City Council
City Council
lun, 17 de abril de 2023
Puntos de agenda
Registros de votación
Resumen del debate
Transcripción
RESUMEN DE REUNIÓNGenerado por IA
Concejo Municipal de Petaluma — 17 de abril de 2023
Esta fue una extensa sesión ordinaria que se prolongó hasta pasada la medianoche, e incluyó dos sesiones cerradas, varias proclamaciones y tres audiencias públicas sustantivas. El tema más controvertido fue, con diferencia, la ordenanza de protecciones para inquilinos residenciales, que convocó a decenas de oradores públicos y requirió votaciones de sondeo detalladas antes de llegar a una votación definitiva.
Sesiones cerradas
El concejo se reunió en sesión cerrada sobre dos asuntos: negociaciones laborales con el sindicato de bomberos y dos asociaciones de empleados profesionales y de mandos intermedios, y negociaciones sobre bienes inmuebles relativas a la propiedad municipal Fairgrounds (175 Fairgrounds Drive / 868–866 East Washington) con la Fourth District Agricultural Association en relación con los términos para la Sonoma Marin Fair. La concejala Nau se abstuvo de participar en la sesión sobre Fairgrounds. Ninguna de las dos sesiones cerradas produjo acciones que deban reportarse.
Un miembro del público, Darren Rakisin, comentó durante la sesión abierta sobre el tema de Fairgrounds, expresando su esperanza de que esto representara un paso genuino hacia negociaciones productivas entre la ciudad y la junta de la feria, en lugar de una simple deliberación interna.
Proclamaciones
El alcalde McDonnell leyó proclamaciones que declaraban el 29 de abril de 2023 como Arbor Day en Petaluma, reconociendo la designación de la ciudad como Tree City USA y su asociación con organizaciones como ReLeaf Petaluma; y que designaban abril de 2023 como el Mes de Concientización sobre la Agresión Sexual, en honor a Verity (el centro de crisis por violación del condado de Sonoma), que atendió a más de 1,200 sobrevivientes en 2022. Representantes de Verity agradecieron al concejo y mencionaron su línea de crisis disponible las 24 horas (707-545-4273). El jefe de policía Savano señaló que Petaluma es la única agencia de orden público del condado con un defensor de víctimas interno.
Comentario público general
Los oradores abordaron varios temas que no estaban en el orden del día:
Elizabeth Clary (Alchemia) invitó al concejo al Inclusion Festival del 13 de mayo en Lucchesi Park (11 a.m.–6 p.m.), que celebra a artistas con discapacidades intelectuales y del desarrollo, y elogió al personal por las recientes mejoras de accesibilidad, incluidas nuevas rampas de acera.
Un residente de Littlewoods Mobile Park planteó preocupaciones sobre el estacionamiento ilegal y presuntas actividades relacionadas con drogas cerca de su domicilio, y expresó su frustración con la capacidad de respuesta de la policía.
Steve De Lou (G Street Action) instó al concejo a prohibir los sopladores de hojas a gasolina (motores pequeños de uso fuera de carretera/SOREs), citando datos de la California Air Resources Board que muestran que una hora de uso de un soplador de hojas produce tanta contaminación de smog como conducir un automóvil 1,100 millas. La concejala Cader Thompson sugirió retomar el asunto en septiembre u octubre.
Dos residentes de parques de casas móviles (Betty Hudson Schrader y Margaret De Matteo de Legal Aid of Sonoma County) instaron al concejo a avanzar con las enmiendas a la ordenanza de estabilización de alquileres de casas móviles de Petaluma, en particular reduciendo los límites de aumento de alquiler basados en el IPC y evitando grandes tarifas de transferencia en el lugar, como las adoptadas en Windsor. La concejala Cader Thompson confirmó que hay programado un taller público para el 5 de junio, con primera y segunda lectura el 19 de junio y el 10 de julio.
El comisionado de planificación Darren Rakisin (a través de Zoom) instó al concejo a utilizar la Comisión de Planificación de manera más activa para sesiones de estudio de políticas, especialmente en estándares de diseño objetivos e implementación del Plan General, en lugar de dejar a la comisión inactiva durante una disminución en las solicitudes de desarrolladores.
Calendario de consentimiento
Los nueve puntos del calendario de consentimiento fueron aprobados por unanimidad. Antes de la votación, la concejala Healey pidió al personal que aclarara el estado de la prohibición de riego ornamental con agua potable en propiedades comerciales. El personal confirmó que la ciudad ha optado por no hacer cumplir esta prohibición exigida por el estado, cuya vigencia está programada para expirar a finales de junio de 2023. Healey también señaló que los niveles de restricción de agua por sequía de la ciudad están desactualizados y no reflejan décadas de mejoras de conservación incorporadas, sugiriendo que se revisaran antes de la próxima sequía. El calendario de consentimiento incluyó, entre otros puntos, la ratificación de reparaciones de emergencia en el dique de Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility, la derogación de las declaraciones de sequía en Etapa 4 y de emergencia local por sequía, y segundas lecturas de varias ordenanzas presupuestarias y de derecho de paso relacionadas con el North McDowell Complete Streets Project.
Votación: Unánime (7–0)
Punto 10: Ordenanza de protecciones para inquilinos residenciales — Primera lectura
El alcalde McDonnell se abstuvo de participar por ser propietario de inmuebles de alquiler en Petaluma. La vicealcaldesa Cader Thompson presidió la sesión.
Antecedentes: El concejo adoptó una ordenanza provisional de protecciones para inquilinos residenciales en septiembre de 2022, originalmente programada para expirar el 1 de marzo de 2023, y luego extendida hasta julio de 2023. Tras una extensa labor de divulgación comunitaria —que incluyó reuniones con partes interesadas, talleres públicos y una encuesta—, el concejo dio instrucciones al personal en un taller del 6 de marzo sobre enmiendas específicas que debían presentarse.
El fiscal de la ciudad Eric Donnelly explicó detalladamente las enmiendas propuestas:
Exención para pequeños propietarios para propietarios de inmuebles de alquiler de pequeña escala (propietarios no corporativos de dos o menos unidades de alquiler en la ciudad, con el aviso requerido al inquilino)
Exención de arrendamiento temporal (residencia principal del propietario alquilada a corto plazo, menos de 12 meses, con una fecha de finalización específica)
Protecciones desde el primer día (los requisitos de causa justificada aplican desde el primer día de arrendamiento, no después de 12 meses como establece la ley estatal)
Alineación con la Tenant Protection Act (TPA) para causas justificadas de desalojo con y sin culpa — con un error de redacción corregido en el momento: "incumplimiento del contrato de arrendamiento" debe leerse como "incumplimiento de una cláusula material del contrato de arrendamiento"
Eliminación de las disposiciones de la Ellis Act, conservando únicamente un derecho de primera opción de seis meses si un propietario retira una unidad del mercado y la vuelve a alquilar dentro de ese plazo
Mayor asistencia para reubicación en terminaciones sin culpa: 250% de un mes de alquiler o $11,000, lo que sea menor
Venta de la propiedad reconocida como causa justificada de terminación sin culpa
Exención de arrendamiento transitorio
El personal también abordó cuatro puntos sobre los que el concejo había solicitado más información: exenciones para unidades subsidiadas por organizaciones sin fines de lucro o el gobierno (no incluidas — no hay necesidad demostrada), la exención de nuevas construcciones de 15 años de la TPA (no incluida tal como estaba redactada), protecciones especiales para educadores e inquilinos del año escolar (eliminadas de este borrador) y la autorización para que familiares se unan al hogar de un inquilino (no incluida).
Los comentarios públicos fueron extensos — 88 comentarios escritos presentados antes del límite de las 4 p.m., con más enviados posteriormente, además de aproximadamente 20 oradores en persona y a través de Zoom.
*Los defensores de los inquilinos y sus simpatizantes* argumentaron que las protecciones eran necesarias e incluso insuficientes. El Sonoma County Tenants Union, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, North Bay Jobs with Justice, North Bay Labor Council y el Sonoma County Democratic Party instaron a su aprobación. Margaret De Matteo (Legal Aid) expresó su preocupación de que eliminar las redes de seguridad de la Ellis Act y alinear las causas sin culpa con la TPA reintroduce vacíos legales —particularmente en torno a la mudanza del propietario y la remodelación sustancial— que la ordenanza original estaba diseñada para cerrar. Una oradora describió el caso de una inquilina de Petaluma (Lisa Tenenbaum) que fue desalojada bajo la Ellis Act mientras el propietario volvió a publicar la unidad a un alquiler más alto meses después. Jonah, de NBOP, señaló que las familias afectadas —especialmente padres y maestros— a menudo no pueden asistir a reuniones de seis horas para abogar por sí mismas. Oradores de la iglesia unitaria, el North Bay Labor Council y otros invocaron la vivienda como un problema de salud pública y de derechos humanos.
*Los representantes de propietarios y administradores de propiedades* instaron al concejo a votar en contra o a posponer la decisión. La California Apartment Association calificó la asistencia para reubicación de "extorsión". La North Bay Association of Realtors propuso dejar expirar la ordenanza y formar un grupo de trabajo. Varios administradores de propiedades argumentaron que la ordenanza llevaría a los propietarios a vender, reduciría el mercado de alquiler y aumentaría los alquileres. Un representante de una empresa de administración de propiedades afirmó que personalmente aconsejaría a todos sus clientes de Petaluma que vendieran sus propiedades si la ordenanza se aprobaba. Otros oradores calificaron la ordenanza de demasiado compleja, dijeron que la exención de 15 años era necesaria para fomentar la nueva construcción y argumentaron que la TPA era suficiente.
Debate del concejo y votaciones de sondeo:
Exención de nuevas construcciones de 15 años: Los concejales Barnacle, Post'l Kay y Schribbs se opusieron a eximir las unidades más nuevas. Healey apoyó firmemente la exención, citando la fragilidad del entorno de desarrollo de apartamentos a precio de mercado. Nau no estaba decidida. *Dirección mayoritaria: no incluir la exención.*
Umbral para pequeños propietarios: Barnacle propuso "dos propiedades o cuatro unidades"; Healey sugirió tres unidades; Schribbs también se inclinó por tres; Nau y Post'l Kay fueron flexibles. *Dirección mayoritaria: tres unidades de alquiler (en la ciudad).*
Derecho de regreso para causas sin culpa: Tal como estaba redactado, el derecho de primera opción de seis meses solo aplicaba al retiro permanente del mercado. Barnacle y Post'l Kay querían extenderlo a las tres causas sin culpa (retiro permanente, mudanza del propietario o familiar, y remodelación sustancial/demolición). *Dirección mayoritaria: extender a las tres causas justificadas sin culpa.*
Asistencia para reubicación: Healey propuso una prueba de recursos al 100% del AMI; el personal señaló la complejidad administrativa. Barnacle se opuso a la prueba de recursos pero apoyó reducir el tope. *Dirección mayoritaria: 250% de un mes de alquiler o $9,000, lo que sea menor (reducido de $11,000).*
Protecciones para educadores/estudiantes: Schribbs expresó su preocupación por señalar a una sola profesión y el posible cribado discriminatorio por parte de los propietarios. *Dirección mayoritaria: no incluir.*
Vencimiento/revisión: En lugar de una fecha de vencimiento, el concejo instruyó al personal a presentar un informe sobre los impactos dentro de dos años (antes si la actividad de desarrollo a precio de mercado disminuye significativamente).
El concejal Barnacle hizo una moción para introducir la ordenanza (primera lectura) con las enmiendas: exención para pequeños propietarios en tres unidades; asistencia para reubicación con tope en $9,000 o 2.5 meses de alquiler, lo que sea menor; derecho de regreso extendido a las tres causas justificadas sin culpa; sin exención de construcción de 15 años; sin protecciones para educadores; y dirección para que el personal informe dentro de dos años.
Votación: 4–2 (Barnacle, Cader Thompson, Post'l Kay, Schribbs — a favor; Healey y Nau — en contra; McDonnell se abstuvo). La exención de 15 años fue la razón declarada de Healey para votar en contra.
Punto 11: Auditor policial independiente — IntegrAssure, Inc.
El personal presentó los resultados de un proceso de RFP para un Auditor Policial Independiente (IPA, por sus siglas en inglés), una de las diez principales prioridades del concejo derivada de las 31 recomendaciones del Ad Hoc Community Advisory Committee. IntegrAssure LLC, dirigida por el ex comisionado adjunto del NYPD Jeff Schlanger, fue la selección unánime tras dos rondas de entrevistas con un panel integrado por personal y miembros de la comunidad.
El equipo de la firma incluye a Aaron Pilniak (ex asesor del alcalde de Nueva York y comisionado adjunto asistente del NYPD), Kenton Rainey (ejecutivo retirado de orden público con experiencia en reformas en múltiples agencias) y Denise Lewis (ex oficial del LAPD y monitora externa con 20 años de experiencia). Schlanger destacó que Petaluma es inusual por adoptar la supervisión de manera proactiva —antes de cualquier decreto de consentimiento, escándalo o tiroteo con intervención policial— y citó su trabajo para ayudar a elevar el índice de favorabilidad comunitaria del LAPD del 23% al 80% a lo largo de nueve años.
El IPA es parte de un modelo híbrido de supervisión en tres partes: el IPA, un Public Safety Advisory Group (que se formará con miembros de la comunidad, con el objetivo de estar operativo en el otoño de 2023) y la búsqueda de la acreditación CALEA (Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies). El fiscal de la ciudad Donnelly señaló que el alcance del trabajo fue cuidadosamente diseñado para ser coherente con la Peace Officers' Procedural Bill of Rights y no alterar los términos y condiciones de empleo, y que la Police Officers Association participó en las discusiones y apoya la iniciativa. El presidente de la POA, Garrett Scholin, estuvo presente.
La concejala Schribbs planteó preocupaciones sobre el costo y la distancia de la firma (con sede en Florida), preguntando sobre los cambios reales logrados en asignaciones anteriores. Schlanger indicó que los viajes representan típicamente entre el 10% y el 15% del valor del contrato, que el jefe Rainey tiene su base localmente y que Denise Lewis se encuentra a cuatro horas de distancia, y que la mayor parte del trabajo de monitoreo en Aurora, Colorado se realiza de forma remota. Dos oradores públicos (a través de Zoom) expresaron su apoyo, incluido un veterano que elogió el enfoque proactivo y un miembro de la comunidad que instó a IntegrAssure a revisar informes anteriores de círculos de escucha comunitaria sobre experiencias policiales dispares entre residentes BIPOC.
Votación: Unánime (7–0)
Punto 12: Audiencia pública sobre eliminación de maleza
La mariscal de bomberos Jessica Powers explicó el proceso legal anual: la ley estatal exige una audiencia pública antes de que el Departamento de Bomberos y su contratista puedan ingresar a propiedades privadas para eliminar maleza que constituya un peligro de incendio. Todos los terrenos baldíos se incluyen automáticamente en la lista de eliminación; las propiedades con problemas recurrentes de cumplimiento de códigos también pueden ser añadidas. Los propietarios recibieron notificación a principios de abril. El plazo de cumplimiento es el 31 de mayo; las inspecciones comienzan el 1 de junio.
El concejal Schribbs preguntó por qué una propiedad que él mantiene aparecía en la lista. El personal explicó que todos los terrenos baldíos se incluyen automáticamente y que, si la propiedad cumple con los requisitos en el momento de la inspección, no se toma ninguna medida. No hubo oradores públicos.
Se aprobaron múltiples resoluciones (Anexos 1–7), con varios concejales absteniéndose individualmente por ser propietarios de inmuebles dentro de un radio de 500 pies de las parcelas afectadas. Todas las resoluciones fueron aprobadas por unanimidad con las abstenciones correspondientes.
Puntos clave
La ordenanza de protecciones para inquilinos residenciales avanza (4–2): La primera lectura fue aprobada con enmiendas destacadas — asistencia para reubicación con tope en $9,000, exención para pequeños propietarios establecida en tres unidades y derecho de regreso extendido a las tres causas de desalojo sin culpa. Se requiere una segunda lectura antes de que entre en vigor. La ordenanza no incluye una exención para nuevas construcciones (la principal objeción de la concejala Healey) ni protecciones para educadores/estudiantes.
IntegrAssure contratado como Auditor Policial Independiente (7–0): Petaluma se convierte en una de las pocas ciudades de California en adoptar una supervisión policial civil proactiva antes de cualquier evento de crisis. El IPA evaluará las políticas del departamento, investigará quejas y ayudará a establecer un Public Safety Advisory Group comunitario previsto para el otoño de 2023.
Las enmiendas a la estabilización de alquileres de casas móviles están en el calendario: Hay programado un taller público para el 5 de junio, con lecturas de la ordenanza el 19 de junio y el 10 de julio.
Se propone prohibición de sopladores de hojas a gasolina: Un grupo comunitario (G Street Action) solicitó formalmente al concejo que considerara una prohibición; la concejala Cader Thompson sugirió un plazo de septiembre/octubre para presentar una propuesta.
Las restricciones por sequía se levantan en gran medida: El concejo derogó la declaración de sequía en Etapa 4 de Petaluma y la emergencia local por sequía, aunque algunas restricciones a nivel estatal (por ejemplo, sin agua potable para la construcción) permanecen vigentes a la espera de una revisión adicional por parte del personal.
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Qué ocurrió en esta reunión
Actas de la Sesión Ordinaria del Concejo Municipal/PCDSA del 3 de abril de 2023
This was a Consent Calendar item for approval of minutes from the April 3, 2023 City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.
Agenda Tentativa para la Sesión Ordinaria del Concejo Municipal/PCDSA del 1 de mayo de 2023
This was a Consent Calendar item for the tentative agenda for the May 1, 2023 City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.
Resolución que Ratifica la Adjudicación del Contrato, Acepta la Finalización y Autoriza la Liberación de la Retención del 10% para la Reparación de Emergencia del Dique del Estanque de Oxidación y la Estructura de Transferencia de la Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility por Team Ghilotti, Inc.
This Consent Calendar item concerned ratifying the award of contract and authorizing release of 10% retention for emergency repair to the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility by Team Ghilotti, Inc. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.
Resolución que Aprueba una Solicitud a la Metropolitan Transportation Commission para la Asignación de Fondos del Artículo 3 de la Ley de Desarrollo del Transporte del Año Fiscal 23/24
This Consent Calendar item involved approving a request to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for FY 23/24 Transportation Development Act Article 3 Pedestrian/Bicycle Project Funding. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.
Resolución que Autoriza al Administrador Municipal a Celebrar un Acuerdo de Mantenimiento de Jardinería con el California Department of Transportation para el Mantenimiento de las Plantaciones Paisajísticas y los Sistemas de Riego entre Highway 101 y Sapphire Street como Parte de la Subdivisión Sterling Hills at Quarry Heights
This Consent Calendar item authorized the City Manager to enter into a Landscaping Maintenance Agreement with the California Department of Transportation for maintenance between Highway 101 and Sapphire Street. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.
Puntos de agenda (12)
Consent Calendar
1Consent CalendarActas de la Sesión Ordinaria del Concejo Municipal/PCDSA del 3 de abril de 2023
Qué ocurrió
This was a Consent Calendar item for approval of minutes from the April 3, 2023 City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.2Consent CalendarAgenda Tentativa para la Sesión Ordinaria del Concejo Municipal/PCDSA del 1 de mayo de 2023
Qué ocurrió
This was a Consent Calendar item for the tentative agenda for the May 1, 2023 City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.3Consent CalendarResolución que Ratifica la Adjudicación del Contrato, Acepta la Finalización y Autoriza la Liberación de la Retención del 10% para la Reparación de Emergencia del Dique del Estanque de Oxidación y la Estructura de Transferencia de la Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility por Team Ghilotti, Inc.
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item concerned ratifying the award of contract and authorizing release of 10% retention for emergency repair to the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility by Team Ghilotti, Inc. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.4Consent CalendarResolución que Aprueba una Solicitud a la Metropolitan Transportation Commission para la Asignación de Fondos del Artículo 3 de la Ley de Desarrollo del Transporte del Año Fiscal 23/24
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item involved approving a request to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for FY 23/24 Transportation Development Act Article 3 Pedestrian/Bicycle Project Funding. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.5Consent CalendarResolución que Autoriza al Administrador Municipal a Celebrar un Acuerdo de Mantenimiento de Jardinería con el California Department of Transportation para el Mantenimiento de las Plantaciones Paisajísticas y los Sistemas de Riego entre Highway 101 y Sapphire Street como Parte de la Subdivisión Sterling Hills at Quarry Heights
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item authorized the City Manager to enter into a Landscaping Maintenance Agreement with the California Department of Transportation for maintenance between Highway 101 and Sapphire Street. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.6Consent CalendarAdopción (Segunda Lectura) de las Ordenanzas Nos. 2841, 2842, 2843, 2844, 2845 y 2846 N.C.S. que Modifican las Ordenanzas 2826, 2827, 2814, 2815, 2828 y 2829 N.C.S. para Cambiar Ciertas Apropiaciones para las Operaciones de la City of Petaluma del 1 de julio de 2022 al 30 de junio de 2023
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item involved adoption of Ordinance Nos. 2841-2846 N.C.S. to amend appropriations for City operations from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.7Consent CalendarAdopción (Segunda Lectura) de la Ordenanza No. 2847 N.C.S. que Aprueba los Acuerdos de Compraventa de Derechos de Vía de Propiedades Inmobiliarias, comúnmente conocidas como 1390 N. McDowell Blvd. (APN 137-011-063/064), 1301 Redwood Way (APN 137-011-013), 1360 N. McDowell (APN 137-011-017), 1372 N. McDowell Blvd. (APN 137-011-014), y Cualquier Derecho de Vía Adicional para el North McDowell Complete Streets Project, y Autoriza al Administrador Municipal a Ejecutar el Acuerdo y Todos los Demás Documentos Necesarios para Completar la Compraventa, y Determina que Esta Acción Está Exenta de CEQA conforme a la Sección 15301 de las Directrices de CEQA (Instalaciones Existentes)
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item concerned adoption of Ordinance No. 2847 N.C.S. approving Purchase and Sale Agreements for right of ways for the North McDowell Complete Streets Project. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.8Consent CalendarResolución que Adopta la Vacación Sumaria de Servidumbres de Servicios Públicos (PUE), Ubicadas en los Números de Parcela del Tasador 006-163-040 y 006-163-041, y Determina que Esta Acción es Consistente con una Declaración Negativa Mitigada Certificada – CONTINUADO DESDE LA SESIÓN ORDINARIA DEL CONCEJO MUNICIPAL/PCDSA DEL 7 DE ABRIL DE 2023
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item involved adopting the Summary Vacation of Public Utility Easements located at specific Assessor Parcel Numbers and had been continued from the April 7, 2023 meeting. No specific discussion or public comment was noted, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.9Consent CalendarResolución que Deroga las Resoluciones No. 2022-130 N.C.S. (Implementación de la Etapa 4 del Plan de Contingencia por Escasez de Agua de la Ciudad) y No. 2021-150 N.C.S. (Proclamación de Emergencia Local por Sequía) y Autoriza al Administrador Municipal a Cumplir con los Requisitos de la Orden Ejecutiva N-5-23 del Gobernador (Orden Ejecutiva de Actualización sobre la Sequía) y Todas las Enmiendas Posteriores
Qué ocurrió
This Consent Calendar item repealed water shortage contingency resolutions and authorized adherence to Governor's Executive Order N-5-23 on drought requirements. Councilmember Healy asked clarifying questions of staff; no public comment was received, and the item was approved as part of the Consent Calendar motion that passed 7-0.Public Hearing
10Public HearingIntroducción (Primera Lectura) de Ordenanza que Modifica el Capítulo 6.60 Titulado "Residential Tenancy Protections" del Petaluma Municipal Code y Determina que Este Punto Está Exento de CEQA conforme a la Sección 15387(b)(5) de las Directrices de CEQA
Qué ocurrió
City Attorney Eric Danly presented the staff report on amending Chapter 6.60 on Residential Tenancy Protections. Extensive public comment was received from approximately 35+ speakers, followed by Councilmember discussion. The motion to introduce the ordinance with amendments (exempting 3 or fewer unit owners, extending right of return, and providing relocation assistance) passed 4-2, with Mayor McDonnell recused and Councilmembers Healy and Nau voting no.11Public HearingResolución que Aprueba un Acuerdo de Servicios Profesionales con IntegrAssure, Inc. para Fungir como Auditor Policial Independiente de la City of Petaluma y Autoriza a la Ciudad
Qué ocurrió
Aaron Zavala, Sr. Management Analyst, presented the staff report along with Police Chief Ken Savano and City Attorney Eric Danly; Jeff Schlanger from IntegrAssure introduced the company and provided background. Councilmembers asked questions of staff, and two public comments were received. The motion to adopt Resolution 2023-050 N.C.S. approving the professional services agreement passed 7-0.12Public HearingAudiencia Pública y Resoluciones que Ordenan la Eliminación de Plagas Consistentes en Malezas que Crecen en Propiedades Públicas y Privadas en la City of Petaluma y que Ordenan al Departamento de Bomberos Eliminar Dichas Malezas Mediante Contrato si los Propietarios No lo Hacen
Qué ocurrió
Fire Marshal Jessica Power presented the staff report on ordering abatement of weeds on public and private property. Councilmembers asked questions of staff and the public hearing received no comments. Seven separate resolutions (2023-051 through 2023-057 N.C.S.) were adopted individually with various councilmember recusals, all passing unanimously among voting members.Transcripción literal disponible
208 segmentos de transcripción indexados
uh mayor it is now five o'clock would you like to begin the meeting yes we would recording in progress good evening welcome to the regular meeting of the Petaluma city council and Petaluma Community Development successor Agency for Monday April 17th I mean we have our roll call for the evening councilmember Barnacle here cater Thompson here Healy here now here post okay here shrimps McDonnell here let the record reflect council member schribs is absent all other members are present thank you very much uh the first item today is our closed session and I'd like to invite our City attorney to comment on the in the actual announcement for the closed session thank you Mr Mayor the council will conduct two closed sessions tonight um the first is a conference with labor negotiators under government code section 549-57.6 the agency designated representatives are Peggy Flynn city manager Byron Cochran assistant city manager Charlotte freckman Director of Human Resources and Charles Sakai labor negotiator with Sloan Sakai young and Wong LLP the negotiating parties are the International Association of firefighters unit 7 and Petaluma professional and mid Managers Association units 4 9 and 11.
CITY OF PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA REGULAR MEETING OF THE CITY COUNCIL & PETALUMA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SUCCESSOR AGENCY (PCDSA) City Hall Council Chamber 11 English Street Petaluma, CA 94952 MINUTES Monday, April 17, 2023 CLOSED SESSION - 5:00 PM / REGULAR SESSION - 6:30 PM CALL TO ORDER – CLOSED SESSION Mayor McDonnell called the meeting to order at 5:00 p.m.
the council will also confer with real property negotiators um and and we posted a correction to the agenda to indicate that that's pursuing to government code section 549-56.8 um the property involved is the city-owned fairgrounds Property Assessors Parcels number numbers zero zero seven zero three one zero zero four which is also 175 Fairgrounds drive and zero zero seven zero three one zero zero five which is eight six eight sixty six East Washington the agency negotiators Peggy Flynn the city manager the negotiating parties of the fourth district agricultural Association under negotiation our price terms and I'm sorry price in terms of payment and other terms of use of portions of the city own Fairgrounds property um for presentation of the Sonoma Marin Fair unless there be confusion like there was last time we had a closed session under that heading I just want to make clear that um the only people that are permitted to be in a closed session agendized like that are City representatives and it is a requirement to list not the principles of the other party to the negotiations um not the representatives but rather the principals so hence we've listed the the fourth diaa so if there are any other questions about that I'll be happy to address them but that those are the um that's the Safe Harbor language for tonight's closed sessions um and I invite you to then permit members of the public who wish to address those items to address them thank you thank you and that is a great
• ROLL CALL PRESENT: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs (joined at 5:04 p.m.) ABSENT: None CLOSED SESSION • CONFERENCE WITH LABOR NEGOTIATORS Pursuant to California Government Code Section 54957.6 Agency Designated Representatives: Peggy Flynn, City Manager; Brian Cochran, Assistant City Manager; Charla Freckmann, Director of Human Resources; and Charles Sakai, Labor Negotiator, Sloan Sakai Yeung & Wong LLP Negotiating Parties: International Association of Firefighters (IAFF), Unit 7 and Petaluma Professional and Mid-Managers Association (PPMMA) Units 4, 9, and 11 • CONFERENCE WITH REAL PROPERTY NEGOTIATORS Pursuant to California Government Code Section 54956.8 Property: City-Owned Fairgrounds Property (APN 007-031-004, 175 Fairgrounds Drive; and 007-031- 005, 866 E Washington) Agency Negotiator: Peggy Flynn, City Manager Negotiating Parties: Fourth District Agricultural Association Under Negotiation: Price and terms of payment and other terms of use of portions of City-owned Fairgrounds property for presentation of Sonoma Marin Fair City Attorney Eric Danly announced the Closed Session items.
PUBLIC COMMENT ON CLOSED SESSION ITEMS Prior to adjournment into Closed Session, the public may speak up to three minutes on items to be addressed in Closed Session. Mayor McDonnell opened public comment.
clarification um and I'm sure the public appreciates that uh councilwoman now I'll leave a comment tonight oh I'll be recusing from the fairgrounds closed session but I'll sit in for the first part thank you very much and um as is uh practice uh the public is invited to make comments on the closed session items public comments are limited to three minutes and we are now opening our public comments period um and I'll ask the city clerk if we've received any comments online prior to the meeting mayor we did not receive any comments on the closed session items prior to the meeting thank you very much I'd like to invite our moderator to uh have our announcement of participation yes members of the public attending in person should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so members of the public attending online who wish to speak to the closed session item should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone thank you and um I I'd like to welcome councilmember stribs and haven't noted that council member schribs isn't now joined us and um let's see so um I have no in-person cards for this item so we'll move to our Zoom audience and see if we have any uh public comment from Zoom audience I do not see any hands raised at this time oh it does look like Darren oh yes he's actually the looks like that we have one yes thank you and um before we begin with that we we should remind that it is just on the closed session item that the
Darren Racusen provided comment on the Conference with Real Property Negotiators item. Mayor McDonnell closed public comment. ADJOURN TO CLOSED SESSION Mayor McDonnell adjourned the meeting to Closed Session at 5:05 p.m.
comments are for thank you and please continue with our audience okay so uh well uh begin with uh the first Speaker Darren rakis and I will unmute or allow you to unmute and begin your your time I thank you moderator I just want to say I hope this is the real next step to the fair board engaging with the city and something productive occurring here I mean I don't know if this real property negotiator piece is just the city deciding maybe what party to engage or if this is really an entree to negotiations with the other side but I think for so much of the public we hope that happens just so we can stop reading news articles about it and hearing about it and kind of that he said she said so I'm going to you know hope that this is this is really that next step to negotiating with the other side and uh everybody coming to the table thank you okay at this time I do not see any other hands raised thank you very much and with that we close the public comment period and we're going to adjourn to closed session we will um begin tonight's meeting at 6 30 or at the conclusion of the closed session we're entering whichever comes later thank you foreign uh mayor it is now uh 6 37 p.m are we ready to resume open session we are ready to resume open session thank you very much good evening and welcome to the regular meeting of the Petaluma city council and the Petaluma Community Development successor Agency for Monday April 17th tonight in addition to having Spanish translation available for
the zoom audience we also have Spanish translation available for those who are joining us here in council chambers if you're interested in listening in Spanish uh here in council chambers please see staff in the back of the room if you wish to provide public comment on tonight's agenda please fill out a speaker card at the back of the chamber and bring it to the city clerk if you have children in attendance with you please note this on your speaker card and I will uh try and bring you to the front of the queue um if I will now invite Monica aparicio and Maria Galvez to provide information to those who want to participate in Spanish thank you good evening everybody um functionality [Music] interpretation is interpretations we are ready thank you and thank you very much um may we have our roll call for the evening council members Barnacle here cater Thompson here Healy here now here post okay here shrimps your mayor McDonnell here all members are present thank you very much um let's see let's have a pledge of allegiance for the evening we'll follow with a minute of Silence moving into tonight's agenda are there any uh changes in deletions recommended from the council seeing none we will move on and uh tonight we had a closed session on a variety of manners I'd like to ask the City attorney to provide a report out of that closed session thank you Mr Mayor there is no action to report out tonight thank you very much succinct as always um and uh next in our agenda we have several
1 CALL TO ORDER - REGULAR SESSION Mayor McDonnell called the meeting to order at 6:30 p.m. • ROLL CALL PRESENT: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs ABSENT: None • PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE • MOMENT OF SILENCE AGENDA CHANGES AND DELETIONS (TO CURRENT AGENDA ONLY) None.
REPORT OUT OF CLOSED SESSION City Attorney Eric Danly confirmed there was no reportable action taken during Closed Session. PROCLAMATIONS • Arbor Day (April 29, 2023) • Sexual Assault Awareness Month (April) GENERAL PUBLIC COMMENT During General Public Comment, the public is invited to make comments on items of public interest that are within the City Council’s subject matter jurisdiction and that are not listed on the current agenda.
proclamations and uh first up is our Proclamation for um Arbor Day and I'd like to invite Howard Hornby are you in the house Howard up to the podium and I'd like to ask council member schribs to present while I read the actual Proclamation whereas in 1872 Jay Sterling Morton proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture what a special that a special day be set aside for the planting of trees and whereas this holiday called Arbor Day was first observed with the planting of more than a million trees in Nebraska wow and um and Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and world and whereas trees reduce the erosion of our precious topsoil by wind and water cut Heating and Cooling costs moderate the temperature clean the air produce oxygen and provide habitat for wildlife and whereas trees are a renewable resource giving us paper wood for our homes and countless other wood products and whereas trees in our city increase property values and hence the economic Vitality of business areas and beautify our community and wherever they are planted are a source of joy and spiritual renewal and whereas the city of Petaluma partners with Community organizations such as relief Petaluma to plant more trees educate our community on the importance of trees and take stewardship of establishing new newly planted trees and whereas the city of Petaluma has been recognized as a tree City USA by the National Arbor Day Foundation and desires to continue its tree planting practices now therefore
be it resolved that I Kevin McDonnell mayor of Petaluma along with members of the city council do hereby Proclaim April 29 2023 as Arbor Day in the city of Petaluma and urge all residents to support efforts to protect our trees and woodlands and to plant trees to promote the well-being of this and future Generations thank you [Applause] we also have a proclamation regarding Sexual Assault Awareness Month and I'd like to invite Kate McCoy Desiree McGonagall and Georgina Tello magarin on behalf of verity the podium well I um while I read whereas Sexual Assault Awareness Month is intended to draw attention to the fact that sexual violence is widespread and has a profound and lasting impact on every Community member of Sonoma County and whereas Verdi Sonoma County's Rape Crisis trauma and Healing Center work with over 1200 survivors in Sonoma County in 2022 and whereas National Research indicates that one in five women will be raped at some point in their lifetime and nearly half of all women will experience some form of sexual violence and one in 17 men will be raped at some point in their lifetime one in five men will experience some form of sexual violence and whereas young people are at the greatest risk of sexual violence and youth age 12 to 17 are two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than their adult counterparts and disabled people people of color queer people homeless people transgender people undocumented people youth in foster care and
Public comments are limited up to three minutes per person. Depending on the number of persons wishing to address the Council, time will be allocated in equal shares totaling no more than twenty minutes, subject to the Council’s discretion (Cal.
Gov’t. Code §54954.3(a), Petaluma City Council Rules, Policies and Procedures, III). Beverly Voloshin Matt Hinds Mayor McDonnell opened general public comment. Elizabeth Clary Katharine Bobrowski Steve DeLue Betty Hautzenrader Margaret DeMatteo Darren Racusen Mayor McDonnell closed general public comment.
people of other marginalized identities are even more likely to be victimized by sexual violence and whereas over eighteen thousand members of the military and over 80 000 people who are incarcerated experience sexual violence every year and whereas with leadership and dedication and encouragement there is evidence that we can be successful in preventing sexual violence in the city of Petaluma through increased education awareness and Community involvement and whereas the city of Petaluma strongly supports the efforts of verity and encourages every resident to actively engage in public and private efforts to end sexual violence including conversations about what sexual sexual violence is how to prevent it how to help survivors of all backgrounds connect with crucial counseling and other support services and how every segment of our society can work together to better address sexual violence now therefore be it resolved that I Kevin McDonnell mayor of Petaluma along with the members of the city Petaluma city council do hereby Proclaim April 2023 to be sexual assault awareness month thank you please feel free thank you so much on behalf of Team Verity we are honored the paraluma recognized April as a sexual assault awareness month this month is so important and we could not do it with no all of you thank you for the support that we received from all of you and we hope that you will join us this month for all the various events that we have through the county as a reminder
Berita has the 24 7 crisis line 707-545-4273 where survivors and their families can connect with trained Crisis Line counselors to get support and resources thank you so much again for this proclamation in the partnership with the city of Petaluma thank you oh and and as president I just wanted to thank all of you in the city council uh for assigning this uh we have a great active partnership with Verity at the police department and in fact we uh are the only law enforcement agency in the county that has an in-house victim Advocates like Georgina so I wanted to thank you for the opportunity thank you [Applause] and now and now the evening uh moves to General Public comment and during general public comment the public is invited to make comments on items of public interest that are within the city's City council's subject matter jurisdiction that are not listed in the current agenda public comments are limited up to three minutes per person depending on the number of persons wishing to address the council time will be allocating equal shares to no more than 20 minutes let's see um um Madam clerk have we received any online mayor we did receive two general public comments prior to the meeting which are posted online with the agenda packet wonderful thank you and let's check with our Zoom audience this evening yes at this time I will start a 30-second clock for general public comment members of the public attending in person should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk
COUNCIL COMMENT Councilmember Healy Vice Mayor Cader Thompson Councilmember Nau Councilmember Pocekay Councilmember Shribbs Mayor McDonnell 2 CITY MANAGER COMMENT City Manager Peggy Flynn CONSENT CALENDAR 1.
Minutes of the City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting of April 3, 2023 2. Tentative Agenda for the City Council/PCDSA Regular Meeting of May 1, 2023 3. Resolution Ratifying Award of Contract, Accepting the Completion of, and Authorizing Release of the 10% Retention for the Emergency Repair to the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility Oxidation Pond Levee and Transfer Structure by Team Ghilotti, Inc.
if they have not already done so members of the public attending online should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone speakers are reminded to be respectful in their comments and that this meeting is being translated please pause between sentences for translation a countdown will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers and now that the 30 seconds have elapsed I see uh one virtual hand raised and I have five cards submitted from folks in house making a total of six and so we will have a three minute clock on the speakers tonight for general public comment and I'd like to invite Elizabeth Clary first to be followed by Catherine babowski foreign good evening mayor members of council and staff I'm Elizabeth Clary and for those who don't know me I work with alchemia alchemia is a wonderful non-profit we support artists who have intellectual and developmental disabilities and we serve Petaluma in addition to Santa Rosa and Novato I am here tonight to formally invite you and you'll get an invite in your email soon but I'd like to formally invite you to our inclusion Festival which is coming up on Saturday May 13th it goes from 11 to 6 and you are invited if you have time and I know you're all very busy but if you want to stop by and say hi it's a wonderful all ages Arts Music Festival celebrating people with disabilities their friends families allies and we'll have a variety of wonderful activities for people of all ages to participate in as
4. Resolution Approving a Request to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for the Allocation of Fiscal Year 23/24 Transportation Development Act Article 3 Pedestrian/Bicycle Project Funding 5. Resolution Authorizing the City Manager to Enter into a Landscaping Maintenance Agreement with the California Department of Transportation for Maintenance of the Landscaping Planting and Irrigation Systems between Highway 101 and Sapphire Street as Part of the Sterling Hills at Quarry Heights Subdivision 6.
well as sensory sensitive spaces that people can enjoy so I just wanted to formally invite you and also acknowledge the support of the Parks and Rec Department to present this event they've just been a delight to work with and really share our vision of a truly inclusive opportunity for everybody where everybody's invited um the the leadership has just been incredible so just wanted to formally invite you also just from the perspective of alchemia we we really appreciate City staff's efforts to make our community more accessible and inclusive the curb cuts that have gone in recently are just a godsend to the people that we serve they can get on buses they can maneuver around town it makes a really huge difference to have a community that everybody can access similarly the efforts of City staff Ingrid Nancy to make things more accessible downtown so that people can access their transportation really makes a big difference so just want to thank all of you for your efforts and hope to see you May 13th would you like to mention the venue for the festival thank you sorry mayor I get a little nervous um the the venue is actually I should have said this at the Petaluma Community Center at Lucchesi Park and we'll be taking over pretty much the entire Community Center so it's going to be a pretty big deal we expect to have between 500 and 700 people throughout the day thank you thank you Catherine babowski to be followed by Steve delou yes my name is Kevin Rossi I live at the
Adoption (Second Reading) of Ordinance Nos. 2841, 2842, 2843, 2844, 2845, and 2846 N.C.S. Amending Ordinances 2826, 2827, 2814, 2815, 2828, 2829 N.C.S. to Change Certain Appropriations for the Operations of the City of Petaluma from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023 7.
Littlewoods mobile park at 1821 Lakeville Highway three story one this manager named this other Cruz at space 29 is purposely illegally having her own families to be parkered on the Farley McFarlane for over 11 months and it's still there and this is against the law and she has her other family Parkins on the farlings and the and also too then again my neighbor has been having his illegal drug dealer friends 14 to be parked against my home which is not a legal Park in the area and illegal dealing illegal drugs against my mobile home with bigger license plate hj49014 and 2144-9g3 and the play The Police for those and you want to do their job at all and the other the other day the managers families face 15 and her other family members faceland has been trespassing my place they do all kinds of stuff the parent placement doesn't want to do their job you need to get the police department start doing their job right get officers out there and start enforce the laws and then I've also heard too that this major is not a legal U.S citizen I don't know the truth is but if she's not a legal citizen she should not be a manager at all do something and and also too you usually have uh officers a pillow Police Department have liability insurance if something happens and to the public then they should pay for it that way the taxpayers don't have to pay for it a police department is not doing their job do something thank you thank you Steve de Lou followed by Betty Hudson Schrader thank you
Adoption (Second Reading) of Ordinance No. 2847 N.C.S. Approving Purchase and Sale Agreements of Right of Ways of Real Properties, commonly known as 1390 N. McDowell Blvd. (APN 137-011-063/064), 1301 Redwood Way (APN 137-011-013), and 1360 N.
thank you very much for listening to me um uh I'm going to read the statement because otherwise I'll digress too much uh last night you each received a statement for my group G Street action about our hope to ban the sale and use the small off-road engines AKA sores gas powered leaf blowers fall into this category they are the source of high levels of carbon dioxide that increase warming many other cities in California have already taken this step as we note in our letter a basic reason for supporting the ban is this right now we are doing a lot of good things that should help reduce our carbon footprint many trees are being planted all over the City by relief and cool cities a great program in which I participate is reducing carbon dioxide emissions and our carbon footprint at the same time but keeping machines that blast into the air a great deal of CO2 as sores do May in fact cancel the gains toward reducing greenhouse gases in our city made by these conservation groups consider this statement as evidence of this View Margaret renquil of the New York Times quotes one expert is saying that hydrocarbon emissions from a half hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3 900 mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a heavy duty Ford truck or consider as another example the harm sores do the California air resources board says that operating a gas leaf blower for an hour leads to the emission of as much smog-based pollution as driving a Toyota Camry for
1100 miles we understand that you have a lot on your plate now but we hope that at some time in the not too distant future you will make a commitment to considering our proposal at a future meeting in the meantime a portion of the city bureaucracy should be given the job to help small business landscapers access the funds made available for the transition by the governor's office we think that a city that can ban bar new gas stations from being built should be able to ban gas powered leaf blowers I note that 350 Petaluma and climate action Petaluma recently endorsed RG Street letter to council thank you very much I appreciate the time thank you next is Betty Houston Rader to be followed by Margaret Damon damateo first time being here um I represent the mobile home parks here in Petaluma and I wanted to speak on behalf of we are looking forward to our rent stabilization program being amended here in the near future in particular those regarding lowering the percentage of the CPI as well as the rent caps thank you very much thank you Margaret de Matteo good evening City staff and Council I just wanted to Second the comment of the person who's up here before me uh I guess this should be formal Margaret dematteo on behalf of legal aid of Sonoma County I have been meeting monthly with the Golden State manufactured homeowners league and hearing their concerns about the urgent need for amendments to the mobile home rent stabilization ordinance this has been passed in Santa Rosa in
McDowell (APN 137- 011-017), 1372 N. McDowell Blvd.(APN 137-011-014), and Any Additional Right of Ways for the North McDowell Complete Streets Project and Authorizing the City Manager to Execute the Agreement and All Other Documents Necessary to Complete the Purchase and Sale, and Finding This Action is Exempt from CEQA Pursuant to CEQA Guidelines Section 15301 (Existing Facilities) 8.
Windsor and there are some lessons to be learned from those two experiences primarily that in Windsor they were able to move this forward fairly quickly I think the advocacy began in October of last year they passed it with urgency Before Christmas and then they adopted a permanent ordinance I believe in February Unfortunately they increased the In-Place transfer fee to 15 so a lot of people have a hard time understanding that it took me a long time to understand what that impact is but ultimately if a home changes hands say a tenant becomes disabled can no longer live in their own home and needs to move out they want to sell the landlord or the park owner is able to increase the rent by 15 on the next uh purchaser so that not only negatively impacts the person trying to move out because they can't find anybody to buy their home because they know the rent's going to go up for the land underneath it by 15 which is very high and negatively impacts the future purchaser because they can't afford that I mean we're talking like twelve hundred dollars a month plus a mortgage twelve hundred dollar a hundred dollars just for the land under your home um and that stays the base rent so all future rent increases come from that really high amount so the third thing it impacts is it reduces the affordability of our last remaining naturally affordable housing mobile home parks and who lives there seniors um primarily seniors you know they're subject to a lot of different abuses that have
Resolution Adopting the Summary Vacation of Public Utility Easements (PUE), Located at Assessor Parcel Numbers 006-163-040 and 006-163-041, and Finding This Action is Consistent with a Certified Mitigated Negative Declaration – CONTINUED FROM THE CITY COUNCIL/PCDSA REGULAR MEETING OF APRIL 7, 2023 9.
Resolution Repealing Resolutions No. 2022-130 N.C.S. (Implementation of Stage 4 of the City’s Water Shortage Contingency Plan) and No. 2021-150 N.C.S. (Local Drought Emergency Proclamation) and Authorizing the City Manager to Adhere to the Implementation of the Requirements of the Governor’s Executive Order N-5-23 (Drought Update Executive Order) and all Subsequent Amendments Councilmember Healy asked clarifying questions of staff on Item 9.
been reported in the Press Democrat lately especially here in Petaluma and so we can look at what Windsor did we can look at what Santa Rosa did they reduced their maximum rent increase but they increased the In-Place transfer fee to 10 percent currently Petaluma doesn't have really there's very limited instances where you can increase the rent when a home transfers hands and it's essentially maintaining that affordability of parks so if you consider making a a lower rent increase amount so that tenants mobile home residents can still afford to live there please do not include a transfer um in place transfer fee thank you thank you that's the last of the cards I have from our in-house audience and I'd like to turn it over to our moderator to bring Zoom participation yes and our uh speaker is Darren rakison please unmute yourself and begin your public comment thank you moderator thank you Council just want to speak briefly about some concerns I have about underutilization of our Planning Commission uh you know just off the top of my head it's like six of the last seven or at least four of the last five Planning Commission meetings have been canceled and it's understandable if developers just aren't bringing projects forward for discretionary review but I do want to advocate for utilizing our Planning Commission for other initiatives and really what sticks out to me is initiatives that would policy changes things of that nature that would flow out of our general plan and
Mayor McDonnell opened public comment; receiving none, he closed public comment. Motion to adopt the Consent Calendar (Resolution Nos. 2023-045 N.C.S. accepting completion of the emergency repair to the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Oxidation Pond Levee and Transfer Structure; 2023-046 N.C.S.
obviously this year is going to be a huge year of changes with a new izo for the past months maybe years we've been talking about objective design standards you know and specifically to kind of close the loop on one big debate that was going on you know I was not not allowed to apply for the general plan committee because is a planning commissioner we were supposed to have kind of an oversight capacity to review potential policy changes stemming out of discussions by the general plan committee so you know I just wonder if we can take this time when there may not be developers coming forward for discretionary review but to engage our planning Commissioners to have really whether it's study sessions very early draft discussions of you know potential land use changes ordinance changes code changes things of that nature that are going to stem from the general plan as it comes together I think objective design standards is kind of something going along in parallel and you know even if it's not something fully formed you know even if staff doesn't have a fully formed complete set of ordinances or standards to review I think it would still be great to engage planning Commissioners to bring forth ideas early on kind of a true study session and it also then brings it into a public forum I know recently A lot of people have been kind of talking more and more about more transparency and so I think this is a great opportunity to kind of push these really big policy initiatives for uh
forward while we do have maybe a downtick in the developer projects coming forward maybe we can Engage The Planning Commission to push these big policy initiatives forward while also engaging the public and making the public feel that there's more transparency about some of these big changes that are going to be taking shape over the next year or two so those are my comments thank you and there are no more uh virtual speakers thank you thank you very much and with that we close our general public comment for the evening and we move to council comment and I'd like to ask councilman Barnacle to start us off tonight thank you Mr Mayor I have no um no liaison assignments to report on and council member Healey um yeah thank you I was in Sacramento for three days last week with the league of California cities um I won't go down too far on the details I wanted to report out on two bills that were were highlighted one is one that I had reported on before um and it came before the governance transparency and Labor Relations uh policy committee and that's SB 769 by Senator Gonzalez and that's the one that would require local officials to take a two-hour course every two years on on finances um that has now been substantially narrowed it's only going to apply to cities that are um considered high risk by the state auditor on its uh on its dashboard and that does not include us so that's one thing that we don't need to worry about and then I also wanted to mention SB 423 by Senator
approving a request to MTC for allocation of FY 23/24 TDA funds; 2023-047 N.C.S. authorizing the City 3 Manager to enter into a Landscaping Maintenance Agreement with the California Department of Transportation; 2023-048 N.C.S.
Weiner and this is one that has gotten some attention because it would remove the sunset from SB 35 ministerial approval of housing but one other thing it does is it um it allows the state to have ministerial approval of of housing on land that it either owns or leases which would include properties such as the fairgrounds and that's something that you know I think whether this actually passes or not we don't know yet or without provision but I'd say the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going to get shoved back in because now we know the state can do that if it feels like it so if folks really want to make sure that there's local control over the fairgrounds a continued a new lease to a a body that's part of the state of California is not the solution and then lastly the water supply coordination Council met this morning and it looks like I'm going to be appointed to something called the Leadership Council for the Russian River water forum and and that is going to be going way down on the Weeds on the future of the Potter Valley diversions so more to come on that thank you thank you very much council member kator John thank you um I want to um we the mobile home park is actually going to be coming back and June 5th the staff will conduct a public Workshop um so watch your calendars and then June 19th and July 10th will be the first and second reading for that ordinance so that's I'm really happy that that's coming forward I was also at the league but I was only there
adopting the summary vacation of public utility easements; 2023-049 N.C.S. repealing resolution nos. 2022-130 N.C.S. and 2021-150 N.C.S.; and adopting (second reading) Ordinance Nos. 2841, 2842, 2843, 2844, 2845, and 2846 N.C.S.
to change certain appropriations for the operations of the City; and adopting (second reading) Ordinance No. 2847 N.C.S. approving purchase and sale agreements of right of ways) made by Councilmember Healy, seconded by Councilmember Pocekay.
for one day and SB 423 certainly opened up your eyes to what the state could do with um City owned or owned property if it's leased it could be used for housing other things and so I think that we need to keep our eye on that at my scta meeting Sonoma County Transportation Authority the discussion was on a ballot measure for climate and I'm not really sure what that's going to look like because other cities are going to want to be putting ballot measures on also basically tax measures so we're just looking at that to determine if it's viable to do a ballot measure so more will come in the near future as far as the gas powered leaf blowers I just like to throw up possibly if we could look at this maybe an early um fall like September possibly bring something back September October I know that we really our schedules are really full between now and then so just want to throw that out and I think I just want to say that I want to thank our police and fire department they do an absolutely tremendous job and I have watched them over the years and I think both have grown into departments that I respect a lot and I've had I've seen them in action and it's we should be pretty pleased with the direction that our Public Safety is today versus in the past so just want to give kudos to them and there was actually an event yesterday that I was late for so I only saw the presentation for the firefighter but a police officer also got an award for the year for their work and I actually saw
the police officer in action once and it was pretty impressive and that was with the safe team and so it's just good to see um our Public Safety in a great space and I think that's all I have to say thank you thank you for mentioning that um council member now um well I have it busy last couple of weeks the airport commission update um we have a damaged hanger on at the airport and from an accident last fall and it's gone out to a bid and I'll report on the outcome after the next meeting in May after the winter storms there was drainage issues on the rooster run side of the airport and the consultant will advise on the wildlife and soil because you don't want birds flying around airplanes and a report will be given to the airport commission and staff on what to do about that the taxi Lanes Alpha and Bravo is having a scoping and design done in late 2023 and construction is set for 2026 to improve the conditions for the pilots our first airport display day for 2023 was held in March but the weather was of course raining so it wasn't the greatest turnout but last Saturday we had great weather um I was at The Good Egg award so I did not get to go so I'll find out what the attendance report um is and um the next one is May 20th and this is when the airplanes are on the um at the airport in the runway area the tie down area and families can go and wander around and ask lots of questions and find out about Aviation um I attended three community events this week which had award
Vote: Carried 7-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: None PUBLIC HEARINGS AND MATTERS FOR CONSIDERATION 10.
presentations um so congratulations to all the uh awardees especially to petaluma's Good Eggs Mitch and Barbara Lind um the petaluma's firefighter of the year is also my neighbor Shea Burke and um as council member um Thompson said we had a wonderful presentation and there was um use who also wrote essays on democracy and there was a beautiful um painting that was done this is just a small rendition but it was amazing to hear these youths so our future is in good hands the police officer of the year is David viso is that you say it and he was just amazing and it was really sweet to see the police chief give his wife a bouquet of flowers and thank the spouse for for the commitment he does for his job last meeting we dedicated the meeting to Marshall West his celebration life will be on April 23rd at 1 pm at the Elam Lutheran Church he will be greatly missed at the veteran eggs Day parade on Saturday which he always dressed as Mr Wickersham I drove our Petaluma Museum egg drop so I didn't remember my button but here's the poster we'll see you on Saturday at the parade I just signed up to throw cow chips and the following week is the antique fair so April 30th but the day before the chess tables that were donated by a grant from AARP will be have their ribbon cutting down on Water Street so that's great um I wanted to mention that the I'm gonna mispronounce it that the park sumex has been working on trance humanis um festival and if you don't know what that is I had to look it
Introduction (First Reading) of Ordinance Amending Chapter 6.60 Entitled “Residential Tenancy Protections” of the Petaluma Municipal Code and Finding This Item is Exempt from CEQA pursuant to CEQA Guidelines Section 15387(b)(5) Mayor McDonnell announced he would recuse from the item due to a conflict of interest and left the Chamber.
Eric Danly, City Attorney, presented the staff report. Councilmembers asked questions of staff. Vice Mayor Cader Thompson opened public comment. David Marshall Jesse Goldstein ceded time to Esaia Gonzalez Esaia Gonzalez Carol West Lina Blanco Angelina Soldatos Kerry Davison Jonah Knuth ceded time to Diana Kingsbury Diana Kingsbury Blake Hooper Sunny Noh Joe Schneider Carolyn Gavriloff Rev.
up it's the action or practice of moving livestock from one grazing ground to another so you might see sheep going down D Street to the peninsula and the festival is on Saturday April 29th a steamer Landing Park and the annual event features food and beverages family friendly and activities live music local herd of sheep that will eat down the weeds and Community weaving and to get more information go to sassyandgrassi.com and um I hope to see everybody at the parade I want to wish council member Cader Thompson I belated happy birthday and that's it thank you very much council member posake thank you mayor um had a few meetings we had a Transit advisory committee meeting where we continued our discussion of updating Transit goals for the city as well as taking the cue from the council and the city staff here to limit the number of goals to less than 10.
we all had a youth commission meeting after failing in the last four meetings to have a quorum actually started doing some reimagining of the youth commission and at least four of the youth are going to join me as part of the zero waste team at the buttern eggs Day Parade around our Council marching as well and finally in the continuing of care we're making lots of funding decisions over the next month or two and we have lots of excellent proposals including some from the city and from cots here locally so we're looking forward to um getting better at Distributing money here thank you that's all I have council member shreds okay I attended two meetings one was on the climate commission and uh there was discussions um again well General plan type things where we're going in the future what we can do and he had a presentation on the American um Institute of Architects about the 15-minute Community uh 15-minute communities that we have proposed here in town and had a Consultants commence we had another presentation on that so regenerating the ideas that were proposed there we also had some letters on some agreeing policies that were written in and so they were endorsed and becoming to our Council here so like okay uh working on the general plan keep us moving forward in a green environmental way to look forward to that and it was long discussion on artificial turf which we have uh at the moment we're sort of putting in Turf so there's a recommendation to move away from
Dara Olandt Clayton Engstrom Scott Shelley Thomas Maunder Helaine B Dorenfeld ceded time to Margaret DeMatteo Corrie Johnson ceded time to Margaret DeMatteo Margaret DeMatteo Jojo Oliver Michael Titone Peter Vorrises Laura Tallent Jennifer Rihl Pat McDonell Davin Cardenas Chuck Hildebrand Max Bell Alper Aiden Smith 4 Daniel Raff Marty Bennett Lee Keith Becker Korin Robles Jack Buckhorn Karym Sanchez Bill Abbey Vice Mayor Cader Thompson closed public comment.
Vice Mayor Cader Thompson called for a five-minute recess at 9:43 p.m. and thereafter reconvened the meeting at 9:50 p.m. Councilmembers discussed the item. Motion to introduce (first reading) Ordinance No.
artificial turf here so that's under consideration because we're in the middle of contracts now so we're working on that then the second meeting was on the North Bay Regional Watershed committees and the main topic there was the groundwater and we had the different um the three four basins the Santa Rosa Sonoma and Petaluma and Napa basins to give a summary of where they're at and where we're going in California for our groundwater and the summary was really good in fact there was the plans the sustainability plants that we produced here locally in our in our little Sonoma County and Napa County there's four basins and of the 64 basins that have to apply and get um accepted for their plans for sustainability plans only four of the 64 have now been completed and endorsed and accepted and guess who's the four Sonoma yeah Petaluma and and Santa Rosa so uh we so our um the folks we have working with the Sonoma County Water Agency and the engineers that are have been helping out and moved over and creating a Water Agency here for groundwater um have done a superb excellent job and we need to commend the Sonoma County Water Agency and the engineers supporting the sustainable water for that um so I was really glad to hear that we we currently do have lots of water on the surface however groundwater is still a concern around the California so that way we still need to have a water conservation effort throughout California and that groundwater in many locations which some communities
depend on still is not coming up to par so there's still many communities here in California they're still suffering from inadequate water supply so we need to be cognizant of that and and support all of California in this way so this is my report thank you and thank you um it is a big week in Petaluma with butter and eggs day coming and as mentioned the opening ceremonies this past week where I was able to provide a proclamation to the good eggs Mitch and Barbara Lynn as well as a proclamation to the Grand Marshal which is Rebuilding Together Petaluma and they're such a good organization that just wanted to provide a shout out to them tonight particularly since Saturday pass was their work day where they put in so much work for people in need on repairs of their houses and most of that effort was focused in our mobile home park communities and so I think there's a lot of awareness for where the need is and and opportunities for where we can make things better I also want to mention that uh on tomorrow's Board of supervisor agenda is the update of measure oh the mental health checks in the county and it's a fund that improves and it adds funds to all the mental health services in the county of which Petaluma is certainly a beneficiary the key takeaway from the oversight committee which I'm on is that they're pulling in more revenue from tax than they had anticipated which is a good problem but now we have to get through the process of putting that money to work and putting it
2848 N.C.S. with amendments (exempting units of owners of three or fewer residential units; six-month right of return applies for tenants displaced for all three “no-fault” just cause reasons; relocation assistance to tenants displaced for a “no-fault” just cause of up to 250% of the last month’s rent or $9,000, whichever is less; and direction to staff to report back to Council within two years, when there is data to show the impacts of the Ordinance on Petaluma landlords and tenants) made by Councilmember Barnacle, seconded by Councilmember Pocekay.
Vote: Carried 4-2 Yes: Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau Absent: None Recused: Mayor McDonnell 11.
out in the community and that's a much slower process so the oversight committee is encouraging a more rapid push out of the funds available and um that that is most I'm hoping our city manager will want to say something about the budget discussions that we have coming up this year and I'll pass it to you perfect timing mayor thank you um in anticipation of our budget Workshop in may we are inviting the community to join us for a virtual Workshop this Wednesday to learn more about how the Petaluma City budget Works how funds we use um how they're allocated and that will be led by our finance director Corey garberolio and she'll walk it through walk folks through and avoid acronyms and and and definitely approach it much more from a Layman's standpoint so I'd really encourage folks to attend it's um it's virtual and if you go to our website it's on April 19th from 5 30 to 7 30.
Resolution Approving a Professional Services Agreement with IntegrAssure, Inc. to Serve as the City of Petaluma Independent Police Auditor and Authorizing the City Manager to Execute the Agreement Councilmember Barnacle moved, and Vice Mayor Cader Thompson seconded, a motion to continue the meeting past 11:00p.m.
so you can join first via zoom and that's all I have to add tonight thank you uh thank you very much next we'll be moving to the consent calendar of items here and um I'm looking for and um anyone want to modify the calendar council member Healey I had a couple questions on number nine so I could ask them now or we could uh pull that and ask it later no um let's uh Let's do let's have any Council uh questions at this time and uh councilmember Healey so um this is the um repealing of the drought resolution um could could staff please clarify because it was I think it was confusing to us and I'm sure it's even more confusing to the public what what the rules are with respect to ornamental Turf irrigation on Commercial Landscaping is going to be going forward water resources and Conference conservation manager Chelsea Thompson to speak on that yes good evening um the prohibition um on um or the ban on ornamental Turf and commercial industrial and institutional properties has been in effect um since last year and will be in fact for June 2023.
Motion passed unanimously. Aaron Zavala, Sr. Management Analyst, presented the staff report along with Ken Savano, Chief of Police, and Eric Danly, City Attorney. Jeff Schlanger, President and CEO, introduced the IntegrAssure team and provided background on the company.
this is a Statewide regulation set in place by various Statewide emergency water conservation regulations that have been in place throughout the drought um the city of Petaluma um has done messaging to property management companies and to um commercial and Industrial irrigation customers on this ban um but has chosen to not enforce it especially because we were in stage four and had been enforcing a two-day week watering restriction so the city of Petaluma does not have the city has the ability to enforce all Statewide regulations and has chosen to not enforce the ban on ornamental Turf irrigation so just to clarify um so we will not be enforcing that ban going forward or is that just what was going on up till now we will not be enforcing that ban going forward and the state plans to re-vote that restriction without restriction um and um June at the end of June of this year okay thank you and then the other point I would make on this one it's kind of a question it's kind of a comment but when we were in the um um stage four drought restrictions we were implementing stages that were designed decades ago to achieve certain levels of conservation and and those those levels are really badly out of date and need to be reviewed because they don't take into account the enormous amount of conservation that's been built into the system over the last 20 years that everyone does um and so I would hope that going forward we can revisit those tiers so that the next time there's a drought
and there will be a drought that we have tiers that are designed to achieve the um the percentage cutbacks that we need so that's all I had thank you and with that um I'd move the consent calendar thank you council member Gator Thompson let me just have a quick comment on this um because I'm seeing that about landscaping and Caltrans and the pocket park possibly on Stuart Drive and I'm just glad to see that that's a possibility and I realize it doesn't have anything to do with what we're 49 tonight but I want to put it in everyone's head okay and I also had a comment about the uh uh repeal of our stage four ordinance I guess that takes us to Stage zero we're out of drought but question again for stamping yeah there are still restrictions on us from the state level uh and um could we I mean we can fill pools but I guess we're still requiring construction water to come from our recycled side could you recap quickly what the state mandate means to us independent of our conservation efforts okay yes so there are still um um since 2021 the governor recently lifted several drought related restrictions um and kept several in place such as prohibiting drinking water from being used for um for construction and street cleaning purposes unless no other water sources available the city has the authority to enforce these restrictions and the resolution before you tonight also authorizes the city manager to enforce the Statewide emergency regulations for their effective duration um the
Councilmembers asked questions of staff. Mayor McDonnell opened public comment. Esaia Gonzalez Ellen Obstler Mayor McDonnell closed public comment. Motion to adopt Resolution No. 2023-050 N.C.S. approving a professional services agreement with InegrAssure, Inc.
request for the use of potable water for construction purposes has recently been brought to our attention and staff need time to evaluate the climate facts of hauling recycled water for construction purposes before making a recommendation on whether or not to enforce that prohibition hey thank you um and we have a motion by Healy did we get a second by posa K and um may we have a roll call vote please if we can just open public comment before uh yeah we should do that shouldn't we yeah um my bad um so I'd like to open public comment for the evening have we received any public comment ahead of time on this no comments on the consent calendar prior to the meeting and can we read our script for the zoom audience sure um members of the public attending in person should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so members of the public attending online who wish to speak to an item on the consent calendar should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone okay and at this time I do not see any virtual hands raised thank you and I have no speaker cards and no Zoom participation so we'll now close public comment on the consent calendar and now we will move back over to the role called the barnacle yes Cader Thompson yes Healey yes now yes post okay yes shrimps yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously thank you very much and now we'll move to public hearings and matters of consideration for the evening item 10 which is an
made by Councilmember Healy, seconded by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson. Vote: Carried 7-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: None 5 12.
Public Hearing and Resolutions Ordering Abatement of Nuisances Consisting of Weeds Growing Upon Public and Private Property in the City of Petaluma and Ordering the Fire Department to Abate Said Weeds by Contract if Property Owners Fail to Do So Jessica Power, Fire Marshal, presented the staff report.
ordinance amending um our residential tenants protection and at this point I continue to recuse myself on this item and um under the advice of our City attorney as I am a landlord in town and so I will pass the gavel to our vice chair to actually read the the item thank you very much thank you very much so this is an introduction first reading of ordinance amending chapter 6.60 entitled residential tenancy protections of the Petaluma municipal code code and finding this item is exempt from sequa pursuant to SQL guidelines section 15387 B5 um and the mayor has recused himself so we're going to go ahead and ask the City attorney to thank you madam vice mayor and thanks Madam clerk for getting the slides ready in the background I'm going to leave him idling there for just a brief moment um I'm for those of you that don't know me and um members of the public I'm Eric Donnelly the City attorney as the vice mayor indicated we're here to present to the council for potential introduction an ordinance that would amend the city's tenant protection regulations in chapter 6.60 of the municipal code um so sure I'll speak closer sorry I tend to either be too thou or too quiet so I'll try to hit her happy medium is that better really because I'm hearing it fine through the speakers um how's this okay so I'll be right over the mic that's fine um thank you for letting me know so I'm going to just briefly talk about sort of how we got to here and then our goal tonight is to set up a pretty
focused discussion for the council and the public in response to the direction we see from the Council on March 6th about amendments they wanted to see to the existing city regulations and also some questions they directed staff to respond to which we've addressed in the materials and we'll be talking about tonight and then obviously there are a lot of folks here who who want to share their views with the council and their community members which is great and then what we hope to do is do whatever straw polling is needed to confirm what the majority direction of the council is and hopefully be in a position for the council to take action on the amendments so in terms of how we got here the council adopted on September 12 2022 ordinance 2823 NCS that enacted the existing residential tenancy protections there was a rush to get there because of concerns about expiring covid-based protections for for against evictions in Sonoma County that ordinance was adopted with a Sunset date of March 1 2023 and when the council enacted it they directed staff to gather input from stakeholders in the public as well as data on the potential impact of the regulations um and and however because of that that deadline it would have been necessary for the new council at its very first meeting to um take action um to avoid um a gap in the protections um so that to allow time for the Outreach that the council directed stuff to do they extended the expiration of the regulations um until um July 2023
Councilmembers asked questions of staff. Mayor McDonnell opened the public hearing; receiving no comments, he closed the public hearing. Motion to adopt Resolution No. 2023-051 N.C.S. (no recusals) made by Councilmember Barnacle, seconded by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson.
and they took that action on January 23rd so in terms of the Outreach many people have here have taken part in it but for those that have not we had stakeholder meetings with the Petaluma people Services Center on January 25 with separate stakeholder meetings with tenant Advocate organizations and property management and real estate organizations and Property Owners on January 26th on February 1st and 4th we had Community workshops one of those was virtual and the other was in person we presented on the regulations and potential amendments that the council could consider and also heard recommendations from members of the public both against the regulations continuing it at all and possible amendments to them and then on February 4th staff released a survey to the community to get further feedback about the regulations and possible amendments and then as I mentioned already on March 6th the city council conducted a workshop to um to hear public comment and give staff directions so so here we are in response to that direction and if you could bring up the next slide please Kendall that would be or whoever's driving thank you so these are the um the changes that the council directed staff to return with to to their City's existing regulations the first is a what was what's what's referred to as a mom and pop or a small property owner exemption the next was a temporary tenancy exemption the next was um was an amendment to have the protections begin in the beginning of a tenancy
Vote: Carried 7-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: None Motion to adopt Resolution No.
2023-052 N.C.S. (McDonnell recusal) made by Councilmember Barnacle, seconded by Councilmember Pocekay. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Mayor McDonnell Motion to adopt Resolution No.
the council also directed that we aligned the just causes for termination of rental agreements with those of the tenant protection act the state law um the council majority also directed that we removed the lsac protections that were in the regulations except that we provide for a six-month Riot of return When a property owner indicates that they're permanently withdrawing a property from the rental market and then actually returns it to the rental rental market within six months Council directed we also add relocation assistance for for no fault terminations and and meaning increase that assistance um allow for sale of a of a of a property as a as a that I'm sorry that's that box is a little confusing um really what the direction was um was to have sale of a property be permissible um as a as a just cause for terminating a tenancy and then also to have a transient tenancy exemption so I am gonna talk a little bit about where and how we implemented those things before um returning or moving to a discussion of what the council asked requested in the way of further information of from staff so um the small property owner exemption um that sorry give me just a moment that that is in um it's let's see that is in section 6.60.030 of the ordinance um in in Part B one um I'm sorry part B2 an exemption for small property owners that applies or that exempts from the regulations residential rental units of owners that are not real estate investment trusts or corporations or limited
2023-053 N.C.S. (Nau recusal) made by Councilmember Pocekay, seconded by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Nau Motion to adopt Resolution No.
liability companies that own two or fewer such units and that have provided written notice to the tenants in the rental agreement that the residential property is exempt from the chapter so a couple a couple of things on that oh and then it that section prescribes the notice that must be given so one of the things that is the case with the tenant protection act that we haven't talked about so much is that it exempts um single-family dwellings residential dwellings both from its um rent control regulations the limits on rents that can be charged and from its just cause regulations which are the regulations that limit the bases for terminating or or for yeah for terminating um rental agreements and in the tenant protection act a requirement of of that single family exemption is that um the tenant get noticed that they're not in fact protected by the tenant protection act and so um we thought it would be necessary in incorporating a small property owner exemption in the Petaluma regulations since under the tenant protection act once we adopt local regulations the tenant protection doesn't apply on the tenant protection act doesn't apply in our jurisdiction to provide that same notice for the same reason it's included in the tenant protection act so so that is so that's that's the implementation of that item of council Direction the next issue was temporary tenancies and that is addressed in the same section 6.60.030 um um Item B 3 which is the exceptions um and it's pretty
straightforward it exempts temporary Tendencies as defined in the chapter and that's in the definition section and that definition is let me flip to it is tenancies in the primary residence of the owner that are of less than 12 months in duration pursuant to an agreement specifying a date when the rental agreement will expire the tenant shall surrender the unit so the owner may reoccupy it as their primary residence so that's that's the implementation for the second directed amendment by the council the third directed amendment was protections on day one of the tenancy um and so that too was reflected in that same section 6.60.030 which says accept is provided in subsection B the provisions of this chapter should apply to tenants and tenant households on the first day of the term of rental agreements for dwelling units so that's the third amendment the fourth Direction was it was a kind of a broad one that you'll as you'll see in and we talked as we talk through the other items addressed in the staff report um is kind of a broad sort of almost like a policy direction that the council gave in response to a lot of the public comment that they heard and that was a line that just causes that based on which it's permissible to terminate residential Tendencies with those in the tenant protection act so that's exactly what we did um hewing with one exception which is an error that I'm going to flag for you in a moment because I'm going to ask the council if they introduce this to to
2023-054 N.C.S. (Pocekay recusal) made by Councilmember Barnacle, seconded by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Pocekay Motion to adopt Resolution No.
2023-055 N.C.S. (Shribbs recusal) made by Councilmember Barnacle, seconded by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay No: None 6 Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Shribbs Motion to adopt Resolution No.
introduce it with a correction but um the so it's section 6.60.050 and the ordinance requirements for termination of tenancies um B lists the at fault just causes um that are that are permissible for terminating rental agreements and D lists the no fault just causes meaning terminations for note through for no fault of the tenant and we've used the exact same terminology and we've included a blanket reference to incorporate the terms of the TPI to the extent I'm sorry tenant protection act to the extent we don't have separate definitions in our ordinance so so so those Provisions now track to the tenant protection uh just causes but but we had an we haven't I I had an error in item B2 of the regulations um that was brought to our attention by a number of folks including Margaret thank you Margaret with with um legal aid and that is the breach of rental agreement um basis at fault basis for terminating a tenancy um currently it says in what we provide to the council the tenant has committed a breach of the lease as described in paragraph etc etc reference to the civil code like in the tenant protection act but we need to insert the phrase so it says insert a phrase so it would read the tenant has committed committed a breach of a material provision of the lease and then it will accurately track to the tenant protection act just causes as intended so apologies for that Council and I'm glad that was raised to our attention so we could correct it um the next directed change from
the council was to eliminate the Ellis act um provisions and the regulations we also got you know well well we've received correspondence um regretting that removal or advocating against it we also got some some responses from some of the Advocates both for the landlords and for for tenant organizations that that they had concerns about preemption related to the ls act implementation um regardless the council's direction was to remove it except for to retain a six-month right of return for that situation I mentioned when a landlord purportedly is removing their property from from the rental market and then re-rinse it within six months so that is implemented um [Music] let me just go to that note that's implemented in section 6.60.090 um titled and appropriately enough re-rental of withdrawn dwelling units and it provides that have a dwelling unit subject to the chapter that was withdrawn is offered again for rent for residential purposes within six months of the date it was deemed withdrawn the owner must first notify the housing manager in writing of the owner's intention and then be the paragraph B provides for a right of return and first refusal of tenants that have given notice so that they can be provided that opportunity so that is the implementation implementation of that direction from the city council um the um another of the council's most um fundamental Amendment directions was to increase the relocation assistance for no fault terminations and I'm going to turn
2023-056 N.C.S. (Barnacle recusal) made by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, seconded by Councilmember Pocekay. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Healy, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Barnacle Motion to adopt Resolution No.
2023-057 N.C.S. (Barnacle and Healy recusal) made by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, seconded by Councilmember Nau. Vote: Carried 5-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Barnacle, Councilmember Healy Motion to adopt Resolution No.
to that that's addressed in section 6.60.080 what's important about this I think structurally um it's it's maybe in in the Amendments presented tonight maybe the most important one is is it I think plays a little bit of a proxy role in lieu of lsac protections because um what we're directed to return with was um was to require for no fault terminations of rental agreements that is for no fault of the tenant the relocation assistance must be provided that's equal to 250 percent of one month's rent under the rental agreement in effect at the time of the notice or eleven thousand dollars um um whichever whichever is the Lesser and also um in that provision it would provide that the eleven thousand dollars would be adjusted annually to track to the Consumer Price Index so um so that is a is a you know I think folks are going to address this tonight in their comments of the public comments but that's significant relocation assistance for displaced tenants it's a significant decision that that property owners need to confront as to whether they're going to terminate a tenancy um also um in in response to last um Direction the council gave us for an amendment to provide that um terminating a tenancy for purposes of sale would be permissible and that that that change has been made too um what what this what this structure presents I think can be thought of as a sort of a business decision so a property owner can decide whether they prefer to sell a property without untenanted having
2023-058 N.C.S. (Healy recusal) made by Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, seconded by Councilmember Barnacle. Vote: Carried 6-0 Yes: Mayor McDonnell, Councilmember Barnacle, Vice Mayor Cader Thompson, Councilmember Nau, Councilmember Pocekay, Councilmember Shribbs No: None Absent: None Recused: Councilmember Healy ADJOURNMENT Mayor McDonnell thanked the translators and adjourned the meeting at 11:42 p.m.
having paid the relocation assistance that's owed to a a tenant who's terminated for no fault of their own um or whether they'd they'd rather they'd rather not pay the relocation assistance um and sell the property tenanted so um with respect to the so that's reflected in these amendments and with respect to the um that last Amendment the seventh one that is uh uh let me just flag where we address that give me a sec that is um that's really implemented in back in section 6.60.050 the determine termination of tenancies requirements under D um the first no fault just cause for terminating Tendencies that's recognized there as permanent withdrawal from the rental market so that also addresses some of the comments that we heard concerned about potential preemption under state law um in terms based on the requirements of the Ellis Act so those are are what we've provided in response to the council's direction I think we're going to need to go I'm sorry oh um I think we're going to want to go through each one of those to make sure that's where the majority still is or if not where they are with some straw polling but before we do that and we'll follow the slides when we do that before we do I wanted to talk about the um and if we go to the next slide please thank you I wanted to talk about the areas where the council want to receive more information and we've provided that in the staff report so I'll touch on it just briefly here so we can get to the important part about hearing
from the the public and receiving the council's direction so the first was whether non-profits and government subsidized units should be exempt um and um what what we basically determine in some of our Outreach is that there doesn't appear to be a great need from um those that are offering the subsidized units including the city has some limited units that it owns that are subsidized um so that um so that what we've presented does not include an exemption for non-profit and government subsidized units um so so that's that's you know that's that's a quick loss of of our feedback to the council about that we've provided more detail in the staff report um the second item the council wanted us to return with additional information about was the exemption for units that are received their certificate of occupancy in the last 15 years the tenant protection act exempt those units uh both from the um the rent control the state rent control of the tenant protection act and from the just cause regulations based on our review of the statutory the legislative history for the tenant protection act the real focus of that of the concern for with that exemption was on the rent control more than the just cause Protections in the staff report we included some discussion of of Oregon's version of the tenant protection act which um which does provide an exemption for rent control but not for Just Cause requirements and if the council went forward with what staff would present tonight they'd be
doing essentially the same thing um we we've also we've got some slides that we'll touch on to give some context for what other jurisdictions have done like we've looked at previously but that seems to be um most of the local regulations don't provide that exemption and we've not included it in what we've provided the council but the council has the ultimate say of course um so the third item the council wanted to hear more about was limiting the withdrawal of the rental market of tenant households of Petaluma Educators and students to the summer months we've removed that those provisions from what we've presented tonight to the council we you in the record tonight in terms of submissions from NAACP from legal aid and others is advocacy for retaining those protections but when we had our stakeholder Outreach there wasn't a lot of strong um support that we heard from from either tenants or Property Owners with respect to that or strong opposition for those except we did hear some arguments from about potential preemption concerns again related to the Ellis act the other thing I would point out and it's true then as we've noted in our in our prior staff reports regarding these regulations these protections have been upheld ours were based on the San Francisco ones that have been litigated and found to be valid and and constitutional but they're complicated and even some um folks that were sensitive to displacement of students and Educators were worried about causing you know
exacerbating the the relocation that tends to happen anyway during the summer months um a limiting eliminating those Provisions um also as you know has a simplifying effect on the ordinance eliminates probably a page of the text of the ordinance um and some some significant complexity and one of the things we heard from the public and the council was to try to streamline the ordinance including by making it consistent with the tenant protection act and just simplifying the language as much as possible so that that's one way that that we can do that but again we'll we'll need to hear the council's direction on that issue um the final item was the one about permitting relatives to join the tenant household the TPA doesn't include those Provisions we haven't returned with those Provisions in these amendments um the um it's it's not clear to us that landlords can preclude that anyway because that may be a fair housing act violation to preclude an eligible tenant household member for joining that the the tenant household in under circumstances that don't breach the lease and remember the council's direction was to um to include all the just causes the the at fault just causes from the tenant protection act and that includes um the um the violation of the lease for um prohibited um subleasing so so so that isn't um that those Provisions are not included in this in these amendments although as as can be seen in the record and some of the submissions that we've received folks are
some folks are advocating for including those protections and really I would say um there's there's some complementary feedback from the tenant advocacy um groups which we appreciate as well as continued advocacy for some of those same for introducing some of those same features that we saw in the model that um that that they originally advocating for and much of which was adopted with the city's initial regulations so um that is my quick run through hopefully quick run through the council's direction and uh we have some more slides we can present to show some context for for where those features show up in in which regulations um so if you go to the next slide please Kendall so there's a comparison of exemption of non-profit units that's addressed and surrounding jurisdictions so um in Richmond it is Fairfax Berkeley Emeryville Palo Alto not in Petaluma Moran San Rafael it is in the tepa with respect to religious and Hospital facilities um and that those Provisions are in in in these current regulations the Amendments that are presented because of the way they tracked to the TPA next slide please this is a comparison of exemption of government-owned units same comparators next slide please this shows the comparison of how exemptions for new units within the last 15 years of certificate of occupancy are treated you can see that's generally not Incorporated in the other jurisdictions um the last can someone else drive for the last slide oh he was driving anyway sorry thanks
Ingrid um a little Blockhead so this is limits to no fault terminations for teachers and students you can see the comparison um not that that doesn't show up very frequently we know it though it's it's not shown here but we know it's in San Francisco and Berkeley next slide please thanks Ingrid um this is relatives permitted to join the household it's a little bit of a mix not in the TPA not not in the interim regulations in in in Petaluma not in Marin yes in Richmond yes in Fairfax not in San Rafael yes in Berkeley not in Emeryville yes in East Palo Alto and that is our last slide so um be happy to take Council questions before we get um public comments and then come back to the council for Direction thank you remember posting um here if we could go back to uh I don't know the slide with the eight items the eight amendments uh anchor would you mind there we go thank you yeah the uh bottom left the remove ellisac provides six months right of return I um I you know it seems like that's limited to removal from the market and doesn't apply the way it's been written for example to family move-in and it was and I sort of understood that it would apply to at least most of the uh of the no-fault evictions but it appears to me it only applies to to removal from the market I mean is that correct or not um so what we what we presented um and what we thought was our Direction and we'll get a chance to confirm was to take all the other Ellis act implementation out we even took out the
recitals referring to it um and I don't know if this was consciously the council's choice or not but it seemed to be rely instead on more substantial relocation assistance um to discourage um removal of properties and instead provide a right of return for a six-month re-offering of a unit having withdrawn it which would seem to be a subterfuture an abuse of that that removal right so hopefully that answers your question well yeah it just seems to me like that that subterfuge could also occur in a family move-in situation am I wrong about that it potentially it potentially could okay right but but we do get notice um and we do have you know I didn't go through it but because we haven't amended it but those civil remedies and are are there then you'll hear comments from the public about those two pro a con um so yes and I'm not trying to sure do a policy debate but yeah hopefully that answers you just wanted to we'll talk more later thank you thank you any other council members council member Healey thank you so most of what I have are really comments I'll save those until after public comment but one one I have one question so with the uh the relocation assistance was there any thought given to means testing that and capping it at some percentage of Ami no because I thought our majority Direction was to come back with that but we may when we do the straw polling you know we'll see where the majority so if we wanted to add capping relocation assistance at 80 or 100 of Ami we
could add that in tonight you you could amend it however the you know the majority wants to all right thank you any other council members okay with that we're gonna go Janice this is more um it doesn't say how much it's gonna cost to pay the housing manager to be under a housing register what is it going to cost the landlords what's that fee the fee provision is eliminated from this from this so how are we going to pay for a housing manager I asked that question the housing manager is a staff member correct right but they've their their position is already funded it's not and and there is no fee currently um and and be in part because um the this is a much more streamlined regulation it to us it made sense to to remove that um because the the really the most um involved tracking and and noticing and those sorts of things we thought we viewed as related to the lsac implementation so that's that's why we structured it this way but the housing manager is a funded position and I I leave it to Peg you to address if she's able or other staff you know where where what are the funds that support that position the inspection within 14 calendar days of service notice of termination that comes at what what is the timeline there and when would they they need to be inspected before they get their money for relocation correct um I'm just checking because I don't know Page Six thank you it says relocation assistance required pursuant to this chapter should be paid within 14 calendar days of
service of notice of termination and then the inspection takes place and then the if it's found to be the tenant left the unit in good repair then the relocation assistance is paid am I correct uh I don't think so so um it's true that paragraph B I mean paragraph a talks about the amount of the relocation assistance and that it's that it's required for no fault terminations paragraph B says the relocation assistance must be paid within 14 calendar days of service of the notice of termination um paragraph C says if a tenant fails to vacate a dwelling unit after the expiration of a notice to terminate the tenancy that has been lawfully given in accordance with the chapter the landlord May recover the actual amount of any relocation assistance provided as damages in an action to recover possession of the dwelling unit so that's a landlord protection um what would the timeline be well the timeline is it has to be paid within 14 days of notice of service of notice of the termination and I was there's no link to the inspection that's a separate um you know that's just part of the um satisfaction of the lease closeout requirements so but it says and D it says relocationists required by this section may not be credited against any other relocation assistance required by any other law or shall not operating as Jude operate as a waiver of any rights of attendant may have enter applicable law right so that means if if the tenant is eligible for some other kind of assistance related to
the termination that the landlord still has to pay the relocation assistance in accordance with with this chapter they can't say well we're not going to pay the full amount in petaluma's regulations because you have this other relocation assistance you're getting from I don't know from um Petaluma people services or some other government assistance or something so that's what that means but there's no link to the property inspection upon you know upon termination of the tenancy needed to be some you know there was Damage Done to the unit uh does the the timeline does the well so so if there were breaches if there were damage if there was damage to the property that gives just cause for termination then the landlord can terminate for for tenant fault and and and and they don't pay relocation assistance if the property is you know if if that's not the case if there's not an at fault basis for terminating the tenancy um then the landlord has to pay relocation assistance but if if the property is not left in the condition that the lease requires it to be left then then the tenant may or may not receive you know part or all of their of their deposit does it then go to a legal like the the tenant and the landlord are are it depends on the facts there's any number of you know litigation it could be a litigation situation it just could be you know it could be the tenant gets their relocation assistance and doesn't get some or all their deposit back it depends on what the facts are it
was just confusing that's all I just was looking for clarity things okay thank you council member schritz okay basically uh two two basic questions um first one's about the um when things are when the unit is renovated um and which may require uh at least a short-term eviction if not a long-term eviction does things get changed and then um when the folks can move back in or it's re-rented and is there anything in in what we have here in front of us now uh that deals with um situations of when things are renovated and tenants are required we know that the um remember the tenant protection act includes um at fault just causes and no fault just causes and we've included all of them in in this regulation and one of the no fault just causes is intent to demolish or substantially remodel um and we've included that in accordance with the tenant protection act language um so it defines what a substantial model is um it's not cosmetic changes it's basically substantial changes that cannot be done safely with the tenant remaining in the unit um so that is that is a that is a basis for terminating a tendency not through the tenant's fault it requires the payment of relocation assistance and then if that happened and the properties returned to the Market within six months in accordance with that other provision we talked about then there'd be a right of first refusal under these regulations okay and but the relocation I think is for the TPA was on is only one month uh or one one month's
rent and not the uh the relocation that that we have for removal of marketing well so remember though um the way that tenant protection act Works in terms of pruning local regulations as it says local jurisdictions can adopt their own regulations and if they do the tenant protection act will and and they have to be more protective not less and if they do that then the tenant protection act um at least um the um the um the no-fault Provisions the um the the just cause Provisions while not applying that jurisdiction so we have to rely on our own um and so it's it's not the the relocation assistance under the um tenant protection act wouldn't apply will be ours so that that two and a half times or eleven thousand dollars would apply for the no fault causes as recognized in our ordinance okay so that's permanent withdrawal owner relative to occupy intent to demolish or substantially remodel or government order okay so that is included in our yes in these amendments that are presented to you tonight okay that's why I wanted to be clear because I didn't quite understand if they would be included or not yep okay the other part is um with all this ordinances that are being promoted uh proposed here um there's always the process of implementation review investigation and so forth and tracking everything going on so do we currently have the city of have a plan for developing some sort of rental registry so we have a database to start with as to what's going on so we can actually track
things and then our do we plan to also Implement a task force that would actually several the stakeholders on on all sides with would be working together as a team to review and to uh and using like the registry and also the whatever they could accumulate in stories that would continue to follow through with this so that we'd have continuous effort to track what we've done today and and continue on uh and how does that how committee report to us is there any movement from us to to do that or should we be doing that as well as implementing an ordinance this doesn't present that we I don't believe we've received the direction to do that uh rental Registries are more common in actual full-on rent control um regulations where you have a rent control board um and a whole Administration and we would certainly need a fee structure if we were going to do that and we need to have staff and we need you know Revenue to support that staff what we've presented instead as we typically do um given the city's size and and um limited resources which are much better than before measure U but still very limited is to provide um a more of a self-policing regulatory scheme it's more straightforward um it that's one reason why a private right of action is important for um for tenants to be able to challenge in court and recover attorney's fees in case of violations that a court finds of the city's regulations remember to we this scheme does not provide for local rent control it's the tenant
protection act that still does that and it would still be in effect doing that for the for the properties that aren't exempt and as I mentioned the single-family properties that provide the required notice are in fact exempt so so no there's I I don't think we've received that direction and we've tried to provide something much more streamlined than that that would be a very significant undertaking in terms of City resources we have reserved on behalf of the city as well as tenants and their legal counsel the right to enforce violations if we choose and you know we generally do hear from folks if there's significant violations that are occurring so that's that's a that's a possibility we're not obligated to do that but we can and if we were to we have the full range of Remedies available in our municipal code for code violations administrative civil criminal the whole the whole ball of wax so so that's a possibility but again um well we haven't presented I don't think have been directed to present by the full council is as um a much more substantial regulatory scheme such as such as would have a rental registry because that takes constant updating um and and it's as in my experiences typically um associated with with local rent control rent control boards Etc okay so with this ordinance if it goes into effect um what is the impact for uh say staff and and resources for the engagement and and uh and the follow-up of the ordinance as is so what's the implications for for the
city at this time to implement this um are we depending on the legal aid folks to to come back and and support it and and follow through and and that would be their job to follow up on all this or does how how does the city get involved continuing forward well we I think we've you know because we do have regulations on the books now we've gotten a glimmer of what that looks like certainly I think legal aid would play a role um as they have and would continue to in terms of serving the clients that are eligible for their services and and Rural legal aid would too and so would we are you know we've we've provided a lot of information on our website we've provided the um the statutory or the regulatory notices that landlords are required to give we've provided them in English and Spanish to make sure that the notices are accurate to make it easy for property owners um to to to provide those there's a lot of information like frequently answered question responses um we have been getting sort of ad hoc questions from property managers and land land owners that we answer about so how does this work especially now when we've got certain regulations on the books knowing that the council may be considering amendments it's it's potentially especially confusing for folks but we would continue to answer those questions because you know we you know these are we worked on these regulations so we're very familiar with them same we but you know I think um I don't think I know that um
Petaluma people Services would continue to play provide the Fair Housing Services they provide provided to the city for Less 35 years and they work as kind of a liaison between property owners and tenants to help explain things so they would be a resource too um so that's what we that's what we anticipated I you know I think it's you know our housing department would be involved um as they are with also the um the city's mobile home uh rent control regulations and my office would be involved but I think at a manageable level um and that's partly we've taken that into account in into what we've presented to make sure that we don't um I'd be remiss if if we presented regulations to the council that we're going to be paper regulations because we couldn't Implement them for real um so if if we had concerns about that we'd certainly be raising them it's totally fair question but that's that's my answer thank you one of the concerns that was also brought up was a level of noticing that that this ordinance is requiring so that every single time the notice would have to come out and has come out in two at least two languages um so um is that correct that that there would be noticing uh possibly several times a year rather than once a year um could we could we just do a once a year noticing and be and say that's adequate for rights of protections and things or do we have to put to continue the stream of noticing throughout every single process uh throughout you're talking about Mr
raf's letter um I think that's an extreme example um the other thing is we've provided the notices um so I mean that what we haven't provided I mean the regulations say say the notices the required notices that we've provided have and we've provided in both English and Spanish have to be should have to be given at various times uh let me see um they have to be given regarding termination um they're also notice of the rights that are uh where are they uh darn it bear with me a second um here we go um so it's in section 6.60.040 words provides landlords and must provide tenants um each tenant a current notice of their rights under the chapter using the form of the Cities provided for that purpose so they don't have to come up with it on their own in fact they're required to use our form within 30 calendar days of the chapter taking effect when entering a lease or rental agreement we're sending out a lot of paperwork so that's additional paperwork when renewing a lease a rental agreement I think the same is true when providing a notice of a rent increase which I think that's a pretty important time to notify tenants of their rights within 30 30 days of notice by the sea that that the rights under this the city's regulations have changed so if the council adopts the Amendments within 30 days of that when the property is listed for sale or within 30 days of acquiring title to the property so when when the buyer acquires it so and and then notice just need to be in English and
Spanish the rental agreements in a different language also in that language failure to comply with those um makes rental increases invalid until they're cured um so given that we've provided the notices I don't I mean this is the council's regulations but I don't think that's excessive and um and you know that's going to get your evaluation of that that's that that's what I would say and I would add with respect to Mr raf's letter um and Miss Ms de Matteo's letter and their joint letter previously I mean I I believe I don't think we've done it quite the way they might have preferred but I think we've addressed all the things they requested in their joint letter um and so and if there are more questions about that I'd be happy to address them but but you know specifically things like streamlining tracking to the tpa's um definitions um we took that all seriously because the the more understandable the regulations are the the less trouble they're going to be for folks to follow and the better they will serve their intended purposes so we're happy to take take and Implement those suggestions thank you well thank you for your answers yeah okay pass it on any other questions okay with that we're going to go ahead and the public is invited to make comments on this item public comments are limited to two minutes per person if providing your comment in Spanish we ask that you pause after each sentence to allow translation the moderator will pause the timer when the translator is
speaking and I'm going to ask the city clerk if there's been any amount of vice mayor yes we received 88 public comments prior to the meeting that was uh with the 4 pm cutoff time we've received about a dozen since then that will be posted online tomorrow thank you very much with that we're going to go ahead and go to public comment actually I'm going to ask the moderator yes uh thank you vice mayor um the public I think my mic is working again um thank you for your patience members of the public attending in person should bring their speaker cards to the clerk's desk if they have not already done so members of The public's attending online who wish to speak on this item should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone and as of now we have uh four virtual hands raised okay so I'm going to go ahead and I'm start I'm going to start with people that have children so I know that there's two but if there's more people that have children please let me know David Marshall how many minutes two minutes if I could just give a polite reminder to all speakers to please speak clearly into the microphone so that we can all hear you is there will there be a timer oh there it is okay all right this ordinance has been controversial from the beginning particularly among landlords however when we examine the text we find a generally moderate well-tailored piece of legislation it does not radically change the Dynamics of the local housing market but instead provides a
range of reasonable Common Sense protections for residential tenants indeed many of the more expansive protections such as greatly enhanced lsac protections particularly those affecting elderly and disabled individuals as well as the right of return in certain cases involving substantial remodels have been removed and while I personally support these Provisions I remain steadfastly in support of the ordinance one of the most significant provisions of the bill is also one of the least burdensome namely section 6.60.040 which requires that landlords provide tenants with the notice of their rights under the ordinance put simply an informed and educated public is one of the simplest and most effective means of providing a preventing abuse providing tenants with a statement of their rights imposes no significant burden upon landlords but could mean the difference between stable housing and homelessness for an at-risk tenant another significant provision is 6.60.80.080 which provides enhanced relocation assistance in cases involving no fault terminations I personally have lost count of the number of cases involving tenants who wanted to move but literally could not afford to leave while this may increase cause in the short term I have every confidence that will allow that it will allow a significant number of tenants to hire movers pay a security deposit of first month's rent and move on without the need to involve the courts these regulations also come without overly burdensome
restrictions upon landlords they retain their ability to terminate Tendencies for the full spectrum of at fault just cause allowed under the TPA many of the most protective requirements have been Stripped Away and even rules applying to small property owners only apply to ownership of rental properties in Petaluma allowing extensive rental Holdings outside of the area this bill currently represents the best and most promising Avenue for introduction of meaningful and appropriate local tenant protections both in Petaluma and Sonoma County I urge you to vote Yes thank you very much um asaya Gonzalez is Jesse Goldstein in the room is Jesse something is Jesse in the room uh okay great thank you yep two minutes two minutes okay uh good evening everyone my name is asaya Gonzalez um thank you to everybody who has dedicated their time to this topic um I'm disappointed that we have to continue to stand up here and Advocate on behalf of why these are important but I understand that some people need to hear it over and over again because they've never experienced it um I am grateful and proud to be able to stand up here and share my story I am grateful that I have access continual access to Mental Health Care Resources to be able to sort out the PTSD that I have as a result of complex trauma um however that is not the case for a lot of other tenants who I'm sure would love to be able to stand up here and share those experiences with you as well uh God it would be a disservice to my
legal immigrant Mexican grandmother who went repeatedly to Sacramento to Advocate on behalf behalf of the Ellis act to see it removed from our proposed ordinance is upsetting to say the least as we are Petaluma and we are choosing to set an example we've removed these provisions and in that way we're Paving the road for any other City around us who wants to do the same thing I anticipated having two more minutes I'll go back to my kids thank you very much Carol West hi good evening my name is Carol West I live in I've lived in piluma since 1993.
we rented for the first 10 years before we were able to purchase a home I'm a community health worker and know through personal experience that safe secure housing is a public health issue please think of the people you love and care for when you cast your vote to uphold tenants Protections in paluma thank you thank you very much Lena Blanca good evening I'm Lena I'm here on behalf of the Sonoma County Tenants Union I'm a lifelong renter and third generation renter of immigrant parents and I call Sonoma County home I am so grateful for the incredible work that you all have put in Petaluma is truly Paving the way to make renter protections possible in our state there are many cities across the state as you have studied who are doing this and just cause is an effective way to truly end displacing tenants I am so grateful to see our renting families here tonight who have come time and time again and really to double down on the very thing that these are protections this is not an attempt to steal anyone's power it's to take back what power we as renters have there are a few places where we can advocate for ourselves and our families but these are the spaces that we have and so we will continue to to fill these halls and we will bring our kids and we will continue to fight to make sure that just cause at minimum is adopted and thank you for building out that amazing portal that exists in Spanish and English that's huge I hope that we continue this momentum and really look to you
as the responsibility that you have to really protect our most vulnerable renters in this city and this County and really pave the way to be a model for our community thank you thank you very much Angelina Sol Eros foreign good evening city council my name is Angelina soldatos and I'm with the California Apartment Association I am the director of local public affairs we strongly urge Petaluma city council to vote down this ordinance the cost of relocation payments proposed totaling to eleven thousand dollars per tenant is City facilitated extortion on housing providers you're subjecting your local housing providers and community members to pay an outrageous fee per tenant furthermore it is to be noted when addressing day one protections that we must acknowledge that ab1482 was written by the legislator with the intent to give the opportunity to both tenant and housing providers to see to see if the business relationship was the right fit thus giving protections one giving protections after one year after tenancy almost like a honeymoon period for all parties involved just cause protections lead to life time tenancies therefore it is strongly advised to follow ab1482 the city council should focus its efforts on building upon their community outreach and education on the existing laws afforded to tenants Petaluma needs to build new affordable housing not more regulations that will discourage housing providers to continue operating in this city thank you very much Carrie
Davidson while a lot of effort has been made to revise the original ordinance and I really appreciate those that put in the time and I know several of you council members have spent I had a lot of community in Outreach and we all appreciate that but I do think the new draft is equally cumbersome subject to interpretation and far too wordy I hope all of you City Council Members fully understand what affects these suggested revisions will have on not only the landlords but the requirements of the city staff to implement this long 13-page document that I have read and reread and I've been in management for 32 years I've provided thousands of homes to people in Petaluma and apartments and I still don't understand some of this and I think that it would be a big mistake to pass this tonight and one of the questions I have where it says um residential owners that have two or less properties that is very confusing to me because our two or less properties an owner that owns a duplex is it an owner that owns their own home and one rental property or is an owner that owns their home somewhere else has two rental properties here we have owners we have an owner that has two rental properties here and one in Cotati are they exempt or non-exempt I I can't make sense of of that and I think two properties is too few myself and others in the field would be happy to spend some more time coming to a reasonable solution I know we want to get this behind us or all tired of being here and talking
about this but I think we need to simplify this law it has become so complicated and I think for the additional bureaucracy and paperwork is just Beyond Comprehension it seems that someone is trying very hard to put Petaluma on the map as what not to do with government handling of private property if you want Petaluma to share the housing problems that befall San Francisco Berkeley and Alameda your ordinance will succeed in accomplishing this please do the right thing and let the states already restrictive laws govern our community thank you thank you very much Diana Kingsbury and is Jonah in the room I can't I'm not sure what his last name is k n hey yes hello good evening I'm Diana Kingsbury and I do just want to say before the clock real quick um so I think there was a misunderstanding with asaya asaya was given the time for Jesse Goldstein um Jesse had put on the card that he was seating his time yes per our Council rule is the person's seating time needs to be present or virtually present to seed time okay but for your time here being seated I'll just ask the moderator to adjust the clock please okay Jonah Jonah is here four minutes thank you thanks Jonah I apologize for that thank you yeah no worries it's good to know the rules so we've been here many times um I do want to address just some of the things that have been brought up already tonight um as well as the Ellis act so the original purpose of this ordinance was to close the loopholes of the Ellis act and I'm not
100 sure how clear we've been or how clearly it's been understood why that's so important um I don't know if you all read the letter that Lisa Tenenbaum sent uh but this was a Petaluma resident Petaluma renter who was evicted from her home on the basis that it was going to be taken off the market the landlord's like going out of business but that did not happen months after getting evicted and this was after uh different instances of housing instability in Petaluma Lisa ended up having to move all the way to Louisiana leaving the community that she loved and because of that uh you know she had to go through all that stress and we're missing her in our community she found the listing of her unit just months after she was evicted and it was at a higher price and we got a call from her on the Sonoma County Tenants Union hotline to that effect so this is the exact reason why we need to take this seriously and why we need the Ellis act protections um this is just one story as we try to really explain it's very difficult to find a perfect story like that in the sense that not every Lisa Tenenbaum calls our hotline right I know that you all do your best at Outreach but in terms of like reaching out to people who have been through these specific situations it is difficult to find people who fall into the exact loophole um because they don't just you know they don't just come to us we're we're still growing we're still reaching people but I really think it is important to make sure
that landlords are accountable because as it stands landlords can say those things they can essentially lie and say that they're taking it off the market meanwhile they're evicting someone displacing someone from the community they could be displacing children we've talked at length about the importance of protections for school-aged children because it has devastating impacts on their mental health and their academic well-being and even things related to food security um so it is very important and part of the reason I want to say that you haven't heard maybe as much public outcry is like children can't speak up in these scenarios right uh teachers are extremely overwhelmed we have supporters who we've talked to who are passionate about just cause protections but are so absolutely exhausted and busy with grading papers working 60 to 80 hour weeks it's difficult to show up for six hour meetings every month right so we need to make sure that we're keeping those things in mind um I do want to address some of the issues around means testing I think that it's it's not we need to look at this through the frame of you are being evicted through no fault of your own so it shouldn't matter even if you're not poor you still deserve compensation to be able to move um and in terms of the rental registry I mean we've sent in this information Margaret has talked with um an organization that provides these services from what I understand it's kind of it's It's negligible basically it's cost
neutral because think about how much does it cost to prevent homelessness or to address homelessness so I do want to address that as well thank you for your time thank you is asiah Gonzalez still in the room as I I apologize my doing good evening again everyone uh thank you for allowing me the remaining two minutes I apologize in advance to the translators um for the amount of time that landlords have spent organizing against this ordinance I am thoroughly curious how many invited their tenants to gather around a table to go over it to ask them their opinions how often do you gather your tenants and request feedback from them do you know if they genuinely feel safe behind that door that you are reasonably entitled to open at almost any given moment because I can almost promise you that that safe feeling is ever so fleeting my grandmother advocating on behalf of Ellis protections has enabled her to do things like put my uncle through through college to become a police officer she's been able to live in the same rent-controlled apartment since the 80s and I am so proud of her for that because she gets to live in the Mission District and she gets to preserve culture foreign Ed with renovation over and over again and now my father her son who is a homeowner who happens to be going through a divorce has somewhere to sleep because she still has that apartment I wish there was a way to get every landlord to experience a night out on a freezing Street if you guys are able to keep a
calendar and know when the rent is due I think you guys can also serve notices in multiple languages thank you thank you very much Blake Cooper good evening everyone as a lifelong petaluman and a renter who spends more than 80 percent of his income on housing and has personally dealt with predatory landlords in the city I appreciate the time taken by this body tonight I am here to give a statement on behalf of the Sonoma County Democratic party the California Democratic party's platform supports tenant protection and anti-displacement measures such as the provisions in the item before this council tonight and the platform opposes any efforts to weaken such measures it does so because these measures not only ensure a community sustainability but also help to address the crippling poverty and housing instability facing families workers and children across the state because after all these measures aren't extreme or radical they are practical effective and in place across a significant number of cities and counties across California the Sonoma County Democratic party affirms and advocates for our party platform and does so here today on the matter before each of you and asks that you not only support tenants protections but steer away from the temptation to weaken them this measure especially in its current iteration is modest but will still help a vulnerable portion of our community in a significant way this population includes teachers caregivers children emergency Workers
Health Care workers students and retirees in other words our current and future Workforce in this community some of the very people you thanked earlier in this meeting in fact the Sonoma County Democratic party asks you to consider the values upon which you were elected and hopes to thank you for moving forward to protect our most vulnerable thank you thank you very much Sunny no uh good evening council members and staff thank you for all of your work on this ordinance um I am proud to be part of a community that is prioritizing diversity and inclusion by advocating for these protections for tenants because we know that tenants tend to be more likely to be low income in people of color um however I'm very disappointed that uh that the amended ordinance has lost the protections for school-aged children and School staff uh the council has routinely asked us for numbers so I'm going to give you some numbers I'm going to summarize my lengthy written comment that I submitted earlier today Petaluma City Schools publish their salary scales and a starting salary for a teacher is 58 300 dollars that amounts to about 4 800 a month in gross income not net uh in the average house in March in Petaluma sold for about just under eight hundred thousand dollars which amounts to a mortgage of just under six thousand dollars a month so frankly teachers cannot afford to buy homes in Petaluma which we all know that's a very obvious fact I'm very lucky that I am a recent homeowner in Petaluma and
uh particularly lucky because as a proud Petaluma resident I think it's probably true I think we can all agree uh that many of these landlords would probably not rent to me again because of how vocal I've been on this ordinance and so frankly the expectation that teachers would be able to come here and parents of school age children would be able to come here and speak up uh is really frankly unfair um I I think that if the council was able to do Outreach directly to the schools like Legal Aid had done you would hear the same outcry that we heard which was that they need these protections they cannot afford to live here and they're scared to be evicted I'm going to give you one more number I'm going to give you the number three I was reached out to this last week by a family by a friend of a family of three generations of petalumans a grandparent a parent and a kid the kid goes to the school that my son will go to next year and they were given notice that they had to leave a single-family home uh based on no fault of their own and they chose to leave and they left not only Petaluma but they not left not only the house but Petaluma because they didn't feel like it was worth trying to fight for their rights and that's one less family that we have in Petaluma that's one less family we have in our school system and that's one less that's you know that's that's detrimental to our community thank you thank you very much Joe is it Sinclair Joe North Bay Realtors you can say your
last name thank you thank you council members my name is Joe Schneider I'm with the North Bay Association of Realtors uh thank you for all your hard work and effort put in thus far in hearing everybody's perspective on this in engaging with a limited number of stakeholders over the past two years to publicly proposing this ordinance did not result in a just or effective process or proposal housing providers tenants managers and program staff should be invited to a transparent discussion on policy development and trying to placate both sides of this this policy has somehow simultaneously lost its original intent and became so complicated that it will be very very hard to implement in real time as written this will create long-term irreparable harm to all parties including the city we ask you to pull back this ordinance and create a working group with all stakeholders to ensure that this issue gets a debate and input it deserves however in speaking with many of you with many of you it is my understanding that the city wants to pass something tonight and put something on the books with that being said there are a few amendments that we would like to propose that we also submit in public comment this afternoon one align with the TPA the strongest potent the tenant Protections in the country in its entirety and begin tenant protections at 12 months rather than day one to ensure that the most financially vulnerable tenants are the ones receiving relocation assistance create a means
test at 80 Ami so the tenants who truly need the assistance are receiving it by enacting this means test you are simultaneously protecting housing providers from having to pay relocation assistance to to tenants earning two three four five hundred thousand dollars a year exempt new construction in its entirety the city is already finding it difficult to attract new housing developers to build much needed housing this will only further discourage new development and with that I want to point to the public comment earlier where the guy was talking about the Planning Commission and the lack of new applicants this is directly related to that thank you thank you very much Betty is it hotson Raider I think she spoke at public comment maybe Betty I'm Carol Caroline Carolyn gaverloff good evening I'm Caroline gabroloff I'm an owner and property manager at Westgate real estate and Westgate Property Management I want to start with my question that I ask at every meeting and I still not cannot get an answer on which is what is the problem that we're really truly trying to solve here in Petaluma this ordinance does not stabilize the housing market add new housing units or provide affordable housing this anti-housing ordinance does not address the real issue in Petaluma which is Supply we have new housing units that are completely unaffordable please visit the new housing complex on Petaluma Boulevard it is lovely but not affordable the rents are 35 percent higher than what I charge for a
comparable unit I'm grateful that you align the at fault causes for termination of tenancy with the tenant protection act single-family homes should be removed entirely from this ornance just like TPA the notice requirements for the exception is very demanding with TPA California gave owner six months to notify tenants of their exception however in this ordinance owners must provide notice within 30 days lastly the relocation assistance of 250 percent of one month's rent 14 days after an owner gives notice is too much with many owners will not be able to meet this obligation please let the tenant protection act of 2019 have a chance to work and before adding more complexities to the rental market please vote no on this ordinance thank you thank you very much Reverend Dara alandrent good evening thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak and I appreciate your public service and I appreciate the opportunity to be here with um fellow people who care about our town my name is Reverend Dara Olan I am a Unitarian Universalist Minister I'm also a renter I'm also the parent of two beautiful children I'm here in solidarity with the people who have been speaking tonight about making sure that there are tenant protections and as I've sat here tonight I've been thinking about what I might be able to add and um I think I feel so passionately about this both in my role as a clergy person and also personally as a renter I have come into contact throughout my career serving in the human
services with a diverse spectrum of people and I can tell you that the vulnerability the instability the anxiety and the real impact of not having stable housing is immense it is ongoing it is multi-generational in my career I've been able to oversee a small community Assistance fund where people would be able to ask me to make small contributions that I could on behalf of the communities that I was serving in order to help delegate resources and close gaps I am aware of how profound and how terrifying on the housing crisis is in Petaluma I want to see a Petaluma that we can all be proud of I'm grateful to be a renter and have a positive working relationship with my current landlords but I in my past history have certainly experienced that precarious feeling of not knowing whether or not my landlords were going to maintain the unit or not I've sat here now for over an hour and I've been looking at this beautiful vision board and up here I see up here at Petaluma bright star housing for all and I know that that vision is a Petaluma that we could all be proud of there is a myth going around that somehow protections like this are giving somehow tenants all the power and that could just be not farther from the case protecting tenants giving tenants a modicum of power just allows us to have a bit more power to demand compensation for example if people are evicted unjustly I think you've already heard for some from some people tonight but it is so true that full-time working
parents or parents that are kind of between the margins or closing the gaps with multiple jobs your time is up thank you so much for your time thank you so much Clayton engstrom I wrote out a speech today and I and I timed myself several times and I was about two and a half minutes so now I've cut it off a lot of it out um the council has received information from all sides including Public Safety this information all comes the same conclusion there is agreement that housing is expensive and so are rents Petaluma has an affordability problem Petaluma does not have an eviction issue we are at the same eviction rate as San Francisco which has more protections leading to the conclusion stronger protections don't prevent displacement I am certain tenants care more about Rising rents than evictions the policy before you tonight will not lower the cost of housing giving relief to tenants the policy raises the cost of providing rental housing filing paperwork with the city will require fees to manage adding costs of providing housing tenants buyouts relocation fees will add costs to provide housing litigation will add to the cost of rents adding compliance complexity to the housing provider will drive some to leave the market fewer unit fewer rentals will drive up the cost of housing I would bet that all those in favor of this policy would not be so inclined knowing this will raise rents to cover its implementation so here we are again hundreds of hours of Staff time multiple
Council meetings public and private sessions all following the adoption of a bad policy this is backwards let this expire thank you thank you very much Scott Shelley good evening um couple concerns I think we're moving in the right direction but there's work to be done um as far as the mom and pop landlord thing I'm not I'm confused too if I own two houses and I decide I want to put adus on those two properties um and it's going to penalize me I'm not going to do that and you're encouraging us to create affordable housing so that's the one thing to consider the other thing is listening to all these stories pretty dramatic and sad what's happened to a lot of people but as a landlord I can tell you that um you call me and you have a problem I come and fix it um you call me and you're having a hard time paying your rent and you need a couple days I'll give it to you when you villainize us and make it as though every one of us landmarks is out to take advantage of you or do something terrible honestly it makes me not want to do this it makes me not want to be a landlord it makes me not want to provide the housing that I'm providing and I said this the last time I was here but if I sell that house I bought for 260 000 in the year 2000 that I rent for twenty four hundred dollars the person that's going to buy it for eight hundred thousand dollars isn't going to rent it out for twenty four hundred dollars so that's something to consider so I think it would be good if we all take a
little bit softer town and try and understand where each side of the aisle is coming from thank you thank you very much Tom munder thank you good evening local housing providers are in the hot seat again tonight for me a senior dependent on rent who lives in the same building with his tenants this ordinance amounts to elder abuse I'm pretty sure I'm not the only septuagenarian here who worked whose hard work and Financial Security have been undermined by your rule changes there are four items that need attention on page three please strike paragraph two or else honor its intent it is disingenuous and insulting to acknowledge landlords who live on the same property with their tenants and then fail to follow through with any corresponding provision in the actual code number two 250 percent relocation assistance is a bit High considering that one-third of that amount is a new security deposit not truly an expense but a forced savings account to be returned to the tenant at a future date number three attorney fees regardless of this ordinance my rental agreements will continue to state that in the event of a dispute between landlord and tenant each party will pay its own attorney fees number four expiration date it is arrogant and irresponsible not to include an expiration date this ordinance depends upon and dovetails with the state TPA and must expire at the same time regarding unintended consequences I have some predictions in the next two years while there may still be a glut
of corporate owned apartments in the pipeline there will certainly be fewer single-family homes for rent as landlords exit the market rents for scarce vacant homes will Skyrocket prospective tenants will suffer an increasingly competitive and arduous screening process ultimately only a sec select thank you your time has expired I got one more sentence you've let other people go over you are ultimately only a select highly qualified thank you very much David Marshall thank you very much um it's a Corey Johnson and this is um your seating time to Margaret de mayo and also Helene dorenfeld so you get nine minutes six minutes probably back to three minutes I don't really want all nine minutes I was just afraid someone was gonna leave um but I appreciate um I appreciate everybody for giving me the chance to speak um and I appreciate you all for the work you're doing here uh City staff city council um I really feel like you know you have connected to the people in this case and I'm talking about the vulnerable communities in Petaluma um and so on behalf of legal aid I just want to point out that we did submit a lengthy legal analysis of this I got it in as soon as I could which was yesterday um but it was before Monday um and there are I want to acknowledge there are some great changes in this ordinance which I pointed out in the letter um my concerns are primarily around the no Faults just causes because it's clear you want to protect tenants who are being evicted to no fault of
their own if you want to protect tenants don't remove the protections when we track the no Faults just causes with the TPA we put back in all the loopholes that we came here to address the Ellis loophole the substantial renovation which is called renovation and is currently at crisis levels in other parts of the State uh the substantial rehab loophole the owner move-in loopholes the TPA is streamed streamlined it was backed by the California Apartment Association because it was watered down after months of money being spent campaigning and legislating it was the bottom it's the bottom of the ocean for tenant protections and what we're doing here is supposed to be improving on that so what I would recommend is that you don't remove the safety nets that were in the interim ordinance I understand the language can be unwieldy and I did say with Dan RAF that it could have been simplified and it could but these are people we're talking about we don't streamline something that's going to sacrifice somebody's rights so that we can all understand what it is it is the attorney's job to make a law that is that will up you know that will withstand legal scrutiny and as the City attorney said these laws track with other jurisdictions who have such protections and have withheld legal scrutiny in fact San Francisco and Berkeley both have owner move-in safety nets in effect that have repeatedly upheld legal scrutiny at the court level but those those safety nets are removed from this
ordinance in the efforts of making it match the TPA so I would encourage you to look at the language we provided in our letter which has specific examples of these safety nets and there are a few saying you're going to move into a house when you already live in a unit in the property that shouldn't be allowed you know saying that you're going to displace a senior disabled person who's lived there for 10 years so that your grandson can move in who is maybe like a 20 owner of the property that should not be allowed there are things that people who do have owner movement protections use other jurisdictions have models so I recommend returning to that and putting teeth in there uh I have I have some points that I just wanted to raise of things that I've heard tonight um these rugs have been in place for six months I do not know I have not heard that there has been any complication any administrative burden in fact the work is already done the work has been done and it has been a lot of work and you guys have made it as easy as possible for a landlord to comply legal aid will step up and provide education to the community where necessary just like they do in other communities when new laws are passed uh we have Petaluma people services that I'm sure would also be willing to do so and um and provide not only tenant education but landlord education because landlords need to understand how to comply with the law so that they can do their job and do it ethically one other thing is the
idea that Adu production would be inhibited I think is kind of ludicrous because sb9 is a law that was passed that allows for expanded Adu production we have seen in the news that sb9 did not spur housing growth and the idea that a hypothetical landlord might hypothetically convert a property to have four adus should not we should not sacrifice a tenant and expand the small property ownership exemption which I think is great I don't want it but if you're going to have one I think it's specifically narrow enough its units in the city that somebody owns two units and you could have a single family home an Adu you have two units those are exempt you do not have to comply with this modest ordinance that says you can't evict for no reason the school-aged child and educator Provisions that they're the comment that there was not strong support I refute because legal aid has been asking for them since the beginning we had Mary Reynolds from Miwok the principal came here last time and asked for them uh the tenants Union nbop this is all part of our common request because of the fact that there are studies that show that children need stability and there's traumatic impact on their lives for the rest of their lives so if we can say in an owner move-in eviction not Ellis that's the preemption issue in an owner move-in eviction you cannot move in during the school year yes there are some yearly schools let's talk about Traditional School years is done in San Francisco and all these other
places they don't have problem with the time constraints it can be done so closing those three loopholes in the no fault I think is essential and one last thing it was referred to that the Ellis act the six-month right to return to place a sub-rehab and that is not the way the ordinance reads there is no right to return for sub-rehab in this ordinance so I would request that you put it back the way it was thank you thank you JoJo Oliver well here we are again uh thank you everyone for another wonderful late night um my well just a brief story about how I came to be in Petaluma my wife and I traveled around the country and when we came here initially she was a traveling medical professional at the time and we came here and we fell in love with Petaluma uh we really liked working at PV you know she really liked working at PVH she loved the people there and we just really enjoyed the town like if I've said in passing Petaluma reminds me of the I grew up in Chico and Petaluma reminds me of the chico that I was promised growing up uh and it did not deliver on that promise if you're wondering it's when they came when the opportunity came for us to come here permanently arose when that opportunity came we took it right before the beginning of covid you know as it happens we the apartment we moved into initially is it's not great but when we were here before we had the uh dubious pleasure of renting from some of our local landlords uh two of them in fact over the course of a nine
month period so that should tell you about how well the first one went and the second one we had issues where uh there were problems like regular maintenance that needed to be performed on the house and their response was to illegally lock us out of the thermostat by putting a lock box over the top of it and running it through a nest from their place out in Hawaii uh so you know what I'm saying is that these protections are important you can't leave it up to an honor System from I mean maybe one person's will follow it seems like other ones aren't that interested thanks for your time thank you very much Michael thong um Thorne hi there my name is Michael I'm a board member of the Sonoma County Tenants Union um you know a lot of people in this County love the phrase housing is a human right but man we don't know what that means I don't think I think we mean different things by that and for me I think people it means people should have a house ideally everyone has a house I think for some people it just means that you know um it's a buzz I don't know it's a buzz phrase we as long as housing is you know reasonable within the limits of the law and the current state of affairs then that's good enough but we have a lot to do um I made a comment earlier I was talking to one of the city council members and it was brought up that you know a lot of tenants might not want to go back to a an apartment that evicted them um because you know if and as a result why do we need a right to
refusal if people don't even want to come back well I thought about that more and why don't we just let tenants decide if they want to come back you know I think if they don't want to come back then no harm but let's offer it back to them and let's see what happens because it at least closes that loophole um and I think that's what's critical about the law um I'm in favor of rental registry um you know is it is is it extortion to ask to to ask landlords to pay moving expenses for tenants when we pay over two thousand dollars a month every single month to rent just to have a bedroom just to have a place to sleep I feel like we're the ones who are getting extorted um and yeah I don't think I've been I was a tenant counselor with Sonoma County Tenants Union I've never been gotten to a point where the TPA helped prevent someone from getting evicted or helped them at all I think it's not good enough and it's not a good blueprint for what we need to do thank you thank you very very much Peter vortese hello my name is Peter vorisis and I found out about this meeting about half an hour before I came here so I don't have all the details or I didn't have a chance to write things down but I was just listening to both sides I happen to be a small landlord here in town and I have to say that you know you have to look at both sides because there's good tenants and there's good landlords for the most part and there's that little part of bad tenants and bad landlords that cause problems I've
been through this for many years over my life because I grew up in a family that had these type of Housing and so forth I'm from San Francisco and the worst place to own eight place is San Francisco with all the rules and laws they have there now when my mom passed away and we inherited the building that my father had paid for and we had for 70 years in the family we lost it about seven years ago because what happened was because of rent control my mother wasn't able to keep it up you know the rents were at one third what did she should be getting and with all the limits in San Francisco that was horrible same thing happens here in Petaluma I'm like that one fellow that spoke over there who has a property that I could probably be running fairly at 2 800 a month and I'm doing 2200 a month because I'm a nice guy and they take care of the place but that's not enough to fix the things that I have to keep fixing when I have to fix the windows do the roof the leaking the paint job the this the that so when people talk about it's expensive to live here but you have to look at both sides because for the landlord it's very very tough to keep the building up for the most part and and collect the rent I just had the other yesterday have to put I put a furnace in a place that cost me forty five hundred dollars that's three that's two and a half months rent and I'm going to lose out on this deal but that's what it is so I'm doing what needs to be done but please look at both sides and you
have to have you talk all I ever hear about is fairness to the tenants how about fairness to the landlords or some happy medium so that's really what I wanted to say is just it doesn't I don't know what the answer is but I can say as a good landlord you know my tenants are happy but then I'm under market and I take care of things but on the other hand when things when more expensive things come up like this thing just came by now that's that's two over two months of rent thank you has expired thank you okay so I just be fair on both sides thank you very much Laura Talent hello everyone my name is Laura and I am a local here and a property manager as well and I help with my parents Mom and Pops rentals which is their retirement solely I am blown away that meeting after meeting we have experts in this field people who have been in the expertise for 10 20 30 years plus and as individuals and yet and they're not just here to advocate for tenants they're not here just to advocate for landlords they're here to advocate for the rental market as a whole and time and time again they show up and they speak their concerns about this ordinance they see the flaws and the unforeseen consequences of the ordinance yet their voices seem to fall to the Wayside this is a true letdown and why their voices are not held to a great knowledge that you can gain from is beyond me and I'm at a loss I feel like some of you have made up your minds and there's really no point in trying to educate you on
that you may in this ordinance um and what it will do to our rental market ultimately some have had bad experiences with landlords and now that experience is being blanketed across all landlords none of you are experts in this field Eric danley's not an expert in this field and Nora's colleagues this is why they've actually supplied you with some screwed data and misinformation but you probably didn't catch that because this isn't you don't know the ins and outs of this field again why you would go to your experts for that and listen to them it would be as if I had some questions on vegetation management and I didn't listen to councilman scrubs or if I had any information I need to know on General Internal Medicine and I didn't talk to post Decay instead I just decided to pull someone out and talk to them and not take the expertise they're sitting right in front of me I feel like that is happening time and time again the signs behind us say to protect Petaluma renters and I believe that but in order to do that we need to protect the rental market please vote no on this ordinance thank you very much Jennifer real thank you good evening Council you might recognize me as the nothing Burger girl uh well let me tell you who I really am I'm Jennifer rile I'm a property manager for the largest property management company in Sonoma County we uh and we manage over 500 rental homes in Petaluma alone I also serve as president-elect for the Sonoma Marin chapter of the National
Association residential property managers I've been in this industry for 10 years I'm quite literally an expert in this field you clearly aren't because if you were you wouldn't have let this proposed ordinance go this far I commend you for attempting to tackle the very real housing crisis that faces not only Petaluma but all of Sonoma County but this is not the way to go about it the root of this crisis is affordability not evictions we've tried to be courteous we've engaged in the process we've provided you with loads of data supporting the fact that evictions are not the problem and you that you seemingly think that they are so now I'm going to be blunt this law is not going to add a single new unit to the rental market in fact it will do the opposite you're already extremely low vacancy rate will drop even more making every available unit Skyrocket in price as and as long as this law is in effect I will make it my personal mission to actively persuade all of my Petaluma clients to sell their properties I work with a lot of investors with significant money to spend on property and I will Advocate that they not spend a dime in the city and tell them that their money will be better spent in Rohnert Park or Santa Rosa this law will have a detrimental effect on the rental housing market the rental market will have a far-reaching domino effect in a year or two when your rental market has shrunk to the point that only rentals you can find are apartments and the astronomical
rents have driven out the low-wage workers from your city it will cause your restaurants to raise their prices and when you go out and sink your teeth into a 30 cheeseburger I want you to remember that the nothing Burger girl was right it's very hard to unring a bell you still have a chance not to ring this one thank you very much Pat McDonnell city council staff my name is Pat McDonnell I'm a housing attorney I think that makes me an expert in this field um I wanted to thank you all for all of the work that has gone into this and your predecessors I know that this has been a long process uh well over a year I've been coming to these meetings for a year I know some of the housing providers and their representatives have been coming here for over a year thank you for taking all that input and crafting a piece of legislation that I have differences with it but I think tenant protections is something that is very important to have here in the city of Petaluma and it's a priority that this city set several years ago that you have the opportunity to make good on I want to just raise two quick points um because I agree with some of the comments from the housing provider side um Petaluma and Sonoma County does have a supply side problem absolutely and I also concede that this ordinance doesn't have an effect on the supply side it really doesn't affect the supply side at all I know quite a few developers I talk with them you talk with a developer and you ask why aren't you building
apartment buildings in Petaluma or Sonoma County or California they're going to say SQL weapons weapon weaponization they're gonna say permitting hassles they'll tell you labor costs Supply costs NIMBY activism you'll have the entire conversation with a developer and they won't mention tenant protections it simply doesn't impact that supply side equation at all you guys have the power to do things about that supply side problem you could create a greater density incentives up zoning make permitting more streamlined you could invest in uh Career Technical education at the petalum srjc extension those are things that will have a much greater impact positively on the supply side problem here in Petaluma and make those rents potentially able to come down this ordinance is good for Petaluma renters and I encourage you to pass it thank you thank you very much David Cardenas hello Council uh my name is Devin Cardenas I am a Petaluma resident since 2018 I live out in Mountain View Avenue I'm very fortunate to live with landlords who are also wrestling with the fundamental contradiction of being a landlord that in part their way of life is subsidized from my paycheck and I'm I understand that to be a very privilege for this and to be in but I also hope that that is a a internal conversation that most landlords are having um and I also just wanted to say that um I'm very happy to live in the city it's a beautiful city and I think we hopefully we all share that Common Ground um and uh I
don't want to be long but I think part of what just cause is trying to do is preserve some semblance of diversity whether that's a class race um world view in in this beautiful city that we get to live in we have the privilege of living in um so I hope you all see that as well and I hope you support Just Cause And continue this thank you thank you very much chuck Hildebrand evening folks I'm a long time property owner here in in the county and in the city um I started renting homes in 19 78 over in another community and moved over here and then ultimately moved to Novato to be closer to my business I went Dr Pharmacy and practiced in Marin County owned some pharmacies there anyhow uh I really enjoyed Petaluma here when I originally moved here I continued to invest here I have some tenants that have been with me for 30 years in Petaluma that's the good news kind of these people have never been able to afford their rent right now they are in debt to me for about three hundred thousand dollars because I was a good landlord I I worked seven days a week all my life took me longer took me eight days a week to get my pharmacy license not all landlords are bad but we do need to get some justification for ourselves this document here I know it's all good intentions these folks seem to be on one side of the aisle or the other I'm on both I'm a past president of the Novato novaro senior housing low income we have 126 units I'm a current board of directors person I have been for several
terms I think I'm a pretty good guy I think I'm a little stupid by letting people owe me so much money that I'll never claim but anyhow a little background on me I've read about you folks also because I want to know who I was talking to like this gentleman in The Scouting I was the youngest Eagle Scout in San Francisco at 12 years old anyhow I'm a good guy I wanted to just mention a few things that concerned me about this ordinance and I I don't think that it should pass pardon me your time is up you've had two minutes I had to I thought I had five sorry anyhow thanks for your service there and uh please vote against it for now and come back with a better one thank you very much Max Bell Alper foreign good evening Council thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this really important issue um so I'm I'm wearing a few different hats uh tonight so first I'm I'm wearing the Hat um as part of the North Bay labor Council executive board um and we just want you to know that thousands and thousands of union members across Sonoma County are watching and are really really really strongly supporting um passing this without without removing any safety nets and one of the things we do in the labor council is we have a scorecard where we really look at how does how do people vote on issues that matter to working people and housing is a really deeply important issue for working people I also wear a hat um as the executive director of North Bay jobs with Justice that represents
community and labor organizations who may not be unions yet but Farm Workers domestic workers day laborers and this is one of the most important issues and so we strongly urge you to support this and not include to put back in any removing of any of those safety nets that that you might take out and then lastly Strangely I actually come here wearing a hat as a as a fellow landlord and I'd like to ask my fellow landlords here um would any of you like to actually trade places uh with with a tenant anyone just just raise your hand if you'd rather be a tenant than a landlord Aiden you're you're talking to the city council not I know I I just I'm just curious because it doesn't appreciate if you just it doesn't it doesn't seem like anyone would and because I think we need to be honest here the the reality is in this day and age it is without a doubt better to be a landlord than it is to be a tenant and we need to be honest about that and we need to pass the strongest protections possible because it's the right thing to do and I urge you to do that tonight thank you so much thank you very much Aiden Smith hi I want to thank you all for uh crafting an ordinance that I think reflects the Democracy of this town I'm very pleased with what this has come to I don't have a speech tonight I just want to talk about some stuff that upsets me to keep hearing I keep hearing the idea that providing notice is restrictive this is supposed to be your job uh the idea that this will raise rents the
rents are rising guys the rents are rising no matter what we do you know and uh this idea that it's unfair that landlords hold the financial burden let's look at both sides the average net worth based on a 2020 survey of Consumer Finance for a renter is six point three thousand dollars the average net worth of a single homeowner not someone who owns multiple properties is 255 000 some quick math that's 40 times renting is not a choice my rent is half of my income every month and my savings get wiped out every time my car breaks down or I have to go to the dentist or the doctor you can say if you don't want to rent just own but it is really hard to save when you were paying someone else's mortgage I've said it before and I'll say it again the only Power renters get is that which is given to them by their government it's the job of the government to help protect its most vulnerable protect landlords too that's fine that's that's why it's a democracy but we are the most vulnerable please pass these protections and last but not least if you're going to sell because of this ordinance sell to your tenant thank you thank you for the time thank you very much that was the last speaker card I have now we're going to go ahead and go to our Zoom audience thank you vice mayor uh for our virtual speakers uh speakers are reminded to be respectful in their comments and that this meeting is being translated please pause between sentences for translation threats of violence and obscenity are
grounds for removal from this meeting a countdown will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers and your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak when the countdown begins and please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so there are six uh virtual hands and the first speaker is Daniel Raff please unmute yourself and begin your comment thank you I really wanted to be there tonight and I'm sorry I'm sorry that I couldn't because I came down with covid I still want to make myself available to any city council members who have questions about how I expect this ordinance to work in practice I know that the council is inclined to adopt some version of an ordinance and in recognition of that I focused my latest letter on the serious technical problems with how this ordinance is written I mentioned in my letter that I actually like the idea of providing notices to tenants Margaret and I agreed in our earlier letter that the law generally favors tenants but they might not get the benefit of that because tenants often don't know what their rights are Mr Danley is correct that I gave an extreme example of the notices that might be required under the ordinance but he didn't dispute my point a landlord could be required to send out the same notices in a one-year period over and over and over and over and over again that is Extreme and it doesn't address the multiple multitude of other
notices that are required under the ordinance we can do better and we can make this ordinance better and as for the Spanish translations I again I don't necessarily think that's a bad idea in theory but as written it is completely impractical the notice to perform I provided with my letter provides a great example of the type of long customized notice that must be translated under the ordinance I provide a reasonable alternative that would notify Spanish-speaking tenants of their rights without requiring the entire long customized notice to be translated I know the council wants to put this behind us but you'll notice that the people who are actually having to work through the regulations the housing providers are all expressing concerns about the regulatory aspect of this ordinance this ordinance has significant problems in how it's written and it needs to be fixed I also there were a couple of questions about um about damage to property and how that works I don't have time to address that but I'm happy to uh to discuss that with council members and would be happy to provide a written statement if you would like thank you all right thank thank you for your comment our next speaker will be Marty Bennett uh please unmute yourself and begin your comment with United Here Local two a union representing workers at the Petaluma Sheraton and three other hotels in the county I am also a delegate to the north bay labor Council and represent that organization the city county and state
are facing an unprecedented wave of corporate takeover of the residential housing market including both single-family and apartment units simultaneously low-wage workers are squeezed between Rising rents and stagnant renter incomes U.S census stated reveals that between 1980 and 2020 inflation-adjusted wages marginally increase for the bottom 60 percent of workers in the accounting by just eight percent for the lowest 20 percent during the same period wages dropped by nearly 3 percent while wages for the top 10 percent increase by more than 35 percent moreover between 2000 and 2020 gross annual rents Climb by 28 percent in the county but renter incomes grew by just 10 percent many low-wage workers on the edge of homelessness displacement from the county to more affordable housing markets were forced to live in overcrowded housing given skyrocketing rents there are numerous negative social health and financial consequences for rent burning tenants particularly if they and their families become homeless due to an eviction we urge you to adopt strong residential tenancy protections applying that will protect the rights of renters and minimize evictions the legislation should include all of the changes proposed by legal aid of Sonoma County 30 California local jurisdictions have adopted just cause ordinances and Petaluma can lead the way in Sonoma County and the North Bay thank you thank you for your comment um our next speaker will be Lee um please unmute yourself and begin your
comment thank you thank you for your time on this issue which is a truly a human rights climate and disability justice issue my concern is for the over 20 000 community members including Working Families teachers and Elders in our community who are vulnerable to the unscrupulous business owners who Lobby for unjust and unfair evictions small business landlords who require our most vulnerable to subsidize their careers uh you know housing provider is another way of saying my job is you being a worker workers um who have to have two and three jobs to afford to pay for your business in 1995 20 an hour is would be the equivalent of 39 an hour today I encourage you to protect the most vulnerable community members from threats of landlords who either can't or won't show basic compassion for their tenants through supporting just cause good landlords are good people who care about the most vulnerable and support just cause evictions um uh again I think it's important to recognize that um a person who is able to get a A working class person to pay for their their career and and and I I'm really specifically hearing a earlier about buying a heating a water heater that is the sort of thing people drive Uber for um that is the sort when when a working class per uh thank you for your comment your time has expired um our next uh speaker is uh Keith Becker uh Keith uh please unmute yourself and begin your comment good evening while I'm not an attorney I worry about the construct of this
ordinance as it's written because it seems to imply with all of the complexities of the ordinance a landlord must abide and comply with each and every step including those that are confusing and even missing one particular step can open them to liability open them to damages and charges and being sued by tenant intended advocacy groups um there are those who have said that this this ordinance needs to go beyond the tenant protection act because the tenant protection act doesn't work today I sent an email to the city council members which included information from the eviction lab which is a National Organization which is relatively unbiased but if it is biased at all it is biased in somewhat in favor of tenants and they analyze the increase in the number of evictions in America Across the Nation between 2021 and 2022 and they listed the top 32 cities in which evictions have increased not one of those cities is in California so the question of is the tenant protection act working the answer is obviously yes the the mayor excuse me the governor stated that the tenant protection act is the strongest package in America and as a matter of fact back in 1990 2019 Rene rubinoff of legal aid called it a pair of full step in the right direction we should honor the tenant protection act as it's written and not tamper with it any further than is absolutely necessary thank you thank you for your time um our next speaker will be Corrine Robles uh and I apologize I'm going to reset that
timer um Corinne um please meet yourself and begin your comment thank you so I'm a property manager and I'm a housing provider that advocates for affordable rental housing and it's clear that this ordinance needs to disappear and completely exempt single family properties it's very clear that new developers are encouraged to create new housing in the area none of them have or all of them are exempt to AP 1482 and that same encouragements needs to be given to the generational Petaluma landlords that have helped build Petaluma to what it is today and they have helped house tenants for generations of passed on properties it's these landlords that because of ab1482 Prop 19 and tough City protection tenant protection they're becoming part of the 135 average of rental property sold per year in the past three years it's essential to preserve landlords rights as much as it is to protect tenant rights without landlords there there will be no more single-family rentals and these tenants are going to continue to squeeze into these new buildings uh with little space and they'll diminish their own rental rights which they're really fighting to protect um the chance for tenants to run an affordable three-bedroom house with a garage a nice yard for their dog that's just going to become a rare opportunity everything that they're doing to try to protect uh families teachers it's really just gonna um backfire in the worst way possible by really just forcing more and more people into apartment
buildings because the less affordable single-family homes there are that's the last option is get an apartment so that's that's all I'm saying thank you for your comment our next speaker will be Jack Buckhorn please unmute yourself and begin your comment I guess good evening Council and uh paluma staff my name is Jack Buckhorn I'm the executive director of the North Bay labor Council and I must start out by saying I really appreciate the landlords that I've shown up tonight and are um so generous with their tenants I mean I know they're out there and I believe uh one of the speakers who said the vast majority of renters and landlords are good Fair people and I believe that but this ordinance is intended for one purpose and that's to make right on a contract that the landlord made with the tenant and that landlord breaks that agreement for no follow the tenant they just walk away from it as a person who is uh very much invested in organized labor we believe strongly in agreements and that agreement should be fulfilled and upheld and that's in essence what we're trying to do you when they when a tenant is asked to sign a lease they have no power to say if you violate this agreement on me for something that I made whole that's all we're asking for and we think that's very important so um we'd like to see the lsac protections put back in uh and again this only applies to a landlord who would break an existing agreement because of no fault of the tenant so thank you so much for
all your hard work on this and good evening okay thank you for your comment our final speaker is uh Karim Sanchez Karim um please unmute yourself and begin your comment uh good evening everyone my name is Karim Sanchez I am with North Bay organizing project and I first want to Express gratitude for everyone's hard work that's been put into uh this ordinance and addressing this issue um to the city council City staff and all the community members who showed up and and stayed till this long I was there earlier myself I had to get home to uh put kids in bed and um join in you all on Zoom now um I also want to express appreciation for uh some comments that I heard earlier that from landlords who were expressing how they're intentionally keep their rents low I'm hearing uh empathy right because you understand as a renter um I myself um I have a hard time making ends meet sometimes right and I'm hearing that you empathize with that and I also want to share my empathy that uh um about you know putting working towards investing for your retirement uh I'm 33 years old I'm I have two young children and I often think about how am I going to get to my retirement and it's really unfortunate that we're pitted against each other um but what I do know is that uh uh just cost protections it uh shouldn't affect mom and pop landlords because my understanding is that they're exempt uh so if um having one property uh um renting it out so that you can retire uh and and that potentially selling
that or losing that investment scares you my understanding is that this wouldn't affect these types of landlords um and so I'm calling to show our uh support for uh just cause eviction thank you for your comment your time has expired and we actually do have one last virtual hand and so that is uh Bill Abbey and um if you could please unmute yourself and begin your comment hello I want to thank the city council for all their work their hard work um I'm um I've noticed that you cited Fairfax as an example earlier and I'm in contact with some people involved in that situation at Fairfax and I just wanted to let you know that there is a petition circulating to put the both net Control ordinances in Fairfax on the ballot in June of 2024 and to completely eradicate both of them and if it passes uh Fairfax no rent control will be allowed in Fairfax unless some people start at the beginning and go out with and start another petition and get enough signatures to put it on the ballot I just wanted to point that out thank you very much okay thank you for your comment there are no more virtual hands thank you very much we're going to take a five minute break thank you foreign ah foreign we're going to resume the meeting so if everybody will have a seat yeah I am going I finally got um council member schribs Jesus council member schribs hey John tribbs we're starting the meeting [Music] thank you so we're going to go ahead and begin the meeting excuse me can everybody please be quiet it's
over there so we're going to bring this back to the city council for a discussion and who would like to go first well nobody's raising their hand I'm going to start with the right with council member Barnacle sure um thank you for all the commenters um I uh appreciate um I agree with many of the commenters who said that this is a clear ordinance um I particularly agree with the public commenters from both sides that were more compromising in their tone I wrote down Tamp it down I appreciate that for the people who did that and I appreciate the people who um offered specific recommendations I also agree with the commenter who said that the number of bad tenants and the number of bad landlords is very small so I don't think we need to be telling everybody to divest from Petaluma and rather it's a very small number of people that we're helping at a really important time that's how I view this so to the person who made a comment about what problem are we trying to solve um it's a very small number of people that are being um forced to be moved for no fault of their own and we want to make sure that they're going to land on their feet that's the problem that I'm trying to solve with this um I do think that the substantial remodel should be we should make sure that winds up in as a um something I also agree with the public comment that um we need to clarify the definition of mom and pop because um as it reads in here it says that are that own two or fewer such units in the city I
think we should say two or fewer um uh we need to say rental units I also appreciate the public commenter who brought up that um small landlords um with two units will be discouraged if they have two properties from adding adus also if you have a single family homeowner I know sb9 we haven't seen a lot of lots but it's in Petaluma but I want to see more of them um and that would be a disincentive for that so I'm would be supportive of making it two properties or four units so that if someone has two single-family homes they are encouraged to add adus um outside of that I am definitely in favor of the 15 years and not exempting units for that I've heard the comments that it will stifle housing production but um one of the cities that is passed to um strong rental ordinances is Emeryville Emeryville is also one of the city the few cities in California that is actually exceeding housing goals by um by like 150 percent of what their Arena numbers are they're doing that because they've made housing a priority and I think that we will too so um I agree with the public commenter who said that housing um that preserving and protecting tenants is a different issue than um then uh Supply dressing Supply so with that um I would uh I would like to clarify the and amend the definition of small property owners I'd like to make sure that we add in um substantial remodel as an LS act right to recall case um and those are mostly my comments thank you very much council member now um thank you
um thank you to all that are still here at almost 10 o'clock at night um I firmly believe that we now have um laws in place and ordinances in place in the state Abe 1482 to protect the tenants but not so much the landlords currently and a lot of these protections have not been tested it was pointed out to me due to the natural disasters we've had in the last six years and the two three years we had of covid the pandemic this ordinance will cost the city of Petaluma plenty to try to manage and enforce it an ordinance like this will not encourage small Mom Pop landlords to provide needed rentals in our community these landlords care about their tenants and we've heard that many rent below market rate I like to see these single family home units removed completely to encourage more single-family homes to be available to renters not fewer also it's questionable when I was 22 years old I was moved out of my house with my husband for the first time we rented a Victorian that was five units in one large Victorian so that wouldn't be under our ordinance because there's two or less also um we we have to think about this relocation costs it we can pay the tenants from the landlords but they're going to attack it on to what the deposit is so someone mentioned it was like a savings account um I understand that the low income needs staff protection I think it's the large apartment units that those landlords are the ones who Maybe are not the best landlords and as a renter 37 years ago I
am one of those tenants who got to buy my home from the landlord we moved in we were good tenants we bought our house from our landlord so it is possible and we also want to protect these small individual mom and pop landlords in Petaluma that's what makes Petaluma the community that it is they care the big apartment owners they don't care and I've heard many horror stories so that's what I have to say thank you very much council member postike thank you vice mayor um I'm uh I come from the same place as council member Barnacle in a lot of ways but I will say that I'm in in favor of the current um um ordinance pretty much as it stands I I look at things differently than some of the folks here I think that um that the TPA of 2019 has been effective and that's a reason to try to improve upon it um and uh I don't think all landlords are bad I've been a tenant I've been a landlord I I I I see this tenant this uh ordinance for landlords as simply um asking asking them to distribute a tenant Bill of Rights in English and Spanish about once a year that's what it looks like to me as someone who has been a landlord um I I want to ask council member Barnacle here before I finish to uh comment on the on on my question earlier which is and I think he he did say in his talk that he wanted to extend the six-month writer refusal did I get that right uh Brian and wait a second and and would you also extend it to the other to the other um um no fault eviction causes yeah I think all the the
six-month right of re the writing I just wanted to be sure um you know evictions um and uh yeah I I think we we need to do at least that much for the elements act if it were up to me we'll see but uh I would extend that Beyond six months to a year thank you thank you very much council member schribs okay um I really hear everybody there's um a lot of hurt that's happened on both sides we have a lot of history here and it's not going to get easier it's going to get worse we know that the housing is going to get more expensive more people are showing up um there's going to be a big shift probably from folks in housing to Apartments over time lots of things are going to be happening here in our future and it's not going to be any easier than what it is now it's probably going to get harder so that's just one of the things to we have to be more prepared for a lot of things coming down so in what I mentioned earlier of asking questions about this how to respond with the ordinance what we need to do in combination with this ordinance I think I believe we have a already committed I think this Council even in the prior Council made commitments to to move forward with with Senate protections and we need to uphold that that we're going to do something here and we're going to keep probably most of this but there might be some tweaking we can do but what we really need to do is um if not a full rental registry to find out what's going on we need at least have a voluntary online database
so that we can find out well who are the renters who are the landlords what are the issues being fed and actually have just a just an online database saying hey I'm willing to put my information in and then we can start tracking numbers and doing things um that would not be that difficult to to put together so it may not be a full legal registry but at least we start some documents in getting some data so as a scientist I feel a need that we we need more data because as I said what is the problem here well it's not well defined um so but if we have some sort of system in place to gather the data over a couple years and and say hey let's let's promote it let's get it going and it'll help us to really resolve what's what's really happening out there um it's mentioned a couple folks have given me data from other cities about evictions um and that um even out of like 9 000 evictions in San Jose that uh um almost 95 to 98 of them are for lack of payment so um just cause evictions are again smaller number than total evictions um so we're dealing with smaller number but it's a very important number and also it's a way of saying to the renters and to the folks who are struggling financially yeah we are here to help you so there's that's part of it um besides having a some sort of online database that starts getting generated that we can actually produce the numbers um I believe there was also recommendation um uh by uh some of the legal folks on both sides we should have a task force
both renters and landlords working together with City staff with maybe even council members and have some sort of tax force that actually starts tracking starts looking at it starts accumulating the information data for Petaluma not just San Jose the state whatever but we need a task force here so I'm so that needs to be part of these recommendations not just plugging in an ordinancing landlords on the head with or you can have more costs here because we need to cover some uh the trouble of our society basically which we sort of are a little bit um that's agreed that's basically what we are doing but yes we may need to do that uh to help our general city and Society um so there's a few loopholes in there the um the school clock uh for for the schools and teachers I was a teacher and so I know other teachers that do have struggled however my main concern is how much influence that might have and who landlords rent to so designating a class of folks that okay we're going to segment you out that's going to change things maybe um so um whether it gets in or out that there could be some unintended consequences there are unintended concerts that are going to happen with these ordinances however they end up so we need to watch out for for those and Be watchful and be willing to back off if we need to down the road so um so I'm willing to put in a timeline date on on this put in the task force put in the Online Registry gather the information work together as a team put together a
crew that's going to really evaluate from both sides and revisit this in a few years say okay we've got the Petaluma data that we need and let's reevaluate this again so that's basically where I stand there's a few tweaks in here I think we've had some really good documents RAF law gave us a really nice fine document with lots of recommendations that we need to really look at about simplifying languages I know Margaret from legal aid gave us a very nice document uh making her suggestions and we also got some nice suggestions um from Joe Snyder from the Realtors making his suggestions and so I said okay we need to really um look at those suggestions say okay let's just reevaluate what we have and just go over one more time in detail because reading through the documents I have a whole stack I visited with a couple Runners I've visited with some uh landlords and I've got a big stack of papers here and ideas that you've given us um and there's a lot of legal language here so it's not easy for us up here to read this legal document and go oh this is what we want it's very difficult for us a PR to say okay this is what we're going to do and live with this document I think I'd like to see the actual review we've had our City attorney group make this ordinance we have lawyers basically on both sides that are willing to step and say well we'll help help with uh refining it let's let's make it simpler let's make it better let's make it smoother more readable and everything so I think
one more cycle I'd favor one more cycle bringing the other outside lawyers in to say okay let's let's work together as a team to review it one more time and then come back so that's where I'm at thank you council member Healey thank you so um like Council memberships I'm a great believer in the law of unintended consequences and there's a lot of unknowns about proceeding with this um and rather than suggest another Sunset because we've had a few too many of those already on this thing I would suggest that the council directs staff to bring this back after it's been in effect for a full year so probably summer of 2024 and we can see what data is available I don't know that we need a task force spinning its Wheels between now and then but I think um we'll have much more solid information about how this thing actually performs compared to how we expected it to um and and I would have to say that there are several Provisions in this that exceed my comfort level to some degree but I'm willing to set those aside but I do have a short number of issues that I'm more concerned about council member Barnacle mentioned increasing the number of units Exempted for for Mom small mom and pop landlords from two to possibly four I would support going to three I could be talked into four but I think three would be a better place to land um I think two is too low um as I mentioned before in questions I think um the move out assistance really should be means tested and and I think it should be
you know someone making more than 100 of Ami a family making more than 100 of Ami really doesn't need the kind of move out of systems that um people with lower incomes do so I would put that out there and the one that I feel strongest about is is quite frankly is the exemption for construction that's less than 15 years old um you know with all due respect the staff report I thought was inadequate in this regard just you know reviewing four-year-old legislative staff reports doesn't really give us much information um and I was disappointed that apartment developers weren't outreached to um and I think at this point given the experience of the last couple of months I think construction lenders may be even more skittish than they were in the past given the turmoil in the banking industry that we've been experiencing and I don't think Bankers need a whole big excuse to say you know I think I'll go lend my money somewhere else and I would say that also that um you know the the list of jurisdictions that were put up um to my mind looked like more expensive jurisdictions in the Bay Area in Marin and the East Bay Berkeley Emeryville Marin County we think the rents here are are too damn high and they are but if you go to those places they're a lot higher and that encourages market rate apartment developers to take more risks than they might be willing to take here mention was made of the new North River apartments by Spanos and how those rents are 35 percent higher than um what what
existing units are in town and I I haven't checked that myself I'll just that number sounds about right but I think that reflects the cost of new construction um and as this council is aware we recently voted to support a a non-profit housing developer uh who's expecting to pay 750 000 a unit um to to build what are going to be low-income units so market rate developers trying to build market rate units are not facing costs significantly less than that so we shouldn't be surprised if the rents are at that level and and yet now Spanos appears to be having some challenges renting out those apartments because there's those guys waving cardboard signs on the street encouraging people to come in and take a look and and so you know it's a very tenuous environment in very fragile environment in our community for for constructing new market rate apartments and our housing element is highly dependent upon that um continuing to have and so I'm I'm extremely concerned about not exempting as the state tpra does construction that's less than 15 years old thank you so um what I'm hearing is I think we need to um maybe just go down the list of what council members agree on and where actually where we don't agree on and one is the 15 years um for to exempt or not to exempt and I'd like to maybe do a straw poll on that one to see where each council member stands so I'll start with council member Barnacle I don't think we should exempt them pardon me we should not exempt council member Healey
we know where you're at I'm council member now this would be for the for the 15 years would we exempt buildings that are 15 years or less well like um council member Healey pointed out that we have some being built and and like Eden Housing I think it's only 12.
so I I I think it's market rate that we're talking about is that correct we're talking about market rate so not that not Eden correct um thank you I could go either way so well you have a choice one or the other yes or no we we can keep it as written okay council member postike council member post okay if you could please turn on your microphone thank you The Mention Of Eden we're not exempting affordable units is that correct Eric that's just market rate no I think we're not so no the in the the tenant protection act exempts housing that has been issued a certificate of occupancy within the previous 15 years it doesn't make any distinction as to Market Raider that is my point so I thought that's what we were looking at yeah I I'm not in favor of exempting uh more recently council member shrimps okay I would not exempt to 15 years as we heard about this tonight one of the folks that spoke said oh um uh that's not really a reason why developers build or not build but what we can do is I'd rather see uh the non not not accepting it at this time but if there is a real impact if what if the story is true the the consequence that we're being warned on that no developer will build here anymore zero um and that's it's a supply issue right now so um if if we don't get a single developer applying for us next year I just go oh okay maybe we need to reevaluate that particular portion and remove it if if if that's what's actually happening but I think we need to start with it in and I
agree with that as far as to revisit this I'm council member strips you were saying in two years council member Healey I believe you were saying one year I personally rather go to two years because I think you're going to get more information in two years than in one year and so I'm just kind of pulling everybody on that we'll start with council member barnacle yeah I would support two years um I mean I've been on the council for just over two years and um there was very few projects that have come forward in that time so I mean we're seeing more now in the um more now coming but um I think two years will give us more accurate um sample size council member Healey um I I would say one to two years but I would ask give staff discretion if if the market rate development applications dry up I think we should do it at the shorter end of that range if if they keep coming in in a robust way then they could be two years I could agree with that council member now um I was gonna even say split it and make it 18 months but um two I'll go out to okay and then we'll that's with staff coming back to us oh definitely with stuff okay because they're going to be the ones doing all the work we just get to listen to them they'll be gathering the information council member post okay I think with other changes that happen it where it's um hoping for the best to think that we're going to have enough data to to make you know a more impactful I'm sorry I think it's uh I think we're not going to have
as much more data as people think in one year or two or five and what data there is is going to be influenced by other things that happen um so um I I I I I don't have a horse in this race okay and Council memberships you'll go with the two with staff to review again with the data that's coming in uh well the critical part is do we or is there a developer that's going to come forward or not and if one year if not not one comes forward I would like to kind of review it in in one year if there's not a single developer that wants to come to our town uh we need to check this out sooner than later and and change it sooner than later if that's what's happening I think what we're just looking at is up to two years but it could be less as staff comes back so yeah anyway the thing between one and two years would be if staff can come back and uh with the appropriate when it when the information is appropriate and right for presentation but between one and two years that would be fine perfect doesn't need to be three or four thank you um let's see is there other things the rental I do want to talk about the Mom and Pops that Brian brought up so do you want to because there are like some different scenarios I think of um man sitting over there and I'm going to look up your name um oh goodness will you um what is it it's Todd okay great Madam vice mayor if I could maybe suggest um I I think we do have Clarity in the existing language I think the question is the number so right now it says
residential rental units of property um owned by owners who are not corporations basically I'm I'm abbreviating that own right now it says two or fewer units in the city and that give the notice that we we imported it from the tenant protection act so they know they're not getting those protections when they enter the tenancy so I think um you know whether you want to cover single-family units with adus or whether you want to cover you know one of those and one way to use I think the simplest thing may still be to do it in terms of units because it's totally unambiguous and it's susceptible of different or you know different scenarios So and I've heard I've heard council member Healy was saying three could be convinced to go to four I think councilmember Barnacle were you at three no I'm suggesting two properties or four units okay so if someone has two property two single-family homes they can add adus on both of those units and still like be considered a mom and pop so would four work for you then I'm not trying to use that well so if someone has four then that um no I think that I wanted like it would be two properties or four units would be how I would word it well that's you know we can articulate I mean two properties or four units we could articulate that so I would that's how I would Define it yeah so I think we can do it unambiguously just depends on where the council wants to land on on the number of the exemption okay and um I think I remember Tom from last time
you live you live in one of your units correct and you have four units but but you were you live in one so I'm wondering if there would be an exemption if a property owner actually lives in one of the units so then that would really be three units because if somebody owns two rental properties their house would not be included in in the number correct this already has two rental units but yet they still have a home that they live in and so that would well that's why we're using the language rental units I mean these are basically income properties right residential income properties and the question is how many of them you want to exempt you know per owner and how you how fine you want to slice it and I'm I mean we can we can do what what you want with respect to that go ahead council member Healey yeah I think we should follow the city attorney's advice on this one and just stay with the number of units because if you talked about how many units on how many Parcels then then that's just a a crazy piece of confusion and I don't know if someone who you know it has three units on one property would qualify under that approach so I I would just say three or four units and keep the the language the way it is okay council member postike I'm in favor of keeping it as it is and or if we're going to increase it at all to eliminate the word in the city the city those words you know to just say two units or three units total as you read it it was in the city can we do that what's
what's potentially challenging about that then is that brings in units they own outside of our jurisdiction which we can't actually regulate but would be factors in whether they are exempt or not and I think that's a little hard to administer okay but then I would stay with two that's what I would want to do okay that does anybody have any other comments on that council member schreibs okay just just weigh in um I originally thought about three myself when we first talked then it got talked down to two earlier and I think because we are pushing on adus so much now we want those promoted this is all very low permit um uh level that you have to jump through to get adus now so we want as many adus produced as possible so with that uh so number of units um I could easily foresee a single house with an Adu you moved into the second house and you make an Adu you live in the front part of the house but you have an Adu in the back so you have your original House your second house with an Adu so that's three units I can easily see that as being there there's also other folks that have a single house with three rentals within their unit that I've heard about so three units is I would say would be a nice compromise in this case and just three rental units within the city is what I would use rather than trying to Define buildings houses because as you say buildings that's well what's a building then what's a house but a rental unit is is I think legally going to be easier and smoother to
work with down the line so do we have agreement with three pardon me well if I can't have it all removed then I'll go with the higher number which is three or four okay we'll take that thank you very much anybody else have a comment on this one and is there any other um excuse me Madam Meister I just want to make sure we get the takeaway did did the majority land on three is so okay thank you very much but I still have that question if you have four units and you live in one of them you have three rentals so would that be that works then okay I just need clarification thank you um um as far as teachers and you know and times um I mean I I I've been to some forums I mean it is it's true I mean when you start thinking of a teacher they're there it's nine months and it would be quite disruptive and and I just want to know where people stand on adding that in to the ordinance so I'll start with council member schribs okay um I think it's going to be very difficult having worked in the school system what is a school staff what is a school teacher and then how many families do we have throughout that have children even if they're not in school private school whatever um so it is I think it's going to be pretty difficult I'm just going to add a lot of complexity to what we have and signaling out a single group like that because then we also have our Hospital workers even our firemen and policemen who have kids and um and displacement yeah it's bad for whenever you're evicted it is
going to be really bad but um if you're only going to be evicted probably at that time once a year and just I've known a lot of teachers that have just established it and got through it it's hard but it's hard for everybody in any career not just to teachers so um I'm not I don't want to focus in on them particularly as a group because my fear of the consequence would be the landlords oh they're they're teachers versus I'd rather go with a dental hygienist than a teacher or something [Laughter] okay I appreciate the clarification because you had mentioned that and I just wanted clarification to see if that's the direction we would go so and I don't think that that is um can anybody did I miss anything the one discussion that was happening Madam vice mayor was whether the six-month writer of return would be provided for as it currently is just for the permanent removal so just which is just one um uh no fault cause or whether it would be provided for all three of the no-fault causes and by that I mean specifically um permanent withdrawal owner relative move in and intent demolish or substantially remodel I I wouldn't suggest I mean the government order requirement is something that a property owner may not be may not be in control of but the other three they are so I thought I was hearing from council members posakay and Barnacle that they wanted to extend that which we could easily do unambiguously to those other um no fault just causes okay um the means testing council
member Healey do you want to bring that up again and all sure sure it was suggested that relocation assistance the two and a half months rent be limited to folks with um less than 100 percent of area median income so our assistant city manager has been doing a little research on that and is I think has some thoughts that that maybe um difficult to implement but before we go to that um I I didn't I regarding the issue of the um expanding the right of return I only really have heard from two council members about that I don't know if there's a there's four before we I just wanted to make sure we capture that if there's a majority the way it is written pardon me I'm okay with the way it's written oh so not expanded just for the just for the um well how many people want to expand it let's I'd like I think that the right to recall should apply to all three no fault just cause um examples council member Healey um I like it the way it's written in the staff report council member now I'll keep it as written council member posaque I I wanted to apply to all three and council member schribs um maybe not listing part I didn't quite understand the exact uh what we're talking about this so so the issue the issue is um currently the um right of return in section 6.60.090 is just limited to when a unit is withdrawn from the rental market um and it doesn't apply to when the owner or relative when there's a termination of the tenancy for the owner or relative to move in or when there's a
termination for intent to demolish or substantially our model so that's the question currently it's just for permanent withdrawal two council members would like to see it expanded to also those other two no-fault just causes of owner owner or relative move in and intend to demolish or substantially remodel as defined yeah as uh as what you've just said yes I'll go with that two extend it to all three yes even with okay thank you very much okay um so I guess that's the direction we'll go on that one but um wait a second excuse me in I'll support it also okay yeah thanks um as far as the relocation what was the yeah I just wanted to comment so when the um suggestion was made it's it sort of got me thinking how we would actually administer that type of a program so currently as it stands the the city at least not to my knowledge has any other types of programs where we are collecting income and uh tax return data you know the types of documents that would be needed to actually verify that type of thing we do have some of our outside non-profit providers that do that for some programs but uh internally if the city were going to administer that type of program to see whether or not they would qualify for the relocation Assistance or not that would take some um we would have to basically Implement that as a program um and so that would take a little bit of time and thought and some some processes to be put in place to be able to do that so I don't know if I'll just sort of call
into the zoom ether here for a second and see if our housing manager Karen shumizo has any other thoughts but just off the top of my head you know I that that was a that triggered for me that we would need to really figure out how to implement that type of program and we're just really trying to implement if you can't really look at how much somebody makes is what you're basically saying it should just be across the board so should the number be different than the 11 000 then well right yeah so right now you're you're correct it's across the board and I think the suggestion was if we were to means test it uh we would say we'd set a threshold of 80 or 100 of uh the annual median income for the household size we would then need to collect their proof of income data to be able to verify against whatever that threshold was and so that's the piece that we don't currently have a process for we wouldn't we would need to we would need to establish one and that is okay I'm a little bit unclear okay so what council member healing is suggesting is um test based on the income of the tenant whether they earn too much to qualify based on a threshold that the council sets to qualify for the relocation assistance um okay no I understand that Park and I is there something that go ahead council member Healey yeah I think we're making differently making this more complicated than it needs to be I think if you just place the burden on the the tenant to produce proof that they're below that
threshold then that would satisfy I don't want staff to go out creating some new database or anything but if if a tenant is faced with a situation where they're entitled to um relocation assistance they could just have the burden of submitting documentation that they qualify under the income threshold that's all okay why wouldn't that work so well yeah so that so that so that may work um I just think we would need to establish how we actually verify whether the documents are complete whether they've omitted certain documents that they should have submitted but didn't submit so there were just maybe some some things that we need to implement council member vertical yeah just to the point that um council member sherbs brought up just a second ago about the the teachers um this feels like it's creating another uh strata that we would that could be screened for when people are looking to to rent to people too and um someone who makes a hundred percent Ami is still gonna it's a significant cost just to move and um that doesn't it's not a Surefire thing that they're going to land on their feet um if we want to reduce the cap a little bit I could see that but um the facts are the facts that it's two and a half months to move into a place right now you need that you need to have that that's like if you look on any website that's what it costs so um I just I think that's um for me that's like probably one of the most important ways that we can make sure that people don't wind up on
the streets is to make sure that if they're being kicked out for no fault of their own again a really really small slice of the overall people that are asked to leave or that Leave You Know Places um that they are you know they have the compensation they need to move into another place so um council member posa K I agree with Brian okay um council member Brian Barnacle when you you were saying to reduce the cap if we're concerned about helping um if we're concerned about giving you know large sums right so let's say someone's renting for I don't know um five thousand dollars a month right like that's probably a good sign that they'd probably make a pretty penny they're doing all right um you know we could reduce the cap so we could keep it at two and a half months and reduce the cap from 11 000 to you know you know nine thousand or something like that um so that you know you are lit you know the more you're renting doesn't necessarily mean that you're just you're tearing up right but um for the the people that are at the bottom of the rental sphere like you know to all the great landlords out there that are paying uh that are renting for below Market um that is uh in that instance it's even more important to have two and a half months because they are um going to be you know it's a lower payment for them so um I think it's this is the part that I'm most passionate about having moved 10 times in 10 years um you know I know what it's like to spend seven eight ten thousand
dollars to move um and feel like you're starting back on you know getting your um your savings building back up again so so do we have support for reducing that number to maybe nine councilmember Healey I think I would take care of so two and a half two and a half months rent or nine thousand dollars whichever is less was that the Olympic frame I'm sure as council member now I would be okay with that I do have one question do they have to be there a length of time like what if they were only there for six months like Brian was councilmember baronicle was saying that he moved how many times and eight times in 10 years 10 and 10.
so is it fair for a tenant who hasn't been there for a long period of time to be given a relocation that would have been I'm wondering if we if we need to put like six months is one month's rent after 12 months is like two and a half months rent I would think that that someone has to move because of no fault of their own in six months that they're more in need of this than less and uh and I would uh they'll go to ten thousand I'd rather not go below that thank you ten thousand yeah yeah that's one for shrubs I would uh I think I agree trying to get the tenants to um put forth their their tax documents IRS which I'm not sure we can even allowed it to get from from the federal documents like that if especially if we're forcing them to do that that might be a little tricky um and then where are their income their other incomes are unreported incomes makeup might be a little tricky so uh that so I agree with what Brian Barnacle said about councilman Barnacle said about the um uh keep it a little bit simpler and if we just want to put a lower cap on it so I would go um at the rents of even a 2500 a month for an apartment uh times two and a half right there okay that that's seven thousand five hundred so so that right there is is going to be less than the 9 000.
so the the 9000 is only going to be for those folks who are renting at uh close to um three thousand dollars per month or more uh so that gets into your uh higher end and to qualify for that income to have a rental for three thousand dollars per month per um that you're paying out your income's probably gonna have to be high to get even into that type of rental so um I'm sorry just looking at the numbers just trying to estimate numbers as two and a half versus three and and rent what the rent is um I'm reducing it down to nine I don't think would be a Major Impact so nine thousand and we're not talking about paying for all renovate or not relocation but basically subsidizing we don't need to pay for that 100 of their relocation just subsidized to the point where it's less painful council member posed again I lost my train of thought waiting sorry then will you agree to nine thousand oh yeah yeah you reminded me what what I was going to say is that uh our median rent in this County for a two bedroom I believe is just about to pass three thousand so it's not not low so yeah okay that's the best okay thank you um did we need to hear from a staff member or I don't think so no so Eric do you want to read back what we've sure thank you so and other staff colleagues please double check me so a majority of the council were not in favor of a [Music] 15-month exemption 15 year I'm sorry 15-year since certificate of occupancy exception as in the tenant protection act um revisiting the
the it was a little bit subtle but the council Direction I think is um not to do a um a sunset or an expiration date not to include that in the ordinance but rather to direct staff to return within two years and and closer to one if the conditions warrant as to what the with the impacts and results are with a focus on whether um new rental housing stock is being created in the city um the small owner exception is set at three units um the um right of return when it when a when there's a been a no-fault just cause eviction um and and the properties returned to the Market within um six months has been ex the council wants to extend that to all three of the no fault just causes not just removal from the rental market and I think we just heard that the council wants to set the relocation assistance at two and a half times the then current rent or nine thousand dollars whichever is less correct okay and can I um was there was there was there um majority direction to not include special Provisions for teachers and students I thought there was but there was yes okay council member Barnacle all right I'll make a motion um make a motion to enter for the introduction of an ordinance amending chapter 6.6 entitled residential tenancy protections of the Petaluma municipal code and finding this item is exempt is exempt from sequa pursuant to SQL guidelines with the following amendments um small property shall be defined as three units not two um the uh the relocation assistance will be set
at 2.5 months of the rent or nine thousand dollars whichever is less um no fault and the right to return shall be extended to all three no fault in Just Cause evictions and I'll just read those into the record as um pulling the unit off the market for sale moving in a family member or major remodel um and I think the 15 years was already included in that we weren't exempting and what was written so I think that's all with and then included in that will be direction for staff to bring this back a presentation um on the um observed impacts of this ordinance in two years or at a date sooner determined by staff sounds do I is there a second council member post again oh second the motion okay council member Healey so before we vote um I think this was it was a good discussion I think most of the changes we made were appropriate um but for me the 15 year issue is a red line so for that reason I will not be supporting the motion thank you and so can we go to a boat Barnacle yes Cader Thompson yes Healey no no no post okay yes shrimps yes motion passes four to two with heli and now voting no and McDonnell recused okay thank you thank you you're right you're right let's documentation foreign I think we'll allow staff a minute here to bring up the next presentation a minute before we start Ed anyway you were right you know okay let's pull the meaning back to order here and everyone's uh good good um before we proceed in the next item which I want to have staff present on I think maybe
now is the right time to take a motion for extending past 11 o'clock gonna get a motion second from someone I'll make a motion to go beyond 11 o'clock that's um motion by barnacle and second by Cader Thompson barnacle yes Healey yes Cader Thompson yes no yes Jose yes shrimps yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously thank you very much and now uh on to item 11 resolution approving Professional Services with in Integra Integra assurance and um Inc to serve as the city of petaluma's independent police auditor and authorizing the city manager to execute such agreement um let's see and we are starting this with uh Aaron Zavala thank you very much thank you good evening city council community and staff thank you for joining us today or tonight I am excited to present to you our staff report on the recommendation to select integrassure LLC as an independent police auditor IPA for the city of Petaluma this presentation is an important step in our ongoing commitment to enhance transparency accountability and public trust in our law enforcement as you may recall the ad hoc Community advisor committee made 31 recommendations for change including the establishment of an independent civilian police oversight mechanism in response we have embraced a hybrid model that includes an IPA a public safety Advisory Group and the pursuit of the commission on accreditation of law enforcement agencies Kalia accreditation today's presentation will provide an overview of the RFP process introduce
integrityure LLC and its team members and explain the rationale behind our selection we'll also outline the IPA startup process and next steps in our overall hybrid oversight implementation we look forward to your valuable feedback and insights as we continue to build a stronger safer and more inclusive community should be some icons but sorry about that um as a refresher I wanted to start with speaking on how we got here the city of Petaluma established the ad hoc Community advisory committee ahcac in response to Growing public concerns over policing practices and the need for increased transparency and accountability the ah CAC was composed of community members who bring or brought diverse perspectives to the table over six meetings the ah CAC conducted a thorough review of our policing and diversity equity and inclusion Dei practices and policies also in providing 31 recommendations to improve law enforcement services and Citywide diversity in Petaluma these suggestions were designed to address Community concerns Foster Public trust and promote a safer and more inclusive environment for all among the recommendations the city council identified the hiring of an independent police auditor an implementation of a hybrid police oversight model as one of the city's top 10 priorities this measure reflects the city's commitment to maintaining public Trust after researching the various models around the country the city moved forward with a hybrid model for civilian police
oversight moving forward with the hybrid model gives the city the benefits of all three models of oversight the three benefits include independent police auditor so the IPA is an external expert responsible for reviewing police policies procedures and practices as well as investigating specific incidents or complaints Public Safety Advisory Group this group is in the process of being created and will be composed of community members advising the city on Public Safety policies and programs ensuring diverse perspectives are represented in decision-making processes and Kalia accreditation the commission on accreditation for law enforcement agencies accreditation process is a three-year process that will help ensure that the Petaluma Police Department adheres to best practices and the highest Professional Standards in law enforcement in August our staff drafted a request for proposal for an independent police auditor which was discussed at the September 12 2022 city council meeting after incorporating feedback the RFP was issued on September 19th remaining open for a month we actively solicited proposals and collaborated with the National Association for civilian oversight of law enforcement Nicole to promote the RFP through their channels in December initial interviews were conducted with a panel comprising of staff and community members followed by finalist interviews in January involving City executive staff in both instances integrassure LLC emerged as a unanimous top
consultant from February to April we engaged in discussions with police officer Association ultimately leading to today's introduction of integrityure as our recommended independent police auditor we are now presenting them for your consideration Integrity brings a comprehensive expertise to the table with a deep understanding of police oversight and reforms their impressive track record demonstrates the history of successful police reform implementation and collaboration with various law enforcement agencies integrassure is dedicated to diversity Equity inclusion ensuring that these values are reflected in their work and approach to police oversight their commitment to community engagement will help Foster trust and build strong relationships between our police department and the community integrity's focus on accountability and transparency aligns with our City's objectives insures an open and honest process furthermore their communication skills will facilitate effective dialogue and information sharing between all stakeholders involved what particularly stood out to us was integris's approach to coaching and mentoring our law enforcement staff this unique approach will enhance our Department's performance and still best practices and promote a culture of continuous Improvement in service to our community we are thrilled to have integrity are the Integrity team here with us in person today their presence demonstrates their commitment to our community and their eagerness to
work collaboratively with us it is a pleasure to welcome such a dedicated and experienced team to our city now I'd like to invite Jeff schlanger and key a key member of the Integra team to come forward and speak about their approach and expertise Jeff will also introduce the rest of the talented team who will be working with us please join me and give me a warm welcome to Jeff schlanger and then Tigers your team thank you um it's a pleasure to be here my name is Jeff schlanger I am the president and CEO of integrassure and integrassure is a relatively new company started in March of 2021 when I left the New York City Police Department where I was a Deputy Commissioner in charge of risk management um but despite its young years um I have 40 years of experience in police oversight prosecution um and law enforcement and each member of our team brings similar credentials to the table you'll hear from them in a moment but I want you to know how happy we are to be here and how honored we are at the trust which you have placed in US this is a very unique position for us to be in usually we are called into cities that have problems real problems consent decrees officer-involved shootings scandals but here in Petaluma there was none of that no consent decree no officer involved shooting no scandals but Petaluma has gotten this exactly right it has put into place a mechanism to best ensure that those things don't happen here um to make sure that its Police Department is really
everything it can should and must be for you all we look forward to working with you all with the community with the Department in reaching that goal to make the police department all that it can and must be I'd like to now introduce the members of our team starting with Aaron pilniak thank you so much for having us here my name is Aaron pelniak I am currently serving as the Chief Operating Officer for Integra Shore also as a deputy consent decree monitor for city of Aurora in Colorado and the deputy independent police Auditor in San Leandro I also have experience as a prosecutor I served as a senior criminal justice advisor policy advisor to the mayor in New York City before joining Jeff at NYPD as his assistant Deputy Commissioner for risk management Bureau and we are very thankful for the opportunity to appear before you tonight thank you excuse me good evening members of the council my name is Kenton Rainey I'm a retired criminal justice practitioner uh come back out of retirement uh to work as a consultant with integrassure because I believe in this work I have over four Decades of law enforcement and experience I've worked in seven different agencies in four different states all where agencies have sent and requested that I join management teams or lead the agency in police reform in order to help as Jeff talked about police departments be all that they can be so it is a pleasure and honor to be here and I just like to commend you for your foresight because as Jeff said
this is what all agencies will eventually be going to and for you guys to be on The Cutting Edge of this you should be commended thank you and Denise Lewis I'm Denise Lewis I've actually been doing this kind of external monitoring for about the last 20 years but 20 before that I was at LAPD so I was active law enforcement as well that's actually where I met Jeff and in the uh because I was monitored we were being monitored by uh under the consent decree so having been on both sides of the coin I have been for 20 years preaching please try to do this before you're in trouble and it's so refreshing that was one of the things that I was so excited about as well as the rest of the team that you all are having that foresight to do it before you're in trouble and before there's a problem and uh anyway we really appreciate it and we're looking forward to working with you all thanks Denise at the appropriate time I'm happy to answer any questions that you all might have but for now I'll turn it back to Aaron thank you team in the first 90 days the office of the independent police auditor will be laying a solid foundation for their work in Petaluma during the week of April 17th um they will be holding meetings with both city and police department staff to establish goals and expectations for the initial phase in Spring of 2023 the IPA will focus on introducing themselves to the uh to the Petaluma community through various Outreach methods such as Community meetings website updates and
other Communications channels this will allow them to become familiar with the community and its concerns simultaneously the IPA will conduct an internal assessment of the police department and as policies to identify areas for improvement and develop recommendations this comprehensive approach will ensure the ipa's efforts are well informed and tailored to the unique needs of Petaluma as we look forward to the next steps tonight April 17th city council will be considering the appointment of Integrity as our independent police auditor if approved we'll work on launching the office of the independent police auditor to ensure a smooth and effect efficient start additionally we'll establish a selection process for the public safety Advisory Group involving community members in the oversight process this group will play a crucial role in providing input and feedback on Public Safety matters finally we will develop a strategic plan for pursuing CLI accreditation which will demonstrate our commitment to the highest standards in law enforcement and improve the overall effectiveness of the police department thank you for your time at this point I would like to introduce our police chief Ken savano for some additional remarks thank you Aaron good evening mayor and council members City staff in the community we serve I'm pleased to be with you tonight to speak to you and our community on the progress of one of our City's top 10 identified goals police oversight and city-wide Dei
efforts this agenda item to select an independent police auditor part of our hybrid police oversight model is an important first step in accomplishing this important city goal I'd like to thank the community specifically the ad hoc members who assisted the city through this process as well as my staff that have helped us get here today I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the Peace Officers Association of Petaluma the labor group that represents both sworn and professional staff in our department for their partnership and collaboration to bring this item to you tonight together I want to specifically acknowledge POA president president Garrett sholin who is here tonight to support this item on behalf of the association thanks Garrett didn't realize you were right behind me I would also like to thank integrassure for their dedication and commitment to improving police community relations the selection of integrassure was based on their extensive experience and commitment to implementing best practices in policing as well as their alignment with the recommendations outlined in the task force report on 21st century policing we are grateful the city has invested in our department to bring a highly skilled team of experienced independent police Auditors who share our philosophy of organizational Excellence through continuous Improvement like we do integrassure prioritizes community engagement and input recognizing that the best Solutions are those that are developed in
collaboration we welcome integrassure and we look forward to building even greater trust and confidence with the community we serve we believe this partnership will help us achieve our existing goals of creating a community that is safe Equitable and welcoming to all I'll hand this over to our City attorney Eric Danley for a few comments before we return this back to you Mr Mayor for discussion and direction thank you thanks Chief savano um I'll just briefly share um from the standpoint of the city's um satisfying its goals under the Myers millius duties under the Mars millius Brown act which is the law that governs um relations between public agencies and their represented bargaining groups um we knew and and and were careful in working through the um scope of work for integrassures IPA Services um to be sure that it did not change the terms and conditions of employment of the unit 6 members um that would that that meant for example that it didn't change their existing processes for discipline it was consistent with their rights under the peace officers procedural Bill of Rights one of the things understandably we heard from them was and concerned to make sure that um all the confidentiality um obligations that we have as a city um with respect to law enforcement information not just plea police officer Personnel information but investigative information itself um would would be um that integrashare would have to to would be subject to the same requirements um so so we we um
received some thoughtful questions a series of thoughtful questions from the United States leadership we um really took some time to give complete answers to those we met to discuss those we had a really nice conversation I want to thank guard and the rest of the leadership of unit 6 for that conversation I am we um for our part we talked about how um We believe We view the IPA process and the civilian oversight structure that the council has directed um and that they've resourced from a budget standpoint as as really a greater investment in the department greater resources being made available to support it to provide training provide policy review to do peer review of internal investigations so um so we've we've concluded those discussions I'm I believe satisfactorily and again I think it was a really um it was really nice to be talking with the um the membership leadership um about our shared responsibilities that we already have of transparency of Civilian oversight accountability of the council and the community but that this is going to help us do better and and and formalize in some some great ways and it's going to provide the the the the um the community body the the peace AG is the acronym um as sort of a um as a vehicle for um um connection between our police department and the community made up of community members one of the roles of of integrassure is going to be to help help um help um inform them about the milieu in which they're going to be operating what
what 21st century policing is in California and and their role as a as a community body um helping oversee and and um that that structure so um I want to thank again um the leadership of unit six for the conversations we've had we're gonna have to have more going forward as we implement the psac but I think we've laid out that structure in a way that that we understand and is consistent with the council's direction um as they heard it and the recommendations from the ahcac so so thanks to unit 6 leadership and I know for my part in my office it's exciting to be um putting the structure together to to solidify what we've already developed to not give up any of the strengths that we have and acquire and acquire new ones and more investment in our Public Safety function so thank you and with that I'd like to turn it back over to you Mr Mayor thank you thank you very much um first I'd like to thank everybody for being here this late hour of the POA as well as integrassure and then I'd like to bring it back up to council to see if we we have uh questions about the presentation and council member opposal Kate thank you Mr Mayor a couple of questions I have actually uh a lot of my people have asked me the questions uh as to you know it sounds like there's a lot of air travel going to be involved and they're looking for a ballpark number for how much we're gonna you know we've agreed to pay for air travel as well as the website and can you give us a ballpark number of what you think
that will come up first of all we're going to try to do this as economically as possible we'll be here when we need to be here we'll conduct uh other business virtually typically 10 to 15 percent of uh a contract price is what is budgeted for uh for travel it may be that much it may be less because of the way the world has evolved since covet sure and just one other question I have uh which uh in regards to the um I'm sorry the the civilian oversight group and again I'm sure you you know you come to these things with an open mind but I wonder if in your past experience what have you decided was the best makeup for the civilian oversight group or do you have any thoughts in that regard different jurisdictions deal with it differently in a way that best suits their own Community I saw the question here relative to whether or not active law enforcement should or should not be on on the committee I think the the way that the city has come down is probably the best leaving active law enforcement out but leaving open the possibility of people who have had prior law enforcement experience I suppose but again that's something that is up to this city to to decide we will work with that group however it is composed thanks I'm really excited about treating you and you asked about the website the website is going to be a relatively minimal cost okay councilmember barnacle yes um can you talk about how your process looks into our mental health policies for officers and how um you help to
to bring back best practices into into that yeah um we will be looking at a number of policies and we'll be guided in part by the meetings that we have over the next few days as to what the uh the serial nature of those will be we can't look at all the policies at once obviously mental health of of police officers is of the utmost and importance We have dealt with this issue in every jurisdiction that we have have worked in um I mentioned before that I was the Deputy Commissioner at NYPD for risk management and I was unfortunately there during a period of uh 10 10 suicides in one year we dealt with the issue head on we came up with a lot of innovative thought and we will be looking at the policies here and trying to make sure that they are as robust as possible thank you sure councilmember Healey thank you so um I have to say that the staff reports at a pretty high bar for what I was expecting to see tonight and you uh exceeded that so I'm really pleased that we're going to be working with you going forward thank you councilman um I my one question was for staff basically and that was kind of a follow-up on councilmember post case question of um there was some cryptic line in the about how we staff up the um the the civilian over uh civilian Advisory board can you put a little bit more meat on that or is there more more to come yeah thank you council member um yes I think what we wanted to do was we recognized the first step was to select and seat the IPA get get started on
that important work and then rely on some of the experience that they have in other jurisdictions to help us shape the conversation and our plan is to start that conversation and then bring it back before you uh so that you can have some input and hear the different options and give us some direction great and do you have a time frame in mind for doing that we're hoping to be able to address that fall of of this year right just we really want to get the team settled with my staff get to work on the highest priority items for us to look at and then as soon as that kind of levels out we'll uh we'll take on the next important task thank you thank you would you like to speak council member Cader Thompson who actually um Brian councilmember barnacle and Healy asked my questions so and um Micah I have I have a couple questions uh in addition to Great support and to reiterate what uh councilmember Healey said about the quality of the staff report um but my question is related to uh speaking with the public on from from our end um so short answers are better for us but um uh it seems to have um predominantly large city experience and and I would say even a hundred thousand uh population looks like large city to us uh so um do your past efforts translate real well uh you know how do you bring big city down to our city I think they do um first of all we are the IPA in uh San Leandro now uh so similar size city but much different issues uh and uh past experience also includes working as
the uh the monitor for the University of Cincinnati which is really a city in and of itself of about 40 thousand students which was a a very very interesting assignment again they had an issue there they had a fatal officer involved shooting that caused them to bring us in first to do a review of their policies and procedures and then once we came out with findings and recommendations to monitor the implementation of those findings and recommendations best practices don't necessarily come in one size fits all but we have learned how to adjust the size of best practices to meet the needs of particular cities and I think we do that pretty well we're also the currently the monitor in Aurora Colorado not a New York not a Los Angeles but not a Petaluma either so again spanning the uh the spectrum of different size cities and thank you also um for our for our benefits I would love to hear in your words what we'd message your benefit being here is to our bipod community and maybe non-bipock Community Eddie 25 words or less say the value add I I think the value add is in the collaboration uh with the city with the police department to bring about a culture of continuous Improvement uh of the police department which in turn Fosters the best possible Community relationship there there can be 25 word thank you that's exactly what they've been 27.
um so I'd like at this point I think I'd like to open the uh public comment period um in Mr shribs okay I've worked for an international company and um so I know about travel costs and movement around and then trying to do Communications at long distance and so now we've done kova done lots of long distance Communications so I've got a couple concerns that um I understand you guys are based in Florida and so um at pretty far distance away from us um and Florida is not California doesn't have the greatest reputation right now so a few concerns crop up so far I'm hearing a great sales pitch you are Top Guns coming from out of town but we're a small local town here in Petaluma in California that says why should you care about us and then oh you and it seems like only 175 thousand dollars well you guys sitting here at the high-powered folks you've got sitting here it's okay I'm looking at maybe just for you guys to travel out here for today but so trip ten thousand dollars that's oh five percent of your whole budget already and it's just sitting here for for the day so I get a little worried when uh um we have high power team coming in with a fantastic sales pitch you got a huge support here it's only going to work the only possibility of this work is that you show up once in a while because I remember as a as a international salesperson you have to show up once in a while you can't just be on the phone the whole time and and locally you have to have 100 transparency and openness
from locally of that this is going to be totally transparent and that some of the folks that are here in town are going to say oh Florida enforce enforcement Auditors coming in and just go to paper over everything and and gee they're going to make us look nice and break great paper bureaucracy and they're going to be a great story and not no change so that's that would be a concern from constituents that are going to come up um so I thought if I could hear a little bit more about the practicality of actual things that you've actually changed where you've been and and what since you've already investigated a little bit what what change you're actually would attack first here and also from from our chief um the level of cooperation if uh I want you need to be a base stinger and come in and whack them once in a while and I'm hoping to hear that that's going to be some openness and transparency to the changes that are going to be needed so I'm still a little concerned yeah so let me see if I can delay some of those concerns um travel especially international travel is is difficult and expensive again in my experience and I have been involved in this for a long time somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of of budget um that's what we expect here um this is one trip we expect to be out here at least twice a year um maybe more we're going to have to see how the uh how the remote thing works for us in this milieu uh I will tell you that in Aurora most of what we do is remote we are out
there once a month but that is a an assignment that is five times uh the the amount of of this assignment and we have many members of the team in terms of local presence we have Chief Rainey who is here locally Denise Lewis is about a four hour drive uh Florida is where I spend some of my time I also spend some of my time in New York and also a lot of time in Colorado we're going to try to make these trips as economical for the city as as possible in terms of what we have done before in change one of the assignments that you you may have heard about is the consent decree monitorship in Los Angeles when we went into Los Angeles and they had big problems there as you know there was a 23 percent uh favorable rating uh of the police department when we left nine years later it was about 80 percent and that study was written up by the Kennedy School at Harvard I can get you the site that's just one example of the change that that we bring what change are we going to bring to to Petaluma that remains to be seen we don't know whether there are best practices in in place yet we haven't started looking at them but whatever change we bring will be a collaborative change that we work on together that we understand is going to as I said before make the department all that it can be and that in turn Fosters the best possible relationship with the community that there can be so and I thank you Jeff and I just want to add that um it was it was because of who integria sure was that all the
the community members and the staff that sat on that panel chose Integra assure because of because we did have some semi-local options but uh the fact that they were collaborative the fact that they recognize um who we were and what our needs were we felt really good about the fit so that's where we are thank you and and we did as well and yeah the idea of local non-local uh a single independent police auditor versus a team there are different models that that can come into play I think the model that has has been chosen offers the the city the widest possibility uh of bringing the best uh to Petaluma okay then public comment period is now open the public is invited to make comments on this item public comments are limited to three minutes per person if providing your comment in Spanish we ask that you pause after each sentence to allow for translation the moderator will pause the timer while the translator is speaking and let's see the city clerk have we any on I items in on this mayor we received one public comment on this item prior to the meeting which is posted online with the agenda packet thank you and let's um go to our Zoom audience and see what we have uh members of the public attending online who wish to speak on this item should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone and at this time we have we have one virtual hand I wonder wow it's now it's two so we're starting to get some yeah and okay and with no cards from anyone in the room I'd
like to go directly into the zoom participants okay um so for our our Zoom participants uh again speakers are reminded to be respectful in their comments and that this meeting is being translated so please pause between sentences for translation again threats of violence and obscenity are grounds from removal from this meeting and a countdown will appear for the convenience of the speaker and viewers uh your microphone will be muted at the end of that countdown the first speaker will be acknowledged and invited to speak when the countdown begins so please make sure to unmute yourself when you are invited to do so so our first speaker is Isaiah Gonzalez please unmute yourself and begin your comment good evening everyone thank you for your presence still in Chambers on this topic I just want to express extreme extreme gratitude uh having spent time in the Marine Corps and as a veteran who is engaged with my community who works to provide therapeutic Arts um and regularly reads and studies and learns everything I can about PTSD um I'm just grateful that we're leading the charge on something like this that the Auditors already said it that that we invited them here before we even had a problem um but I also just want to say with what was proclaimed at the beginning of the meeting with it being um Sexual Assault Awareness Month uh with what we've seen go on amongst the military and and the need for independent Auditors for that reason my my gratitude is just so deep so thank you
to the city thank you to our First Responders to our police and thank you to the auditors thank you and now I invite Ellen opsler to speak please unmute yourself and begin your comment um hi everybody and yes thank you so much for still being here and for this finally coming up on the on the calendar and uh and um uh being handled um I'm thrilled that uh we're moving forward uh I wanna again thank you I also want to make sure though I know we're keep on saying that you know we're getting in um this group uh Integra Shore before there's a consent decree or before there's um any kind of police deaths um please cause deaths um here in Petaluma which is obviously great however there is a problem here and um I hope that uh it won't take any flight time or anything like that but before and toga Shore um starts meeting with police starts meeting with community that it goes and looks at what's already been done in this community about talking about a community-based relations and policing and the best place to smoke to start would be in the listening circles to to look at the reports and which made very very clear that the white people all were like calling the police and talking about how the police were meeting their knees and all the the bypoc people in our community were having completely different experiences and it's it doesn't it it that should not be the way and that hopefully is why you're here to be able to start a new and start a real a real uh community-based relations
and policing here in Petaluma so I wish you the best of luck I hope this works thank you so much Council for doing what you're doing and again just godspeed to all thank you thank you for your comment at this time we do not have any more hands thank you that closes public comment on this and I'd like to bring this back to the council and council member healing um I'd be happy to remove the item so we have a motion by Healy and a second by Cader Thompson any other comment from any other council person going once going twice um so um I I do want to um uh thank you all and I think that's a very good point the caller made that we're building on work we're already doing uh valuable voices already heard um I do appreciate this this proposal uh brings a diversity on the team and that's much appreciated in this community I would like to see us be uh Best in Class which I think we're approaching and your help will get us there um and I would love to see us um uh have have uh our case be the study case a published case a success in in this kind of a hybrid and advancing community policing so with that and we have a motion in a second I'd like to have a roll call vote Barnacle yes kater Thompson yes Healey yes now yes post okay yes shrimps yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously and thank you for being with us this late hour okay and thank you staff and will take just a second to go from the police department to the fire department and uh we're now moving to item 12 which is public
hearing and resolutions ordering abatement of nuisance consisting of weeds growing upon public and private property in the city of Petaluma and ordering the fire department to Abate said weeds by contract if Property Owners failed to do so and uh welcome Jessica powers fire marshal good evening good evening mayor Vice Council vice mayor council staff and community on April 3rd the city council approved resolution number 2023-42 NCS which declared that weeds growing upon Parcels of public and private property are a public nuisance requiring abatement a public hearing was subsequently set for tonight to hear any objections to said Declaration on April 6 a letter was sent to affected Property Owners alerting them of their right to attend this public hearing this is a part of the government code that this is a part of the government code requirements that requires the city council to provide a venue for property owners to voice their objections regarding the city's weed abatement program and how the properties are abated this public hearing and subsequent resolution meets the intent of the law which allows the fire department and its contractor to enter private property and force a payment of weed-related fire hazards if Property Owners fail to abate property owners are highly encouraged to handle their own weed abatement and abatement by the city only takes place after non-compliance with the stated abatement deadline of May 31st this year inspections for abatement by the city
will begin June 1st depending on weather conditions and will continue throughout the season thank you thank you great fabulous presentation this is our moment for any questions from Council Members any questions council member sure is okay so as I looked down the list um I saw a property that I actually do weed Management on um and have been doing for for a couple years now and it shows up on your list and I'm going okay why would we debate men even appear on this property as being a need when it's pretty weed free for the most part the last couple years so it's just raises the issues of who's actually looking at the properties who's evaluating them what criteria are they using what is the evidence that they're using to show to the person to the landowners what needs to be done um and and I know all what I've read through the materials as to what the recommendations are which is all great and most of it's focused on land that has to be discs farmland or near near uh where fire breaks need to be made and the like but there's a long list of smaller properties that are included and I'm kind of wondering if the um what the expectations are and what what level is it we that actually gets on this list so what's the criteria and what is the evidence of that criteria being provided to the property owner so they know exactly what to do otherwise because this property owner would go what are you talking about and so there's um receiving a letter if they're receiving a letter they're
going huh um what's weed so um so I'd like to hear a little bit more about the criteria at the evidence and the demonstration of the evidence to the property owners and then the recommendation of what Maine that they can do other than just a blanket letter oh you need to do something so that's what I'm concerned about is that letters are going out and and and folks getting them going what's this all about what am I supposed to do with this okay yeah thank you so any vacant parcel that does not have any structure on it is automatically put on our list because there's no development whether it's commercial or residential people there to maintain the lot on a regular basis and then we also work with the code enforcement Division and any properties that they have a regular compliance issues with nuisances are put on that list to go through this process versus the inspection notice and then citation process which is more that process is not only more time consuming to to us and that property owner which you know leaves that fire hazard there for longer but it also can be more costly to that landowner so we place those Parcels that they that code enforcement has developed on that list in terms of the information we provide them that letter that on the front page has all of the information regarding tonight's public hearing how they can contact us and the city and then on the back page is all about how to maintain those requirements we have some information on our website as well
each time we receive some feedback we try and put more information on that website so for example last year we provided the compliance date on the website so people wouldn't have to call us to get that compliance date if they you know failed to receive or remember where they put their their letter we try and update the the guidelines and recommendations with with further information if possible um and then I think I'm missing a third piece of your question yeah but you started saying that it's pretty much an automatic if you're a vacant lot you get on there because it's not just the vacant Lots it should be all the parcels that where farm houses are on also and I'm still clear on um once they get on the list um who actually does the checking and what's the criteria for checking for weediness when they say oh oh is this just the potential that it's a vacant lot and so all vacant Lots just automatically get this letter is that what's going on correct yes so if if people are maintaining it we're not we're not doing anything so the the process is that that that we've said that compliance date this year from May 31st so on June 1st are all of our inspectors have an assigned list and they go out and they drive the entire city and check every single lot and if uh it has been maintained they check it off and move on to the next lot if it hasn't been maintained then we create a work order for our contract our third party contractor and then send them out to do the work if they get out
there and the work has already been done if the the landowner was just a little bit late then they move on to their next lot so it's it's only for the lots that haven't been maintained by that landowner by the compliance date that we are doing any abatement on and back to the uh the why or how they get on that list um the the reasoning behind all of the vacant Parcels like I was alluding to is that you know there's not somebody there maintaining their home or their commercial property or whatever that land type is on a regular basis and so um weeds can grow higher and not fire risk can threaten other properties in the neighborhood uh what we call light flashy fuels are are high weeds meaning they dry out quickly in the Sun and they ignite and spread more rapidly they create longer flame lengths and can and spread fire much much more rapidly than like a a large Wildfire um more out in a wooded area and so we want to keep that fire risk Low by maintaining those weeds to a low height okay thank you okay thank you great explanation let's move to public comment at this time and have we any letters of cards on this early mayor we did not receive any comments on this item before the before the meeting tonight thank you I have no in-house cards let's check our Zoom audience members of the public attending online who wish to speak to this item should raise their virtual hand or press star 9 if participating by phone and I do not see any hands raised at this time shocking thank you
very much that closes public hearing and let's bring it back to the council council member barnacle I will move uh resolution number attachment one and thank you we have a motion for attachment one from council member Barnacle with a second from council member Cader Thompson bar Nicole yes Cader Thompson yes Healey yes no yes post okay yeah shribs yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously thank you and since each of us has a bit of recusal this will be mine and I will be stepping out of the room thank you thank you so this is um item number two is the attachment to is there a motion I'll move attachment to a second and post the case second Bowl call Barnacle yes Cader Thompson yes Healey yes no yes post okay yes shrubs yes motion passes unanimously with McDonnell recused there's a list here somewhere moving to attachment three can we get a motion I'll make that motion thank you motion by poser case second by cater Thompson Barnacle yes Cader Thompson yes Healey yes okay yes shrimps yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously with now recused thank you and I'm recusing and now uh council member close okay recusing I'll move attachment four second uh we have a motion and we have a second uh but we're gonna pause for a heartbeat so we we are uh pause for a heartbeat here gonna get out before midnight yeah exactly it'll take a tall one oh God um Mr Mayor well while we're pausing briefly I just wanted to know for the record that the reason the counselor doing the segmenting
process as it's called is to um is because of the fact that they own property within the 500 feet of the property that's subject to the action so thank you yeah thank you for making sure that got in the record with the clarity who's watching Place proceed with a roll call vote Barnacle yes Decatur Thompson yes Healey yes now yes shribs yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously with Posta k recused and we are now to uh shrimps recusing Jose returning I'll move attachment five we have a motion from Barnacle with a second from Cader Thompson Barnacle yes Peter Thompson yes Healey yes no yes post okay yep McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously with shrubs recused and I'll be recusing from the next two items foreign and we have a motion by Cader Thompson a second from posake Barnacle oh sorry Cader Thompson yes Healey yes no yes post okay yes shrimps yes McDonnell yes motion passes unanimously with Barnacle recused thank you and now I will recuse from the next two items thank you and may we have a motion council member Cader Thompson makes a motion council member now makes the second Cader Thompson yes now yes post okay yes shrimps yes McDonnell's yes motion passes unanimously with barnacle and Healy recused okay I'll make the motion we have a motion second from uh Cader Thompson the second from Barnacle Barnacle yes cater Thompson yes no yes okay yes shribs yes McDonnell's yes motion passes unanimously with Healy recused and I might add this system though it looks funny is
actually more efficient than any we've done in the past so thank you and before we hit adjournment I just I do want to thank our translators uh who bring a lot to the community but also work hard and are also here as late as all of us so thank you to them and with that the meeting is adjourned