spouse. The people of the United States, they love their parks, and they will continue to love their parks regardless of who is president or who's in Congress at those times. But we do we do realize
01:09:48.83	Dave Smith	I heavily, heavily, heavily
01:09:51.44	Dave Smith	on our partners and our friends and our community. These parks belong to every one of us. You know, one thing that we're doing down in San Mateo County more and more, we just don't have a lot of resources. For landowners that are adjacent to park properties and the wildland interface, they apply for a permit and they do some work to remove fine fuels from the area that's adjacent to their property on park lands. So that is something that, you know, I've never seen inside of a national park before, but it's a route that we're having to take in some of our areas. So I would encourage you, if you do have constituents who are concerned about fire in their areas and we cannot make it to their areas to do the kind of thinning that needs to be done, have them reach out to the park, have them reach out to our special permits office, our special use permits office, connect with us. And there's a process we can go through where they can contract out, where they can actually thin out some of them and create a more defensible space around their house as well.
01:10:47.96	Dave Smith	So if you have any questions for me, I'm happy to answer them.
01:10:52.75	Mayor Cox	Again, thank you so much for your presentation. We like hearing from our regional partners
01:10:59.23	Mayor Cox	Annually, if we can. So this was overdue. I would like to hear a little bit more and maybe Chief Barnes can address this a little bit more about the collaboration between Southern Marine Fire and National Park Service, given your lack of funding and personnel.
01:11:15.48	Mayor Cox	to address vegetation management on those areas that really do border Sausalito throughout much of town.
01:11:22.05	Dave Smith	And I will and chief Barnes will be presenting later.
01:11:25.17	Mayor Cox	No, just to interface with...
01:11:25.49	Dave Smith	Okay, well, I...
01:11:27.19	Dave Smith	I may have him start talking soon because he has a lot more experience in this than I do because I'm a relative newcomer to this area. So we contract out with our local fire partners to help aid us in this process.
01:11:41.81	Dave Smith	you know, we recognize that we can't do it all. And it's essential that they be part of this system. Chief Barnes, you're right behind me right now.
01:11:50.60	Unknown	Thank you.
01:11:50.61	Babette McDougall	Wow.
01:11:50.90	Babette McDougall	Do you want to talk a little bit?
01:11:54.16	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:11:55.56	Dave Smith	I'm going to go.
01:11:55.59	Mayor Cox	I might have given him a heads up. So...
01:11:57.69	Chief Barnes	Good evening.
01:11:58.97	Chief Barnes	Madam Mayor, Council, City Manager Zapata. It's an honor to be here tonight to talk about the collaboration that we have with the park. I've been in the fire service for 32 years, the last 23 years here in the Southern Marin Fire District. And when the Presidio Fire Department was in its process of going away, I was part of the committee to help the partnership be formed between the Southern Rim Fire District and the parks. I'm happy to report that the three members of that specifically rely on fire protection in the park, I have them on my cell phone. We talk probably every week in the summer, and especially every time there's a red flag event. We also work collaboratively with MWPA, the Golden Gate National Recreation
01:12:53.56	Chief Barnes	has a seat at the table at the operations level to talk about strategic initiatives to
01:13:00.49	Chief Barnes	conduct fuel reduction and then we also provide assistance with those fuel reduction activities for the for in in partnership with the park i'm happy to report that the district is in the process of developing a hand crew program and that hand crew program will be you know the first start will be about a 12 member program that will be specifically designed for the southern marine area and sauceusalito and the go to gate national recreation area to help with those fuel reduction measures. Um, I think it, it's, it's, it's a true honor being in the fire service and being at some of the major fires throughout California, um, and, and Mexico and Oregon and Nevada, um,
01:13:44.34	Chief Barnes	our relationship with the park is like no other and um i think that
01:13:49.53	Chief Barnes	tends to lean on.
01:13:51.64	Chief Barnes	the relationship and trust that we have with each other,
01:13:54.29	Chief Barnes	and the collaborative efforts to get the job done that we need to do to, you know, provide the public with as much safety as possible.
01:14:03.62	Dave Smith	I feel like giving you a hug right now, but I'm not going to do that. So we were chatting before the meeting, and Chief Barnes had mentioned that he was down on the Eaton Fire and a number of other fires that were in parks and Forest Service lands. That's what it's all about, that we all help each other out in these things, because we cannot maintain a force of 500 people at Golden Gate for fires. We rely on our partners, and we help each other out with law enforcement, with fire, and for other things as well. So I appreciate everything that you've done.
01:14:37.56	Dave Smith	And I'm very thankful to have you as a partner. Yeah, absolutely.
01:14:41.10	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much. Any other questions of the national party? Yes. Council member Hoffman.
01:14:48.17	Councilmember Hoffman	Thanks, David. Thank you for coming. And yes, I have been trying to get in touch with you. So thank you.
01:14:53.37	Dave Smith	Yeah, but please feel free to call. I'm sorry. Today was an insanely busy day. For both of us. Yeah.
01:14:57.64	Councilmember Hoffman	both of us yeah thank you yeah i appreciate that so yeah um but you know what this was a useful for use for our time both of us right so and all of us so you caught us all up without having to talk with us individually so a great use of our time um especially the the special use permits i think that you know answers a lot of our questions frankly um and i think um if we have uh that point of contact and probably what the permit actually is, if you can just provide us with that and we can probably post that on our- Josh, is it in your office? Is that Joshua? Hi, Joshua, how are you? Thank you so much for your emails.
01:15:26.11	Dave Smith	Yeah.
01:15:27.37	Dave Smith	Oh my gosh, is it in your office?
01:15:30.18	Dave Smith	TOO.
01:15:31.05	Dave Smith	So Josh Winchell's our new chief of comms for the park. So it's inside of his office. Which, what address should they get to?
01:15:40.94	Councilmember Hoffman	I've got it. Yeah, I've got it. So I'll just contact you tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:15:43.19	Mayor Cox	THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE
01:15:44.13	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:15:44.18	Councilmember Hoffman	So-
01:15:44.22	Mayor Cox	So what's the...
01:15:44.48	Mayor Cox	go ahead and call it out because we've had a couple of residents right who are exactly interested in doing that is from across the street from their house removing eucalyptus
01:15:53.51	Councilmember Hoffman	We have somebody right here up on our diet. It might be interesting.
01:15:55.77	Mayor Cox	And so could we call out an email address or a phone number?
01:15:57.33	Councilmember Hoffman	We call out.
01:16:00.28	Councilmember Hoffman	Oh yeah.
01:16:01.06	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, I was just going to have it posted on our website.
01:16:01.41	Mayor Cox	Yeah.
01:16:02.71	Dave Smith	Do you want to use your personal email or the...
01:16:03.86	Councilmember Hoffman	Yep.
01:16:05.75	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, Joshua, yahoo.com.
01:16:10.64	Mayor Cox	time you approach the microphone.
01:16:12.36	Mayor Cox	Yes, please.
01:16:13.10	Councilmember Hoffman	So,
01:16:13.21	Mayor Cox	Yeah.
01:16:14.83	Unknown	So we have a permits email inbox. So what I'm going to do is pull it up and then I will provide it to the council so it can be distributed as part of the meeting notes.
01:16:22.89	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
01:16:22.94	Councilmember Hoffman	Right.
01:16:24.80	Councilmember Hoffman	Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah. And then the next thing that I was, you know, was interested in talking about was a further coordination with actually Chief Barnes in the Southern Marine Fire Department about, you know, coordination with the Park Service, because I know that's what that is within the area of responsibility for Southern Marine Fire. and especially when we're talking about Sausalito and our responsibility with Southern Marin Fire and the Marin fire. And especially when we're talking about Sausalito and our responsibility with Southern Marin fire and the high fire risk, frankly, that's part of the map that the
01:16:25.10	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much. Okay.
01:16:58.13	Councilmember Hoffman	PG&E that Mark put up, but also that
01:17:01.33	Councilmember Hoffman	Sausage was mostly high fire and very high fire. And we're talking about reactivating perhaps Firehouse 2, which is very close up on, close to Wolfpack Ridge. And as you know, the park service is very close. And it's interesting that you have a, I didn't know that you had a fire truck down at Fort Cronkite. So, you know, sort of trying to figure out how that we can coordinate reactivatingate in these assets and the ever-increasing fire risk that we see with our changing climate or things like that.
01:17:11.81	Councilmember Blaske	you know,
01:17:33.09	Dave Smith	So I will be at the fire refresher in May up at Point Reyes so I can get my red card re-up. So that's one more resource we have. It's a small resource. Our new fire management officer, Tony Sandrini, is coming up from Santa Monica Mountains. He is amazing. And I know he's going to get on board. You know, he is going to be looking for ways to reactivate our fire engine as well as expand on the crew that Chief Barnes was talking about. That's the kind of work that we're going to be doing. We just needed that kind of leadership. Yeah.
01:17:41.14	Unknown	Yeah.
01:18:01.61	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay, good. Well, I'll follow up with you later this week on that. And then we'll talk maybe.
01:18:05.04	Councilmember Blaske	more specifically. Thank you.
01:18:06.84	Mayor Cox	Councilmember Blaske.
01:18:08.45	Councilmember Blaske	Hi, thank you for being with us. It's always a pleasure to hear from our superintendent of parks. And speaking of our parks, you know, you mentioned that you have organizations like the Conservancy and the Presidio Trust that are supporting you right now, but given our difficult
01:18:21.76	Councilmember Blaske	environment with funding from the federal government. Are there ways that members of the public or the community can directly support?
01:18:28.22	Dave Smith	My God, I couldn't have paid you to say such a softball question there. Thank you very much.
01:18:34.52	Dave Smith	You know, volunteering is where it's at. I have a friend, she just got fired from the federal government. She's in my rotary group. And she said, I want to do something to help my community. And so she is now volunteering at the Presidio Visitor Center as an interpreter. So that's a great thing. You know, working in the greenhouses with re-vegging, you know, as we get out the exotics and replace them, that's a great thing to do. You know, water safety, you know, our lifeguard system this summer is gonna be pretty compromised. You know, being able to have volunteers working in the beaches, talking to people about water safety. There's lots of volunteering. I'd much rather have volunteers than cash right now because they're just, they're wonderful to work with.
01:19:17.97	Dave Smith	So thank you, Melissa.
01:19:19.09	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:19:19.15	Councilmember Blaske	Thank you.
01:19:19.24	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:19:20.44	Mayor Cox	All right.
01:19:21.80	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much again. Thank you. And thank you to Chief Barnes, as well as your staff, David, for being here. We greatly appreciate it. It's great to see Steve again, who has appeared before us in the past. So thank you very much.
01:19:35.37	Mayor Cox	All right, with that, we're going to move on to our third special presentation, which is a presentation from the Sausalito Police Department. So
01:19:43.84	Mayor Cox	This is a different type of presentation. As part of our budgeting process, we have asked each of our department heads to prepare a brief presentation regarding their goals, their successes, their budgetary needs for the upcoming year so that we can evaluate each department's needs as part of the whole as we put together a budget. And so the Sausalito Police Department gets to lead us off on that charge, and I'm happy to welcome Chief Stacey Gregory.
01:20:17.29	Stacey Gregory	Thank you, Madam Mayor, Council. I'm going to say that that's a hard act to follow. We do love our parks, and these guys are funny. So we'll do our best to...
01:20:28.00	Stacey Gregory	share information. This is an update as well as a budget presentation. So we're excited to be here tonight to share because we haven't had the opportunity to be in front of the council for a while.
01:20:37.49	Stacey Gregory	Talk about the good work we're doing.
01:20:39.71	Stacey Gregory	Our agenda tonight, we're going to talk about who we are and what we do. We're going to cover our budget considerations and funding requests, provide an update on recruitment retention,
01:20:51.41	Stacey Gregory	Talk about our RIPA data.
01:20:53.77	Stacey Gregory	Waterfront and emergency management. And lastly, we're gonna talk about parking related items, specifically related to the Dixon Report. So we have a lot to get through in the 20 minutes. We're gonna do our best.
01:21:05.33	Stacey Gregory	We'll probably go over a little bit.
01:21:06.97	Stacey Gregory	Lieutenant Mather and Parking Manager Wayne Kwan are going to assist me this evening as well.
01:21:14.27	Stacey Gregory	Sorry, next slide and then next slide.
01:21:19.93	Stacey Gregory	So this statement here defines our purpose and values.
01:21:24.82	Stacey Gregory	It really serves as our guiding framework on
01:21:29.39	Stacey Gregory	what we do, why we do it, how we do it.
01:21:32.55	Stacey Gregory	So that's the mission statement that we live by next slide.
01:21:38.89	Stacey Gregory	I'm going to start by talking about the police department and who we are.
01:21:42.57	Stacey Gregory	I like to say that we're a small but mighty team. Our team is dedicated, hardworking, and understanding of what the community of Sausalito wants in their police department.
01:21:53.47	Stacey Gregory	Currently, we have authorized 18 sworn members with number 19 and 20 frozen. However, we've operated most of 2024 with only 14 officers to include me and two of the lieutenants. We have five people dedicated to our parking enterprise and two people who manage the administrative tasks within the police department. Next slide.
01:22:19.23	Stacey Gregory	what we do.
01:22:20.96	Stacey Gregory	Our department is broken into two divisions. Each lieutenant runs a division, operations, and support services. This slide shows a lot of, but not all, of their areas of responsibility. Much of the work that we do as a police department is very obvious and is visible to the public, but a lot of it is not. And as a smaller agency, we are required to do the same things larger agencies are required to do, except we have to do it with less people. And I think we do a pretty good job.
01:22:54.41	Stacey Gregory	Next slide.
01:22:56.64	Stacey Gregory	So we'll talk about 2024. In 2024, we handled
01:23:01.73	Stacey Gregory	10,829 calls for service. Of those calls for service, we had 136 arrests and wrote 657 police reports.
01:23:14.91	Stacey Gregory	Of those 136 arrests, we were required to use force two times. One was to keep a subject from trying to run into traffic on Highway 101. He had to be physically taken to the ground to prevent escape and also from harming himself or others. The other was an attempted stabbing suspect who was confronted with a knife in his hand. the taser was presented to gain compliance and The other was an attempted stabbing suspect who was confronted with a knife in his hand. The taser was presented to gain compliance, and he was taken into custody. The taser was not actually deployed or actually used. Okay.
01:23:52.27	Stacey Gregory	All the other arrests that we made, we used our biggest and best tool, which is our voice. De-escalation through communication, our voice, is our best tool and our key to success.
01:24:09.00	Stacey Gregory	Next slide, please.
01:24:12.54	Stacey Gregory	All right, we'll switch gears to the budget request and considerations.
01:24:18.99	Stacey Gregory	So our Axon service contract, we are coming to the end of a five-year service contract with Axon. This vendor supplies our tasers, our body-worn cameras, our in-car cameras, our interview room cameras, as well as our digital evidence storage system.
01:24:37.40	Stacey Gregory	So I already said it's expiring the end of the year to maintain our contract with our existing equipment,
01:24:45.60	Stacey Gregory	we must enter into a new five year contract.
01:24:48.91	Stacey Gregory	The dollar increase for this contract comes with significant equipment upgrades.
01:24:54.02	Stacey Gregory	And all of this new equipment will ultimately enhance our efficiency, transparency, and accountability. The increase for the contract for the next five years would be $33,000 per year, $166,000 total over our existing current five-year contract, if that makes sense.
01:25:20.14	Stacey Gregory	Our second budget request is to transition one of the lieutenant's positions into a captain position. This change supports our traditional
01:25:28.90	Stacey Gregory	Chief Captain Lieutenant structure and is critical for succession planning, which is a focus of the departments currently.
01:25:38.69	Stacey Gregory	positions already allocated in the position allocation table and the dollar amount that comes with that transition is $22,500.
01:25:50.99	Stacey Gregory	between the two positions. The third request is unfreeze the two police officer positions that have been frozen since 2021. That's officer number 19 and number 20. Unfreezing these positions will allow us to provide more to the community and when we're talking waterfront management, traffic management and all the extras that we like like to provide.
01:26:19.96	Stacey Gregory	A top step fully burdened. Yeah, okay, that's been updated. $200,000 plus fully burdened for a new police officer.
01:26:29.97	Stacey Gregory	And then we always want to keep our patrol boat on the list. That's a wish list item, but we want to talk about it.
01:26:39.81	Stacey Gregory	in order to effectively manage our water.
01:26:42.98	Stacey Gregory	and to maintain the safety out on the water.
01:26:45.61	Stacey Gregory	we do need to be present on the water.
01:26:48.43	Stacey Gregory	Thanks to several of the council members, we are in communications with some community members to talk about a boat share program. And so that's ongoing.
01:27:03.87	Stacey Gregory	And then I also want to talk, take the opportunity to thank RBRA and the Marin County SO for their assistance on the water, because there are there and available every time we call.
01:27:14.79	Stacey Gregory	We've been asked to provide potential budget reductions. And in the past we've explored this. We've done our best to be fiscally efficient with what we do and our vendors that we use. But ultimately in order to cut our budget we'd have to cut people because 90% of our budget is people and salaries.
01:27:42.28	Stacey Gregory	Next slide, please.
01:27:46.41	Stacey Gregory	So the staffing breakdown,
01:27:48.49	Stacey Gregory	It shows our minimum staffing, which is what we're operating a lot often.
01:27:55.22	Stacey Gregory	Currently, which is one supervisor and one beat officer, we have four 12-hour shifts, two day shifts, two night shifts. So outlined here, you'll see all the positions that we have allocated, including the patrol, the investigations, parking and records. Management to lieutenants and the chief, we are included when I talk about sworn positions, even though we're not necessarily working the streets. We've been in, let's see, we have three current open police officer positions. We have one police officer that started two weeks ago. He's still in his orientation phase. So in six months, as long as he passes a training program, he will be available to work in a solo car.
01:28:43.16	Stacey Gregory	The other thing to note here with
01:28:46.02	Stacey Gregory	Our investigations position is currently working. Patrol?
01:28:54.32	Stacey Gregory	because we don't have the manpower to pull him out to allow him to be an investigator and a detective on his own. So it's, you know, it impacts his ability to work cases and do his investigations. And we do the best and work with other agencies to get that work done.
01:29:12.60	Stacey Gregory	Next slide, please.
01:29:17.00	Stacey Gregory	So recruitment has been challenging for us, especially since police officers are premium with all the signing bonuses. Some of the factors that play into this challenge are the benefits compared to other agencies in the Bay Area.
01:29:29.77	Stacey Gregory	our location being the southernmost city in Marin County, and our size, meaning we have limited opportunities and specialties to provide young officers. The city council did authorize a $10,000 signing bonus, so we appreciate that it has helped.
01:29:47.17	Stacey Gregory	But another part of our recruitment challenge is that once we find somebody that we want to pursue hiring, they don't pass the one part of our background. And so then what puts us back to square one.
01:30:02.66	Stacey Gregory	Next slide.
01:30:07.54	Stacey Gregory	So making sure that we put our efforts into the
01:30:11.32	Stacey Gregory	The current employees is really critical. The majority of our recent hires, we've had to hire
01:30:18.69	Stacey Gregory	put through the academy which is six months long then they come out into our internal training program which is
01:30:25.56	Stacey Gregory	five distance long. And so, you know, the whole process takes almost a year, almost $100,000 until that person is available to be on the streets and working as a beat unit that can fill one of our vacant positions. So we've been working hard to maintain our current staff. We've been successful so far. We've done this through accelerated pay steps, professional development opportunities, and overall morale, support, and culture of the police department. And we will continue this work until we are full staff.
01:31:02.52	Stacey Gregory	So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Lieutenant Mather, who will talk about some of our programs and go from there.
01:31:16.81	Bob Mitchell	California.
01:31:19.11	Mather	COB, Dan Burke, Dean of Council City City Manager Thank you for having us like the chief explained i'm gonna go over a few of our projects it's only a few of our projects, but we don't have the time to go over everything the first project that i'm going to talk about if you go to the next slide please.
01:31:35.29	Mather	is our RIPA data compliance.
01:31:38.68	Mather	Part of a lot of what we do is being in compliance with the case law policies and procedure.
01:31:44.39	Mather	Assembly builds. Every time something happens, there's usually a reaction and we need to start
01:31:49.09	Mather	collecting data for whatever means this one happens to do with a rip a data.
01:31:53.84	Mather	And RIPA stands for Racial and Identity Profiling Act.
01:31:58.12	Mather	AB 953.
01:32:00.55	Mather	This was passed.
01:32:02.48	Mather	several years ago, and our agency has been in compliance with this act and submitting our RIPA data since 2023. And so essentially what that is, is anytime an officer makes a traffic stop,
01:32:14.32	Mather	or goes through a call for service or makes a contact in the community and there's a detention involved, that officer has to document the perceived demographics of that stop, we collect that data
01:32:25.38	Mather	at the end of the shift but throughout the year and we submit that data to doj as required
01:32:32.43	Mather	Next slide, please.
01:32:34.57	Mather	So in addition to being in compliance with our RIPA data collection and reporting,
01:32:39.08	Mather	We're also
01:32:40.21	Mather	A few months ago, we posted on our transparency portal on our city department website.
01:32:46.94	Mather	all of our ripa data. And this is a screenshot of what's on our website.
01:32:51.41	Mather	It shows the larger number of 1,059 is the contacts in 2024 in detentions and the ripple logs produced to DOJ.
01:33:00.88	Mather	And then the smaller number is just the quarter four for last year. So in a couple of weeks, we'll be putting out quarter one for 2025. We put that data out that way our community can see the transparency and accountability that way we can hold our officers accountable. The community knows what we're doing.
01:33:17.28	Mather	And it's ongoing. So we'll.
01:33:19.51	Mather	We'll update this quarterly on our department transparency portal.
01:33:24.27	Mather	Next slide.
01:33:25.79	Mather	So with RIPA data, the benefits and limitations.
01:33:29.80	Mather	Like I said before, it enhances our accountability and transparency. It allows us to.
01:33:34.43	Mather	view our stop data to see if there's any anomalies and trends.
01:33:38.71	Mather	for fairness and equality.
01:33:40.77	Mather	internally we can look at it for statistic purposes. If there's any outliers, we can look at it, dive deeper into that data to see
01:33:49.14	Mather	What's going on? We're not seeing it. A lot of that right now, I must mention.
01:33:54.04	Mather	But the limitations are that the data is compared to
01:33:59.00	Mather	the demographics and the census data that
01:34:02.98	Mather	is populated every year or produce every year. As you know, Sausalito is, there's no walls around Sausalito.
01:34:10.98	Mather	we get a lot of tourists and visitors and people that work here and come and go every day. So when you're comparing the data against our census data of 7,500 people and those demographics,
01:34:22.25	Mather	They're not going to be accurate, but it still helps us look at the data.
01:34:25.80	Mather	dive into it and see if we can
01:34:28.48	Mather	see any trends that we need to pay attention to.
01:34:31.57	Mather	I mean, it also doesn't account for
01:34:33.64	Mather	multiple stops of the same individual.
01:34:36.92	Mather	often that we'll get an individual that comes in the town
01:34:40.16	Mather	a transient, but maybe a subject of many calls for service. And our officers have to go out there multiple times a week or per day
01:34:47.85	Mather	And the RIPAA data doesn't differentiate that.
01:34:51.12	Mather	just the attention and a stop, and we have to log that data. Next slide, please.
01:34:56.78	Mather	Also this year we rolled out back in June of 2024, we rolled out our bias by proxy campaign
01:35:03.31	Mather	informally,
01:35:04.76	Mather	We've been doing this since I started working here in 2008.
01:35:08.51	Mather	Um,
01:35:09.67	Mather	But formally, we put this out so that we can engage with the community and educate the community on
01:35:16.37	Mather	not every
01:35:17.69	Mather	thing you see, if you feel like it's suspicious, is really a call for service that the police have to come out. Maybe it's a mental health call. Maybe it's a fire call. Maybe it's not a crime, so the cops don't need to be showing up.
01:35:30.07	Mather	And so we're asking the community and we put this on our social media, we put it on Currents.
01:35:34.51	Mather	And we're talking about this at our community meetings.
01:35:37.95	Mather	Try to trying to share information that
01:35:40.99	Mather	Sometimes it's not a crime. There's no need to call. And we're making our officers aware that.
01:35:46.24	Mather	when we go to these calls,
01:35:48.06	Mather	Make sure there's a crime. What elements are involved?
01:35:51.18	Mather	All before we start making contacts and a lot of times we're not even going to the call for service because it's not a crime and it's not something we need to pay attention to so.
01:35:59.38	Mather	Just because the person's suspicious,
01:36:01.86	Mather	Why are they suspicious? Are they committing a crime? If your friend was doing the same thing, would you call on your friend? That's what we're asking people to look at.
01:36:10.84	Mather	And then we've had a couple instances where we're not responding to calls. We call that community member, we educate them, tell them what our limitations are and ask them to next time. This is the criteria and follow these steps, please. Next slide.
01:36:28.54	Mather	So I'm going to go through our waterfront management. This is a hot topic and was a hot topic for a long time, but we're, we're, I don't want to say we're getting towards the end of it. Cause it's going to jinx it.
01:36:37.23	Mather	but it's an ongoing effort.
01:36:39.14	Mather	But this is where we were in 2015.
01:36:42.43	Mather	That's a snapshot we were still out there patrolling but we weren't doing the waterfront management enforcement that we're doing now next slide.
01:36:49.22	Mather	This is in 2019. So in 2019,
01:36:52.78	Mather	The slide before we had 80 to 90 boats in our waters alone.
01:36:57.05	Mather	In
01:36:57.87	Mather	2019 we had 14 boats. Not all of that was through enforcement on our end. It was more through education. So some boats just left on their own. Some were taken for.
01:37:06.98	Mather	off the water by us through enforcement efforts,
01:37:10.65	Mather	But we had 14 boats in 2019.
01:37:13.01	Mather	Next slide.
01:37:14.81	Mather	And then,
01:37:15.56	Mather	In 2023, this is our
01:37:17.62	Mather	the last time we took a picture, but the two red dots right there,
01:37:20.91	Mather	The red arrows indicate
01:37:22.76	Mather	The final two boats in our waters.
01:37:25.30	Mather	That's it. So the other boats that you see there are all gone.
01:37:28.79	Mather	And that's what we have left. Next slide.
01:37:32.64	Mather	And so talking about some of our achievements
01:37:35.49	Mather	Since 2015, we've gone from 90
01:37:39.13	Mather	Dan Burke, COB OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP, OSMP
01:37:55.01	Mather	We assisted three legacy members off the water and into alternative housing through efforts through the city.
01:38:02.42	Mather	We removed a very large vessel that's been in our water for 30 plus years. That boat costs $170,000 to get off the water. Plus, that doesn't include manpower in the efforts and attorney's fees and everything else that it took to get that boat off the water. Luckily, we were able to offset some of the costs through grant funding. We apply for a grant every year.
01:38:25.08	Mather	It's a biannual grant and we had a $100,000 grant that covered the majority of this.
01:38:30.77	Mather	and we continue to apply for grants. So this last year we applied for another grant. We got $50,000. We don't have as many boats on the water, so they're not giving us as much money anymore.
01:38:42.14	Mather	Next slide.
01:38:44.08	Mather	So goals continue the collaboration with our neighboring agencies, RBRA, Marine County Sheriff, U S coast guard,
01:38:51.83	Mather	without them,
01:38:53.40	Mather	I honestly think we would be lost at this point. Like the chief said, we don't have a boat. We have that boat right there that we are allowed to use and we use it on a
01:39:01.73	Mather	call for service based, um,
01:39:04.37	Mather	initiative we don't proactively go out there unless we're managing our waterfront to get counts but that's the sheriff's boat that they loan us to use and we only have two people that can operate that boat in the house currently it's myself and another night shift sergeant
01:39:19.82	Mather	So what we want to do is work proactively with our marinas. There's a lot of boats that our marinas need to get rid of. And so we're trying to use our save grant money to get those boats off the water.
01:39:30.37	Mather	on top of trying to make sure we save some of that money for when a boat sinks in our water, we can manage that as well. So trying to be responsible with that money, but also use the money for what the state wants us to use it for. And it's getting all boats off the water that could become abandoned or derelict later on down the road.
01:39:48.26	Mather	I'm not sure.
01:39:49.73	Mather	To be able to get a boat, we've got to increase our staffing. Like the chief said, I don't want to belabor that, but we...
01:39:54.34	Mather	We it's a, it's an extra activity. It's an overtime based activity.
01:39:58.60	Mather	And for us to get back on the water, we're going to need more staffing so that we can have our officers come in on overtime and work Marine Patrol.
01:40:05.89	Mather	So that would be our long-term goal is to establish that Marine Patrol element again. Get back to the 2019 standards.
01:40:13.72	Mather	Next slide.
01:40:15.55	Mather	Emergency management. This has been a big topic. Um,
01:40:18.95	Mather	And this is, we've, we've all been to a lot of updated training recently.
01:40:23.04	Mather	We've worked very hard on this with Southern Renfriar.
01:40:26.23	Mather	and our county OEM. And so we've been working with the County Office of Emergency Services and Southern Marine Fire to
01:40:32.93	Mather	hold evacuation drills, create social media posts, make sure there's an awareness and also multi-agency exercises to
01:40:44.20	Mather	Brett KenCairn, prepare better prepare ourselves and our departments on what we need to do, and like we said on social media we're trying to get it out there that we need to expand our outreach expand our public awareness and so we're going to hold another evacuation drill with southern fire here shortly next slide.
01:41:04.37	Mather	So Marin County OEM, what's their role? And so Marin County is the...
01:41:08.20	Mather	operational area. So they are the umbrella for the county. And so
01:41:12.67	Mather	I like to look at Marin County OEM as a bunch of
01:41:16.60	Mather	a network of Mike McKinley's. So in house, we have our emergency operations coordinator, Mike McKinley.
01:41:22.81	Mather	OEM has a whole host of them.
01:41:25.75	Mather	And so they're a huge resource for us for
01:41:28.90	Mather	whatever we need to do, whether it's finding funding,
01:41:32.04	Mather	reporting our emergencies and our disasters appropriately
01:41:37.07	Mather	Um, setting up training, we recently held a training at the
01:41:41.20	Mather	the EOC building here at Southern Ray fire station one.
01:41:45.02	Mather	To.
01:41:46.13	Mather	you know,
01:41:46.69	Mather	better prepare our city employees. And so we just held out on March 25th.
01:41:50.81	Mather	And
01:41:52.44	Mather	So we're in regular communication with County OEM. They give us...
01:41:55.78	Mather	um three-day briefing reports if there's a weather event coming they send us all of that information to help us better prepare get together with southern and fire and make a game plan of how we're going to attack this next um period next slide
01:42:11.01	Mather	So what we're doing, so we're updating our ICS training. So all of our SPD officers, all of our officers currently are up to date on all the required ICS training. And so with the exception of one of the new officers that just showed up last week.
01:42:23.56	Mather	The City Council's reestablishing the Disaster Preparedness Committee with the Police Department and Fire Department as a liaison member.
01:42:31.71	Mather	I do believe there's some name changing going on there, but it's essentially a committee that's gonna do some outreach for us, which is gonna be huge.
01:42:39.07	Mather	We're continuing evacuation planning, like I discussed, and we had recently held a tabletop exercise to try.
01:42:48.08	Mather	and the inner city staff. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to our parking manager, Wayne Kwan, to go over some parking. Thank you for your time.
01:43:01.24	Wayne Kwan	Hello good evening Madam Mayor, Mr Vice Mayor, Council Members and City Manager.
01:43:07.44	Wayne Kwan	For those of you who don't know, my name is Wayne Kwan, and I'm the parking manager for the Saucedo Police Department.
01:43:13.88	Wayne Kwan	I'm here today to present and discuss the department's parking priorities recommendation for the city.
01:43:20.35	Wayne Kwan	But first, I'd like to start by showing you what parking means to the city of Sausliu. So here's a snapshot of annual revenue that parking generates for the city of Sausliu. I'd like to point out the top two, which is off-street parking and
01:43:35.73	Wayne Kwan	on-street parking. That is 88% of the total $2.9 million
01:43:42.18	Wayne Kwan	Annual parking revenue comes from transient parking. So that means it comes from visitors, all the tourists, the tourists in Baptist city. And then of course the remaining 12% that rounds out
01:43:54.80	Wayne Kwan	includes all the various different programs that we have, hotel parking, residential parking programs, employee parking and miscellaneous items.
01:44:06.60	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:44:11.91	Wayne Kwan	So I'd like to start by also providing a little context of background. So back in 2023, the city hired Dixon Consultants
01:44:21.25	Wayne Kwan	to conduct a comprehensive parking study for Sauslio. Dixon and our parking expert partners, the goal was to assess
01:44:30.93	Wayne Kwan	the current state of the state's parking infrastructure, identify challenges, and provide actionable recommendations to modernize the state's
01:44:39.25	Wayne Kwan	Parking infrastructure in operation.
01:44:41.55	Wayne Kwan	So the Dixon study focused on three main areas.
01:44:45.46	Wayne Kwan	How can we modernize the connectivity and parking payment systems
01:44:50.22	Wayne Kwan	maximize parking revenue.
01:44:52.65	Wayne Kwan	and enhance the customer service experience enhancements.
01:44:57.24	Wayne Kwan	And as a result, that report returned 43 recommendations of how the city can improve the efficiency, parking efficiency, customer satisfaction, and revenue consistency.
01:45:11.20	Wayne Kwan	Next slide.
01:45:13.20	Wayne Kwan	So I'd like to talk a little bit about a roadblock challenge that we have here in Sausalito. So on the left is the current situation. We struggle with connectivity.
01:45:23.53	Wayne Kwan	all of our parking pay stations,
01:45:26.27	Wayne Kwan	enforcement equipment, handheld technology, and even the customer payment platform on their end, the meters,
01:45:34.23	Wayne Kwan	Uh,
01:45:35.60	Wayne Kwan	Park mobile.
01:45:37.30	Wayne Kwan	It's just about 100% of our parking equipment depends on some sort of connectivity. And we struggle with that because
01:45:45.05	Wayne Kwan	We have poor sales taking down, especially in downtown
01:45:47.80	Wayne Kwan	Sauce Leo.
01:45:49.10	Wayne Kwan	So what we need to do is we need to get to the right side.
01:45:53.15	Wayne Kwan	And hopefully,
01:45:54.92	Wayne Kwan	Currently, the Climate Check Project can help us with that, you know, knock on wood. That's what they promise.
01:46:02.02	Wayne Kwan	That is going to help pave the way for all of the upgrades of the parking infrastructure, equipment and enhancement, and just bring Sauce Leo to the forefront of the parking infrastructure technology. So we're a little bit behind the game right now, so I think it's very important to point this out.
01:46:22.44	Wayne Kwan	Because, um,
01:46:26.02	Wayne Kwan	And so with this in mind is what I'd like to segue into the next presentation of what we believe are the top five priorities that will help SOSLIO get to the next level. So next slide.
01:46:41.07	Wayne Kwan	So parking priority number one.
01:46:43.96	Wayne Kwan	We need to upgrade to modern multi-space pay stations. So right now the city has 19 pay stations throughout the city in our muni lots, and they are 10 plus years old.
01:46:55.38	Wayne Kwan	And they are on its last legs.
01:46:58.81	Wayne Kwan	The Barry died out.
01:47:00.92	Wayne Kwan	They lose connectivity.
01:47:02.71	Wayne Kwan	Um,
01:47:03.57	Wayne Kwan	It buffers a lot.
01:47:04.98	Wayne Kwan	So it's a poor customer experience when they're trying to process some transactions.
01:47:10.25	Wayne Kwan	We do have Park Mobile, which works a little bit better.
01:47:13.56	Wayne Kwan	But a lot of people, especially of our tourism, they come to the city and they either don't know what Park Mobile is or they don't have it on their phone. So they keep going to the pay station to pay. So it's really important that this is number one. We need to upgrade to current pay stations, make sure they work properly.
01:47:30.50	Wayne Kwan	enhance the customer service experience, and also help increase the revenue generation for the sake.
01:47:38.50	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:47:42.55	Wayne Kwan	Fire number two, transition to license plate
01:47:45.84	Wayne Kwan	AKA LPR systems.
01:47:48.69	Wayne Kwan	This will help streamline the enforcement
01:47:50.99	Wayne Kwan	and help also eliminate our fiscal permits.
01:47:55.04	Wayne Kwan	And I'll talk a little bit about that in the next priority.
01:47:59.64	Wayne Kwan	But, um,
01:48:02.17	Wayne Kwan	And this will also help reduce our administrative overhead, our physical permit supply costs, improve efficiency, and also pave the way for real-time enforcement capabilities.
01:48:14.63	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:48:18.48	Wayne Kwan	So number three, so what we want to do is we want to also develop a virtual permit management system. So right now, all of our permits in Sauce Leo, transient parking,
01:48:30.03	Wayne Kwan	hotel parking
01:48:31.67	Wayne Kwan	employee parking all revolve around a physical permit, whether it's a hang tag or a sticker or a dashboard pass.
01:48:41.07	Wayne Kwan	Those costs us a lot of money. We probably spend tens of thousand dollars per year just on those fiscal permits.
01:48:50.03	Wayne Kwan	Ideally, what we want to do is transition to a virtual permit management system where we use the vehicle license plate as a permit. So that will help us save money. It will also help eliminate a lot of fiscal stickers and hang tags and also helps...
01:49:08.61	Wayne Kwan	avoid misuse.
01:49:10.42	Wayne Kwan	The other issue with these fiscal hanging tax is a lot of people try to
01:49:13.76	Wayne Kwan	fabricate them.
01:49:14.82	Wayne Kwan	and they get into the wrong hands. So the license plate will help also eliminate that.
01:49:20.74	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:49:24.54	Wayne Kwan	Priority number four is to integrate real-time parking guidance systems. So these are basically space availability wave-finding sites that we can post strategically at the north and south of town as people come in
01:49:38.53	Wayne Kwan	on 101 and Bridgeway, it basically helped direct them to where the open spaces are.
01:49:43.78	Wayne Kwan	Um,
01:49:46.41	Wayne Kwan	And it'll help reduce congestion with people circling around looking for spaces and also help enhance the visitors overall experience.
01:49:57.50	Wayne Kwan	Next, please.
01:50:01.04	Wayne Kwan	Priority number five. So we also want to expand paid parking to lot five. So we currently have a lot five located at Bridgeway and Locust. Currently right now, this is a three-hour first-come-first-serve free parking.
01:50:15.74	Wayne Kwan	You can park up to three hours for free. After that, you're subject to a citation.
01:50:20.80	Wayne Kwan	A proposal here is where we can convert this to a million lot five and mirror it just like lot four in all of our million lots to be a pay parking lot.
01:50:29.49	Wayne Kwan	And we can also utilize this as an opportunity for employee daily parking for all the employees that work in Caledonia Street.
01:50:40.80	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:50:44.23	Wayne Kwan	So I want to talk a little bit back in December of 24 staff submitted an application for some grant funding that was available through the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, aka MTC.
01:50:58.97	Wayne Kwan	I'd like to update that.
01:51:00.78	Wayne Kwan	As of last week...
01:51:02.97	Wayne Kwan	we got noticed that Sauslio was awarded a partial grant of $500,000.
01:51:09.98	Wayne Kwan	so i'd like to also point out that um we didn't have time to draft up the official staff report so that'll be forthcoming in the next um
01:51:18.63	Wayne Kwan	Submit for the next council meeting.
01:51:22.80	Wayne Kwan	I also want to point out that
01:51:25.82	Wayne Kwan	The grant also has a lot of steps in order to obligate the funds and support. And so I'll explain all that in the next report.
01:51:36.69	Wayne Kwan	And also as a quick reminder, back in 2024,
01:51:41.82	Wayne Kwan	MTC awarded a grant for a parking study by a transportation consultant firm, Fair and Peers. That is currently in the works right now, and a formal presentation will be forthcoming.
01:51:56.60	Wayne Kwan	And as far as the RFP process, so also want to point out that staff, we're ready to secure additional vendors and equipment through an RFP process, regardless of where, how we utilize the grant, or we have funding, or we can use like city funding, we'd like to be able to secure, just need to understand how much we can secure as we move forward.
01:52:23.06	Wayne Kwan	Next slide, please.
01:52:25.69	Wayne Kwan	So in conclusion, so I would like to present this as an investing opportunity in these priorities. So
01:52:34.86	Wayne Kwan	Investing in upgrading these parking priorities will help modernize our current parking systems. It's going to help improve our customer's satisfaction. It helps strengthen revenue collection. And also help establish a strong foundation for future improvements.
01:52:50.94	Wayne Kwan	and also help ensure Salt Stale parking systems are modern, efficient, and meet the community needs.
01:52:59.58	Mayor Cox	That's all.
01:53:00.32	Wayne Kwan	Any questions?
01:53:02.43	Mayor Cox	All right. Thank you all so much. Any questions?
01:53:09.38	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
01:53:09.42	Unknown	I just want to say, oh, sorry.
01:53:14.01	Councilmember Hoffman	No questions, are we supposed to give feedback?
01:53:18.43	Mayor Cox	Yeah, but this is a special presentation, so we're not giving feedback tonight. We'll have an opportunity to give feedback as a part of the budgeting process. Okay. I do want to say thank you all so very much for this very comprehensive report, and I know that Councilmember Sobieski wants to say. Yeah, I just want to say. Same.
01:53:27.25	Kathy Nikitas	Thank you.
01:53:27.29	Unknown	Okay.
01:53:27.46	Kathy Nikitas	Thank you.
01:53:35.20	Unknown	I just want to say congratulations, Chief and Wayne. Awesome job on the presentation. I guess, yeah, lots of other parking stuff is great. Go for it. I love it. But the question I had was, you know, in San Francisco, people stopped getting arrested for shoplifting. There's a lot of shoplifting going on. I have benefited from getting a warning from Mac on his motorcycle. I've also been in the back of an Uber twice in town that got pulled over for speeding that got a warning both times.
01:54:09.95	Unknown	I never identified myself. I just was listening to how the interaction went. Very professional, awesome interaction.
01:54:16.14	Unknown	But that's been my experience is three warnings and no ticket.
01:54:20.97	Unknown	And I am just wondering what the thought is about how much that's a philosophy versus a and how that you heard the presentations on Saturday about increasing.
01:54:35.16	Unknown	enforcement of things, and I'm wondering if do we need more personnel to do more enforcement, or does there need to be, or could there be potentially a slight shift in philosophy on actually issuing a stick as well as a
01:54:51.88	Stacey Gregory	Yeah, so a couple comments on that. You're talking about the numbers that were presented. In 2008, we had 2,500 citations. In 2008 to 2000, I think it was 11, you couldn't drive one mile an hour over the speed limit in Sausalito without getting a citation. And that showed, and people knew that. Don't drive over the speed limit because you're going to get a ticket in Sausalito. So the philosophy has changed a little bit. In that time, we also had warning citations. So those were also counted. So as you talk about, you know, getting pulled over and being given a warning, there's no number attached to that. And so we are bringing back warning citations, so we'll have more to count. But I also want to say that counting doesn't necessarily mean success. You know, sometimes us just being there, a lot of times we'll park a car, and that's success. So there's a lot of things that we do that provide that success, I'd say. So citation numbers in and of itself doesn't show that we're either doing or not doing our work.
01:56:09.17	Stacey Gregory	Um, but we, we, you know, we are bringing those back. So we have more to count and, you know, so we can hold our officers accountable too. You know, you're out there giving warnings. Well, show us.
01:56:19.78	Stacey Gregory	Right. So, you know, that's a two-edged thing there. The other thing I was going to say, I forgot.
01:56:29.34	Stacey Gregory	Anyway, that's my answer.
01:56:31.56	Unknown	Was it about needing more resources or not for...
01:56:34.85	Stacey Gregory	I don't think so. All right, thanks.
01:56:37.05	Stacey Gregory	But well, and I have one other thing I want to say that we forgot to talk about in our presentation was that we are trying to hold a sentence police academy. And so for those that are here in the room or listening, we have nine people. We need to get to at least 12 to feel comfortable holding a class. So for those that are watching, listening, if you're interested in what we do and who we are, please apply to this in police academy so we can get a class rolling and make new friends.
01:57:03.46	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
01:57:05.06	Mayor Cox	Thank you. So although this is a special presentation, because I did ask you to talk about budget, and because you are a city department, I am going to open this up for public comment. Public comment will be limited to two minutes per person. City Clerk, do you have any speaker cards?
01:57:22.98	Mayor Cox	Thank you. All right. First speaker card I have is Tammy Edmondson.
01:57:33.09	Tammy Edmondson	Good evening, Tammy Edmondson, I'm with MV Free.
01:57:36.84	Tammy Edmondson	And just want to
01:57:38.61	Tammy Edmondson	take us back for just a second to talk about the RIPA data.
01:57:42.57	Tammy Edmondson	MB Free has been analyzing Marin County RIPA data and working with the Mill Valley Police Department on equitable policing strategies recommended by the RIPA board since 2021. And in fact, the 123 bias by proxy campaign that was mentioned in the report, we created that. So I'm very happy to see Sausalito has adopted it.
01:58:07.19	Tammy Edmondson	That campaign, together with some RIPA-recommended policies and protocols, actually reduced race-based calls for service in Mill Valley by 25% in the first year. So a really impactful thing to do. So glad to see you're doing it.
01:58:25.15	Tammy Edmondson	Um,
01:58:26.13	Tammy Edmondson	Recently, MB Free has been meeting with law enforcement and elected leaders all around the county and with the San Rafael Police Department.
01:58:36.30	Tammy Edmondson	accountability and advisory commission. I wanna make sure I get that correct.
01:58:38.19	Catie Thow Garcia	THE ADVISORY COMMISSIONER.
01:58:42.41	Tammy Edmondson	to basically help folks understand and
01:58:47.32	Tammy Edmondson	and address the really groundbreaking findings in this year's RIPA report.
01:58:52.60	Tammy Edmondson	And with the time I have, I'm not going to go into what that is, but really important things have been discovered in this year's RIPA report. So we'd love to include Sausalito in those conversations. I hope you're interested. We don't charge for this service. We're just interested in helping to advance safe and equitable policing throughout the community.
01:59:14.80	Tammy Edmondson	And I'd like to suggest perhaps a meeting with one or two council members. They don't want to run a foul of the Brown Act. Be happy to include a member of the police department to just talk about what we can bring to the table.
01:59:27.28	Tammy Edmondson	With the time I have, I have a few cards with my contact information. I'd like to bring them up, if I may.
01:59:35.92	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much. Next speaker is Damian Morgan.
01:59:40.29	Mayor Cox	Your time is up, ma'am.
01:59:46.16	Mayor Cox	I don't know what that means.
01:59:50.20	Mayor Cox	Oh, sorry.
01:59:50.86	Mayor Cox	Okay, Frank Shinnaman.
01:59:56.00	Frank Shinderman	Thank you. My name is Frank Shinderman. I'm also with MTV Free. I wanted to briefly touch on this year's
02:00:01.64	Frank Shinderman	Ripper Report.
02:00:02.97	Frank Shinderman	and why it's different and how it allows us to make more productive approach to Marin's racial stop disparities. Until now, because RIPA was phased in over time, we've had incomplete data and had to address the question of stop disparities one agency at a time.
02:00:20.66	Frank Shinderman	As a lieutenant.
02:00:21.45	Frank Shinderman	Mather correctly pointed out.
02:00:23.93	Frank Shinderman	There are some of the challenges in trying to quantify precise racial stop disparities for single agencies and particularly small jurisdictions that have heavy visitor traffic like Zasalito.
02:00:35.14	Frank Shinderman	But now for the first time,
02:00:36.77	Frank Shinderman	The RIPA board has analyzed two full years of demographic data.
02:00:40.96	Frank Shinderman	on every police stop in the state, over 4.7 million stops per year.
02:00:46.26	Frank Shinderman	This comprehensive analysis conclusively demonstrates a pervasive state and countywide pattern of large.
02:00:52.13	Frank Shinderman	policing disparities for black and Latinx people.
02:00:55.72	Frank Shinderman	And it shows that the disparities are not justified by finding the criminal conduct.
02:01:00.70	Frank Shinderman	The black and Latinx disparities are present in more than 90% of the state agencies and 100% of Marin County agencies. In the face of these widespread systemic disparities, allocating precise degrees of responsibility to a particular agency,
02:01:15.22	Frank Shinderman	is a needless and divisive distraction.
02:01:17.78	Frank Shinderman	Our focus needs to be on eliminating the harms
02:01:20.38	Frank Shinderman	tumor in communities of color.
02:01:22.45	Frank Shinderman	from these proven policing
02:01:24.12	Frank Shinderman	disparities.
02:01:25.52	Frank Shinderman	What we can do to reduce the racial
02:01:27.94	Frank Shinderman	profiling disparities that will not compromise legitimate law enforcement interests.
02:01:32.48	Frank Shinderman	And we'd hope that we could do that.
02:01:34.30	Frank Shinderman	with you together with MV Free.
02:01:37.12	Frank Shinderman	Thank you very much.
02:01:39.18	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:01:40.04	Mayor Cox	Next is Damian Morgan.
02:01:47.75	Mayor Cox	Welcome. Thank you. Hello, everyone.
02:01:50.79	Damian Morgan	It's interesting that the South Central Police Department wants to push the bias by proxy program for the betterment of.
02:02:00.24	Damian Morgan	black and brown folk
02:02:01.76	Damian Morgan	Even the police department themselves don't
02:02:05.05	Damian Morgan	Police that way.
02:02:07.60	Damian Morgan	just a few months ago in these chambers here.
02:02:10.23	Damian Morgan	Stacey Gregory herself
02:02:12.03	Damian Morgan	Follow me.
02:02:13.01	Damian Morgan	harassed me.
02:02:15.27	Damian Morgan	in these chambers.
02:02:16.39	Damian Morgan	Just recently.
02:02:18.78	Damian Morgan	I'm born and raised here.
02:02:20.20	Damian Morgan	And they have a history.
02:02:22.24	Damian Morgan	of harassing black drivers.
02:02:24.42	Damian Morgan	from Renn City.
02:02:26.14	Damian Morgan	in the streets of Sausalito.
02:02:27.85	Damian Morgan	Many years of it.
02:02:29.26	Damian Morgan	And we have data, I have data going back 30 years from DA's office that proves
02:02:34.93	Damian Morgan	what I'm saying.
02:02:36.32	Damian Morgan	So to say bias by proxy, we're pushing that program, that's baloney.
02:02:42.34	Damian Morgan	because Stacey has harassed me
02:02:44.03	Damian Morgan	more than once.
02:02:45.28	Damian Morgan	And every time you harass me,
02:02:47.66	Damian Morgan	I will file a complaint.
02:02:50.24	Damian Morgan	Every time.
02:02:53.27	Damian Morgan	And to the black and brown folk who are watching and listening, when they harass you, they pull you over, file a complaint.
02:03:01.14	Damian Morgan	Period.
02:03:02.81	Damian Morgan	That's what they bank on, people not filing complaints.
02:03:05.97	Damian Morgan	So going back to
02:03:07.70	Damian Morgan	Uh,
02:03:08.68	Damian Morgan	the early 90s when this police department shot a guy
02:03:12.66	Damian Morgan	Travis White that I grew up with from Ren City at 7-Eleven over 25 cent candy bar.
02:03:20.04	Damian Morgan	That's what they're about.
02:03:22.64	Damian Morgan	I don't care when it was, be quiet while I'm talking.
02:03:25.69	Damian Morgan	Uh, they
02:03:26.86	Damian Morgan	I have a history of harassing people,
02:03:29.66	Damian Morgan	for decades and the data shows it well before
02:03:34.62	Damian Morgan	Rip a data, I have a data. So it's interesting and
02:03:40.69	Damian Morgan	you know,
02:03:42.58	Damian Morgan	It won't stop.
02:03:44.37	Damian Morgan	It won't curtail.
02:03:45.94	Damian Morgan	until you file complaints and file lawsuits.
02:03:51.68	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Next is Ava Krasanth.
02:04:00.56	Eva Cresanti	Thank you, Eva Cresanti. I just want to note that while Mr. Morgan was trying to speak, one of your lovely white elderly residents was interrupting him and mocking him. And I do want to point out that the man who was shot by your police department, Travis White, was a very slight man. And he was shot in the back of the leg by your police officers as he was fleeing because they'd already sicked a police dog on him. I want to talk a little bit about your body cam, which you're spending a lot of money on. What the September 26 body cam shows is that your officers aren't even turning it on per Lexapro guidelines. They're turning on
02:04:45.24	Eva Cresanti	midpoint in any incident i would like to know where uh in the statistics i was counted because they used force to remove me when i was civilly exercising my first amendment rights very politely to raise the issue of the cost of the war on local budgets the war that we are funding the genocide that we are funding that israel's committing against palestinian civilians
02:05:10.59	Eva Cresanti	I was violently ejected. I was unlawfully ejected.
02:05:15.38	Eva Cresanti	Uh...
02:05:16.83	Eva Cresanti	I also want to bring up that the bias by proxy should have stopped that because what the police report indicates, despite all its errors, is that this was done at the behest of Melissa Blaustein, who is a member of JCRC Banjo,
02:05:32.63	Eva Cresanti	which is a de facto lobbying group for Israel.
02:05:36.51	Eva Cresanti	Uh...
02:05:37.67	Eva Cresanti	There was no reason that a reporter should have been manhandled in that particular way or at all. I wasn't doing anything illegal.
02:05:45.55	Eva Cresanti	Uh, I'd also like to point out that, uh, and I, I thank Tammy Edmondson for bringing it up, but
02:05:50.82	Eva Cresanti	That bias by proxy program that you incepted as appears to have been done by court, not court order, but as a settlement term. So it wasn't by choice. You needed to do it to get a lower settlement. Thank you.
02:06:01.09	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much.
02:06:03.51	Mayor Cox	We got together.
02:06:06.49	Mayor Cox	All right, and Bebette McDougall.
02:06:07.94	Eva Cresanti	Thank you.
02:06:17.26	Babette McDougall	Thank you for acknowledging me, Babette MacDougall, a local resident.
02:06:21.04	Babette McDougall	So thanks for opening the public comment for these three presentations because they were
02:06:25.16	Babette McDougall	Very instructive.
02:06:26.69	Babette McDougall	in so many ways and they overlap and
02:06:29.90	Babette McDougall	remarkable ways. It's too bad that so many of the representatives are not still in the room to hear some of the feedback.
02:06:36.70	Babette McDougall	So with regard to PG&E,
02:06:39.13	Babette McDougall	I think the gentleman who spoke is a really good example of some of the fine people who are truly
02:06:46.52	Babette McDougall	the best part of PG&E.
02:06:48.98	Babette McDougall	The ugly part of PG&E is that it's a really
02:06:53.20	Babette McDougall	unpleasant.
02:06:54.37	Babette McDougall	corporate neighbor. You know, it's owned by the guy that ran Enron. I used to work with him.
02:07:00.16	Babette McDougall	I know what he's like. He's out of prison now.
02:07:03.14	Babette McDougall	So PG&E is not really doing great for residents, and I'm a resident.
02:07:08.91	Babette McDougall	PG&E forces residents to pay the most money
02:07:13.34	Babette McDougall	above everybody else.
02:07:15.09	Babette McDougall	starting at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Monday through Friday through 9 p.m.
02:07:19.24	Babette McDougall	We get penalized if we have families. We get penalized if we want our children to do homework
02:07:24.39	Babette McDougall	A lamp.
02:07:25.16	Babette McDougall	We get penalized if we want to sit down and have a meal. We get penalized if we turn on the heat if it's cold.
02:07:30.53	Babette McDougall	Or if it's hot, we get penalized or if we put a fan on. We get penalized for being a family.
02:07:36.42	Babette McDougall	What kind of corporate neighbor does that?
02:07:38.36	Babette McDougall	They earn
02:07:39.90	Babette McDougall	money over their best market expectations. They are not a public benefit corporation, they are a privately held, publicly traded corporation.
02:07:49.67	Babette McDougall	The rate payers are not their priority. The shareholders are their one priority.
02:07:56.03	Babette McDougall	So I really think it's time for us to think about this relationship with PG&E.
02:08:00.52	Babette McDougall	It's not okay for them to keep coming in and wanting to take over our town.
02:08:04.91	Babette McDougall	Section by section. Somebody really needs to stand up to it. I think we started on Saturday.
02:08:10.52	Babette McDougall	Clearly.
02:08:11.40	Babette McDougall	3D got pulled, so that's another fight for another day. But why does it have to be one piece at a time their way? Thank you.
02:08:18.56	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much.
02:08:19.82	Mayor Cox	All right, that concludes our special guest.
02:08:21.09	Unknown	We actually have somebody online.
02:08:23.03	Linda Pfeiffer	Thank you.
02:08:23.05	Mayor Cox	Okay.
02:08:23.45	Unknown	Thank you.
02:08:23.98	Unknown	uh linda uh linda pfeiffer
02:08:30.98	Linda Pfeiffer	Yes, can you hear me okay?
02:08:32.83	Mayor Cox	Yes. Yes. Welcome.
02:08:33.04	Linda Pfeiffer	Yes.
02:08:33.81	Linda Pfeiffer	Okay.
02:08:34.61	Linda Pfeiffer	My name is Linda Pfeiffer and I'm a Saucyutel resident and I want to thank
02:08:40.29	Linda Pfeiffer	Sausalito's police department for outstanding service to our community. We need to make greater investments in our police force. We need to hire more officers. I am so proud of Sausalito's Finest. And I want to thank Chief Stacey Gregory in particular. She has extensive experience in her profession.
02:09:01.20	Linda Pfeiffer	and a deep understanding of the daily challenges so unique to Sausalito. So thank you very much. Very great. A really informative presentation.
02:09:11.07	Linda Pfeiffer	that I think a lot of people learned a lot about
02:09:14.13	Linda Pfeiffer	with regards to the challenges facing our local
02:09:18.55	Linda Pfeiffer	police department, and I know we all support them.
02:09:25.79	Unknown	We do have another commenter.
02:09:27.98	Unknown	Thank you.
02:09:35.05	Pat Zook	Can you hear me?
02:09:36.23	Unknown	Yes.
02:09:37.09	Pat Zook	Hi, this is Pat Zook, Sausalito resident
02:09:40.33	Pat Zook	And I'd like to comment on something that I think you actually have control over.
02:09:44.84	Pat Zook	And that is how you handle upgrading the parking equipment.
02:09:48.74	Pat Zook	I know it's boring, but
02:09:50.97	Pat Zook	Thank you.
02:09:51.39	Pat Zook	I have an opinion and I'd like to express it. As someone who's been around for some time and seen several turnovers of various equipment at various costs for various periods of time, I'd like to see any analysis that goes into upgrading our equipment include
02:10:09.81	Pat Zook	a calculation of the payback.
02:10:12.84	Pat Zook	that we can expect.
02:10:14.47	Pat Zook	the length of time that we can expect the investment to return
02:10:19.28	Pat Zook	a reasonable amount of money.
02:10:21.37	Pat Zook	And
02:10:22.84	Pat Zook	as well.
02:10:24.12	Pat Zook	an analysis of the impact that the recent changes in our parking capacity
02:10:30.15	Pat Zook	We'll have
02:10:31.87	Pat Zook	created in terms of budgetary
02:10:34.79	Pat Zook	generation.
02:10:36.53	Pat Zook	We've lost quite a bit of
02:10:39.40	Pat Zook	Parking.
02:10:40.16	Pat Zook	off street parking.
02:10:41.64	Pat Zook	And I'm not sure that the million nine that we have received in the past
02:10:46.48	Pat Zook	Is a reasonably.
02:10:48.10	Pat Zook	a good expectation.
02:10:49.98	Pat Zook	but,
02:10:50.69	Pat Zook	Every so often, every five or 10 or seven years,
02:10:54.82	Pat Zook	We spend millions of dollars to exchange existing equipment. It may be a good idea, but I think we should have an analysis of whether or not it is. Thank you.
02:11:06.70	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:11:08.25	Unknown	No further public comments.
02:11:09.89	Mayor Cox	All right, so that wraps up our special presentations for the evening. We will move on now to communications. I do want to let you know that Council Member Blaustein was called away and will not be able to attend the balance of this meeting this evening.
02:11:28.86	Mayor Cox	All right, next is communications. This is the time for the City Council to hear from citizens regarding matters within the jurisdiction of the City Council that are not on the agenda, except in very limited situations. State law precludes the Council from taking action on or engaging in discussions concerning items that are not on the agenda. And so again, we will be giving folks two minutes apiece. The first is Babette McDougall.
02:12:01.90	Babette McDougall	If this were a raffle, I'd be a winner.
02:12:04.97	Babette McDougall	Thank you for acknowledging me, Babette McDougall, Sausalito resident. So during this particular portion, I would like to raise the issue of small-D democracy once again, U.S. Government 101. I just want us to remind each other and ourselves that when we take an oath,
02:12:25.02	Babette McDougall	It's not just a convenient facilitation to get to sit in the chair, whether it's this chair or the chair of the Supreme Court or some other chair that requires taking an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States is right in this room.
02:12:44.49	Babette McDougall	I mean, most of us have this far away idea of what it means, you know, oh sure, I'll uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, but I don't think a lot of people take it quite seriously.
02:12:47.46	Catie Thow Garcia	know,
02:12:54.58	Babette McDougall	I don't think if they took it seriously, illegal meetings would not be convened, for example, to try to push through the agenda of the corporation that was here earlier.
02:13:04.10	Babette McDougall	Things like this wouldn't be going on in America right now if we took that oath of office seriously.
02:13:10.19	Babette McDougall	So I'm asking you because an oath taker is someone that is, for all intent and purposes, like the stones and the bricks that create the fortress that protects a village. I think about the Great Wall of China, for example. It's visible from out of space. That is not an offensive posture.
02:13:31.15	Babette McDougall	That thing was built to defend marauding invaders from the villages.
02:13:37.31	Babette McDougall	And I think we need to think of our elected officials who swear an oath to protect our rights as guaranteed in the Constitution.
02:13:45.43	Babette McDougall	should think of themselves as like those bricks in that wall. Now, if you violate your oath or decide that it's not important to exercise it, that's like...
02:13:55.03	Babette McDougall	Slamming a hole in that wall, the integrity suffers. So please remember, we protect ourselves through you. You're our wall. Thank you.
02:14:02.88	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:14:04.41	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Next is Ava Cresante.
02:14:11.16	Mayor Cox	I'll call Bob Middlestadt.
02:14:22.79	Bob Middlestead	Thanks.
02:14:24.29	Bob Middlestead	Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Welcome.
02:14:27.58	Bob Middlestead	I'm Bob Middlestead. I'm a retired lawyer who commuted by bicycle from Kent Field to my San Francisco law firm for many, many years. The highlight of my trip was always coming around the bend on Bridgeway and seeing the city.
02:14:42.53	Bob Middlestead	I mean this very respectfully.
02:14:45.20	Bob Middlestead	I know this is too little, too late.
02:14:48.22	Bob Middlestead	But I want to share some observations about Saturday, sort of as a postmortem, and this will summarize my written comments, which were submitted this afternoon, starting with two pieces of what I think are common ground. The first is, if at all possible, a separate bike lane and separate car lanes are ideal, better than sharing them.
02:15:10.17	Bob Middlestead	The second is that
02:15:12.28	Bob Middlestead	There should be a strong reason.
02:15:15.12	Bob Middlestead	before turning down half a million dollars, which would provide separate bike lanes along with pedestrian safety and resealing the street. And so I listened for what that strong reason was, and what I heard mostly discussed was the response time. So I looked at the staff report, and here's what it said. Emergency services are confident that any reconfiguration that retains the street curb-to-curb width, such as the repurposing of the center lane, will not hinder emergency circulation along this section of Bridgeway.
02:15:53.19	Bob Middlestead	Then there were questions about...
02:15:56.29	Bob Middlestead	Uh,
02:15:57.31	Bob Middlestead	Did you see anything that would show a faster response time?
02:16:01.03	Bob Middlestead	But nobody was asked, did you see anything that showed a slower response time? And nobody was asked what I thought was the key question, which is, if two configurations have about the same response time, but one makes the road safer for bikes and cars, wouldn't that be preferable?
02:16:18.97	Bob Middlestead	Thank you.
02:16:19.33	Bob Middlestead	That's what I thought was missing. But I respect what you're doing. Thank you very much.
02:16:25.10	Mayor Cox	Thank you very much.
02:16:26.41	Mayor Cox	Avery Corizante.
02:16:42.50	Eva Cresanti	I just want to note that as we go on about these mundane issues here in California, where we have good clean water and food and electricity,
02:16:55.78	Eva Cresanti	People in Gaza are suffering something unimaginable, and it's being done with our tax dollars. I was at the candidate forum on September 26th, and I was violently and unlawfully removed by our police officers simply because I raised the issue of the war costs.
02:17:12.75	Eva Cresanti	on local budgets. And it turns out that I was prescient. And it wasn't hard to be prescient about that.
02:17:20.62	Eva Cresanti	Um,
02:17:21.58	Eva Cresanti	I get it that I attended the Greek Orthodox Church as a girl. I get a daily update on what is going on at St. Porphyrios Church in Gaza. It is the Greek Orthodox, so the largest Christian population in Gaza. And I can't talk about what is happening there. It's horrific. I note that one of the organizers for the Women League of Women Voters is present. No one from that forum with all our talk about the Constitution, which you just heard about, democracy, small d democracy.
02:17:59.70	Eva Cresanti	and the First Amendment, no one reached out to me after that incident. And it is deeply disturbing that this goes on. 15 paramedics were just slaughtered by Israel. Their hands were tied. This was reported in the Guardian. You're not going to read it, I guess, in CNN. And that's why I'm here. That's why I rode my bike here from the East Bay today, to make sure that people in the county where I grew up are aware of what their tax dollars are doing. And if it meant that I got violently removed by your police officers, so be it. I'm not afraid of the Israel lobby.
02:18:38.19	Eva Cresanti	and no one should be. We're Americans. We have a right to ask questions about- Thank you, Ms. Cresante, your time is-
02:18:43.35	Mayor Cox	Thank you, Ms. Cresante. Your time has elapsed.
02:18:45.92	Unknown	Thank you.
02:18:47.56	Unknown	We have.
02:18:48.28	Unknown	We have some people online. I'll go with Pat and Seth.
02:18:56.08	Pat Zook	Am I unmuted?
02:18:57.78	Mayor Cox	You are. Thank you, Pat.
02:18:59.52	Pat Zook	Sure, thank you. I turned in, I tuned in earlier today and noticed that you were
02:19:04.47	Pat Zook	carrying on the interviews for the head and bike committee.
02:19:08.48	Pat Zook	And
02:19:09.39	Pat Zook	Without
02:19:10.61	Pat Zook	re litigating Saturday's hearing.
02:19:14.39	Pat Zook	I would like to suggest
02:19:16.21	Pat Zook	that you, before appointing people,
02:19:19.16	Pat Zook	Re-examine the mission of that committee if you choose to retain it.
02:19:24.12	Pat Zook	One of the problems I think
02:19:26.45	Pat Zook	of that, of the whole process.
02:19:29.49	Pat Zook	was that
02:19:31.31	Pat Zook	The committee and many people became advocates for a one size fits all.
02:19:38.72	Pat Zook	Uh,
02:19:39.87	Pat Zook	Configuration.
02:19:41.35	Pat Zook	without
02:19:43.11	Pat Zook	necessarily regard to other factors and other stakeholders.
02:19:48.71	Pat Zook	Um,
02:19:49.59	Pat Zook	I hope that if you do keep that committee, it is renamed
02:19:53.81	Pat Zook	And the mission is redirected to include
02:19:57.45	Pat Zook	both cost
02:19:58.87	Pat Zook	and benefit
02:20:00.14	Pat Zook	and impacts on businesses and residents, as well as bikes, which I think that committee became overly focused on.
02:20:13.82	Pat Zook	My humble opinion. Thanks for your efforts.
02:20:18.50	Mayor Cox	Thank you. You made the announcement at the commencement of interviews that that is precisely what we're planning to do, as well as the fact that the existing members of the PBAC tendered their resignations following Saturday's hearing.
02:20:36.45	Unknown	Who's next? Linda Pfeiffer.
02:20:42.20	Linda Pfeiffer	Can you hear me?
02:20:44.32	Mayor Cox	Yes, you're a little faint, but yes, we hear you.
02:20:46.46	Linda Pfeiffer	Thank you.
02:20:46.75	Linda Pfeiffer	Oh, okay.
02:20:48.94	Linda Pfeiffer	Hang on a minute. Let me just turn this up a little bit.
02:20:52.33	Linda Pfeiffer	Okay, my name is Linda Pfeiffer. I'm a resident of Sausalito, and last Saturday, residents successfully fought to save the Southern Marin
02:21:02.02	Linda Pfeiffer	a southern bridgeway middle median lane. But the bigger question is, why did residents have to fight for five months and spend thousands?
02:21:10.20	Linda Pfeiffer	thousands of dollars to save this median lane.
02:21:13.05	Linda Pfeiffer	when during the November election, residents were told the middle median lane would not be removed. And that is why
02:21:19.74	Linda Pfeiffer	I believe our council
02:21:21.20	Linda Pfeiffer	needs to conduct an independent investigation about why the middle median lane was
02:21:26.50	Linda Pfeiffer	was threatened after residents were assured it was safe from removal.
02:21:31.24	Linda Pfeiffer	We need, I believe, an investigation on
02:21:34.10	Linda Pfeiffer	How much staff time was spent the last five months supporting the median removal
02:21:39.12	Linda Pfeiffer	How much money was spent on the Parisi consulting firm the last five months? Why was the Parisi data all over the place the last five months between what was presented at the Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee in December versus
02:21:54.46	Linda Pfeiffer	I believe there was a meeting in January versus March.
02:21:58.13	Linda Pfeiffer	And most importantly, why did it take a Freedom of Information Act
02:22:03.26	Linda Pfeiffer	for residents to secure the city memo that documented police and fire department concerns over losing that middle median lane.
02:22:12.18	Linda Pfeiffer	A Freedom of Information Act.
02:22:14.44	Linda Pfeiffer	We need counsel to perform an independent investigation to answer these questions. Thank you.
02:22:23.05	Mayor Cox	Thank you. City Clerk.
02:22:23.89	Unknown	No further public speakers.
02:22:25.09	Mayor Cox	All right, then we're going to move on to our consent calendar. We have three items on our consent calendar, having removed item 3D. Are there any, I'll just read them off. 3A, adopt the draft meeting minutes from February 25, March 4, and March 7, 2025.
02:22:44.38	Mayor Cox	3B, reappointment of Nicholas Stevenson and Kimmery Wiltshire to second three-year terms to the Sustainability Commission. And 3C, adopt a resolution declaring one recreation vehicle as surplus and authorize the city manager to dispose of said vehicle at auction.
02:23:00.48	Mayor Cox	Any.
02:23:01.24	Mayor Cox	Questions?
02:23:03.08	Mayor Cox	Okay, I'll open it up to public comment. I will take public comment on items 3A through 3D.
02:23:09.78	Mayor Cox	See?
02:23:09.96	Unknown	none.
02:23:10.28	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:23:10.69	Mayor Cox	All right.
02:23:14.06	Mayor Cox	All right, kindly step forward.
02:23:17.37	Mayor Cox	No, you can just step forward.
02:23:26.35	Babette McDougall	Thank you.
02:23:27.82	Babette McDougall	Thank you. Once again, Babette McDougall, Sausalito resident.
02:23:31.99	Babette McDougall	I take great exception to the idea that you can even consider this March 7 minutes as a legal record of a legal meeting. The least you could do is note that it's an illegally run, illegally called meeting. The optics, by the way, were horrible. Whose idea was it? You look like you were reporting from a
02:23:53.60	Babette McDougall	bomb shelter in a banana republic, hiding from your own publics in this illegal meeting to conduct ridiculous business. Now you can shake your head as if, oh my God, what is she going to say next? But you have to hear this because it makes you
02:24:07.73	Babette McDougall	who represent our town.
02:24:11.10	Babette McDougall	look exactly like we don't want to look. Now maybe you all have friends and neighbors who live here who can't wait to see this whole place get turned upside down.
02:24:23.44	Babette McDougall	one block by one block.
02:24:25.93	Babette McDougall	to become something that it is not now and will never reflect what it is now if they have their way.
02:24:32.13	Babette McDougall	So this illegal meeting has got to somehow be, and bootstrapped it to the next legal meeting, the hearing,
02:24:38.78	Babette McDougall	Somehow you need to go back to the drawing board on these minutes because otherwise I find them quite unacceptable. They do not reflect reality.
02:24:45.81	Babette McDougall	in real time as it actually played out.
02:24:49.61	Babette McDougall	Now, I don't know what else to say to call this to your attention. Clearly, you're ignoring my words.
02:24:54.55	Babette McDougall	But that doesn't change the reality. The reality is the meeting was illegal.
02:24:59.23	Babette McDougall	It was not appropriately noticed. You took up the people's business illegally
02:25:04.73	Babette McDougall	This is not good.
02:25:06.67	Babette McDougall	And you don't even want to acknowledge this in any of the documents that acknowledge this meeting even took place, which I'm pleased to see that you did that much.
02:25:15.17	Babette McDougall	Thank you.
02:25:17.59	Unknown	No further public comments?
02:25:18.99	Mayor Cox	Thank you. I'm just gonna respond. This meeting in question was a special meeting called for March 7, 2025.
02:25:26.97	Mayor Cox	Following.
02:25:28.41	Mayor Cox	a
02:25:29.40	Mayor Cox	Uh,
02:25:30.35	Mayor Cox	You are not going to speak out.
02:25:32.37	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:25:32.41	Babette McDougall	Thank you.
02:25:32.42	Mayor Cox	Pardon me, I should have clarified that it was called a public hearing. Public comment has closed.
02:25:32.66	Babette McDougall	I should have clarified that.
02:25:37.43	Mayor Cox	Mm-hmm.
02:25:39.61	Mayor Cox	So this was initially noticed for March 4th as a public hearing properly noticed. We had to adjourn the public hearing on March 4th because of an Internet challenge. And so we called a special meeting on March 7th in order to meet a deadline. We then ratified the action that we took on March 7th at another properly noticed meeting to which the March 4th meeting was adjourned on March 18th, 2025. So there was nothing illegal about any of the process. Everything was properly noticed and properly conducted.
02:26:13.60	Mayor Cox	With that, I will close public comment, bring it up here for a motion on items 3A through 3C of the consent calendar.
02:26:21.22	Vice President	Move approval.
02:26:29.46	Mayor Cox	All right, is there a second for the consent calendar?
02:26:34.50	Mayor Cox	Second. All right.
02:26:37.15	Mayor Cox	I guess we'll take a roll call vote.
02:26:39.92	Unknown	Councilmember Hoffman.
02:26:49.56	Unknown	Councilmember Hoffman?
02:27:00.39	Councilmember Hoffman	Sorry, I'm concerned about the issues with the March 7th meeting.
02:27:06.77	Councilmember Hoffman	I was, I guess, not aware that there was an issue about whether or not the March 7th meeting was properly called, but I was aware that we subsequently ratified our actions. I don't think the issues, though, about the minutes of the March 7th meeting were.
02:27:24.88	Councilmember Hoffman	art issue.
02:27:25.92	Mayor Cox	Correct. The minutes are accurate. If there's a challenge on the noticing, that's a separate matter.
02:27:26.51	Councilmember Hoffman	The benefits.
02:27:32.08	Mayor Cox	correctly reflect the actions that were taken. I see that the city attorney has turned on his camera.
02:27:37.30	Sergio	Yeah, and I will just briefly note that that March 7th meeting is a special meeting under the Brown Act.
02:27:43.30	Sergio	The Brown Act requires only 24 hours notice of a special meeting.
02:27:47.69	Sergio	24 hours notice was given. The meeting agenda was posted in the manner required by the Brown Act.
02:27:53.58	Sergio	I think the only concern was
02:27:55.83	Sergio	whether or not the hearing notice procedures were followed for the one agenda item
02:28:01.66	Sergio	And for that reason, the city council also took action on March 18th to
02:28:08.09	Sergio	reaffirm and ratify its prior action.
02:28:11.45	Sergio	for which notice was given in the matter required by the municipal code.
02:28:15.50	Councilmember Hoffman	And if there was an issue with the March 7th meeting, we subsequently cured that.
02:28:19.65	Councilmember Hoffman	with the later action.
02:28:21.02	Sergio	That is correct, yes.
02:28:22.57	Councilmember Hoffman	And there
02:28:22.98	Mayor Cox	No one pulled that off consent. No one raised any...
02:28:26.98	Mayor Cox	challenges or concerns
02:28:29.07	Mayor Cox	at the March 18th meeting.
02:28:30.57	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:28:30.60	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay.
02:28:31.28	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay, thank you for clarifying that, and thank you for raising that to our attention so that we could address that at this time. So, okay, thank you. Is your vote yes for the consent calendar? My vote is yes. Thank you.
02:28:42.13	Mayor Cox	My vote is...
02:28:43.85	Unknown	Councilmember Sobieski, Vice Mayor Woodside, and Mayor Cox.
02:28:48.12	Mayor Cox	Yes, that motion carries unanimously with Councilmember Blaustein absent. All right, next we will move on to public hearing items. The first is 4A, Introduction by Title Only and Waiver of First Reading of Ordinance No. 03-2025, an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito amending Chapter 10.44.240, Formula Retail, Table 10.24-1, Land Uses in Commercial Districts, and Chapter 10.24.4.2 for a formula retail table 10.24 dash one land uses in commercial districts and chapter 10.24.0 for special requirements of title 10 of the Saucydeau municipal code and we welcome Matthew Mandich senior planner
02:29:08.17	Catie Thow Garcia	.443.
02:29:26.92	Matthew Mandich	Thank you, Mayor. And good evening, council members, vice mayor and mayor. Gonna go ahead and jump right in here because I know it's already been a little bit late evening. So can we get the next slide, please? Thank you. So yes, just to repeat the title again. So the request here is to conduct a public hearing and introduced by title only and waive first reading of ordinance number 02, 2025, an ordinance of the city council of the city of Sausalito amending chapter 10.44.240, which is on formula retail, corresponding table 10.2.
02:29:56.33	Matthew Mandich	for one lane season commercial districts and chapter 10.2 4040 which is special requirements for commercial districts of title 10 of the Sausalito municipal code next slide please
02:30:05.69	Matthew Mandich	So just to break down our current formula retail ordinance, it was adopted in 2003, later amended in 2007. It does require a conditional use permit or a CUP to establish a formula retail use in the city. This also comes with additional specific findings that are layered on top of the findings already required for a conditional use permit. It also requires a conditional use permit for the expansion of a formula retail establishment if that that expansion is 500 square feet or more, it limits formula retail to three of our six commercial districts. So it's limited currently to the CC, CS and CN zoning districts. And currently the definition of formula retail is a bit vague and does not clearly define how many locations or standardized elements constitute a formula retail business. Next slide, please.
02:30:51.12	Matthew Mandich	So some of the current issues and problems with the ordinance that we have right now is this requirement for the CUP. So a conditional use permit must run with the land and cannot be establishment specific. So the permit must be able to transfer over to subsequent purchasers of that parcel. So it needs to be with a land use, such as a restaurant use, versus a user, such as a McDonald's. So we can give a conditional use permit for a restaurant use that can transfer over to the next owner. If we gave a conditional use permit for solely for a McDonald's, for example, that could only transfer over to another McDonald's. So it needs to be a use rather than a user. Specific subjective findings are also included in the current CUP with the additional findings required on top of it. And there was a recent measure several years back, Malibu Measure R, that did lose in court when it came to a cup being required for formula retail establishments um again to reiterate formula retail is not clearly defined in our current code uh the current definition is vague and could apply to almost all businesses in the city with a logo sign or trademark um and the current ordinance um also does increase risk to the city legally violates recent court rulings land use laws discussed currently a bit too vague to enforce and could be understood to discriminate against interstate commerce next slide please.
02:31:32.35	Catie Thow Garcia	There was a...
02:31:32.58	Unknown	Thank you.
02:31:32.60	Catie Thow Garcia	the
02:32:07.35	Matthew Mandich	So we have some changes to try to clean this ordinance up, professionalize it a bit and bring it up to current standards. One of those is the removal of the CUP requirement and instead the adoption of a formula retail zoning clearance, which would work like an OUP or an occupational use permit.
02:32:23.55	Matthew Mandich	um formula retail zoning clearances would be allocated by zoning district so each zoning district would have a set number of clearances they would be allowed and once that number was reached there would be no more clearances given for that zoning district these would be approved administratively by the planning department in a streamlined fashion as opposed to a discretionary review we also want to clearly define formula retail and the new ordinance and to do that we've defined it as a business with six or more locations worldwide and two or more standard elements as defined in the code. Existing formula retail establishments will receive a zoning clearance. So those current establishments that we have in the city of formula retail will also count against that zoning clearance total. And certain uses are also exempt, such as grocery stores, pharmacy, banks, medical, real estate, service stations, movie theaters and couriers. So those will not require zoning clearances, formula retail zoning clearances. We've also included the commercial waterfront district. That is an additional add. It was not a commercial district that was previously included. This is the kind of increased economic development opportunities in that area, especially as much of that district borders along Bridgeway. We'll be amending the corresponding table 1024 accordingly, and also adopting a prohibition of fast food drive throughs in the special requirements section.
02:33:39.43	Matthew Mandich	Next slide. Thank you. So this was discussed to previous hearings by the planning commission before making its way to the Council. Some of the concerns of the Commission originally revolved around the issue of losing that discretionary approval process and relinquishing control of that in favor of an administrative approval. They wanted some more clarification on how these zoning clearances would be issued and tracked. They also recommended the consolidation of the CN district from CM1 and CN2 to just CN. They wanted also to understand how we would address a change in business status. So we've defined formula retail as being six or more businesses worldwide. What if you have a business that's five and then it moves to six thereby becoming formula? What if you have one that's six and it drops down to five? Talk about how we're gonna deal with that. And then other key changes include the updates that we've already talked about previously. Next slide, please.
02:34:29.25	Matthew Mandich	So we did discuss this issue, and we spoke to legal counsel, city attorney on this. It's recommended that the CUP requirement and that approval process be removed because it invites too much risk to the city. Zoning clearances will be issued like occupational use permits and tracked via our internal software, Central Square, also known as TrackIt colloquially, and the city webpage. So those will be clear on the city webpage and for the public. These clearances will be issued by the director of CDD or his or her designee. We took on board the recommendation of the planning commission to consolidate CN1 and CN2 just to see it.
02:35:05.50	Matthew Mandich	And the planning commission approved of our addition of the CW district for further economic development in that area. The change in status of business that question we discussed on the last slide will basically be assessed every time a new formula retail application is received. So if we get a new application for formula retail in any zoning district, we'll go back and look and see if any of those businesses that currently have a formula retail clearance are still qualified as formula retail in case they were on the border as we previously discussed next slide please.
02:35:34.64	Matthew Mandich	So we have three existing formula retail businesses in the Central Commercial District. Those are Lappert's, Benetton, Crazy Shirt, and Ingle & Volkers, which is an exempt retail, so they don't count against those three. Two in the CN, which is 7-Eleven, and MJ Sushi, who will be opening soon, as well as an exempt service station, a Shell Gas, and exempt courier UPS. The CW currently has zero because formula retail was not allowed to locate in there previously. And the CS, although they have an exempt grocery store in Molly's own Molly stones also has zero. There's additional formula retail in the city, such as the FedEx and the industrial zone, which is an exempt courier and Sausalito equator in the CR zone, which is exempt due to a name change. Next slide, please.
02:36:15.82	Matthew Mandich	So here's a breakdown of how we're looking at proposed limits for each one of these zoning districts and what the existing and future. Capacities are for those so just to read through this list a little bit we have proposed limit of six formula retail for the central commercial they're currently three existing as discussed which means there's a future capacity of three there. CN district proposed limit of five currently two so you have a future capacity of three CW two as we discussed zero so two more and CS one zero and one next slide please.
02:36:46.97	Matthew Mandich	Here's just a map highlighting some of those districts just for the public here as well. CM1, CC, this is the new addition of the CW here in yellow, another neighborhood commercial, and CS and neighborhood commercial. Next slide, please.
02:37:03.10	Matthew Mandich	Also, just to be clear that, you know, any one of these uses still, if they require a discretionary permit for that zoning district will still require that discretionary permit. So, for example, you know, CUP is required for restaurants in the CN, for example. So if a Panera, let's say, wanted to move into the CN, they would still need a conditional use permit to be a restaurant in that area. So it doesn't get them out of the other requirements that are attached to the land uses, whatever those may be. So I just want to clarify that as well.
02:37:29.66	Matthew Mandich	Next slide, please.
02:37:31.42	Matthew Mandich	So that concludes the presentation. Recommendation is to move to approve the draft ordinance as proposed or with modifications that the council would like, continue the proposed ordinance for a second reading at the April 15th meeting, and authorize a summary of the ordinance to be published five days in advance of the second reading and for 15 days after its adoption. With that, I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you.
02:37:54.70	Mayor Cox	I'll start.
02:37:58.43	Mayor Cox	Well, because I used to be a planning commissioner and struggled with this for years. So, um...
02:38:03.88	Mayor Cox	I'm very interested in the removal of the CEP requirements.
02:38:10.48	Mayor Cox	Planning Commission had concern about that. I have concern about we are elected officials who are charged with maintaining
02:38:19.04	Mayor Cox	certain, you know, the character of the town. And I'm very concerned about abdicating that responsibility to staff, the majority of whom don't live here in Sausalito and aren't...
02:38:30.17	Mayor Cox	daily in touch with many of the residents here in Sausalito. So I'm very interested to hear why
02:38:35.89	Mayor Cox	there's a perception that
02:38:38.44	Mayor Cox	maintaining the CUP process we've had in place since at least 2003 invites risk.
02:38:45.60	Matthew Mandich	Um, I would actually defer that question to the city attorney and I see something on right now. Thank you.
02:38:50.09	Sergio	Yeah. So, uh, uh,
02:38:52.30	Sergio	Mayor, I think the answer to that is the Parker Cross Creek versus City of Malibu decision where the Court of Appeal held that a CUP requirement for formula retails violated basic principles of California land use law because it regulated the user requirements.
02:39:09.04	Sergio	basically, you know, whether or not it was a McDonald's or a pizza.
02:39:12.31	Sergio	ATTACKS.
02:39:12.92	Sergio	rather than a land use, i.e. whether it was a coffee shop or a restaurant. So on the basis of that case, I think that there is a potential risk to the city with regards to continuing to require a CUP permit or a similar kind of permit.
02:39:28.58	Sergio	That being said, the city can impose CUP requirements on, say, categories of
02:39:34.97	Sergio	businesses such as restaurants or
02:39:38.25	Sergio	you know, coffee shops or...
02:39:42.79	Sergio	you know, laundromats, what have you.
02:39:45.64	Sergio	The issue is, is if you're imposing higher permit requirements specifically on a business because it is, say, an out-of-state corporation or a chain, you may be inviting some additional litigation risk based on having higher permit requirements that...
02:40:02.34	Sergio	could be seen as targeting specifically out-of-state businesses.
02:40:07.31	Mayor Cox	But our formula retail, as we well know, targets just California businesses as well. So, you know, we made Barcelona make itself very distinct from its sister city organization in San Francisco. We required Firehouse Cafe to make itself distinct from its other locations. So rather than allowing this to be an administrative permit
02:40:38.17	Mayor Cox	issued by
02:40:39.39	Mayor Cox	Staff.
02:40:40.33	Mayor Cox	What is a mechanism to still have the planning commission
02:40:43.98	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:40:44.13	Mayor Cox	way in without it being a conditional use permit.
02:40:48.72	Sergio	Well, so you could still keep the zoning clearance structure, but instead of having it be issued by the community and economic development director, you could have it be issued by the planning commission.
02:41:00.33	Sergio	So I think that's fine. It would still...
02:41:03.45	Sergio	be a non-discretionary
02:41:06.59	Sergio	you know, verification of compliance with city municipal codes.
02:41:11.78	Sergio	But I think you would not have the risk of
02:41:15.25	Sergio	a legal challenge the same way that the city of Malibu faced, if you were to do that.
02:41:19.01	Mayor Cox	So even the ordinance's initial author, Ron Albert, thank you, Ron, expressed concern about delegating that authority to staff rather than an elected body.
02:41:35.56	Mayor Cox	Eat.
02:41:36.24	Mayor Cox	Do you believe so what we would do how we would do this is just change the ordinance to state that rather than it being the director, it would be it would continue to be a role of the planning commission.
02:41:54.04	Sergio	I think that is an option if the council would like to proceed in that manner.
02:41:57.97	Sergio	Okay.
02:42:00.37	Sergio	And that would just be a simple modification I think you could introduce on first reading.
02:42:04.74	Sergio	by modifying 1044, 240,
02:42:08.65	Sergio	C4 to read the planning commission shall issue a formula retail zoning clearance.
02:42:15.02	Mayor Cox	Okay.
02:42:15.96	Mayor Cox	And then this
02:42:18.46	Mayor Cox	The CS designation is shopping centers at the 7-eleven.
02:42:22.58	Matthew Mandich	No, Molly Stones.
02:42:24.25	Mayor Cox	Okay, but that's a shopping center. It's one store.
02:42:28.13	Matthew Mandich	It's a zoning overlay. CS is a zoning district in the city.
02:42:29.95	Mayor Cox	don't even know.
02:42:31.39	Mayor Cox	So...
02:42:32.87	Mayor Cox	um,
02:42:35.17	Mayor Cox	But right now it says formula retail by zone, proposed limit one, existing zero.
02:42:41.36	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:42:41.39	Matthew Mandich	Correct. Molly Stone's is an exempt grocery store.
02:42:41.69	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:42:46.30	Matthew Mandich	So if it were to vacate that space, there would be a formula retail.
02:42:50.76	Matthew Mandich	or it's available.
02:42:52.11	Mayor Cox	Got it.
02:42:53.95	Mayor Cox	Okay, those were my initial questions. I might have a couple of others. Yes, Councilmember Hoffman.
02:42:57.98	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, thank you so much. One of the issues when I saw this was, it's interesting that this came up at this point. It didn't seem to be a high priority on our priority list that we started off the year with, and when I was looking at what CDD was supposed to be working on in the context of our housing element and what our...
02:43:22.75	Councilmember Hoffman	our council was working on with priority lists, re-imagining formula retail ordinance didn't seem to be a priority either. So I don't know how this came up in the context of why it's a priority right now for us.
02:43:36.73	Councilmember Hoffman	I can give you two answers. Okay, go ahead.
02:43:36.89	Mayor Cox	I can give you two answers.
02:43:38.58	Mayor Cox	So the city attorney identified this at the beginning of last year as an ordinance that had legal risk for the reasons that were described tonight about the Malibu case. But also, we have a theater building that has been empty, and there have been a couple of different formula retail establishments that have expressed an interest in taking up the business, that first floor business, which is a great economic opportunity for the city, but they were daunted by the formula retail ordinance, which is difficult to interpret and apply in its current form.
02:43:49.74	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
02:43:49.77	Unknown	Thank you.
02:43:49.80	Catie Thow Garcia	Okay.
02:44:13.99	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay.
02:44:14.74	Councilmember Hoffman	All right, well thank you for that. So let me, I did actually, so I saw the citation, thank you, in the staff report, city attorney. So I did pull out the,
02:44:25.39	Councilmember Hoffman	Malibu case to read it and and looked at the applicability and I think
02:44:30.18	Councilmember Hoffman	you know, when I looked at
02:44:32.60	Councilmember Hoffman	the citation and the
02:44:35.48	Councilmember Hoffman	what the, you know, the facts of the case, I think it's, I'm not sure that it's actually, you know,
02:44:43.89	Councilmember Hoffman	The type of ordinance or the type of fact pattern there, I'm not entirely sure that we should be overly concerned about that being applied to our ordinance. They were talking about
02:44:56.90	Councilmember Hoffman	you know, an initiative that Malibu passed requiring a specific plan for every new commercial development over 2,000 square feet, that that was overly broad and that they were, it was specifically aimed at specific chain retail establishments and then illegally restricted transferability of conditional use permits. So I'm happy that this was highlighted and no doubt that there's some, you know, that this was extended and applied in certain ways that would be troublesome for us and might be extended to Sausalito and certainly we should keep an eye on these litigation risks and we need to, you know, keep an eye on this, but I too am concerned about removing
02:45:40.32	Councilmember Hoffman	discretionary approval from the planning commission and um i don't want to jump into this too quickly and i know that um our town is so small and and especially when you're talking about the commercial neighborhood districts where the um where the the storefronts are so close to the housing um in fact most of the town but particularly in our commercial neighborhood districts. And storefronts are so close to the housing in fact most of the town but particularly in our commercial neighborhood districts and the fact that I think this is a third time this has been on the our agenda and twice before people have shown up and given public comments from those neighborhoods I don't know if they're going to be able to be here tonight I know at least least in one of the districts, the neighbors are out of town, and they're not going to be able to come tonight and speak. But they did come the last time that this was on the agenda, and it was taken off. And so, you know, people in our town want to be able to weigh in on what's going to be right next door to them and right in their neighborhood. And we don't necessarily feel comfortable with it being an administrative approval without neighbors being able to weigh in about impacts on their neighborhood or weigh in in support of something in their neighborhood. And when I see in the commercial neighborhoods, the proposal
02:47:12.76	Councilmember Hoffman	of also consolidating the districts. There's three currently across town. There's one on each end of town and one in the middle.
02:47:25.62	Councilmember Hoffman	and consolidating them and presumably you could consolidate all of the all of the impact they're tiny little districts consolidate all of the formula retail permits into one neighborhood so conversely you're consolidating all of the benefits into one neighborhood or the opposite you're consolidating all of the
02:47:48.57	Councilmember Hoffman	impacts or negative impacts into one of the tiny neighborhoods and then all the permits are gone
02:47:54.08	Councilmember Hoffman	So once you use all these permits,
02:47:56.70	Councilmember Hoffman	They're gone until...
02:47:58.61	Councilmember Hoffman	one of them lapses and then
02:48:00.82	Councilmember Hoffman	somebody else comes in and...
02:48:02.62	Councilmember Hoffman	Snaps another one up.
02:48:04.16	Councilmember Hoffman	And then
02:48:05.85	Councilmember Hoffman	Residents don't have a way to weigh in because it's something that's going to be stamped up at the desk. So I think...
02:48:12.68	Councilmember Hoffman	I think the Malibu case is a complicated case.
02:48:19.70	Councilmember Hoffman	I think that it was a...
02:48:22.50	Councilmember Hoffman	an initiative passed by the city of Malibu. I think that might have had something to do with the second district court of appeals in their decision. And I think maybe some further
02:48:36.46	Councilmember Hoffman	Can I just remind you, we're in the question
02:48:36.58	Mayor Cox	Can I just...
02:48:37.03	Catie Thow Garcia	to see.
02:48:38.69	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah. Portion now?
02:48:40.76	Councilmember Hoffman	question to our city attorney is, I don't know how much we looked at how this decision was further, I don't know, further vetted with or explained in subsequent cases in towns of our size or further explained. Did you look at that?
02:49:03.00	Sergio	There have been no subsequent decisions, as far as I'm aware.
02:49:07.02	Sergio	I prefer to talk to you offline.
02:49:10.01	Sergio	frankly, about any concerns that you have.
02:49:10.19	Unknown	Thank you.
02:49:10.21	Councilmember Hoffman	frankly, about any concerns that you have.
02:49:12.13	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
02:49:12.62	Councilmember Hoffman	Yeah, I'm sorry.
02:49:13.94	Babette McDougall	Thank you.
02:49:14.48	Babette McDougall	Thank you.
02:49:14.50	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay. Yeah, I'm happy to do that.
02:49:17.48	Mayor Cox	Any other questions of staff?
02:49:19.98	Vice President	Quick question to the city attorney. You're recommending that we adopt this ordinance, and you further, well, let me just stop there and ask a subsequent question after that.
02:49:30.41	Sergio	Yes. Yeah, I do recommend it. In the present form, I have no legal concerns about it before you. I will also note that this...
02:49:40.33	Sergio	ordinance that is before you got a recommendation from the planning commission.
02:49:46.61	Sergio	I'm just checking the resolution as to the vote of that.
02:49:50.81	Sergio	Ah.
02:49:52.48	Sergio	And that was a unanimous vote of the Planning Commission to put the text before you today.
02:49:57.20	Vice President	Thank you and then my subsequent question there was some mention of allowing the planning Commission to be the issuing body, but it would not have. The same kind of discretion that is at issue with the Malibu case is that.
02:50:14.01	Sergio	That is correct, yes. And to be fair, if a business still required a design review permit
02:50:21.15	Sergio	you know, they would be allowed to exercise their discretion as part of the design review permit process. Similarly, a conditional use permit, but if it's an existing building,
02:50:30.21	Sergio	that exists and you know it's already an authorized restaurant use
02:50:34.99	Sergio	Really, the only kind of permitting required would be building permits for tenant improvements and or applicable sign permits and or, you know, a zoning preclearance of a formula retail.
02:50:46.09	Sergio	location wanted to open in an existing
02:50:49.48	Sergio	use that was suitable and compatible with that kind of business.
02:50:53.42	Vice President	Okay, and that last question just has to do with whether a reported decision of the Second District Court of Appeal sets precedent for us here in Northern California.
02:51:03.98	Sergio	I don't think it's specifically binding, but there have been a fair amount of there. I've also just for the council's reference, there's been a lot of federal cases outside of the Ninth Circuit.
02:51:16.03	Sergio	that have
02:51:16.91	Sergio	taken up the issue of formula retail litigation. I do anticipate that in the next several years that this may be an issue that gets
02:51:24.20	Sergio	More scrutiny at the federal level.
02:51:26.52	Sergio	Um,
02:51:27.60	Sergio	And so for that reason, it may make sense to be proactive.
02:51:30.78	Sergio	in this area. Um,
02:51:33.31	Sergio	But no, in answer to your question, I think that a second district court of appeal decision is persuasive authority.
02:51:40.70	Sergio	on trial courts in our jurisdiction and also persuasive authority on the Court of Appeal for our jurisdiction.
02:51:49.39	Vice President	Thank you.
02:51:51.92	Mayor Cox	We did receive a couple of public comments, as Councilmember Hoffman mentioned last time. One was an objection to the combining of CN1 and CN2. And they are in very different neighborhoods, in my view. One is the 711 near Spring Street, and that's just those, you know, that very small little mall. And the other is across the street and further south. And so I'm wondering...
02:52:21.71	Mayor Cox	if we chose not to combine them, is that something that's easily edited in this ordinance, Sergio? I couldn't see where the ordinance said that we were combining them into CN. It just makes reference to a CN.
02:52:38.31	Sergio	Yeah, so it would be in...
02:52:41.67	Sergio	And I will defer to our planner, Matthew Mandich, on this. I believe the only places that the ordinance does regulate this issue is with the number of formula retail establishments allowed.
02:52:55.27	Sergio	And so it would be in
02:52:58.97	Sergio	uh 1044240c4 where there is a table
02:53:05.33	Sergio	that limits the number allowed, and if you wanted to set different limits, we would modify that table accordingly.
02:53:11.81	Mayor Cox	Well, the other place is that page.
02:53:14.93	Mayor Cox	on the
02:53:16.13	Mayor Cox	Third page of the ordinance.
02:53:18.62	Mayor Cox	It says that for the CN district, we're allowing five. What that means is that the tiny little CN2 could ostensibly become the subject of five formula retail establishments. And that's why I have a concern of combining the two.
02:53:35.55	Matthew Mandich	May I add some background to that? First of all, the consolidation recommendation came directly from the Planning Commission, so that was a recommendation we took on board. Secondly, the CN district in the zoning table for commercial land uses is just listed as CN. There is no CN1, CN2. It's just CN. So that's kind of why we went that route, and you could actually see that reflected in the ordinance amendment of table, I believe, 1024.1.
02:54:00.44	Matthew Mandich	it's listed just as CN and that's a direct poll from the existing municipal code.
02:54:05.56	Mayor Cox	So if I wanted to distinguish CN1 from CN2, I could just change this table to say CN1, 3, CN2, 2.
02:54:14.48	Matthew Mandich	Yes, but be aware that that would change the table for the entire
02:54:17.67	Matthew Mandich	table all the way running down to every land use and every
02:54:21.84	Matthew Mandich	development standard that we have, because right now it's just exists as CN in the current municipal code.
02:54:26.72	Matthew Mandich	So if you were to make that change, it would carry over to...
02:54:29.58	Matthew Mandich	both those tables, table one and two.
02:54:31.34	Sergio	I think the mayor is suggesting modifying the table
02:54:34.83	Sergio	not in 1024-1, but the table in 1044-240-1.
02:54:43.22	Sergio	C4, which lists the maximum cap on the number of formula retail establishments.
02:54:49.21	Sergio	At five.
02:54:50.41	Matthew Mandich	What would be the recommendation on the split between CM1 and CN2? CN2. 3 and 2.
02:54:50.71	Mayor Cox	And I...
02:54:53.90	Mayor Cox	Yeah, I think it's the DN2.
02:54:54.95	Mayor Cox	two because at one time we did have two in that little strip mall so and and i guess mj sushi is
02:55:02.59	Matthew Mandich	thinking of going there? That's, well, MJ Susie's further down at the very north end of town.
02:55:03.57	Unknown	to the next episode.
02:55:03.66	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:55:06.47	Mayor Cox	Okay.
02:55:06.91	Matthew Mandich	And then the strip mall you're talking about with 7-Eleven also encompasses where Sailors is in that location as well as all part of the CN.
02:55:06.95	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:55:13.75	Mayor Cox	Mm-hmm.
02:55:14.78	Matthew Mandich	or Sailor's was rather.
02:55:16.57	Mayor Cox	So, and the map that
02:55:19.05	Mayor Cox	as part of your presentation distinguishes CN1 and CN2 as well.
02:55:23.94	Matthew Mandich	Correct, the zoning map does differentiate. The zoning map does differentiate.
02:55:24.87	Mayor Cox	different map does yes yes and so that would be the that would be how an applicant would be able to distinguish and a and a decider would know
02:55:35.31	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
02:55:35.40	Matthew Mandich	Yes.
02:55:36.39	Mayor Cox	Okay, and then we had, finally, we had one public comment from Fred Moore recommending that we remove...
02:55:42.65	Mayor Cox	on page two of the ordinance
02:55:45.59	Mayor Cox	three out of the seven standardization measures.
02:55:49.98	Mayor Cox	So right now there's
02:55:51.70	Mayor Cox	Seven things. If you meet even two of them, you're formula retail.
02:55:55.28	Matthew Mandich	combined with the six.
02:55:57.22	Mayor Cox	Yeah.
02:55:57.57	Matthew Mandich	Or more locations.
02:55:59.51	Mayor Cox	Correct. And so
02:56:01.64	Mayor Cox	The ones that he was recommending removal were standardized color scheme, decor, and uniform apparel, which control things inside an establishment as opposed to outside, which is really where the distinctiveness sometimes occurs. Were you aware of that comment, and do you have any thoughts on that comment?
02:56:20.52	Matthew Mandich	I have not seen that comment and I don't have any issue with that comment. I will defer to city attorney if he thinks that's an issue.
02:56:27.32	Mayor Cox	Sergio, on page two of the ordinance, the recommendation would be we would remove numbers. Under subsection D, we would remove numbers 2, 3, and 7.
02:56:38.56	Mayor Cox	I mean, hardly anybody has uniform apparel any longer.
02:56:38.78	Sergio	So...
02:56:42.05	Sergio	Correct. Standardized color scheme may be standardized color scheme regarding exterior signage.
02:56:48.03	Mayor Cox	Well, there's also the, however, standardized facade, which to me
02:56:51.98	Mayor Cox	applies to the exterior, perhaps.
02:56:56.62	Sergio	Well, and
02:56:58.20	Sergio	To be clear, if the council is wanting to focus on regulation, it would
02:57:03.60	Sergio	What I would suggest would be combining two and four to read
02:57:09.58	Sergio	standardized facade or exterior color scheme.
02:57:12.82	Mayor Cox	Okay, that's fine with me.
02:57:17.31	Mayor Cox	I think those are all my comments. Council member, should be asking anything.
02:57:24.29	Mayor Cox	All right, then I'm going to open it up for public comment.
02:57:27.67	Mayor Cox	See you later.
02:57:30.16	Mayor Cox	Yes.
02:57:34.08	Mayor Cox	This is a public hearing. I should have opened the public hearing before we heard the staff report, but the public hearing is now open and we will hear public comment.
02:57:41.18	Vicki Nichols	Okay, thank you, Mayor. Vicki Nichols, I agree with the points that you raised initially as a former planning commissioner.
02:57:54.45	Vicki Nichols	I can't imagine that there are similarities between Sausalito and Malibu. All their businesses are right on the coast. They don't want formula retail on their coast. I get it. So they may have went overboard or whatever. I don't see that happening here. I wanted to just talk about if this process goes forward. Right now, I think we all love and respect our community development director, but we have known that certain times in our existence here, we've had contract people, we've had people that have never set a foot in Sausalito. So the idea that if this is the scheme that's going to go ahead, I would really suggest this not be delegated.
02:58:39.25	Vicki Nichols	I would rather see the Planning Commission do this. And just as a background on
02:58:44.01	Vicki Nichols	previous other
02:58:46.00	Vicki Nichols	Formula retails equator was just conditioned not by the name, but slightly changing the logo I think anybody knows its equator from looking at it, but we were able to do that So this removes any ability to ask for slight modifications to color or whatever Formula retails identified by this branding and now you're going to have no way to do that and if you talking about the Caledonia Street property putting formula retail in there just as a
02:59:15.82	Vicki Nichols	sort of point of history,
02:59:17.84	Vicki Nichols	When that...
02:59:18.86	Vicki Nichols	What's conditioned is the theater, if you're again going to allow a lot of people in there in a cafe or something.
02:59:25.20	Vicki Nichols	some of the parking that can't be provided was
02:59:29.37	Vicki Nichols	condition to be provided in lot five. So when you're messing with all these changes, I think you have to look at these preexisting conditions for the businesses on Caledonia to balance all this.
02:59:40.96	Vicki Nichols	Thank you.
02:59:41.98	Mayor Cox	you.
02:59:43.73	Mayor Cox	Next is Babette McDougall.
02:59:55.05	Babette McDougall	Thank you. Well, as the city clerk said to me, you sure have a lot to say. And I said, well, you know, it's my town.
03:00:00.88	Babette McDougall	care. So about this formula retail question, which of course every time it has come up, I have said something that we have to be very careful how we move on this.
03:00:12.01	Babette McDougall	I completely concur with what my neighbor, Vicki Nichols, has just had to say. However, I'd like to take it further.
03:00:19.17	Babette McDougall	On the one hand, when we're looking at how to slice the hairs, like how many here versus there, et cetera, then six versus something other number.
03:00:27.66	Babette McDougall	If you're looking at what color of flower box to hang on your windows,
03:00:31.86	Babette McDougall	That's one question. If it turns out that the structure of the household or the building itself
03:00:37.43	Babette McDougall	is in such horrible disrepair that it's collapsing and you're worried about the flower boxes. I actually think that's the problem we have here.
03:00:45.85	Babette McDougall	yet another so-called promulgated public hearing.
03:00:50.37	Babette McDougall	like the March 7 meeting was promulgated as a public hearing with three hours advance notice.
03:00:55.79	Babette McDougall	So here we are in a situation, once again, where this is supposed to be a public hearing, and I would like to invite you. Saturday was a really successful day for a public hearing, so why don't we stop trying to sandwich public hearing, important, let's change the law things, in agendas that even you, Madam Mayor, tend to overlook and forget to announce we're about to close the regular public city council meeting, and we now open a public hearing because there are implications that i imagine most residents don't quite understand otherwise maybe we wouldn't keep forgetting them
03:01:28.46	Babette McDougall	or just sliding the whole process altogether.
03:01:31.88	Babette McDougall	I think Council Member Hoffman is correct when she says we residents care very deeply about what happens in our immediate vicinities.
03:01:40.67	Babette McDougall	And finally, I have seen plenty of places die because they ultimately die.
03:01:45.38	Babette McDougall	Yield.
03:01:46.39	Babette McDougall	to big boxes, and they become food deserts.
03:01:49.67	Babette McDougall	And I would hate to see that happen here, but it's all possible, isn't it? Thank you.
03:01:54.59	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Alice Merrill.
03:02:00.59	Alice Merrill	Hello, everybody. I figured since I'm here, I may as well say something. I think that this should stick with the Planning Commission.
03:02:12.74	Alice Merrill	I agree with Vicki and Bebette. We just have to keep it's a small town. And with Jill, we have to keep it's a small town. Why are we hearing about this now? It looks like you guys are going to vote on it now. This is the thing that really bothers me, is that we never hear about anything until it's upon us. And I don't know if that's because we don't have a newspaper or because the currents puts in just some things and not others. I don't know. But we need to hear about things before it's upon us. Thank you.
03:07:09.09	Bob Mitchell	test.
03:07:10.24	Unknown	Yeah, okay.
03:07:22.31	Unknown	Thank you.
03:07:22.97	Unknown	Thank you.
03:07:24.35	Unknown	Thank you.
03:07:24.77	Unknown	Thank you.
03:07:28.35	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:47.04	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:47.12	Unknown	We're...
03:08:49.05	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:52.17	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:52.25	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:52.34	Catie Thow Garcia	a more
03:08:53.74	Unknown	you
03:08:53.80	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:53.92	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:53.97	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:54.02	Unknown	you
03:08:54.21	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:54.34	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:54.68	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:55.54	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:55.80	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:55.81	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:55.91	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:08:56.22	Unknown	Thank you.
03:08:56.71	Unknown	Thank you.
03:09:01.38	Mayor Cox	Okay, so we're up and running. Okay, folks, we're going to resume. We are back up on line.
03:09:07.94	Mayor Cox	uh,
03:09:12.72	Unknown	Thank you.
03:09:12.79	Unknown	She'll take it.
03:09:13.02	Unknown	Thank you.
03:09:13.31	Mayor Cox	Okay, Fred, we're back up on line.
03:09:15.40	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:09:16.60	Mayor Cox	Okay, we have finished with public comment in the room. We're going to take, we have a couple of public commenters online. City Clerk.
03:09:27.35	Unknown	Yes, we have a pad suck.
03:09:32.74	Pat Zook	Yes.
03:09:35.33	Pat Zook	I would I really urge you to take this back for further discussion and analysis. This town has faced
03:09:43.97	Pat Zook	Um,
03:09:45.32	Pat Zook	formula retail in the past with some great controversy.
03:09:49.19	Pat Zook	from Pete's Coffee to Subway.
03:09:52.09	Pat Zook	to McDonald's, and the notion of having
03:09:55.15	Pat Zook	something be non-discretionary
03:10:00.09	Pat Zook	either by staff
03:10:02.13	Pat Zook	THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF THE END OF
03:10:03.11	Pat Zook	or by the Planning Commission, the non-discretionary part of it concerns me.
03:10:07.67	Pat Zook	and
03:10:08.36	Pat Zook	I did note
03:10:10.13	Pat Zook	some conflicting comment.
03:10:12.16	Pat Zook	from the city attorney that we don't have to worry about this for years and
03:10:16.96	Pat Zook	We should deal with it now proactively.
03:10:19.26	Pat Zook	I'm not quite sure I understand the
03:10:21.98	Pat Zook	you know,
03:10:23.68	Pat Zook	the linkage between the two of those. If we don't have to worry about something like this for years, let's not worry about it for years.
03:10:34.19	Pat Zook	I hope that you will take this
03:10:37.32	Pat Zook	and not approve it tonight.
03:10:39.49	Pat Zook	I think many people in town would be very upset at the notion of non discretionary approval.
03:10:44.79	Pat Zook	of McDonald's in the waterfront district.
03:10:48.18	Pat Zook	or on Caledonia Street.
03:10:49.97	Pat Zook	you
03:10:50.56	Pat Zook	Thanks.
03:10:52.62	Unknown	Thank you.
03:10:53.23	Unknown	Senator Bushmaker?
03:10:57.67	Unknown	Hi there, counsel. Yeah, I have the question too. Why now? If we have some latitude in time, why are we doing this at this point? I also have questions about the applicability of the Malibu case. I'm not completely clear that it applies or not applies and I would like to have further legal briefing on that before any decision is made.
03:11:19.91	Unknown	I also support the Planning Commission's involvement rather than an administrative approval.
03:11:25.17	Unknown	Obviously this town and I recall the earlier discussions about formula retail being concerned of having golden arches throughout our town in in the areas that are approved.
03:11:39.03	Unknown	I am concerned about the
03:11:44.19	Unknown	the consolidation of CN1 and CN2 and the impact that it would have on the neighborhood.
03:11:50.45	Unknown	And as council member Hoffman raised,
03:11:55.21	Unknown	and a mere
03:11:57.17	Unknown	Cox raised about the neighbors having impact and also Pat's up just now about having the neighbors input. I think this is a big enough issue
03:12:07.07	Unknown	And if there's no urgency, why are we doing this in this manner? Let's give the neighbors a chance to to deal with it better and address it better impacted by it.
03:12:18.89	Unknown	I don't think we should approve the first reading tonight. I think the matter should be continued.
03:12:23.21	Unknown	for further analysis, particularly about the applicable law in this case and as it applies to Sausalito per se. Thank you.
03:12:32.67	Unknown	No further public comment.
03:12:34.63	Unknown	Thank you.
03:12:34.82	Mayor Cox	Thank you. I will close the public hearing, bring it back up here for discussion. I'm going to go ahead and make a motion.
03:12:41.57	Mayor Cox	I'm going to move that we introduce by title only and waive first reading of ordinance number 03-2025, an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Sausalito amending Chapter 10.44.240, Formula Retail.
03:12:57.26	Mayor Cox	Table 10.24-1, Land Uses in Commercial Districts, and Chapter 10.24.040, Special Requirements of Title X of the Sauciuto Municipal Code, with the following changes to Ordinance No. 03-2025. On the second page of the ordinance, at the very top of the page, the No. 2 is deleted, The number two is deleted, number three is deleted, number four is revised to say standardized facade or exterior color scheme, and number seven is deleted.
03:13:33.20	Mayor Cox	On the next page, item four, the words community and economic development director or his slash her designee is replaced with planning commission.
03:13:43.61	Mayor Cox	And at the bottom of page four, the table,
03:13:46.58	Mayor Cox	a neighborhood commercial CN.
03:13:49.24	Mayor Cox	is split into neighborhood commercial CN1
03:13:53.88	Mayor Cox	with number of formula retail establishments allowed at three, and CN2 with number of formula retail establishments allowed at two.
03:14:05.00	Mayor Cox	That's my motion.
03:14:06.65	Vice President	I was seconded.
03:14:08.51	Mayor Cox	Okay, I do want to address a little bit of the discussion. So why now? I have been trying to have us adopt a revised formula retail ordinance since I was first elected to office in 2017. On eight years on the Planning Commission, it was a non-functioning,
03:14:28.91	Mayor Cox	Um,
03:14:30.17	Mayor Cox	ordinance and it has paralyzed our ability
03:14:33.95	Mayor Cox	downtown to fill empty storefronts.
03:14:38.12	Mayor Cox	Um,
03:14:39.03	Mayor Cox	We have had to pass variances, as someone said, make small changes to exterior facades, which is really promoting form over substance. And so my hope is that by maintaining the fact that this comes to the Planning Commission, these hearings will still be noticed. And so anybody who, if another subway is proposed next to the 7-Eleven, just as happened...
03:15:10.99	Mayor Cox	over 10 years ago, we will have a room full of people telling us don't put Subway next to 7-Eleven. Similarly, if another Pete's Coffee is proposed at Molly Stone's, as was done over 10 years ago, or no, it was proposed where Barbache now is,
03:15:32.38	Mayor Cox	Um,
03:15:33.52	Mayor Cox	it will, you know, we will once again have a chambers full of people
03:15:37.77	Mayor Cox	providing their opinions.
03:15:40.41	Mayor Cox	By bringing it to the Planning Commission, we retain the public hearing aspect. By the way, I do want to gain a clarification from staff. So the...
03:15:52.86	Mayor Cox	manner in which the, any, um,
03:15:57.37	Mayor Cox	formula retail is considered by the planning commission will still not be a CUP, it will be the manner in which is described in the ordinance, is that right?
03:16:06.21	SPEAKER_01	Thank you for the question, Mayor. I appreciate the clarification. I also appreciate the focus on public transparency and ensuring that these discussions can happen in a public forum. That being said, I think the answer to the question is the process based on council direction tonight would remain ministerial.
03:16:22.75	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Thank you. Yes.
03:16:24.60	Unknown	Mr. Mayor, sorry to interrupt you, but your two examples, I just want to make sure I understand it correctly. Neither of those examples, Pete's nor Subway,
03:16:32.80	Unknown	could possibly be even considered because they have more than
03:16:36.57	Wayne Kwan	Thank you.
03:16:36.60	Mayor Cox	Sixth.
03:16:36.97	Wayne Kwan	something.
03:16:37.11	Unknown	locations. So everyone's using McDonald's Golden Arches Subway
03:16:37.12	Wayne Kwan	Excellent.
03:16:37.36	Wayne Kwan	Thank you.
03:16:41.82	Unknown	None of these. We're talking about avatars.
03:16:44.60	Mayor Cox	That's right, or equator, or, right.
03:16:48.65	Mayor Cox	So, and I guess I'll just close my comments by saying I feel as though this is a challenging issue. It has been, this is the third time it's been on our agenda, and so there's been plenty of opportunity for public comment. I've addressed every single letter that we've gotten on this, as well as the public comment we've heard before, or at least attempted to address. And I do not want us to be the victims of analysis paralysis. If we adopt this and it doesn't work in some way, we can bring it back to tweak it as necessary. But in the meantime, it is thwarting our ability
03:17:28.04	Mayor Cox	to fill empty storefronts in Sausalito. And so I would like to, and there is some risk, according to our city attorney. And so I would like to move this forward at this time.
03:17:42.43	Mayor Cox	Who else would like to speak?
03:17:44.32	Vice President	I'm-
03:17:44.93	Vice President	If I can just add, I agree with your comments and I appreciate the attention to detail and the changes that you suggest because I think it will provide the appropriate limits within the law. I just wanted to reinforce that we have asked the city attorney to look into it. He has been concerned about it and his concerns are not just speculative. This case is published. It's there, and it leaves us vulnerable if we just maintain the status quo.
03:18:20.01	Vice President	The other thing to say, and this is a cause for worry overall,
03:18:23.89	Vice President	is that as we know in dealing with the housing element, a lot of our discretion is being challenged by the legislature. So I think we want to be as smart as we possibly can to retain as much local transparency as we can, even though we don't have the same amount of discretionary control as we perhaps would like. But fundamentally, we have empty storefronts as well. And the numbers here that are provided are not huge. And the fact here that are provided are not huge. And the fact that anything over six is excluded, I think provides a level of limitation, if you will, that will protect us going forward. So that's why I'm supporting the motion.
03:19:06.69	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:19:07.38	Mayor Cox	Who else?
03:19:09.03	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:19:09.07	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
03:19:09.13	Mayor Cox	Councilmember Hoffman, thank you.
03:19:10.03	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
03:19:10.35	Mayor Cox	you
03:19:10.37	Councilmember Hoffman	Hi, thank you.
03:19:13.72	Councilmember Hoffman	um sorry i'm not convinced um i uh i think that i've had enough of the state legislature and other bodies taking away our discretion here in sausalito about how we make decisions about who's going where and our town is so small and our our permits as we've just defined are so few for formula retail and we really need to be thoughtful
03:19:36.57	Councilmember Hoffman	about
03:19:37.64	Councilmember Hoffman	who's coming in and trying to
03:19:40.98	Councilmember Hoffman	to the extent that we can within the legal scope of what we can,
03:19:44.74	Councilmember Hoffman	Um,
03:19:45.84	Councilmember Hoffman	and decide be...
03:19:48.25	Councilmember Hoffman	very thoughtful about who's coming in and what we want to come in. And how is that complementary to what is already here? And how is that going to complement the stores that are here and curate those to the extent that we can and not be and also not have paralysis and not
03:20:06.32	Councilmember Hoffman	and not have empty storefronts, which we have many right now in town. And so, right now, if it's ministerial, if you meet the criteria,
03:20:16.62	Councilmember Hoffman	then
03:20:17.50	Councilmember Hoffman	You can't say no.
03:20:18.59	Councilmember Hoffman	and the input from your community really
03:20:21.85	Councilmember Hoffman	is going to mean nothing.
03:20:23.17	Councilmember Hoffman	And so even though it's at the Planning Commission, of course there's gonna be a hearing, but you take away the ability
03:20:28.61	Councilmember Hoffman	for the community to have input and have any really meaningful input. And so I'm not convinced that we have to say no, that we have to go down this road and that we can't do some further analysis and come up with a solution that's right for our town. And so I think we've lost a lot of control about how our town looks
03:20:55.33	Councilmember Hoffman	And we've gone through years worth of housing elements that have taken away our control. And this is one of the few things that we can control. And I'm not ready to give that up. And I'm not convinced that this case that's been cited is authoritative. Certainly tonight, I'm not convinced. So anyway, I'm a no. Thank you.
03:21:20.66	Mayor Cox	All right, I will call the question. Will you call the roll, city clerk?
03:21:26.28	Unknown	Councilmember Hoffman.
03:21:27.86	Mayor Cox	No.
03:21:29.16	Unknown	Councilmember Sobieski.
03:21:30.43	Mayor Cox	Yes.
03:21:31.76	Unknown	Vice Mayor Woodside. Yes. And Mayor Cox.
03:21:34.55	Mayor Cox	Yes, that motion carries 3-1 with Council Member Blaustein absent. Okay, our next public hearing item is a public hearing on annual status of vacancies
03:21:46.27	Mayor Cox	recruitment and retention efforts as required by AB 25,
03:21:50.38	Mayor Cox	6-1.
03:21:51.66	Mayor Cox	This is a new requirement that we hold these public hearings.
03:21:55.98	Mayor Cox	I think this will be fairly routine. So,
03:22:00.68	Mayor Cox	May I confirm that the required notice was provided?
03:22:05.48	Kathy Nikitas	It was provided through the inclusion with the agenda, absolutely.
03:22:10.74	Mayor Cox	Thank you. So I'll introduce Kathy Nikitas, our human resources manager, and I will go ahead and open the public hearing.
03:22:17.93	Kathy Nikitas	Thank you very much, Mayor Cox, and thank you, Vice Mayor, Council Members, City Manager, and members of the public. So, as the Mayor said, California Assembly Bill 2561 was passed into law last year, last September. So, if you could go to first slide, please. Thank you, Maria. and it codified the need for public agencies to be transparent and let their communities know what is going on with their staffing. And I will say that I believe that we've already been doing this, just not having it so formalized. But last June was the last time that we did a big presentation about what our recruitment and retention efforts were. So this one is the first one that's being held in accordance with the law, or as a result of the law, and it's in advance of our budget that will be passed later this later this spring for July 1st. So if you could go to the next slide, please.
03:23:29.78	Kathy Nikitas	So just as an overview, the city has three main groups of employees. We have the SEIU employees, the SEIU Service Employees International Union, Local 1021. We have our Sausalito Police Association. And then we have a non-represented group of management and professional and technical employees. We also have seasonal temporary employees, but the three main groups that are represented on our position allocation table are the three that I just mentioned. We have 79 total approved positions, and the table that I included was just a summary showing where our vacancies are currently.
03:23:42.34	Unknown	Yes.
03:24:15.23	Kathy Nikitas	We have two vacancies in SEIU. We have five in the Sausalito Police Association and four in the non-represented group.
03:24:25.17	Kathy Nikitas	And if you could go to the next slide, I'll just tell you about the vacancies in each group. So in SEIU, we have 31 positions that are approved. We have two slots that are currently vacant. And we are not recruiting right now. We've paused our recruiting because they're both in our wastewater collection division. And because of the ongoing discussions with Sausalito Marin City Sanitary District regarding potential transfer of services we felt it was the most responsible thing not to currently recruit because that you know that could put things it could change the the the possibilities of going forward with that transfer and so we're just strategically using our current vendors to support the division so that we don't lose services
03:24:58.55	Catie Thow Garcia	you know,
03:25:14.82	Kathy Nikitas	And the next one.
03:25:16.98	Kathy Nikitas	Sausalito Police Association and the chief was here earlier doing her budget Budget presentation and spoke about the vacancies, but there are 23 total authorized positions in the police association So again, that doesn't include management it doesn't include the chief and the lieutenants and Wayne Kwan the parking manager and the Assistant to the chief so we have five current vacancies they're all in the sworn section two of those vacancies are positions that as the chief mentioned as well are frozen positions they are not budgeted and they're not allowed to be filled currently so
03:25:56.31	Kathy Nikitas	there are really three vacancies that we could be filling.
03:25:59.87	Kathy Nikitas	Four of them are sworn police officers and one is a detective spot. Those recruitment efforts are ongoing, and this dovetails with the chief did talk about the recruitment efforts. And we've looked at more than 200 candidates in just the last two years alone. We have ongoing recruitments that we update periodically. And in addition to, you know, yes, it is hard. We are a smaller city and we're surrounded by some places that can pay a little bit more, but we are absolutely in the middle of the market for Marin County for our salaries. One of the things that can be challenging for the recruitment process is the amount of time that it takes to go through a background investigation after we even decide that we wanna try to bring someone on
03:26:56.49	Kathy Nikitas	And...
03:26:57.33	Kathy Nikitas	the high standards that the city has for who we're going to bring on. So we've had many people who we've brought on, brought on, or brought on to the recruitment process, and they go through background, and it takes a long time, and then they just don't make it. They don't make it to that high level of the standards that we have for the city. And most applications, as the chief mentioned, as well are for trainees. We haven't had a lateral transfer or a police officer come on board who has already trained since I think 2015 until last month. We had our first lateral, first person that we brought on as a full-time officer who has experience elsewhere. And she also mentioned the $10,000 hiring bonus.
03:27:43.10	Kathy Nikitas	So next slide, please.
03:27:45.61	Kathy Nikitas	And then we have the non-represented group, 25 positions. Four of them are currently vacant but are being filled in some way, but not by a permanent employee. The risk manager position, that was newly approved by the council and very much needed. It was approved in 2024. We've done three separate recruitments in 2024, evaluated almost 40 candidates, and we haven't found the right person, the the right fit so we're currently using a contractor and We'll launch a new recruitment in the summer or fall as we had discussed with the council when we decided to To pursue that that avenue of having a contractor for a limited time the next position is our finance director and It's currently being filled with an interim finance director who is a retired annuitant and
03:27:55.60	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:28:38.60	Kathy Nikitas	And that is on a temporary basis. Then our chief building official. That position's never been filled by an actual employee. It was newly created in 2022. We've conducted three recruitments in that time. And we're currently using contracted services again. And we're going to be launching a new recruitment in the spring.
03:28:59.05	Kathy Nikitas	And then last one is our principal planner position, and it's currently filled by two retired annuitants. So that is something that while the complex processes that are ongoing in CEDD, while those are ongoing, we feel it's really a wise move to keep these retired annuitants on because of the experience that they have with the city.
03:29:25.46	Kathy Nikitas	And next.
03:29:27.70	Kathy Nikitas	So how do we try to retain our people? We have a small city and we've got a small workforce, but they have a huge impact in everybody's lives on this city. I mentioned all the departments that we have. We do have that mid-Marin market philosophy that the council adopted back in 2023, and it's reflected in the most recent years.
03:29:49.86	Kathy Nikitas	memorandum of understanding for SEIU that was approved that year, the one for Sausalito Police Association, and the one for the non-represented groups. We tried to
03:29:59.82	Kathy Nikitas	say we can't pay the most, but we're not going to pay the least. We want to be right in the middle of that Marin market
03:30:06.18	Kathy Nikitas	and be able to do the best we can for our employees because we expect the best from them. We have compensation benefits, packages are regularly evaluated. We try to maintain that position within the market.
03:30:22.26	Kathy Nikitas	We have some flexible work schedules in many of our positions, obviously not police. They've got to be here. But we've changed to a four-day work week for some of the groups, and that's a cross for SEIU and the non-represented. And we really just try to provide growth opportunities for our staff to learn and to continue to grow in their positions whenever possible or to move into different positions. And we're going to be able to do that.
03:30:48.72	Kathy Nikitas	I think we have great leadership amongst our staff and amongst the city leaders. We have wonderful residents who are really, really very involved.
03:30:58.71	Kathy Nikitas	Thank you.
03:30:58.93	Kathy Nikitas	And I think that brings us to having great employees, and we value them, and we want to keep going in the manner that we have been going. So my staff report covered some other things, but I won't go through all of that. It's on the record, as is the presentation, and our position allocation table is linked to the agenda as well, which tells which positions one by one are within each group. And with that, I am done. And I would ask if you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them.
03:31:34.28	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:31:35.45	Mayor Cox	Any questions of Kathy? No. Seeing none, I will open it up for...
03:35:17.02	Catie Thow Garcia	A 2022 Marin Grand Jury report calling for overall county guidance on electrification. The county has undertaken a nearly two-year process of developing this electrification roadmap.
03:35:36.68	Catie Thow Garcia	during which a lot of public engagement happened to gather the community's support and interests from various stakeholder groups. During this process, two sustainability commissioners were involved, of one of which is here tonight, the chair, Mark Palmer. Thank you, Mark. And as a result, the county developed this finalized roadmap, which Christine O'Rourke will present coming up. And we are looking for your support and potential adoption for this tonight. So Christine from the Marin Climate and Energy Partnership together with the county and the jurisdictions of Marin, we are presenting this tonight.
03:36:25.97	Catie Thow Garcia	Let Christine take it away.
03:36:28.40	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you.
03:36:28.43	Christine O'Rourke	Thank you, Katie. And good evening, Madam Mayor, members of the Council.
03:36:28.79	Catie Thow Garcia	Thank you, Katie.
03:36:33.16	Christine O'Rourke	I am Christina Rourke. I'm the Sustainability Coordinator for the Marine Climate and Energy Partnership, or MCEP for short.
03:36:40.24	Christine O'Rourke	Thank you for having me here tonight to discuss the countywide electrification roadmap.
03:36:45.36	Christine O'Rourke	The County of Marin was the lead agent
03:36:47.96	Christine O'Rourke	see for the development of the roadmap but they were assisted by a steering committee from comprised of mcep members
03:36:55.50	Christine O'Rourke	And those members were very active in conducting outreach and developing the policy and the recommendations that are in the report.
03:37:03.55	Christine O'Rourke	Next slide, please.
03:37:07.43	Christine O'Rourke	So the primary impetus for the development
03:37:11.38	Christine O'Rourke	of the map was a
03:37:13.79	Christine O'Rourke	grand jury civil, a civil grand jury report that was issued in 2022.
03:37:18.35	Christine O'Rourke	which among other recommendations called for the development and coordinated implementation of a countywide building electrification plan similar to what we did
03:37:27.93	Christine O'Rourke	for the EV acceleration strategy.
03:37:31.12	Christine O'Rourke	Most of the Marin jurisdictions agreed with this recommendation in their written responses to the civil grand jury report and
03:37:39.93	Christine O'Rourke	So here we are this evening.
03:37:42.09	Christine O'Rourke	Now, of course, the primary reason for electrification is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the use of natural gas.
03:37:49.01	Christine O'Rourke	However, there are some important co-benefits that I'd like to highlight at the beginning.
03:37:54.21	Christine O'Rourke	So as you may know,
03:37:55.64	Christine O'Rourke	The gas burning appliances in the home can release
03:37:58.65	Christine O'Rourke	that are harmful to health, including unburned methane,
03:38:01.94	Christine O'Rourke	nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde.
03:38:06.04	Christine O'Rourke	electrification of buildings can also lead to improved resiliency, as studies have shown that after a major earthquake,
03:38:12.84	Christine O'Rourke	The electrical grid
03:38:14.41	Christine O'Rourke	can be returned to service in days and weeks compared to weeks and months for the gas infrastructure.
03:38:21.39	Christine O'Rourke	So in addition to the grand jury recommendation and these known co-benefits,
03:38:26.44	Christine O'Rourke	We wanted to develop a roadmap because we wanted to develop a coordinated path forward towards electrification.
03:38:32.93	Christine O'Rourke	as there are local, regional, and state mandates to shift to zero emission building appliances and systems.
03:38:40.51	Christine O'Rourke	Next slide, please.
03:38:43.42	Christine O'Rourke	So let's start by looking at the, through the local lens. This chart here is showing countywide emissions from 2005 to 2022. And a chart would be very similar if we looked at just Sausalito emissions.
03:38:57.83	Christine O'Rourke	The dotted red line
03:38:59.93	Christine O'Rourke	is the 2030 target, which is to reduce emissions
03:39:04.20	Christine O'Rourke	40% below the 1990 level by that year.
03:39:08.12	Christine O'Rourke	and the two bands on top
03:39:10.52	Christine O'Rourke	The red and the orange band are the emissions that come from the built environment.
03:39:15.24	Christine O'Rourke	So the red band are emissions that are produced from the use of electricity, and that has been getting smaller over time as our electricity has been getting cleaner and cleaner.
03:39:24.67	Christine O'Rourke	Then the orange band are the emissions that come from natural gas. And that really hasn't changed over the last 20 years.
03:39:33.20	Christine O'Rourke	So what's really clear from this chart is that we need to tackle the natural gas emissions if we're going to have any hope of meeting our 2030 target, let alone meeting our 2045 target, which is to
03:39:46.65	Christine O'Rourke	achieve zero net emissions by that year.
03:39:49.67	Unknown	here.
03:39:51.32	Christine O'Rourke	Next slide.
03:39:55.66	Christine O'Rourke	Now if we move on to regional and state mandates, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates
03:40:04.30	Christine O'Rourke	air pollutants in the nine county bay area
03:40:07.30	Christine O'Rourke	has recently issued some what they're called zero NOx, nitrogen oxide, zero NOx appliance rules. And these rules will effectively eliminate the sale and installation of natural gas, gas monitors, and heating systems.
03:40:23.52	Unknown	And that's done through a phased approach, specifically.
03:40:27.53	Unknown	Peace out.
03:40:28.56	Unknown	only zero and a box water beers. These are small. All the same type of water here. We'll be able to be sold or installed in the Bay Area. And then in 2029, that regulation is extended to all furnaces. And I'm so sorry, I'm going to ask you
03:40:42.33	Mayor Cox	I'm so sorry, I'm gonna ask you to pause for a second. Your transmission has become garbled, I don't know if it's a.
03:40:50.13	Unknown	Bye.
03:40:50.47	Mayor Cox	a bandwidth issue on our end or what the issue is. So maybe if you turn off your camera,
03:40:57.89	Mayor Cox	Oh, and now she's gone.
03:41:00.95	Unknown	I just turned off my camera.
03:41:01.30	Mayor Cox	Turn off my camera. Is that any better? Okay, great. Not really.
03:41:09.75	Unknown	Okay.
03:41:12.42	Unknown	I don't know.
03:41:14.92	Unknown	Well, I can try to.
03:41:21.42	Unknown	I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
03:41:22.31	Mayor Cox	needed.
03:41:23.02	Mayor Cox	Yeah.
03:41:23.14	Unknown	Amen.
03:41:23.42	Mayor Cox	and
03:41:23.78	Unknown	Can you leave the meeting and call back on your phone and we'll put you as a so you
03:41:24.03	Mayor Cox	So-
03:41:28.52	Mayor Cox	So the Zoom, the...
03:41:33.60	Mayor Cox	the agenda page, I'll give you a number that you can call in.
03:41:37.73	Mayor Cox	So here's a phone number for you to call, 669-900-6833.
03:41:49.24	Mayor Cox	And the passcode is 123456. So if you call that number, the city clerk can broadcast your voice and we can continue to watch your slides.
03:41:58.59	Unknown	Watch your slides.
03:41:59.47	Unknown	Okay.
03:41:59.98	Unknown	Thank you.
03:41:59.99	Mayor Cox	Very good.
03:42:03.13	Unknown	Please be a junior, repeating either of students, call by town.
03:42:06.17	Unknown	Thank you.
03:42:06.44	Unknown	Bye.
03:42:10.64	Unknown	1, 2, 3, 4.
03:42:13.52	Unknown	Thank you.
03:42:17.03	Unknown	Good blind here.
03:42:25.88	Unknown	Mayor, if we're having problems with that, an option might be for Katie to walk through the PowerPoint and that way you can continue.
03:42:32.54	Mayor Cox	Yeah, my understanding was that it was a brief presentation, so maybe you can just wrap it up for us, Katie.
03:42:39.11	Mayor Cox	Yeah.
03:42:44.14	Catie Thow Garcia	that.
03:42:44.88	Catie Thow Garcia	Yes, so I think Christine mostly covered a lot of the slides, but basically in summation, the California Air Resources Board appliance rules are dictating future electrification of indoor appliances like hot water heaters and furnaces. Future guidelines will not allow those to exist in California homes. You can go to the next slide, please.
03:43:13.77	Catie Thow Garcia	So throughout the nearly two years of the roadmap development, the county led a steering committee of 20-plus members with a lot of volunteer hours, three public workshops. I will just add that Mark or Greg Palmer from the Sustainability Commission also attended community-based organizations throughout Marin, specifically focused on disadvantaged communities were included in those workshops. On the building community, realtors, contractors, developers, architects were focused. There was a local government, regional government focus as well, and a focus on climate commissioners, utilities, and finally a community action survey, which we also participated in. Next slide, please.
03:44:01.93	Catie Thow Garcia	So throughout the roadmap, the county is presenting 10 recommended actions to help either the city or the county in concert with the city to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through electrification. These are 10 non-binding recommended actions that are presented in the plan, both short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals towards electrification. I'm not going to go through all of them, but they are listed on this slide and listed in very well detail in the roadmap, in addition to action plans to help us to help us get to some of these goals. This was presented in detail in December to the Sustainability Commission, where we went through some of these short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals with the help of Christine. And we were discussing these in depth. The Community Development Department was also in attendance that night, so it was great to talk about building electrification with the upcoming code cycle coming up. So those are the 10 recommended actions. You can go to the next slide, please.
03:45:20.75	Catie Thow Garcia	So tonight we're talking about roadmap adoption, potential acceptance. It's important to note that the roadmap adoption does not obligate the city to taking any particular action. The roadmap does affirm the city's view that the roadmap provides valuable guidance on next steps in the electrification transition. And finally, to date, the roadmap has been adopted and or accepted by the county at their board of supervisors, the town of Fairfax, the town of Tiburon, Mill Valley, and Corte Madeira. And I think Larkspur should be hearing this very soon. Next slide, please. All right, that is it. It looks like maybe Christine is also back online, but I am happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
03:46:10.08	Mayor Cox	I just had a couple of questions. Thank you so much for the presentation and for the really comprehensive materials. You said that other cities have adopted or accepted the roadmap. Our resolution asks that we approve the roadmap, which seems a little, rather than accepting it, it seems as though it's buying into it more.
03:46:31.19	Mayor Cox	Um, so I am wondering if we can say accept rather than approve. Um, and I have a couple of reasons, um, in the report on page 103,
03:46:43.58	Mayor Cox	It says that, you know, a challenge...
03:46:46.73	Mayor Cox	to the roadmap
03:46:48.28	Mayor Cox	is that the utilities are not expanding their transmission and distribution networks rapidly enough to meet the state's renewable energy and electrification goals. That in order to do so, you know, a Berkeley Energy Institute study said that PG&E would need to spend between $1 and $10 billion to upgrade costs that would then be passed along
03:47:09.95	Mayor Cox	to consumers. And that brings me to page 115 of the report, Appendix D,
03:47:15.62	Mayor Cox	where it talks about equity considerations,
03:47:18.93	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:47:19.08	Mayor Cox	hardship,
03:47:20.70	Mayor Cox	for low-income households. But I will tell you,
03:47:24.35	Mayor Cox	I am not a low income household and I have a hardship paying my PG&E bill every month as it is. And so the thought that PG&E would be passing along to consumers $10 billion in upgrades in order to attempt to
03:47:40.24	Mayor Cox	um,
03:47:41.25	Mayor Cox	Electrify.
03:47:43.01	Mayor Cox	just reminds me of Peter Van Meter's comments during our general planning process where he said, it's absolutely unrealistic, infeasible for California or the United States to attempt this total electrification goal as a means of carbon emission reduction. So for those reasons, my question to you, very long-winded, is can we vote to accept this, you know, endorse this good work
03:48:12.96	Mayor Cox	But recognize that this is, right now, this is not feasible. The goals are just absolutely infeasible logistically.
03:48:20.79	Catie Thow Garcia	Yes, absolutely. Right now, you know, everything is completely non-binding as, as we said, the city attorney presented the words as it is presented on the agenda as a reflection of a lot of those comments. And that's why it is except resolution to accept, you know, just to reflect on your, your other comment. I think it's,
03:48:47.52	Catie Thow Garcia	When it comes to a lot of these climate goals, whether that's sea level rise, whether that's electrification, we are looking at astronomical numbers. And a lot of the times we know those are not going to be feasible. However, it's important to note the cost of inaction towards getting those to help us start to get on the right path right now. Because in the future, if we continue to admit...
03:49:13.04	Catie Thow Garcia	our greenhouse gases as we are now, we're going to be paying even more in the future for our expenses now.
03:49:20.43	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Other questions?
03:49:22.50	Mayor Cox	All right, seeing none, I'm going to open it up to public comment.
03:49:28.51	Unknown	See you then.
03:49:30.05	Mayor Cox	Okay.
03:49:33.61	Mayor Cox	Okay, please step forward.
03:49:37.64	Mark Palmer	Thank you. Mark Palmer, Chair of the Sustainability Commission. Welcome, and thank you for your good work for the Commission. Thank you.
03:49:44.81	Mark Palmer	We've heard tonight about the importance of fire safety and how local agencies are working together to make Sausalito safer from the threats posed by worsening climate crisis. And part of the county's climate mitigation strategy is this advisory document, and that's exactly what it is. It's a roadmap to help us find our way through this.
03:50:06.25	Mark Palmer	maze of requirements that will help us become less dependent on natural gas, which has an inherent and immutable carbon footprint. It's never gonna go away. Solar and wind are contributing to very low
03:50:26.56	Mark Palmer	carbon footprint of electricity.
03:50:28.92	Mark Palmer	And to address your questions about electricity supply and cost thereof,
03:50:34.48	Mark Palmer	The amount of electricity that's going to be required for AI is tremendously more than will be required for building electrification. Building electrification will be a drop in the bucket compared to what is being planned for the big server farms for AI that, the other side of that coin is that as more electrification takes place and fewer people are left on the gas system,
03:51:08.67	Mark Palmer	that represents a stranded asset or
03:51:11.25	Mark Palmer	of
03:51:11.99	Mark Palmer	the gas prices are predicted to increase much faster than electricity prices.
03:51:18.52	Mark Palmer	Electricity prices are going up
03:51:20.58	Mark Palmer	rapidly due to
03:51:22.57	Mark Palmer	PG&E mostly.
03:51:24.27	Mark Palmer	having to pay for their wildfire liability and doing undergrounding, and it's tremendously expensive to
03:51:29.89	Mark Palmer	to
03:51:30.86	Mark Palmer	deal with that liability. So we're all in this together. We are subject to necessarily
03:51:45.49	Mark Palmer	Thank you.
03:51:45.50	Mayor Cox	Your time is up, sir. I'll let you wrap up your sentence.
03:51:49.17	Mark Palmer	Okay. This has basically been adopted by, as Katie said, Fairfax, Hennon-Selmo, Mill Valley, Tiburon. And just last week, Larkspur adopted this as well. And also, it's been adopted by Marin County. Sir, I'm so sorry. I really have to ask.
03:52:05.74	Mayor Cox	Sir, I'm so sorry, I really have to ask you to conclude your remarks because I only let anyone speak for two minutes. Thank you so much for being here. That that McDougall.
03:52:09.87	Mark Palmer	Thank you.
03:52:11.49	Mark Palmer	two minutes.
03:52:11.88	Catie Thow Garcia	It's a great day.
03:52:23.10	Babette McDougall	Thank you, Madam Mayor. Babette McDougal, local resident,
03:52:26.97	Babette McDougall	acknowledge and thank you for your own remarks regarding the role that our
03:52:32.05	Babette McDougall	major utility.
03:52:33.40	Babette McDougall	Pacific Gas and Electric seems to be playing or not playing
03:52:36.95	Babette McDougall	in how communities are able to respond to our problems, especially our environmental problems.
03:52:43.87	Babette McDougall	I really support strongly the work that Katie's doing
03:52:47.08	Babette McDougall	And I,
03:52:47.75	Babette McDougall	we'll never be able to thank Janelle Kelman enough for getting us our first million dollars started.
03:52:52.57	Babette McDougall	point to get it moving forward. So really, I'm really glad we're doing this. Why am I spanning here now? Because I think we need to do something about pressuring PG&E every year. Now, corporate model, frankly, if I was a CEO, I might be a little embarrassed. $23 billion above your best market expectations. That was 2023. $2.3 billion, funny that it's the same numbers, this time there's a decimal in 2024, just reported. Every year, these are above and beyond best market expectations. And yet what happens to that money? And yet we, the citizens,
03:53:28.69	Babette McDougall	Have our rates raised, how many times? 12 times in the last 10 months or something crazy like that.
03:53:35.60	Babette McDougall	You know, really, we need to force this corporation to be more of a partner. It was at one time a wonderful partner. It was not structured.
03:53:44.96	Babette McDougall	as it is now as a corporation,
03:53:47.21	Babette McDougall	but it was part of the community and it acted like it.
03:53:50.87	Babette McDougall	So I'd like to see a little more pressure brought to bear. Maybe that's another regional challenge. I don't know.
03:53:56.08	Babette McDougall	but somebody has to start stumping on these guys' toes. It's not fair to keep passing the costs along to the residents. Thank you.
03:54:04.15	Unknown	No further public comment.
03:54:05.51	Mayor Cox	All right, thank you. I will close public comment, bring it back up here. I will move that we receive...
03:54:12.06	Mayor Cox	the report and adopt a resolution accepting the Marin County Building Electrification Roadmap.
03:54:19.77	Vice President	Thank you.
03:54:19.79	Mayor Cox	Second.
03:54:22.31	Mayor Cox	Any discussion?
03:54:24.33	Mayor Cox	All in favor, aye.
03:54:26.61	Mayor Cox	That motion carries 4-0 with 1 absent.
03:54:26.73	Catie Thow Garcia	MOST OF THEM.
03:54:30.15	Mayor Cox	Okay.
03:54:31.11	Mayor Cox	Mm.
03:54:31.62	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much, Katie, and please thank your colleague at the county as well. And thank you, Mark, for being here. All right. Moving on. Next is City Manager reports, Council Member reports, City Council appointments, and other Council business. First, I'll turn it over to the City Manager for City Manager information for Council. Thank you.
03:54:53.24	Unknown	Thank you, Mayor, members of the council, members of the public.
03:54:56.80	Unknown	that are briefed update you on one is at a council meeting last month the mayor and council you asked chief Gregory and I to meet with the southern Marin fire district chief to talk about wildfire and emergency preparation specifically as related to dispenser station firehouse it was we had that meeting last week it was a productive meeting I think everybody understands that the LA fires past fires and a new fire maps have created a sense of urgency that you know we all are embracing so part of that discussion included some of the interim steps we could take in partnership with Southern Marin fire to move the needle in this area and then the commitment to explore long-term steps that would actually be the optimum solution so we've committed to meeting to bringing stuff forward to the city council and to the board so that this can in fact be an initiative that we work through one of the good things is you approved the commissioning of a facilities assessment by bureau veritas that facilities assessment included the Spencer Station facility. So that's part and parcel of something that we will present in our capital improvement program as a way to, again, get that facility ready for us to partner with Southern Marin to create more fire resources, fire prevention resources in that area. The second thing is today you received a copy of a letter that I sent to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and liaison Thomas art about the city's refusal of the grant for a bridgeway included in that letter were some comments about the extensive public participation process but also the commitment by the city of Sausalito to use local funds to create safety improvements and that we would be bringing that forward and so that is what I was directed to do on Saturday that's been done you have a copy of that letter in your in your packet or in your inbox
03:56:55.36	Unknown	That concludes my report, Mayor.
03:56:57.39	Mayor Cox	Thank you so much.
03:56:59.60	Mayor Cox	I'll move on to city attorney information for council.
03:57:06.48	Sergio	And I have nothing for the council this evening.
03:57:11.95	Mayor Cox	Okay, great.
03:57:16.57	Mayor Cox	I will move on to council member reports.
03:57:22.34	Mayor Cox	Yeah, I'm going to start off. So I had asked that an item get added to our agenda that is not there. It was a Cal City's action alert regarding SB 79 asking that we oppose this bill for transit-oriented development that would have an adverse impact. And so I'm reporting this in my role as representative to the MCC-MC Legislative Committee. And this alert came from Nancy Hall-Bennett, the lobbyist that reports to the Legislative Committee. And so...
03:58:03.64	Mayor Cox	I would like consensus to endorse the opposition being requested by the League of California Cities.
03:58:12.92	Councilmember Hoffman	Did you just you want to describe what it is?
03:58:15.22	Mayor Cox	Yes, it is a bill that would advance transit-oriented development. So it requires cities to ministerially approve higher-density residential projects up to seven stories near public transit stops, including ferry landings, regardless of zoning codes. So it is yet another bill.
03:58:38.75	Mayor Cox	draconian effort to wrestle away from cities any semblance of local control.
03:58:47.09	Vice President	It sounds like something we will want to endorse. My only concern is that it wasn't on the agenda today.
03:58:52.27	Sergio	Yeah, and I similarly echo that concern. I think the appropriate thing would be
03:58:57.23	Sergio	have
03:58:58.36	Sergio	either a council resolution prepared or a letter prepared in support of the mayor's suggested position that can be ratified by the whole council at the next council meeting as a consent calendar item.
03:59:09.01	Mayor Cox	So...
03:59:10.16	Mayor Cox	I don't know what the deadline is. It was...
03:59:13.15	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:59:13.16	Councilmember Hoffman	The alert that I had said that it will be, it's not set for hearing. Let's see, but it will be heard in the next few weeks. All right.
03:59:22.97	Mayor Cox	All right.
03:59:23.74	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
03:59:23.78	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
03:59:23.86	Mayor Cox	TODAY.
03:59:23.93	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
03:59:23.96	Mayor Cox	So we'll add this to the agenda for April 15.
03:59:30.61	Mayor Cox	Um...
03:59:33.80	Mayor Cox	I'll defer to someone else while I think about what other council member, council member committee reports I may have. I did also attach a list of wildfire bills by subject, just so that everybody can see the huge volume of wildfire bills pending. I did
03:59:50.90	Mayor Cox	but I think that's a good question.
03:59:52.04	Mayor Cox	give a copy of that to our
03:59:57.38	Mayor Cox	Disaster Preparedness Committee staff person, Mike McKinley, to share with the Community Disaster Preparedness Committee when they meet.
04:00:08.75	Mayor Cox	Who else has a report?
04:00:11.06	Councilmember Hoffman	This isn't... I don't know what this would fall under, but I'll just throw it out here. I got a request from the Marine Mammal Center to send a letter to our... to Congressman Huffman and...
04:00:26.38	Councilmember Hoffman	in our Senator Padilla about funding for
04:00:26.45	Catie Thow Garcia	in our
04:00:32.24	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:00:32.75	Councilmember Hoffman	It was from the Marine Mammal Center for the fisheries to protect whales from impacts from fishing gear, from lost fishing gear, fishing time, or from fishing gear that had gotten lost and that whales get caught up in it and also harmed by it. So if anybody's interested in that or feels like they want to send in a letter to a congressman or our state senator, let me know. I have a letter on how to do that through the Marine Mammal Center. So anyway, I don't know who that would fall under, but they're good partners with us and they're near neighbors.
04:01:17.48	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:01:17.51	Mayor Cox	Okay.
04:01:17.84	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:01:18.11	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
04:01:18.22	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:01:18.73	Councilmember Hoffman	Anyone?
04:01:18.97	Mayor Cox	Anyone else?
04:01:19.96	Vice President	I don't think so.
04:01:20.99	Mayor Cox	Okay.
04:01:22.02	Mayor Cox	All right, then I'm going to move on to appointments and removals from boards and commissions. The first
04:01:30.86	Mayor Cox	item is make appointments to the sewer MOU ad hoc committee. So we are
04:01:35.40	Mayor Cox	in the process of finalizing negotiations with the
04:01:38.58	Mayor Cox	Sausalito Marin City Sanitary District on
04:01:41.65	Mayor Cox	a Memorandum of Understanding regarding
04:01:44.30	Mayor Cox	the transfer of our
04:01:46.94	Mayor Cox	a collection system over from our jurisdiction to theirs. We need help.
04:01:52.63	Mayor Cox	getting us across the finish line. And so I, without even asking them in advance, I'm asking our vice mayor and council member Hoffman to serve on this committee.
04:02:02.66	Mayor Cox	probably involve two meetings with their two board members to just finalize the negotiations before bringing it to this council for final approval.
04:02:16.68	Vice President	It's an important issue. I'd be happy to work on it.
04:02:20.66	Mayor Cox	Sure. Okay. Thank you. All right. Next, there's a staff report in our packet regarding City Council consideration of removing Angela Weber from the City of Sausalito Historic Preservation Commission. Okay.
04:02:35.17	Mayor Cox	Any questions?
04:02:38.48	Mayor Cox	All right, I'm gonna move the removal referenced in the staff report. Actually, I'm gonna open it up for public comment.
04:02:48.39	Mayor Cox	Yes.
04:02:51.88	Mayor Cox	Vicki Nichols, another member of the Historic Preservation Commission.
04:02:58.12	Vicki Nichols	Thank you, mayor. I'm currently the vice chair. Um, I, it isn't specifically about this item, but I didn't know how you're going to ask for public comment on the third bullet down.
04:03:08.30	Vicki Nichols	You have a possible appointment to the Historical Preservation Commission, but right now we have six people, including Ms. Weber. So dependent on what action you take in that first bullet, we do have the complement of five with your last appointment of Mr. Wayne Bonet.
04:03:27.05	Mayor Cox	Thank you. Thank you.
04:03:31.13	Mayor Cox	Any other public comment?
04:03:32.60	Mayor Cox	See you then. All right. I'm going to close public comment.
04:03:35.27	Mayor Cox	I'm moving.
04:03:37.06	Mayor Cox	We have the service.
04:03:40.46	Mayor Cox	These commissioners serve it at the pleasure of the council. For the reasons enunciated in the staff report, I move removal of Angela Weber from the Historic Preservation Commission.
04:03:53.17	Vice President	Second.
04:03:57.68	Unknown	Rock off or should it? Yes. Okay.
04:03:59.65	Unknown	Council member Hoffman. Yes. Council member Sobieski. Vice mayor Woodside. Yes.
04:04:01.94	Mayor Cox	Yes.
04:04:06.86	Mayor Cox	Yes, that motion carries 4-0 with one absent.
04:04:12.37	Mayor Cox	Okay, next, consider making appointments to Planning Commission, Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee, and Historic Preservation Commission.
04:04:24.08	Mayor Cox	We I am not going to propose any appointments this evening. We interviewed a planning commissioner, but we have at least two other very qualified candidates. We interviewed pedestrian and bicycle advisory committee candidates, but
04:04:40.45	Mayor Cox	We are going, as I mentioned earlier, we will be retooling and re-imagining the, uh,
04:04:47.66	Mayor Cox	constitution and purpose of that committee. And so we're going to pause for a moment before making any appointments. And for the historic...
04:04:56.84	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
04:04:56.96	Mayor Cox	Preservation Commission, we are down to five. We have two possible candidates that I think we've interviewed, but we can consider those another evening when all of us are here.
04:05:13.09	Unknown	Thank you.
04:05:13.97	Unknown	Thank you.
04:05:15.05	Mayor Cox	No, we only interviewed one. There are two other applications pending and the current
04:05:21.09	Mayor Cox	The current member who will be termed out is a member until the end of April.
04:05:28.58	Mayor Cox	All right, future agenda items. I'll take public comment on
04:05:34.30	Mayor Cox	appointments.
04:05:37.04	Unknown	Thank you.
04:05:37.20	Unknown	Can I note something on the Historic Preservation Commission? I think the historic, it's going to need to fill a vacancy for a full term member starting tomorrow and ending on April 13, 2026. This to serve for the remaining three year term for Angela Weber. And so the city council could appoint David J. Kornmeyer, who is the alternate commissioner.
04:06:02.36	Mayor Cox	Vicki Nichols says he's already been appointed.
04:06:06.87	Unknown	I think he's an alternate. This is what I went over with with Brandon Phipps.
04:06:11.51	Mayor Cox	Okay, again, I'm not going to take action tonight. They can still take action. City Clerk, may I ask that you confer with the Vice Chair of the Commission to be sure that we are in alignment about the status of the commissioners?
04:06:25.37	Mayor Cox	Okay.
04:06:26.11	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
04:06:26.12	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:06:26.24	Mayor Cox	Thank you.
04:06:26.26	Councilmember Hoffman	Thank you.
04:06:27.78	Mayor Cox	All right, future agenda items. Any additional future agenda items?
04:06:34.39	Mayor Cox	I seeing none I'll take.
04:06:39.32	Mayor Cox	uh,
04:06:39.61	Councilmember Hoffman	Let me.
04:06:39.62	Mayor Cox	Let me...
04:06:40.03	Councilmember Hoffman	I'm not sure how to
04:06:43.96	Councilmember Hoffman	I'm not sure how, let me just,
04:06:47.83	Councilmember Hoffman	City Manager, you and I, there's been several inquiries or suggestions about, and I'm just, I don't know, I'm asking I guess the council for input too on this agenda item, about investigations about the, you know,
04:07:06.41	Councilmember Hoffman	hearing on Saturday or how, I'm not phrasing this correctly, but the hearing on Saturday about how we got there, about the bicycle
04:07:17.19	Councilmember Hoffman	grant, you know, the
04:07:21.85	Councilmember Hoffman	the presentation that was given, whatever. Do you have thoughts on that? We talked about it Monday, I asked you for your input, what that would look like. We've had several comments from the public about
04:07:36.51	Unknown	I listened to the comments. I saw the communication. I did have the conversation with you. You asked me about how we paid this person and the idea that we needed to do a look-see into the appropriateness of that payment. And I think I told you that was all grant funds. I believe that the sea level rise money was all grant funds. If the council directs me to do something over and above what's already happened, happy to do it. But I need direction from you all.
04:08:05.55	Councilmember Hoffman	Okay, fine. Any thoughts from the council? Any further action?
04:08:11.41	Mayor Cox	I don't see the need for further action.
04:08:15.12	Mayor Cox	I've given this careful consideration after seeing the, um, various emails. Uh, I, um, was very critical of staff back in 2023 regarding the fact that this, that grant funds had been applied for.
04:08:33.06	Mayor Cox	without the council direction in the first place.
04:08:37.13	Mayor Cox	Um,
04:08:39.54	Mayor Cox	uh,
04:08:40.45	Mayor Cox	exportation was received and i'm quite clear that staff will not in the future seek grant funding without the endorsement of a majority of council members and i think that's the way to avoid that issue but every other vote that we took on this we discussed i did not want it to move forward in 2023 but there was a majority of the council who did we decided to hear options i tried to have heard last year there was a majority of the council who did. We decided to hear options. I tried to have it heard last year. There was a majority of the council who wanted more public hearing opportunities, and that discussion happened after the September election. And so every step of the way has been directed by a majority of the council and not by staff. And so So I don't see the recourse for the residents who are unhappy with the actions of the council and not by staff and so I don't see you know the the recourse for the residents who are unhappy with the actions of a majority of the council is to not reelect a majority of the council if they're unhappy with the manner in which the council is conducting business but every step of the way was directed by council and a majority of the council and so I don't any need, and I think it would be a waste of public funds to spend staff time or other time further investigating this.
04:09:54.62	Unknown	Thank you.
04:09:59.59	Mayor Cox	Okay.
04:10:04.49	Mayor Cox	I'll take public comment on future agenda items.
04:10:08.54	Unknown	See you, man.
04:10:09.43	Mayor Cox	OK, no other reports of significance.
04:10:14.61	Mayor Cox	I'm going to adjourn this evening's meeting in honor of my dear friend and a dear friend of all of us, Ann Teller, who passed away. Many of you will recall that she served as an invaluable role as treasurer of most of the community organizations within this town on one occasion or another, including, um,
04:10:37.50	Mayor Cox	the Sister City organization, Rotary. She was a treasurer of Rotary for over a decade. She was declared Rotarian of the Year in 2018. She served as treasurer for the community boating organization.
04:10:55.89	Mayor Cox	and she served as treasurer for many of the council members who have served in the past and who currently serve on the council. She was a longtime resident of Sausalito. She moved to Santa Barbara several years ago to be closer to her family with her partner, Mark. She will be missed. I think many of us feel so fortunate to be, to have known her and to have listened to her sage counsel on a myriad of issues over the years. So I'm adjourning this evening's meeting in her honor. Thank you.

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