Maureen Maureen if you're in the audience. I'd like to check in with you up at the clerk desk
Okay, it is seven o'clock and I am calling to order the meeting of the San Leandro City Council today is Monday April 20th
2026
Would you please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance?
At this point in time, Madam Clerk, would you please take a roll?
Councilmember James Aguilar.
Present.
Councilmember Victor Aguilar is absent.
Councilmember Bolt.
Present.
Councilmember Bowen.
Present.
Councilmember Simon.
Present.
Vice Mayor Viveros-Walton.
present and mayor Gonzalez present the city of San lano conducts early meetings to fulfill its mandate and discriminatory statements for conduct that would
potentially violate the federal civil rights act of 1964 and or the California Fair Employment and Housing Act
California penal code sections 403 or 415 are per se disruptive to a meeting and will not be tolerated
Please see the City Council handbook and City Council meeting rules of decorum for more information
Madam clerk your announcement, please
If you would like to make a public comment during the meeting you can do so in person or via zoom
If you're present at the meeting
Please complete a speaker card and submit it to the city clerk before the item is presented
Then wait for public comment on that item to be called if you wish to participate in public comment via zoom
You can use the raise your hand tool when the item is called
During the public comment session speakers will be invited to speak and we'll have a set time to share their comments a countdown timer
will appear for their convenience and when the time is up the micron will be
muted. All raised hands outside of public comment will be lowered to avoid
confusion. Once public comment is opened hands may be raised to speak. There will
be a 30-minute window for public comments which will take place under
item 7 public comments as per the published agenda. After this time is up
the City Council will proceed with the rest of the meetings agenda. If you have
not had the opportunity to speak during the initial 30 minute period there will
be another chance to do so after item 12 City Council reports in addition today
we do have some translation services both for Spanish and for Mandarin
Cantonese if I am correct is that correct madam clerk thank you mayor yes
we do have translators available our interpreters today are Spanish and
and Cantonese.
And Cantonese.
And if I could please have the two translators come
to the podium mic and make that announcement
in Spanish and Cantonese.
So please approach this mic right here.
Thank you.
It appears my colleague, the Spanish interpreter,
is on his way.
He is negatively impacted by a storm, by the storm.
And so he is slightly late.
Let me switch gear to Cantonese.
Thank you for joining us today and for your time today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I am very happy to be here with you today.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with you.
Thank you very much.
We will move to item number 3 which is a report on closed session action taken.
Thank you Mayor Gonzalez.
On item 3a, Tapia versus City of San Leandro, the council took action based on the following
by motion of Councilmember Bowman, seconded by Councilmember Simon with all members voting
six eyes
zero nose and one
Absent to issue a nine nine eight offer on item 3a topia versus City of San Leandro of between seventy thousand and eighty thousand dollars
More information will be forthcoming regarding this
998 offer. Thank you
And then robust discussion on all items at this point recognition. So we have two recognitions today
We've got a proclamation to declare April 22nd as Earth Day
And we also have a mayoral award for kindness to Darby Curry and Jennifer Ramos
And so we will begin with that first. Please join me down front
So, let me just give a very short description these young ladies as part of their community service projects come over here to the
in the middle so that everybody can see you.
So part of their activity was developing a community seed bank
for the benefit of everyone in the community
so that they could get access to seeds free of charge.
So this concept of giving back to the community
with no recompense just because they cared.
So for your kindness, we have given you this award.
Would you like to say a word or two?
Certainly, you can say we had a great project.
or something like that.
What do you think?
There you go.
We had an amazing time building the seed library together.
We had lots of donations from Evergreen Nursery.
I think my favorite part of our project
was probably when some of our Girl Scouts
helped us with picking sunflower seeds
and getting donations and picking out
seeds from the nursery, what was it called?
Evergreen nursery.
Yeah.
That is excellent.
So, San Leandro community,
how do you feel about kindness?
Thank you.
Good.
Thank you.
In the city of San Leandro,
we obviously celebrate Earth Day,
regularly now, for many years.
And we've got Maureen Forney,
a former SLUSD instructor, teacher, union rep.
What else do we want to say about you?
Rabble-a-rouser, cross-country coach.
All this kind of stuff, so I'm going to let you hold that.
And we're going to read this and celebrate,
and then I'll give you the mic and let you talk about
whatever you want to talk about.
She came to mind, especially because of her great work
in bringing Sun Day to San Leandro.
We celebrated in September.
Sunday on Guess What Day, Sunday in September.
So thank you for having done that.
But let's celebrate the Earth here for a little bit.
56 years ago, millions of Americans
gather across country as part of the Earth Day movement,
joined by a common belief that we should prioritize
the planet's well-being.
And whereas we saw the passage that year of landmark
legislation, like the Environmental Protection
Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act,
For those of you that don't remember,
Lake Erie literally caught on fire.
So the world was in significant need of improvement
to protect the environment.
And whereas the global community continues
to face challenges such as health
and environmental issues, economic struggles,
as well as food and water shortages,
and whereas people, all people,
regardless of race, gender, income, or geography,
should have the right to a healthy sustainable environment
with opportunities for economic growth and for prosperity.
And whereas we, we all are the caretakers of this planet
and have the obligation to combat climate change
and environmental degradation
to preserve the Earth's beauty and resources.
And whereas it is necessary and proper
to broaden and diversify this global movement
to maximize success.
Now, therefore, I, Juan Gonzalez III,
mayor of the city of San Leandro,
do hereby proclaim April 22, 2026 as Earth Day
in the city of San Leandro and encourage all people
in our city to support efforts that address climate change
and environmental degradation,
to champion green economy initiatives,
and to encourage others to undertake similar actions.
Well, I accept this on behalf of many people
that are in this room, and also on behalf of Third Act,
a nonprofit organization of elders,
of more than 100,000 people.
San Leandro has been at this for a long time,
a short list, and again, many people in this audience
have been part of these successes and benchmarks over time
was one of the first clean air cities,
and we became that during the second Bush administration,
I believe before 9-11.
This city defeated an attempt to bring an oil train
down the Capitol corridor, and it was beaten back
by this city as the first to say no,
along with our school districts and our unions,
saving our children from great hazards and dangers
right through the middle of town.
We adopted in San Leandro a social responsible,
socially responsible investment policy,
a climate action plan,
and that work has continued through Sunday, 2025,
and we thank you for your support of that.
But for those of you who've done this work in the past,
many of us have done this together, late hours,
lots of emails, lots of meetings.
And for those of you who have your loved ones,
your little ones in your lap right now,
for now and forevermore, let's protect, conserve,
and build a world for our children together.
Thank you.
At this point in time,
we will move on to item number five, consent calendar.
Would council members like to pull any items
from the consent calendar?
Council member James Aguilar.
Mayor, no polls. I would like to move to approve the consent calendar. Okay first
hold on just a second please excuse me for just a second. Okay sorry for the
confusion. Is there any item that someone would like to pull aside. I would like to
just briefly discuss 5A. So I will have some questions on 5A. Let's see if we can
avoid pulling it and just kind of initiate a discussion. So there's
nothing else. So what I'm going to do at this point in time is I'm going to take
public comment on this item to see if we've got any public comment on our
consent calendar. Do we have any? Madam Clerk. Mayor we have not received any
comment cards for the consent calendar. We do have one hand raised online. Okay
so again we are opening public comment in person. If you have any public comment
on the consent calendar now is the time to speak. Seeing none we will close
public comment in person, move public comment, open it online. Our first online speaker on the
consent calendar is Douglas Spaulding. Good evening council members. Happy rain day. I'm home
sipping my apple juice before my surgical procedure tomorrow. Uh 5A caught my attention.
There's a lot of big ticket items on this uh consent uh calendar. I hope everyone did their
due diligence. But I'm wondering why are we paying three separate firms for on-call environmental
evaluations, which to my mind means we don't have something specific in mind,
but it's like 500,000 each. That's a one and a half million dollars. Like why are we spending
all this money on this? Maybe hire one firm for 500,000 if it's really that necessary,
But again, what is that they're doing?
Secondly, I noticed that there's a lot of vehicles that are being purchased here. I understand some of them are are very specialized
Where purposes but that like the souped-up, you know pickup truck
I'm thinking like really do
Do can we not repair the old one? I mean, we're having inordinate financial difficulties as people are
Many places as I have in my own life and one of the ways I cut back on expenses
I drive a used car and then I buy another used car and I repair it in between
I just think we need to like take a little closer look at some of these things
I know something coming down the a vehicle coming down the pike that's gonna need replacement is that
the command and control center for the police but but actually they haven't had use of it for the last year and
They've been using their backup. So if the backup works good enough, why do we need to replace the the bigger batter, you know
Mobile home that they use for command. I just think we have to just say no sometimes
We have to tighten our belts a little bit here and there and it'll make things better. Thank you. Sir. Your time has elapsed
Mayor that concludes our online comments
Okay at this point time with the consent calendar. I will go ahead and pull item 5a
And happy to receive a motion for approval of the consent calendar with the exception of 5a if council is open to that
vice mayor I
Don't want to pull the item, but I did want to
Thank the Rotary Club before their
installation of the fitness court at Marina Park
Just wanted to
Pull that out as a as a thank you, but not necessarily pull it out of consent. So thank you
And for the benefit of the public we will be hearing from rotary in two weeks
There's some exciting things happening
Councilmember Bowen
Thank you
I had I just
Cute into one second it because I think come some bird
You secular I had made the motion and then I also just wanted to give us out to the brewery club and the fine
gentleman sitting in the front here representing them. Excellent. So I'm gonna
come back to council member James Aguilar. Are you fine amending your motion to
approve the consent calendar without item 5A? Okay and the seconder I have is
council member Bowen. I have a thumbs up and I will interpret that as a second of
the motion. So at this point in time so you know for the discussion please vote
on the motion on the floor. Councilmember Bolt, may we have your vote? Aye. Thank you.
All votes are in the motion for the consent calendar except item 5a passes
with six ayes from councilmember Simon Bowen Aguilar, James Aguilar, Mayor
Gonzalez and vice mayor Viveros Walton with councilmember Victor Aguilar absent
okay and it's certainly the case that on all the equipment that we have just
purchased that we have delayed purchases of equipment for for a while and at
some point you just have to replace things that that don't work but we
certainly appreciate the focus of city staff on having equipment that works and
And in some cases purchasing equipment to lower our overall cost so that we can do things
in-house.
With respect to 5A, I'd like to begin, and I think it's Mr. Lee, is that correct?
That's going to come in and share with us a little bit.
The concerns that I had expressed to city manager is really the authority, less so having
they would be. We have done
three consultants that doesn't
bother me. Um but the authority
as written. Would be for up to
$7.5 million of spend. With no
specific deliverables such as
kind of open ended. So talk to
us a little bit about that. Uh
Yeah, thank you. Thank you,
are the maximum amount per consultant per fiscal year.
The consultants would be used on an on-call basis
based on specific development projects.
These consultants would be used
to support development applications
where environmental review
pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act
is required as council is aware of many,
many development projects to come before you
require analysis for compliance
with the requirements
of the California Environmental Quality Act,
and these consultants would perform
their very technical work.
And they would be used on an as-needed basis
based on the development review that comes in.
That doesn't require the city to spend
500,000 per consultant per year,
and just provide the same flexibility
to use these firms to perform the work on an as-needed basis,
paid for by the the applicants that are submitting development proposals and
would be not coming out of the city's general fund but instead be paid out of
paid by the paid by the applicants as part of their development application so
do we have a hundred percent cost recovery on this we do okay any
questions from council members casing no questions I move that we adopt item 5a
a councilmember James Aguilar okay so we have a motion by Gonzalez second by
James Aguilar seeing no further discussion please vote councilmember
bolt to me we have your vote please aye thank you all votes are in and the
motion carries with six eyes and councilmember Victor Aguilar is absent
thank you very much at this point in time we will go to city manager or city
attorney reports if we have any city manager thank you mr. mayor good evening
council members and community members I have one announcement for today this
earth day April 22nd starting at 10 a.m. join us for an eye-opening tour of the
city's wastewater treatment plant learn about how the water from homes and
businesses gets treated so that is safe to flow into the San Francisco Bay as
As well as some of the sustainable practices that have been implemented and projected plans
Space is limited and registration is required to register. Please go to
Www dot San Leandro dot org
Forward slash Earth Day tour and mayor that concludes my announcement
Thank you
Definitely encourage members of the public to go I've done the tour before and as there's some cool stuff that happens out there
You also probably saw a video that we put out regarding the wetland
Project the the basin where we are helping reduce
Nitrogenation in the bay to keep everybody safer
So for public comment, we are now taking public comment on items that are not on our agenda
But are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the City Council
If we have anybody present to make a public comment on items not on the agenda. Madam Clerk. This would be the time
Mayor, we have not received any comment cards regarding non agenda matters. And we have one hand raised online. Okay, so we have open public comment in person are now closing, we will now in turn open online public comment.
The first online speaker is Douglas Spalding.
thank you very much. I wanted to double back on the news emanating from San
Leandro, primarily the disturbing case of the violation of Mr. Shaquille
Coleman's civil rights, where he was removed from the city of San Leandro and
summarily dumped off in Oakland in December of 2024. And I appreciated
the mayor's clarifying remarks that it had been investigated and indeed violated not only our
moral sensibility but department policy. I wish that that public statement had been revealed
much earlier than 18 months after the fact. And I wish that going forward we adopt some kind of
understanding, if not policy, that while these are personnel matters and we can't talk about
specific people and whatnot, you know, as a city, we need to acknowledge when wrong
has been done, when harm has been done, and what we're doing to ameliorate.
So now, given that it was a personnel matter, I think it's also quite disturbing
That body camera footage was leaked to the media
and apparently the source of the story was a former long-time president of the
Police Officer Association and current officer in the department Michael Oliveira
So it's a personnel matter. I I can't really rightly say or I can't rightly know
But I would sure hope that there's an investigation going on to how it is these leaks came about
especially so long after the matter happened, after there had been adjudication within department
and by the independent police auditor. It's just uh it's beyond my understanding how such a thing
would happen. Thank you. Thank you. Your time has elapsed. Mayor, there are no more raised hands
online. So we'll close public comment online and move forward with our agenda to our public hearings.
at this point in time we are on our first public hearing with respect to item 8a as listed in
detail in the agenda we do have today assistant community development director avlon schultz
presenting on this item and madam clerk if you could put 15 minutes on our clock and it looks
like you already did thank you rotary we'll see you soon all right is it working all right good
Good evening Council.
Let me just get my presentation up.
On we go.
So we're pleased tonight to present you
with four related actions that will implement
San Leandro's brand new rent program.
This includes our fee structure,
appropriating the budget for fiscal year 2027,
authorizing a staffing plan
and aligning the rental registry filing deadline
with the program launch.
As a reminder, Council adopted the rental registry ordinance back in April 2025, then
later amended it in October 2025 to shift the registration deadline so that we could
get the software ready.
The original point of the rental registry was to collect rent data to see if rent stabilization
was necessary, but before we even launched the rent registry, the Council decided in
December 2025 to provide us direction on a rent stabilization program, which was then
later adopted in February 2026 and we have an effective date of January 1,
2027 for the rent stabilization ordinance. That's context for tonight's
actions. So these next two slides will look familiar. They are taken straight
from the December 15th council work session on the rent program where
council provided direction to us to establish an enhanced enforcement option
for the rent program with up to six FTEs full-time equivalent staff. Council
also directed staff to prepare for this to be a fully cost recovery program. The
assumptions that were shared on December 15th for that cost recovery program
included a one-time general fund loan of up to 2.2 million dollars to get the
program stood up, a tiered annual fee structure of up to 175 and 300
per unit per year depending on whether it was partially regulated for rental
registry only or fully regulated for rent stabilization as well as a late
penalty structure of up to 60 to 100 percent of the annual fee including
liens and special assessments to enforce and we also laid out assumptions for
staffing and program costs so that is a refresher for some and new information
for our newest council member, but this was direction provided back in December
before the rent stabilization ordinance was adopted that led us to tonight's
implementing steps. So everything shown here in black font is a refresher, just
what we discussed back in December. The red highlights some new information for
council's consideration. So tonight's actions would establish the program fees
and late penalties. We now have a fee study from NBS, our consultant, to
support the recommended fees we would be establishing the new special revenue
fund so this program's budget would live outside of the general fund and we
would be appropriating funds for fiscal year 2027 to cover a full year of
operations the program would have up to six FTEs although we should know only
five are anticipated to be hired for fiscal year 2027 I will get into those
details later and then the general fund loan details we're sharing the interest
rate proposed which is new 3.76% based on our portfolio return and then another piece of new
information and a request to council is that you consider aligning the program launch so the
entire rent program would launch in January of 2027 and we'll provide some recommendations on why
staff recommends that. So the proposed rent program fee structure is based on the fee study by NBS to
achieve the full cost recovery for program operations as directed by
council. All rental registry units which is approximately 9,500 units would pay
the $148 per unit per year and this is the fiscal year 2027 rate shown. And then
the rent stabilized units would also be subject to an additional $108 per unit
per year fee for a combined fee of $256 for fiscal year 2027. We are also
proposing petition fees at $472 for a fair return petition and $236 for a rent
decrease petition and this should be noted that these are not full cost
recovery fees for those petitions. They would be more expensive to process and
the cost of that processing would come under the annual fee but this does
acknowledge the time to intake and process from an administrative
standpoint those two applications. The fees that are presented are within the
range of what we discussed in December and I might have said yes December 2025
sorry. And then a tiered late penalty structure ranging from 25 to 50 to 100%
would help to create escalating incentives for compliance. And we are
proposing a first cycle administrative waiver so staff can have discretion to
address good faith efforts towards compliance if there's a property owner
who was not in receipt of correspondence and has done their best effort to comply
in a timely manner. And so the total projected annual revenue for fiscal year
2027 is approximately 2.1 million dollars. The code does allow for a 50
percent pass-through of the rent stabilization fee which is the second
row of the table, the 108 dollar fee. 50 percent of that could be passed through
to tenants per our ordinance. So the budget for the fiscal year 2027 program
totals approximately 2.23 million dollars and the largest line items are
salaries and benefits at approximately 1.06 million. Legal consulting and
software account for the next significant categories and we should note
that the legal costs do include the costs of third-party hearing officers for
petitions not just for legal support of the program so that's that's a bucket of
funds not all going straight to one entity. And then the $125,000
shown here that's the budget for furniture and fixtures is the one
program cost in year one that's not directly recoverable through program
fees because there's an amortization process for that upfront investment. And
so you will note that there is a gap between year one program revenue and
program budget that's essentially that $125,000. When we were last discussing
program budget council asked can't you find a place within City Hall or city
facilities to house this program why are you budgeting for lease payments you'll
notice there is no lease payment line item we are working very hard to
accommodate this program unit within City Hall so that has been removed from
the program budget. The general fund loan that is proposed the details are shown
on the right side of the slide. And as mentioned that 3.76% interest rate is
based on the December 2025 portfolio investment return. So if the general fund
were parking this money in a portfolio and earning interest the program would
be paying the equivalent interest that the general fund reserves could have
been earning is the rationale that the finance team has used for this 3.76%
proposed interest rate and another note is that 25% of the total budget or
$550,000 a year will be coming back to the general fund or special revenue
funds to cover indirect costs, internal service charges, and loan interest. The
terms of the loan are set up so that the new fund could pay it back in
installments or in a lump sum when revenues are equivalent so that it can
be paid back. So this isn't this isn't necessarily set in quarterly or monthly
repayments. There's a term of up to six years to pay it back depending on how
aggressive or how slow program revenues are realized. As directed in December
this program would have the six FTEs that were discussed with five hired by
end of fiscal year 2027 and as council is aware these are extremely high touch
programs with heavy volumes of calls and emails and in-person inquiries our team
has been meeting with peer cities who run these programs to really understand
the the staffing needs and the day-to-day operational needs and it's a
very heavy touch program so we are very happy to report that our first program
higher is with us actually here tonight Nicholas Draper and so our management
analyst to position has been filled and it's been a great relief just to have
our first program staff here and ready. We have an accepted offer from our
second position the program specialist to they will be starting unfortunately
not May 1st but mid May we've got a start date and then the rest of the
positions would be filled July 1 upon council authorization with the
exception of the admin assistant to which would be joining January 27 half
way through the fiscal year and then the last program specialist is going to going
to be joining us in fiscal year 28 and through that time we'll also be really
monitoring the necessary staffing levels and so we definitely don't want to
overstaff the program so we will we will continually be making sure we're
running this operation as leanly as we can but we also are following council's
direction to provide the full enforcement services and really have a
robust program so we can support property owners and tenants and all of
the activity that will come from that and so at full staffing it's
anticipated the staffing and benefits would be about 1.3 million annually so
the new information that we're sharing with you tonight is about the rent
stabilization alignment with the rental registry deadline and so the blue square
is it's different from the first timeline that I showed in that we're
proposing January 2027 be the launch for both aspects of this program the
staffing is combined there are a lot of cost to the program that are combined
and so there's a lot of wisdom and we think in merging the launch so that the
property owners and affected parties really understand what we're asking and
have fewer more consolidated touch points with the city. And so the main
reason that we're proposing January alignment comes down to data
relevance, business license alignment, and program readiness. And so the July
2026 date made sense at the time, but that data that we would be collecting
would predate the rent stabilization ordinance by six months, making it of
limited value for enforcement and January turns out is also our annual
business license renewal cycle and so when property owners register with the
city to be a business operating in San Leandro they pay their the renewal fee
every January and so we're anticipating they're going to be a large number of
property owners who may not have business licenses and will also need to
get a business license from the city and January could be the month that they do
their rental registry and their business license renewal. And then the program
readiness. While we are definitely on track to launch the software in July as
is currently the deadline, it doesn't leave a very long runway to train up
land property owners and to really get out there and educate and make it an
easy path to compliance. And so by providing that additional window from
between when the software is ready to where we actually need people to
register, the additional six months would really be an engagement outreach
training handholding time, which we think could have great value to get as much
compliance as possible at the start of the program. And so, you know, just
comparing side-by-side the value of January versus July, our team felt we
would be remiss not to bring up the opportunity tonight to say that we really
do think January is preferred for data collection, alignment, administrative
efficiency. And so while it might sound like a delay, we really think this is a
value and makes sense for the ongoing program that we're getting off the
ground. And so we are pleased to bring this set of implementation steps back to
you tonight. Again, the new information is highlighted in red. Everything else is
what was decided back at the end of last year when we were moving forward with
the program design. And so there's a resolution before you and an ordinance.
the resolution would establish the fees, set up the program budget, appropriate funds,
approve the positions, and authorize the general fund loan with the terms that were described,
and then the ordinance, as we just went over, with the program launch alignment, that would
actually amend the meta code.
And so I'm available, our team's available tonight for any questions, and then we also
have NBS on the line, if there are any technical questions about the fee study.
Thank you.
Thank you for the presentation at this point in time, we will go to council members for
clarifying questions, council member Bowen.
Thank you, mayor, and thank you to the staff for working on this.
Really appreciate the explanation and the focus on making the general fund whole.
Can you clarify what safeguards are in place so that in like the three to six year window
that we have for the repayment that it does get repaid? Yes, our model really
looks at conservative estimates in terms of number of units we can count on
coming in, looking at all known costs that we can estimate and I think the
most important factor that we wanted to disclose to Council had to do with
willingness to place special assessments annually when we do the lien list. For
accounts that have not paid. So that mechanism is very essential to recouping
revenue that makes this program not a burden to the general fund. So we've
modeled and we have a conservative and more aggressive modeling and that's
where the three to six year time frame came in. Thank you. And then in regards
to a burden I appreciate you know the effort that the council and staff have
made towards the rent registry because the more information that we have the
more effective these programs can be and so in terms of outreach and support to
all of the landlords in San Leonardo but in particular our mom and pop landlord
owners like what is what is the plan to ensure that there is going to be enough
information and enough time and support for everybody to be able to participate
participate and not be burdened by these additional fees especially during these rather difficult economic times
Yes, the the proposed alignment for a January 2027 launch will provide I think much more
Time to work with the smaller property owners
To really help them understand the software and walk them through the registration process
Which we think will be very valuable and then in our budget both for you know
this current fiscal year startup and for fiscal year 2027.
We're accounting for translation and workshops
and community CBOs that can help us spread the word
and help advise property owners.
So I think engagement and outreach is critical
to the success of this program.
It's not something you can just flip a switch.
You're gonna really have to be there
to help people navigate.
And then our team is also working on robust website content,
flyers that are translated in multiple languages,
demonstration so people can learn how to do it themselves and just looking at different ways to
meet people where they're at. I really appreciate you bringing up language accessibility both on
the forums on the website but also obviously to engage with folks especially in our city. This
month is actually national language accessibility month so that's fantastic. You didn't mention
there but I think we've talked in the past about working with the different nonprofits we have in
San Leandro that do really cater to language specific residents in the in the community so
encourage that collaboration. The other thing that we've often talked about is
the launch of a new program, and obviously, you know, we're thinking big
picture, we want to make this really successful, but in terms of what metrics
we have in place in KPIs, like, what are we actually going to be measuring so that
it's going to be successful so that when it comes back the year after launch we
know, like, you know, this is the best course and also the most effective way to
to be able to run this program.
Yeah, so I think some of the key indicators are volumes.
So we have the data on how many units exist
that are rental units.
And so we can compare registration volumes
against the known quantity of units.
That's one indicator of how successful we've been
in capturing who we need to capture into the program.
And then I think because the registry is collecting data,
and the software provider that we're working with
can provide reporting out on various data
that we're collecting on the market here.
We'll be able to track in real time
how rents are, what levels they're at,
and we can look and see how that compares regionally
and looking at all of the other indicators
that we were starting to look at
when Council was considering this program.
And then we can, I'm looking to Director Leo
if there's any other performance indicators
that we're anticipating bringing back to council.
But we do have the notes from your direction
during the adoption as well.
I would just add also probably compliance rate over time
as we've learned, it will take some years,
but you know, we have a plan to get it repaid.
But I think looking at the compliance level,
we've seen other cities gradually over time
get to, you know, 100% or close to that, so.
Great, and then I just have one more question.
Would you want me to loop back on it?
The last question was around the timeline.
I think it makes sense to align the launch
for all of the reasons you noted in the staff report
and then in the presentation today.
And I'm really excited that we have new folks hired
and ready to start,
because I know that's one of the biggest factors
for in terms of a delay.
What does this mean for looking at the other items
we have on the list in terms of housing policy,
like the mobile home rent stabilization ordinance,
for example, it's gonna be next on the list.
And so if we move sort of the launch of the rent registry
to the January of 2027, does that affect the staff work
or starting to think about the next item?
It wouldn't affect it beyond what was presented
at the council retreat because we are hiring
a separate team to launch this program
and work on this program.
We still have our other staff that are focused
on other housing issues.
So no additional delays besides what was already discussed
would be entailed based on this change tonight.
The push will remain to get the software ready by July.
It's just that outreach that the rent program team
will be doing provides that additional runway.
Thank you.
Next, we'll go to Councilmember Tim Tagular.
Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you, Director Scholz, for your presentation.
And forgive me for my catch-up questions
because I have a couple with regard
to staffing and capacity and specific.
What happens operationally if we under hire
or we face any delays in recruitment?
I'll tackle that question first.
Yes, we've already had some delays in recruitment
and so we do have within our roughly 30 FTE team
in community development, a great set of folks
who can kind of pitch it and get in there and help out.
So that's what we've been doing in the meantime.
So we're feeling confident about the recruitments
that we've outlined and these dates are adjusted
based on some of the recruitment challenges
that we faced early on.
So not too concerned there,
but I think we are able to supplement
within our existing staff group to the extent necessary,
but it's not a long-term solution.
but for a short period, we're willing to pull in
where we need resources to get the program launched.
Okay, totally.
That makes sense.
And I think that kind of answers my second question is,
is there flexibility to scale up and down
depending on the demand of the program as we see it in 27?
Absolutely, and we've seen our peer cities do that as well.
And I think that's why you're seeing
our staggered hiring plan,
and we're not looking to have all six positions seated
in the first fiscal year of the program
to really understand operationally whether
and how the sixth position is necessary.
I think based on volume, based on revenue,
we'll have a better sense.
Something I was remiss in not putting into the presentation
that if I could share, we do anticipate doing
another fee study before the end of fiscal year 2027
since this is the first year of the program.
We wanna make sure that the fees are based on the actuals
once we have actual data.
And so just like the staffing can be scaled,
we anticipate other expenses
will need to be reevaluated as well.
Okay, great, thank you.
And then my last question is more of a help for definition
because when I see the first slide,
or not the first slide, slide three that mentions
the idea of enhanced enforcement,
what is enhanced enforcement actually look like?
because that term is new to me.
Very good question, yeah.
So when council was considering adopting a rent cap,
some models look at putting it on the books,
but not really following through with collecting data
or enforcing non-compliance.
Some rules and regulations that are on the books
could be civilly enforced, for example.
The city may not be taking an active enforcement role.
This program was directed to provide the eyes on the data
to look at compliance, to go out and get compliance.
And so that requires more resources,
more people to do that work.
Okay, thank you, I appreciate.
And I mean, I'd be remiss to say that this is,
I'm in full support.
I think that this is a necessary step
that we need to take to protect our renters.
And so I appreciate the work that you've done.
I appreciate the work that everybody hands on has done
with what we've been presented today.
So that's all my questions, thank you, Mayor.
Thank you, coming back to, you're coming to Vice Mayor.
I just wanted to check if Council Member Dillon
wanted to chat.
No, he's not on the queue.
Okay, then I'll take my time.
I just, he's three hours ahead of us,
so I wanted to be respectful of his time as well.
Okay, so I'm actually going to dig down
on the budget on slide seven.
And first off, thank you to the housing team,
the community development team for getting us here today.
And welcome to the team, Mr. Draper.
It's great to see a face here to the FTE
that's on our budget.
So welcome to the team.
So I'm gonna dig into slide seven on the budget.
So what is the difference?
So what would be considered like operations
on the line item 63330 versus like indirect service costs?
Like I'm not quite understanding
like what those budget lines mean in terms of actual
like what would that work look like?
Yes, so in an effort to simplify some of the categories,
our line item object codes are combined.
So for you're asking about operations,
the 5,000 to 6,000 series, we're talking about translation,
transportation, training, subscriptions, postage
and delivery, office supplies, forms, and business cards.
OK.
But translation is already on 5121.
Thank you, yes.
So we pulled out translation and the other ones I mentioned,
I don't think we pulled those out to highlight specifically.
So it's expenses that are not a service, typically.
And then may I ask on the loan interest,
this is a fund from the general fund
going to essentially the same organization
I don't quite know who to direct this question to, Mayor.
We'll start with City Manager and then she can allocate it.
I'm specifically asking on is it a practice or a policy
to when the city loans from the general fund
to run a program?
Is it a practice or a policy to have a loan interest payment?
It depends on the program.
We've done it both ways.
It can be a general fund program,
with this being a new program with a revenue base,
normally that's in its own fund.
I think off the top of my head of anything
that's revenue-based, recreation is also something
that's in the general fund.
But I think for this specific program,
it is more fitting than it's outside of the general fund.
Okay.
And I believe that there are other programs
where there are loans at an interest rate,
inter-fund loans.
Okay, so this is not unique to this one.
It's a policy and a practice.
It is a policy and a practice,
but it's not all one way or the other,
but the mayor's 100% correct.
We do have, for example,
we've done loans for the parking fund,
we've done loans for the golf fund,
that's just too off the top of my head,
because I was talking about them the other day.
Thank you.
In terms of the,
so now I'm going to the staffing plan on slide eight.
So I see that the administrative assistant is in one FTE,
but on the FY active is 0.5 and FY 27.
So is one FTE, but is 0.5 on the FY active,
fiscal year active column?
Yeah, so I could see the confusion there.
The administrative assistant is going to be joining
the program in fiscal year 2027.
However, the budget reflects half a fiscal year
for fiscal year 2027,
because the start date is anticipated to be January 1,
halfway through.
The other positions for fiscal year 2027
have a July 1 start date,
so it's a full year budgeted for that position.
So it's just to highlight the half year.
So to be clear, that is not one admin position,
one admin assistant position
that is sharing their time between two programs.
It is one full FTE dedicated to rent registry,
rent stabilization, but it's only that it is billed half
because they're hired midway through the fiscal year.
Yes, and they would be full the following fiscal year.
Okay, I understand.
I will leave my questions there.
I have more, but I'll come back.
Councilmember Simon, please.
Thank you for the presentation.
I have a question on the interest
that you will be paying back to the general fund.
If the city's portfolio performs better than the 3.76,
do we have the ability to pay back at a higher rate?
The proposal tonight is a fixed 3.76% rate,
a variable rate based on the performance. That's my question thank you. If someone can check for
Councilmember Volt any hands? Okay so now hand online so I will proceed with a few questions
of my own. The 3.76% portfolio return did we consider using a risk-free rate for a duration
So I have a question of six years could we look at treasuries for six years out.
I don't know who would know the answer to that.
Is that finance.
Okay someone from finance did we look at using no one for finances here.
Okay so we're going to come down to deputy city manager I mean to assistant city managing my apologies.
when the finance department looked at this,
they simply just looked at the rate of performance
for the month of December, 2026.
So the answer to your question is no,
they did not look at alternatives for bonds.
Thank you.
The rent registry costing $1.4 million.
When we adopted the rent registry,
I do not remember the cost being anywhere nearly
as $1.4 million.
Was it $1.4 million in the presentations back then?
No, I think when the rental registry ordinance was adopted
without rent stabilization, the numbers were smaller.
In looking at the actual costs of running
the combined program with the enforcement mechanism
that we discussed in December, we realized that
the actual costs that were attributable to all units
could be significantly higher than what we originally
had budgeted.
We budgeted a two-person team for just rental registry.
My recollection was approximately $500,000.
I think it was $650,000.
But I think at the time, I think in the fall
when the programs started to integrate together
direction-wise, I think that's when we also messaged publicly
that we would probably be evaluating them together for.
Okay, so I'll talk about that during my comments.
The penalty for non-compliance.
I think I'll come to legal counsel on this.
Legally, is there something that limits
the penalty that we can charge?
So we've got a fee structure just hypothetically of $200.
Is there something that limits how big the penalty can be
for not paying your fee?
What we provided in the ordinance, Mayor,
is in line with our current fee structure,
I'm sorry, penalty structure in the municipal code.
So we wanted to make it consistent,
but there is growth if there is continued non-compliance,
that is slightly higher than other penalties
within the municipal code.
So that's what we have in the current municipal code.
My question is is whether they're if just suppose that this council wanted to say hey, this is really important to us
And so if you don't
comply we're gonna charge you a $500 penalty as opposed to 25% of
$200 which is 50 or 60 dollars, right? So that's a nominal fee
So suppose that we want to do five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars for non-compliance
Can we legally do that?
So then we have to we fall back on whether there are specific provisions in the government code
That would apply to this penalty fee. We did not find anything that specific then we go back then to
Reasonableness arguments mayor and
Again going back to the reason was we compared it against the other penalties within the code
To keep within this reasonableness argument so that if there were to be a challenge
Remember that the fees themselves have to be Prop 26 compliant so that they have to recover the city's costs
but not necessarily it cannot
Create a profit if you will over and above our costs in compliance with Prop 26
Okay, so if we're coming on that separately scale up
So I heard that we can scale up or scale down
My general experience thus far in government. Is it scaling down? Is it really a thing?
So I was hoping that you could elaborate a little bit on that
yes, I mean transparently we are
looking at a
staggered hiring date
For our FTEs for the programs to really understand that this the final position is necessary
So when I say it could be scaled down
I think we're looking to ensure that we have the right program staffing
that's sustainable based on the number of units based on the level of service.
The program cannot easily be scaled down on a whim. Just more attuning it to the
actual units and the actual volume which will be knowable as the program
launches. My last question is at the Air District when we're dealing with
expansion into a new program. We sometimes choose to use temporary workers,
someone that's being hired for a three-year period of time or a five-year
period of time. Is that something that we considered here as we were developing
our modeling? We looked into it. We also, you know, we had a question about
consultants and I think for a program like this that's very high-touch and
and impactful to the community,
we found that to get the quality of staff
that would really do the program justice
that the full-time positions made sense,
which is what we're proposing.
We've had experience with limited duration positions
and it can be hard to have the sustainability
that you need to really see the impact.
Thank you.
Vice Mayor, please.
I'm gonna dig in now on the program freeze,
which is our current slide.
So again, with my goal of making the implicit explicit,
I just wanted to kind of ask some clarifying questions
that we've discussed before.
So apologies if it's redundant to the team,
but I just wanna make sure that we're all on the same page.
So when I'm looking at the fees per unit
and the estimated units, and I'm gonna kind of base it
as I'm a property owner, and I have two units,
one unit that is not subject to rent stabilization
and one that is.
So under that scenario,
The total number of every rental unit in San Leandro,
regardless of whether it is subject to rent civilization,
is under the 9,500, am I correct?
That's correct.
Okay.
And so, I'm the property owner,
and one of my units is rent stabilized, right?
So I have two, one is not, one is.
So I'm looking at the 256 number, right?
So my second unit would be at a 256, correct?
Correct.
Okay.
So under what scenario then
would the second row fall under
if all units have to be registered and are stabilized?
Well, I'm sorry, not all units are stabilized,
like single family homes are not,
but I guess I'm not quite understanding
in what scenario the second column would be used?
Like if I have a single family home, that is?
It's used to get to the 256.
So the 256 is the 148 plus the 108.
So we would, to be more accurate,
say for your first unit that is not rent stabilized,
you're paying $148.
For the second unit that is rent stabilized,
you're paying $148 and $108.
You're paying two separate fees.
They happen to total 256,
but you're paying fee one and fee two.
And we're just showing you the added amount to make it easy.
Okay, okay.
Thank you for clarifying that.
And also again, I know it's stated at the top,
but for folks that are listening or may not be following
and are not seeing the screen,
50% of the 108 is maybe passed through the tenants?
Or is it 50% of the 148 or 50% of 256?
50% of the 108.
Only for units that are run stabilized.
Correct.
Thank you.
Those are all my questions on program fees.
I'm trying to group them so that we're
kind of going through themes um i will since i have a little bit of time i just
wanted to say that i am supportive of the six month timeline
extension to align uh the program watch uh for both um
i am and i'll save the rest for comments i'll
yield my time back to the chair just confirming that we do not have a hand
from council member milk okay since we've gone through our
Question phase we're not going to move into opening our public hearing on this matter the time is 2 0 8
208 it is 808 and we are opening the public hearing
So do we have members from the public who would like to address us as part of this hearing?
Thank you
Thank you mayor we have received
I'm sorry if you could repeat that please not sure if this is coming through
We ever see five comment cards from here in the room and we currently have
Okay, so we will have technology come and join us in the chambers so we can address your microphone and separate from that
Why don't we begin with the?
Five people that would like to speak in person
the first three speakers are
Jennifer Rizzo Carol Haber Cross and Craig Williams
Hi, my name is Jennifer Rizzo and I represent the California Apartment Association and San Leandro rental housing providers
We appreciate the city's goal of supporting housing stability
However, we have serious concerns about the cost structure and long-term consequences of the proposed rent stabilization
program. To begin, I have a number of concerns with the NBS fee analysis for
this program. First, to be clear, this is this was not a program or budget
analysis. NBS states their main reason for the study was to establish fees and
to ensure fee recovery. So as fiscal stewards of the city of San Leandro, the
council should be provided with a detailed analysis. Second, the proposed
rental registry fees are significantly higher than originally presented in
2005 during the October 15th and the April meetings the staff presentation
stated the rental registry fees would not exceed $100 per unit and the
council approved the rent rent registry ordinance with that information from
staff now after the rent registry has been approved the proposed fee has
increased to $148 per unit along with the 256 per unit for the rent
stabilized units. Third, I want to highlight that the fee analysis study
determines the maximum permissible fee at a hundred percent recovery. It states
the city can adopt fees at or below full-cost recovery amount and I urge you
to consider perhaps lower fees. Fourth, the fee study recommends that fees
increase annually by at least CPI and I believe this is flawed. The city passed
the council passed rent control of 65% of CPI and this creates an imbalance
with fees rising with inflation but rents increases being
restricted below that level. So over time that gap grows and only way to manage
that is through regular rent increases simply to cover the program fees. And I'd
like to also talk about the proposed budget. You look closely. Thank you. Your
time has elapsed. Our next three speakers are Carol Haber-Kross, Craig Williams, and
David Stark.
Okay, good evening City Council Mayor's staff. My name is Carol Haber-Kross and I'm speaking.
I am so happy that this has passed. We have been working on this for so long and you are
helping so many members of the community so I want to thank the City Council and
staff for all they've done and Tom Lau this has been a while in the making so
this resolution is a starting point and are the building blocks to support and
implement our rent stabilization ordinance which has already been adopted
on February 2nd, 2026. So I think the start date to move to January 1st,
2027 to align the program is a good idea. And I think I know the city is taking out a loan that
will be repaid by the rent program fee revenues over time. The housing providers will be paying
a fee to help pay for this. The renters will also be paying a fee. But the renters benefit
from this because rent stabilization cannot go up more than 3% or 65% of CPI, whichever is lower.
and the rent registry will hold housing providers accountable for reporting their units.
I think this is clearly the honest and accountable way to run their businesses.
Alameda and Berkeley already have these programs. I was a renter in Berkeley years ago and I was
protected. I felt safe and the landlord was honest and accountable due to the rent program
that Berkeley implemented, so I look forward for this happening in San
Leandro where renters can have the same comfort and assurance that they will
have protection and have peace of mind. Thank you. Thank you. The next three
speakers are Craig Williams, David Stark, and Mike McGuire. Hi, my name is Craig
Williams. I'd like to thank the council for their work on this issue. You put a
lot of time into this issue over many many months. One thing, in terms of the
fee, the petition to decrease rents, maybe we could do something with based on
people's income. If it's limited income, you know, we might be able to lower that
fee. It would make sense to help out those tenants. I also have this idea for the positions
that are available. You know, we have a problem with rent stabilization in that less than
5% of tenants are aware of this issue. And, you know, thinking about this, you know, it's
almost as though, you know, we talked about redlining, this redlining issue has come up
recently, the apartment buildings in San Leandro, it's almost like they have a red line around them
because the San Leandro times does not go to any of the buildings. None of the tenants get
the political news of their local community. The most important, one of the most important issues
that they face is rent stabilization.
And the suggestion that I did that I have is that, you know,
maybe getting tenants a digital copy of San Leandro Times
as part of this project.
Also getting them the city managers newsletter
would also be worthwhile.
And maybe also with some sort of a page for tenants
and even landlords to, you know, bring up news.
But I wish you would consider that to have somebody
as a communication person as part of that staff.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next three speakers are David Stark,
Mike McGuire, and Mark Jonowitz.
Good evening, I'm David Stark,
representing the Bay East Association of Realtors,
and I really appreciate the questions you're asking
regarding the financial aspects of this program,
have a few more.
What are the ongoing costs of this program?
Specifically, pension liability,
since it looks like staff is intent on hiring
full-time employees, I'm curious as to the ongoing,
beyond the startup cost, cost of the staff.
What if the program fees don't cover the ongoing costs?
Will you be cutting other programs to cover
of the commitments you've made to this program.
Also, what is the current city budget deficit?
So just a few questions there
that hopefully maybe staff can answer.
And then just a few observations
that I think you and residents and tenants
should understand about these staff,
if I understand it correctly.
These employees won't create a single new unit
of rental housing.
these employees will not preserve a single existing unit of rental housing.
These employees will be implementing policies that have been documented to
reduce the supply of rental housing. Now I've been to this council chair many
times and and one would think that the Bay East Association of Realtors is
solely focused on real housing policies. We are not. We're very concerned about
the infrastructure of this community, about public safety, about library
services, about other programs that make this a desirable place to live, a
desirable place to become a homeowner. We are very concerned about the impact
funding this program will have on those other things that were also concerned
about. And one final question. How much does it cost to replace a single unit
of rental housing that could be lost?
Thank you. The next three speak the next two speakers are Mike McGuire and Mark Janowitz.
Hi there. I applaud the council for following through on two years of staff work and passing
the rent stabilization ordinance. Please don't render it meaningless by making it burdensome
for either landlords or tenants to use it by charging excessive fees in addition to its more
or visible annual charge.
Some of those fees will be considered tonight.
By the way, as I look around San Leandro,
I don't see landlords producing any new units
of rental housing either.
Developers do that, that's their job.
Most that'll happen is you have a marginal unit
of rental housing being on the market or off the market,
but it's not really a widespread phenomenon.
What we've gotten a chance to return to with the RSO
is a stable local housing market
where both landlords and tenants
can economically plan intelligently for their future.
We need to follow through with putting into a local ordinance
a list of legitimate reasons for asking tenants to leave
and limit evictions to those.
This would tighten up the state law.
Of course, landlords should help develop that list
as they have wide experience
as to what can go wrong in renting a property.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The last speaker is Mark Janowitz.
Good evening, Council, Mr. Mayor, staff.
Thank you very much for all this hard work,
really quite comprehensive.
A couple of comments that I want to focus on
in my brief time.
It's very troublesome to have a fee of $238
for a rent reduction petition.
No other jurisdiction, certainly in the Bay Area, has that.
City of Alameda doesn't have it.
Oakland doesn't charge for a petition.
Berkeley doesn't charge for petition.
San Francisco doesn't charge for petition.
So that's gotta go.
It will only inhibit enforcement
of broad public policy issues,
the maintenance of well-maintained housing
and enforce, in fact, the fundamentals
of the ordinance itself, which is to stabilize rents.
So that is a very bad policy
from the broader issue of enforcement
and an effectivity of this ordinance.
Without precedent, and certainly in the Bay Area,
probably statewide that I'm aware of,
there's no reason for that.
I hate to say it, but at a minimum,
if you're gonna go there,
you need to have some kind of fee waiver form
so that persons of lower income can afford it.
But without precedent in the Bay Area,
there's no reason for us to have it.
It's only a total of projected $6,600 anyway
in the total cost of the budget.
I wanna also respond to the comment
that this staff and this bureaucracy and this ordinance
does nothing to preserve a single unit
of affordable housing.
It most certainly does at zero cost to the city.
Over time, these rent stabilization ordinances
create a stock of affordable rent controlled units
at not a penny's cost to the city.
It is efficient, it is cost effective,
and it is sound public policy.
That's what this bureaucracy, if you wanna call it that,
will do, is enforce this ordinance
that a broad range of housing becomes rent stabilized, protected hopefully by just cause,
and creates a stock of affordable housing over time. That's what this ordinance does.
Thank you. Thank you. Mayor, that concludes the cards
here in the room. Let's continue our public hearing online please.
Our first online speaker is Douglas Spalding. Thank you. Yeah, you know, this reminds me
of that famous poem of, you know, what do teachers make? You should look it up on Google, but
what will these employees do? What will they say? They will save renters in San Leandro from having
to move out of town, from having to be stressed every damn month with whether they can make the
rent or not. I am so appreciative to the city for doing all this work, and it certainly seems like
a long-distance rate race. I do support the fees. Note that the fees can be passed through and
certainly will be passed through to tenants but they're going to hit differently for tenants
than they will for landlords. A tenant struggling from month to month is going to have a hard time
absorbing you know a hundred more than a hundred dollars. Is it possible that it can be paid
months by month back to the back to the landlord. I think that's something that
should be maybe structured in. I do want to say that the fee for the petitions,
I'm just gonna speak from the tenant side. To me that's a recipe for recreating
our rent review board that we have now that never hears any cases. It's gonna
deter people from from making valid petitions that they or they need help.
and as the previous speaker noted,
it's really a minor part of the budget.
St. Landers deserves a world-class housing
stabilization program.
Certainly feels like we have a world-class team
like Peugeot running alongside the Tour de France
with extra bicycles and champagne ready to go.
So, you know, I'm sure we'll get a lot of bang
for the six FTEs.
I'm thinking maybe we won't need that sixth one,
but the alignment doesn't make common sense to me.
We need the six months in order to find out what we have.
Thank you.
So your time has ended.
Our next speaker is Amanda Chang.
Hi, good evening council members.
My name is Amanda Chang
and I'm a staff member at Urban Habitat.
I'm very supportive of the rent stabilization ordinance
and really applaud the city for all this thoughtful work
The ordinance that's been put
into it, but I would like to
share some concerns with the
proposed rent program fees.
First, we're concerned the
ordinance allows half the rent
program fee to be passed on to
tenants. But the reason the
city passed a rent
stabilization ordinance in the
first place was to protect
tenants from rent increases
they can't afford. And so
adding new annual fees on top
of the rent goes against the
policy goals of the ordinance.
and perhaps drafting alternative language in the ordinance
and amending it to remove this provision.
Salinas' rent stabilization ordinance, for example,
states that a landlord may not recover any portion
of the rent program fee or any associated late penalties
from tenants.
Secondly, I also urge that you not impose any fee
on tenants to initiate the rent decreased petition.
A fee of $236 is just egregious.
Charging tenants any fee to file petition
creates a significant cost barrier
for challenging legal rent hikes.
Imagine you got robbed and then in order to file
a police report you had to pay a $236 fees
to recoup any money that got stolen from you.
It's just really prohibitive
and would make enforcement of this ordinance
really difficult.
And then these tenant protections
are meant to be consumer protections
make sure that the product people are purchasing in this case housing is of good quality at a fair
price. And you know people say that they're providing housing but I want to remind you that
it is a product and if people do not want to be in this business they're always able to sell it to
someone who is you know maybe just wanting to live there themselves. So again please take a look at
the fee program and I hope you make. Thank you. The next speaker is Alro Ramos.
Can you hear me? Yes. All right. I just want to add that you know today is a
rainy day and what I was taught in my family was to prepare for when rainy
days come and I think that you know you you do your best and you you try to come
prepared. You try to prepare for when that day comes. Water is very appreciated. I know
we have drought, but it's always best to be prepared for the surprise, the unpredictable.
I think we have allowed too much instability from inequality. Housing is a perfect example
of that. These rules help governments to get the situation under control. I think there
is a price to getting rent money and then the tax exemptions and tax cuts. I mean there
are benefit cuts that are leaving deadly budget shortfalls for household budgets. And especially
the burden will fall on the renters the heaviest. Governments are in a position to step in and
and stabilize housing, not just I think for,
to benefit everybody and comment.
Thank you.
The next online speaker is the phone number
ending in the digits 941.
If you have the phone number ending in the digits 941,
you may now unmute yourself.
So hi, can you hear me now?
This is Ginny Adson.
Yes, we can hear you.
OK, good.
I don't know how to do this phone thing,
and my phone's not working very well.
But of course, I would have to call in tonight,
because I want to thank Ms. Viveros-Walton for getting
such a clear clarification of what
the pass-through of the rent registry fee is for tenants,
because the presentation was not clear.
I heard Avalon say something about $50
but I think that's what I heard,
is that 50% of $100, $108
can be passed on to the tenant for fully stabilized units.
Thank you for that because I was totally enraged
when I saw this.
I still find the $236 fee
for doing a rent reduction hearing to be,
It's just not fair, and I won't be able to afford it.
And I'm doing better than most people.
But this is, it needs to be reconsidered.
And I don't know what NBS based this on,
but nobody else charges money for this.
Five, $15, if you wanna make sure somebody's serious
about it, that I think I can sell to tenants.
But Tom knows, you all know.
I do so much outreach from the city with half of the population that is tenants that you've
got to give me something to work with.
Don't make it egregious.
Don't make it designed to basically anger every tenant in town, because that is what
I've had to deal with all weekend long trying to talk to people about this.
I beg you to think through this
before you institute the fees that NBS said.
Thank you, I can be done now.
Thank you.
Mayor, that concludes our online raised hands as well.
It is 8.30 and I'm closing the public hearing.
At this point in time, we will come back
to council members for discussion
of both of our resolution.
So we will begin with, nobody wants to speak?
Vice Mayor, we'll start with you.
Okay, so just a couple of comments
that I want to kind of contextualize
our conversation tonight.
So at the direction of the Finance Committee
and ultimately at the vote of the City Council,
the 2.2 million that was the kind of higher end
of the estimate is already included in the city budget.
So at the direction of our council, it's built in already and baked into our current budget,
and so I just wanted to kind of make that clear for both programs.
Also to kind of contextualize because I think for some of the folks who are kind of looking
Looking at this purely from the number of staff and the 2.1 million, we are looking
at 16,000 units that need to be tracked and also 9,500 of those are I'm sorry, 6,500 of
those would be rent stabilized and so we are looking at a total number of 16,000 units
And at a really conservative revenue of a two bedroom, one bath rent apartment in San
Leandro, which is about $1,800, $1,850 a month.
We're looking at an annual income of about $29.6 million a month.
So we're looking at a team of six people running a $2 million budget to essentially oversee
16,000 units at $355 million a year.
So when I think about and contextualize, and these are just rough numbers, and so when
I contextualize and I look at the budget, the staffing plan, and the budget, although
it's a large number, we just want to make sure that it is adequately staffed and adequately
resourced to ensure that the program is implemented to the fidelity of the intention of this council.
With that being said, I do want to I have a couple of thoughts regarding the fair return
petition increase and the petition for rent decrease.
I think the estimated number of annual petitions here would be 20 for a rent increase petition
and about 24 for a rent decrease petition.
you know, it's 9,000 plus five, or let's just round up.
So it's 10,000 plus six, so 16,000.
And I'm thinking about whether we could put a moratorium
on both of them.
I don't feel comfortable doing on just one end,
but putting a one-year moratorium
to actually see what this looks like
on the first year of implementation
and see how many petitions we have.
I know that it's, you know, it's the first year.
So we run the risk of a lot of petitions
coming before the city as staff and the community
and property owners and renters all kind of understand
what this means in their day-to-day lives.
But I just, I'm struggling with those fees,
particularly for the rent decrease.
And I'm just wondering if there's,
and I think council member Bowen
talked about this a little bit
around having some sort of
deferment of fees if you are low income.
So if you qualify for the PG&E care program,
or if you're, we wouldn't verify income,
but if they come ready with some sort of
income verified program that we can verify like a PG and E care program or something
like that for both landlords or property owners and tenants so that we could kind of figure
out and see if that's something that could be possible.
So anyway, just to kind of close my comments, I just wanted to contextualize a little bit
about stepping away from the six FTE 2.1 million
and really contextualize just the number of units
and the annual amounts of revenue that we're looking at,
which I just wanted to provide that context again,
making the implicit explicit.
Thank you.
Okay, seeing no other comment,
offer my comments at this time. Let's start with the rent registry. I am very
frustrated. I proposed the rent registry and I was told that it was going to cost
about six hundred fifty thousand dollars. Now I come into this room that says 1.3
1.4 million dollars. To me that's not acceptable. The rent registry cost what
the rent registry costs. If rent stabilization and the ornaments that get
hung on the tree because of rent stabilization make that whole process
more expensive so be it but it has you know it was very clear what we agreed to
in terms of what the budget was and so I think it has nothing to do with the
registration process and so I'm not happy to see that the fee basically
doubled when we come in here for rent registry because I just view that as a
cost allocation game. Portfolio return. Portfolio return. We're tying up the
city's money for somewhere probably an expected value of five to six years. If
you invest today as of this morning in a t-bill rate you will pay approximately
three point nine percent interest or you will get a three point nine percent
return. It's 3.85 for a five-year t-bill, seven years it's 4.05 something like
that. And so a more appropriate rate of interest is not what happened in a very
specific month, it's really the commitment that you are holding to tie
up that money. And to be very direct, that's the government, U.S. government,
best possible lending rate possible. And that to me is the bare minimum.
realistically, it should be probably at least four, a little bit over four, but
3.76 is simply too low. It doesn't make economic sense. When I
look at the penalty, if we really want to drive compliance, we cannot threaten
people with a $50 penalty. $50 penalties mean nothing. So I just I have no idea,
and that's hence the question to legal counsel. If there's no legal restriction,
that strikes me that the legal penalty for non-compliance
should be at least $500, or $1,000,
something that's material that encourages people
to actually comply with what we've laid out.
We could spend easily $200,000 advertising
every single week in the San Leander Times
and the Daily Review in Chinese, Spanish, and English.
We could buy social media ads, Facebook, and the like.
and spend a lot of money and say,
you had no reason not to know.
I believe that if we really want to drive compliance,
we can drive compliance.
And that it's unreasonable to expect
that business people will not see information
in one of the various media.
We can hit WeChat groups.
We can, if we really want to communicate
with people in the city of San Leandro,
we could send a mail, a letter
back of a burro to every single house and let people know this property is under rent control.
And we could do it for just a few hundred thousand dollars. And so I'm very concerned that we have a
compliance expectation that's low when in the modern era information can be gotten to people.
There are companies that specialize in sending information to parcel owners.
And so every single owner, even if it's a homeowner,
could receive a letter in the city of San Leandro.
There's only like 25,000 parcels in the city.
And so we could just send it to everybody.
And people could throw away the letter,
and it would be cheaper than perhaps some other methods.
But so I think we need to go and drive compliance.
And I don't think that the current penalty structure
emphasizes that significantly.
I am concerned about scaling up, scaling back.
I think that once you create government infrastructure,
it's very hard to scale it back.
So I don't really see that happening.
I am concerned about the passing on of these fees to tenants.
So I would propose that none of the fee
gets passed on to tenants.
Just keep it simple.
The amount of money at issue is really inconsequential.
Big picture, my biggest frustration,
I'll just keep pushing this.
The whole point of the rent registry program
was to make sure that we could collect market data.
There is market data that says in the city of Oakland,
rents are down over the last two to three years
for studios, one bedroom apartments,
I don't know about two bedroom apartments.
If that's happening in Oakland,
I find it surprising that it's not also happening
in the city of San Leandro,
but we haven't let the rent registry data play out.
Now we're delaying further collecting that data.
And that's very frustrating to me,
especially since we're telling the public
that it's now at twice the cost.
So with that being said, I think everyone has spoken
and I'd be happy to take a motion.
Vice Mayor.
So just to, so there's a couple of things
that I took notes on.
There are the, hold on.
I was checking on the presentation for rent registry,
but now I'm back on today's presentation.
Okay, so there were a couple of kind of sticking points
that folks mentioned.
One of them, mayor, you mentioned the,
the fee pass, the 50%, that the ordinance allows
for 50% of the fee to be passed to the property,
to the renter, are you proposing to amend the?
I see no reason why that should be passed along to renters,
so I would be happy if that got taken out.
So to do, I'm supportive of that,
I'm just kind of wondering what the vehicle
for that would be, does that mean we need to bring back?
we'll come to legal counsel on that.
So as we've done in the past Vice Mayor,
if it's the council direction to not enforce
but leave that in the ordinance,
then the direction would be,
the motion would be not to enforce it
for a certain amount of time.
And that would be one option
that this council hasn't done in the past.
It's certainly a possibility or like you said,
a moratorium on enforcement essentially
happened before. So then the vehicle, just to be clear, the vehicle to do that would be
to do a moratorium on the, I guess what I'm what I'm struggling with is that what we're talking
today is the fee, but the ordinance talks about it allows for 50% of the of the of the fee to be
pass to the tenant. So in my head that's revising the ordinance not the fee. So I'm just struggling
to kind of... So I'm gonna like try to frame it. Let's start with under the Brown Act,
can we today discuss and or we clearly discuss as we have, but can we provide guidance on
the topic of the fee pass through to tenants, or would that have to come at another meeting?
You can certainly have that discussion, and you can provide guidance, yes.
But that would be with respect to amending the RSO?
That is correct. Certainly though, if the direction from the council and you took part
of the emotion or action is that the language would exist,
but would the council direct staff not to enforce,
or do you actually wanna change the language
in the ordinance, which would then require it to come back?
So my concern here would be that,
I know Council Member Bolt is listening to us,
but we don't have our full council tonight,
and I would be hesitant to bring back,
to just even direct staff to bring it back
without the discussion of the full board.
But I'll just leave that there
because it just sounds like it's a can of worms
that I'm not necessarily ready to open tonight,
at least not with all my colleagues present.
The other thing that I had suggested,
and I don't know how tenable it is to my colleagues
is to have a one-year moratorium
on the petition for rent decrease
and the petition for rent increase.
I think the estimate there is 20 a year
for a petition to increase the rent
and about 24 to decrease the rent.
Or we could just eliminate the fee.
I think Vice Mayor, to simplify, I think your second option would probably, you know, keep
it more simple to eliminate, we wouldn't necessarily have to put a moratorium for the for the first
year on the fees, if that's the council's direction.
Okay, I'm sorry, I am not clear. So if you can just repeat what he is agreeing to.
So my original proposal was to have a one year moratorium on the rent increase and rent
decrease petitions to just kind of see what it's like.
That's what I have in my notes.
On the fee itself, not to eliminate the fee,
but just to have a moratorium on the fee until we charge.
The fee for that one.
And that's what we have agreement on.
Not from the not from the council, but that's when you
said I your first option would be the better option.
I was confused between the first and the second option.
But all that matters to me as a chair
is that that is what you're proposing.
Yes.
Thank you.
But that's okay.
We'll just come back to what's being proposed is this.
And then Council Member Bowen said something
that I did not take a note on and you were specifically,
there was a component to it around provision
or some fee related to exempting folks
that were low income, and I believe it was property owners
who were low income, but I don't want to speak
for the council member, but I know she brought
something up like that, and I did not take that note.
That's all I have.
So if there's consensus, I'm happy to make a motion
after that.
We'll come to Councilman Bowen.
Thank you, Mayor.
I have some questions around whether it's a moratorium
or not a fee and fee of return, rent increase petition
or petition to rent decrease,
because there's still an estimated cost,
and the whole point of this too
is to make the general fund whole.
And so what would happen to those costs incurred
if we do not charge a fee for it?
With permission to speak.
Please do.
I would suggest that for this first year,
the fee model looked at a conservative,
smaller number of petitions.
So it's a very nominal amount of revenue.
So I think we're proposing fees for adoption
and inclusion in the master fee schedule.
If the council so chooses to direct
to only adopt certain of these fees
and not adopt others, the fee study can still be accepted.
And in the next fiscal year fee update,
we'll have data to provide and more information.
So I think the easiest approach would be
to not adopt any fees for petition.
they're free and included in the normal annual fee,
which is what most cities do,
and then we can provide that data
in terms of the processing costs
and the revenue opportunities.
But because it's such a small amount in this fee model,
that 15,000 is relatively negligible in the big picture,
and so it's not at risk of hurting the general fund
for this first program year.
We can go in with more information next program year.
OK, I appreciate that.
And again, it's really because, while we want this program
to be effective and to actually meet the goals that we have
for it, but I want to make sure that we actually
have the funding for it.
And while you're right, $15,000 is a small amount relative
to the $2.1 million more than $23,004.
We've also just spent the last month and a half, two months,
on top of the last, I don't know how long,
talking about very small amounts
for lots of programs that are really impactful.
So I just wanna be really mindful
of what we are trying to do
just because that does affect many other things.
And I just wanna remind us what we as a council decided
we were going to do going forward
in terms of fiscal responsibility.
But I really appreciate the commitment
to come back with the real numbers and information
that we can make a more informed decision about it going forward and once
we get the more detailed information. Okay Councilmember Simon please. Yeah I
support the concept of eliminating the fees to the renters particularly the
pretension for rent decrease the public commenter one of the public commenters
making their response or the comment if you're hard for being harmed it's really
hard to pay more money to correct that harm so I really see this so rich just
to confirm if we are to remove the freeze for the renters this has to come
back for to start over essentially where we are started tonight no what I'm
hearing staff suggesting is that it would not be in the fee schedule that
would be brought back at a later time yeah the petition fees could just not be
adopted tonight that's simple just don't adopt them and they won't exist but the
pass-through I think is a separate matter that I heard was maybe up for a
future agenda item to officially amend the ordinance to not have the pass-through
for the normal annual fee but we'll take direction on that so that Claire could
you restate that so sir there's two we'll come back twice no no no once again
the pass-through that was just discussed that's in the ordinance and so we would
have to come back and have a exciting the suggestion from vice mayor's I have
a more fulsome discussion but the other fees that would be going into the fee
schedule you can just not you can just take them out of the fee schedule and
they would not be instituted or put in place
because they would not exist
within the adopted fee schedule that's before you.
Okay, any other fees just to confirm the other fees?
Those are in the ordinance themselves
that would require a different action.
So to be clear, when you say other fees,
you mean the pass-through of the fee to the tenant?
Is that what you mean, 50% pass-through?
or what do you mean by the expression other fees?
Rich just said other fee,
so I just wanted to confirm what you mean by other fees.
Well, in the context of what we're presenting tonight,
all the other fees, assuming that they're still
in the fee schedule, would be approved.
You could take a fee out from there if you wish.
That's what I think the staff would be fine with that,
and that would be legally acceptable.
So for example, there's a $108 fee for a unit that's subject to the ordinance, the rent
stabilization ordinance.
That's a fee that's in there.
And then there's a $148 for all rent registry.
Those are part of a fee schedule.
what we what we have I think talked about is possibly instead of having a
moratorium on the rent decrease petition or the what was the other one rent
decrease petition or the fair return petition that those fees would go to zero
instead of doing a moratorium of some kind you just take that 472 you scratch
it out. You take the 236, you scratch it out, you make them zero. Okay, so those
two go to zero and the other three we're saying pass that, take that away from the
renter, but that has to come back. That's correct. Okay, I support that. The other
comment I want to make is the rate of return. I would agree that's a pretty,
that's not the best rate of return that we've shown at 3.76. I would agree with
the mayor we could get a better return through treasuries. Can we increase that
interest rate that we pay ourselves back? So I'll start with that as a legal
question. So can we change that number tonight? Yes. Okay and then I'll come
next to Miss Schultz. The modeling for the payback period was based on this
interest rate so if the rate increases the payback term may also need to
increase. We have not modeled the specific interest rate you're mentioning
but the interest the collective interest do would increase if the rate increases
and so we would just don't feel as confident about the exact six-year term.
Correct, so somewhere if the interest is higher that's collected somewhere that
has to come either through increased fees or through a longer term for
repayment. The interest was also an input to the budget so the interest in the
program budget that's a line item is based on this percentage which we were
just saying anything else councilmember okay so I'm going to come to James
councilmember James Aguilar next thank you mayor just two comments I guess for
council regarding my positioning so I'll make it quick I'm in support of the
vice mayor's proposal for a moratorium on the increase and decrease petitions
And then mayor, I am also in support of your proposal
to have a discussion at a later point,
because I think the vice mayor made a good point
about having more council here on that 50%,
because I do very much agree with you,
none of that fee should be passed down to tenants period.
And so I'd like us to have further flesh out
of that conversation in revisiting the ordinance
at some point, but that's where I'll kind of keep it for now.
And then council member Bolt,
I think you have your hand up online.
Thank you, mayor.
Yes, I'll start with the easy ones.
The decrease and increase,
I'm fine with what has been suggested already.
I do have a question though about the pass-through.
If that is, and I guess this would be to counsel,
if the pass-through has to be in there,
could we change the number and not make it 50%?
And could we make it so that we can move forward with this?
Let's make it $5.
So I think this is a legal question.
I will confirm with a city attorney,
but the ordinance is not on the agenda today.
So that is that pass through percentage,
whether it's as a percentage or a dollar amount
is captured in the ordinance itself.
So we can't change that today,
but out of this may come direction to staff
to address a concern that we have.
Have I summarized that correctly city attorney?
have summarized it correctly. That the language of that proposed language is not before the council
today. And putting that aside does not affect how we can vote today. We can still vote on whatever
we're going to vote on today. Okay, so I support us not allowing pass-throughs and having us talk
going to talk about this at a different time or agendize it so we can
re-discuss this, but could this be answered tonight? What does that do to the timeline?
Okay, so I'm going to come to Assistant Director Schultz.
You know, it sounds like there's been consensus about the January launch and providing that
additional time to launch the program, which makes the fee question a bit less time sensitive.
so we've heard some feedback about the interest rate and some concerns about
the pass-through option. If the council wants to move the ordinance to change
the registry timeline, perhaps we could come back to another meeting and bring
some refreshed information for you along with an agendized ordinance change for
consideration that might make it a bit smoother. There's no pressure to adopt
fees tonight especially for launching in January. So if I'm hearing your feedback
on what you've heard thus far correctly it would be perfectly fine for us to say
yes you have permission to delay the launch of rent registry other elements
like what exactly do we charge could be delayed and it wouldn't stress staff.
That's correct. Okay but what you really want for us absolutely is can we delay
the the launch? Um that's correct and I I think one caveat is that we would like
the you know we would like the budget authorization and we would like the FTE
authorization so we can get to recruitment and launch right away that
would be great. The specific fees are less time sensitive so if there's a way
to keep us moving on staffing that would be ideal and we know the direction is
to provide a cost recovery program. Okay so what I'd like to do is to just kind
of try to facilitate an outcome here and then vice-american you keep me honest
to make sure that we're all kind of on the same page so what I'm going to
propose is that we postponed some final decision on the precise fees but
But you do have, I think, broad consensus around how to adjust the fees, particularly
on the two petitions, taking those to zero for the time being, unless someone specifically
wants moratorium instead of zero in the first pass.
Okay, so we'll come back to any further discussion on this.
But that's what I'm going to lay out, is what I think is our starting point that you'll
get the most votes on.
And then the second thing is with respect to the interest rate that goes into the fee
calculation is that correct or that impacts your budgetary authority it is a it is a line
in the program budget and it does then pass into the fee calculation so what I want to
suggest just as a starting point for any final refinement is that that you get that this
council give you budgetary authority that you have requested thus far and
that you come back with modeling on what a more how-called matched interest rate
would be to match the term of the indebtedness not what our historical
return is on two-year T-bill or something like that but if we're going to tie up
money for five years six years seven years what's an appropriate rate of
return for that for that to cover term risk and that you're also being given
direction to accelerate not to accelerate to slow down implementation
of rent registry and the last one being that the council is giving you direction
to giving you direction no on the rent stabilization ordinance 50% pass
through to bring that back to us. So those are the four things. So now I want
to come back to my council colleagues and see try to build consensus and feel
free to express any concerns that you might have.
Councilman Maravatos-Walton or Vice Mayor, please. I just wanted to tease apart a
a little bit around the decision point
on the two petition fees.
So I'm gonna ask a question
and then I'll have a comment after that.
Do other cities have a petition fee
both for fair return and rent decrease?
It's commonly included under the program.
So most cities surveyed just have the annual fee.
So again, the, so now I'm going to ask to kind of tease out that decision point, why not fold that into the fee, as opposed to having a separate fee for both petitions increase and decrease.
The upside of having a fee is that it can decrease unnecessary applications and people are really truly invested and ready to come prepared.
Um, but there is not an issue with folding it into the base fee.
That's the common model.
Um, and we've heard a lot of feedback from the community and council tonight
and would support that determination.
Okay.
Um, thank you for that.
Um, because I think it feels to me a little bit, actually I want that
commentary to that.
Um, so I, I do want to approve the, I don't want to get rid of the fee per se.
Cause that's what it costs, right?
Because you have an independent, I mean, the, the model or the, the, the
program, uh, that y'all have kind of mapped out for us today is that there's
an independent, um, person who will evaluate these claims and make a decision.
Right.
The program budget includes legal
and third party hearing officer costs.
The line item for the petitions
basically would just cover administrative intake.
It does not cover the cost of hearing the petitions.
So those were not full petition costs anyways.
Right, because that, okay, I understand.
I would want to eliminate those two fees.
I think that that's what I'm leaning towards
and just fold it into the program fee.
It feels a little bit like nickel and diming.
I think if that's the fee to run the program,
it should include the full cost of the program.
And then just putting myself in the shoes of property owners,
I really don't want to delay this much further.
I think folks are doing some financial projection
and implementation kind of thinking through
what this would look like
for different types of property owners.
And I think there is also, you know,
renters want to know what is 2027 gonna look like
in terms of the actual implementation
of these two programs.
So the only thing that, you know,
just based on our discussion,
The only thing that may need to come back
would be the 50% pass-through of the fee.
But I'm just wondering, what is the possible delta
that it could be between the matched interest versus the 3.76?
And is it, I'm just wondering what the delta,
and I know we don't have the modeling,
so we don't really know.
I'm just wondering if the juice is worth the squeeze
in terms of waiting and bringing this back
when we're already pushing this program six months out.
And I think that there's just,
there's a little bit of, it's a new program
and when things are new, people just get a little bit edgy.
And I just, I think is the soonest we have clarity
from this council to give direction,
I think it puts everyone at ease.
That is the universe that we will be dealing with.
It provides clarity and direction to everyone,
both property owners and renters and city staff.
So I just, I think we're almost there.
We're just kind of, you know,
I think the main sticking point is the two petition fees,
but I mean, I guess if we want to,
if there is consensus that we want to delay this
for another meeting or at a future date,
I just really don't want to.
Okay, so let me do this.
I don't want to make a motion.
I'm gonna make a motion that we give budgetary authority
for the amount requested by staff.
And that we give them the reprieve that they've requested
on the implementation of the rent registry program.
That the other issues for which staff
is so that there is not urgency.
We just, we bring those back as staff sees appropriate
in a few weeks, a few months, whatever.
Can I get a second on that motion?
Second.
Okay, so I've got two seconds. I did happen to hear council more bolt first
So I'll give him the second with that. Is there further discussion?
Seeing them, please vote
councilmember
Thank you
all votes are in and
The motion carries with six. Yes votes and council member Victor Aguilar being absent
Okay at this point in time it is 909 and we will take a 10-minute break we stand in recess
Okay, it is 919 and we are back in session as promised
We're moving to our second public hearing item 8b and we do have human resources manager Tiffany Johnston here to present
Johnston, and I am the human resources manager in
compliance with AB 2561 tonight. I will be presenting on the city's vacancies recruitment and retention efforts
today's presentation will begin with a brief overview of a be
2561 a breakdown of the city's vacancy rates and finally what the city is doing to address recruitment and retention efforts
This is a reminder of why we're conducting this public hearing today
AB 2561 was enacted in 2025 with the legislative intent to foster transparency
within the public employment landscape.
The law requires all public employers including the city to openly disclose information about current vacancies,
recruitment strategies, and retention efforts.
It also has a special caveat that if any bargaining group's vacancy rate reaches or exceeds 20%,
they have the right to request further details.
This information must be presented at a public hearing before the governing board each fiscal year prior to the adoption of the annual budget
There are various reasons the city experiences vacancies
Vacancies can occur if a new position is approved and is waiting to be filled. There are two vacancies because of this reason
Another possibility for a vacancy happens when an employee transfers or promotes within the agency
Promotions and transfers allow for staff to move up,
which is positive for both employees and the organization.
Over 10 FTE vacancies are due to promotions or transfers.
The most common reason for a vacancy, however,
is voluntary separation.
Natural turnover can be because of resignations
and retirements, which account for over 50%
of the total vacancies.
Employees do leave for other opportunities,
perhaps with a different agency,
leaving for private sector employment,
finding a position closer to home,
perhaps moving out of state
or due to another personal reason.
Finally, a vacancy can occur
due to an involuntary separation,
which is usually when an employee
does not successfully pass probation.
There are 8.9 FTE vacancies due to this.
As of March 30th, 2026,
the city has 48.5 full-time equivalent positions vacant.
This includes all budgeted positions except non-rep part-time positions such as interns or seasonal recreation staff
This is a breakdown by bargaining group of the number of vacancies
Overall the city's current vacancy rate is 11.6 percent for reference last year
We presented a vacancy rate of 14.7 percent
There are 48.5 vacancies out of a total
419.7 budgeted FTE
The San Leandro Police Officers Association has 19 vacancies amongst police officers and sergeants
I will present more information on police positions in a separate slide
The San Leandro Police Management Association has one vacancy amongst police lieutenants police captains and the system police chief
We have one vacancy in this group in the San Leandro Management Organization. There are two vacancies
Our largest employee group is the San Leandro City Employees Association and has twenty five point five vacancies
Among confidential HR City Clerk and the city manager's office support staff. There is one vacancy
Finally, we are fully staffed at our non-represented executive level
This slide shows the breakdown of vacancies by department. The police department has the highest number of vacancies
Police officer and public safety dispatchers remain hard to fill positions
Last year the Human Resources Department had the highest vacancy rate and now we have zero which just highlights how positions ebb and flow
This is a breakdown by bargaining group of those hired in calendar year
2025 we completed 87 recruitments which yielded 74 hires and 7 promotions
Staff is continually finding ways to streamline the recruitment process to make it more efficient while maintaining a focus on the candidate experience
On average it takes 12 to 14 weeks from recruitment to hire in
Order to reach those candidates the city employs several ways to connect including social media local job boards professional
Associations as well as targeted advertisements
We have placed a high priority on employee recognition, which is critical to retention and morale
Thus we have developed and or refined opportunities for recognition which
include employee of the quarter and employee of the year awards and other
appreciation events. Work-life balance is a key priority for both candidates and
employees alike so offering telework options, alternative 980 work schedules
and generous paid time off are a few ways we satisfy this need. Recruiting for
police officers remains highly competitive. The police officers
association has a vacancy rate of 23.2% which equates to 19 out of 82 positions vacant.
All agencies are competing against each other to select and retain qualified candidates.
We prioritize this recruitment by dedicating an HR analyst to partner with the police department's
professional standards and training unit to focus on these recruitments to ensure daily
screening of applications and weekly opportunities to interview.
recruiters will go to a testing facility that offers the necessary tests for
police officers and do outreach there, which we found to be a successful way to
connect with potential candidates. We advertise widely both online and in
person at recruiting events and test sites. In 2025, we received nearly 400
applications for police officer and interviewed over a hundred candidates. We
successfully hired 13 officers. Of the eight separations, five were resignations,
two moved out of state, and three went to different agencies, one retired, and two
were released. To summarize some of the key takeaways, the city actively recruits
to fill vacant positions. The city proactively addresses vacancies using a
multifaceted approach. We also prioritize employee engagement and other retention
initiatives. This concludes my presentation on vacancies recruitment and retention efforts.
Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. At this point in time we'll take Councilmember
questions. Checking to see if Councilmember Bolt has a question. Seeing none, what I'm going to
do at this point in time is I'm going to go to our public hearing. You can rest for a little bit.
We're going to open our public hearing. It is 9 28. Mayor, we have not received any comment
cards from here in the room but we do have one hand raised online. Please proceed online.
Our online speaker is Douglas Spaulding. Good evening council. Mayor the speaker has
dropped off the call and there are no other hands raised online. Completely dropped off
the Zoom platform yes. So what I'm going to do is I am going to give that speaker the
courtesy of approximately 30 seconds to get back on because perhaps he inadvertently hit
an exit or something like that and we do have just a few minutes so I want to give him the courtesy
and while we do that seems we do not have any questions are we still leaving the public
hearing open I will just remind council members that when we come back after I close the public
hearing I'll come to you for any discussion for the questions or I will entertain a motion
at that point in time. So have we have we seen Mr. Spalding rejoin the platform?
Mayor he has not rejoined the call now. Okay so at this point in time I'm gonna
close the public hearing. The time right now is 9 30 coming back coming back to
council members for discussion or a motion to adopt the resolution. Vice
Mayor please. Making a motion to adopt the resolution, to adopt the resolution.
Thank you. At this point Councilmember James Aguilar. Mayor I'll second the
Vice Mayor's motion. Okay. We've got a motion in a second. Is there any further
discussion? Okay so just to be clear there is there is not a resolution to
accept the report. Okay well my apologies that's what my agenda says so let's not
stressed about it but we have had our hearing we've heard thank you for the
report on all the fine work that you are doing to make sure there was a statement
that I was supposed to read and I'll take the opportunity now to read that
statement so in accordance with the legislation and thank you for advising
us of this bargaining groups were also given the opportunity to make a
presentation before us today during the public hearing however no bargaining
group has indicated interest in making a presentation at this hearing and so
that's why we proceeded in the course that we proceeded but know that they do
have that right and they do have that opportunity councilmember Simon I come
to you next thank you thank you for the presentation I have a question regarding
the police vacancy and I understand it's difficult to recruit it's difficult to
fill those positions but I'm just curious have we looked at outside
contracts how those impact our police vacancy for example the mental health
response unit in the budget process we've reduced the budget to that program
yet the mental health response unit supports the police so is that making it
more difficult for us to fill our positions if we're reducing outside
services that could help them. Good evening Mayor Council, Angela Averitt
police chief. No that is not impacting our ability to recruit and retain
personnel. It is having those alternative resources for our police
officers is great because it frees them up to do other public safety initiatives
right, to focus on those things. Our issue is not necessarily recruitment, it's
retention. And so we are so far behind in trying to not only hire for people that
have retired, but also hire for people that have left to go to other agencies,
have left the profession altogether. So we're also trying to fill our vacancies
while backfilling for people who have left the organization or who didn't
past probation or whatever. There's a myriad of reasons why. We have, you know,
a lot of interest in people that want to work here in San Leandro, which is great.
It's just that the process takes so long. The background process, right, sometimes
people get hired by other police departments before we can pick them up.
And so we have interests. That's not the issue, I think. We also have explored
maybe hiring outside recruitment firms to assist in our efforts, but as you can
imagine those firms are very expensive. I think the best recruiters are the
people in this room. The best recruiters are police officers and our staff. I
personally have recruited at least five to ten people. I mean
whether I'm in uniform or not I'm always passing out my business card because I
believe you know that I need to practice what I preach, right. I really want to
fill these vacancies. I want our police department to be fully staffed and I
know that we can get there. It's just very difficult and it's not unique to
San Leandro. So it's interesting because your mic, I thought your mic was on it. Do
you have it? There you go. Thank you. You are complete, correct? Thank you. Okay, so I
think we are done with this item and we will proceed to our next item on the
agenda very quickly item number nine presentations there are no presentations
scheduled or action items to be addressed so that's item number 10 so
we'll move to item number 11 council requests to schedule agenda items and I
believe city manager that we do have one item today is that correct thank you
mr. Mayor yes we received one item from councilmember Simon councilmember Simon
will come to you. Yes I have one item this item is to remove the two items of
interest the investigation reports from 2024 and 2025 and associated documents
from the city's public records online website. This item if approved by Council
will not excuse me will not impact staff's progress on other high-priority
projects. Per the council handbook and past practice of these type of non-impact
staff. All those in favor of
that item. This item this item
shall be added to the May 4th
2026 Council meeting or next
available meeting. Is there any
council? Are there any council
members? Uh with questions on
this. Council member Bowen.
Thank you, Mayor. Just for
administrative clarification.
Is this an urgent referral? Or
that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm
consulted with city attorney and city manager.
This item can be added to May 4th or next available meeting.
Can I, for clarification then, I am concerned
that that rationale for why we can add something
to an agenda could be problematic.
I would also then entertain the notion
of doing a referral myself to, for example,
keep the discipline investigations
and relevant information that is of interest
to the public permanently on there
as a testament to our city's commitment
to our own integrity and discipline policy.
So I am certainly not supportive of that.
I'm afraid of the precedent
that this sort of referral process is setting.
I also believe that this item was potentially brought up
at a last meeting and was referred to rules.
And so I'm, again, really concerned about the roundabout
ways that Council Member Simon is again
trying to bring this up.
So one thing that I'm gonna be a little bit sensitive
to here is that this is not an agendized item.
So I think that we can ask some clarifying questions
such as whether it's an urgent referral,
but I do want to be sensitive about extended discussions
on this item.
I want to come next to Vice Mayor.
Thank you, and what's the goal of removing it?
What is your goal of removing the two disciplinary actions
from the items of interest?
Yeah, I would have to go back to stating
we shouldn't be discussing this at this time.
We can discuss this when it's on the agenda.
Was that not included in the item to the city manager?
This was filed.
So that's a question to city manager.
This was filed by the deadline today.
So city manager, if you could address
the vice mayor's question.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor.
I will just say what was provided to me
and this is all I received.
The request was to remove the two items
interest investigation reports from 2024 and 2025 and associated documents from the city's
public records online website this item if approved by council will not impact staff's progress on
other high priority projects per the council handbook and past practices of these types of
non-impact items this item shall be added to the may 4th 2026 council meeting or next available
meeting that was all I received on this item. I understand. I'm not supportive of
putting it on the May 4th agenda. I think it's not urgent. It wasn't stated
in the email to the city manager and to the clerk. The goal of why you want it
removed or the why. So I'm not I'm not supportive. Are there the council members
that would like to ask questions on this item so I I have a de facto motion from
councilmember Simon to place this on the May 4th agenda is there a second just
to clarify this this doesn't require a vote there's other items from past
practice that don't come before item 11 they just are put on there's several
that you've put on I've put on one and this is past practice so this doesn't
require a vote to be put on to the agenda.
And I'd ask the city attorney to confirm that.
So before we go there, because you have told the chair
that the chair has put something on the next meeting,
what are you referring to?
I said, past practice.
No, but you said you, you looked at me and you said you.
So are you saying that I, as mayor,
have said I want something on the next agenda
I got it on the next agenda. My understanding is that you've added items so have I to the council
agenda that did not require that did not impact staff's progress and other high party projects
so they were added. So I'm asking you what did the mayor add to the agenda that did not impact
staff time and that was not discussed with the council? I believe there was the Ava energy
came forward that wasn't approved by the council to be added which was fine. Did you look at the
priority session data from a year ago? There's another one as well I'd have to refresh my memory
but there is another one. Okay this is a request to put something on a specific date. Our standard
practice would be to take it to the work session. We just completed our priority session and we said
none of the requested items would be handled this year.
And so now you're asking for an exception
to a council decision.
So that's why I'm saying this requires a motion
to circumvent the will of the council.
The council has clearly stated
whenever that was in January or February
that we would not be proceeding
with any of these referrals.
You had already made this referral.
Just to clarify or to confirm,
if it does not require,
does not impact staff's progress,
It can be brought to the agenda.
It can be brought to, added to an agenda.
It can be brought to the council
because the council has already decided
what the council will do this year
from the priority session.
And so you're asking to change
what council has voted on.
And so since we vote,
but we voted, you presented this at the priority session
and we voted to do away with all the referrals.
We voted as a body.
And so now you're asking to sidestep what council
has already given as direction.
And so that's why I'm asking for a motion and a second,
because you're asking to change what council has voted on.
I'd have to go back and see what was at the prior session.
I don't recall that.
However, I would like to ask the city attorneys
opinion on the matter.
And what is the question?
What is, you're seeking his opinion to,
his answer to what question?
The question is, per the rule, per the handbook,
if it's not, if it does not impact staff progress,
can the item be added to the May 4th agenda
or next available meeting?
That is my question to the city attorney.
Okay, city attorney, please.
So the, thank you, thank you, mayor.
The council handbook doesn't address that specifically.
What I'm going to the points to the mayor's point
is that under the Brown Act,
which is supreme to the handbook,
California Government Code Section 54954.2A3,
is that what we're doing right now
is that a member of the legislative body
or the body itself,
subject to rules or procedures of its own,
may provide a reference to staff
or other resources for factual information,
request staff to report back to the body
at a subsequent meeting concerning any matter,
take action to direct staff to place a matter of business on a future agenda. So
that's what the Brown Act provides. It is a council choice then direct staff to
take action. You can take action to direct staff to place a matter of
business on a future agenda. So that's what the mayor is attempting to do. So
may I go to Vice Mayor at this point in time or would you like to continue? The
past practice that's what I'd like to better understand besides the Avery
energy I understood there was another item I don't have it in front of me that
you have brought and it was a valid item it means fine to bring forward if it
doesn't impact staff I got it so I think it's it would be fair that if you've
done it I think others should be allowed to do it if it's not impacting staff so
I would ask that we if it requires some time to figure that out then I can do
some research and figure that out but I think we should be fair I agree we
should be fair coming to vice mayor thank you I wanted to highlight page 16
of our City Council member handbook which talks about requests for future
agenda items and urgent referrals so I just wanted to highlight that in addition
to the Brown Act but we do have to have a vote of the majority or even a second
the process that we outlined for ourselves is to have email the city
manager and it would be added to the City Council priority list and then
added to the planning retreat which is what was done and then we all voted to
not add any more agenda items. There is however an urgent clause right so if
there is an urgent matter that shall be prioritized it needs a two-thirds
majority vote so it needs a vote of five of us on the five members of the
council I don't think that this qualifies as an urgent item and we
already voted to not add any more items to our council priority list for this
year so I think both the Brown Act and our council handbook outlines the
process to follow. Okay so at this point in time I'm not hearing a second on a
motion so I will interpret that unless my parliamentarian says otherwise
that the motion has died requesting to place that on a future agenda of May 4th.
The parliamentarian do you disagree? No I do not disagree I agree. Okay so with
that having no further items there are there City Council reports calendars or
announcements at this point in time beginning with vice mayor just wanted to
announce to the public that I will very sadly be missing the mayor state of the
city on the on the 28th I will be traveling for work and I am unable to
to attend, but really do encourage and I'm sure the Mayor will have, and has sent out
an invitation along with the Chamber of Commerce and the City's social media outlets about
our state of the city on the 28th. Best of luck, Mayor, and I'm sorry that I'm not able
to be there. And then those are, that's just my only absence in terms of a council event.
Thank you council member James Aguilar. Thank you mayor I just wanted to uplift
really quick the scholarship foundation dinner last Thursday really good time
and appreciate you mayor Gonzalez for the work that you put in and city
attorney Piorota thank you for what you did as well it was overall just a lovely
event great to see good people break bread with folks and have a good time
I'm looking forward to the state of the city on the 28th.
I'm excited to, again, see some people here from you, mayor,
and I'm just looking forward to being there on the 28th.
That's all I have for this evening, thank you.
Thank you.
Just checking online for Councilmember Bolt.
No hands, so I will wrap up very quickly on my end.
Grateful for the city of San Leandro working with Tarani
and the Boys and Girls Club to provide some mentoring
to the Europe interns.
We as a city have taken dozens of Europe interns
over the last, I guess, three years.
It's been a highly successful program
and grateful for the partnership with Europe.
And we had one of our own employees
who joined me on the panel to talk about
her wonderful experience here at the city of San Leandro
and offer mentoring advice to some folks.
Also, just highlighting that scholarship foundation
was such a beautiful event and very grateful for that.
I also want to celebrate Arroyo High School,
Arroyo High School Key Club.
I think council member Aguilar,
you might have a connection there.
Their Key Club, I had an opportunity to speak
at the Key Club Gala on Sunday.
And Arroyo High School Key Club was recognized
as the Club of the Year.
We've got a number of San Leandro students
who attend Key Club and who are just worthy of celebration
for all the great work that Key Club does
in the city of San Leandro.
The only other announcement that I will offer is Arbor Day.
We have Arbor Day on this coming Friday at 10 a.m.
And we've got flyers up,
check social media for the Rec and Park Department.
We'll be doing tree planting.
It's a great opportunity to continue demonstrating
our commitment to the environment.
So with that, it is 951 and we are adjourned.
Oh, Council Member Bowen, you snuck in there.
What is this?
What is this, what's going on here?
You're next.
I was just going to add, since you brought up the Key Club
and as a former Key Clubber, Kiwanas and San Leandro,
who sports our Key Club, is having their community mixer
at Fieldworks this Thursday from five to eight o'clock.
And so this is for anybody who's interested in Kiwanas
and the work that they do to just come and meet the group.
And it's, I mean, it's Fieldworks, it's going to be fun
and it's a great group of people.
Excellent.
Okay, so it is 952, and we are adjourned.