Council rejects new camping ordinance rules

Turn on my microphone, that'll help. And call to order our October 6th City Council meeting and we will start with an invocation by our chaplain. Yes, there you are. Come on forward. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members, I thought I'd ask the Lord's blessing on tonight's meeting. Father in heaven, I thank you for all of your goodness. I thank you for this beautiful city of Chico in which we live and work. And I pray your blessing on tonight's proceedings, be with our governing officials and I pray that you'd lead them in a way that benefits all of the people of Chico, that your wisdom would be on display and ultimately that your son would be glorified. Amen. Thank you. All right, please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Salute and pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Roll call. Madam Clerk, can you call our roll for us, please? Council Member Goldstein. Present. Council Member Hawley. Here. Council Member O'Brien. Here. Council Member van Overbeek. Present. Council Member Winslow. I'm here. Vice Mayor Bennett. Here. Mayor Reynolds. Here. Speaker card and remote participation announcement. If you are here in person, you should first complete a speaker card found at the back of the chamber. Once completed, please turn your card into the City Clerk and the speakers are taken in the order the cards are received.

Please note that all of you who wish to speak via Zoom will be asked to raise your hand when it is time for public comment for each specific item. Once the first speaker begins, no additional cards or Zoom speakers will be accepted. 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, we may call a recess requesting removal of such persons. I will mention also that we did have a power outage earlier, so if we lose power, we have provisions in place and we'll let you know at that time. So just be aware that there is a chance that could happen again. City Attorney, Mr. Jones, can you give us our closed session announcement?

Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. There were five items in closed session. The first were there was anticipated litigation on two cases and direction was given to legal counsel on that labor negotiation. There was a update also provided from staff. The two existing litigation matters, the Hall v. Chico and the Vedder v. Chico, counsel gave direction to legal counsel and there's a discussion on that matter. And finally, on the public employee evaluation of the City Clerk, there was a discussion that took place with council members. And that's the report tonight. All right. Thank you so much. If I can have Cal Water, Ms. Shannon McGovern and staff, whoever's coming down, meet me at the podium.

Now? Oh, there we are. Now we're working. Hello. So, a proclamation for Cal Water on their 100-year anniversary. Whereas California Water Service, known as Cal Water, was founded in 1926 by three World War I veterans whose vision helped establish a water utility that could serve generations of California families and communities, including the City of Chico. And whereas the company has demonstrated exemplary stewardship through conservation programs and rebates that have helped customers reduce their water usage by 30% between year 2000 and 2020, supporting both environmentally sustainable and household affordability. And whereas Cal Water has been recognized as one of America's most responsible companies and world's most trustworthy companies by Newsweek and by Great Places to Work, reflecting the company's commitment to protecting the planet, caring for people, and operating with utmost integrity.

And whereas Cal Water continues to maintain and improve Chico's water infrastructure, including projects that strengthen our water reliability and fire protection while monitoring and testing water quality to support the health and well-being of its customers. And whereas through generations of employees and leadership, Cal Water has maintained its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for customers and communities, creating jobs, supporting the local economy, and engaging with community organizations in our neighborhoods and throughout California. Now therefore, let it be resolved that I, Kasey Reynolds, Mayor of the City of Chico, on behalf of the entire City Council, do hereby congratulate and recognize Cal Water Service on its 100-year anniversary and express appreciation to its district employees, past and present, for a century of service to our community and extend our best wishes for many years continued of community partnership and service to residents and visitors of Chico.

Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Yeah, just real briefly, on behalf of all of our men and women that work out there 365 days a year to ensure reliable, safe water service, not just for our customers and our community, for our fire department as well, thank you for this honor. Thank you. Thanks very much.

All right. Consent Agenda. All matters listed under the Consent Agenda are considered routine in nature and therefore can be enacted with one motion. Are there any no votes or Council disqualifications? Yeah, I'll just register a no on 2.2. Okay. No? Okay. Do we have any speakers on consent? I'm sorry. What did Council Member Winslow say? 2.2. Okay. Yes, we have one speaker and it's Stephen Hazel. Okay.

So, yeah, there's three minutes on Consent Agenda, Mr. Hazel. Okay. Please don't interrupt me. Okay. Thank you. You don't like to be interrupted. I don't like to be interrupted. You know, that's a lot of money. Forty-nine million dollars. Where do you get the money? I told you where you get the money. Always give some background. You know what? I wasn't going to be a cop. Me. I was a security guard in 1977, top security guard, guarded everything, FMC in San Jose. You know what? I moved to APS. I was a supervisor, 19 or 20 years old, for Northern Telecom, 2050 in Santa Clara. It's a communication company, it's still there. Top supervisor before your chief was even Indian. I could have been a, I don't know, Director of FBI, you know that?

You're just, what happened was, you're the misguided cop. It's always that way. You got your Michael Vincent, I had a Donald Azzarini, but you know what? He got caught lying on a witness stand, so guess what? But I, two felonies, like, I lost my guard card. I went from there, that's why I got into drafting. I wouldn't, but I- Mr. Hazel, your comments are not on the subject matter. I'm not asking for it, I'm talking about my background. For the city council. But you're about to police officer. This is a warning, you're disrupting a public meeting. Okay, I'm talking about the police officer. I gave a background myself that I was going to be a police officer, briefly what I went through. And people are, why should we pay if we got a Michael Vincent, you know, to deal with?

That's what we're looking at as a public. See, we're all on the same team. It's like this, I brought an example, like, you know, there's a Hershey bar and there's a Jiffy peanut butter, right, or a peanut butter, there's a Hershey bar, they have the gun. You know how it goes. There's an open jar, and all of a sudden this, boom, they come together. What do we get? Before Katie Hawley was even born, we got a Reese's bar, oh my God! Mr. Hawley, this is your second warning. This is not on closed session or on consent agenda. My presentation, there's nothing wrong with it, I'm just saying that we're all on the same team. We're all on the same team. Why are we divided? See, you divide everybody and you do this, you're cutting me off.

This is my right to speak, she doesn't want me to, so I get down to common sense, she's trying to divide us. We see the debates on TV, she got a debate coming up. Hey, the cop, we're all the same citizens. Why are we divided? Like I tried to tell you, I was going to be a police officer. I told you what happened to me, there was a corrupt police officer that threw me off. I admit it, it's true. The cop's guilty, it doesn't matter. You just have to deal with the bad ones. You don't deal with that. And she's cutting me off, I'm out of line, she's brought me cover, that's so corrupt what she's doing. She's violating my rights of free speech. I'm born at Berkeley, I'm a Pulsar boy, free speech. See, I draw the people out, remember, words, then take a sword, a bomb, I've got no words, get the bad guy, just take the S, sword, put it at the end, it's words that get these guys.

They hate it. The truth that comes out, they hate it. The mayor, oh, she cuts me off all the time because she's afraid the truth would come out. Of course, you're a corrupt police officer. We're paying half your money, where are you going to get the money? I'd like to see them paid, but no way, if you're corrupt, you're corrupt. And I show it. This is true. It's this and this. Who's guilty? Is it the guy with this or that? Well, whatever, who walks around with an open jury, it's the funniest little thing, the chocolate bar and the peanut butter. That's time. Thank you, Mr. Hazel. Council Member Bennett. Words. So I wish to pull 2.3. All right, we're going to pull 2.3 and we have a no vote registered.

Do I have a motion? Move to approve. Second. We have a tie on a motion and a second. That was a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda as read with item 2.3 removed for further discussion. Council Member Goldstein. Aye. 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. Motion carried 7-0. All right, item 2.3. Council Member Bennett. Sorry. It's okay. So this is no reflection on the actual subject matter, but I do wish to, and I haven't used the word this term in a long time, but I think we need to vet this a little bit more. We're hiring two full-time staff members to the city and I think it deserves a little bit of discussion.

So I'm going to make the motion that we postpone it for today and hear it again in two weeks. That will give us time to talk. And I'm going to request that you make a presentation at the next meeting about the addition of those two employees. All right. Council Member Goldstein. I just want to say that I had talked a bit with our city manager before about this and I support the addition of the positions. I wouldn't mind a bit more info, but I am surprised to hear that we're looking at postponing it. That's all I have to say. Council Member Hawley. I can commence the Vice Mayor's request. It is a significant amount of money, $230,000 and $330,000 from the general fund. So I definitely understand wanting to speak about this more, but I would like some direction for staff on what content in the presentation you would like to see besides what is in the two page staff report.

Is it the need that really needs to be justified to you? I believe our city manager will address my concern appropriately at the time that she makes a presentation, period. Council Member Winslet. Would you mind elaborating a little bit for us now and then we'll see if we can get there. Thank you. I appreciate it. Through the mayor, yes. So the request before you is for two additional positions from January to June, the rest of this fiscal year. As I came into the position of the city manager, the city manager's office staffing is currently 2.5 FTE. I come from a similar sized city, both in Santa Rosa and Vallejo, where those staff in the city manager's office range from 8 to 13 to get the work of the community and the city done.

Two and a half is a challenge. So the request for the public information officer, justification on that is to increase communication as the community may have already seen. We started a city monthly newsletter, doing some filming and some outreach to the public. We have a whole communications plan that we'd like to work to integrate more engagement with the community. And I can't do that alone. So I need that public information officer position. It's a very common position across cities to have that PIO position. And then the admin, it is also very common for city managers to have that full-time assistant to help with scheduling and contracting and analysis and providing the information. As I have some days between 10 to 12 Zooms a day, I need that support to help me get the work done.

And so it's a very modest request. I'm asking for six months of funding. I'm happy to have Director Martin speak to our budget and the availability that we have. What I'd really like to do is a full assessment of citywide staffing come starting in our new budget discussions. So we can talk about that workload and staffing and the needs there, but most immediately to get the work done, even through the first quarter and second quarter, I will need some additional support and assistance. So that is what the request is for. All right. Council, since you were mentioned, Ms. Martin, would you mind addressing us at this time? Sure. Happy to. When we had the discussion about the funding for this position, considered the available funds in the general fund, we're anticipating a bit of a surplus in the general fund as we do most years.

So we have that funding available through these next basically six months by the time we get the positions filled. And then as City Manager Haen mentioned, we'll look at this at a broader scope when it comes budget time and see where we need to fill gaps and what we need to do to fund this going forward into the next budget cycle. All right. Oh, you're broken again. All right. Council Member Winslow. Okay. Was there a second on the motion by Vice Mayor Bennett? Not yet. Okay. Well, I'll just I'll just weigh in then that I had discussed this with Ms. Haen before and I like what she's doing so far and I want to make sure she's equipped to keep the momentum going and not hung up. And so I do appreciate you pulling this because I thought it was weird that we had new hires on the consent agenda.

So I'm glad we had the discussion, but it's been noticed. There's been a lot of, I think, ask for the entire time I've been on the council for the city to step up communication. So the public information officer addresses that, but also making sure that she has the tools and the team that she needs in order to move forward on some of these council priorities, which have been backlogged for a long time. I think it's important that we get it going. So I'll wait to see if there's a second or make a substitute motion. Council Member O'Brien. So yeah, thank you for the explanation, Gillian, I appreciate that and I understand where you're coming from. I think that communication piece especially is critically important.

I think that needs to be enhanced from staff, from the city to our community. I do completely agree with that. And I think the broader conversation we need to have that you mentioned, I think is also critically important. So I think there's another gaping hole. I won't mention what that hole is right now. And that can be brought up during budget, but thank you. So I'm sorry, did you make a motion, Addison? No he didn't. No, I was still waiting to declare the motion. So Council Member Goldstein, I'm going to go to Council Member Van Overbeek, because you already spoke. Okay. Council Member Van Overbeek, go ahead. Well, I've also spoken to the city manager about it. And I mean, the concern is we have, we're in a situation where we have flat revenue.

Director Martin says we've got funds to cover this. So we need to be really careful about extra headcount, particularly with all the inflationary pressures. But I also recognize we have some needs that are unmet. We have the funding to pay for these two positions. And so I'd like to make a motion that we approve this hiring of these two positions. I'd second that. All right, Council Member Goldstein. I was also going to voice support. I've heard from so many people, especially during this election season, that what they want is more transparency and communication from their city government. And I think that this could be a really good opportunity, seeing that we have the funds, to be able to hire somebody to help us do that.

All right. Council Member Van Overbeek, would you consider a friendly amendment to that, that just we ensure before we come back at our budget session that we would have, I don't know if we call it a public staffing audit it was already mentioned but that we that when we come forward it that would you accept that as absolutely yes I just want to make sure that gets done that's a great idea thank you okay okay thank you councilmember Goldstein I was actually going to ask one more question it can can you elaborate on the staffing audit was that already in the in the staff report no it was what the city manager alluded to but basically an audit of all departments and what their staffing is so when it comes back at budget time we have all of the information I see a nod I just wanted to make sure a city manager yes I would call it a staffing assessment we'll look at workload and staffing and do a staffing assessment for budget then that's a yes okay councilmember Hawley yes councilmember O'Brien yes councilmember van Overbeek yes councilmember Winslow yes vice mayor Bennett I thought I had a good idea but that's not how it worked out yes I do support you mayor Reynolds I carry 7-0 all right I didn't public comment members of the public may address the council at this time on any matter not listed on the agenda and worth are within the jurisdictional authority for those of you who are participating via zoom please raise your hand now if you would like to speak please note that council cannot take action at this meeting on these requests made under this section of the agenda how many speakers do we have we have 11 in person and I don't see any hands going up in zoom so the 11 so two minutes each no go to okay all right I'm gonna call the first three names and if you can line up in the middle aisle please Vic s followed by Sam barber and Julie three so Vic s and the mayor has asked for two minutes each hello my name is Vic and it has been several months since last time I attended City Council meeting please know we need to have red light surveillance cameras on Palmetto and Sheridan Avenue note the Police Department should not mention motorist names and also not mention their license plate numbers there needs to be more professionalism and I'm not sure if this is true enough that there could be a possible somebody filing a lawsuit because of this I hope it's not true however those cars that do not stop at stop signs and are speeding down these roads need to be accessible they're not accessible oh my gosh accountable these red light speed cameras could generate money if they are paid in full by these drivers I held on to this article and it was done last year early in October which is real interesting I spoke about this before where San Francisco speed cameras ticket thousands and they had generated thousands of dollars because of this for the community and I think that is a wonderful thing to do but you just don't do it in parts of our community you got to do it through a lot of different parts which I have brought this up especially on the streets that I live on I walk my dog at least three different times a day during early early morning sometimes early early before noon and in the evening I have talked with many residents on Sheridan Avenue and Palmetto and side streets and they are frustrated how motorists are exhibiting or be just going through these stop signs and not even stopping and they're on their phones and they're texting and they're speeding safety should be a number one consideration on our streets period and if you recall a couple years ago I was on my way to go volunteer for reading pals and person went down the street to stop and we're texting get my car and totaled it lastly I support Addison that's really a bird thank you Sam Barber followed by Julie three and then Bo pal hey y'all so we had that special meeting about the LPR cameras which was frustrating say the least I'm sure you probably noted that I got frustrated during that meeting one of the points the Republicans brought up Mike O'Brien and Tom Van Overbeek was that we have cell phones I'm the cool thing about a cell phone is I actually don't need to get one I purchased it with my own money it doesn't cost six hundred thousand dollars from a campfire mitigation fund there's some amount of guardrails on cell phones I don't have to accept cookies I can choose which applications I want and don't want on my phone no one consented to these LPR cameras we didn't purchase them individually we didn't democratically decide that we wanted six hundred thousand dollars from the campfire mitigation funds to go to these cameras we didn't decide that we wanted them to be shared with ice when they're out there murdering people and zip-tying naked children and putting them in the back of U-Hauls so if you're going to you know bring that kind of dumb rhetoric to a council meeting it just comes across as unprofessional and uneducated on the topic at hand that was frustrating the other piece I wanted to talk about was a little bit of sex education when it comes to consent so mr. van Overbeek actually commented on the Michael Williams situation he said there was no issues with consent in his opinion the interesting thing is you actually can't consent to having sex with a police officer on duty there is a implicit power dynamic at play believe it or not so that makes it so you cannot consent the second piece I wanted to talk about was there was a mentally unstable woman that Michael Williams had sex with cannot consent if someone is mentally unstable there was another woman who joked about wanting to have her orgasm before Michael Williams had his orgasm he got very mad she felt afraid if you're afraid you cannot consent the last piece is mr. van Overbeek had a podcast where he was commenting on this woman who gave him a hug was very happy about this thing he passed and then he noted she was very cute too I was just wondering if you would like to tell the council and everyone here how old that woman was he was commenting on it's time thank you that's what I thought okay so Julie three just a second before you start speaking please so I can line up Bo Powell and then Kevin Walters thank you go Julie thank you hello council Julie three district six here to advocate for those injured by the kovat vaccine me being one of them I sent you guys an email about a group that I was a panelist on today called medical doctors for kovat ethics international I actually got to speak to senator Ron Johnson and give him the information and research I did that shows that we have 1160 Americans who were killed in the hospitals vaccinated diagnosed with kovat and murdered on remdesivir remdesivir so it's something that he's investigating next Wednesday I'm going to be a panelist on a group led by Curtis cost called our children are under attack the CDC is targeting poor black and Hispanic children for the kovat 19 shot there is no kovat emergency is extremely dangerous and even deadly injection this is genocide parents say no to the CDC's kovat 19 vaccine for your children I'll remind you guys that March the 14th of 2022 Javier Becerra visited Chico he visited Butte County got in a private meeting at Enloe with select pediatricians and he wanted to know why our parents were so vaccine hesitant we were the lowest in the state he came they came up with the plan I got all the documents on FOIA I have it all documented by a journalist flashlights podcast Javier Becerra paid Butte County $225,000 to hunt little kids in Chico not paradise not Orville not Durham Chico and they started rolling out little vans all over the city I came and warned you people when they held the one over at the at the mall in April you let little kids get injected with poison you need to do something about this you need to warn people you need to get treatment you need to get healing there's nobody in this planet nobody in this room nobody in this county that knows more than me and I'm holding a podcast every Wednesday night called speaking truth to power on Twitter X it's Julie the number four Butte the number five we need more people to stand up and speak about this problem this county they've got some Siberian plague now happening that's not going to come back to this county we're not going to mask up the kids we're not going to lock up the seniors we're not going to isolate our social distance so please do something thank you Bo Powell followed by Kevin Walters and then Deb Doug Hipton been about a year ago when I came here I wanted to make sure I was here when Sean Morgan and and now the other guys gets my name they his name they were both on the council Sean Morgan apparently have been in the Finance Committee for a long time but I wanted both of them to remember about me and bringing it to their attention earlier about spraying I think what you're doing with the news media having the debates is a good thing but Chico Enterprise record has refused to write anything about the when your county legalized spraying the roadways action news has refused to do it when in 2019 when they were doing the housing development thing in my neighborhood Stephanie Lynn came out there and I told her you know she's taking pictures of our property and I told her about this you know it's I'm sure that the information we're getting from the debates is helpful like mr. Overbeck's the ability to make up numbers that's real helpful after taking over after Sean Morgan thank you mr. Winslow for sticking up for your mom that's what I'm doing my mother's lived in the mobile home park on Dayton Road for 40 years farmers didn't spray her there there's cops live there in our neighborhood they're despicable pigs Kevin Walters followed by Doug Hipkin and then Stephen Hazel all AI has been programmed to believe that we're grossly overpopulated all AI your Siri on your phone will tell you that it will reduce the population phenomenally David Wilcox before he was murdered off of ancient aliens said that they can murder 64,000 in one second Alex crawl carp of the CEO of Palantir says that he can murder anyone anywhere it's gonna be everyone everywhere the 75 data centers that are up and running right now are equal to ninety seven thousand five hundred neutron bombs which will disintegrate all organic life all birds all bees all humans all animals will cease to exist if all 5,000 data centers are completed it will be 6,500,000 neutron bombs which will exterminate all organic life on earth Palantir data centers AI 5g towers 6g towers part and Starlink off of Terminator all need to be liquidated or we're gonna be liquidated PG&E has billions of dollars from military industrial complex almost at military industrial complex all five armed forces have been weaponized against humans to exterminate us that's what chemtrails do there's only stopped at one state and that's Florida and it's $100,000 fine to spray chemtrails if PG&E has billions of dollars from the military industrial complex they could pay all the long nets to bring in the trash islands and trash can be turned into the plastic can be turned into thousands of barrels of fuel we conserved enough fuel to last every American until the year 3000 so oil gas propane registration definitely should never be over a dollar that's time thank you thank you I'm Doug Hipton followed by Steven Hazel and then Robin Klitski good evening mayor and council I'll keep this short for you guys tonight I know I'm backed by a large corporation but I grew up in this area and I have a vested interest in keeping it clean and I wanted to share some positives with you guys we have a recent Bidwell parks cleanup over there and I know you guys don't get to hear the stats very often but last year councilmember Winslow and I were in a dumpster trying to pack into it make sure it all fit this year we ran two-thirds of the tonnage that we ran last year so that's pretty awesome tells me I wish Skyler was here tonight but they're doing a great job out there especially with code enforcement and just keeping the trash off the streets doing a lot of camp cleanups and things like that so it's really cool to see year over year the the numbers that we're bringing in and not not having that trash in the parks anymore so we can use them because like I said I grew up here we were out at Thursday night last Thursday night market last week and the people didn't want to leave so that was pretty cool to see they didn't leave until I turned the headlights on and remove the roadblocks so but it was 930 and they were like okay you guys got to pack it in so that's the Chico I remember that's the Chico I grew up in and I'm happy to be part of it so thank you guys thank you Stephen Hazel followed by Robin Klitsky and then Dan Gonzalez

Wow hold two minutes okay I'm the poet by this ago with that automatic license plate reader you know what you know I was at the tourist shelter for up 14 months I recorded but you put my car stolen twice and when I got the apartment apartment 217 at Jarvis Gardens one year's birthday I won't tell her her name I'm at apartment 217 Jarvis Gardens police officer we found your car good don't my license plate reader see here it is it's an Avalon 2007 Avalon there it is licensed it's a custom ice plate window it's a little stupid dog and six digits are letters it says dog my d-o-g-m-a-i dog I had to catch a dog and mom was the girl and it's me I don't want dog ma well it says dog my but the license plate frame says John 3 16 says it all the front was says USA in God we trust remember trust is earned and it's not given respect is earned too it's not given but this car they said we found your car but here's a problem uh-oh they found it but uh guess what it came apart but someone registered their name what Wow it's an organ I can't get a lawyer whoa not to go up thing but I would be you guys good the guy would have beat you in court over a parking spot some guy died he was right you would have lost that case you know one my god bark spells you know uh when we mourn with II I need to talk to that guy do I need a lawyer on this look at this even Randy I'm you know we're at South California I've come back Diablo and Walnut Creek car came down oh oh Randy I came out the car was oh there's a cop up there what happened long story the car was a snowplow it wasn't nothing it bounced off it hit me it was two lanes turn right Rambi that car see this Gambia says dogma I am God backwards look at that they're like God there's the car it exists right now I need a lawyer come on give me a lawyer that's time I told you that's time thank you mr. Hazel just a moment Robin let's ski followed by Dan Gonzalez and then Bill Monroe sorry just a second go ahead now hey guys I'm Robin could ski I own a store downtown called sweet Chico confections before that it was your candy store pals I've been here in Chico for six years downtown and it's been absolutely a great ride but we decided to close our doors on October 30th so we've already made that announcement online and since then we've had a lot of questions about why are you closing right and so first of all I want to let everybody know our last day is gonna be October 30th at the end of Treat Street at any inventory we have left is gonna be given out to the kids so please come down at Treat Street also the questions as to why we're closing that's multifaceted but I wanted to let you guys know personal reasons is for me I just want to be a mom first and I want to get back to that sometimes being a business owner is really conflicting with that so I want to be a mom first second I think when the city entered into the Warren agreement it made our downtown open to unhoused people and with that came a change in downtown also since then we've had a change in our DC BA leadership about two years ago we have a new GM that was probably ushered in illegally we found a lot of allegations and we're working with an attorney Steve sorry Rob Barry right now to bring something to the public so our downtown has kind of had a decline we've had counterfeit items being sold in the streets and that needs to be brought to light we've tried for years to get in with DC BA and I'm a member I should be able to have access so should Rob follow along on our Instagram for when we're gonna hold a meeting that will be informative we'll keep it open to press any DC BA member and then we want to be able to live stream it to voice our concerns in a more public light thanks thank you I believe Dan Gonzalez then followed by Bill Monroe don't start it yet I prepared for three minutes but I'll read fast am I ready oh I lost five seconds what I've learned at Merriam Park I'm Dan Gonzalez I'm the developer at Merriam Park and also Barber Yard future Barber Yard my vision from the beginning based was based on my vision for Merriam Park at the beginning was based on economic development housing types of social hud the choice of architecture everything was designed to support a future medical and commercial hub and for businesses to grow that was the number one focus from the very beginning large-scale large term master plans that's just Merriam Park are loaded with risk and unknowns after nine years I am convinced with where we are, especially considering what we've been through.

We've been through COVID, through campfire, and over $70 million worth of insurance claims for defective workmanship, which set us back three years. We're finally getting on our feet. Before I acquired it, Marion Park sat for 10 years. 10 years, people passed on it until I bought it. I have learned, Marion Park, that it's not only risky to do master plan development, it's highly capital intensive when you attempt to build a sense of place community, because there's no return on your investment. It comes at the very end. Everything is built on, is basically investing in infrastructure and the future. I've learned that building workforce housing is extremely difficult in today's environment, in particular in California, and most particular in Chico.

We have a limited workforce who are busy and quickly losing our knowledge base to retirement. I've confirmed my belief that people are happy to live in smaller, smarter living spaces on smaller lots and smaller houses without garages in order to save on rent and to be able to afford to buy a house. Even though they could live in Canyon Oaks, we're getting a moving to Marion Park for that very reason. I've learned that Marion Park was so encumbered by conditions in the DA that overhead to build a single house was so high that I could never build anything that my day camp employees could live in and walk to work. Not one day camp employee can walk to work. They can't afford it. I try not to look at this as an image of failure.

Is that it? Okay, well, I'd like to speak longer if anybody would like to extend my time for another 30 seconds. If not- We're not allowed to, I'm sorry. Okay, if not, if you have a question about the lack of flexibility in the development and want to ask me a question on what the impacts of that are, I'd be happy to answer. So what are the impacts on the lack of flexibility? Mr. Gonzalez, can you enlighten the council? So lack of flexibility, when you're working on a development agreement or you're working on a large scale development, when you're singularly focused on workforce housing, at the end of the day, you need flexibility. Without the flexibility, you have to do what's prescribed, what you know is gonna sell.

And what we know is gonna sell in Chico is 4,000 to 5,000 square foot lots with a 1,300 to 1,500, 1,600 square foot house. That's not what I want to build at Barber Yard. So if I'm forced, if I don't have the flexibility I need, that's what you're gonna get at Barber Yard. And this is a loss for the city of Chico, for the community, for workforce housing. It's not a loss for me. It's easier for me to do that. Any developer knows it's easier to do that. That's why nobody builds small houses, 650 square foot houses, 700 square foot houses. Nobody does it. That's the ramifications. You're welcome. Okay, and then Bill Monroe. Hello, thank you, council. I really like Miriam Park. So if he can do something like that at Barber Yard, that's great.

I came up here to talk about the APLR business. It looks like quite a mess, and I am in agreement with the idea that was expressed from the dais that we just get rid of those cameras. I will also like to express that the red light cameras are a great thing because they have a practical purpose. On my way down here this evening, I was coming down Esplanade. I was approaching first. I had a green light. Two cars came across the intersection against my green light. It was kind of amazing, and I hope they get their $500 fine or whatever it is. Also, I was hoping to be able to stand in solidarity with Julie Threat on the APLR cameras, but I will push back on her kind of continuous anti-vaccine dialogue.

I'm a public health nurse. Vaccines work. The COVID vaccine was developed by none other than Donald Trump and his administration. It was the only real effective thing he did in his first term, and it has saved millions of lives around the world. So thank you. Thank you, and then Council and Mayor, I'd like to bring something to your attention. So in APNP 1010, there's policies regarding banners, cameras, and such. I've had my deputy director ask the gentleman in the front row who's blocking people from sight to please move to the back of the area, which is that's where it's set forth that they can be. I just wanted to bring it to your attention. She's asked him twice, and he won't move, so. So you've been asked twice, nicely.

Do you mind going with the rest of the press?

So we can't hear him without him speaking, so if the Council wants to go by the rules that you set forth for every other person in the audience in terms of not holding up banners, cameras, or anything, that is blocking the view. Well, if that's the rule that everybody has to apply by, it's not your phone. That's much larger than a phone. So then we're gonna have to ask you to take banners and anything else to the back of the room with the rest of the media. Thank you. All right, item 4.1, autumn leaf CMD modifications and initial hearing. We have a report from Mr. Ottoboni, Director of Public Works Engineering. Yes, good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council members. Item 4.1 is the initial hearing for a modification to an existing CMD for the autumn leaf estates subdivision.

So the original CMD was approved in 2025. In the second phase of the subdivision, the developer elected to reduce the number of lots by one. And so this process essentially revises the distribution of costs to 67 units versus 68 units so that everyone has a fair share of costs for the future ongoing maintenance costs. That concludes my report. I'm available for any questions. All right, any questions? All right, do we have any speakers on this item? We do. We'll call Chris Giampoli first. Okay. As the. I'll keep it real short. This is just more of a formality and maybe a little unlike Mr. Gonzalez, but we did find that some folks do want bigger lots. And that's one of the reasons why we did it.

We changed one, but anyhow, thanks for Brendan. So if there's any questions, that would be all it is. All right, thanks for being available. Thank you. And I'm followed by Steven Hazel. Thank you.

Sir, you left your equipment or so the wheelchair can't get by. Oh. Okay.

Yeah. Wow, I got three minutes. Wow. I only got two minutes last time. Hey, I don't leave. I remember I came here for the first time. I got caught. I didn't even get a chance to respond. I was against this project no matter what, because you know what? See here, there again, doesn't matter. You know what? We got a water short. They'll tell you cut back on everything, but oh, the developer, because that thing was, and then they sit for the designate for housing. Yeah. You need housing. That is, you need jobs. Okay. You need to fix what you've got. Developer, they never saw a bad project. You know what? You had to do a moratorium on housing. He said, I don't care. Let's really look at, like you're talking about data sharing.

You know how much electricity, it's just put a drain on your general fund. Everybody knows it. They don't tell you that. It's just a profit, man. There's no talk about it. And that's why you're spending 49 million for a police officer salary. You get nothing in housing. And once that land's gone, it's gone. I mean, what a joke. Barbarian, shit Valley. It's all a joke, man. You know what? Because you know why? Because you're gonna fix, you're talking about bigger house, all this stuff. Oh, developers, scammers. I did their furniture. I was top lead installer in Santa Clara Valley. You know that? My last job was the airport, San Jose International, Normandie. That was my account. So I'm top lead pivot right before 9-11.

It's a military ship. So I'm in a construction, all that stuff like that. And I'm certified installer. And so this whole project is all, I said, what happened? They always come back. See, that's what kills me, especially with the drought. Man, what's the limit? What is it? How many houses, you know? It's bullshit because it's nothing but a drain on your whatever. It's all about housing, housing. No, these guys are thieves. These damn developers, and they're in with the city. There's bribes going on. Oh man, if you knew, that's what's great about being God. I know all this stuff going on behind the scenes. See my license plate? I am God. They don't like it. It's true. And they wouldn't let me see the guy's license.

He wouldn't let me see his license. I got a license. They wouldn't let me see his license. How about that? I can't see a lawyer. Consider a motion to, motion? Accident. I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second. I have a motion and a second. All right. 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. Carries seven, zero. All right. We're gonna take a break and we will come back and go to our 5.1.

We're gonna take a break and we will come back and go to our 5.1.

We're gonna take a break. Right. Because you can turn the music off. I don't know if I can, but I'm gonna try to do it. But hey, maybe you can talk to Casey. Who just hung up on me? I thought it was somebody who did the interview. All right, let's get back together.

Yeah.

All right, what's your walk-up song, City Attorney Mr. Jones? They wanna know what you're walking on. Item 5.1, public nuisance overview. If there are any speakers on Zoom at this time wishing to speak on this item, now would be the time to raise your hand if we have anyone on Zoom. And if not, we have a report from our City Attorney, Mr. Ryan Jones. Yes. Good evening, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council Members. My name is Ryan Jones. I'm your City Attorney and happy to come back and present on public nuisance ordinances. We have now talked about this a couple of times. Back in early May, the Council provided some direction to staff about updating its ordinances and thinking about life after the Warren Settlement and what updates could be made to the Chico Municipal Code.

And then just a couple of months ago on August 18th, there was a little more specific direction from the Council on a variety of code amendments that we were gonna move forward. So tonight is the first, we'll call it the first phase of that. I have been comprehensively looking over the Municipal Code, specifically related to public nuisance, working with our Police Department and Code Enforcement on those. So the three tonight that we wanted to bring to your attention for a first reading. And again, this is your policy direction. These are the ones that seemed appropriate to bring forth. The first one is on 9.20 on camping. The next one is on designated restoration areas. There's a particular fix regarding requirement defense.

And then the last, those two sections in 12.18 and 12.R about exceptions to the camping prohibition. So just as a backdrop, and I wanted to remind the Council, remind the public, clearly we are not endorsing anything that would violate federal, state or local law or the Warren Settlement Agreement. And you can be assured that your staff and your City Attorney, these are all compliant with that. There are certainly policy directions that you can take within the scope of these, whether these are things you want to move forward or not. But it is important to know the Warren Settlement will be expiring January 14th, 2027, which is coming up pretty shortly. And so we wanted to, we thought as staff and based on your direction to start bringing forth ordinances now because they take a first, a second reading, and then typically 30 days before they can become law.

So we'll talk about those three particular ordinances. And I've highlighted the section for you and for the public to see. The first one is maybe kind of a simple fix, but it was an important one that when talking to police department and code enforcement, when we would designate restoration areas, sometimes like a park or some area that we wanted to come in and the staff wants to come in and fix and make certain updates, they were having to fence that and it was a very expensive requirement. It happened to be in the code. So what we've done simply is remove the word fence and now you have to post. Totally legally compliant will allow us to restore those areas and not have to fence them. Perhaps fencing is something we want to do and may need to do, but at least this gives us the flexibility to not have to fence those restoration areas.

Now, these are two big updates that look kind of small, but they're significant. So in both this section 12.18 and then the following section, which I'll scroll down to in a second, 12.R is where camping is prohibited. And currently our code says there's an exception for unhoused individuals. We're looking to eliminate that. So now camping is not allowed, even if you're unhoused. Now, clearly this would be contrary to the Warren Settlement. We're not proposing to enforce or do anything with regard to these updates until after the middle of January. The last one in section 9.20, which is a more comprehensive section about camping. I'm going to highlight, there were quite a few changes, but I want to highlight the main ones.

The first one is we added the highlighted words are what's been added or proposed to be added. Waterways and levees were an important area of public infrastructure that we currently didn't have the ability to clean and deal with here. So that was a suggestion from the police department. We want to add those two areas into, and I think that makes some sense for public safety perspective. Also camp paraphernalia, we've added the terms fire ignition sources or other equipment or material used to facilitate and effectuate the act of camping as defined in this section. So that's added in there. 20G, shelter space, there was a few areas that we wanted to make a little more simplified definition so it wasn't as complicated, and that's been proposed for your first reading and adding as well.

9.20.050, we added that word parking structure. That is something that had not been included for this section. Public parking was, like parking lots, but it was unclear whether structures were a part of that. We wanted to add that to give the city some more tools to try to address these issues. The three last areas of 9.20, there's now some additional noticing requirements for property removal. Again, we're codifying due process rights. We want to be consistent with what the state law requires and what is good practices. And so if you look through there, you'll see some additional noticing requirements that are now being codified to make sure that everybody's treated fairly, appropriately, but there actually is a plan to move forward.

Same thing with disposition of impounded property. We are proposing to reduce the time that we store it from 90 days to 60 days. We feel like that's still a reasonable amount of time for people to come and claim any property that may be theirs, but also limit some of the cost and the storage time and effort that it takes to house those things. And lastly, in the violations or penalty section, we have now added, again, more potential tools for the city staff. You can take civil actions to abate a public nuisance. So you could, if people are violating code violations, you can actually make a civil action. We don't know whether that's gonna be something we're going to do or not, but it gives us the ability to do that.

We're not looking to be ultra draconian in any of these efforts. We just want to give options and tools for our staff to address some of these important situations. Next steps. So tonight, if you're comfortable, we can move forward with the first reading, right? We'll then come back at the next meeting or a future meeting for that second reading and final adoption if that is the case. As I mentioned in a couple of these, we would not have them go, it wouldn't spring into effect until January 14th, or actually probably January 15th at that point. I just wanna remind the council that I am planning on bringing back more ordinances, more updates. This is the first round of them. They'd be kind of consistent with what the direction was a couple of meetings ago.

But again, it's always your policy decision how you wanna move forward. And I just wanna remind you, there is, city manager does have a comprehensive unhoused strategy that we are actively working on, and this is one important part of that. So that's my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions that the council may have, or we can hear from public comment first, if you'd like. Well, let's take questions first for you, and then we'll go to public comment. Council Member Winslow. Thank you, Ms. Jones. There's a couple of concerns I have with one. The designated restoration areas, that one's fine. That's great. Thank you for bringing that back first. I think that's the only one out of these that I see actually making a difference between now and January 14th.

For the other ones, there is one about noticing for property storage. And the amount that we require noticing is less than is recommended by the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. I bring that up because we had a letter that mentioned that we apply for encampment resolution funding. We're applying for about $4 million. We've received somewhere around $2.5 million to offset costs of the pallet shelter, and that we would be ineligible for that funding if we are not following their best practices. And on their best practices, I believe it's a 48-hour noticing, unless it says imminent threats to life, health, safety, and infrastructure are present. Was this considered, or should we probably shape this to meet those guidelines so we can qualify for the funding?

Yes, excellent point. What it says is a minimum of 24 hours. So certainly we can talk to code enforcement and police as they're executing these things and perhaps consider extending that to 48 hours, or you can make the motion to change it to 48 hours at this point. It is a best practices that is not required under the law, but it could impact funding in that particular source. If that's an important aspect from the City Council, then we could adjust appropriately or at least adjust the enforcement appropriately. Thank you. Yeah, I think we can consider that after that, taking one of those paths. If there's a carve out for what constitutes an imminent threat to life, health, safety, infrastructure, perhaps we can expand that at least to some areas like waterways so we can have shorter noticing.

The other one, this is more of a policy thing, but I wanna throw it out to everybody. We're removing language that says that we have to offer somebody shelter before we clear them out of a public space, tell them to move. So when the city actually got sued at the Warren Settlement Agreement, people forget this, but the tourist shelter was closed due to COVID. There was no shelter available. So there were 50 plus people being wiped out of areas told to move, but there actually was no place for them to go because all shelters were closed. In the city, rather than following what actually is also in this Interagency Council on Homelessness Best Practices, rather than the city designating a place that's reasonably accessible that people can go to, we didn't say anything at all.

We just told them to scatter and hope they would figure something out, which they did figure something out. They sued us, right? So what would we do if there's no shelter space available? And we can change the law. And I don't think this is a question for you so much because it's a policy question, we can remove the requirement and ordinance that we make sure there is shelter available or designate some kind of reasonably accessible place. But as it stands right now, I don't think any of us know what we would do if there was no shelter available. And maybe everyone should think about that. I'm curious, I will ask after public comment, if anybody wants to weigh in on that before we change the law, that we know what we would do in the event that something happens, which very well could happen.

We could fill up the palace shelter overnight. If we just offered it to people, those beds would be taken. Last winter, I saw the tourist shelter down to one bed. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually filled up at one point, but at least there was times last winter when we had one bed available in the tourist shelter, we're likely within a year, within six months maybe of expedited enforcements to actually see shelters fill up. And then that's a really important question that I think the community would like to hear on is what we do then. So one further question, which ties into that, City Manager Haen, if you would weigh in on the status of the comprehensive unhoused strategy and how these ordinance changes kind of intersect or don't intersect with that.

Sure, through the Mayor, I'm just about done with a very high level outline, utilizing some prior work I've done, looking at some other cities and best practices, incorporating some information that we gathered last week at the California City's Conference. Month of October, I'm hoping to have it finished by Friday. In the month of October, we'll be all outreach and engagement, working with the community, doing some meetings, some public meetings, meeting with the unhoused community themselves and getting that feedback and engagement to make any edits or adjustments. The goal is to bring it back to City Council in November. November 17th is the goal date. If everything moves smoothly, and if we need more time, then we'll let you know.

These ordinances are a strategy that is listed in the plan. It does not specify to this level of detail. It says to address the ordinances and move the policies forward, basically that the Council directs staff and how we deal with these different situations. So the ordinances and what's within those ordinances is not detailed out in the plan. It's just the strategy to amend them in accordance with the direction that Council would like to go. Thank you, that's all I have. All right, Council Member Hawley. I just wanted to thank Mr. Jones on his hard work on this matter. I know it takes a lot to sift through the CMC, and I also really appreciate you being so proactive as to send us an email with the red line version for us to review as well.

That was really helpful in reviewing this, and I'll of course be holding my comments till after public comment. Council Member Goldstein. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Ryan. I had one question kind of building on Council Member Winslow's question about us potentially not being eligible for funding sources. I'm looking at Liz Nix's letter right now. This is regarding the, I'm looking for the name of the grant program, the encampment. Yes, I was... Anyway, thank you for that. I lost my train of thought. Basically, I wanna make sure that we're not going to do anything that's going to disqualify us for that funding source. And Council Member Winslow already brought up the one aspect, which was the noticing factor, but they also mentioned the other aspect of us, whether or not we have shelter available.

And I just wanted you to have a chance to elaborate on that. And if you see that as making us ineligible for this funding source, if we move forward with these changes. Yeah, I think it could make us ineligible for the funding source. I think that's something that Council should consider when it comes to the, really it's just the noticing provision more than anything. Right now, we're suggesting a minimum of 24 hours. They, under those funding guidelines, it does say a 48 hour. Maybe those funds aren't as, I guess it's a decision to know whether that's important enough to make that change. I am suggesting that perhaps we, either the Council could amend that particular notice to 48 hours or keep it as a minimum of 24, see how things go with that funding.

If that continues to be a source that's important to us, then in the meantime, we're telling staff, we're not going to enforce it shorter than the 48 hours, even though it's in the code. So it gives you more flexibility if you leave it in there at the 24 hours. Yeah, but isn't it beyond just the 24 hour noticing language that the LISNIC letter commented on? My understanding was that our language, you know, sorry, I didn't have a lot of time to review this letter today before the meeting, but I believe that it was more than just the noticing period that was an issue. Yeah, they commented on, it did come in just this afternoon. So we didn't have a lot of time to analyze it. They commented on violating the Warren Settlement and they wanted to make sure there was no language in here that talked about when these would spring into effect.

And that's true, it doesn't say that, but it doesn't go into effect until the council says it goes into effect after the second reading. So I think that's the other piece that we would make very clear at the second reading that other than the fencing provision, these would come into effect January 14th. I think that would address the principal issues they raised. Okay, thank you. I'm going to keep scanning through this to see if I can find the other thing I was concerned about, but I'm done for now, thank you. All right, I don't see any more questions for you. How many speakers do we have? We have four. Okay, three minutes each. Get it back to Granicus, okay. I'll call the first three speakers and if you can go ahead and line up.

Lynn Overholzer, followed by Nicole Nava and Rob Berry. So it's Lynn first and then Nicole and then Rob. Okay.

So how much time is there? Three minutes. Three minutes. There is three. Yes, there's only four speakers. Okay, I was set for one. I figured I'd have to read it. Well, actually, I was going to come tonight anyway to address the Sycamore Creek flood project control issue and it turns out that it kind of ties in with this agenda item, I guess. In fact, I was happy to see that in red it was added waterways and levees to prohibit camping. There are strict Department of Water Resource rules banning camping inside levees and down the sides of levees. I live near one. My son is an engineer and he's dealing a lot with levee failures now so I've learned a lot about them in the last couple of months and camping can be one cause of it.

Destroys the integrity of the levee, leading to failure. 34,000 pounds of trash were taken out of Sycamore Creek flood project, flood control project a couple weeks ago, 34,000 pounds. I didn't even realize really how many people were down there. They're kind of at the end of my street. My street ends at the levee. They're down in the trees. There's no camps on the south side of the levee because that's actually private property so we make sure people, we run them off when they camp there. I realize maybe Warren has limited your ability to enforce no camping there and that's going to change soon. I was happy to see that levees were added into that in terms of that will be enforced after January and I think it should be a priority and there's one thing you need to do that needs to be done really soon and it would really help with enforcement.

Campers are already returning. The gate on the north side of the levee at Cohasset is the chain link has been cut out so I've been watching people for months and they're already returning. They ride their electric bikes, pulling trailers loaded high with their stuff down the north side of the levee and that gate needs to be fixed. I talked to the workers up there. It's a little confusing. Who's responsible to fix the gate? Is it the city? Is it the county? I don't think it's DWR. One thing I was told was DWR pays the county but I think the city owns it so I'm really not quite sure but that gate needs to be fixed. It needs to be fixed. ASAP, I don't think Warren would preclude that. I don't know who is responsible to fix it.

Is it the city or is it the county? I don't know, maybe you can coordinate on this to get this done. Again, that gate, it needs to be kept fixed because if the north side of the levee that fails, your airport's gonna flood. So I'm very happy to see that it was, it's in section 9.20 right now adding waterways and levees to the ordinance to prohibit camping. But DWR has strict rules and it looks like maybe you'll be able to enforce them and for the safety of the community. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole Nava followed by Rob Berry and then Steven Hazel. Evening. So I'm very happy to see that we're gonna be hopefully tweaking ordinances to bring a little more structure and boundaries to and for our community in light of some of the recent activities, which have been problematic for years, but we've seen yet another, there's been stabbing, shooting just in the past like couple of weeks here.

And so I know some of us that are park adjacent, Lindo channel adjacent, et cetera, have been concerned and expressing that continually for years. So good that we're doing this, right? I think I would like to draw your attention and I think probably most of you have seen this post by the retired behavioral health director, Scott Kennelly. If you have not, I highly suggest you look at it. He made it public. It is excellent. It's what many of us professionals have been saying for a very long time. And I'm very happy to see his voice get out there even more. I know some of you have reached out to him and had discussion before. I encourage you to do so again, please, as you're moving, maneuvering through this.

I'm going to just do an excerpt since he did make it public and it's okay. So it says combined with a brain rewired by deep chemical dependency, their decision making center is entirely offline. They are biologically incapable of making a logical decision or understanding future consequences. Motivation cannot exist without clarity. You absolutely must stabilize a person first through structured care before they can regain the cognitive capacity to make good decisions. So he's talking about people who are, you know, basically out on the street, but also people that are in homes. And I have an example to give you. To fix this broken framework, we need a comprehensive public health pipeline, the Community Safety Treatment and Recovery Act.

So he's talking about legislation that's out there. And it's talking about like a drug court framework, mental health diversion court. It's talking to basically conserving people doing treatment, getting them stabilized for up to a year. Because as I've said here at this podium, you cannot really even get through to a person for about a year, depending upon what they are going through. So this is like vital that we have this conversation. And the part I wanna bring to you is time and place. I've said that before too, getting in front of the right people. You as council have purview over part of the public safety scenario, right? The county has purview over another part and they have purview over shelter and care.

You know, our courts have a different place. So I encourage the public to learn that so we don't waste time at council for things that are not within their purview. And then how they should get together as entities and have a collaborative discussion about where we can go. I know you've done that to some extent. I encourage you to dig in deeper and really listen to this community and put the collective safety first and get these people stabilized, get them the help they need and show them the dignity. And dignity means compassionate care, not toxic compassion. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Rob Berry followed by Steven Hazel. Well, for those of you that know me, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

And so I wanna say a couple of things. Number one is that my experience with the city council on this topic is that you've been almost exclusively focused on what to decide. And I would suggest that it's more important to look at how you decide. Now, when we look back at the history of the Warren case, one of the biggest failures of the entire Warren episode was the manner in which the city council decided to commit to the Warren settlement agreement. Now, what that resulted in is that we spent the last four and a half years having our hands tied by a settlement agreement that was not well vetted in terms of what its implications were going to be down the road. And I would urge you as we start looking at the post-Warren situation to not make that same mistake again.

So I sent you a letter today with a suggestion. That's not the only thing to consider, but I would say that the most important thing that I can offer is that the decisions that you make should be vetted by people who have some professional expertise in this area so that you have the full range of options to consider without just having it be a sort of closed system to deliberation. I'll give you a couple of examples. This idea of notice, for example, the 24-hour notice. I can tell you as an attorney, there is absolutely no legal requirement to give any specific notice. The law says reasonable notice. Reasonable is based on the totality of the circumstances. And so why would you want to give your enforcement agencies a limit that says that they are not allowed to exercise their discretion?

They have to observe either 24 or 48 hours notice in circumstances where it's not called for. The second thing I want to address is the idea of grants. I think Mr. Winslow brought this topic up. One of the most dangerous things that you can do is set your policy on the basis of the criteria set by grants. If you place yourself in a situation where you're dependent upon grants, what you're doing is you're ceding the management of your municipal affairs to some agency in Sacramento that decides what's best for Chico. And so if you're going to decide that 48 hours notice is not in the best interest of Chico, but it's necessary in order to get the grant to support the pallet shelter, that is a rather critical decision that you need to really look at the consequences.

And so I would suggest that you have a lot of resources in this community on both sides of this issue. There's a number of people that are highly professionally qualified to give you advice and to help provide guidance. And I would urge you to take advantage of that expertise. Thank you very much. Thank you. And then our last speaker is Steven Hazel.

Any of you ever been homeless, not by your choice, I got a story, don't interrupt me Mayor. I was homeless, not by my choice, I called 9-4 a week before 9-11, give it to about 9-11, the rest is history. I had all my teeth and everything, I was healthy. There's my car, look it, I showed you earlier, I had a home, I had a car, there's a Cadillac in front of that too, a Cadillac Catera, I had two cats, a boy and a girl, so sweet. Boy's name was Pudgy and girl's name was Girl, she came with Girl, that's her name, I raised her with Girl. I had cats, look it, the house was paid for, $10,000, two bedroom house, I lost everything, you know why? Man, because this guy, 9-11, I gave a two-point check, that's what made me homeless, because Bush, George Bush, behind 9-11, and with the Saudis, involved 9-11, yeah, the final spoke coming in the sack.

He was involved, the school, are you kidding me, the school, the tourist shelter, remember, I say, you're nice by tourist shelter, yeah, and what I get, oh God, what happened on 8-20, 2023? I said, it probably saved my life, but then, if it got kicked out, I'd probably die, so he said, well, and I said, well, I don't die, they buzzed me on Ferris Street, you know, to the side, in the bike lane, three cops went boom, boom, boom, whoa, did I shoot you? I went to a car camp, or what was that, that's SUV camp, or was it where a body camp, what, you gonna show me that you can hurt me? Man, I was pinned tight against the curb, one, two, in a bike lane, and a third guy came around, looks like I turned around, I was on my way home, okay, that's, that's, okay, your problem is here, look, I spent, how long, your thing was, I kept telling you, the tiny hometown of Chico, by Brevard, at the Valley Edge, see, you don't understand, I was a Boy Scout, Troop 14, not 41, April Fools, like the opposite, Chief 14, I was a Boy Scout, I know the camping, look, I don't want to infringe on people, you know why they did it, it's in your face, they don't have a place to go, you understand it, you're not homeless, okay, you understand, they need a place to go, of course, you don't want to fund them, I have the money, okay, not to give you that, but give you free, that's gonna come late, free parking and everything, but I tell you about Preacher, okay, I came from good news, you know what, that guy Bill and Patrick, they died, before I came, he kicked his grout, wasn't it, I got two, two hours from Hope, man, he only gave me hours to stay in the bed, but then he kicked his grout, that's why he died, and then the pastor died, you know that, because I hate fake preachers, Jim Baker died today, because I hate fake preachers, and I told you, the last Pope died on Easter Sunday, because it was Calvary time, it was still, it was still Easter, yep, you know why he died, because he's stuck on the first time, think about it, it's a profound statement, but it's true, I am God, my son is Jesus Christ, and he's dead, got it, so the money's there, Chris Waddell is a fraud, he's collecting money on my son's behalf, 300 billion dollars, I'm going to give every county a billion dollars, guess what, if you can't find it, you get 200 million, your share, forget Measure H, I'll tell you, I'm going to come out at 2%, I'm going to find everything, yep, everything, tell him I'm here, all right, that's time, there's my house, there it is, that's the time, Mr. Hazel, there's the police report, he's our last speaker, time for a new mayor, huh, Robin, we'll see, hey, the debate, you can return to your seat quietly, so we can carry on with business, all right, council, you can return to your seat quietly or be removed, thank you, all right, council, further discussion, questions for staff, where would you like to go, Council Member O'Brien, all right, I'll jump in, excuse me, so I want to say, first of all, I like all of this, I want to thank our city attorney for putting this together for us, thank you very much, Ryan, so we are getting ready to exit the Warren settlement, and I have no interest in joining another one like this referenced grant does, I do not want us to be burdened with any artificial restrictions on our ability to clear encampments from our public spaces like we have been for the last almost five years, we will remain compassionate about the unhoused, I am confident in that, however, we need to bring back accountability starting in January to bring balance and sanity to this issue, thank you, Mayor, all right, Council Member Winslow, a question for you, Council Member O'Brien, when we got to the Warren settlement agreement, there was no shelter available and we cleared people out anywhere with no recommendation, no designation of where to go, what do you suggest we do now and how is that compassionate?

So we do have shelters, we have a pallet shelter, we have the tourist shelter, we have a lot of space, if such time, if it happens in such time that we lose that, we can have another conversation, we can suspend this particular ordinance, but right now we do, and right now this community is hungering, they're starving for accountability, which we do not have, we have compassion, that's great, I'm all about that, however, what we're lacking right now on that equation is accountability, if we need to make adjustments in the future, we can always do that, that's always easy for us to do as a council, and I would have no problem doing that, but right now, that's not where we're at, and I don't think that's where we'll be at in January.

Sorry, what does suspending an ordinance mean? Who adopts the laws in order to plan to suspend them when something that is entirely predictable happens? That's not how laws work. We actually can suspend laws, we can change it, and we can put a moratorium on things that we need to do, people and municipalities do it all the time. So the idea that we would see an artificial restriction on the best practices that are based on research that come out of the California Interagency on Homelessness, Interagency Council on Homelessness is, I mean, it's ridiculous, it's like you're looking for the opportunity to reject money. We gave direction to staff just a few months ago, just in May, where we said, continue to offset the cost of the pallet shelter with grants.

That is what we said, and you know what money we have gotten to offset the cost of the pallet shelter? It's exactly this money. So the idea that we would reject best practices, that you give a 48-hour notice unless there's some exigent circumstance is just ridiculous. Like on what principle are you trying to act? What's ridiculous is bringing us back into another settlement agreement, and that's what this grant does. That's exactly it. That's ridiculous. The legal advice we just heard, that you can interpret reasonable notice as meaning no notice at all, because the Supreme Court overturned the Eighth Amendment problem of cruel and unusual punishment, but the due process issue still exists, and you're saying we should just run forward and just ignore that and act like there is no due process in the Constitution.

That is asking for another lawsuit. That's exactly the kind of illogical action that got us into the settlement in the first place. We do have due process, and I trust our city attorney with his particular motion that he is asking us for us to approve. He has vetted this, and he believes it's constitutional. Is that correct, Mr. City Attorney? Yes. The proposed ordinance would be constitutional legal. If you also just heard the same thing I just heard, is that we received a letter this afternoon that pointed out that this compromises our access to millions of dollars of funding that would offset the cost of a shelter that we've agreed to operate anyway. It would be stupid to reject that for some principle that you can't even explain.

There's no compassion in this at all. This is setting us up for a situation where we're running people out of areas with nowhere else to go. This is not what the community wants. When we talk about compassion with accountability, that has meaning. You have to do something for that, and that is to tell people where they can go. It's complicated when it gets to that point, and that's why we think about it now. That's why we don't defer to talk about suspending our laws to deal with the situation that we had just a few years ago, that we would have had this winner if we would let people into the shelter that we operate. This is ridiculous. The reality is we do have places for them to go. Period.

Okay. We have other people that want to speak. So, Council Member Van Overbeek. Well, Mr. Winslow, I know you're running for re-election, and that was a great speech. However, I would suggest that we take the judgment of the city attorney rather than your legal judgment. If you remember the remarks of the city attorney, there was a minimum 24-hour notice. City manager can give direction to the police department to make that 48 if that's what we need to do. We decide that's the right thing to do. But the bigger issue, the bigger issue is, is our responsibility as city council people to the quarter percent of drug-addicted homeless people who are out, most of them are drug-addicted, or is it to the 99.5% or 99.75% who want to raise families and have peaceful enjoyment of our public spaces?

So what we know in California, which has half the unhoused homeless in the country, is that California's policy has been a disaster. We know this. If we look at the last 20 years, we had 19 people die, homeless people die in their tents last year, primarily of drug overdoses. Allowing people to camp is the farthest thing from compassion. That is abandoning them to die. And so I think it has to, it starts with no camping. Because what we know is if we don't, if there's not some intervention, if they don't go to shelter and get structure in their lives, they have no chance and they will die in their tents. And so I want to thank the city attorney for doing a great job of crafting these ordinances and I think we should adopt them as they were presented.

And that's a motion. I'll second that. So member Hawley. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds. I actually concur that pursuing grant funding should not be the only reason that we change code amendments. But I think in this particular case, looking at the amount of money that is supported at our particular shelter, it's very applicable here. But, you know, grant funding always changes. And I think Councilmember O'Brien does make a good point that we can always go back and alter that CMC if the 24 hours or 48 hours does not seem adequate. I think the vast majority of the code changes here, including 12.18, 12.18r, are not contentious in any way, shape or form. It really goes back to 9.20, largely 070, which hasn't been brought up yet in this discussion, which is giving officers the autonomy to charge infractions as misdemeanors for everything in Section 9.20.

And although that is industry standard, largely, I still think we should be a model city for protecting democratic participation and lessening the influence of our criminal justice system on minor offenders. So that's my reasoning for not wanting to vote in favor of that, because it would change our also 9.20.040. I have concerns of changing the ordinance for allowable overnight camping extended for over three days. I think if someone's in a recreational vehicle and has consent of the homeowner and are a guest of the home that they're parked adjacent of, limiting to that three days and allowing officers to charge that as a misdemeanor, I think is the city using too much power despite it being constitutional.

So that's my explanation for not voting in favor of all CMC amendments as they stand right now. Council Member Goldstein. Yeah, I'll try to be real quick here, but I just want to elaborate on my questions earlier about clarifying I am very concerned that our proposed changes, including not having adequate shelter to provide to people who we are evicting, regardless of the noticing period, that that will potentially disqualify us from those programs. And I know we just had a big conversation on that. I agree with Council Member Hawley that although that shouldn't be our only target to comply with grants, that is how we fund our shelters. And if we don't comply with grant programs by complying with the California Interagency Council guidance on addressing encampments, then we are at risk of severely exacerbating our homelessness crisis.

Council Member Haen, or Council Member, City Manager Haen, can I ask a quick question? I would assume that part of your comprehensive unhoused strategy, if there was something that needed to be applied to allow us to apply for grants, that you would include that and we would operationalize a 48 hour, 72 hour, whatever notice if there's a grant that you would bring us that information. And yes, we can absolutely do that. Yes, we can absolutely do that. OK, so whether we put 24 hours in there or not, we can choose to do as an enforcement policy, 48, 72, anything else that we want to do. Correct. OK, thank you. Council Member Hawley. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds, I just wanted to remind the Council as a whole that our job isn't to, you know, vote across lines, especially during times of campaign season, like Council Member van Overbeek correctly alluded to, and that I think it's our job to accurately represent the public despite our political ideology.

And I just wanted to throw it out there if there would be any appetite for a friendly amendment, potentially on the overnight camping of recreational vehicles to not lower that to three days and instead keep it to seven days, or if there would be any appetite for maybe existing CMC infractions as misdemeanors for for a certain number of codes rather than everything in 9.20. Because if so, I would love to come to a agreement, maybe that more reflects the the middle aisle of the people of Chico. OK. Council Member Winslow. No, I don't accept it. She she proposed a friendly amendment to my motion. But she I think she was taking a temperature and saying and like wanted some feedback from people up here.

That's exactly right, Mayor Reynolds. OK, Council Member Winslow. So what I gather with that, you know, it's like I don't think that that's a middle ground here. I think the vast majority of people, because I talk to them and they say that they do think that we should provide some place for people to go. That's actually why the language compassion with accountability is used, because they're trying to come to this middle ground. But then you just throw it out the door here and say that we can just suspend our laws if we ever come into a perfectly anticipatable situation. What also I note in that is that we just had a presentation on these code changes and didn't even mention the change from RVs.

The direction we gave at the last meeting, if anybody remembers all that about the RVs was we said that a guest can stay in the adjacent property for seven days. That's what our code says right now. We said the council majority said we'll move it down to one day. So then we came back here with a three day proposal, which wasn't even what the direction was, and it didn't even make it into the presentation, which tells me this is some sloppy governing going on right now and that this is done hastily for no purpose. It's performative. We're saying we're not going to enforce these things until after January. So what would be the harm in tabling some of these deferring the ones, especially the ones where we're talking about compromising millions of dollars that we're applying for right now, the money that we are spending anyway, until we are hearing a comprehensive strategy, which is currently being worked on.

We're told we're going to get like an overview of it within a week. And so why would we be acting right now? We can't even enforce these until later. I mean, just it would be nice to just admit that we don't know what we should do. Information came in this afternoon, which led city attorney Ryan Jones, if I interpreted correctly, to change his recommendation from what you're asking for now, the 24 hour notice to 48 hours so that we don't compromise our funding because 48 hours is not that big of a deal in any case. It's not allowing camping, like no matter you can say that over and over again, it's not allowing camping to say that people can get a 48 hour notice, not a 24 hour notice. It is complying with best practices.

And there is an exception recommended exception by this, the same best practices to have an exception for imminent issues with health, safety, infrastructure, things like that. Somebody's, you know, sabotaging a levy like we can just go in there and do it like this is it's carved out for because they make sense. They think about this more than you do, frankly. So we should consider more. The recommendations that are there, in addition to the fact that we're spending millions of dollars, we're applying for four million dollars and you're going to throw that out, throw that away just so you can make a statement right now. Councilmember Van Oberbeck and then Councilmember O'Brien, I know you've got your guys here. So, you know, again, great speech.

This is all a smoke screen. The we're not throwing out funding. I have great faith in the what the city attorney has crafted. And there's a motion and a second on the floor. So can we move forward? We can, as soon as everybody's done talking. Councilmember O'Brien. So, as I said before, we can edit and pass any constitutional law we want within our purview. And if we need to make changes along the way because circumstances change, that's perfectly fine. That's what councils do. And I read the grant requirements, by the way, it wasn't just 48 hour notice. There were a number of other conditions that would restrict us from doing our job that this community wants in the future. Like I said, we will remain compassionate about the homeless.

I'm confident in that. I've always been compassionate about that issue, but we do not have balance. Anyone in this community that lives in Chico realizes that. And this brings back a little bit of common sense to this issue. Please name one of those requirements that would prevent us from doing our job. Councilmember Hawley has her hand raised. There's nothing. Councilmember Hawley. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds. Since I didn't get any feedback from anyone on making a friendly amendment, I'll just give it a shot in the dark. I would like to make a friendly amendment to Councilmember Van Overbeek's motion just to make an alteration to remove the language of giving officers the autonomy to charge infractions as misdemeanors and anything in Section 9.20, as well as making the amendment for overnight camping extended over three days to seven days as it is now.

No, removing the teeth from enforcing the law negates the whole point, we have to be able to enforce these, otherwise it's a waste of time. All right. Mayor, can I make a couple of comments as I listen to this? A couple of things. One is that you. we could wait to do the second reading, like November 17th at that meeting. At that point, you may know a little bit more about the funding situation, right? We're expecting that to come in some of the resolutions in the next couple of weeks. The other idea is, is you don't have to vote on all three of these collectively, which is currently the motion. We could separate them probably even better. So you can handle one at a time to see, because I think, for example, the first one on fencing, it appeared to be fairly, you know, it was a kind of a majority, at least maybe even everybody wanted that one.

So those are the two ideas. You could wait for the second reading and you could take these separately. Vice Mayor Bennett. So I'm gonna ask, would council member van Overbeek be amenable to that suggestion by our city attorney to separate these into individual pieces rather than all three at once? I don't like it, but sure. Okay, so our first one then is Title 9, 9.20 camping, right? So I'm, Mayor. Yeah. Could I ask a question? Yes, absolutely. Perhaps the city attorney could help me. We have an ordinance title that does contain titles 19, excuse me, 9, 12 and 12R. That is the title. And so we don't have it split out. And so I don't know how you want me to handle that. Because typically it's by reading of title only, it doesn't go into effect until the second reading, after the second reading, 30 days later.

So what would you recommend do we? Yeah, I think the city clerk makes a good point because it's written as one ordinance amending three of them. It is hard to parse out. You could do another, you could have the next first reading at the next meeting if you wanted to, or you could pass all three of them tonight and move forward. Well, we have a motion and a second for all three. So I think that we should move forward with the motion and the second and see what happens from there. Some people would say, this sounds like you should table this a little bit until you have more information or you're able to break up the ordinance so that we can do what we wanna do and not be pigeonholed by the fact that we got this written in one ordinance, but you do you.

Would you like me to call for the, okay. Council Member Goldstein. No. Council Member Hawley. No. Council Member O'Brien. Yes. Council Member van Overbeek. Yes. Council Member Winslow. No. Vice Mayor Bennett. I want to see these come back individually, so I'm gonna vote no and we'll bring it back. Mayor Reynolds. No. Okay, it comes back, excuse me, it fails two five. So then the alternative motion would be to bring them back at the next meeting, separated. You can just give direction to. Okay. I think I've heard the direction. At this point, the language of them is not to change. You could certainly make motions as you want to, but I will separate them into three separate ordinances at the October 20th meeting.

Can I just ask, would you consider, because we got a letter this afternoon about the encampment resolution funding, consider adjusting your recommendation to try to save us from losing out on millions of dollars of funding? Understood. Thank you. Thank you. All right, item 5.2, downtown park and go program and park funding. If there's any speakers on Zoom that would like to speak on this matter, please raise your hand at this time. We have a report from Ms. Barbara Martin, our administrative services director. Madam Mayor, I need to recuse myself. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds. Good evening, Mayor Reynolds, Vice Mayor Bennett and members of the council. This item is a follow-up to the council's June 2nd direction to implement the park and go pilot program in downtown parking lots for July through September, and then return with information regarding that. And then tonight I'll be briefly reviewing the results of the three-month pilot, and then also putting that into the broader context of the parking funds financial condition. Ultimately, we're looking for some direction regarding the park and go program and whether council would like to see further evaluation of some other parking and cost recovery options. So as you remember, back in May, the PBID came to the council with a proposal to offer free parking downtown for the summer months.

That was referred back to the Internal Affairs Committee, and a modified version came back in June, which the council approved, which approved two hours of free parking in the downtown lots from July through September. One thing that I do want to note that besides the free parking in the two hours that our paid parking hours are only from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. So there's only paid parking during those hours and then evenings and weekends are free already. Council asked staff to come back after the pilot, which is what we're doing tonight. Okay. Okay. The staff report included information through August. We do have information through September now since we are into October.

So these numbers are updated for that information. You can see that we saw 8,000 more sessions in the downtown lots over the three month period, but the net increase in sessions system-wide was 3,600. This indicates that there was an increase in utilization of the parking services downtown, but some of that is possibly due to a shift from other areas into the lots. And along with that, during that same period, the three month period, we did see a reduction in revenue system-wide of approximately $36,000. The data by itself can't tell us whether the Park and Go caused all of these changes or whether there's an increase due to other downtown business activity. There will be information regarding sales tax increase or decrease, but we won't have that available until probably the January timeframe.

We won't get revenue in for two months after probably the November timeframe, and then we don't get the actual data from our consultant until about January. So onto the more broader look at the parking fund in general. In fiscal year 25-26, we did see an overall increase in revenue in the parking fund. We saw about a $77,000 increase from the prior year, which was a benefit to the whole system. Sorry. We did see increase both in meters and in lots. And then this doesn't by itself tell the council whether the program was successful or unsuccessful. Park and Go was intended to provide a customer benefit and reduce a perceived barrier to visiting downtown, but there is a cost associated with that benefit, and that cost needs to be considered in light of the financial condition of the parking fund.

When we had the proposed budget, you saw this very detailed figure here. This is actually from our budget page itself. I don't want you to be concerned with the actual details of this, but we did have the projections that in 26-27, we would have a beginning balance in the operating fund of the parking fund of negative $200,000, and that was projected to go even further negative to the negative $730,000 with a reserve of $320,000. The fiscal year ended better than what we originally projected, but the imbalance is still there. We are still going in the negative direction. Fiscal year 25-26, we had an estimated, we're gonna be drawing reserves of about $70,000. It looks like it's gonna be closer to 65 when all is said and done.

We're still closing the books. But at the same time, we are not meeting the needs that we have established in our budget policies. Our budget policies require us to transfer $150,000 or 15% of the parking revenues, whichever is higher, into the parking reserves for future capital needs, and this hasn't been able to happen since 2019-20 fiscal year, initially because of COVID and because of the reduction of parking downtown due to that, and then since then, the parking fund has not ever recovered. So why it matters that we have good reserves. The reserves aren't intended to balance the annual operations of the fund. The parking revenue also supports the long-term maintenance, the rehabilitation, and eventual replacement of parking infrastructure.

We've reduced available capital funding over successive budget cycles, and the amounts available to rebudget those projects has also declined. Using reserves for recurring operating expenses means those same dollars are no longer available for future parking facility needs, and postponing maintenance doesn't eliminate the expense. It generally moves that obligation into a future year and also results in greater costs down the road. What we have done to reduce costs, we are continuously looking at operating efficiencies. One thing that we did in the 26-27 budget was we removed the funding for one parking meter collector. This was not only for parking, this was not only just for parking cost savings, but also with the kiosks, there has been a reduction in the need to do the routes of cash collection that the meters required, and then also there's lower maintenance requirements for that purpose.

I want to kind of change direction a little bit about operational costs and what we've done in the past and the effects of that in the fund in general. Back when we established the kiosks, we changed our process in terms of the transaction costs. We used to charge a $0.35 convenience fee for all parking transactions involving credit cards. Typically, the city and all municipalities charge a fee for credit card use. This is just a means of cost recovery. It's a generally used method throughout different municipalities and government entities, and we used to do the $0.35, which at the time was establishing about a $1,000 cost, basically breaking us even when it came to credit card transactions.

Now with removal of that, we've estimated just for fiscal year 25-26 alone that we've incurred about an additional $170,000 cost just based on all the transactions that have come through without that fee. Initially, we established this so that we could incentivize people to use the parking app and to use the new kiosks, but ultimately it does come at a cost. So this is just a consideration to maybe reimplement those transaction fees or some sort of version of that and what we want to do going forward. Oops. Okay, the other thing that has come up that has been an idea amongst different citizens as well as staff is the idea of extended or extended parking tier rates. Currently, we have some premium parking areas where you can only do a two-hour maximum in those areas and you have to move out of those areas after that time.

So there's a rate charged and then no matter what you have to move, there's a potential real tiered model would provide a base rate for the first two hours and then the next period of time would establish other rates for that. So it would be like an extension period of two to three hours and then a higher rate if it's longer than that and then it escalates from there. These are ideas that we would have to study more, but they're ideas that you can consider tonight. So we have a kind of a balancing point that we have to consider here. We want to have the experience of parking downtown as a good experience for customers. We want people to be able to come down and have an ease of use of the parking program, but we also have to balance this in terms of that we need to have revenue that will provide for rehabilitation, for maintenance, for all the things that we need to do to keep the program running.

We also need to look at efficiencies in terms of cost control, efficiencies with kiosk and efficiencies on the staffing side and then we also need to continue to consider the long-term and what we need to do to continue with our infrastructure maintenance, rehabilitation, et cetera. So we really just need to look at this from a balanced perspective. So tonight we're looking for direction from you all whether we should continue some sort of version of the Park and Go program, modify the structure, return to the paid parking situation, also evaluate whether we can reinstate some or all of the credit card transaction cost recovery, whether you want to look at more of the tiered rate structure, extended parking beyond that two hours and then any other strategies that you may consider that you want the staff to research and come back to you to consider.

And with that, I will take any questions. All right, any questions for Ms. Martin before we go to speakers? Council Member Goldstein. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you for this report and I'm of course excited to talk about parking today so that we can do our best to support downtown and also ensure that our parking fund is fiscally solvent. So thank you for the detailed report and you've already addressed some of my questions that I had. Did you say that in January we're looking at getting our quarterly sales tax data? Yeah, it'll take about that long. It's about a quarter lag. All right, well, I'm very excited to see what we find out then. I feel a little bit like we have to kind of work in the dark here without that, but it's good to have those preliminary stats on transactions in our parking lots to kind of tell us part of the story.

And so you answered some of these, but just to make sure that I heard everything correctly, it looks like we did see, I think in the staff report, it said a 23% increase in parking transactions in lots and that amounts to what, 8,000 or so increased transactions. So that's great that people are using the parking lots more. That was a big part of why I supported Park and Go is to get people aware that these lots exist for a lower rate. So that sounds like a success as long as it didn't negatively impact the amount of people going downtown as well as our ability to stay solvent. So what I saw in your report here is it looked like we saw what, 3,600 increases in sessions system-wide, is that correct?

Yeah, it was actually, I think, yeah, I think that's about right for the quarter. I can get back to that. Yeah, I think I said that kind of awkwardly, but 3,600 more transactions downtown-wide. Yeah, so, oops, sorry. I can flip through my booklet here if that helps you. Okay, so you can see that, yeah. Perfect, beautiful. Yep. Great, yeah, so that's one of my questions that you've already answered by putting it in the PowerPoint, so you're so far ahead of me. I think that's really useful to know that it does seem like we've been able to bring more people downtown, but is that versus, okay, it says as on top, compared with last summer, perfect. I'm super interested to know if it's a statistically significant increase, but do you have any estimation as far as the percent increase that that 3,600 amounts to?

I don't have that information readily available, but I mean, just from the indicators from fiscal year 25-26, we saw an overall increase in revenue overall, so that means that there are more people are coming downtown in general. I don't know whether in this three months, whether that is representative of the program or whether that is just more activity and people coming downtown just because they wanna visit downtown. Okay, great, thanks. So things are looking pretty good for the program, except I've learned that it sounds like the city has been paying for some transaction fees even when the session is free to the consumer. Has this been happening? Yeah, it's a transaction fee that occurs every time you use a kiosk or do a credit card transaction.

One thing that there is a possibility to do and that's available on the app is you can, what doesn't cost is if somebody loads their app with a certain amount of money and then uses those sessions over time, there's only one transaction cost to load and then onward. Okay, okay, well, that's good to know. Maybe that's an opportunity for us to do some outreach. Okay, and finally, so since it looks like we're paying for transaction fees, which have amounted to 170,000 in the last fiscal year, I just wanted to note that in. other cities, and at Chico State, most of these other cities, people are paying for their own transaction fees. So I'm glad that you brought this up as a potential cost-saving item that we'll have to discuss. But I also think our fee, it's kind of steep if you're paying only a couple dollars for parking, having to pay that 35 cents. And then possibly, I've heard that even if someone extends their session, say 10 minutes, the city is still covering another transaction fee. So I'm just wondering if there's any opportunities to negotiate with our vendor on potentially lowering the fees and also potentially making it so that we don't get charged the transaction fee or the service fee, whatever you want to call it, every single time somebody extends their session. Because I know if I bring my car downtown, I don't know exactly how long I'm going to park there, and I'd love to extend my session without knowing that the city is getting charged every time.

I don't know what kind of ability we have to negotiate it. We do have an agreement with them that has kind of contract language, so we can reach out to them and find out. But again, you know, as I said, the education about the wallet and the ability to add funds that way, that's one means to kind of mitigate some of that cost. Okay. Well, thank you so much. That's all my questions for now. Really appreciate you taking the time to answer them. All right. Council Member O'Brien. Thank you, Mayor. And that was what I wanted to know as well regarding the percent increase. For some reason, I read that in one of the documents from someone, and it was pretty substantial. But really, I want to understand what that translates into business for our downtown, because that's really what this is about is to increase business.

So having that information, I think, is going to be critically important. But seeing that percent increase and usage of our downtown lots, I think that was pretty significant for my vantage point. Thank you. Council Member Winslow. This is kind of a tag on to Council Member Goldstein's last question. Isn't the charge that we have, that's like a Visa charge, just like a small business charges to use a credit card, right? So it's not the app itself. Am I incorrect in that? There's both. Both. Yeah. So the charge that we were getting when there was no financial transaction, people just claiming their free two hours, that's the app that's just taking our money. But otherwise, it's Visa also sucking our money out? Yes, there's also percentage merchant fees on top of that. I understand. Thank you. Also, great presentation. It's great to hear about parking from just a financial point of view. It gives us a whole different perspective. Thanks.

All right. I don't have anybody else in the queue. So how many speakers do we have? We have five. All right. Three minutes each. Okay. Just a moment. Let me get it back to the screen. Okay. I'll call the first three speakers. Chris Daniels, followed by Rich Hartman and then Anika Rodriguez. So Chris Daniels, Rich Hartman, and then Anika Rodriguez. Good evening, everyone. My name is Chris Daniels, Kirk's Jewelry, Air Estate, Fine Jewelry, Downtown. As we all know, parking continues to be a major frustration to our customers, major. This has come before the city multiple times, and the frustration has not gone away. In fact, it has increased, in my opinion. Just look at social media. Whenever parking comes up, people hate the kiosks. They really do. And many tell us they'll never come back to downtown again because of those things. I'm asking the council to consider a few practical changes. First, increase core downtown parking, street parking, from two hours to three hours. Let consumers pay for two hours initially and then add a third hour if they need it. Right now, someone can come shop, have lunch, meet a friend, or have an appointment, and when two hours are up, they have to leave that parking place and go somewhere else to a long-term parking spot, and that really does discourage our customers, and that is something that makes absolutely no sense to me. The problem isn't a customer spending three hours downtown. The problem is students, employees, and even business owners parking all day in front of other people's businesses. These spaces need to turn over to customers. So I don't know what that sound was, do you? Hopefully it wasn't me. So this is where I think the tiered parking would really help for that additional time. Second, reorganize the parking structure. Make the ground floor two- to three-hour parking, customer parking, and designate the other second and third floors long-term parking. Right now, if you go down there at 7 30, 8 o'clock at night, in the morning, I'm sorry, every space is taken by an employee or a business owner. So I'd really like to keep that for customers and something that we could look at.

So I'm asking the council to take a look at this, to direct staff to bring these changes for consideration, and we want people to shop, dine, and spend time downtown. We should make it easier for them to spend that time down there. What I'd really like to see is to extend the park and go program through January, through the Warren settlement is over, and let people come downtown, have that two hours on the street, as well as parking structures, and the ability to extend that third hour and have to pay for it. So thank you for your time. Thank you for listening, and I can only hope this is considered. Thanks so much. So Rich Hartman, followed by Anika Rodriguez, and then Stephen Hazel. Good evening, Council. My name is Rich Hartman. I'm a small business owner here in Chico. We employ 25 people, and more than 80% of our clients come from outside of the Chico area. Downtown Chico is special. It is the heart of our community, is where we take visitors.

It's where our history is. It's next to Chico State and should be one of the easiest and most inviting places in the city to visit. At an early start in downtown Chico, growing up here as a kid, and six years ago when I started my current business, we came right back downtown. Our trainers are downtown virtually every week. We bring clients here. We eat here. We shop here, and we regularly use social media presence to showcase downtown Chico and its businesses to the people who don't live here. So we get to see firsthand what paid parking does. We watch citizens walk up to a kiosk, confused about how to use it. They finally get there and discover they need their license plate number. They struggle to read the screen, and then they're told to download an app.

They simply get frustrated, get back in their car, and leave. That is not welcoming. And I struggle when I hear that Chico is pro-business city while we make it more difficult to patronize the businesses in the most historically important business district in our community. Think about the message we are sending. You can shop at our shopping centers and malls without paying the city to park. You can visit restaurants and businesses in Merriam Park without paying to park there. But when you choose downtown Chico, the city charges you for the privilege of coming here. Why are we putting that burden on the very businesses and district we should be working hardest to support? Downtown Chico simply isn't just another source of city revenue.

It's an economic engine. It's a community gathering place, and it's part of Chico's identity. I would ask the council to look at parking differently. Instead of asking how much revenue can we create from these parking spaces, ask how many people can we bring downtown, how long can we get them to stay, and how easy can we make it for them to spend their money on local businesses. If we truly want to be pro-business city, let's start by removing those barriers and allowing people to do business. Make downtown Chico the easiest place in Chico to visit, not the only place where we charge people just to show up. Chasing business away is losing the funding that we get. So if all the businesses close down and there's no more downtown, it doesn't matter where all the other funding comes from. It hurts everybody. I don't have a business in downtown. I know that when we bring people to Chico, they rely and they want to go to downtown.

They want to see that. They want to visit the restaurants. They want the culture that's there, and it's starting to disappear. And we visit city businesses, downtown businesses, every day. There's several business owners here that we recognize because we're in their shops daily, and they're hurting, and they're struggling, and as a council and as a city management, we're chasing business away. We're making people get in their cars and leave and go shop somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you. Anika Rodriguez, followed by Stephen Hazel, and then Bill Monroe. Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council, on behalf of the PBIT Board, we thank you so much for supporting the Park and Go initiative. Over the last three months, we had two main objections, one to encourage people to come downtown over the summer months, and first, I want to apologize. I had a seizure this morning, and I haven't gotten fully back my cognitive function, and I didn't prepare notes for this because I knew it so well, but I'm not 100% there yet, so I'm going to actually just take my time on this. And then our second objection was to educate our city about our six public lots. On the first objection, that's hard to speak to because we have not received sales tax data. The only thing that I can personally speak to on that is that Anika Burke had an increase of 25% in our sales over the three months of July, August, and September. We do know that 10% of that increase was informal wear due to a store in Redding that had been in business for 40 plus years closing, so that is a little bit of an anomaly. Our second objection, though, educating on our city lots, I would say that we met that objection. We had that 23% increase in utilization, and we did a lot of education campaigns. We produced over 200 pieces of social media content.

We ran the Be Our Guest campaign on TV, radio, and multiple social media channels. In addition, we work directly with city staff creating educational videos that can be found on the city's YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. I personally answered over a thousand questions through the Park & Go Instagram and Facebook page. I monitored complaints. Our biggest complaint that we had would be the two-hour sessions in the 959287 zone. Somewhere in the last year, there's been a change where you can't reload. After having a lot of conversations with engineering, I would 100% recommend going to that tiered model in the 959287. I sent you guys an email last night that gives you a lot of information on that, and one thing that I would like to say in Park & Go are citations decreased. So we had a little bit more warnings, but citations did go down. So I think our education campaigns have been working, and on behalf of the Pubid Board, we would like to continue to work with you on Park & Go. It doesn't have to be the free two hours. I sent a recommendation last night on email even doing free 30 minutes in all zones when you claim your session through the app, and that would give people the ability to get notifications, and would reduce citations, and it would keep more money in the parking fund because citations do go into the general fund. However, Council would like to continue working with Pubid on this initiative. We're here. It's time. Thank you. Stephen Hazel followed by Bill Monroe.

Mr. Hazel, it's your turn.

We're on. I saw you looking on your notes. We're on 5.2 downtown parking. Parking. Yeah, parking right in my alley. Oh, parking. Wow. I remember that one. I've watched you guys from afar. Remember that over big? He's a business owner, but he doesn't have point of sale. He's a businessman. He's a different kind of guy. He really doesn't care about people buying stuff. He's one of those businessmen, and, babe, that was the biggest scam ever. You know why? Because remember how it ended? It was a three-three tie. That was a big giveaway. It was like $100,000 giveaway. The second point, they wanted to extend it, and you guys, the so-called liberal people, you want it just straight up just to see if it works. Oh, no, and right in a minute, it was going to fail, and then the mayor stepped in. She knew what it was. She goes, oh, oh, and you know what? You blew it. Hawley, you shouldn't have changed your motion. She just stuck with it. Mr. Hazel, this is on downtown parking. No, I'm talking about the parking.

The parking, no addition. It should have failed in the beginning. It was a giveaway from the beginning. You had her. You had her. It was tied, and she just gave it to her, man. This is a blood sport. You never give in. She stopped it. It was going to fail, and now here we are all giving an update. Up there, what? It costs us money. Plus $6,000. What about that? ALRP? Yeah, Motorola thing. What the hell was that? That audit. Winsor was right. He'll pay you $6,000. What else are you going to learn? Yeah, what a joke. Mr. Hazel, you're out of the subject matter. You're interrupting the public meeting. This is your warning. She has to cut it. She has to stop me because she's- You're disrupting the public meeting. No, I'm not disrupting nothing. Keep it on parking or you're going to be removed. I'm talking about parking, and it should be free. I'm against it all, and the whole thing was a scam. So what are you cutting in front of me for? What are you stopping me for? What, to kick me out? What a loser. You're a loser. You know what? A woman can't be president. You sure can't be mayor. And guess what, no?

Sorry. I have a right to speak. Okay, go have your little break. You're a little tired. A little tired. You're a little tired, little baby. Gotta go. Oh, my-

I'm next up. A really brief, with no epithets included. Okay. Bill's ready to go. We got to come back together. You look like you got chose for prices right, Bill.

Bring it back together. Ms. Presson, do we have one more speaker? Do we have one more speaker? All right. Mr. Monroe. It's your turn. Come on down. Thank you. Bill Monroe here again. The Butte County Democratic Party has rented the space across the street that used to be the Chamber of Commerce building, 1600 bucks a month. It's really a nice office. But I ran into a problem there. And it's a problem I think that hasn't really been addressed too well yet. If I work there two hours, and then I want to go for lunch at Thai Basil, a great restaurant, I can't do it. It's the same zone. You cannot repark in the same zone. And I didn't realize that until I was parked in front of the thing. After two hours, I wanted to stay longer. So I figured I'll just go around the block and park on wall. No, can't do that. It's in the same zone. So basically, after two hours, everyone who comes to downtown Chico is kicked out of downtown Chico. So that needs to be fixed. Thank you.

All right. Council discussion. Council Member Hawley. Thank you, Mayor Reynolds. As many, including staff and speakers have alluded to tonight, this is a conversation that's been going on for decades. A while ago, when researching the downtown revitalization project, I sifted through a bunch of old downtown major planning documents. And I just wanted to note, this is the downtown access planning recommendations from the year 2006. Adopting a goal of 85% parking occupancy was industry standard even back then. We only have that in a couple of blocks, which indicates, yes, there is a problem. Recommendation two, use pricing, not time limits to prioritize shoppers. That indicates support for the tiered pricing that Manager Haen and I were discussing this week and has been presented to us as an option. I think this is a really good solution to at least experiment on.

So I will for sure be supporting that as an option. And although there are technical difficulties associated with any parking meter option, we can continuously be responsive to the public's needs and try to address those the best we can. This kind of goes in line, I don't want to speak for Manager Haen, but with our master communications planning, you've alluded to having more defined and worked out guides for the public to use those parking meters. And I'm excited to be moving forward. on those. Of course, with the old parking meters, we are running into people breaking them pretty easily. They're very expensive to replace and also took so much more staff time to enforce using the old meters. So the new meters do have a pretty significant cost benefit and I'm sure we continue to build out more tools for the public to better utilize them. So I'm excited for this item.

Vice Mayor Bennett. So I was on the DCV board of directors back at that time. So I remember all of that vividly. I'm going to support number one, I'm going to support that we continue with the park and go campaign through at least December 31. Probably I think somebody suggested January. I think that's a good idea. Let's go through January. I have always been an adamant supporter of downtown Chico and I will always be an adamant supporter of downtown Chico. So number one, step one is to try and make the parking as gentle and as accommodating as possible. So we go with that. I like the tiered structure. Somebody sent me, it was Jesse Horrigan, wasn't it? That suggested. Okay. Okay. I read most of it and then life happened and I couldn't finish. So I want to look at that again. But I think the tiered structure has a great deal of merit. So we could look at that. And then the last item number three is we've got this complication with the two hour parking. And if you want to stay longer, you have to not move, but you have to go someplace else. So I know staff is working on that. I hate to say staff. The team is working on that. And I'm sure we can get that resolved. So let's move forward with continuing this program and do everything we can to be of assistance to downtown Chico. Council Member O'Brien. Yes, thank you, Mayor.

So yeah, I agree with all that you said, Vice Mayor Bennett. I think the tiered model makes sense. And I think that probably could address the same zone issue that Bill Monroe mentioned. I think that is a real issue. And I think some tiered structured model will fix that. And I did find that percentage as far as our increase from last year, July and August compared to July, August this year, that transaction on page two, it is 23%. 23%. That is significant in those six lots. So again, well done by everyone that pursued this particular project. I think that is going to be hopefully realized and profit for our businesses downtown. Another issue that a very smart friend of mine brought up that I think we can probably improve upon are some of the signs where you if you're using the app, which I completely advocate for, it's a wonderful thing. It works easy. There's really not much to it once you're actually plugged into it. But he parked at a place with a sign that did not have the zone written on that particular sign. So there's probably some little things like that we can improve. And then I think extending this Park and Go program would be very, very valuable to our downtown. And I think running it let's let's get past December, probably run it to the end of January, like you said, I think makes a lot of sense get through the holiday Christmas season. And let's see where we're at. Let's look at those numbers. Let's find out from the businesses what that translates to if this was a success. I would imagine with that 23% increase in those downtown lots that we're going to see some similar increase in revenue for our businesses, but we'll have to wait and see on that.

Councilmember Goldstein. First, no, no, Jesse Horgan, not even on zoom. All right, that's a surprise. No, Chico State Parking Services Manager for those not in the loop. Well, so I have three main goals here. We want to do what's best for our downtown, our city and our residents. And I believe that parking management is essential to supporting all three. We've had a lot of conversations on parking downtown. And I think we're all clear as council members by now that these parking fees are a way of managing the demand for a limited supply of parking. And this is especially useful in a place like Chico where our university is directly next to downtown. And we have to ensure that our students don't prevent customers from parking your businesses. And I really appreciated the communications we got from downtown business owner Anika Rodriguez and from our Chico State Parking Services Manager Jesse about that potential tiered parking model, especially for the premium zones. I think that that could really help create a better system that solves both the two hour maximum problem that people are having in the premium zone and also help like Councilmember Hawley said, use pricing as a way to incentivize people to, you know, have a shorter stay downtown versus using a spot that's meant for short term visits for all day parking. So that would be a really great idea. And I wanted to talk just a little bit about the idea of free parking and extending the Park & Go program and why I'm hesitant about that, even though it's looking like it's having some good impacts. I'm especially concerned about that transaction fee, if I'm using the right terminology, but basically the 35 cent fee. Once I learned that initially, I think we were told by the vendor that we would be able to let people park for free for those two hours in the lots without that fee. That sounded great. And it's been good. But the problem is the city is paying every time somebody does this free parking session. So I would need to see that that's going to be addressed and that the city isn't being charged for people to do a free session before I'd be comfortable with us subsidizing free parking, especially because we saw in that report that the city has lost $170,000 annually on these fees. And yes, that's part of the cost of business, but also it's putting our parking fund in the red and we need to be solvent. We can't be letting our infrastructure and services decline. So we need to look into that and I trust that staff will. So yeah, that makes me concerned. I also want to just talk for a moment about parking citations. I also learned recently that our parking citations are going into the general fund and not back into the parking fund. And I thought that was especially interesting because although I try to stay off of the Facebook argument world, I see sometimes people saying, well, the city is just charging us parking fees and then charging us fines and then paying their own salaries with that. And I'm like, oh no, our parking fund, we're barely even making money. Well, we're actually putting those fines into the general fund.

And while it's great to support our city, we need money. We also need to be able to provide our constituents with something tangible that's a benefit for what their money is going towards. So I think that's a conversation that we need to continue. I don't know if that would be supported tonight or that we would even have the general fund ability to backfill that if we put the citation money into the parking fund. But I think that in the next budget session, we need to be aware that that is something that I would support is having our parking dollars going to parking so that we can do things that benefit our downtown such as safer bike parking, better sidewalks, better striping in our parking garage. I've heard that our parking garage downtown on Salem, we have had a project that's been in the works as in in the pipeline, but not funded for a long time to improve the striping and clean the garage. But we haven't been able to fund that. So I'm looking for ways that we can make our parking fund solvent for those tangible things that will make quality of life downtown better for everybody. So I would like to start off with a motion to direct staff to return with strategies to allow for non time limited parking in the downtown premium parking area, such as a tiered fee structure, and to direct staff to find cost saving measures for parking downtown. I'd second that.

Go ahead, Council Member Winslow, and then I have some comments as well. Yeah, I'll try to try to clear this up. There's parking is, of course, one of the most complicated things that we deal with. And I'm glad that we all think about it so much because everything that everybody said, I think has been pretty on point. I think that PBID and my internal affairs team, we did a good job with this Park and Go program, the evidence that the use of the lot is up, also relative to the use of the two hour parking means that the goal of educating people about the lots, how we want people if you're going to be downtown for more than two hours, even if you're walking to lunch, to park in the 10 hour zone so that we can save that parking for other people. And I don't think that us making money in the parking fund is the most important thing. It is just to pay for parking. That's what we charge for parking for. It's not to pay other things with the exception that our parking citations are just kind of siphoned off of the general fund. But thinking about incentives, this program has provided the right incentive that we're getting people more accustomed to using the lots when they're downtown for longer. And that's good. I want to talk about this credit card fee and make sure that while it wasn't explicit in the motion that I really think we need to stop covering that 35 cent fee. I didn't support it initially like three years ago maybe when almost four years ago when we put that the city decided we would cover that fee because we knew that the kiosks were inconvenient. But I understand that the parking kiosks are so inconvenient that it made a lot of sense for us to cover some costs to try to offset that impact on people. It didn't work, obviously, because people still hated the kiosks. So I don't know if there's any return from that at all. What I do know is that it provides a perverse incentive. You can take out the app if you ever tried the app. You can load money on. You pay that fee one time. We want to incentivize people to do that because that's smart. That reduces the cost to everybody except for Visa. This is us paying Visa. So Visa probably loves the fact that we have extra transactions going on. But we remove the incentive for people to do the cheaper thing and load the money on one time. And therefore, people have even avid app users who are very accustomed to it are going through it every time because they're offloading that cost onto the city.

And we're just paying Visa out for this and Passport, I guess, that that we shouldn't do that. So we need to stop doing that. Also, when it comes to the insolvency of our parking fund, which it is, we don't make money on it. We're actually losing money for this whole system, parking enforcement. I think a lot of it can be chalked up to the difference in us covering that. And that's us basically just dumping all this money into Visa's pockets. And they're just not my highest list of corporations to please here. So I really want to make sure that it's explicit that we stop covering that. It will drive up the cost just a little bit for people, but that is them covering the cost that's already there. And being able to provide things of benefit like improved signage and cleaning out the parking garage would be useful. And I also just want to add on just as a friendly amendment to one more thing that Chris Daniels had brought up about the first floor of the parking structure being maybe better fitted for short term parking over long term. I don't know that I have the answer there, but I would like to throw that out for consideration to staff.

Is that two friendly amendments? Yeah. So one would be affirming that we do stop covering that $0.35 and then we give people the incentive to use the app more efficiently and stop giving money to Visa. And the other one would be to include in considerations making the first floor of the parking structure short term, shorter term parking. I think I will accept that, but I would love to hear from perhaps Brendan Ottoboni. If you could weigh in on the concept, especially of the parking garage first floor being reserved for shorter term parking, I'm a little worried that that would get into such things as that re-striping project that is not funded, that we might not be able to do it yet. Yeah, I think if we're looking at a policy where the first floor is a shorter term duration, that's mostly just going to be signage. I don't know how we would differentiate though, because we use the kiosk in the parking garage. So we'd have to look at logistically how to differentiate which level you're on and where you pay and then how long that stay is. And so I think that might be a logistical challenge. And then the duration, are you looking at four hours? I'd assume something like a four hour stay possibly is something that you could do. But again, we'd have to look at, is it even feasible to differentiate between the first, second or third level? We also have the Diamond Hotel's designated spots. And so we have to preserve those based on our agreements. So it would only be the non-Diamond Hotel designated spots.

Following up on that, sorry, I could talk forever about the parking garage logistics here, but it seems as though most of the spots, or maybe at least half or so, are reserved for the Diamond Hotel and other businesses. And then I think there are some spots unreserved on the top floor. And I'm wondering if there might be an opportunity to rearrange and put some of those spots where people are likely to park for a long time for a hotel or for all day for a business ownership at the top. Yeah, I believe, I don't recall specifically, but I believe, don't quote me exactly on this, but I believe it's a 25 year term that the agreement for those designated parking stalls with Diamond Hotel was originally agreed. If you recall at the time, the Diamond Hotel was abandoned and there was a huge investment into bringing it back. And so that was a negotiated agreement with the city. So we currently have that agreement in place. So we can evaluate those terms potentially when the agreement expires or as we get near that.

But you can't just rearrange which floor the spots are on? The agreement is specific to the location and the different numbers of parking stalls per level. Shouldn't have done it. Well yeah, hindsight is 20 years ago or whatever they say, you know. I think we could more loosely direct our staff to assess opportunities for the parking garage for shorter term parking. I trust that you all will be able to come up with some ideas there. Member O'Brien. Yes, thank you again, Mayor. So I'm going to agree with you, Addison, that citations are not about revenue. That may shock you, but it's not. It's about circulation. So thank you for pointing that out. And then Council Member Goldsie, you mentioned the tiered model having staff bring that back. Would that include the same zone issue that was mentioned during public comment?

Yeah, yeah. Basically building off of what our public had communicated to us, especially in Anika Rodriguez's email. And the tiered structure would at the same time solve that two hour cap issue. So thank you for that. And then I would like to see if you will accept this as a friendly amendment to make sure that all of our signs are properly noticed as far as zone numbers. So people using the app will be able to use that more readily. Definitely. And then last, I would like to see the Park and Go move on, at least till the end of January. I wanted to make sure that or ask you if you'd be interested in seeing that as well. I would like to vote on that separately, potentially. I think that could be a because I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I guess my nuanced opinion on that is that we need to first figure out the fee issue so that we're not paying every time somebody does a free session.

So Councilman, or you're giving me a raise, a position raise. May I make some suggestions? Definitely. I think that there's a few things that we could do immediately and then a few that we could research and bring back to you. Great. So I think deleting the two hour maximum, we've heard from all of you in the public that that's a challenge. I think we could do that pretty immediately, yes, with the tiered rates through the system. Yeah, I'd say just signage and communication would be the critical element of that to make sure it's successful. So we can do that. It'll just take a little bit of time, but we can do that without having to come back. I think we can, I'm looking at Barbara, address the transaction fee issue and put those on to the user immediately as well.

We don't need to come back to you for that. I think we can work on the signage and the proper noticing that Councilmember O'Brien suggested immediately with the directive without having to come back for that. And then the last thing, which sounds like you want to vote on separately, we could extend that two hour free parking go through January 31st immediately without coming back if you want to take a separate vote on that. And then the two items that you could vote on us bringing back would then be researching that tiered rate structure and what those numbers look like. And then looking at that parking garage, first floor, second floor, short term, long term parking agreements and all of that information.

So those two items could come back as more information, but the others we could act on this evening. Can I ask for first a recap and then a procedural question? So you're saying immediately we could address the two hour cap removal, signage and the fees. But were you you're saying separately we would do the tiered structure because you want to be able to analyze that more? The tiered structure and the parking garage research would come back. OK. And then procedurally, if I were to, Debbie, would I need to totally redo my motion or how would you feel about that? I feel most of that was in there. So well, would it be cleanest for us to just all vote no on that one and start with a new motion or how do you want to?

Well, I think that she could amend her motion to capture what was left over. And it sounds like the city manager was indicating that the deleting of the two hour maximum could be implemented. And the user fees on the credit cards could be placed back on the users and the signage could be done. In addition, the tiered rates and parking garage in the parking garage research would need to come back. So those would be the two items remaining on your motion. I'd be happy to amend my motion to add those two to come back later. OK. And then just to clarify, you were not in agreement with extending extending the park and go to the end of January. I wouldn't. want that one to potentially be a sticking point that makes the rest of this motion fail if we're more in agreement on these other ones but I'm not I'm not sure I also I guess to be clear I would revoke my second if the extension of the parking go through January would be fair enough let's vote separately on parking go okay so and all right so right now the motion there's a motion in a second to have staff bring back some research on the tiered rates and the parking garage the short-term long-term parking in there and then that would be the item that would be voted on can you read the motion back sorry I have it as a motion in a second to direct staff to bring back research on the tiered rates and the parking garage short-term long-term versus the parking spots and to see if there's anything that can be done there and then the the other things deleting the to our maximum would already be implemented because staff said that they can do that and that user fees will be placed back on the users and signage would be implemented okay thank you I will express a quick concern about deleting the to our maximum without the tears that that could open up a can of worms or we end up with people parking for eight hours for $2 an hour downtown councilmember Winslow were you on there first I saw your name earlier it fell off yeah yeah you go who do you want to go first I don't care go ahead okay I had some clarifying questions and it was along those lines yeah so extending the to our maximum but not having tiered rates means what we're gonna we're gonna have all the two-hour spots taken up for long period of time by students and employees employees already do it a lot of the time students I think know a little bit better and they're gone they're there for longer and further away from the cars even with the tiered rates we'd find out really fast how much students are willing to pay to not be late to class and park in the two-hour zone and maybe that's the solution to our parking fund issues I mean if we set the rates high enough I have one just procedural question if when we establish rates say we establish tiered rates do we need to change that by resolution does need to come back to the council for us to change parking rates or can we give you authority to like go within a range because we want to find the sweet spot where students are not parking there for six to eight hours yeah but sometimes people in a particular situation want to walk to lunch or whatever and they they pay more yeah so believe it was in the 2018 time frame when we went to the premium and economy zones and through that in our Muni code allows director authority to adjust the rates actually upwards or downwards based on the 85% occupancy rule mostly the parking rates are established through the the fee schedule I believe so it would be a fee schedule adjustment I believe would be the sorry did those things kind of each other you said the director does have the authority to move up and down based on occupancy but but also we can't we need to have a fee schedule update yeah okay so we'd have to look at that more cleanly of exactly what the Muni code says and then yeah that would be evaluation between the Muni code and the rate structure okay I do share the concern about extending the two hours to three four or five ten hours or whatever and without implementing tiered rates that all that parking would get taken but it wouldn't be the end of the world more people would probably bike if there was no parking spots vice mayor Bennett so this has become far more complicated than I feel it needed to be I will not be voting in support of this I think we need to take the vote see what happens and then we can start over but any motion that does not include continuing with the park and go through January I will not support councilmember Goldstein I wanted to clarify director Ottoboni so if we were to direct staff to move forward on analyzing the tiered parking do I understand that that could be that the tiers could be established internally without coming back to council to approve the full tiers no okay all right well thanks for that clarification that's all well I think I could make a substitute motion that we do extend park and go through January which does not obviate the original motion so we can vote on that and then we can vote on the other one I'll second your substitute motion to extend parking oh yes I have a procedural question sorry if a substitute motion passes then we don't vote on the original one right only if the original one is like defunctors there's some word it's like that yeah so no in this case okay right that is correct okay so there was a motion and to do the park and go to approve it through the end of January and the motion was by councilmember Winslow seconded by the mayor is that correct okay let me just get that in and then we can do another motion to deal with the other items correct well we would just go back to the original motion that's on the floor that was what but if this one passes then we don't go to that and this is only about the park and go okay pilot program yes absolutely we're going back to the other one if you were eliminating any of the other aspects of the other original motion and it carried then that would negate the need to go back to the first question never mind I just do it sorry okay councilmember Goldstein no councilmember Hawley no councilmember O'Brien yes I'm glad we saw the wisdom in this councilmember Winslow yes vice mayor Bennett no this was on the park and go until January yes okay here Reynolds I it carries four two with one recusal let me get that in and then we're gonna go back to the original motion which was by councilmember Goldstein seconded by councilmember Hawley and strategy to direct staff to bring back strategies for tiered zones and wait sorry it was there was more writing research have staff researched the tiered parking rates and the parking a short and long term parking spots in the garage wait a minute that didn't deal with the signage the card in the two-hour removal because that that's because the city manager had indicated that staff could move forward with deleting the to our maximum okay and could put the user fees back on the users okay the signage would be taken care of I just want to put it on the record that the most important thing to me in this whole entire thing is that to our thing to have a customer come downstown and spend two hours and then go home try on a dress try on whatever and then want to come back later that evening and have dinner and not be able to park and come back and spend time in our town is absolutely crazy I know that it was put into effect to try to fix a problem which was the feeding the meter problem but we've created a bigger problem that's more of a problem that is not wanting people to enjoy our downtown so to me that is the most important thing that we take care of and I do believe that we do need to do the tiered pricing and that needs to happen but right now we need to fix this two hours whether it be letting people add on an hour and go to the three hours as one person mentioned or just taking it out all together and then mr. Monroe can hang out here and then he can go to where he wants to have lunch and it won't be a problem and we can deal with it in January or whenever all the rest of this comes back so that that notation confirms what the city manager said and that's in this motion I did want to just sorry to continue this but um does the staff feel that they can use their discretion to figure out if that's extending if that's fully removing the cap on hours extending it by one or two hours like that do you feel confident in that okay great perfect I got councilmember O'Brien you're on did you want to say something else before we vote I do not thank you mayor making sure okay we've got a motion a second councilmember Goldstein yes councilmember Hawley yes councilmember O'Brien yes councilmember Ben of Rebecca is recused councilmember Winslow yes vice mayor Bennett I'm going to vote no because I'm not going to I remember going through the 35 cent charge fee I'm not gonna vote in favor of removing that until such time as our director of finance and services administrative services weighs in that one was actually already handled in the previous the previous motion I think well no actually no I was just extending parking no it wasn't it was okay yeah so mayor Reynolds so it is it is part of this motion that the user the 35 cents would go back on okay all right so mayor Reynolds I okay that carries five with one no and one recusal all right I'm not sure all right five point three consideration of the internal affair committee's report recommendation if there are any speakers on zoom wishing to address this matter please raise your hand at this time and we will ask for a report from the internal affairs chair councilmember O'Brien so yeah so we discussed this mayor thank you and really there's you know multi layers to this and looked at actually heard a lot of comments from people which was helpful heard from the franchisees that are involved in this this particular endeavor so it was all helpful but ultimately the internal affairs council did not make a recommendation other than to bring back the full report to council a later date for us then to decide on a course of action and my understanding without speaking out of turn and I see Skyler has joined us thankfully that this we brought back without full report or city manager Haen at some point maybe in the end of November or December is that accurate right did you have anything else you'd like to add man of many words I'm sure it'll all be in that full report in November or December nothing else to add other than yeah we're just seeking direction here from internal affairs heard the issue and has a report back to council and so we're seeking direction from the full council at this time so thank you for that and I think what I wanted to see was really all the comments we had anecdotal comments that came in filtered in through these various meetings I really wanted to see that full report and read that for myself before I made a decision and that was the direction of internal affairs all right questions from counselor how many speakers do we have we have five all right three minutes each all right if you could go ahead and line up in the middle aisle please so Joanna Guthrie Tracy Vincent and Marcy Walton Joanna Guthrie is first followed by Tracy and then Marcy thank you Joanna Guthrie waste management I just wanted to follow up when I saw the agenda packet and I'm just a little bit closer to the mic I don't think we can't hear you sorry thank Gary there was some material that was submitted at the I a meeting that was from some multifamily home proprietors so we went back and looked at those photos and we identified the property that the waste management bins were on that particular property so to kind of put it in context the overage charges that are allowed in the franchise agreement is not another revenue generator for the franchise haulers it's actually a tool to help change behavior so the way that it's written in the franchise agreement is when they have an overage and it's within a 12-month period so if you haven't had one in 12 months or your last one was 13 months ago you you go back to the 12 months starting then so in that 12-month period you get two warning letters so the first two times you have an overage you get a warning letter and then there's a third time we can either give you a fee or not give you a fee so our practice is we're doing the two letters we're exempting that third time on the fourth time we are charging the fee and the fee is designed like a parking ticket fee is designed and that is to change the behavior if the fee isn't relevant enough for them to want to not have that fee again then they're just going to pay the fee and keep having the overages overages cause multiple problems one they can be a safety hazard because of how people tend to put Jenga on their top of their bins and then if they don't get balanced correctly they can actually fall from the truck especially in these multifamily homes there are parked cars around so you know it's just not a good idea plus additional litter etc so I just wanted to give you guys that context this particular one that came to the IA meeting and was part of the exhibit that was submitted I will tell you that after two fees they have no longer had any more overages so that's it worked thank you.

Okay Tracy Benson followed by Marcy Walton and then Dave Donnan. Well I guess now I have more questions because I thought we were going to get some questions answered so this this has been going on back and forth I feel like we're not actually getting good information through the reports it's all just way too much time spent on this which is kind of the point too we have big fish to fry we have a lot of stuff coming up the pike and my experience anyway with waste management they have been very helpful very like responsive to when there's a problem like even now they switch their whole call bank to you call and you get a human I feel like we're wasting so much time on all of this when we couldn't just why can't we just negotiate a contract if they fulfill it and they agree to the requirements great we move on with that and give us a few more years to settle all the big fish that we have to fry in here and and again if we can't get to a contract agreement then go to an RFP I would like some questions answered before anybody agrees to do that because in one spot it said that the city consultant would estimate about 60 hours just to do a draft how much is that going to cost us just for that one draft and then how much is the whole thing going to cost just to run it to that I mean there's lots of questions that the numbers aren't there versus like I said we negotiate a contract see if they can meet what our demands are and whatever the issues are with the complaints I saw there was some complaints what are those complaints have they addressed it like it seems so easy right now and I will just throw in there that bigs recently just went through the same thing in September and they reviewed the competitive bidding looked around and found out that our rates were so great that they were like no forget it we're just gonna stick with what we've got we actually have lower rates than they do so I think some of the other issues aren't gonna magically just go away anyway by changing to another company like the whole green waste problem and stuff like I said I think we should just save a little bit of time and money if possible let's work on a contract with them we have enough time if we can't get a good contract negotiated fine then we go to an RFP. Thank you Marcy Walton followed by Dave Donnan.

Good evening Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council. I'm Marcy Walton the general manager of Recology Beat Calusa. At the internal revenue meeting I gave a brief recap of Recology so I'm gonna shorten that just because it's been a long evening and it's it's due. So Recology is a hundred percent employee-owned company we're the only national or regional company in our industry that can say this every driver customer service representative or mechanic has a stake in the company which maintains ownership and in the hands of our local employees not our external shareholders. Recology is just here to support the city's decision whether that be the extension or the RFP. We're here to answer any questions you know please feel free to email call me willing to discuss any things that you need to discuss. Thank you. And then our last speaker is Dave Donnan. Hi my name is Dave Donnan I was involved in writing the the agreement the waste agreement on the recycling end of it I was a independent recycler that came to Chico in 1980 and I was the garbage company's worst enemy because I was keeping stuff out. I made enough money to put two daughters through college. I was also appointed by the City Council to be on the Sustainability Committee and the Climate Action Committee because I spent 30 years in the recycling business. It was on seven different counties of their waste diversion programs when the law first came.

came out. My concern in this contract is how the city is no longer enforcing. When Linda Herman was here when I helped her put this together on the recycling end, nobody's been really keeping track of it. It's not that I don't trust waste management, but garbage companies are haulers. They pick up from point A and take to point B. And what happened is they got into the business of now having to sort the material. It's a commodity, whether it's glass, aluminum, plastic, paper, whatever it is, it all has value. And what my concern is is we're not getting the exact numbers that are checked on by the city. So I would like to see a little more teeth put into the recycling end of it, because when I helped start the Work Training Centers program, the only recycler here was George Scott at the time, and him and I used to go around and around about what the price of aluminum was.

But I guess you understand my point here, is when it comes to renegotiating it, I'd be more than happy to give my expertise to the city manager to help go over this again. I sure haven't forgotten about it in that many years. Thanks. He was our last speaker. All right. Councilmember Winslow. Let me just say as the dissenting member of the Internal Affairs, it was a really good presentation, would recommend. So if we come back to having it, I think that will be helpful. It was more information than we had initially. I did feel like I had sufficient information to make a call. I think that going to RFP is a better idea. I think we bring in competition and this allows more benefits for our customer base. And I think the first time, as I said last time we discussed this here, first time our franchise agreement was negotiated, we didn't know exactly what we were doing, and we can do a much better job now. I will just point out one thing that's in there's kind of statements and then staff clarifications in the presentation we were given, which is in your staff report. One says RFPs are very expensive. That's the statement. Staff clarification is that the agreements need to be reworked or updated anyway. So the difference in admin work between an RFP and an extension is minimal.

So we can get lots of benefits from having different haulers come in, potentially make a bid that is under what we expect and find out we can get a better deal. But we only get that if we do an RFP. Otherwise, we negotiate with the current franchise holders and we don't get the opportunity for getting anything better for people. Yes, that's all. All right. Council Member Hawley. Sorry, I'm going to be a little grumpy. But the reason that I voted against initially punting this item to Internal Affairs is I don't think that any additional information would come to Internal Affairs that the Council hadn't already seen and considered themselves. So I don't really understand the point of Internal Affairs hosting a meeting to ultimately not even have a recommendation. That's not even final policy. But to not even sift out additional things that we had learned from the public was disappointing, but not surprising, considering this Council's pattern of extended deferral on decisions that are contentious.

Council Member O'Brien. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Actually, we did make a recommendation that was to bring back the full report because we did not have all the public comments, particularly on multifamily commercial properties that was lacking. And I want to make a informed decision out of respect to the franchisees, but also to our public. We owe them that. And that is made when we have full information. We did not have full information at that time. And that was a recommendation of our Internal Affairs Committee. So I will disagree with that. All right. So consider a motion. So are we like is this agenda? So we just need to schedule now another presentation. So we can't actually just make the decision that we could have. Yeah, we could have just recommended at that point because we can only discuss. So, yeah, essentially the committee by not making a recommendation, which is overall is what happened. It actually says the motion was without a recommendation of the committee. That actually made it so we're unable to move forward more efficiently with one direction or another and just make a decision. Even if you're going to say, let's just negotiate the franchisee. We can't do that now. So that is kind of a waste of time. But I guess I'll make the motion that we hear the report and we so we accept the committee's recommendation, which I dissented on in committee.

I guess I'll second that. Council Member Goldstein. Yes, I heard the report. So Council Member Goldstein. Yes. Okay. Sorry. Council Member Hawley. Yeah. Council Member O'Brien. And just to make sure that's to bring back the full performance report that was not yet fully provided. Is that accurate? Was that the motion? That's kind of important. I mean, the motion was yours and internal affairs and it said bring the discussion back to council without a recommendation with staff providing additional information, including the full performance review that we did get this summer. So the yes, the motion is to have this discussion at another time. And we did get that report. We did. Yes. Some of us read it. I don't think we did. I disagree with that. Anyway, I will I don't know whose turn it is to vote. I think I have clarification on that for myself.

Council Member van Overbeek. Yes. Council Member Winslow. Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett. Yes. Mayor Reynolds. Aye. Carries 7-0. All right. We're going to power through here. Everybody good without taking a break? Okay. All right. 5.4 Vina GSA letter. Director Ottoboni. Yes, Deputy Director David Kehn will lead the presentation. Good evening, members of Council, Vice Mayor Bennett, Mayor Reynolds. My name is David Kehn, Deputy Director of Public Works Engineering. Tonight I'm joined with Richie Bamlet, City of Chico Urban Forester and Dr. Christina Buck, Assistant Director with Butte County Water Resource and Conservation. Tonight we will be giving you a presentation on the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency and the periodic evaluation. We're targeting around 15 minutes. So what we'll go over is the agency itself, how the periodic evaluation fits into that. The Chico management area, the beneficial users. And then lastly, we'll close with the data gaps and projects and management actions. So the Vina Subbasin has two groundwater sustainability agencies. These are GSAs. We have the Vina and the Rock Creek Reclamation District. The Vina consists of a joint powers agreement between three member agencies, the City of Chico, Butte County and Durham Irrigation District. It has a five-member board of directors that includes those member agencies as well as an agricultural stakeholder and a non-agricultural domestic well stakeholder.

The City of Chico also participates on the management committee. So the GSA's task is to create a groundwater sustainability plan, which was accomplished in 2022 and approved by DWR at that time, Department of Water Resources, with a goal of getting to sustainability by 2042. Along the way, we are required to do a periodic evaluation. At a very, very high level the groundwater levels have stayed well above every minimum threshold and the subbasin is on track for sustainability for 2042. There's a lot of detail in the periodic evaluation itself, but that's a high-level overview. So the GSA consists of a large area. It goes roughly from the Butte County to Hama County line all the way down about halfway to Oroville.

So they break it into three management areas, Vina North, Vina Chico, and Vina South. Within Vina Chico, it's the City of Chico proper, and that consists of beneficial users. Those beneficial users are municipal, domestic, and environmental. I'll talk about municipal and domestic. Richie will talk about environmental. So the City of Chico is a relatively small area. Therefore, four representative monitoring sites have been selected to monitor groundwater within the City of Chico, and these representative monitoring sites are monitoring wells. Richie will show an image of those later, but they are specially designated to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Currently, there are four RMS wells in Chico, with two RMS wells proposed for groundwater-dependent ecosystems. Those are the environmental beneficial users, and Richie will talk about that. But first, municipal. So given that there are four RMS wells and it's a relatively small area, a minimum threshold of 85 feet above median sea level was selected. However, each well of those fours has its own measurable objective, and I'll spend some time right now talking about the graph to the right.

The vertical columns represent the type of year, a dry year or a wet year. Dry is red, blue is wet. The dashed red line at the top is the ground level. The blue line that goes up and down, that's the groundwater levels each year. You measure them twice in the spring and the fall. The dashed dot red line at the bottom, that is the minimum threshold. That is where we do not want to go. That is when undesirable results occur. Bad things happen at that time, including the state coming in and asking you why you're not meeting your objectives. The purple and green dashed dot line, that is the measurable objectives, and that is where we are trying to get. As you can see, there is a long-term trend downward.

Therefore, that measurable objective takes into this gliding account effect. Think of a big cruise ship. You can't change it overnight. It takes years to get to, so it has a target of getting to that gliding path. As you can see, there's been some rebound in the past few years, so for municipal wells, we're in a good position, and the minimum threshold is significantly lower than recent readings. With domestic well users, the Groundwater Sustainability Plan identified approximately 387 domestic wells in the city of Chico, and out of that, the minimum threshold was set to protect the majority of those domestic wells. That is determined by this graph up here at the top. That red squiggly line actually consists, each one of those is a dot that represents a domestic well, and it's a depth, and so as you can see, the minimum threshold crosses the point where about 35 wells would be at risk if the minimum threshold was achieved. And with that, I'll let Richie talk about.

Thank you, David. Vice Mayor, City Council, good evening. I've just got a couple of slides. So, my segment, I'll be looking at environmental uses. So, this is a great photograph, a drone footage. As you can see at the bottom, you've got one mile, and then looking southeast across the city, you can see the urban canopy, and if you look at the top, you can actually see like the Chico Mall. So, it's just going on and on. It's a really great photo that shows the canopy that we have. One thing to point out is that that canopy doesn't just stop at the boundary of Bidwell Park. It's about halfway up from one mile, but it just keeps on going. So, it's one of the items, one of the data points that we got out of the Urban Forest Master Plan. We did that back in 2020. We did a full LIDAR assessment, and that's how we established that figure of 36% tree canopy.

And it's actually one of the highest tree canopies really anywhere in the United States, probably one of the highest in California. So, it's quite an important resource for the residents of Chico. And an interesting fact, just to put it in perspective, as David mentioned, the Chico area is just one of the three management areas, but in fact, like nine out of ten residents that live within the whole Viner sub-basin actually live in the Chico management area. So, we're all living among this tree canopy. So, it's vitally important for the livability of our city. So, this is the only part of the slide that I will read out. So, what is a groundwater-dependent ecosystem? So, I'll read the code. California Code of Regulations, Title 23, 351M, defines a groundwater-dependent ecosystem, or GDE, as an ecological community or species that depend on groundwater emerging from aquifers or on groundwater occurring near the ground surface.

So, it's an important legal phrase because there's a lot of things that it actually doesn't say. So, it's not necessarily connected to riparian habitat, which a lot of the original groundwater sustainability plans focused on that in order to identify GDEs. It also doesn't specify how long of, for what time scale, a particular GDE may have to rely on groundwater, and we'll get to that in a couple of slides. We'll explain that. We'll unpack that a little bit more. So, part of that 36% tree canopy, well, it's made up of over 34,000 publicly owned street trees, and there's probably three times that amount in private ownership. So, we're not going to measure every single tree that's within Chico. But one thing that we can do, because we have the data, we can analyze that groundwater dependent ecosystem based on the valley oaks that we have, because we know where they all are. Thanks to the tree inventory that we did back in 2020, we have all of our publicly owned trees mapped. So, this map shows where all our valley oaks are, and this really makes a great data set that we can use going forward to map our groundwater dependent ecosystems. So, a quick biology lesson on the valley oak tree.

It's a photograph of a typical valley oak that we're all used to seeing. Really big specimen, but the bit you don't see is what it might look like underground. So, we have a artist impression. So, a couple of things to point out. So, the root system is made up of really two different types of root systems, so it has a dual purpose. So, the top layer, the shallow layer is the, well, shallow root system, and that system primarily taps water through the fall, through the winter, natural rainfall, and then the second part is the deeper sinker root system, and that's really the system that qualifies valley oaks to be classified as a groundwater dependent ecosystem. These deep sinker roots, they're the ones that get the tree through the drier summer months when there is no rainfall, and those roots grow down and then tap the aquifer, and that's really, you know, what we're all here discussing. So, they tap the shallow groundwater, and that gets them through the summer ready for the next rains to come, and so the cycle commences. So, as it's got up there, valley oaks have a dimorphic root system.

The other piece there is that they're classified as a really fancy word, facultative, free to type. Try saying that five times quick, and really what that means is that they're not fully dependent on groundwater 365 days of the year. It really is just a seasonal episode mostly through the drier summer months. So, getting down into some of the mapping, and David had a similar version of this map in his part of the presentation. You'll notice one of, on the right hand side, one of the wells is crossed out with a red line. So, that was in the 2022 plan. It's since, I think, identified as being damaged, I believe. I'm looking for some, yeah. So, that was taken out. So, all of that left us with the four cold water deep monitoring wells. Now, those wells are screened 600 feet and beyond, so they really tap into the deeper aquifer, and on the right hand side, sorry, on the left hand side, you can see a simple drawing of what a typical aquifer might look like. So, you can see in that drawing, we have a shallow aquifer, which is the upper area above the confined layer, that brown layer in the middle that separates the two water bodies. So, it's really that upper layer that the valley oaks are tapping into. The problem with our current network is that those four groundwater wells don't measure that shallow groundwater aquifer. So, myself and staff at Butte County Department of Water Resource Conservation, we looked at the current network of available wells and looked to see which ones can we use now in this current five-year periodic evaluation. Because even though there are new wells being drilled, and they've been drilled, and they will start collecting data, that data won't feed into the groundwater sustainability plan until there's at least five years of data. So, it really isn't going to help us until the next periodic evaluation. So, what we wanted to find is shallow wells that can help monitor where the valley oaks are getting water and do that now. So, we did find two wells.

I won't read out the names of the wells, but you can see them on the map, and we've got them ringed there. So, as you can see, the two new ringed wells are proposed, and they're the ones that are tapping the left-hand side of that aquifer, so the shallow aquifer. And it's really the first time that we've had that in Chico. Following on from that, these are the hydrographs of those two wells. So, there's currently 20 years of data that we can look at to monitor the shallow groundwater. And as you can see, over the last 20 years have been pretty flat. They do go up and down seasonally, as you would expect, but there really isn't a trend that's worrying, that's showing that they're going down. They're just really stable, which is good to see, and we hope that that continues.

But if we didn't have these wells, you know, the old cliche, you can't manage what you can't measure, you know, if we didn't have them in the network, then we just wouldn't have the data that we need to verify that the groundwater dependent ecosystems are in a good healthy state. So one thing I would, finally, one thing I would like to clarify is I've had people ask me, you know, why do we have, why have we settled on a 30-foot threshold? It's not based on the perceived rooting depths of Valley Oaks. It's really just based on the depths of these two wells. So these two wells only go up to 36 feet deep. There is a lot of scientific data that shows that Valley Oak roots can go way deeper than that. We've done isotope studies and all kind of fancy studies to show what water they're tapping, and there is a lot of good scientific evidence that they do tap much deeper than 30 feet. But if the well only goes to 36 feet, we can't measure anything deeper. We can't measure 50 feet or 60 feet or some of these numbers that we think those roots could go down to. So we kept it at 30 feet for this periodic evaluation. When more data comes in and we have better information, when the new wells start producing data, we can look at that number and refine it as needed. So that concludes my section.

The other thing to note at the bottom is it does say that, well, currently there's no guidance from the Department of Water Resources on how to manage groundwater-dependent ecosystems, but that guidance is coming out. There is no timescale on that, but we do hope that it would be available for the next periodic evaluation. And then at that time, I think we'll be able to map the GDEs with much more confidence. But at this point, having these two new wells proposed into the Chico network really gives us that barometer, if you like, that we can measure and we can see the groundwater and compare that with the health of the trees that we can visibly see. So, yeah, so that concludes my part of this presentation, and I'll pass the mic to Dr. Christina Buck.

Thank you. Good evening. Christina Buck, Assistant Director at Butte County Department of Water and Resource Conservation. I've been providing technical staff support to the Vina GSA as they've been doing this periodic evaluation. I'm going to provide just a quick brief speaking to the work that the GSAs have been doing to implement their plan over the last five years and kind of where they're headed. So building off of what Richie talked about, the plan that was adopted in 2022 identified two key data gaps and described those. And a data gap per the groundwater law is information that we don't have that significantly limits our ability to understand the system, the groundwater system, or is limiting the GSA's ability or the state's ability to assess whether the sub-basin is being managed sustainably. And so there's kind of two pieces here. One is related to the domestic well data set. That is to say that what we don't have is a data set of how many active domestic wells are in the sub-basin. We don't know how many there are that are actively being used to supply households where they are and what depth they're at. What we do have is a data set of domestic wells that have been installed over time. And work was done in this last year to refine that data set to try to remove wells that we think were probably replaced, old wells that were replaced by new wells over time, and to better refine the information that we have that you heard from David about what those at-risk well numbers might be. So the numbers that you heard from David are resulting from kind of this refinement of that data set. So that work has recently been done. And the second piece is the lack of available shallow groundwater data. And you heard what work has been done to kind of bring some of that into the plan. In the 2022 plan, because we didn't have shallow groundwater data to really get at this where streams are connected and where trees are connected, criteria were not set specific to those aspects. And work has been done to fill that data gap in two ways. One is evaluating existing monitoring wells like the ones that Richie identified and discussed that are out there that we can measure more. And then new wells have been installed over the last couple months, newly drilled wells. So that data gap is being filled and data will be collected into the future that can help us continue to to do more of what Richie talked about and better understand those connections. So the other way that the plan is implemented is through what are called projects and management actions. This is what needs to be done to achieve sustainability. And I want to just hone in on one of the management actions that the plan describes is a domestic well mitigation program. And that is always been described in the plan, but the Vina GSA has committed to developing that program in the coming year in 2027. Meaning what wells would be eligible, what would be the mitigation, how are you going to fund that program. So all of that would be defined when that program is developed. And then the periodic evaluation also describes kind of the current status and progress that has been made on some of these other types of projects such as irrigation efficiency, recharge water supply. So all of that details in the document. The other thing that is there is some additional new projects and I just want to highlight these two that really address again this data gap of understanding how is the Chico urban forest connected to the shallow groundwater, what's the vulnerability of that system to groundwater pumping from those deeper depths.

So the Chico urban forest vulnerability assessment and continued or additional local refinement of groundwater dependent ecosystem mapping is described as future work that could be done along with some other projects as well that have been added. So what do the next five years look like as work continues? This is as David kind of showed that roadmap, right? It's an ongoing process of managing groundwater. Certainly monitoring and data collection will continue in existing and in these newly drilled monitoring wells. That data gets reported out annually. Developing the domestic well mitigation program as I mentioned. And then development of criteria specific to streams and habitat. We can expect that to happen in this next, I believe in this next kind of implementation period as that data gap gets addressed with new data. And continuing to address those data gaps either through these new additional efforts and also supporting project implementation. So in the short run these draft documents are available for public comment.

There's a bunch of dates here but I just want to highlight October 26th is the close of the public comment period on both the draft periodic evaluation and there's also some draft amendments to the plan itself. Both of those documents are available on the website and then there's a few different conversations that are going to happen with the advisory committee and the board but ultimately on December 9th the joint GSA boards will consider review and adoption of those documents. So with that I'll turn it back over to David. So now you've heard about the agency the beneficial users in Chico and the next steps for the groundwater sustainability plan. Council Member Hawley asked us to bring back some items of discussion for a potential letter to the Vina GSA and so we've drafted up some options something simple as identifying beneficial uses and a statement. We could also support specific actions or specific things within the plan and then we could go further and encourage something that we want to see a change that we want to see and then lastly we could offer the city as a partner.

Those projects and management actions that she describes that's something that the city could take up both from a staff perspective or a budgetary perspective. So those are items for your consideration into a letter that concludes our presentation. All right questions for staff? Council Member van Overbeek. Thank you. Let's see what do we call you a director assistant director? Mr. Kehn. Mr. Kehn. All right I like it. So I wonder so the first question I have is I'm not seeing what the problem is. I mean we we have a healthy urban forest. Mr. Bamlet, Mr. Bamlet's presentation indicated that the level of the aquifer is stable over time and in fact it's 71 feet above the minimum threshold and more than 20 feet above the target. It went down during the drought in 2022 and since then it's been coming up every year. So why are we having this conversation?

I think that's probably a better. No no it's a serious question. We want everybody to feel welcome to share their opinions here so we're going to let council members speak and we're going to do it one at a time. Thank you. Well this was originally brought forth by Council Member Hawley as a request as a presentation to potentially provide a letter to the GSA and as far as the the problem I think that what's been identified is a data gap and so we know that trees need water obviously. Is that a groundwater dependent ecosystem and how is that related to the regional aquifer? Those are what we're trying to figure out. So there's people on both sides that think maybe they are connected or they are not but that data gap is the solution to finding that answer. So so this is all about getting more data so we can make better a better decision about whether or not I mean we don't have we don't seem to have a problem now but you're saying we need better more data to to really have confidence that we're on a sustainable track with the aquifer. Right and and so a letter and that was the point with the letters it could encourage specific projects and management actions or offer support that's where the city could could lean in. Thank you. Council Member Hawley. That was a great answer Mr. Kehn. I get very defensive because I'm the one who directed staff to have to make this presentation so really that was a question best answered by me and I am happy to get into that after public comment. I just wanted to thank Mr. Bamlet, Mr. Kehn, and Dr. Buck for the presentation and to formally apologize for my agendizing of this item resulting in you staying here at 10 p.m on a Tuesday. If I could bake I would send you cookies but I'm not very good at that.

Anyways before we go to public comment I just wanted to clarify that the ask is not for council to become subject matter experts from a 15-minute presentation. It's simply to establish a public record of the city reminding a agency with which we are partners in that the people under the city's jurisdiction are a unique set of beneficial users within the groundwater sub-basin and that our job is to educate lawmakers on the local impact of the policy they set. So if any audience members are planning on asking for us to make recommendations on sustainability and management criteria that would be completely inappropriate and if any council members were to make that recommendation I would vote it down because that's not our subject matter. Just want to make that clarifying statement.

Council Member O'Brien. Thank you Mayor. So just to clarify first number one let me say that I appreciate Council Member Hawley's agendizing this. I think it is important for us to have this conversation. However we are not the water police. I'm glad you recognize that as well. But really I want to defer my question to you David. So the data gap that exists that we're trying to remedy represents or is represented in the two shallow monitoring sites. Is that accurate? Is that what the data that we need right now as far as filling that data gap? That will help us get there with the existing resources that we have. Additional wells have been installed but that data is forthcoming over the future two to five you know future years. So that will help round out the picture but by adding these RMS sites now it helps fill it with the wells that we have. Okay thank you. All right thank you. I don't have anybody else in the queue.

How many speakers do we have? We have 11. All right um given the time of the evening I think we should do one minute each. Okay. If you're okay with that. I don't because we one and a half is you can't do the half right? Okay. All right so I'm going to call the first three speakers and if you would please line up in the middle aisle. Susan Tichutti, Pat Dobson, and Michelle Jordan. Necessarily I will be very brief. Some of the concerns of what has been done with the GSA are not coming up here. The city of Chico is at a disadvantage because the people that are on the GSA and Katie Hawley is really the is the Chico city representative are outnumbered by ag and ag wants unlimited use of water. If that happens if ag gets unlimited use of water we will lose our urban forest. So what you can't change that what you can do is write to the GSA stating strong feelings about establishing a new much higher minimum threshold and giving greater representation to the city of Chico and not have the farmers making our decisions about water here.

Okay um Pat Dobson, Michelle Jordan. Okay and then Patrizia. First of all one of the things I want to address really quickly is the 387 wells. This is an incorrect number. The board chose to only include wells that were drilled after 1980. I'm a homeowner here with a well that was drilled in 1960. On my block there is two blocks of homes that all have wells before 1960. We're not counted and we're looking at losing our wells and I'm also going to tell you about on El Monte on Centennial on Manzanita those are all wells. So why we're here is because you're going to see a lot of people lose their water. I do not have Cal water on our street for two blocks so we're talking $28,000 to even hook up to Cal water by the time they bring lines. Meanwhile my property depreciates. I don't have any water in my home and my landscape starts dying. So that's the importance of this. There is over 4,000 wells in the area including Durham and small farmers who are going to lose their farms their wells and their farms.

Okay so Patrizia followed by Robin McCollum and then Marian Vina. Thank you for your time. I'm hangry. I'm sure you're hangry too. I wanted to address council member Tom. Why are we here? I'm here to implore you don't waste your seat at the table. The city of Chico is part of the joint powers agreement. You're lucky enough to have a seat. Environmental users do not have a seat at the table and we realized that when we looked at the JPA when they had a new domestic well non-agricultural person chosen. So here's some a few stats. In 2001 we had a drought 98 wells went dry and those were self-reported on mydrywell.com. That is only a small percentage of the wells that actually have gone dry and are still going dry. So the data gaps are very large. I would ask you to please read the periodic evaluation, do your homework, spend as much time as you do on parking and just dig into it and really like don't waste your seat at the table. Just beneficial users implore you. Thank you. Okay Robin McCollum, Marian Vina, Susan Schrader and if you could please line up in the middle aisle please.

Excuse me, this is not enough time. The Vina GSA, the plan is not sustainable as it's written. It's not, I appreciate cooperation between Dr. Buck and Richard Bamlet, but the farmers, the ag interests are aggressively pumping. It's not their action, it's not sustainable and we need to protect our town from those effects. When they take too much water, we're going to be the first to know about it. They'll be able to pump for a long time before they ever feel it and it'll take decades for us to replace the water that they've taken. I hope that we can correct that in the process going forward, but right now the plan as written is out of control. Thank you and then I have Marian Vina, Susan Schrader. Maybe it's not your last name. Maybe not my last name. I'm Marianne Paiva and I'm here to answer Councilman van Overbeek's question.

The answer is that we are doing fine just right now, but the plan is to keep us down at the measurable objectives and the measurable objectives are not sustainable and that's are not healthy for the aquifer. The measurable objectives are right about where we were in 2021 and 22 and early 2023 when we saw historic lows at all of the wells in the Chico area and we also saw historic lows or within just a few feet in 16 of the 17 management RMS wells that we saw in the Vina Subbasin. When we saw those levels, we saw one in 13 Chico domestic wells go dry and have to be hooked up to Cal water. We saw 86% of our GDEs become disconnected from their water networks and we saw subsequent vegetation stress as a result. We are here because the measurable objectives, not the minimum thresholds. If we get to minimum thresholds, we're Bakersfield.

The measurable objectives are not sustainable and that's why we're here. Thank you. I'm Susan Schrader followed by Grace Marvin and Julian Zinner. Good evening. Yes, I'm Susan Schrader, and I'm a member of the SHAC, and I represent domestic well owners. And there's been a lot of questions. So there's a lot of data we don't have. I was making, we don't, we need domestic well data set. We have a lack of shallow groundwater data. We don't know that much about the Valley Oaks. You know, what is their rooting depth? Where does the water really come from? So there's a lot of questions. And so one of, I am asking that the city council write a letter to the VINA board and say, let's take a caution, a prudent cautionary approach to managing the sub-basin. There's a lot we don't know, and there's a lot we still need to know. And raising the level of the MT, which is that level at which bad things, undesirable things happen, would be an important part of the plan. And we know that at the VINA board's next meeting, Dr.

Todd Greene will present such a plan. So I think a go slow approach would be a good faith effort to say we are serious. We don't want undesirable effects to take place. And we expect, we respect the domestic well owners. And who knows? Maybe, I think, you know, you can still. That's time. Thank you. I know. I let you go a little bit longer. You can still gather data, even though you're kind of going slow. Grace Marvin, followed by Julian Zinner, and then R. Alexander. Thank you. I'm Grace Marvin, conservation chair of the local Sierra Club, but I'm speaking for also for Marty Dunlop, and she's been attending the meetings immensely. And I've written some, I have some report from her that I'd like to share. She said that David Kehn and Katie Hawley need to be extremely vigilant in ensuring the city of Chico's needs are represented in all facets of the VINA GSA functioning. Her observation is that attending meetings and reviewing multiple reports is that regardless of a chronic lowering of groundwater levels, an average 25 to 40 feet over the last 25 years, the primary supposition is that there's no reason for concern, that everything is going to be okay. I have further observed that the risk of continued dropping of groundwater levels in extended and unregulated pumping is being controlled by the agricultural representatives on various boards. Last sentence, this lack of consideration of the needs and rights of all stakeholders, beneficial users, and uses is coming at significantly and predictable risk of domestic well owners, farmers, and shallow wells. Thank you. Julian Zinner, followed by R. Alexander, and then Todd Kimmelshue.

Good evening. I would, I have basically have one point, and that is I would urge you to reconsider the minimum threshold, which is grossly low, and it's an outlier from all our surrounding GSAs. And Wyandotte has raised theirs. Colusa and Tama County have raised theirs. And our measurable operating levels are actually near the lowest levels that our monitoring wells have met. So if we go down actually to 120 feet below the surface level, we can just kiss our city canopy goodbye. And as far as domestic well users, they will just be screaming. Thank you. Thank you. R. Alexander, and then Todd Kimmelshue. I hope you on the City Council, all of you can decide to file a letter. It's perfectly natural to do that for a public review and comment period.

Hundreds of people did it in 2021, the last time this plan was initially, the first time it was initially approved. This is a new period that will end by October 26. And you can join the many hundreds of people, individuals, and organizations that will file public, or you can choose not to and not to act. Thank you. And then Todd Kimmelshue is our last speaker. Good evening. Todd Kimmelshue, County Supervisor representing District 4. I just want to thank the partnership that the City of Chico has with the Vineyard GSA. I'm one of the board members. Mayor Reynolds has sat on the board and now Councilwoman Hawley sits on the board. I appreciate all that you have done. This is a very complicated issue. In my opinion, this is the most consequential and important law that the State of California has passed in the last 25 years. It's something that's very, very vital to the whole survival of the State of California. Rest assured that we have hired consultants. We have hired folks with our County who are very well educated in groundwater.

And we are doing the very best to make sure we have sustainable groundwater. And we also welcome any public comments, especially letters from this Council. Thank you very much. And Mayor Reynolds, we do have Eric Nelson. Good evening. The Vineyard GSA periodic evaluation is puzzling on several fronts, but none more than this. Why would our GSA, responsible for the protection and sustainability of our groundwater, set minimum thresholds that would very likely not trigger actions necessary to avoid dangerously low levels, levels that would threaten our wells, our groundwater dependence ecosystems, Bidwell Park, and our urban forests? Why not establish levels that will alert us early on so we can take the necessary actions before there is harm? The answer lies in who gains from this kind of management. The current thresholds allow the continued unlimited pumping of groundwater, 90 percent of which is used for agriculture. This is not a question of either or. It is really a matter of balance and the kind of wise management that thinks less about short-term quarterly profits and looks to long-term water sustainability for our citizens, our farmers, and our ecosystems.

Thank you. Thank you. That's it. All right. That was the last one. All right. Right at 10 o'clock. We're doing good. Council Member Hawley. Actually, did any other Council Members have their speakers on? Okay. You're the only one. I just wanted to make sure there are no questions. Okay. Well, I feel like suggestions for the City of Chico Council to change the VINA GSA's GSP sustainability management criteria were at a minimum, at least. But again, I just want to restate the ask, just like we did for CalWater when they went before the CPUC for a rate increase. We can also send a letter of support just identifying beneficial users affected by the GSP, as was in the final staff option. I do think it is important to name those beneficial users, which are domestic well users, shallow agricultural wells. One small farm that supplies the farmer's market with fresh produce is a block out of my district, so they're not within the city, but they still have a well under 100 feet that would be at risk under the current plan. Environmental users and cultural users, of course. The Mechupta Tribe also sent a statement letter to the VINA Board of Directors. It's important that we also support cultural beneficial users of groundwater, as that has been applicable since time immemorial. Supporting the addition of two shallow RMS wells, as was presented by Mr. Kehn and Dr. Buck. So those two wells are supported by staff of two partner agencies within the GSA. I think that goes to how important it is to be monitoring our shallow aquifer, as well as the deeper Tuscan aquifer. And it increases the sample size to improve shallow aquifer considerations in relation to GDEs, which still data gaps exist.

And then really three, four, and five, supporting continued monitoring, encourage evaluation of groundwater trends before empties are reached, and offering the city as a partner in monitoring GDEs and observation. Those are things that are already ongoing in some shape or form. So are there any questions from my colleagues before I make a motion? Yes, Council Member Hawley. So are you essentially the comments or the recommendations that were provided by David, or is that essentially what you're recommending our letter consist of? Yes, that would be my motion. Okay, yeah. I'll make a motion to have staff draft and subsequently send a letter that aligns with the five points included in the staff recommendation and the presentation.

And I'll support the motion. I just want to offer that on the last one, offer city as a partner in monitoring groundwater dependent. This is something that the state of California thrust upon us, much like many things that they do, giving us things that we are mandated to do, but of course, they give us no funding to do it. So we're all doing everything that we can to get the information and do the best that we can on this. And by offering city partnership, that is likely going to include money. So we would just want to see that come back. Obviously, still, we love hosting the meetings here, and we love doing all that. And that's an easy part for us to do having staff here and all that. But as we go into projects and those things, which I know is the next and biggest step, then we'll have to take that up at, obviously, our budget time to talk about how we can help in offering our city partnership, which is what they really want.

That's a great point, Mayor Reynolds. It's really important to be mindful of staff time in this process. Yeah. Council Member Van Overbeek. Yeah. So what I heard Mr. Kehn say is that we needed more data, but I would like to get a restatement of what the staff recommendations were before we vote on it. Is that possible? David, can you put up the slide? Is there a specific item you wanted to talk about, or we could just roll through them? Well, I just I just want to. Yeah, certainly. So the first bullet would basically be simply identifying the beneficial users within the city of Chico. The second one would be supporting the addition of the proposed shallow representative monitoring sites, which is already in the periodic evaluation in the amended GSP. We would support the continued monitoring and evaluation of groundwater conditions. This would basically be just agreeing with what they're already doing in the plan and ensuring that that continues. Encourage evaluation of groundwater trends before minimum thresholds are reached.

So in outside of the Chico management area, they're introducing a concept called local management levels, and that's a proposed concept in Chico. There is not that concept. So what this would say is, OK, we don't have these local management levels, but we want you to look and do something before minimum thresholds are reached, which they would do, because if you're not hitting your measurable objectives, then you need to tell the state why and bring those levels back up. And then offer the city as a partner. And to Mayor Reynolds' point, at this point we would offer in-kind staff support services, which we do, but if we wanted to formalize any type of project, some type of urban forest monitoring or groundwater dependent ecosystem monitoring, that would entail city dollars. So those would be the bullets points included.

Yeah, thank you. Council Member O'Brien, did you have something else? No, just real quick. So I looked at these initially, and I do not find these inappropriate or offensive. We're not dictating policy to find a GSA. I think we're just saying, you know, let's pay attention to Chico, let's monitor. I think data is important as it relates to this. Having those shallow wells, again, as part of that data collection process. So I don't think any of this is inappropriate. I don't think the GSA would find it such. I think it's just good stewardship on our part. So I'm going to support that as well. All right. So you need a second. I'll second your motion. I think you got a motion, right? I'll second it.

I just did. Oh, okay. Okay. I just wanted to say one thing. Can I? Yes. I just have my mic on to say. I just want to say thanks for Supervisor Kimmelshue and Cam and Christina for showing up, our Water and Resource Conservation staff at the county. Certainly from my perspective, it seems like in this process of implementing sustainable groundwater management that the interest of us as City of Chico and our environment have been subordinated to agricultural users who want to, or else we would set a more, we would take a more precautionary approach in setting these allowable groundwater levels. I'm looking forward to seeing some of those data gaps addressed for groundwater-dependent ecosystems and interconnected surface water. And I appreciate all the attention that you put on it and coming out here tonight.

All right. Anybody else? All right. We got a motion. Vice Mayor Bennett, I see you're off. We got a motion and a second. Okay. Council Member Goldstein. I talked enough on parking, so yes. Council Member Hawley. Yes. Council Member O'Brien. Yes. Council Member Vandover-Beck. Yes. Council Member Winslow. Yes. Vice Mayor Bennett. Yes. Mayor Reynolds. Aye. Carries 7-0. All right. Reports and Communications. All right. Reports and Communications. The following reports and communications items are provided for the Council's information. No action can be taken on items under this agenda unless the Council agrees to include it on a subsequent agenda. City Manager's Report. Go ahead. It's okay to leave, but if we can leave quietly, so because we got to finish up a couple things before we can go home.

City Manager's Report. Ms. Haen. I'm going to fly through this. I didn't call you Council Member for once. Um, lots of work and lots of people and coordination in the last several weeks. Um, attended the Police Department badge pinning, um, in September. It was a wonderful event. Lots of community there. Um, I have managed to make it to every roll call for PD and every shift change for the Fire Department, so I've got to meet our staff face-to-face, and it's been a really wonderful experience. I'm actually going to also, um, attend the Academy's live burn next week, suited up and fitted and ready to take part with the firemen, or actually, I should say, with the recruits. We have six Academy recruits right now. I met them all, and we're really excited to hopefully bring them on board if they all pass.

So that was great. Did a Butte College tour on the new Science and Planetarium. Beautiful facility. I cannot believe, um, the additions, um, that have happened in that, uh, facility in the last years that I haven't been there. It's gorgeous. Very excited, uh, for them. Sunrise Rotary went this week. It was a great group of people, and we're able to connect with many of them after the meeting and, um, subsequently through email, so it's great to tap into that portion of the community. I did meet with, uh, three Butte County Farm Bureau, uh, representatives, um, so that was great to meet with them and hear from them on priorities and potential partnership, partnerships. Met with a good size, uh, downtown, uh, business owners and heard some concerns, um, around, um, kind of cleaning up downtown and support through the holidays, so it was really good to hear their input and have some ideas and collaboration on how to move forward in supporting local business here. Um, attended the Cal Cities, uh, conference recently, uh, with the mayor and, uh, Director Ottoboni was, um, elected as the Public Works Director President for the entire California, League of California Cities, so it's a very big, um, honor. Was happy to see him do that.

Um, I met with CARD and we did some brainstorming on opportunities, uh, there to work together, so that was great. And then really quickly, um, as we discussed earlier, the unhoused strategy, working on staff review this week, hopefully, so hopefully next week we'll have a draft for public to comment and engage upon, and our goal is to bring it back to Council November 17th. Our monthly newsletter, our city newsletter will come out this week. And then just really briefly, the entertainment zone is in full effect. I participated. I checked it out. It was pretty cool. Um, and also we have, uh, two private security armed officers Thursday through Sunday, now through the end of the year, which, um, we did see in action and I think is already making a great improvement on the safety and security. We want people to come downtown, so we want to get that word out, um, that that security is there through the holidays. Bring your families, participate, and shop and eat and play and utilize all of our downtown, um, area. Thank you.

All right. Yes, it was fun to see the October festers using our new, um, entertainment zone. Not that I was down there using it. Um, anyways, um, it was great to see. Councilmember requests. According, pursuant to APMP 1010, Councilmembers may verbally request an item to be agendized at a future meeting. After stating what the item would be, a majority of Council is needed in order for staff to agendize. Do we have any Councilmember requests? No. All right. We are adjourned to October 20th. Closed session either at 5 or 530. The regular meeting at 6 right here at 421 May. Thank you.

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