Downtown street redesign vote ends in tie

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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Members. Let's pray. My Father in Heaven, I thank you that you hear me through your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank you for our city government, the officials that you've put in place and power to preside over this great city. And I ask for your wisdom, and I ask for your wisdom, and I ask for your wisdom, and I ask for your wisdom to guide this meeting and these decisions. I pray for your goodness to be upon this great city. And I ask, O Lord, ultimately that you glorify yourself in showing your overflowing grace and kindness to us in Christ.

Amen.

Yes. Council Member Goldstein? Council Member Goldstein? Present. Council Member Hawley? Here. Council Member O'Brien? Here. Council Member van Overbeek? Here. Council Member Winslow? Here. Vice Mayor Bennett? Here. Mayor Reynolds? Here. Speaker card announcement. Anyone wishing to address the council on any matters listed on the agenda should first complete a speaker card found at the back of the room. Once completed, turn in your cards to the city clerk and the speakers are taken in the order received. Once the first speaker begins on that item, we will not accept any more cards on that item. Persons demonstrating rude, boisterous, speaking on matters outside the jurisdiction of city council or engaging in otherwise disruptive behavior will be called to order.

If such conduct continues, I may call a recess requesting removal of such persons from the council chambers, adjourn the meeting, or take other appropriate actions as necessary. Closed section announcement. Mr. Jones, can you do our closed session? Madam Mayor, members, the council, there were several items of closed session. I'll report on those. First, there's a conference legal counsel regarding pending litigation, the LR versus City of Chico. Direction was given to staff and legal counsel on that matter. Then two other matters of pending litigation, the Hagan v. Chico and Horry v. Chico. Also, direction was given to staff. There was conference labor negotiators on a variety of employee groups, and direction was given from counsel to the negotiator and staff on that.

There was an item added, which was the pending litigation on Warren v. Chico, also direction given to legal counsel. As to the final one on the city manager recruitment, the council's not yet complete on that. We're going to resume back into closed session during this meeting. And once we come out of that closed session, I'll then report to the public on what action, if any, was taken during that closed session matter. That's my report. All right. Thank you very much. Consent agenda. All matters listed under the consent agenda are considered routine in nature and can therefore be enacted with one motion. Do we have any no votes or canceled disqualifications? All right. Do we have any speakers on close?

We do not. No? All right. Consider a motion. Move to approve. Second. A motion and a second. Council member Goldstein? Yes. Council member Hawley? Yes. Council member O'Brien? Yes. Council member van Overbeek? Yes. Council member Winslow? Yes. Vice mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Aye. Carry 7-0. All right. Public comment. Members of the public may address the council at this time on any matter not already listed on the agenda and are within the jurisdictional authority. The council cannot take any action at this meeting on these requests made under this section of the agenda. How many speakers do we have? We have eight. Eight. All right. Three minutes each. Okay. I'll call up the first two names and if you can line up in the middle aisle as soon as you hear your name called.

The first speaker is Ashley Olawson followed by Bill Zagin. And if you can pull the microphone closer to your mouth. Okay. Thank you. Hi. Hi. I'm just going to start. I've never done this before. I've never made any public speech ever. Um, but I am standing here because, um, I believe I have found a possible solution to the homeless crisis. And, um, I'm not just coming to you as a citizen. I am coming to you as a fellow homeless person myself. Um, so recently a friend of mine sent me, um, a video basically, uh, outlining how, uh, Finland has basically eradicated homelessness altogether. Um, basically what it was saying is that, um, Um, um, sorry. Um, that, uh, to solve homelessness in itself, you can't just expect people to keep going to different encampments, going to shelters, going to programs.

When these programs are going to kick you out within, like, three to six months. Um, so, um, I have, uh, given copies of this packet I typed up to, uh, sorry, I didn't get her name earlier. Um, basically to, um, Um, in, in the specifications, um, I listed that, um, So the average homeless person, um, spends between $1,634 and, uh, $2,308 just to survive. Out there. And, um, I was with a group of college kids down in LA, and we did this study to where, um, we found that, um, just by placing four chronically homeless people in an apartment, a permanent apartment, with their own kitchen, their own bathroom, a door that locks, it saved the government over $80,000. And that is way more than, sorry.

That's your time. Ashley, you picked the busiest day of the year to come and talk to us. Thank you for coming. And, um, the clerk will be sure to pass that to us. Yes, Ashley, we will take your document that you turned in to us, and we will actually scan it and get it to the council so that they have your notes. Thank you. Uh, Bill Zaguin, followed by Kendall Ross. Council members, mayor, uh, staff. My name is Bill Zaguin. I'm the director of facilities for Enloe Medical Center. The medical center has asked me to come and speak on our behalf about the sewer rate increases that have been proposed. So I had the opportunity after looking at it, gone through some of the older council meetings, gone through the information that was provided, and the hospital has some serious concerns.

The first being, it's great to talk about a sewer increase that is 180%, or 2.8 times what a residence is paying, but the businesses in the community are paying significantly more than that. So you are asking the hospital, in this current rate set, to increase by 7.6 times what we are paying currently. You are asking me to go from $48,686 for the hospital alone, to $370,000 a year. Enloe Medical Center, as an organization, would go from $127,000 a year in sewer fees, to $966,946. That is 7.6 times what we pay today. Now, I also, at the same time, we have some concerns about the numbers. In the published report that the city has, the numbers that you use for hospital and convalescent homes, the average is 128 HCF.

The hospital alone discharges 5,306 HCF all by ourselves. So, you can't average that in any way, shape, or form down to 128 HCF. So you've got a numbers problem. When I look at the numbers overall, there is no question that we need money, to improve the sewer system. The question is really, how much money and how soon do we need it? You know, without all of the rest of the details, you're looking at it, conservatively, 2.8 times what you earned in last year. That's at least $22 million surplus every year for the next five years, which more than meets your five-year projection in construction. And it far outstrips your $315 million that you need by 2041, including your extra money for reserves and the rest of it.

Our concern is that the money isn't spaced out the way it needs to be. In one of the council reports you talked about, or it was discussed that we didn't get the revenue that we were looking for from the sewer. Well, it's a zero sum game. That means you didn't have the load on the system to create the drive or the improvements and the repairs. So we think we need to relook at this and slow this down. Thank you very much. Thank you. Kendall Ross, followed by Kim D. Good evening, council and community members. My name is Kendall Ross, and I work at Chico State with our student life and leadership and recreational sports programs. I'm here to introduce Wildcat Wednesdays, a collaborative initiative between California State University, Chico, and our local businesses that's aimed at strengthening community connection and revitalizing our downtown.

The idea is simple. On Wednesdays, we invite everyone, students, faculty, staff, alumni, and Chico residents to wear Chico State apparel while visiting, participating local businesses. In return, our businesses are offering small incentives or discounts and specials. This program creates a visible sense of unity, university pride, encourages residents and students to shop local, and brings consistent midweek energy to downtown Chico. It's a low cost, high impact way to support our local economy while celebrating what makes Chico so special, our town and gown relationship. Let's make Chico, let's make downtown Chico come alive with Wildcat pride one Wednesday at a time. I have some handouts that I'll hand to the clerk.

Thank you. Just a second. So Kim Dietz, followed by Susie Lawry Hall. It's better to go after her than the Enloe guy. Sorry about that. No offense, but I'm on the same topic of the Enloe. My name is Kim Dietz, and I've lived in Chico since 1982. I graduated from Chico State in Michigan, State University College of Law. My husband and I own and personally manage 20 single and multifamily residential units in Chico. We're long-term members of North Valley Property Owners Association. I asked the council to reconsider the March 17, 2026 vote on option one. As an 180% sewer rate hike would require me to raise rent $60 per unit, not millions. But to my renters, $60 a month is a lot. Please reconsider the alternatives that spread the increases over a five-year period, including debt service.

I think that would, I hate to go in debt, but that might be a good option since our renters might not be able to afford rent after this. My rentals are in the following districts. District 2, two units. District 3, two units. District 4, 16 units. District 7, my personal home. Thank you. Thank you. So, Susie Lawry Hall, followed by Molly Kofta. Hi. So, good evening, council and the mayor. My name is Susie Lawry Hall, and I am here on behalf of the Chico Chamber of Commerce. I serve as our board chair. And we wanted to just come to you today to also talk about the sewer increase and ask that you reconsider. We agree that the current sewer situation is not sustainable, and we recognize that these rates cannot continue as they are.

However, that said, we are asking the city to slow down this process, just take a step back, and let us have time to reconsider and understand the proposed sewer rate increase. There is a widespread concern among our local businesses and the general public about the speed at which this measure is moving forward. It's difficult to understand with the sewer enterprise study that the public can understand how the rate is justified. Local businesses are already facing significant financial strain, with the rising costs, including this recent state-mandated minimum wage increases. Business owners are asking a very fair question, and that is, how are we supposed to absorb another increase right now?

What we do know, though, is that if this goes into effect, that it will jeopardize our small businesses, our downtown restaurants, it will hurt our local to moderate income homeowners, like we just heard, and it will negatively impact our local nonprofit hospital, which I know Bill just chimed in on. We do appreciate that the council has identified multiple alternative options, options that appear to be feasible, balanced, more proactive, and our community's economic health. We're just asking you again to consider taking a step back and giving us time, and the chamber would be happy to partner in allowing us to get a, creating a committee of like low-income housing providers, small businesses, and study the proposal, including alternatives such as different construction techniques, spreading out capital costs over a much longer time period, as well as different approaches to operating and maintaining the wastewater system.

All that to say, the worst result of this could be that there would just be a delay in the implementation, but we would at least have a better result of understanding, hopefully better community support, and perhaps a reduced fee. So thank you for your time. Thank you. Molly Kofta, followed by Brandon Slater.

Good evening, members of city council, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor Bennett. Thank you. My name is Molly Kofta, president and CEO of the Chico Chamber of Commerce. On behalf of the chamber, and the business community we represent, I want to acknowledge the work that has gone into evaluating the city's sewer infrastructure needs, and the importance of maintaining a safe and reliable system. We also recognize that the council has taken action to move the proposal forward into the Prop 18, Prop 218, and we appreciate that there are still procedural steps ahead that allow for community input. At the same time, we want to respectfully highlight the level of concern we continue to hear from the business community regarding both the scale and timing of the proposed rate increases.

It is our understanding that the council retains the ability to reconsider its prior action before final adoption. It is our understanding that the council retains the ability to reconsider its prior action before final adoption, and we would encourage you to consider this, whether additional refinement at this stage would strengthen the outcome. Specifically, we believe that there is value in revisiting the structure and the phasing of the proposed increases. Potential supplemental funding strategies and opportunities for continued engagement with the business community. A rate increase of this magnitude, particularly when concentrated in the early years, risks unintended consequences for business retention, investment decisions, and overall economic activity in Chico.

We believe a more gradual approach, forgive me, we believe a more gradual approach over the full five years would provide businesses with the predictability needed to plan responsibly and to absorb these costs in a more sustainable manner. While Proposition 218 provides a formal protest mechanism, we believe that there is still the opportunity at the council level to ensure the final approach reflects both the infrastructure needs and the economic realities. We remain committed to working collaboratively with the city to support a solution that achieves both. And I echo the sentiments of our board chair that we, the chamber, are committed to being at that table and bringing representatives from all across the community to be able to talk about how we do this and how we do this right.

Thank you all so much. Thank you. Brandon Slater, followed by Greg Wheatbrook. Hello, Brandon Slater, here representing the Chico Chamber of Commerce, also to talk about the sewer fee increases. I was open to just take a look at kind of the timing and the processes that I've seen. It looks like February 18th was the first time this was announced in a public meeting. It was at the finance committee. And that was the furthest back I could find. There was another subsequent meeting, I believe two weeks later, where finance committee recommended to bring it to council. And then February 17th, council voted, even though there was some people here asking for more time and more information to move that forward.

So basically the city, from my perspective, the city is asking the public, the taxpayers to $30 million, just the first year. And it goes up over a period of time. And I just, I compare that to Measure H, right? And I think about how much energy I put into Measure H to, you know, that was, in my opinion, the right way to ask the public for more money. It was a nine month process. You know, we got a lot of people, we got 60, almost two thirds vote of the people. I think pushing through an even larger ask for money this quickly is just, I just don't think it's smart. So I would ask you, number one, to just reconsider the vote, take some time. looking through the reports, I was trying to figure out, I can see that it's about half regulatory and half like replacing sewer lines.

So I'm assuming regulatory is upgrading the sewer plant. And obviously replacing sewer lines. But from my perspective, I would like to see like a list of, hey, you know, replace this tank, add this clarifier, have a list of projects and dollar amounts. And how those are going to play out over a period of time to get a better understanding of what the actual need is. And then if that is determined, you know, we take this back out, we mush it around and determine, okay, the dollar amount you're asking for is appropriate. I think then you, like, I would ask that you reconsider and go more option two and roll that out over like a five year period, just so people have more time to adjust. Uh, for these increases.

I would also just, the other thing I want to highlight is like the last time we had a sewer increase, like three years ago, it was substantial, like percentage wise, but it only took us from like, we were like one of the lowest, like in the bottom, um, 10 percentile of similar communities. Anyways, this, that took us to like 30 percentile. This last bump took us to like 95th percentile as far as comparing to other communities. So I think that's at least worth considering. Thanks. Thank you. Our last speaker is Greg. We rock. It's Greg here. All right. Thank you. Um, we have no public hearings. Our regular agenda, 5.1 Jesus center treatment center project funding options. And we have a report from our city manager, Mark Sorensen.

Thank you, mayor. Uh, back in October, city council unanimously supported a $6.5 million grant application submitted by the Jesus center to the California department of healthcare services to fund construction of a 16 bed substance use disorder facility at its fair street campus. Uh, I think earlier this month, the Jesus or last month, rather Jesus center did receive a notice of conditional award, uh, for that grant among the conditions is a grant match for the project of $651,376 in the item before you tonight. I'm proposing that the city of Chico provide opioid settlement funds to the Jesus center for that grant match. Uh, these funds can only be used for items such as the construction of the proposed project or operation of those kinds of projects in the report that I provided to the council.

The current fund balance of opioid settlement funds is, uh, over $2 million. I think we're re have received. And it, uh, that includes about a 471,000 that we've received this year. And it also provides you with, uh, estimates for the next several years. And there for the next five years, they typically are in the 400 to $500,000 per year range, uh, asking for council approval of the resolution before you tonight that would authorize the use of opioid settlement funds and a budget, uh, supplemental appropriation. So happy to answer any questions. And I believe executive director at, um, Amber Abney Bass is also present. All right. Any questions before we go to speakers? No, do we have any speakers?

I don't have any speaker cards. Okay. Do we have any questions now after speaking? No speakers. Comment? I do have any. Sorry. We're supposed to be using our thing, but go ahead. No, I was going to say, this is a very appropriate use of this money. In fact, a perfect use of this money. We've had a issue with substances, not just in Chico, but across this country where it kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, kills a hundred people in Butte County alone, typically every year. This is significant. We need treatment. And as I said, I don't think we can find a better use for this money and better place for this money to go with this substance abuse center run by the Jesus Center. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds.

Just for the public to be aware, I did reach out to Mr. Sorensen to get a little bit more in depth information on exactly how these monies are to be spent and reviewed those rules very thoroughly. And there are very specific constraints on how this vast amount of money is spent. And like my colleague, Mr. O'Brien, I can't think of a better way to partner with an organization that has consistently delivered for the city and for the residents who live here. So thank you. Councilmember Winslow. I remember I used to hear people say, and back before I was like more, more in it and could be aware of what was around. It's like, these people here, it's like, they ought to like go to drug rehab as if this is something that just existed.

And you just walk in and say like, I want to get clean now. I mean, it really hasn't existed this whole time. So it's very good that we have an organization that's like deeply experienced in this kind of work and is able to take this up. I also remember when I think it was a renewal center opening like six years ago or something and thinking like, you know, this is like a higher barrier service. And I heard a lot of people say like, people don't want this kind of services. And so I thought that, and then it filled up right away. Like there is extreme demand for this sort of thing in the community. And it's, it's very good that people were able to sue these pharmaceutical companies that pushed this whole opioid epidemic on people.

We're able to put this to work to try to reduce some of those impacts in our own community. I'll make a motion to approve it, but I'll give a, Vice Mayor Bennett. Vice Mayor Bennett. I'll second your motion. So as with Councillor Hawley, I reviewed the conditions on which you can spend opioid money. And it's extremely limited in how you can do this. This is a perfect example of using that money. It will be a 16 unit recovery center or treatment center. We could possibly save 16 lives. So the use of this money is absolutely appropriate. And I do support it. Now I'll make a motion to approve it. I'll second it. And I'll just make a small comment that, and not only are we doing this, we, this still will allow us to fund the $119,000 a year for the sobering center for the next several years that we've already committed to.

And it's not going to take any funds for that. So we're helping in multiple ways. And just to focus again, this is no measure H funds. This is no general funds. This is opioid settlement funds. I'm going to work very, very hard in our community. So thank you to Ms. Bass and the team at the Jesus center for bringing this forward. I think it's a great opportunity. Thank you. Council member Goldstein. Yes. Council member Hawley. Yes. Council member O'Brien. Yes. Council member van Overbeek. Yes. Council member Winslow. Yes. Vice mayor Bennett. Yes. Mayor Reynolds. Aye. Carry 7-0. All right. 5.2. We have the resolution adopting the procedures for consent to public hearing on 218. The only thing I wanted to bring up on this one before we went into it, I sent a message to the city clerk and the city attorney this morning.

The two attachments on here, one says staff report, one says resolution. The one that's titled resolution actually is the staff report, a duplicate time. So I just wanted to bring it up to the council in true transparency to see if we want to put this to a meeting, like two meetings from, or the next meeting just because the resolution wasn't attached and in transparency. I feel like we shouldn't have the resolution attached. I think legally we are okay to move forward, but I just wanted to bring it up for discussion in case anybody. Yeah. Legally, mayor and council note, no issues from a Brown act perspective is purely a, you know, policy transparency issue. If you think it needs to be continued, but you're, you satisfied the requirements.

So is this a time sensitive that we pass it tonight? Essentially the action being requested in this item is establishing the process in which the proposition to 18 process will occur. So essentially what it does is protects the city through that process. After the proposition to 18 process is completed and legal protections. So it's not absolutely critical, but it is a protection. The previous council action has already been given to staff. And so mailers are going out with the ballots and all that this week. They've already been sent to the company, sending out all the ballots. So it's not absolutely critical, but it is a necessary step with new laws to prevent that legal action potentially in the future.

And again, I totally agree that we need to do it. I just worry that in transparency, that the resolution wasn't attached for the public to review. And then we're moving forward on doing something. So that was my concern. I would move that we move it to a meeting two weeks from now. So that resolution can be loaded up. I would, I would concur with that. Will that delay our process in a significantly, that way? At this point, no. Okay. So I'm in motion. I'll second that. Was there supposed to be public comment? Oh, do we want to? You still need public comment. Yeah. Even if you're continuing it. Okay. Well, because people have come to talk about it. So I think that's fair. I apologize for jumping the gun on that.

I just wanted everybody to know. Yeah. Council member Goldstein. Yeah. Just a question related to this process. Last meeting, when we talked about the sewer fee increase, we had discussed potential low income programs for sewer fees. And I was wondering if in the future, if we discuss those, would that require its own 218 process? Or could that be during this process? not to quiz? Not to quiz. That was not a part of the previous action. So at this point, that is not a function of the current rate. That is part of the proposition 218 process. So that is not currently included as part of that program. Okay. Thank you. Just to be clear. I think the question is, if, if we were to implement some low income subsidy programs, then would we have to go through a separate prop 218 process in order to implement those?

I believe you would. Yeah. Yeah. At least in order to maintain, it's like, if we need this much money and we're going to give some people discounts and we only have this much money and to make up the difference, we'd have to have a different process. That's something to keep in mind. All right. Let's take our speakers. Also, also building on that, sorry. Since we did have speakers earlier asking us to, you know, potentially switch alternatives that we were looking at or something, would that also require restarting such a process? Or is that something that can be discussed further? fine-tuned during this 218 process. Brian, do you want to take that? Yeah. Okay. What was that particular question about the.

I'm just unfamiliar with how the 218 process Works in its detail. So I was making sure if we were to reconsider how we increase our sewer rates and fine-tune that, can we do that during this same 218 process that we're approving now? Yes. Unless you're going to increase rates, then you can't, you'd have to start the process over. Or if you have any, and I don't think you're looking to increase rates in addition to what's already out there. Well, it depends. If we shifted to option two, the overall amount paid in several years from now would increase. Depends how you look at it. First year, a decrease, later increase. All right. Should we take our speakers and then we'll continue discussion? We have a motion in a second.

We'll hold on that. We'll hold on that. And I apologize for jumping forward on that. And then we have 11 speakers. And I'll go ahead and I'll call the first two speakers up. And if you could please line up. Katie Toma, followed by Matt Deppa. Okay. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council Members. My name is Katie Toma, and I'm the Executive Director of the Chico Builders Association. You received a letter late this afternoon from our CBA president, Matt Galloway, on behalf of our entire board, where he outlined our concerns on the recent vote to address our current sewer system inadequacies. We are concerned that you did not receive adequate information and sufficient public input when you selected the most aggressive fee increase option.

The potential fallout to the community is devastating and far reaching. In our letter, we provided you a lengthy lift of questions in areas that we don't believe staff addressed. They are, how did we get here? What's the economic impact on the community? Did staff consider alternative revenue sources? Our ask tonight is first that Vice Mayor Bennett, Council Members Goldstein, Holly, and Winslow would reconsider their vote on the rate increase and not pass the resolution before you. And with that, we would actually, secondly, also ask that the council would vote to send the proposed increase back to Finance Committee for further consideration. Thank you. Okay. Okay. And so, I think it's Matt Deppa, followed by Austin Barron.

If you could go ahead and line up in the middle aisle. Thank you. Good to see everybody again. Kind of as I mentioned last time, I'm here on behalf of MVPOA. I am past president. I'm also on a board for the statewide Rental Housing Association as well. Again, you know, everybody's seen that housing providers has some have spoken here already as other local businesses and chambers have spoken. There's been a lot of increases put on us over the years. You know, insurance costs going 500% or more. You know, you got garbage fees going up 300% or more. Now you've got a potential 180% or more for sewer fees. As I mentioned last time when we were here, four years ago, we were told it was going to be 15 bucks.

That's going to do it. We'll get everything taken care of. Here we are four years later. Just kidding. It's 75 more bucks now. You're a business downtown. You know, another thousand bucks or more. You know, one of the items you guys are talking about downtown is redoing downtown here next. Well, if this sewer rate goes through, what businesses are going to be downtown to even go eat at? Or so who cares what you do? Had the whole entire thing be a bike lane. Nobody's going to be down there. We need to save our downtown. We need to save our properties. And I would encourage the council to consider pushing this out further, find some better options. And again, you know, we have a housing shortage.

You keep putting the screws to housing providers, to homeowners, to tenants. Things can't get fixed. When things can't get fixed, guess what? There's no housing. Then there's more people on the streets or people are leaving our town. So I think, you know, I've requested if possible, the council does reconsider this. Look at some more issues there. The city, go back, look at some better issues. You know, financing might be the way to go, but if it helps keep people housed, if it helps keep businesses in business, that's what we need to do. So thank you so much, guys. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Austin Barron, followed by Emily Martin. Good afternoon, council. My name is Austin Barron. I'm here on behalf of Sierra North Valley Realtors.

You know, in times of high gas prices, high home prices, high rents, high taxes, do we really need another soothed increase? In 2022, we passed a 1% sales tax. Now, I didn't bring the receipts like Brandon Slater did, but, you know, that was, part of that was, supposed to help infrastructure, roads, public safety. I assume we can use some of that towards the infrastructure needs that our sewer system needs, or at least we can use it to supplement and not increase our fees by over 180%. And, you know, on another note, last month, I came in front of you during Business from the Floor to discuss dozens of businesses that had shut down downtown and how we can help them. And, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you for certain it's not increasing sewer fees like this.

Thank you. Thank you. Emily Martin, followed by Christine Sismon. Hello, Council Members. My name's Emily Martin. I'll be reading a letter I mailed to you a couple weeks ago regarding the sewer rate increase so that it will be part of the record. I'm writing as a homeowner and resident of Chico to formally express my strong opposition to the recently approved sewer rate increase, which are projected to exceed 200% over the next five years. While I understand the necessity of maintaining and upgrading critical infrastructure, the magnitude and pace of this increase places an unreasonable and inequitable burden on the residents of our community. My household consists of two working adults and a young child.

Like many families in Chico, we carefully budget to live within our means while trying to responsibly save for the future. We already contend with a high overall tax burden within the city and we make conscious financial choices every day, including limiting discretionary spending such as dining out in order to stay financially stable. A rate increase of this scale will have a direct and meaningful impact on our household. It will reduce the amount of money we have available for essential expenses like food, as well as the limited discretionary spending we direct to local businesses. Decisions like this do not occur in a vacuum. They ripple through the local economy. When families like mine are forced to cut back, it ultimately impacts Chico's small businesses and the broader economic health of our community.

It is also important to note the utility rate increases of this magnitude are highly unusual. In most municipalities, utility rate adjustments are implemented gradually, often in the range of 3 to 10 percent annually to allow residents time to adapt. A cumulative increase exceeding 200 percent over five years far exceeds typical practices and places an extraordinary burden on rate payers in a compressed time frame. I recognize that the city is addressing serious concerns related to an aging sewer infrastructure, regulatory requirements, and declining reserves. However, these challenges are the result of long-term planning decisions, including years of minimal rate adjustments and deferred investment.

It's deeply concerning that residents are now being asked to absorb such a dramatic increase in such a short period of time without sufficient exploration of alternative solutions. I respectfully urge the city council to reconsider this decision and take the following actions. One, schedule and hold a dedicated special public hearing focused specifically on the sewer rate increases, allowing for greater transparency and meaningful community input. Two, conduct a thorough review of the city's overall budget to identify opportunities to reallocate funds or share the financial responsibility more broadly rather than placing the overwhelming burden solely on rate payers. And three, re-evaluate the timeline and scale of the proposed increases to mitigate the immediate financial impact on residents.

Infrastructure investment is essential and I do not dispute the need for improvements. However, the approach to funding is up- That's time, Emily. Thank you for coming. Sorry. Christine says none, followed by Richard Roth. Thank you. Council, it's the first time I've ever spoken in a public event like this. I've never done this before. I've lived in Chico since 1994 and I'm proud to live here. I do want to address the sewer increase. I recently, at 66 years old, this month, happy birthday to me, I will- I had my last day at work at my institution where I served for 24 years and my employer decided to close my department permanently encouraging everyone to use AI, go AI, the brain, no brain. I am now unemployed after 24 years and before that I worked many, many years.

because you've decided to triple my sewer bill with no sight of a low-income program in place at this time, how am I to manage my bills? I've got a great recipe book for stretching my budget for my grocery bills. I can- I did without PG&E this last winter. I had a space heater in my office. The house was very cold but my $188 PG&E bill versus my $600 PG&E bill the month before was a great improvement. So I'm taking the necessary steps. I encourage you to look at some low-income residential service assistance programs. One is with the LADWP.com residential services assistant programs level pay. The next one is a Sue's Creek Water District Civic Plus Com243. It's a low-income program. These are two simple low-income programs I found 20 minutes before this meeting.

Katie, I want to thank you for the phone call that we had this last weekend. It was very helpful. I appreciate meeting you and hearing what you had to say about this. I also appreciate the NAP-inducing city finance public Works document which Mr. Audubonny outlines three separate methods of solving the budget shortfall. Like I said, it's NAP-inducing for me because I don't do numbers. I do language. It's a great if Mr. Audubonny is here I mean no disrespect I don't know where you are. It's a great budget outline. It helped me understand the problems. However, I'm wondering if there's been any looking into an Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act implementation resources which lists the American Plan EDA public Works discussing grants.

I don't see any grants in this program and I watched the previous video and they said grants were not a possibility. So I'm looking at your funded sewer septic projects and I know I'm coming down to time here. Are you looking at adoption of new rates? That's what I'm encouraging you to do. Thank you very much. Thank you. Richard Roth followed by Annalise Ulrich. Oh. Okay. So I guess it's Annalise Ulrich. I understand Richard Roth wants to speak on a different item. So Annalise Ulrich followed by Jennifer Morris. Hello. My name is Annalise Ulrich. I'm representing MWS Properties here in Chico and serve on the board for the Northern Valley Property Owners Association. I want to discuss the proposed sewer rate increase from March 17th just like everybody else.

One concern our community is facing with the proposal is the limitation of the protest process. Many of the people who will ultimately bear these costs particularly renters and small businesses have little ability to have their voices formally counted in that process. The main concern also remains the timing and scale of the proposal. 180% sewer increase in just four months starting in August will be extremely difficult for renters, homeowners, and businesses to absorb. It's difficult for the community to understand. 180% plus increase must occur within four months to address the problem when we've known about it for years. Changes this large can have lasting impacts on a community if businesses close and residents leave because costs become too high.

The number of ratepayers shrink and those remaining may end up carrying even more of the burden. That could also change the assumptions that the original rate study was based on. I would ask the council to consider phasing these increases in overtime perhaps starting maybe 50, maybe 60% while beginning the needed repairs and I would also ask the community to share with the community the financial options other than just the loans and the immediate increases and then we also all support fixing the infrastructure but it needed to be done in a way that the community can realistically sustain. Thank you for your time and consideration. Thank you. Jennifer Morris followed by someone with no name provided in the name.

So you must know who you are. Good evening council. On behalf of the North Valley Property Owners Association we respectfully request that the city council members who voted in favor of the proposed sewer rate increase on March 17th reconsider and rescind your prior votes. We ask that the reconsideration take into account the broader cumulative impacts of the proposed rate increase on community members, local businesses, property owners, and renters. As outlined in the city's administrative procedures, only one written protest per parcel is counted toward a majority protest. While we understand this aligns with current statutory frameworks, it raises significant concerns regarding the ability of all affected parties to meaningfully participate in the protest process.

In particular, many residents who ultimately bear the financial burden of these increases, especially those in rental housing, do not have a direct mechanism to have their voices counted independently. In practice, these costs are commonly passed through to residents, which limits their ability to formally express opposition despite being directly impacted. We raise this concern thoughtfully and with the respect of the city's ongoing efforts to balance infrastructure needs with community stability. It is not our intent to challenge the legality of the process, but rather to ensure that the spirit of the community engagement and fairness remains central to decision-making. We also recognize the importance of maintaining critical infrastructure and appreciate the city's responsibility in doing so.

However, given the current economic pressures facing Chico residents and housing providers, we believe in both reasonable and necessary to pause and fully evaluate the real-world impacts of this decision. We respectfully urge you to reconsider the prior vote, approving the proposed rate increase, re-evaluate the structure and timing of the implementation, ensure that all affected stakeholders have a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Chico is strongest when our decisions are made with careful consideration for the impact across all members of the community. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And then the person wrote on the card open slash public. Thank you. Anyone want to come up? Okay. That was the last one?

Yes. Oh, it says open slash public. But there's no name. But go ahead and come up. Okay. Well, come on down. It's you now. Speak now or... Can you tell I don't do this normally? All good. All good. Well, let me introduce myself. My name is Alicia Sanchez. I'm here as a resident of Chico as well as a small private owner working to keep affordable housing. I'm here today respectfully to protest the sewer rate increase and ask for more time to consider the financial burden to renters, business owners, or I'm sorry, business owners and homeowners and to explore all options. While I understand there is an urgency and a burden on this council to find a solution, I just urge that the council is doing so wisely and not at the cost of the local businesses that we all know and love or at the expense of residents that have continued to put their trust placed with this council.

We hope that there's more transparency in the future as far as the options that you guys are exploring so that there's a mutual understanding and good collaboration. Thank you. Thank you. She was our last speaker. All right. Council Member Winslow. You know, I hate talking about this. I feel like I've talked about the sewers a lot because I've gone to the council and then this kind of gets slapped out there. And so one of my first meetings, we're talking about raising the sewer rate the first time. And I felt like, you know, it's really important that we recognize, like we are the arbiters of like what are our needs and making sure that we can get them and we need to do something, right? So I didn't come up with the proposal this time or the last time, but we need to accept something.

I really appreciate everybody's comments. It's like really respectful. I really appreciate the ways that people are encouraging us to weigh in differently. There's a couple things that came up in my mind that I just want to respond to. And one was the question, how did we get here? Obviously, we should have raised sewer rates in the past and we didn't. We didn't do it incrementally. We had the lowest rates in the region, but we did not have the lowest costs. We had very similar costs to everybody else. So now in order to catch up, we're asked to raise our rates to near the top, right? We could space it out for longer and that would be doing very similar to what was done in the past and just pushing those costs off longer.

And we looked at these alternatives and putting out for multiple years. We could certainly consider that spacing it out, but it comes out to a larger cost in the long run. We're talking if we finance it like 20 to 40-something million dollars over five, 10 years. It's a substantial amount of money that we're paying in addition if we don't do this. So I hope that people understand that. There's also references of alternate financing and somebody suggested that we want time to review the city budget to look for ways to save money and say, please come to our budget hearing. I'm right there with you. Look over the budget. Look at what you've been doing with the money. And especially when it comes to infrastructure, I think we have some serious issues that we should address.

Never was Measure H pushed as addressing sewers in infrastructure because it's this enterprise fund and because we pay for it out of fees. So could we use Measure H, could we use a general fund to subsidize the sewers to avoid this rate increase to a certain extent? Yes. But think of all the people who are not here on septic tanks in Chico, which is a lot of Chico, and how they would feel about using the general fund revenue to pay for the sewers that they're not connected to. That's why it's done this way and not done out of the general fund because not everybody takes part in the sewers so we have it as a user fee. We're talking about putting this off and I think that's fine. I mean, the fact that there's like the enthusiasm from the chamber, people who know how to like review some of this stuff.

I mean, I say have at it. Yeah, there also was a mention of at the last meeting people asked for more information and I must say, in my recollection, I didn't hear that because we have the information. I would be happy if you'd come up with something that would save us some of this rate increase and I say go for it and it seems like it doesn't hamper us that much if we put it off a little bit so we can put it off a little bit and like take a look. Look for alternative solutions. You can look at the project list. It's not, it's nap inducing but it's not like not there, you know. So I'll support putting it off a little bit. Council Member Goldstein. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks to all those who spoke.

I do worry that putting off any decision could delay our process and the longer we delay this the more people have to pay but since we asked staff earlier and it doesn't sound like this specific approval, delaying it would impact us that much and I could be okay with it but I just want to kind of reiterate that we didn't just come up with this sewer fee out of nowhere. We're not just making this up to somehow increase our funds and burden everybody. We have infrastructure and we have to pay for it and we haven't been paying enough and we're going to see major issues in the long run if we don't raise fees now. I do believe that we can talk about better solutions for this. I'm open to that. So I just wanted to just restate that that this is a big decision.

We understand that it's going to be hurtful for people and I appreciate you all making your voices heard on it. Happy to continue the discussion. I don't see any other speakers in the queue so we have a motion and a second. Council Member Goldstein? Yes. Council Member Hawley? Yes. Council Member O'Brien? Yes. Council Member van Overbeek? Yes. Council Member Winslow? Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Aye. Aye. Carry 7-0 and it'll be back on the agenda at the next meeting. Okay. Perfect. And we are going to take a quick, I'm going to say 15 minutes. We've got to finish. Everybody's going to want to talk for a long time on downtown and I want to give downtown all the love and attention that it needs but we need to finish up our quick conversation so we're going to take a 15 minute break before we hop into downtown and we'll be right back.

You can go shop and we'll be right back. All right. We will get going and we actually made it on time. 5.3 downtown revitalization project alternatives. Mr. Brendan Ottoboni, our director of public Works engineering. Take it away. Madam Mayor, before we do that, I need to recuse myself on items 5.3 and 4 because I own property downtown. Okay. Thank you. We'll come and get you when we're done. Now you can take it away. All right. Good evening. I am Mr. Auduboni. So just clear that up. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council members. Tonight, staff is pleased to present the results of an in-depth community-driven process to define the scope of downtown public infrastructure improvements.

This effort revisits and expands on the 2024 initiative following City Council's direction to re-engage the community and start fresh with a more collaborative approach. To support this work, we issued a competitive RFP and brought on a team of experts to assist staff with technical analysis and creative public engagement. Their contributions have helped shape the community's feedback and refine the key considerations before you tonight. Their experience, knowledge, and technical expertise have been paramount in the success of the process. For example, some unique things that we changed in this process. Typically, on our public outreach, we hold like a one date for an evening. On several of our outreach efforts, we held multiple day expanded hours drop-in efforts to increase engagement as well as providing augmented reality visuals to help provide visual feedback of what those opportunities look like, different alternatives look like to help inform the community and get more refined feedback.

Over the past several weeks, there have been many discussions about downtown, and we've met extensively with downtown business owners, property stakeholders, including yesterday's IAC meeting, to discuss the ongoing concerns relating to downtown. For Public Works, our role is to create public infrastructure, spaces that are safe, accessible, and welcoming, designed to attract people across all modes of transportation, and encourage repeat visits. We recognize that downtowns today succeed by offering memorable experiences as much as traditional retail, and we've looked to other communities for inspiration. This evening, we'll review the process, summarize how we've reached this point, and seek council's adoption of a preferred alternative for downtown improvements.

Establishing this scope will give staff direction needed to begin design-level work. Ongoing collaboration with businesses and property owners will continue through the design and construction phases to manage impacts and coordinate project sequencing. For context, this is step one, and depending on many different factors, most notably funding of a project of this size, will take multiple years before it is ready to begin construction. While these decisions are challenging, they're essential to the long-term vitality of our community. With guidance from our consultant team and robust public input, this has truly been a community-led effort, and we're confident in positions our downtown for lasting success.

So tonight, we're going to go through the background. We're going to talk about the public outreach efforts that were achieved through this process, look at the alternative development opportunities and considerations, look into some of the more refined evaluation and key considerations of topics that came up throughout the process, and then ultimately discuss the preferred alternative and what the next steps look like. So getting into the project's background and what the area of consideration is, is essentially bound from 1st Street down to 11th Street, essentially from Salem over to Flume. The key project goals were developed throughout this process, including, on the next slide, you'll see the basis for many of the considerations, but the project goals address economic development, complete streets, connectivity, sustainability, and resilience, and our community downtown identity.

So the basis for much of the policy basis and planning framework for these efforts are bound by several documents established over the years, most notably, the general plan and the downtown element, as well as program-specific considerations like our active transportation plan, climate action plan, local road safety plan, and our downtown access action plan. Say that 10 times fast. So that is the basis of much of the policy framework that we as staff worked off of. And so with that, I'll pass it off to our outreach consultant, Katie DeMaio. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having us. So my name is Katie DeMaio. I own AIM Consulting, and it was a pleasure to lead the community engagement process as part of this.

So as you can see on the screen, we had kind of a four-step process that I'm going to walk you through. It really started off with a project launch last January. We then went into our visioning and listening where we looked into existing conditions. We then moved into defining some of the community needs, and then where we're at now is presenting the draft plan. So on this next slide, you're going to see a little bit of what we, what Brendan just talked about, the variety of community engagement events that we did as part of this plan. So again, as part of the visioning in phase one, we started by listening. We brought together stakeholders from the college, from local businesses, from local walking and biking groups.

We had two community workshops in this room right here. We went to the Thursday night market. We went on some walking groups, and then we started listening, showing. We have a project website where we started to communicate and educate the community about where we were going. During phase two that started in December, Brendan started to talk about these two three-day open houses. We went into the downtown area. We were opened up for three full days to hear from business owners, to hear from local community members, local residents, all about the different types of engagement. So people could find us online through social media. They can visit us on our website. They could see us in person. We met them where they were at, at the Thursday night market, and again, tried to find as many opportunities to engage them as possible.

So as you can see on this screen, my team went through hundreds of different comments, comment forms, online emails, post-it notes at boards, community conversations, and what we heard most often was safety, multimodal safety, slowing down traffic, the need for bike lanes. We still heard that parking was still a tension, but we still had wide support for the wider sidewalks. And so we tried to stay as transparent as possible throughout each one of the steps of the process, showing people what we heard and how we heard it. And so again, as we ended this community engagement process, you might be able to see around town, there are six different QR codes at different places around town that people can interact with these project designs and see in real time.

I can tell you that as somebody who is leading the engagement of over 30 different projects in Northern California, there is not one project that my team put more effort into this year than this project alone. There is no other team that we did two, three-day downtown events with, and I'm very proud to say that. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mila, who's going to talk about the designs. Hi, I'm Jamila Florelez. I'm with Mark Thomas. I'll be talking to you about the alternative development process. So when the project team first started looking into developing alternatives, we first looked at project constraints. The downtown corridors are mainly constrained by 82 foot right away.

And within that space, you have to fit travel lanes, parking, loading, bike facilities, and sidewalks. It all needs to be accommodated. And because everything can't fit everywhere, there are some trade-offs that must be looked into. And so the project team initially developed 24 concepts, reflecting a wide range of approaches for each street within the project footprint. We weighed the pros and cons. If you can look at the screen and see the concepts we developed, we then took those and turned them into plan view exhibits. If you happen to make it out to our December three-day open house, you would have seen these very large exhibits plastered all over the wall with the goal of getting public feedback to see if we can help, they can help narrow us, narrow down the number of concepts we have.

And so what we heard at that three-day open house for people that commented on the main corridors was that 47% preferred the one-way protected bikeways on Main and Broadway. 20% did not want to see bikes on Main and Broadway. Instead, they would rather see them on Salem Wall or Flume. 17% preferred two-way protected bikeways on Main or Broadway. And then 16% in general wanted to see wider sidewalks on Main and Broadway. So we used this information as well as the technical feasibility of each alternative as well as if it is in a line with city policy to refine these 24 concepts down to three alternatives. The first alternative is the one-way bikeway on Main and Broadway. This option was heavily supported at the three-day event and it supports pedestrian activity with the wider sidewalks as we're showing 16-foot wide sidewalks.

It largely maintains parking and the trade-off is it reduces the lanes down from three to two, which is consistent in all three alternatives. This option also offers the most direct connectivity to the existing bike facilities on Espanade and Park. Alternative 2 provides a two-way protected bikeway on Main Street and then emphasizes a more pedestrian environment on Broadway with significantly wide sidewalks. We're showing 21-foot wide sidewalks. It does offer a more complex design at the intersections. And then alternative three is the bikeways on parallel streets. So this shifts the primary bike facilities to Wall Street and Salem Street. And for Main and Broadway, it emphasizes larger sidewalks as well, as well as parallel parking.

So this option would, excuse me, this option provides less direct connectivity and results in greater parking impacts on the parallel streets, specifically on Wall Street, which we'll talk about shortly. Hi, Council Members. My name is Sonia Anthoin. I was hired as a transportation planner and data analyst on this effort. So you can think of me as the numbers guy for now. So I'm going to go into some of the data analysis we performed that went into the evaluation of these alternatives. So based on the data we collected over the past year, there are over 20,000 vehicles that enter downtown every weekday and around 13,000 on weekends. During the busiest hour of the day in the late afternoon, that's roughly 1,000 vehicles traveling south on Broadway and 900 traveling north on Main Street.

According to the Highway Safety Manual, this amount of traffic on a daily and peak hour basis would necessitate two travel lanes and not the three currently there. And preliminary modeling, a screenshot of which is shown to the right, shows that reducing Main Street and Broadway to two travel lanes would result in an average of less than five seconds of added delay to vehicles at intersections. It would maintain an acceptable level of service. Now a key concern with the lane reduction is truck loading. Today, trucks load and unload, downtown typically stopping the travel lane, effectively closing a lane to vehicle traffic. Data we collected showed that a segment of a travel lane on Main and Broadway was blocked around 3% of the time between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m.

And similarly, semi-trucks, box trucks, and vans make up less than 2% of vehicle traffic throughout the day, with truck drivers typically delivering before the busy hours of traffic in the afternoon. As with many downtown business districts across the U.S., commercial loading activity could occur along the curb or on side streets rather than in a travel lane on a main thoroughfare. Planned improvements could allocate a mix of permanent and temporary or time of day curbside parking spaces along with side street loading. And notably, there are already several loading zones downtown, mainly designated for passenger now. This would or could allow for more convenient and safer loading activity without taking away from the accessibility of downtown businesses.

So this next slide shows a rendering of a semi-truck turning from Main Street onto 2nd Street, something that we all see every day. And depending on the size, truck deliveries could load at locations on Main and Broadway or at designated loading on the side streets like it's being shown here. A wide berth. But showing that the geometry is there. And again, time of day loading zones could be selected to best overlap with when parking demand was low and when traffic was low. For example, prior to 10 or 11 a.m. when most businesses open. In terms of parking, today there are 500, over 500 on-street parking spaces in the downtown core, as well as 600 in parking lots and garages in the vicinity. And a thorough study of parking across three months of data collected in January through March of this year multiple times a day indicated that around half of spaces are available in the downtown core on any given day.

So in the proposed designs, the space for bike lanes comes from the removal of the travel lane, so parking impacts are generally minimal. So alternative one with the one-way protected bike lanes, you'd lose one space on Main and Broadway. Alternative two, you'd gain 15 spaces. And alternative three, you'd actually lose 49 spaces with losses because of the removal of diagonal parking on Wall Street. And I'll pass it off to Aaron. Hi, everyone. Aaron Silva with Mark Thomas. I served as a consultant project manager. So these alternatives were evaluated under five main categories. So the first being multimodal safety and comfort. We were looking at the protection level for vulnerable users like pedestrians and cyclists, as well as looking for alternatives that helped reduce vehicle speeds along these corridors.

The second is mobility and network, how well these alternatives connect to existing bikeways, as well as interfaced with the transit opportunities along the corridors. The next one was economic and curbside impacts, and that's where we really dove into parking impacts for each alternative, loading and deliveries, as well as access to businesses fronting the corridors. The next one was the cost and deliverability. So we looked at construction costs and delivery costs, as well as ongoing long-term maintenance, and then looked at the implementation of these alternatives, how these alternatives could be constructed, and if there are any unforeseen impacts with a particular alternative. And lastly, based on community input and policy alignment, and that's what we covered a lot already today, but we collected stakeholder feedback and used that as evaluation criteria, as well as how it aligns with existing city plans.

So after going through these three alternatives, Alternative 1 ranked high in all five categories. It provides really strong connectivity to existing networks, as well as direct access to the main corridors and key destinations, and it helps improve safety performance with the level of protection with the Class 4 bikeways. It also received the most community support. And we do have a few more statistics on what we heard when we presented these three alternatives to our second three-day workshop. 60% of respondents said Alternative 1 was the preferred alternative for the one-way bikeways. 2% preferred the two-way bikeways on Main and Broadway. 18% of respondents for Alternative 3, and then 18% responded, no build, to do nothing.

And so there was an overwhelming support for Alternative 1. So with this, we're here today to recommend the council select Alternative 1 to move forward into future phases. It does receive the most community support. It does address the plan for increased walkability and bikeability in the downtown core. It provides direct connections to existing bikeway networks. And then, yeah, it aligns with all the plans and planning studies that have occurred to date. And that is the end of the presentation. All right. Thank you very much. Any questions from council before we go to public comment? I do have a quick question. I'm sorry for making you back up to the podium. Thank you. Yes, please. So I just want to know how many people attended the individual workshops.

Do you have that number, please? Yes. Thank you. Council Member Winslow. Really well done presentation. I was going to ask some of these hot button issues that I think, I mean, we just heard about it at a committee meeting yesterday because we kind of held an additional hearing on this. And you went over like the loading zone and the parking issues and how, but one that hasn't come up and I feel like it's kind of been dropped by the wayside a little bit because we had these, like we're jockeying all these priorities with this, you know, is trees and shade cover, which is really important to citywide and I think everybody recognizes it. It's like she goes to city of trees and for the future, it's like she was getting hotter and hotter and pavement soaks up a lot of heat.

And so I noticed in the renderings, I see trees in that five foot buffer, but in the, just the little design, thing, we're just seeing some shrubs there. And I look it up and it looks like six or seven feet is generally like what you need for a tree median and I want to know like what's the realistic prospect that we are actually going to have trees in those buffer spaces of five feet. I can answer that, Aaron. That was part of the 2024 effort where we did receive council direction to remove the existing trees and plant new ones in a future potential widen scenario. Some of that will come through the design phase and when we get down to those details, but that was previous council direction to basically plant new trees.

If you recall, many of the issues we have with the current trees downtown, they're planted too close to the buildings. There's no root barrier protection. It heaves the sidewalks. There's a lack of proper irrigation and then they're non-native species. So the plan was to install new ones that have all the modern features that help them grow in a healthy and effective manner and then ultimately are kind of pushed out further into the road to provide more of a canopy. And so we've kicked around some ideas too potentially of maybe trying to plant some trees in advance and let those grow. We'll get a couple years of growth and then get big scoopers and put those in. But that'll come, a lot of that will come with the, once we have a clear scope of work to start the design process on.

So that applies more to the current trees that we have kind of interspersed in the sidewalk. But you're talking about taking the trees completely off the sidewalk and just having them in the buffer as opposed to both. I was looking for, are we having a new row of trees or just redistributing the existing trees? There'd be a new row of trees, yeah. And then based on site distance issues and stuff, setting trees at certain distances back from intersections so we're not creating a safety issue there. Okay, great. I'll add that Alternative 1 does propose wider sidewalks which does give additional space for a landscape strip between the bikeway and pedestrian users walking on the sidewalk. So there are opportunities there.

Council Member Goldstein. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks for the presentation. I have a question on funding. My understanding is that we are hoping to adopt an alternative that we can further develop and then apply for active transportation program funds from the state. I believe that the deadline to apply for those is in June which is right around the corner at this point. Am I correct in that? Great. Yes. Great. Just wanted to make that clear why we're looking at adopting an alternative now. Awesome. Thank you. All right. And we'll see any other questions. How many speakers do we have? We have 28. That's one minute, two minutes. 28. We can go two minutes. You want to go two minutes? Over 45 minutes.

Yeah. Let's do two minutes each. All right. So. All right. So the mayor has just announced that we'll do two minutes per person. We have 28 speakers and it's, I'm going to, again, call up the first two people and if you could line up as quickly as possible we can get this going. Our first two speakers, Carol Munson followed by Austin Barron. Okay. Let's go backwards. Number one, you know who I am. I've had a business downtown for 48 years. They have not been in Chico for 48 years with a business and we have out, people that aren't from Chico planning our downtown. In the 60s, do you know that we had two lanes on Broadway and Main and guess what they did? They made it three. Everyone think about it.

Why do we have three lanes? We got an ambulance going down. We have police. The fire department. We have delivery trucks and you're not going to give them a designated place to park their truck to deliver 30 boxes to my store down the street. And then wider sidewalks. We don't need them. My sidewalk is wide enough and I have an awning. So you're going to widen the sidewalks. I don't know why, so that they can walk in the rain, not under my awning. Then you're going to put a bike lane in front of my store and then you're going to have the cars. So when you get out of the car, you're going to go in, the passenger's going to go into the bike lane and the driver's going to go into the street. So I want everyone to think very clearly.

Get in your car, go down the esplanade and think, could I park my car right now? You're going to have delivery trucks on both sides. The other is, well, put the things on Salem and Wall. And there was one other big thing. Number one, when you're doing this, tearing up the streets, I know there's a sewer thing. You're using the grant so that you can improve on the sewers, but you're going to kill downtown and I promise you, you will. There is no way my doors can be open. I carry a big inventory. How am I going to sell it if customers can't get my through door? But you will have big sidewalks and you'll have some back. Bike pass. Thank you, Carol. Thank you. All right. Let's try not to, try our best to not cheer or boo because we want everybody to feel welcome to speak here tonight.

So it's Austin Barron followed by Valerie Rediman. Austin Barron, Sierra North Valley Realtors. Man, I wish I could match the energy of our last speaker, but I'm, you know, I'm going to do my best. So as I mentioned on the last item, you know, dozens of businesses downtown have closed this year. I'll name a few. Panama, University Bar, The Beach, Woodsy Sunglasses, Collier Hardware, Tomfoolery, Brambly Cottage, Winchester Goose, Mamona, Bun Burger, Midnight Munchies, Cheers Chico, and Starbucks, which I hear is getting a new coffee shop. So that's at least one positive. Now, before we kill a dozen more businesses by reducing the available parking or putting in more bike lanes that the homeless will use to sleep on, maybe we should think about how we can help the most important part of downtown, the businesses.

I encourage you to look at other cities with successful downtowns and look into what they're doing. Some, for example, are offering tenant improvement grants from the cities. Some cities are offering streamlined permitting for downtown businesses. Some offer facade improvement grants. These are all great things. Here's a thought. This was disappointing. I attended the International Council of Shopping Centers annual meeting recently in Monterey. There were over a dozen Northern California cities that attended, attempting to recruit businesses and key investors that could help out with their cities and downtowns. Colusa was there, Yuba City, Madera, Rockland, Citrus Heights, called Manteca, Merced.

Why wasn't Chico? We could easily send city manager or Audubonni or V, sorry to throw you under the bus, the mayor, a few council members. We need to make business vitality the core of our downtown revitalization plan, not bikes. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Valerie Rediman followed by Megan Kurtz. Hello, everyone. My name is Valerie Rediman, and as board president, I am here on behalf of the Downtown Chico Business Association. Our membership represents a broad cross-section of downtown businesses, and there is no single consensus on a preferred design. And rather than advocate for one option, we'd like to share key considerations from those who depend on a vibrant downtown every single day. First, maintaining parking availability in zones A and B is absolutely critical.

Downtown businesses rely on convenient access for their customers and their clients, and we are very concerned about any options that reduce parking in any way. We support improving safety for all users, including cyclists. However, the current configurations appear to prioritize cycling in a way that, as Carol had mentioned, potentially could reduce accessibility for the majority of visitors who primarily travel by car. From what I understand before when I heard statistics, it's less than 3% are on bike. So I wonder, are we sacrificing for the majority for a few? Something to consider. Our shared goal is a welcoming, accessible, and economically resilient downtown. And many businesses are already struggling, and while these changes may be years away, the long-term impacts on how people access and experience downtown must be carefully considered.

We also request clarity on how the city plans to support businesses during this construction. Street closures and reduced access can significantly impact already vulnerable businesses. Proactive mitigation such as signage and access planning should be considered. We recognize that grant funding often prioritizes bicycle infrastructure, and we encourage the council to balance these opportunities with the clear assessment of long-term impacts on both visitor experience and economic vitality of downtown businesses. Ultimately, the question remains, how will these changes best serve the greatest number of Chico residents and visitors and support a thriving downtown? So we appreciate your leadership and welcome continued collaboration.

Thank you. Thank you. Megan Kurtz, followed by Pyra Tavell. Hi. My name is Megan Kurtz. I'm the Community Relations Director for the President's Office at Chico State, and I'm here tonight to share something that we don't always say out loud. The partnership between Chico State and the city of Chico over the past few years has been very strong and intentional and something we should all be proud of. One of the things that makes Chico so special is that our downtown truly feels like the university's front yard. That connection is a major draw for families across California who are looking for an authentic college town experience. They're not just choosing a campus, they're choosing a community, and what they see downtown matters.

Looking ahead, there's a really good opportunity in the conversations around the downtown revitalization concerning the university. We have nearly 15,000 students and about 2,000 faculty and staff just blocks away. That is an immediate, built-in community of people who are eager to spend time and money locally, but only if what's offered aligns with what they're looking for and where and how they want to spend their time. And that's where I encourage all of us to think carefully. Societal trends have shifted, especially over the last six years, and even more so with the arrival of Gen Z on our campus. Their expectations, habits, and interests are different than previous generations, and those habits and interests are evolving quickly as they become young adults that have money to spend.

As we plan the future of downtown, I encourage the city and our downtown business community to lean into the university as a resource. Let us help you better understand who this 17,000-person neighbor really is and what we can do to help bring them through your doors. Business as usual is not going to cut it. We see that. Regardless of how many lanes or traffic spaces there are, we need to see businesses downtown that reflect why people choose Chico as well as what fits the current market trends for Gen Z and their early millennial parents and what they want. There's a pivot coming with the revitalization, if we do it thoughtfully, it's not just a change, it's a tremendous opportunity that has a chance to benchmark the formation of Chico.

Thank you. Thank you. Pyra Tuvel, followed by Nicole Nava. Good evening, everyone. My name is Priya Tuvel, and I'm here as the co-manager of Chico Velo. We're a bicycle advocacy organization since the 1980s, and we're here to express our support for Alternative 1, presented by the Downtown Chico Revitalization Project. We have an office in downtown Chico for over 30 years, and it's been difficult to watch the vibrancy decline. So while we advocate for safe bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, this goes beyond one user group and is really about creating a downtown that is safe and enjoyable for all users and is a vibrant destination rather than a thoroughfare. Across California, communities that invest in streets designed for people arriving by bike and on foot see stronger local business performance.

Protected bike lanes, convenient bike parking, and people-friendly features like outdoor seating, parklets, and entertainment areas increase foot traffic, boost retail activity, and improve customer satisfaction. Research from U.S. retail corridors shows that customers who walk or bike often visit more frequently and spend as much or more per month than those who drive. We see firsthand through our Bike Valet program that convenient bike parking increases ridership to downtown with hundreds of bikes parked weekly in the spring and summer downtown. When secure bike parking is available and there are vehicle-free areas for pedestrians and families to freely enjoy downtown, people show up. We like that Alternative 1 prioritizes safe, intuitive bike and pedestrian parking while not decreasing parking for our businesses.

That has been a very vocal concern. We also like that it preserves traffic flow, vehicle parking needs, and timed loading zones. Data shows that reducing by one lane would only increase travel time by zero to four seconds, which is a minimal tradeoff for meaningful improvement in safety and overall experience downtown. Thank you. Thank you. Nicole Nava followed by Matthew Knoll. Good evening. So, our city basically has a unique, in my opinion, layout in that we are directly adjacent to the university. We also use our downtown to traverse to neighboring towns that go south of us and heavily populated neighborhoods to the north, east, and west. So, that puts us in a different position from communities such as Redding, where they've tried some of these things that you guys are discussing and have not gone over well.

I've heard that presented differently. I have spoken to a lot of people in Redding who said it basically, in their opinion, has made their downtown like a ghost town compared to what it was. So, it's kind of interesting to hear different dynamics. Grass Valley, we are not akin to them. They do not have the university embedded downtown. They do not have to use it to get to some primary neighboring towns because they can jump off to the side to a freeway. You are going to disperse traffic into streets that really cannot accommodate that. The bike community, as mentioned before, I've heard, tossed around, and I heard it directly here, I believe it was more like 6%, but anywhere between 3% and 6% of all the types of traffic are bicycle.

So, even if you allow for, gee, we think it will increase bicycle traffic by making a change, by removing a lane, I don't think you're going to come up to the degree you think you are to offset the negative impact on everyone else. Reducing a lane of traffic equating to almost 100 lost parking spaces means delivery drivers, maybe. That's what was tossed around originally, and honestly, the things keep shifting. Thanks for your affect. Anyhow, so delivery trucks will have to compete for space. You could get road rage, it could be unsafe. Our poor business owners have had enough. I really encourage you to not do the two options. Thank you. Thank you. Matthew Knoll, followed by Rob Berry.

Hi, thank you for having us today. I just want to say, as a consumer, I'm in support of the revitalization effort, particularly... Can you pull the mic in just a little bit? Sorry. Particularly alternative, one, primarily from two standpoints. One, I'm just thinking fiscally as a city, roads are expensive to maintain, and the average bicycle weighs 20 pounds, while the average personal pickup truck weighs about 5,000 pounds. If you... You know, people are very concerned with the sewer rate increase, and I think everyone is concerned about taxes and expenses continually going up for the city. I think it is important to look at what can be done to reduce the maintenance costs long-term for Chico.

The second will be rethinking congestion. I actually think, and people may think it's crazy at first, but more congestion downtown will actually be a good thing. Slower traffic means that more families and pedestrians will feel safer. It'll be less noise pollution. It'll be more pleasant. The revitalization effort will also beautify downtown. And secondly, and importantly for business owners, if cars are going slower through downtown, it means that there is more time that they can see the shops and stores that we have. It gives them more time to say, hey, that's a cool store right there. I want to go into it. They can find a parking spot or they can turn on a side street. With what we currently have, if cars are going fast down the thoroughfare, they may not have time to see the stores that Chico has to offer, or they may see something that may affect their interest, but they're going too fast or may be in the middle lane and they don't have time to safely get over.

And that is now a customer that could have been had had they been going slower and been able to actually see what we have to offer. Thank you. Thank you. Rob Berry, followed by Kathy Squires. Good evening. I know that everybody in this room is in favor of a vibrant and attractive downtown, but I'm here to offer a word of caution that there's a difference between a vision and the consequences of that vision. Other California cities have tried this exact approach, and I went through and looked at a few examples. Fresno turned its main downtown street into a full pedestrian mall in the 60s, and because the customers couldn't drive in, they tore that out and basically returned it to its prior configuration.

Oxnard did the same on A Street in 1970s. Merchants watched sales drop, so the city reopened it to traffic in 1988. Sacramento closed K Street to cars in 1969. 42 years later, they reopened it because pedestrian-only models had hurt retail. Last year, Ventura tried making Main Street a permanent pedestrian zone. after COVID, property owners and businesses showed clear revenue losses. Santa Barbara is wrestling with it at this time where they have now tried to use State Street and businesses are pushing back hard against that. So, Chico's situation is strikingly similar. I know that the consulting process goes through a sort of check-the-box deal and 100 people show up that have a vested interest in this, but the people that are not represented is the diversity of people, diversity of ages and so forth and we are an automobile-centric society.

We can't change that overnight. Be careful what you wish for. Thank you. Thank you. Kathy Squires followed by Kathleen Gabriel. Hi, my name is Kathy Squires. I've owned Country Squires Antiques for 52 years. My son owns Squires Fire Protection and the Naked Lounge and the rejection second, I'm nervous. We've been presented with pretty much the same plan. We've already rejected over and over. Rejection was based on very real issues that would directly affect our daily commerce, traffic, deliveries, outgoing merchandise and of course, emergencies. We're asking that bike lanes be relegated to Salem and Wall for north-south traffic. Ask that east-west bike lanes are installed on second and fourth to access to and from the park and downtown.

This would have little or no effect on businesses downtown that are already struggling. It would allow all our customers access without hardship. Consider downtown events, farmers markets, deliveries throughout the day, handicapped people who wish to shop downtown in emergency vehicles. My customers are primarily in cars, maybe 5-6% on bikes. I sell fine jewelry, art, and furniture. Large pieces of furniture that I bring in trucks and load out the same way. Narrowing street would make it impossible to function in my and other businesses in this respect. As I mentioned before, they tried a test of this by taping off one lane of third a few years ago. It was a disaster. Everything stopped. They found it simply did not work and removed it.

Please consider the plans that were presented to us will shut down many specialty shops found in no other part of Chico or even in the North State. This is why people come to downtown Chico. This ambience is lost. It will not come back. I hope you... These are the places that bring people to downtown Chico. I hope you preserve that. Thank you for listening to those of us that are most affected by your decisions. Thank you, Kathleen Gabriel. followed by Anika Rodriguez.

Right now, there are 23 restaurants downtown with outdoor eating spaces. Of those, currently, several of them... 10 of them have access to the sidewalk streets, so the sidewalk's already been widened. 10 of them are not being used, so we have 43% empty restaurant outdoor eating spaces going on right now. I don't think we need any more extended sidewalks for more outdoor seating spaces that would take away parking places, create too many loitering places, remove existing trees, remove one of the driving lanes, or overall make downtown look more empty than it already is. furthermore, I think we need to keep the three lanes on both Main and Broadway and two lanes on the side streets. I think that we could dig up the sewer, which is down the middle of the road on both places and put the streets back the way they are.

A bike lane on Salem near the college, I think, on the south side makes great sense. And again, I just want to reiterate that we could also slow down traffic by changing the traffic lights and putting in fines at the lights, you know, when people try to speed up or go through the lights. Adding up the numbers that she, that were earlier said of how many people attended the workshops and all that, that's 280 people, 100, and only 63% saying they prefer Alternative 1. That's only 173 people. Of all the people that I talked to and I was born and raised here and with all of the contacts that I have and just did a survey among my old high school class, classes ahead of me, people I've known all my life, I think I've had more contact with probably about 300 people that are saying absolutely no to Alternative 1 and 2 and number 3, if you do some changes and put the bike lanes on Salem.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anika Rodriguez, followed by Irene Galvin. Hi, I'm Anika Rodriguez and I'm coming to you as a member of the community and not as a downtown stakeholder. I want to talk about accessibility and safety and I'm going to consider us all friends because this is stuff that I only speak to with friends, but I have epilepsy. I have not driven since 2014. When we talk about bike safety and pedestrian safety, that is me. I did bike here today. I was invited to a community meeting a couple nights ago at Crush. I biked there. I rode my bike home in the rain. That is my mode of transportation if I'm not relying on a family member. So bike lanes are a big deal to me. They make me feel safe.

Wider sidewalks make me feel safe. Not only having epilepsy, a lot of our vacations are planned around that and going to communities that are walkable and accessible and where I can bring my bicycle where I don't rely on my family. And in 2020, I was on one of those vacations and I was hit by a vehicle going 40 miles per hour. I fractured my spine and they said I should have died, but I didn't. And then a month later, I went into septic shock and my family actively watched me die and I was revived. Thank you, Inlow Hospital. But it was a long recovery and if I would have been biking in a place that was safer, I would have never been hit by a car going 40 miles per hour. And I feel like downtown Chico is my neighborhood even though I sleep in Dells District.

I spend the majority of my time there and it is a thoroughfare and it needs to slow down. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Irene Galvin followed by Linda Wanapina. And I apologize if I insecure your name. Mayor and Vice Mayor and people. So I had a big thing written and I'm just going to speak. One thing that I heard or that I didn't hear was how many bikes go through downtown and how many pedestrians go through downtown. Go ahead and continue their comment. They can't answer it now, but we can ask them the question. I didn't hear any of those stats on what... And as... We moved here from San Francisco fell in love with Chico, literally cried on my way home over the Bay Bridge because I knew I'd found our home where we were going to start our family.

Like, I want to cheer up right now thinking about it. And it just makes me so sad on what's happened to Chico. And my brother moved here, my mom followed us, we all fell in love here. And now, just to see, for this to happen to downtown, we won't be able to go. Like, I'm disabled to be able to have to take away parking spaces and think that we're going to pack up all the kids and ride our bikes in 100 degree heat and go to a restaurant. That's just unfeasible. My mom's a senior. She, how's she going to do any of this? Like, and this story, I hear over and over and over again. My brother moved. Him and his husband, they left. He got bashed in the back of the head by, with a skateboard by some homeless guy and knocked him out.

A couple weeks later, he got beat up again and rolled down that little hill over by Northern Star. And this just isn't, this is ridiculous. It's almost embarrassing to say you're from Chico now. And like, downtown is so cute. I think the people making the decision should be these people. If you want to ask how to plan it and how to make downtown better, ask all these people and get them, get them at a table and plan a meeting and have them sit down with their pens and their iPads and plan out what to do. Thank you. And they're going to know how to make it better. Thank you. Not people who aren't from here. Thank you. And who don't live here. Thank you for your time. I appreciate all you do. So, Linda Wanapina, followed by Jillian Leach.

Thank you. Linda Wanapina, and I own the Ruse Cafe on Main Street. I also worked at Unlo Hospital 20-plus years, and my big concern is emergency services, how this will impact them getting through downtown. As I know, in traumas and emergency seconds matter. I've observed where there was one lane on Broadway because of delivery trucks, and the esplanade was backed up. There's no way emergency services could have ever got to anyone. So that's a big concern of mine. The taxpayers and citizens of Chico deserve a rapid response and quality care. So I think before bike lanes. Linda, can you pull the microphone? I'm not used to this, sorry. Deliveries. People have mentioned having deliveries at certain times.

That's not practical. We get lots of supplies from San Francisco, Sacramento. It's not reasonable to ask them to be here at a certain time. They have to plan their labor, their routes for efficiency, too. The other thing I'm concerned about is going out of business during this project. People aren't going to come downtown while this is going on. And it's a real concern. I've already experienced Caltrans closing parking outside my restaurant. My employees called and said, hey, we have no employees. I'm sorry, no customers. There's no parking. And I called the city, and they said it was Caltrans. What's going to happen when they're doing this revitalization? People aren't going to come downtown.

So it's a real concern for all of us. It's worked very hard for our businesses. Thank you. Thank you. Jillian Leach, followed by and by Kurt Kaufman. Hi. I'm a Chico native and a frequent downtown customer. I also have a background in economics, and I work as an analyst. So I automatically focus on what the data says Works. I'm also speaking today as both a driver and a cyclist. I support downtown revitalization through safer, more accessible bike infrastructure. Right now, many of our downtown lanes feel unsafe for cyclists, which discourages people from riding in the first place. When we don't see cyclists, it can seem like there aren't any at all. This isn't often a chicken and the egg situation.

People won't bike where they don't feel safe. By improving bike lanes and thoughtfully reducing our car lanes, we can create an environment where more residents and visitors can safely choose to bike. In addition, the Chico culture is generally really active compared to many other cities. So it's in a good position to implement a plan like this. If we want to support local businesses, we need to make it easier for people to access downtown in multiple ways, not just by car. Reducing some car lanes to create protected bike lanes isn't about taking something away. It's about adding more options and bringing more diverse people in. Cities that have invested in protected bike lanes have seen real benefits.

In places like Davis, Portland, and Boulder, improved bike access has correlated with increased retail activity and more vibrant street life. While people feel safe moving around through downtown, they're more likely to stop, shop, and spend time locally. If we build safer infrastructure, the community will come, and so will the economic activity that follows. Thank you. And by Kirk Kaufman, followed by Dave Druitt. Hi. Hi. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to give you our feedback. So downtown is slowly dying. The status quo is not working. We can't just keep things the way they are because downtown will just keep dying. We have to do something differently. It's well documented that downtown districts do better when there's more foot traffic.

So we need to increase foot traffic. And the way to do that is to calm the traffic, widen the sidewalks, put in bike lanes, fewer car lanes. That is how you make it a pleasant place that people want to be and want to walk around in and spend money. That is exactly what Alternative 1 is doing. And I'm so impressed with these people. They're doing it without giving up parking. One parking space is lost. Wow. That's amazing. It's a win-win for everybody. And bike lanes will encourage people to go downtown on their bikes who want to. Right now, many people don't because it doesn't feel safe. So every time someone rides a bike downtown, that opens a parking space for somebody who wants to drive downtown.

So keep that in mind. This is not a bikes versus car thing. This alternative helps everybody and makes it possible to have more people come downtown without impacting the parking. So I really encourage you to go with Alternative 1. They've done a great job presenting the alternatives and the data behind it. And I just want to point out, people keep saying, put the bikes on Salem and Wall. That reduces parking by 49 spaces. That's time. Thank you, Anne. Thank you. Dave Druitt, followed by Leanne Powell. Good evening. My name is Dave Druitt. I visit downtown every week by foot, bike, and by car. And from every perspective, especially as a cyclist, the message is clear. Our streets weren't built to invite people in.

They were built to move them through. That is the legacy of the state routing Highway 99 through our corridor. But a street optimized for car speed cannot foster the environment people want to visit. You can buy anything online today and have it tomorrow. So experience and human connection are the only competitive advantages that a downtown has. Alternative 1 creates that human-focused atmosphere. It offers calmer traffic, safer crosswalks, sidewalks wide enough for wandering and outdoor dining and shopping and bikes so that more people can come downtown. That should be a goal. And we only have to sacrifice one parking space for all that. If you've been to the Thursday night market, you've seen what downtown looks like when the street belongs to people.

Businesses do well and the energy is contagious. Alternative 1 aims to make our everyday streets feel a little more like that. That atmosphere is something that Amazon can never replicate. And we have proof that this Works. In 1997, Lodi invested in similar street calming and wider sidewalks. Despite initial business owner fear, at the end of it, they saw sales tax revenue rise and vacancies go down. It was such a success that they are now expanding those efforts with further human-centered design. I understand the anxiety around construction. It will be disruptive. So the city and residents must make a concerted effort to support our local businesses during that time. We will make it to the other side, just like Lodi did.

The infrastructure under downtown must be replaced regardless. The question before you is, do we rebuild the same struggling corridor, struggling corridor? Or do we seize this chance to build a productive downtown Chico that draws people in instead of moving them through? Thank you for your time and service to our community. Thank you. Leanne Powell, followed by Logan Underwood. Hi, my name is Leanne Powell, and I own a business on Main Street. And I just want to say, we have an amazing park to ride your bike in, just saying. And I am definitely against having any bikes on Main or Broadway. I think they need to stay on Salem and Wall. If you want to get into the park, you can take First Street.

It takes you right through Annie's Glen and then right into the park. I also kind of wanted to talk about a couple of other things with regards to areas that actually put these types of things in place in their cities. One of them is San Francisco on Valencia Street. In 2023, multiple business filed a lawsuit due to the new bike lanes, and they ended up demanding the removal of the bike lanes. They stated that significant economic harm and reduced foot traffic due to the 67 parking spaces that were sacrificed to bring the bike lanes in. Of those 67 parking spaces that were lost on Valencia Street, 48 were put into bike lanes, and the other 19 because of the state law requiring visibility around the corners.

In 2024, more businesses even joined the legal fight in San Francisco on Valencia Street, stating that the bike lanes damaged their businesses by diverting traffic and limiting parking. These businesses maintained that their businesses dropped 30 to 50 percent. There was a report that stated foot traffic dropped slightly three months after the implementation, bike traffic increased slightly, and vehicle traffic dropped by 17 percent. Then I looked at Bloor Street in Toronto in 2024. More than 40 businesses had filed lawsuits during the city or suing the city for $10 million for negligence and nuisance because of the bike lanes. The retailers, the restaurants, and the professional offices stated that the bike lanes' negativity affected their businesses, causing runaway congestion, which is like bottlenecking and high traffic congestion.

At that time, they were looking to remove the bike lanes as well. Yes, we have parking lots. That's fine. Thank you. Sorry. That's okay. Thank you. Thank you. Logan Underwood, followed by Alan Tochterman. Hello. I cycle a lot, and I enjoy cycling through downtown. I think alternative one is a very good option since the data presented does not decrease traffic flow and building more pedestrian and bike infrastructure when we also have data showing that people would like to bike and walk more but do not feel safe doing so would encourage alternative modes of transit and that the bike ways would have overall less maintenance costs long-term. The less width of car roads means less maintenance for the car roads.

And I think that is it. Thank you. Thank you. Alan Tochterman, followed by Adam Vedele. Good evening. I'm Alan Tochterman. I am a downtown landlord. I am responsible for 22 downtown businesses and 39 office tenants. I can only survive if my tenants survive. Right now, my tenants are surviving, but I must say they're not flourishing. About two years ago, the Department of Public Works came downtown with a proposal for some bike lanes. They had two public meetings. It was overwhelmingly unpopular. And here we are two years later with the exact same proposal, only relabeled as downtown revitalization. I kind of think of it like the same old snake oil only being repackaged or remarketed some different way.

From what I've seen, it will reduce traffic. It might reduce parking. It's going to be disruptive to the businesses of our local merchants. And I'm really asking whether the costs of doing this might outweigh any future benefits we're going to get from it. I think the real cost of this project is going to be borne by the local merchants and businesses downtown. These merchants have families to support. They have employees who have family support. And the only thing I'm asking the council is not to make a decision tonight and to perhaps take a little further consideration of what the impact of the project is going to be. And in your presentation, I was told that we contacted downtown landlords.

Given the number of properties I take care of, nobody contacted me. And I don't know of any of my tenants or merchants that were contacted or approached for the survey. Thank you. Thank you. Adam Fidelli, followed by LaDonna Keningi. Evening, everybody. I'll keep my comments brief. So when I first came here to town in 1986, when I was 18 to go to school, I immediately noticed the danger of the left-hand turn at the major intersections, second and Broadway, second and Main, third and Main, fourth and Main, et cetera. My dad even pointed it out, being a mechanical engineer, he noticed it right away. So I'm in favor of a mash-up solution of sorts. I don't know that any one plan tonight is going to do it.

But something that calms traffic down some, gives more space for bikes to maneuver in the existing setup, I think pinching down a lane on Main and Broadway is a good idea just for the spatial things. More people can pop out their sidewalks or patios if they wanted to. People have just more space to maneuver whatever their situation. Because right now it's tight and it's fast. I was crossing second to go to Naked Lounge and get some coffee, because I work downtown and have for 20 years. And there was a guy coming the opposite way, turning left. I had the light. I had the right-of-way. If I hadn't seen him at the last second and jumped farther than I think I ever thought I could at 58 years old, they would have run my ass over.

So I think things we want to focus on are, once we get people downtown, calm things down so that those people walking around and doing business and observing and enjoying everything don't have to be quite so aware. I think that would help welcome more people. And plus, we need to incentivize landowners downtown to cut better deals for prospective tenants. As my friend Austin has pointed out, we've got a 30% vacancy rate downtown, from what I'm told. So, creativity. Let's be creative. Thanks. Thank you. LaDonna Carnegie, followed by Jacqueline Chase. Thank you. Hi. I'm LaDonna Carnegie. And I've lived in Chico since 2006 and teach in Chico State. And I've been really involved in this process.

And I'm really impressed with the amount of the length of the public meetings and the amount of outreach that's been done. And gosh, I wish everybody would have been at the outreach meetings. But that's always a problem. I teach planning, and you do the best you can to bring people in. I am in support of Alternative 1. A lot of things about it really make a lot of sense. Downtown right now, with three lanes of traffic, that's more than we have on the interstate. It's like a drive-through. We want to make it a district, not a freeway. So, how do we slow down cars? You know, we know that if we narrow the lanes, if we put interesting things, we put all belts and things that make it safer, that that can slow down the traffic.

And we also know that if we can slow down the traffic, have more pedestrian traffic, more bicycle traffic, it usually enhances our businesses. And it's safer for everybody. So, I think just the idea of thinking of downtown as a destination and a district and not as someplace to drive through. Two thousand or 20,000 cars going through a day is a lot. But how many of them are really stopping downtown? So, how many compared to the 3% of the bicyclists? I mean, I don't know. It's just a good question. Because I know I'm a bicyclist and a car driver, you know, and a pedestrian. So, I think that bike infrastructure and safe paths are shown to, you know, increase traffic. When we have a bike path, when you can see somebody who has their kids on training wheels in a bike lane, you know you've arrived.

You've got a safe space. So, I think that it's a good goal to try to enhance everybody and have mobility and access for all modes of transportation and all abilities. So, and thanks for the public process and for all the work you guys have done. And we're supposed to stay awake. That's time. Thank you. So, thank you very much. Thank you. I'm Jacqueline Chase, followed by Nicole Hill. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity. Council Member Winslow just mentioned that we need to live up to Chico's reputation as a city of trees, but it's also got a reputation as a city of bikes. And I think that we need to live up to that. And not just for riding in the park, as one of the speakers just said, but as commuters and shoppers.

Some of us ride bikes more than we drive. The redesign of downtown has devolved into a bunch of us versus them arguments, cars versus bikes, drivers versus cyclists, parking versus bike lanes, shoppers versus recreationalists. And even though many drivers don't bike, all bikers drive. I don't know any biker that doesn't also drive sometimes. Cyclists can see design issues from both sides, from behind the steering wheel and from behind the handlebars. It's obvious to cyclists that there are many reasons to be afraid of cars in downtown. The speed that we've talked about, the lack of space to ride safely, blind corners, all the things that we know by now. But as drivers, it's also terrifying to have near misses with cyclists and pedestrians because of bad design.

So we have an opportunity to fix some of those bad designs. I don't want to run over a pedestrian or cyclist or door a cyclist. It would ruin my life as a driver. It's easy to blame cyclists when bad things happen. I hear it all the time that we're not paying attention, that we're not following rules. But I think it also has more to do with designs. We wouldn't be breaking the law riding on sidewalks if it weren't for it being too scary to ride in the street. Yeah, so I think separated bike lanes will make us all safer cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers. Thank you. Thank you. Nicole Hill, followed by Richard Roth. Hello, my name is Nicole Hill, and I'm here tonight to speak on behalf of Lupine Legacy Foundation and Stoble Coffee and Workplace, all who are based here in downtown Chico.

And we'd like to strongly urge the council to approve alternative one. To us, this is the clear alternative to provide exactly what downtown Chico is so desperately needing. Number one, safety. Through protected bike lanes, reduced car lanes, and reduced car speeds, as opposed to the freeway-like three lanes we have now. And wider mobility-friendly sidewalks that are safe and more accessible to downtown Chico makes it safe for all who are traveling through it. Speaking of, number two, accessibility. While car travel is currently the most popular way to travel to downtown, it is certainly not the only way. This alternative still allows for cars to travel to and through downtown, while making it more accessible for both pedestrians to travel and walk through downtown.

And folks like myself, who, unlike many of my Lupine counterparts, is not a super confident biker, and would and could bike if it was safer to do so downtown. And in the simplest way to describe it, number three, cuteness. This is a word we throw around a lot at Lupine. But what we mean by it simply is creating space, and in this case, infrastructure, that is both functional, aesthetically pleasing, and pleasant to experience. And ultimately, creating a place that you want to be. A place that you feel safe, comfortable, and happy. A place that you would bring your family and friends. A place that you would return to again and again. Safety, accessibility, and even though the word feels really silly, cuteness, are the things that will help create a strong, vibrant, and economically sound downtown district.

As Lupine develops multiple downtown properties, including the former 7-Eleven, Mr. Copy, and the Collier Buildings, we would love to see the infrastructural and aesthetic updates that Alternative One provides in downtown Chico. With remaining time, I would like to say thank you to staff and everyone that worked on this for the amount of feedback that you got from the community. So thank you for all you do. Thank you. Richard Roth, followed by Jesse Horgan. Mayor and Councilmembers, my name is Richard Roth, and I'm here to strongly support Alternative Number One. Alternative One removes one parking space. One. Alternative Three removes 49. If this were truly about parking, the choice would be obvious.

The fact that some would rather lose 49 spaces than lose one tells you a lot. It was never about parking. It's about whether cyclists belong on Main and Broadway. Since 2012, there have been 112 accidents in this exact location, quarter, including two deathly crashes. Meanwhile, downtown already has 500 on-street spaces, with half of them sitting empty. There is no parking crisis. There is a safety crisis. One car space holds 10 to 12 bicycles. Cities from New York to San Francisco have found that protected bike lanes increase retail sales on commercial corridors. E-bike sales have nearly doubled every year since 2019. And it continues at that rate. And California is 53% of that market. Chico is flat, sunny, and a college town.

We are ground zero for this transportation shift. These riders have already arrived and more are coming. Tonight, this council has a chance to meet and greet them and plan to take their money. Please adopt Alternative One. Thank you. Thank you. Jesse Horgan, followed by Casey Bounds. Good evening. My name is Jesse Horgan. I have been a parking professional for 26 years. I've worked on several transportation demand Management plans, transportation planning, and I've got to say, the city got its money's worth. That was an excellent, excellent presentation. Alternative One is kind of a miracle. Not slowing down traffic, losing one parking space, adding protected bike lanes gives you something for everyone.

And I love that it addresses all the concerns by learning lessons from other cities that have managed deliveries, that have managed emergency vehicles. There are good solutions out there that can be designed into downtown. So, excellent work. Very impressed. So, the feel of downtown is what is holding back the businesses. We have got to have a space that feels like a place you want to hang out in. We also need to have safety. When we survey people at the university, 30% of people say they don't bike downtown because they don't feel safe. The survey is over 1,000 people, and it's representative of the campus community. And when 30% of those people say, I would bike, but I don't feel safe, it's because of the infrastructure, the design.

We need to have people feeling safe. They can come downtown, and then they don't take up parking spaces if they're on a bike. Also, we need connectivity. We need to connect the bike lanes north and south of town to let kids get to Chico High, get through to the university. Option 1 does that. So, I would like to encourage you to choose option 1. That is a great outcome for both downtown, for businesses, for commuters, bicyclists, and drivers, improving safety. Thank you. I'm Casey Bounds, followed by Griffin Rhodes-Albert. Hello. I'm a frequent patron of downtown by both foot and car. And as someone else said, if I were more confident on a bike and it was safer, also by bike. And what I've noticed is people have spoken.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Alternative 1, and people have spoken really eloquently to that. And what I've noticed is that we're setting up this tension between the shoppers and the businesses and just wanted to reemphasize that the current status quo isn't working. They've talked about the vacancies and that these businesses aren't thriving, and many of my favorites have closed down just in the last couple of years. And I want to emphasize the interdependency of these two big stakeholders, that the businesses need the shoppers and the pedestrians and the cyclists and the people who drive through, who can hopefully be going slow enough and have places that they can stop. Alternative 1 really does address, as someone just recently said, a lot of the concerns, and that these groups, they're interdependent.

And I think Alternative 1 helps meet the needs of both of them. There was a lot of discontent about the sewer lines in the last agenda item. This idea that we're kicking something down the road and now it suddenly comes due. This feels like the kind of thing where fear about change is keeping us from making a change that will have very clearly temporary pain points, but that can long-term really help all of these members of their community thrive and create a more vibrant space. Thanks. Thank you. Our last speaker is Griffin Rhodes-Albert. Good evening. So I feel like I have two feet in two worlds. Not only am I a lecturer at Chico State, which is a prevalent part of our downtown, I am also a Chico local.

I have been born and raised here for 24 years. One of my parents has lived here all of her life. The other one moved here for college and has been here for the last 50 years. I feel like not only should we take the opinions and the guidance that our Chico locals have deserved to receive, but I also do feel that taking proper guidance, which it seems this survey has done, not only from Chico locals, but also within members of the actual research team. I know many of the speakers here tonight are not privy to information. One of those researchers is actually also a local-born Chico resident. And while I understand that there is a certain anxiety that comes from how we can approach downtown's infrastructure, I always look to my parents who have been living here for the last 50 years, I will remind you, and they always seem to reminisce to a time where the downtown was a much more revitalized area.

Well, in order to revitalize an area, you actually need to have people in it, because you can drive to downtown, but you need to walk into your stores. Thank you. Thank you. And that is it for our public comment portion. All right. And Council Member Hawley. Thank you so much, Mayor Reynolds. I'll try to get through this quickly. First, we can all cherry-pick different cases of successes and failure on pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure on either the pro versus con side. But let's focus on Chico. And in Chico, we have a plethora of planning documents dating all the way back to the 60s, to the early 2000s that I took two days to sift through. And a lot of issues that cities face is that they'll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on these planning documents with consultants, only for councils like our body to ignore and just throw to the side and take a different option.

The 1981 Downtown Study Group recommendation was pedestrian-oriented land use, rather than what it is now, wider sidewalks that are unobstructed. 1960s needs of Central Business District provided for pedestrian circulation, recommendations, and improvement of better, wider sidewalks. The Downtown Access Planning documents back from the 80s and today, updates address traffic speeds on Main and Broadway, which thinning those really wide lanes would do, and identified difficulties for pedestrian crossing and cyclist safety. The Downtown Streetscape recommendations recommended corner bulbing, improving crossings, heavily improved pedestrianization methodology, which we have been presented here today.

So what I heard from our speakers, I will say, I appreciate anyone who comes out to give their opinion. It is always, always, always appreciated. But I could tell who was really paying attention during the presentation. So first of all, it was pointed out consultants aren't from Chico. If you were to have gone to those workshops, you would find out that one of them is a Chicoan. But I do want to say the 62% of people who favor Alternative 1 out of the almost 200 are Chicoans. That doesn't include what our parking manager over at Chico State, Jesse Horgan, stated about those approximate 1,000 students that said they would love to bike in downtown, but do not feel safe doing so because of the current infrastructure.

Parking availability, as we already discussed, Alternative 1 only has a change in one space. I hardly think that is worth throwing away the whole revitalization project for. The traffic flow impacted as the consultants presented. There would be a less than five-second delay delivery. Options have been presented with solutions as well. And is construction impactful? Absolutely, yes, it is. In fact, I've taken plenty of time with downtown business owners, sat over coffee, talked extensively to them. If you're a downtown business owner and haven't reached out to me for a coffee yet, please do so. I'd love to sit down with you for a half an hour and talk about it a little bit more, as I have been already.

I am very confident in the consultant and our city staff's ability to mitigate those impacts as much as possible. But I promise they won't be nearly as impactful as sewage in the streets because of a 100-year-old sewer system that desperately needs repair. So the last thing I want to leave with you guys is that the state of California does not provide grant funding to projects that do not incorporate safe street design. If we want to make the repairs in the most fiscally responsible way that we can, we have to incorporate some of these items. And I'm so sorry I took so much time, but when I was down there when this first came to council, it was one of the leading reasons that I finally gave in to one of the people's requests that I pursue running for city council.

Thank you. Council Member Goldstein. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you to all of our speakers tonight and to our presenters. We are at a pivotal time for downtown. We have businesses struggling. People are buying most of their goods online. And yet we're facing a loneliness epidemic. And we're facing an epidemic of pedestrian deaths increasing in the U.S. So we're looking at this at the right time, where we can change our downtown for the better. And we've done an extensive process over the past two years. We have been engaging our community in trying to make sure that we create a design that Works for everybody, that we're hearing all those issues, like how are people going to load furniture into a store or move it out when they buy it?

And we're going to be addressing those issues in our final design phase and when we build this. I do hear all those concerns. And I hear the concerns about how are we going to make sure that businesses can still be accessed during construction. I want to point out a few things. Last year, we agreed in our priority planning session before budget season that public safety is our number one concern. If we neglect to take action or don't prioritize an alternative that keeps people safe, no matter if they drive, walk, or bike, then we are neglecting our council priorities by allowing for people in the future to continue getting injured or even dying on our downtown streets. But we're also just neglecting the future of downtown and the fact that things have changed and we need to adapt as a community.

When I go downtown, I know I'm one of those maybe 3% or 6% or whatever who feel confident riding a bike on a busy street. And I want my friends who don't feel confident to be able to join me. So far, when we meet up at the farmer's market on a Saturday, one of my friends will drive because she doesn't feel comfortable walking alone or biking. And we park over by City Hall and then we walk. We walk down. We cross over to 2nd Street. We go to Naked Lounge. We walk to Bootleg because they have good clothes there, to the bookstore, to the antique stores. It is an experience where young people like me, we can get away from our phones for a few hours and go somewhere. It's better than shopping on Amazon or Poshmark.

And I bring that up. I know it's a tangent, but I bring that up because that is the future of downtowns and of in-person shopping in this new era where people are going online for everything. And I think we need to take that into account here, that pedestrians are going to be a priority regardless of how people get downtown. As somebody commented, people still need to move through downtown. And within that, bike infrastructure is also important to me. The trees are incredibly important for creating that beautiful space downtown where people want to linger. If it's hot in the sun, they're probably not going to. We need places to sit, outdoor dining, because most of the year it's really nice here.

And with the wider sidewalks, we have the possibility for that. So finally, if we want to get state funds so that we're not just paying for whatever it is that we decide to do downtown out of the pockets of our local taxpayers, we need to have a good application. I'm a transportation planner, and I've worked on active transportation program applications. Most of them don't get funded statewide because those funds are limited. You have to show that your project is good, and it's going to benefit people, and it's going to be transformative. And I think the only way that we can get there is if we have the confidence to go for something that creates better access and safety for everybody, such as Alternative 1, which I heard a lot of support for.

I also want to just clarify once again, Alternative 1 says it would result in loss of one parking space, not 100 or whatever. Alternative 2 actually would increase parking, but we didn't hear a lot of support for it. And Alternative 3 would remove 49 spaces. So I just wanted to clarify that again, and I'll wrap up my comments for now. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? Okay. Council Member Bennett? Or Vice Mayor Bennett? You're on. So tell me, a wise one, tell me how much difference there is between Alternative 1, 2, and 3, all three, improved bikeability downtown. When you apply for a grant, how much more credibility or how much more merit does one have over the other? I see all three of them achieving the increased bikeability of downtown.

So does it really make a big difference? Yeah, I think the main thing in the active transportation program grant is eligibility of the reimbursable costs. And so it pays for those certain functions. So in Alternative 1 and 2, with the bike lanes down Main and Broadway, those are eligible for costs from the grant program. Alternative 3, putting the bike lanes off the main street likely would not be eligible for reimbursement or the cost to cover the main and Broadway components. But it would pay for the off-street improvements. So, and none of that money would be available for any of the infrastructures, such as the sewer system, which needs to be worked on, and other infrastructure costs. It would just be for the bike lanes, period.

It would incorporate the complete, when you talk about the term complete streets of all modes of transportation, and you're doing it on that boulevard, it creates the ability for those costs to be reimbursed. So, whereas if the bike lanes are on Salem, Wall, Flume, it'll pay for those improvements, but not necessarily repaving the roadways on Main and Broadway. I think, can I follow up on that? I don't see any other. Just for clarification, I think what Vice Mayor was asking, is it only reimbursing the cost of putting the bike lane in? Or if we put this down Main and Broadway, is it covering all of, not including the sewer, but all of the paving, sidewalk, everything? I think that's the question.

Yeah, so it would in the Alternatives 1 and 2. And so, no matter what, there's a match for maximizing your point total. So, on the active transportation program, a 20% match gives you the most points. As Council Member Goldstein mentioned, it's a very competitive program. It's a scale of 0 to 100, and I think the cutoff line for funding was at like a 96. We did submit this project in the previous cycle in 2024 without real clear scope, and we still received an 87. And so, with a clear scope of work that incorporates those components, we've done debriefings with Caltrans, and they've communicated support for that type of project. What year was that? 2024. And we scored an 87 in 2024, and from what I can tell, option one isn't much different.

It's a fairly similar project, right? Similar, yeah. I think what the concept, the main concept previously was essentially Alternative 2. Yeah, we kind of took a step back and started from scratch this go around and let the community speak. And so, yeah, it shifted slightly with Alternative 1, having the basically bike lanes in the lane of, in the direction with traffic, essentially. All right. Any other council members want to speak? Council Member O'Brien? Council Member O'Brien? thank you to our staff. They did a fantastic job with us to include our consultants, so thank you. I disagree with the outcome, but I do appreciate your hard work and effort. It reflects well on you, so thank you very much.

So 75 to 80 people, 75 to 180 at another, does not constitute a majority of our 110,000 people we have in the city of Chico, so let's just be clear about that. It may have been Alternative 1. Alternative 1 may have been the majority of those that attended, the 75 and the 80, but it does not necessarily represent our 110,000 people in this community. I do suspect that the majority of our downtown business owners, hearing from them tonight and hearing from them yesterday afternoon, they would not support and do not support having a bike lane on Main and Broadway and removing a lane of traffic, and I concur with that. One of the reasons is that is a major thoroughfare for emergency vehicles. We added Engine 1 because we have so many calls for service in our downtown area. I have ridden on both of those thoroughfares many, many times, writing to emergencies. It is an issue removing a lane of traffic.

I think what I heard, again, from our business owners, who, by the way, are the ones that pour their time and treasure into our downtown, they invest in it more than anyone, they are not going to do anything that shoots themselves in the foot and harms their business. They do not want that. They would support some form of a bike, protected bike lane on Salem and maybe wall. I know most of the traffic, or excuse me, the parking spaces would be impacted with that on wall. I'm sure we can mitigate that to a great degree and minimize that, but that's where really bikes, I think, are safer. Maine and Broadway and removing a lane of traffic does not make sense to me, and I do respect everyone's opinion. All the bicyclists, I support you. That's fabulous, but those that have poured their time and treasure into our downtown deserve to be heard, and I've heard them for two days in a row telling me the same thing. Just before we go back to other speakers that haven't, do you want to say anything?

I'd like to listen to anybody else. Okay, well, we usually have a rule that everybody goes through once before we let people go again. Okay, Council Member Hawley. Just back to the topic of strength of grant applications, one item that I believe would further strengthen our application is the incorporation of a more robust community engagement surveys. Is that correct? I'm looking at price, too. Yeah, I mean, the community engagement that we've done since 2024 would certainly help improve our score, and I also, related to that, want to point out that if we were to submit for ATP funds for something that only got 18% support, like, I don't think we would get those funds. You have to show community support for your project. Yeah, that's what I thought, and I originally wasn't going to do this, but I just have to rebuke some of Council Member O'Brien's claims. I think it's completely inappropriate to homogenize a demographic like downtown business owners. I think there's a lot of nuance to opinions, and just because there are, some people who have a really strong lobbying tactic, that doesn't mean their voice should matter any more than the downtown business owners, residents, and representatives as a whole.

This has been going on for years, and it's been the same conversation for years. I was on the board of directors for the DCBA back in 2007. We were talking about this, and I still attend all the DCBA board meetings. So I support, my priority is supporting the downtown businesses. It always has been. It always will be. I'll never change. So I want to protect the integrity, the profitability of the downtown businesses. I'm always going to lean in that direction. I think the biking community, I respect you. You choose a mode of transportation that I can't ride anymore, but that's fine. So I'm glad you were so vocal, but a few statistics here. There were 208 votes for, in the March 2 to 4, 26 session, there were 208 people that voted for alternative 1, 2, 3, and no change, which was 20%.

That equates to.0018% of the 213,847 citizens in Chico. Some of those are kids I don't have to break down. But when I look at making a decision based upon community input, I need to have a better number than.0018. If we look at the choice of alternative 1 of the 127 people, which is 61 or 62%, there's two different numbers there, that wanted to choose that, that equates to.0011% of the 113,847 people in Chico. That's not enough for me to make a decision. It's just not enough. I need a lot stronger indication of what the citizens of Chico would like to see in the revitalization of downtown Chico. You know, wait to make a decision when I see some numbers that really push me in a direction other than what I've already chosen, which is to support, protect, and defend the businesses of downtown Chico.

Council Member Winslow. Oh, I can say something. Maybe it'll throw some people off or surprise some people. It'll be like, why would you say that? My personal preference is actually to alternative two. I think that the two-way bike path, like it connects better to the Esplanade. I also think we just kind of have a pattern of these going around town. This is the way that, like, when you bike around town, this is what you're used to biking on. And there was a lot of complaints back in the first iteration of this about people going to run head on. We've had this Esplanade bike path, and I'm on it, like, every day, and it's totally a concern. We all slow down to pass each other. We don't head on.

But I don't think that my job here is to push my personal preferences on people. It is to survey what's right for the community, but it is to make that decision. And we sat for two years now we've gone through since we had this robust discussion. It actually didn't start in 2024. It was in 2023. And I'll tell you, because there's a few major reasons why I support, you know, one of these alternatives. And I would go with the one that has a 60% support in the survey, because the survey is a sample of a population, but it is the best that you get. And that's how you make decisions. You can't actually ask everybody permission. And one is, you know, we've got to get it funded, right? And that's, like, obviously, like, look at the grant opportunities.

And that's huge. Like, we're actually not going to be able to do anything and even, like, fix our streets if we're not looking for opportunities like that, even if you don't care too much about a lot of the benefits of it. I do think it's just overall more beautiful. It's like the kind of Chico that you see on postcards. Like, when my, you know, parents came here and they had kids, and I think the notion is we went on road bikes. We went to the park. Yeah, there were trees around. You don't see, like, just, like, empty three-lane Main Street on postcards. It's even, like, going far back in the historic stuff. Like, you see life in downtown. It was 1949 when these three lanes were first introduced.

And downtown has been struggling since. And this is where all these studies are going on because downtown has been in tough spot, like, since that came in. There never was this, like, utopia to return to. Like, since we've had this, it was the same year the passenger streetcar last ran. The number one reason, though, that I think that we need to do something here, it is a safety reason. The cars are driving too damn fast. And it's not just unsafe, but it's noxious to public life outside. And I'll give you some examples just to make sure. You know, I can show you this. This is the heat map of, like, accident injuries. That's north downtown, south downtown. But when we had this discussion at Internal Affairs Committee, we actually moved out to this chamber because it garnered a lot of public interest.

It was December 2023. And that night, a car turning left off 4th Street right out here at 4th and Main crashed into the bike parking. A couple rails went all the way through it and into a car in front of it. They weren't drunk or anything. They were just, like, adjusting the radio when they were turning. Last year, I was walking across the street at night to a Parks Commission meeting here. And somebody also turning left off 4th Street there was driving straight into me because he just wasn't making attention. He had kids in the car. And I jumped out of the way in lieu of jumping on top of his car. And he stopped and apologized. And I don't think it was his fault. He was just distracted. And when we create these wide roads that encourage people to drive fast, it makes for unsafe decisions.

Imagine if that guy would have killed a city council member right there. You know, he would never live it down. That's, like, think of the driver, right? He would be in bad shape. That same year, from the first one I mentioned, there also was somebody walking on the same intersection right there in front of Melody Records on the sidewalk. And she got hit by a car that drove off onto the sidewalk. And you think maybe that particular intersection has a problem. We could address that on an intersection level. Just go down the street. And that same year, another bikepacking rack, a third in Broadway that was in front of Broadway Heights, the Phoenix building there, also got run over. It took over a fire hydrant, too, if I recall.

But we still haven't replaced that. Now, maybe it's north downtown, right? So take a south downtown. And six in Broadway, that same year, I was riding my bike on Main Street. Broadway, actually. And Nantucket, what's now the Westport venue, a car had driven right into their building, right? There was a pole out front. And I just happened to see it when I passed by. And there was a cop out there. A block away that same year, I was also riding my bike down Main Street. And there was a car inside Jack's. This is a diner, right? The cop said, you can't park there. That's good to me. It was a really good one. Yeah, there was plenty of parking. It was nighttime. The car was inside Jack's. This doesn't happen everywhere.

It's not a coincidence. This happens in places that we design for people to drive very fast. And that's exactly what we did in 1949 when we decided suddenly everybody's driving cars post-World War II. We had this, like, big ideas of how Chico can be different. We've been struggling ever since, and it's been dangerous downtown ever since. And this is our opportunity to do something different. I think that the plans that we have, it would be more beautiful. There'd be more trees and less pavement. It's going to be safer for more people, like kids who famously cannot drive but still need to get around. It's better for the environment. It's better for public health. It'd be more lively with more people sitting outside.

More people walk and bike. This is a wonderful thing. If for every one person that walks or bikes instead of driving a car, there is one more additional parking space out there for somebody who needs to drive a car. For all these reasons, I think we need to make a decision and settle it somehow. I think that if we choose an alternative that's not going to be good for walking and biking here, we're not going to get it funded, so maybe it'll never happen. But we do need to make a decision here. And I would support Alternative 1 along with the overwhelming majority of people who participated in the survey. So I'm just going to make a couple of comments. One is I'm super confused because I'm being told that we're doing this because we want to slow traffic down, but yet we were also told it's only going to make it four seconds longer to get through town.

So I'm not sure that four seconds is actually really slowing traffic down. And it actually would not stop a car from hitting a bicycle parking area, of which we're telling people to bicycle and park. But anyways. And we've also not addressed any of the east-west connections. So you still got to, even if we fix downtown, you still got to risk your life, is what I'm hearing, to drive in Chico. Which I biked my whole entire life. I bike all over Chico. I love Chico. Neil Dow, Chico Jr. Chico, hi. So I'm just hearing conflicting information. So I'm not sure if we're actually slowing down traffic. So if we do take it down to two lanes and it's only four seconds slower to get through town, we were told that today, then really all we've done is take it down to two lanes.

And now I am worried about the ambulance getting to in low if, God forbid, my mother or family member or kid is in there. I want them there as fast as possible. So I don't know. I'm more inclined to do option probably one. One of my concerns on option one versus option two is how are we going to, you can go that way. It's a one-way road. But, you know, bicycles, they pretty much most of the time go the way that they want to go anyway. So I think we're going to have two lanes of travel. So if we're going to do a lane on Main or Broadway, it almost makes sense for me to agree with the council member as I'll hold that, put that on the calendar, that it might be better off to have it two-way traffic, you know, going in the right direction.

It might be actually less confusing for bicycles. And then you're connecting straight on to the two lanes that we have going on Esplanade. I see some sense in that. So I'm not saying what I'm going to do, but I just do hear a lot of conflicting information. Can I just respond to one of those? All right. Thank you very much. I just have a couple quick points to close with. We do not have a downtown without businesses. It does not exist. So we need to remember that fact. And if we want to support those downtown businesses, let's not slap 180% increase on our sewer rates. That would be a good start. One's low and then I'll come back around. Back to downtown. The reason why, so it's what they measure to say that there would only be like a, what, four-second delay?

That's delay at intersections when there's congestion. So at what point are there so many cars that are going to go slower? Whenever there's congestion, cars are always going to be going slower. The speeding and all the instances we're talking about, every single one of them, it was not at like peak traffic conditions. If there's a lot of cars, people are careful of the other cars. It's creating these wide open spaces with lots of like sightliner people feel comfortable essentially nodding out of the wheel a little bit that people speed. So it creates situations where people feel comfortable speeding and that's when they kind of lose control and then drive into a diner every once in a while.

So that is the difference. What they were saying is at, based on how much traffic there is, how much are they going to get stuck at intersections and delayed? Not like, can you speed through downtown or can you not? Really, anytime you've got a straight lane, you could speed through. It's just more or less risky. People are less likely to do it. The more risky it feels and the more there is things around you like curbs, wider sidewalks, trees, the slower that people go. Council Member Hawley. I'll make a motion that council adopt the following alternative. Alternative one, protected one-way bikeways on Main Street and Broadway. I'll second that motion. All right. We've got a motion and a second, but I still have two speakers in the queue.

So, Vice Mayor Bennett. So, and I didn't address this. I'll be very quick. I prefer Alternative 3, which has a dedicated bike lane north and south on both sides of the street. So no matter what direction you're going, you do have a dedicated bike lane with a buffer, three-foot buffer. Same thing for Salem. Wall and Salem makes a big difference. And then we can have a protected bike lane downtown. You're going to have to walk a block. But if you're shopping out at Walmart or anyplace else, you're going to be walking a block or two to get to the store. So it really doesn't make that much difference in my mind. So I prefer number three. Which loses 49 parking spots. Yes. Council Member Goldstein.

Yeah, I was also going to point out that I'm against Alternative 3, especially because it would lose 49 parking spots. We constantly hear that parking is such an issue downtown. And that would really go against what business owners have been asking us, which is to remedy that. Parking is, of course, a complex issue. There's a lot of need for better managing the spaces that we have. And I just also want to flag that I am trying to figure out if we are best using those spaces and managing them. So I'm sure that this parking conversation will come up again in the future. But, yeah, let's be very cautious about anything that would decrease so many parking spaces. I also wanted to ask Director Audubonni for clarity on what will happen with our east-west streets.

I had asked him previously about some other aspects like the Caltrans corridor at 8th and 9th Street. And he told me that those will be figured out as we fully design the project. Is that also the case with our east and west streets? Yeah, at 8th and 9th, being Caltrans right away, once we have a scope, we would coordinate with Caltrans through the design process. It is important to note that the 2024 council action, similar to the trees, there was action taken to include a bidirectional bike path on 4th Street connecting Lower Park to downtown. And then ultimately kind of going through South Campus to Ivy Street where we have those bike lanes. So you're creating connectivity there. Thank you for the clarification.

Council Member Winslow. At the risk of being like a little too specific, I do just want to like share an experience generally so that you understand why pushing bikes out onto Salem and Wall isn't super practical. And especially when you consider it's like what are cars actually giving up by having these bike lanes is like not a lot of parking spaces, like one. And then also they're not being delayed really in any way. But I live next to the largest employer in the county. That's the hospital in the West Avs, which if you go west of the railroad tracks, the highest density neighborhood that we have in the north state. And I ride a bike most days downtown. And just I already have to when I come down, say I'm coming down the Esplanade bike path or on the other side of the Esplanade.

And I have to go like divert a little bit because we have that big fence up there by Children's Park. So I go a block out of the way to get to Broadway if I want to get to, say, Second Street, my offices. I would have to just go an entire another block out of the way to go to Salem Street. Like it doesn't make any sense for me not to use Broadway, except that there's no bike infrastructure there. And I have to cross three lanes in order to take a left turn there, which is kind of a wild thing that I do every day. It just from the perspective of people using it on a regular basis, it is very impractical to try to relegate bikes to these side streets. Like the Main Street and Broadway are the streets with most of the businesses on them.

They're the places that you're going. City Hall, you know, destinations. We want people to actually use these so that we can diversify the way people get to downtown. We're not relying on accommodating every single customer by car where we run out of capacity for it. Council Member O'Brien. I lied. I said I was going to hold to those last two comments. So my apologies for that. I do agree with Council Member Goldstein. The East-West piece of this does need to be fleshed out. I kind of like that Fourth Street idea that is kind of bisect our downtown, bisect Main and Broadway. That does make a lot of sense. And the reason why we're losing so many parking spaces, again, a reminder, with Alternative 3 is because of Wall Street.

And I'm sure much of that can be mitigated with some other planning. But really, the Salem corridor is a great place for our protected bike lane. And this time, I promise, that is my last comment. All right. So we have a motion and a second for Alternative 1. Council Member Goldstein. Yes. Council Member Hawley. Yes. Council Member O'Brien. No. Council Member van Overbeek is disqualified on this item. Council Member Winslow. Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett. No. Mayor Reynolds. No. It fails 3-3 with a tie vote with one recusal. So I would like to make a motion. I'm very, very close on option one. I'm not completely done. But for whatever reason, I'm not sure why, but we didn't hear. We heard a lot yesterday from our downtown people.

So I don't know. Can we have a workshop? Can we talk one more time and bring it back to the next meeting? And we have to, I do agree with Council Member Hawley. We do need to make a decision. And I appreciate your willingness to go talk to people as much as you can. I will talk to anybody that I can. Maybe we can have some more conversations. And we've got to make a decision. We have to do something. And I agree that the only way that we're going to get this done is by getting a grant. Because you see how much sewer is costing. We absolutely don't have the money to go out and pay for this on our own. I just don't think we're there yet tonight. I struggle punting it down the road even more. I mean, we've had extensive workshopping.

You saw the last 50-something pages of the document. What more do you need to see? I feel like we've maximized the possible engagement we could get. Mayor, I would be happy to try to get you to a yes. I just don't know that another workshop is going to do it. I don't know that there's another project in Chico's history that has had as much community engagement as this one right here. Is there a different outcome that arises? You know, yeah, we had an internal affairs meeting yesterday that turned into basically a pre-hearing for this. And it brings out particular people who are coming in and saying, we're going to lose 80 parking spaces. We're going to lose 100 parking spaces. And it's not the constructive kind of engagement.

I think where we did get that was at these workshops that really pulled from different areas of the population, really got like a diverse array. I mean, they're professionals in this. They could probably break down the whole process and data and everything. I don't know how we're going to do any better. I think that it's just on us to make a call and go with it at a certain point. Vice Mayor Bennett. I have no problem whatsoever in furthering this discussion about what to do. I think it could be detrimental to make a decision because we have to make a decision. Sometimes it's better to talk about it some more and try and find common ground. so I support having another community meeting and talking about this again.

Maybe we can find a pathway to resolve this issue, but right now we don't have a decision, so let's try something different. House Member Goldstein. I am really glad to hear that you're close to a yes on this, so it would be great if we can come to an agreement. I'm concerned about the timeline, knowing that the ATP program closes in June, and there's presumably a lot of work to be done before then on making sure that this is a solid request. I do like the idea that we could get a little bit more downtown business owner buy-in and try to make sure that we can make them feel more comfortable that we're going to work with them throughout this process. We're not just going to say, we're doing this deal with it.

Like, we need to make sure that our business owners are on board. But what I would request is that we can approve alternative one with the stipulation that we will continue that engagement in some form, even if that's a meeting this month. Would that be amenable to you? Thank you. Thank you. So, Member O'Brien. So, I agree with you, Mayor. I think this needs further fleshing. I'm not a big fan of ready, fire, aim. I think sometimes we do that too much. I think we need to make sure that all the stakeholders, not just those that showed up at this particular, or these particular workshops, but some other stakeholders that were not part of that. I'm not blaming the consultants or staff. That's not their fault.

However, I think now this has been eliminated to the point that it's got people's attention. I think if we were to hold something now, we would get more people and more input. I think it would look a lot more representative of our full community. Can I ask a question for staff? Is our contract with the consulting company complete? No. We have the ability to add scope to that. We have available budget, because what we did use is carbon reduction funds that are federal funds for the design portion. And for this, this effort, I will mention timing. Obviously, as council member Goldstein mentioned, applications are due in June. There is quite a bit of work where we have to package this into a project study report.

I know that's engineering talk, but, but basically there is, you know, some work. So if, if that is the desire of the council, just having some sense of urgency, obviously these are important decisions that we want to make sure are fully vetted, but there is a timing constraint with the funding opportunity in front of us. Can I ask that our firm, based upon what you hear and based upon what you hear from council direction, do you think that there's something that you could hold for us to have a downtown community input, one more listening session, and bring that back fairly quickly? Sorry to put you on the spot, but I am. Yeah, that's something that we could arrange. My fear is that we're going to hear the same input that we've heard to date.

It's a lot of emotions about what change could look like on the corridor, and we're not going to reveal any new information from having another outreach event. I don't know where to go. So a tie vote is, is nothing. So we have to do something, and I would like this to come back at our next meeting if we can, or soon. I want to keep the conversation going. I mean, Council Member Goldstein suggested just making that vote forward with all one, knowing that further community input will be implemented when the design continues in detail. Okay. Council Member Goldstein. Yeah, yeah, I'm in agreement. Thank you, Council Member Hawley. Director Audubonny described this to me as a scoping effort, and we're putting together that project study report with the outline of what we're doing, and we're continuing to develop the design.

We're continuing to develop, you know, what exactly will those loading zone hours look like, things like that, and we're going to continue engaging our community. I had specifically brought up, like, I go to shows at Naked Lounge. How are people going to unload their van there? And he assured me we're going to continue working so that we can continue to have our, you know, our trucks and our live music people, you know, use our streets and to design these bikeways on the east-west streets, things like that. So my point is that there is more work to be done and that I wouldn't want us to put off making any decision and then in the future just hearing the same well-thought-out comments again but not moving forward.

So I'd like for us to make a decision today, if you're amenable to it, and maybe put a pin in some aspect of that as far as, like, maybe we say we are going to have a defined date of a meeting about loading zones or something that we've heard a major concern about. Vice Mayor Bennett. Mr. Odabani. Is there is a deadline for this year, is it every June or every other year? I can't remember what. Every two years are the cycles. Every two years. And this project is at least two years away. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Council Member Winslow, then Council Member O'Reilly. You know, something that Council Member Goldstein said that makes a lot of sense to me is if there's a problem and we're not quite there, then let's try to narrow down what the problem is, right?

We hear people talking about a lot of things. Like, we can cross parking off the list. That's not really the concern with alternative one, right? I mean, people have talked about it, but ultimately if you're willing to go with an alternative that takes away more parking, that can't be the issue, right? And so help me out here. Like, if it's not that people aren't going to be able to drive fast enough, I heard that people would have to, passengers would step out into the bike lane. There's one. I mean, is that a concern we really want to try to resolve in order to get this through, or is it just the loading-like trucks? That's one of the biggest issues I've heard. Do we need to solve the loading truck issue in a more firm way, and then can we get there?

I'm, like, seriously looking for some guidance here. Council Member O'Brien. We make a decision tonight. It defeats the purpose of taking input. The whole purpose of taking input is to make sure we make a sound decision. It's better to make a good decision than a quick bad one.

These are verbatim comments. Like, you can go through them. There's, like, sticky notes. Like, they typed out all the sticky notes, hundreds of sticky notes. I just want to point out what we're approving tonight isn't all of the details and minutiae, though. Like, we're making a decision about, basically, what street bike lanes go on, not how we're doing everything else. And so there is so much more that we can keep discussing. We're not deciding the whole thing. Vice Mayor Bennett. To be clear, I am not going to vote for Alternative 1 based upon we're going to continue to talk. I won't do that. Thank you. Brendan. I want to say Brendan. Mr. Audubani. How much room is there and what changes can be done?

In the scenario presented says, hey, this is the general direction we're going, but we can make changes as needed later down the road. What does that look like? And if we get community, I am very worried about loading zones. I understand how hard it is to receive your trucks. I know you've got 20 and 30 and 40 boxes coming to businesses. You've got beer trucks. Loading is a reality. And when you have trucks coming from all over, you know, so that is a genuine concern. So how much flexibility do we have after tonight to make minor changes, major changes? I might ask Aaron what your thoughts are real quick on if, because I think the next one would be April 21st or the meeting after that would be May 7th, I believe.

Would a May 7th, would that be too late to package everything in your opinion and knowledge? For an ATP application, it wouldn't leave enough time. But to maybe answer your question about where can we go from here, if we go down the path of alternative one, do additional community outreach, receive input, and we realize that the scope has to change. So if it was, we got a successful grant and it was awarded to the city and down through this process, the scope change, there is a scope change request that could be made post-selecting alternative as long as you could show that the new alternative provides the same benefit. So for example, if we want to go down with alternative one, but through additional outreach, alternative two rises to more community support, it still provides the same distance of protected bikeways, and that would be something that we could propose to the CTC for a scope change request.

And those can get approved. Now where you really struggle is if you select an alternative that provides less benefit, the funding can get reduced or removed. If that answers your question. Yeah, and I would just add, it would be helpful to narrow down what those specific topics might be that would be discussed. Because we have done this for multiple years, multiple public outreach, a lot of times it is the same feedback. And so trying to narrow down what those points of contention or concern are so that we can have focused conversations and find solutions that are amenable. And so I think the loading, unloading is a big topic that we've heard throughout this process. We think there's a path forward in terms of shifting some current operations that still maintains accessibility, still maintains public safety.

I will mention on the public safety aspect, we do have preemption where they're going code three, it automatically turns lights green. So from a public safety accessibility standpoint, there are other technology things that we do that provide those types of opportunities. So types of things that we can do to shift to better utilize those spaces and talk about what those look like, again, narrowing those focus down to those specific topics would be helpful. I guess the next question is for the city attorney of how we can proceed forward because we have a failed motion. Yeah, I mean, if you don't have a majority, there's just no action. So I'm hearing the discussion about maybe further discussion, but even that action to postpone still requires a majority decision.

I do suppose if you have no action tonight, meaning you can't resolve anything, it can always be put on a future agenda item, right? So because it fails at a 3-3 doesn't mean that, yeah, it doesn't mean that you couldn't re-agendize it in a month or two or whatever you want to, I suppose. Well, we don't have that long. So I think we need to give some clear direction to either have another meeting or to move and do something tonight. I just don't know exactly what the path forward is. I'm just not 100% uncomfortable on a yes vote. The way I see it, it's up to you, Mayor Reynolds. Seriously, I mean, that's what the makeup is right now. Well, we got 25 minutes. No, 32 more items. So this issue is going to be with us for decades.

We don't need to decide that tonight. We can have further conversation. That is okay. This is something that's going to impact our downtown essentially for the rest of our lives. Let's make sure we do it right. What's wrong with having more discussion? Are we afraid of more discussion? What do you expect to get out of more discussion? I don't know. Let's get more people involved. I don't think we heard from everyone that is impacted. I would like to hear from those people too. I think this, again, has illuminated an issue that has got the attention of our community. And if we were to have one of these additional workshops, I think our attendance would rise greatly. So can we have a workshop in one week and have this back on the next agenda?

Because we're obviously hearing that having it May is too short. So it needs to be on the 21st in order for them to qualify. And what I'm very leery of is we did sit here and have this exact same conversation two years ago. And we said, we'll get everything ready and do it in two years. I'm really frustrated that we're just now here. And it feels like we're up against this wall again. And to somebody's comment, it feels like we're almost being presented with the exact same thing that we were presented with two years ago. And maybe that's where we're at. And maybe that's where they are. I would be willing to try to have another meeting in the next week to invite all the downtown. To have a business owner that has 30 tenants in downtown and that he was not including.

I know that's only one person. It's just like the sewer. The night that we talked about the sewer, we had six speakers. We had 11 speakers here tonight. If we were talking about sewer all over again, I think it would be different. So just to keep this moving forward, if you guys would be amiable to it, I say let's have another meeting next week. And I would like to see this back again on our agenda in two weeks and to make a decision. Is that a motion? I'll make that as a motion. I will second that motion. Can I comment? I guess, yeah. I'm really worried because it has been two years. And I really want us to be able to move forward. And I'm glad to hear that you are too. Do you think that there's any way that you'd be amenable to changing that to approving the general concept of alternative one, but with that meeting being on refined topics?

I've already said I, in general, I'm really close to supporting a vision one. I'm really very close to being there. I would just like to have one more meeting with our downtown business owners so I can come back and look everybody in the face, just like we would just went through with the sewer and say, we listened, we did, and I would like to have one more meeting. And I promised to put it on our next agenda and we should still be able to make our grant. Cause I don't want to wait two more years. I do definitely do not want to do that. And can staff confirm we could put this on the next agenda? Okay. So that would be a motion. And I second that motion. It feels like that's the only way that this is going to be able to move forward at this point.

I don't like delaying it. I do like the idea of more community input, but I just want to voice again, I'm very, very concerned that, you know, we keep having a lot of agenda items and we're going to bring this back in two weeks and hear from the same people. We've had a very lengthy, thorough engagement process. And most people, if not all, who've wanted to speak have participated. And if we can get a few more people, then that's great. I don't think that it would or should significantly change the direction of the project if we get a few more voices. And I don't know that that's, you know, worth potentially delaying this and decreasing the quality of our application. I guess maybe worst case scenario, we come back with those exact things that we agree to one.

We agree to what those exact things that all the downtown businesses, owners are, and be it loading, be it whatever it is. And so when we make the motion and we approve, if that's what happens, then we have that really defined. That's my thought. What if we put the fire lanes on Salem? I just don't see how we're getting... The ambulance and then put them through the roundabout. You know, I'm trying to solve the problems here. I don't see the going off to another discussion solving any problems. We talked about all the problems. We've had the problems out there. We have... People said when we had that December 2023 meeting in this room in Eternal Affairs that people hadn't been properly noticed and a bunch of people showed up.

We had a bunch of people show up. We had robust engagement. And the reason why we're so close to the deadline now is because they took all this time to get all this community engagement, the most that we've ever seen on anything. So it's like, where is the end here? You know, we have to like, at some point, some objectively, subjectively set ourselves some limit and just say like, within these bounds, we have to make a decision. Like we're elected to make decisions, not to defer and defer and defer. So we have a motion and a second point of order. Okay. Point of order, Carl. We have a motion and a second. Okay. And that was to direct staff slash consultant to hold another community meeting with this item to be brought back at the next April meeting for council action or discussion.

Is this with us or is this with the community? I mean, are we talking about having a special city council meeting to rediscuss? That was to gather more community input. Between now and the next city council meeting. Is that the idea? Right. And this would focus on certain items of the project that have been discussed or is it just a general downtown business owner stakeholder meeting? The stakeholder meeting, I would recommend that we talk about option one because that's what has the most community support and address the specific concerns of the downtown businesses and building owners. and have, so when we come back on, because we heard some yesterday and we've heard some a lot yesterday and a lot today, then when we come back on the 21st, we can specifically say, yes, we can move forward with one as long as these two, three, four repeating themes are addressed.

So a friendly amendment, can we just not ham in the conversation so if they want to bring up another point that we can allow them to do that? Oh, absolutely. Okay. So to include in the stakeholder meeting to address the specific concerns of the business owners around alternative one or leave that out? Why don't we just leave it open-ended, Mayor? I think that's the best way to do this. I'll accept that friendly amendment. Thank you. All right. Council Member Goldstein? It feels like this is the only way that we're going to move forward, so I will vote yes. Council Member Hawley? I would never favor some stakeholders over others, no. Council Member O'Brien? Yes. Council Member Winslow? No. Vice Mayor Bennett?

Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Yes. Carries 4-2 with one recusal. Okay. Take a five-minute break, and we can get back and hopefully get through the closet. Really quick before we go, do you want to do a closed session? Wait till we come back on. The announcement. The announcement. Yes. Come on.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But there's some investment with that money that would save us money down the road. So, of course, abandon the system. part of it, so it would have a little bit of an aesthetic element as well. Just to check, it says the cause remains unknown, but this had to have been like heavy machinery on the plaza, right? Like what else could have caused all of these to break? It's hard to say. I mean, it is fair that really the only use that we've changed in the last 20 years down there was probably the ice rink and the installation, the ice rink itself on top of the plaza. All those heavy skaters.

That darn Zamboni. Council Member Goldstein. I was just looking for clarification on something we were talking about with the sand for installing the ice rink, and the city manager said that option two would pay for itself within a year. Is that, that's compared to option one? How much? Yeah, so that we would save 50k not bringing in the sand. Is that correct? By the time we bring in the sand, and then at the conclusion of the season, we have to remove all that sand. Wow. Okay, and it seems like we're for sure continuing the ice rink at this point. Okay, that's expensive sand. Thank you for that clarification. I know, I know. We could just make like a sandy plaza during the off season, off season. Okay, this isn't on the agenda. How many speakers do we have? We have one.

All right. Hello again. So I'm really torn on this one, but part of me, I know you cannot respond, but I would like to throw out there, have we evaluated how much you actually, when the fountain was working, had it on? Like how much of a percentage the entire year? So if you're going to expend more funds, does it make sense to do so? Is the plan that it would be able to be on more than what it has? That kind of thing. I think that would be kind of fiscally responsible to think about. I do love the, somebody in this town takes the most wonderful pictures of like the downtown plaza events and the kids frolicking in it and the older people frolicking in it are fun. And I think it is a good central gathering place. So I guess the only other thing I would say is we're staff spitballing what would go there if we didn't do the fountain. And if so, what would that look like given that, of course, the stage is not too far from that. And that is where people, I think, tend to dance and do their thing. So I'm a fan of when we talk about downtown revitalization, just think about what do we use the space for what will work best. And again, how often were we actually using what was going on?

And I'm a fan of the, if we feel like we do use it enough, I'm a fan of let's try to recoup some of the money by looking at that option that you spoke of, Skylar. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you. That was it. All right. Further discussion by council or questions? Council Member Hawley? Yeah, I remember Council Member Goldstein incorporated, incorporated whimsy into their political campaign. And I fully align with the whimsy, the whimsy aspect of your politics. So as long as we're not going with option three, I will be happy. Council Member O'Brien. So my daughter said I need to have more whimsy in my life. So I completely concur. You're very whimsical, I understand. So I think option two makes a lot of sense. I think spending a little bit more money right now and making it easier when we have the ice skating rink, which is a downtown hit, I think makes the most sense. And there's not further discussion. I'll make a motion to support option two.

I'd second that. All right. Council Member Goldstein, and then we'll go to the vote. I'm just glad that we're talking about maintaining the fountain. It's an important part of our plaza. Council Member Winslow? Yeah, I mean, it makes sense from the savings standpoint using the ice rink. I think, on a broader standpoint, I always felt like we overdid it on the hardscaping a little bit and go figure out more too much pavement downtown. I think that's a lot of people's opinion, but there's difficulties with the old plaza and, you know, we can always reminisce old things. I just really hope that in doing this, because there is some like change into it, that we don't skimp on what looks good. And I think that's not what's being presented here. I just want to make sure that it's going to continue to be a really nice looking thing or maybe even look nicer because we'll re-pour everything and restore some of the artwork.

When we redo this, can we insulate those so we can like open them up and work on them and not have to dig out concrete again when they break? Yeah, absolutely. So the intent would be to go with a more modern design that's a little bit more serviceable. Yeah. We wouldn't have to be breaking apart the concrete in order to get to them. Can you incorporate some bike lanes around there? By the way, I forgot to thank the police department for changing their dress code for bicycle cops. That was on the last item. So we have a motion in a second. I know there's some really good pictures. We have a motion in a second. Okay. Council Member Goldstein? Yes. Council Member Hawley? Yes. Council Member O'Brien?

Yes. Council Member van Overbeek is recused on this item. Council Member Winslow? Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Aye. Carry 6-0 with one recusal. Okay. Is he still here? Okay. All right. Well, let's go ahead and start in the essence of time. We got a few minutes here. Perklet analysis. Brendan Audubonny, Director of Public Works and Engineering. Yes. And our Associate Planner, Jesse Hudson, is going to be doing the presentation for this. All right. So just go ahead and get yourself warmed up there, and then we'll wait for our two esteemed colleagues to make it back. to esteemed colleagues to make it back.

Mayor, would you like me to report on closed session while we have a minute? Can you do it without? Earlier in the meeting, the council did have a closed session to continue to discuss the city manager recruitment. There's no reportable action from that. There was just direction that was given from the council to staff in that matter. All right. Go ahead. Good evening, Mayor and members of the city council. My name is Jesse Hudson, and I'm an associate planner in the Public Works Engineering Department. Tonight, I'll be presenting a discussion on our department's research into parklets. So what is a parklet? A parklet is a space or structure temporarily installed within the existing parking space.

Parklets are not currently defined or allowed in our municipal code. Our code does allow the use of outdoor cafes, which must use existing widened sidewalk or widen a new section of sidewalk. So first, some background on the history of parklets in Chico. 2016 is when the first discussion on parklets began, but there was no further discussion on the topic until the COVID pandemic. In 2020, the city adopted an emergency executive order to allow temporary parklets for outdoor dining. In 2022, the emergency executive order and the nine existing parklet permits expired. The municipal code has since been updated to allow permanent or temporary outdoor cafes, but not parklets, in the public right-of-way.

No outdoor cafe applications have been submitted since this update. At the May 20th, 2025 City Council meeting, council directed staff to complete a report highlighting past discussions and decisions surrounding parklets in downtown Chico. This topic was later presented at the November 3rd, 2025 Internal Affairs Committee meeting, where staff was directed to research the feasibility of developing a parklet program for Chico. To complete this research, staff looked to cities similar to Chico, such as Penaluma, San Luis Obispo, Eureka, and Ventura. We also researched San Francisco as they have a well-developed parklet program. We found these cities have municipal codes with language relatively similar to our outdoor cafe language, except they allow parklets and include definitions for them.

They also provide guideline documents that identify requirements for parklet design. These guidelines primarily focus on safety elements, which I will highlight in the following slides. Some common themes that we saw, parklets should be set back from intersections for pedestrian visibility. They should not be located on streets with a speed limit over 25 miles per hour. For reference, Maine and Broadway have a speed limit of 25 miles per hour, as downtown is identified as a central business district. The structures themselves should be designed in a way that provides good visibility, such as wall height and minimal roof cover. Barriers should be installed on the chance a vehicle does collide with the structure.

There should also be adequate space for emergency responders to access the parklet and adjacent buildings. It is important that stormwater can access storm drains and the drains can easily be accessed for maintenance. Lighting should be an appropriate brightness, and cords should not create dripping hazards. If any propane heating devices are used, they should be stored properly. ADA accessibility must be met by designing the structure in a way that allows access for all users. If on-site alcohol is served, then the applicant must ensure all local and state laws are followed. Staff estimates developing a parklet program could take approximately six to nine months, if not longer. It may include tasks such as identifying a funding source, developing a new ordinance, or updating the existing ordinance, developing a process and guidelines for permit applications, potentially developing pre-approved parklet designs, and engaging the stakeholders.

Staff recommends council discuss information and provide staff additional direction. This concludes the presentation. We are available for any follow-up questions you might have. Questions before we go to speakers? Nope. Okay. Well, nope. Well, actually, yeah, I tried to press it, but I'm okay with hearing from speakers first if I can ask you more questions after it's needed. Okay. Nice PowerPoint, Mr. Hudson. Thank you. I wondered, reading this, because there's a suggestion, which was that we would need to have, like, a whole program, and it's going to take a significant amount of staff time, which our department's overburden, so they're looking at hiring consultants for it. But given that there are these pretty, maybe more or less standard safety elements that other cities incorporate, and that we can look at these other cities and see that we like what they have going on.

We like that here. Is there, like, a rough and dirty version where we can just take that out of there? We can even go, like, go top, like, the most restrictive, and let's just say, let's just pull that, because we want people to be able to do these sort of in the near term, and part of this is me thinking that the downtown streets would be torn up in some time, and so this is, like, will this work in the interim? Of course, this can apply in other places in town, but, yeah, can you respond to that? Yeah, Jesse, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but through the research, you know, San Francisco ultimately had, like, the most robust parklet program, all these different scenarios. So generally speaking, I think you can water that down to a more reflective kind of set of boundaries.

To Jesse's point and some of the details presented, there's kind of do's and don'ts to consider, and so, yeah, I mean, I think we can develop something relatively quick. Like a lot of things, though, easy and quick don't always result in the best outcomes, and so utilizing something like a San Francisco model, I think, from what we've seen, had kind of the most robust considerations of all those different factors. That's a good thing. I like to hear, it feels a bit when we're, like, this is such a big deal. It's, like, in order for us to let people do what we already had people doing, just in recent memory, you know, Google Maps images, there's this barrier where, like, we need to hire consultants for that, and I would really like to think that we can somehow streamline that process and just make it happen.

Of course, we can review, like, a year later, you know, to make sure that things are up to par. I would say San Francisco, obviously, is very different than Chico, but they spent a lot of money developing a whole packet, and so a lot of those figures and considerations are in there. I think that would be the processes kind of going through and extrapolating those certain elements that would be critical to kind of give guidance on. Yeah, and we could benefit from the hard work of San Franciscans that they put into this. Council Member O'Brien. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Can you go back to one of those slides, Jesse? I'll stop you when you find it. I can go back. Yeah, that doesn't look like whimsy to me.

I'm sorry, that's lacking. You weren't there. I can go back to one of those slides, but I can go back to one of those slides. I can go back to one of those slides, but I can go back to one of those slides. But is it cute? I'm not sure it's cute or whimsical, but I'll withhold my judgment. All right. Now I want to comment. Okay, also just, I was going to say for context that we've been talking about this for a year. I had brought it up probably last March, and I'm glad we're talking about it again. Yes, these didn't look perfect, but they were put up quite quickly during the pandemic with these kind of ugly barriers. You can also see there are barrels. And yeah, the point of this program from my conversations with our engineering director is we want to be able to make sure that these look good as well as being functional places for our businesses to have more customers sit outside.

Yeah, I am skeptical of potentially putting too many requirements on them. I would rather have the outdoor seating, even if it looks a little less than perfect, versus over-regulating it, but I hope we can find a balance. All right. How many speakers do we have? We have two. All right. Three minutes each. Thank you. And our two speakers are Jesse Horgan, followed by Anika Rodriguez. Hello. Once again, I was a parking manager for four hotels in downtown San Francisco for five years up until 2020, and I was surrounded by parklets. They were great. They changed the whole feel of the street that we were on. The other amazing thing is each parklet reflected the personality of the business, told you a little something about how they ran, what kind of crowd they had.

Right next to one of my hotels was a shop that specialized in Japanese goods, and they had Japanese plants, and customers could buy drinks and come out and sit in the plants in the bench and drink them. And they really used their creativity to improve the environment, the atmosphere on the street. And that's what we need in downtown. We need to retain our businesses by improving the atmosphere, making downtown a fun place to hang out. The changes that it takes to put in a parklet, a lower speed limit, pedestrian spaces, these things improve the feel of downtown, making it more appealing for people to bring their families. My family had a cafe in downtown Reno when I was growing up. We did not have the opportunity to make a parklet, but one thing I learned from that experience was that you have to continually adapt as a small business, and you have to look for ways to show your creativity and pull your customers in.

One of those is the environment that you create. And so the city giving businesses those opportunities to create something, a place for their customers to hang out, is really valuable to changing the perception of downtown Chico as a place where there's closed storefronts to being a place where it's fun to hang out. Thank you. And Anika Rodriguez is our last speaker. I'm so excited about this topic because I love parklets, and I read all the staff reports this week, and it was a lot, you guys. And I am worried that we're a little bit overthinking parklets. They don't have to be super complicated, but I did want to give you guys some data because Director Audubonny said he would appreciate if more stakeholders provided data.

So in January 2018, January is our slowest month of the year, so that's why I decided to give you guys these numbers. Pluto's was still my neighbor. They had four outdoor dining tables. I had 768 transactions that month. That is the lowest transaction month. Going to January 2019, after Pluto's had closed, we dropped down to 624 transactions, an 18% increase. January of 26 has been our best January since post-COVID, and we only had 363 transactions. That would be 52.7% less than January of 2018 when I had a great, strong neighbor who had outdoor dining. We're the only block on Main Street, I think, actually downtown, that doesn't have any food. I feel like it's really hurting our block. You can feel it, that when people are outside, they're dining, they're talking, they're hanging out, they notice you.

And so we're lacking that at Anika Burke. And I just really encourage you guys to move forward on this. Let's bring the whimsy. I'm sorry, Naked Lounge, it wasn't cute. We can do better, but it doesn't have to be ultra complicated and something that I would like to recommend because I do know parklets are really expensive. In Berkeley, they have shared parklets for multiple dining, so if you buy something at one restaurant, you can go to the shared parklet and enjoy it. I know that I'm loitering at Naked Lounge all the time. I'm sometimes sitting in their chairs when I didn't purchase something. Thank you guys so much for your time. Have a great night. All right. Further comments? Council Member Van Opeck?

Yeah, so we had parklets right after or during COVID or after COVID, and they were eyesores. I mean, the K walls, you know, it was one by Duffy's and one by the coffee place on 2nd Street. And the other thing is they consume parking spaces, and I can't support anything that's going to remove any parking from downtown. So, and the last point is, you know, this is all about outdoor dining. I'm all for outdoor dining, and the answer is you pour concrete, you create a barrier to traffic, and you apply to the city for a permit to do that. So, bringing back this parklet idea, which is something we already tried, and we all decided, or at least the council decided, that it was a bad idea. I don't know why we're revisiting it.

So, I'm opposed. I'm going to say Council Member Winslow because his button's not working. My Bieber's broken. Sorry. That wasn't a very whimsical take. I'm sorry, I ran over back. I think that it's so out of my, like, personal experience to think that people thought they were such eyesores that they weren't worthwhile. People love sitting up. People still bring it up. It's been years, and people still bring it up. Like, in any mention of it, I think it's a lot of attention because people want to see other people sitting outside, and they want to sit outside, and it's like, take advantage of the nice weather and stuff, and I like the idea of these kind of temporary ones because you can kind of decide if it's not getting enough business, look, we're looking at charging them the lost parking revenue, which I forget what that is, but it's not nothing.

So, there's sort of this natural filter in who would use one of these. So, some aren't really used. You know, they'd go out. And I really think that we'd be better off supporting this just like any city with a good downtown. And I mean, except for Chico, any city with a good downtown. I think you're seeing these right now. And I think that we should make it happen soon in light of the possibility of a downtown street project. So, I would like to explore what we can do to make, put on just enough parameters to get satisfactory output here where there can be a line of design review, like go through the Planning Commission's Architecture Review Board, even the City Council, just like Stobel did for their bike rack.

And we can just say yes and let it happen, but without having to hire consultants in order to draft the ordinance, that's what I would like to see here. Yeah, Council Member Goldstein, go ahead. Okay, thank you. The buttons turn off after 10 or something. Thanks, Mayor. Yeah, I really want to see this continue. I think it's a great opportunity, especially in the interim where whatever we choose to do downtown, that will take several years. And we need something now to help our downtown businesses. And expecting people to just pour concrete, that is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. And it's unrealistic. Yeah, tens or hundreds of thousands, especially knowing that they can only use it for like five years before we do a new project.

So we need something temporary. We need it to look good, but we need it to happen fast. But I would like to see staff come back with a draft ordinance knowing that that could take some time to establish it well. Hopefully only the six months, not the six to nine months. So when folks are ready, I can make a motion. Thank you. I don't see any other comment. I would just comment that I'm very sensitive to the fact that there are a lot of business owners that have gone the, I don't want to say the right way, but it is the right way to go through the ordinance that we have right now to do the pop out and pay for the extra and have spent thousands of dollars to do beautiful patios. And what I don't want to do is, you know, we need to do better, I think, than we did during COVID.

But knowing that we're going to be ripping everything up in five to ten years, depending on how long it takes and funding and everything else, I think it's silly to ask a business owner at this time to invest that amount of money in pouring concrete. So I'm willing, as long as they are aesthetically pleasing, safe, and we do the other things, I'm willing to, you know, look at bringing something forward and maybe it'll be a shot in the arm for downtown. Who knows? Councilmember, let me go, I wasn't spoke yet. Councilmember O'Brien. Yeah, so we want to just do this right. I think there's a lot of dynamics. I appreciate Councilman Van Overbeck's concerns. I think drafting, crafting a ordinance, something we can look at, see what this actually will do.

I'm certainly willing to support that. I may not support it in the end, but I would like to see that and see if it's something that will benefit our downtown. Councilmember Winslow. So I remember the owner of Raw Bar restaurants, I believe he said he put $300,000 into a widening sidewalk, but you know what? Nobody's going to put in a little bit of money and have one that looks nearly as nice as Raw Bars, and that will continue to stand out. But I don't think that just because people in the past have been burdened by city regulations and forced to do something nicer than maybe they otherwise would have done, we should maintain those regulations and all these other businesses who would potentially benefit, maybe even need it for the survival of their business to expand for some extra space.

And in addition to the external benefits and just liveliness downtown, the feeling of safety people get when other people are sitting outside. But for making a decision that is doing it the right way or just enough the right way within our time constraints and not hiring a ton of consultants for too long, what direction would we need to give? I feel like, is it aesthetics that is making this complicated where we want to have design parameters and we want to hire people to make the designs? Like if we can take all these safety things out of these other ordinances, then what do we need to provide in order for this to be as simple as possible for staff to execute? Just going through the details and drafting an ordinance of all those, I know we want to make it simple, but there's so many nuances, right?

Parallel parking, diagonal parking, how many per block phase do we want to allow? What are those impacts? And then just the design of it. As Jesse mentioned, certain criteria of keeping a certain distance from intersections, from a site distance perspective, making it accessible. So, yes, there's elements that we can draw from it, but we really have to then craft it so that it is understandable when and how it applies. And so that just, you know, takes time by time you do that research, draft the ornaments, circulate it internally for input from all the different various departments that will have input on that as well. There could potentially be building components to it and where they have to meet building code requirements if there wants to be lighting, electrical, gas, those types of things.

So just kind of going through thoughtfully of what all those components are just takes time and then getting on the council agenda and preparing a staff report and all that. So just with everything else we got going on, that's just kind of the realistic time frame. Okay. Is there anything else that we can do to make that simpler? To decide, as in like a question, you know, that we can, you know, yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, simple in my mind, I guess, is making it clear so that someone who's looking to do it can go follow this ordinance, look at the requirements, and achieve an outcome that is going to get submitted and reviewed and approved quickly and timely. And so having clear requirements is important in making sure that someone who's considering one can do it efficiently, timely, and get it through on that first go around.

Okay. Well, I'm up for any requirements we would want to put on it that would not be $300,000 of pouring concrete. Well, preferably far less. Yeah. Just to get it through, I mean. Yeah. Well, I'm unsure how complicated of a motion I need to make, but I will move that we direct staff to develop a parklet program. Do you need anything further than that? Yeah, it would just entail bringing forward an ordinance amending the municipal code to reflect those criteria. I'd second that. All right. Staff bring forth a whimsical ordinance reflecting that criteria. All right. We got a motion and a second. And that was Council Member Hawley who made the second. Correct. O'Brien. Goldstein with the motion.

It's getting late. Okay. Council Member Goldstein? Yes. Council Member Hawley? Yes. Council Member O'Brien? I'll take a look. Council Member van Overbeek? No. Council Member Winslow? Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Aye. Carry 6-1. Okay. We had our passed our 10 o'clock with GNR, so we will move the other items forward. Reports and communications. The following reports and communications are provided for the Council's information only. No action can be taken on items under this section unless the Council agrees to include on a subsequent agenda. City Manager's report? Nothing for tonight. Council Member request? APMP, according pursuant to APMP 1010, Council Members may verbally request an item to be agendized at a future meeting after stating what the item would be.

A majority vote of Council is needed in order for staff to agendize. Do we have any Council Member requests? Council Member Hawley? Thank you, Mayor Reynolds. I'd like to agendize a discussion regarding need-based sewer rate models benefiting low-income residents. Similar to what Sac Area Sewer District, the City of Cerritos, the City of West Sacramento, Redwood City, and a small handful of others that found themselves in similar situations have done. Seconded. Okay. All right. We got a motion or a second? Council Member Goldstein? Yes. Council Member Hawley? Yes. Council Member O'Brien? Yes. Council Member van Overbeek? No. Council Member Winslow? Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett? Mayor Reynolds? Willing to listen.

I'm sorry, what was that? Yes. Okay. I carry 6-1. Council Member van Overbeek? So the reconstruction of the Bidwell Mansion or not is something that's a major issue for this town. I think it's important that the City Council express an opinion about what we would like the outcome to be. So I would like to have us have a conversation about what we want to see happen there at the Bidwell Mansion. And I can define some options in there. I'll second that.

Council Member Goldstein? Sure, yes. Council Member Hawley? That's out of our jurisdiction now. Council Member O'Brien? I'll be willing to have the discussion. There are some things that are in motion, obviously, that need to play out, but I'll have that discussion, yes. Council Member van Overbeek? Yes. Vice Mayor, oh, excuse me, Council Member Winslow? Yeah. Vice Mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Yeah, well, it is state property. It is in our city, so I think it's worthy of at least the conversation. I'm not sure how much influence we'll have, but I'm worthy of the conversation. Carry 6-1. Yeah. Okay, Vice Mayor Bennett? So, I would like to request to agendize a reconsideration of my prior vote on the sewer fee increase, item 5.1, which was heard on March 17th.

I'm making a motion to approve by request. Do I have a second? I'll second that. All right, there's a motion and a second for reconsideration of a prior vote on item 5.1, where you were a prevailing member of the vote. Council Member Goldstein? No, as we can discuss this during the 218 process we discussed earlier. Council Member Hawley? No. Council Member O'Brien? Yes. Council Member van Overbeek? Yes. Council Member Winslow? Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett? Yes. Mayor Reynolds? Aye. Carries 5.2. Is that it? All right. I'm adjourned to, we will adjourn to closed session on Tuesday, April 21st at 5 p.m. or 5.30, followed by the regular City Council meeting at 6 p.m. in the Council chambers at 4.21. casein'