I am honored serving as Mayor this year for the City of Walnut Creek and I want to welcome
you all to the regular meeting on Tuesday, September 19, 2023 of the Walnut Creek City
Council.
If you will please rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it
stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
couple of quick announcements. We are running tonight's meeting as we do
all of our meetings under the rules and guidelines from the state of California about
transparency and open meetings. The city council is here in the chambers along with staff
and we also have attendees here in the city council chambers as well as attendees who are
joining us virtually. So welcome to all. There will be opportunities for public comment during
the meeting three opportunities tonight. The first during consent calendar items if anyone
wishes to speak on one of those. The second during public comment on items not on our
agenda this evening and the third on our priorities which we're discussing later in the evening.
I would also mention that under state law we need to see if any member of the City Council
is requesting to participate in the meeting remotely due to an emergency circumstance
Is that the situation this evening?
Because there are only four of us, is anyone?
That is not the situation this evening.
Council Member Francois is absent due to a work commitment.
All right, so then if we could please have the roll call.
Council Member Darlene?
Here.
Council Member Wilk?
Here.
Mayor Pro Tem Haskew?
Here.
Mayor Silva?
Here.
During public comment this evening,
we ask that you fill out a yellow speaker card.
If you intend to speak this evening,
please grab a speaker card.
they're on the little table next to the main door
and then submit it to the clerk's office
because I will be calling off names at the time
and we will be going back and forth
between those who are joining us virtually
and those who are here in the council chambers.
We have three presentations this evening,
the first of which is with our first year,
District Four Supervisor Ken Carlson,
former Council Member and Mayor
of the City of Pleasant Hill.
and Supervisor Carlson, please join us
and tell us what you wanna tell us about what's happening.
Well, good evening, Mayor Silva, Councilman Frans.
I'm here kind of on the whirlwind tour.
So I plan to make it an annual event
to go around to each of the cities in District Four
and talk about what's going on in our communities.
I just appreciate the opportunity
to have 20 or 30 minutes of your time
and to share a few things with you.
I'm just kidding.
they laughed because they knew.
So yes, I am Ken Carlson.
I'm the newly elected supervisor for district four.
First openly gay LGBTQIA supervisor
in a country across the history.
I'm really proud of that as well as
in the city of Pleasant Hill.
It's all started off real quick and easy
because I'm extremely motivated
by diversity, equity and inclusion
and how we can bring that about
not only in our local governments,
but in our communities and in the world at large.
And so I stand with you and the challenges you face
with the anti-Semitic and other attacks
that have been coming before, not only you,
but elected leaders across the county.
So I just wanna start with that.
I'm born and bred Contra Costa, right?
I've been here 90% of my life.
I'm really proud of the fact
that I'm following in my grandfather's footsteps.
He was a county supervisor here in Contra Costa County.
And so at a young age, kind of admired that
and really wanted to aspire to that.
And so to be in that seat at the dais where he was
is really kind of a really important thing for me.
I'm also proud of 29 years in law enforcement
for the community of Concord,
stayed my entire career in the Concord Police Department.
A lot of my experience comes from that service
as well as service on the Pleasant Hill City Council,
and then on numerous boards, bodies and commissions
that I served on as a volunteer,
such as the John Muir Community Health Fund,
Family Justice Alliance, and the Rainbow Community Center's
Board of Directors.
I've had the privilege over the last 10 years
of working with many of you on boards, bodies,
and commissions, and I look forward
to that continuing as well.
So one of the accomplishments we'll get to,
but basically the county has a $5.1 billion budget.
A little bit of a learning curve for me there
coming from Pleasant Hill on a $31 million budget,
not quite the same number of departments and operations
that we have in Pleasant Hill as we do at the county,
but to oversee a $5.1 billion budget
was a little bit of a learning curve for me.
And a lot of that is that federal and state money
that passed throughs that we can provide the programming
and the services to our community.
We have 10,000 employees and our health department,
the hospital system, our healthcare plan,
that is our largest department within the county.
Of course, I think everybody knows District 4,
but we did go through redistricting
just prior to the election.
So picked up a significant portion
of the Walnut Creek community in district four,
lost a sliver of Concord,
and we also picked up Morgan territory.
So we cover the majority of Concord, Walnut Creek,
all of Pleasant Hill, all of Clayton,
and out into the Morgan territory area.
A lot of departments, so like I say,
coming from Pleasant Hill City Council,
it was really a significant learning curve.
So we spent the last eight months
with a great team supporting me.
I have some of the best staff that the board is given
to see me through this learning curve.
So I have been making the whirlwind tour,
including an air tour across the entire county,
to learn about each and every one of these departments
and their priorities and their needs.
I think you all know what I do.
I hope you all know what I do.
But really, it's going from being in city government
and perhaps hiring your city attorney
and hiring your city manager.
We're responsible for not only the county CAO,
but the city or the county council and department heads.
So there's a lot more to it.
My team and myself, we really help our constituents
to navigate the systems within the county,
whether those are health challenges they're facing,
code enforcement challenging,
we do our best to see the resolution.
And then we're out in the community as best we can,
meeting with our residents and finding out
what's important to them.
Oh, wow.
Here's the other thing.
The growth of responsibility expands.
And again, I'm still on the learning curve,
but these are the county commissions that I'm,
or county committees that I'm appointed to,
airport committee, family human services,
the legislation committee,
our Los Modernas Healthcare Operations Committee,
as well as our Head Start Committee.
And then of course that comes with a plethora
of other assignments that are both not only local but regional and broader across the
entire Bay Area.
I sit on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Executive Board of A-Bag.
It goes on and on and on, as well as central solid waste and others.
When I first came into the office, put in my request for committee assignments, within
a week of getting those committee assignments, my chief of staff came to me and said, you
you have more than any other supervisor.
Do you want me to fix that for you?
And I just figured they were taking advantage
of the freshmen, so we let it go.
Some of the things that we've been able to accomplish
in just the first eight months,
I'm not sure if you're aware,
but there is a new federal immigration court
that will be opening and conquered in the next few months.
It was supposed to open a couple of months ago,
thank goodness the feds are a little slow,
but it hasn't opened yet.
So we were able to expand funding
who are stand-together Contra Costa,
which sees two asylum seekers facing immigration court,
what we know is that they're not entitled
to legal representation.
So if they go in to face the challenge
of a court hearing over asylum,
that their odds of success are 90%.
They're just not gonna happen.
So their odds of success are actually 10% or less.
So with legal representation, that mark comes up to 90%.
And there are hundreds within our own communities
that are working and paying their taxes
and doing the work we need
that are facing these challenges.
And with an expanded court,
we were able to expand their program
to give them additional clerical staff
as well as additional attorneys
to represent an immigration court.
We also, based on the George Floyd incident
and what's come out of Sacramento
about tracking racial issues within law enforcement
and the criminal justice system.
We've been able to add five additional attorneys
to the DA's office.
It's a significant amount of their time
is actually tracking those statistics
and reviewing past and current cases
for any racial bias that might be in there.
Our public defender's office is doing the same thing,
so we've expanded their office
by five additional attorneys as well.
And of course, I was privileged to lead
the LGBTQIA Plus Pride Month presentation
and recognition at the Board of Supervisors.
And believe it or not, we did pass a balanced budget.
So talking about homelessness,
which I think is at the forefront,
and of course it is for me, it's a priority for me.
Our core team has expanded their hours now.
They are working seven days a week, eight to midnight now.
And again, they're that entry point
when we're dealing with our unhoused population
to get them services connected to services
and or in shelter.
They did release their 2022 annual report.
is out there, as well as the point in time count, but as part of the point in time count,
there's a story map with that that gives you a little bit of more insight and a little
more personal touch to those people that we contacted as we did the point in time count.
Measure X, we just had, I think my longest board meeting so far, we just finished at
five o'clock today.
Measure X was on the agenda, so it's the half-cent sales tax to raise funds.
We are seeking advisory board members.
So those are citizens that are interested in the services we provide and how we can
expend those funds.
But we're also looking for oversight board members, one from each district, to make sure
that we hold ourselves accountable to meeting the promises we made when we went out to the
public and asked for them to vote for Measure X.
Today we had a discussion.
There was $4.7 million in unallocated funds that we're looking at where can we put those
dollars to the best use. We were we were given numerous presentations just by
county departments with a total dollar figure of 56 million so it's a little
bit of a challenge because our citizen advisory body is still meeting over the
course of the next few months to see what we can do to support our CBO's and
other programming out there in the community. So we'll be reevaluating over
between now and the 28th when we're actually going to make the allocations
of November, unallocated funding, what's been promised but not spent, and do we pull that
back? Do we roll it over? Or how else can we use it? So there's a lot going on with
Measure X over the course of the next two months. I'll mention the housing element.
I know that's a touchy subject for all of us. I thought I had jumped ship from Pleasant
Hill as they were just getting theirs ready to be submitted, but we're all facing that
challenge so we have submitted our our housing element and we've gotten some
comments back once or twice and we're getting ready to send it off again but
we are doing our general plan at the same time it has not been done since
1991 yeah I saw that I had the same reaction it's that's a long time so the
general plan is expected to come to us in early October and then it'll be open
for the couple of months for public comment and review and we've had great
community participation. We've been out in the community, so there's a lot to be said.
But I would ask you to take a look at it, envision Contra Costa 2040, add comments.
And finally, I'm going to be in Walnut Creek again on this Friday. Okay. Gosh, I have someone
taking care of my calendar. Just an opportunity to get out in the community will be rooted
at 9 a.m. on Friday morning to just meet with community members, talk about what the issues
are and see what direction they might give me.
We're seeking – I'm trying to talk fast because I know you've got a lot.
We are looking for nominations for humanitarian of the year, and that's recognized at our
January Martin Luther King Day celebration.
So nominations are open.
If you can get that out there, we'd like to know that by October 23rd.
Just want to cheer on National Library Month.
So get out.
If you haven't got one, get your library card.
And then National Voter Registration Day.
I have notes and I've totally forgotten them.
Anyway, National Registration Day is coming up today.
But we are also going to be out at your school.
So we're going to be at Northgate in Los Lomas.
Our clerk recorder and her team will be out there and they'll be out registering and also
looking for poll workers.
So those are two opportunities as well to get out.
open door I love to meet with people my staff hate it because I never say no it
seems like but you can reach out to my office through email phone call you can
follow me on Facebook I don't do Twitter for I won't go into why follow me on
Facebook or Instagram and I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any
hopefully I didn't talk too fast no thank you very much for coming and we
look forward to getting these updates more frequently even than maybe every
year. My council colleagues do you have questions for the supervisor? Not a
question just a comment though and I appreciate can you have come out ever
since you became our supervisor you've made lots of outreach you have had an
open phone line email policy between you and your staff and us we've had any
questions or needs anything I really appreciate that that kind of outreach is
really critical and I hope that you keep it up thank you I will just add oh what
did I forget okay oh yeah see I have to have staff first off there's there's
actually two things we are creating an ad hoc committee to study an African
for African American Holistic Wellness Center and so we're looking for someone from District 4
who can provide community input on the development of the center they have to live in District 4 of
course and then we really want somebody with direct experience from the systemic harms
and how they can bring that experience to us and and of course how we can improve the outcome so
I put it out there that it would be great to have someone from District 4.
There are other boards, bodies, and commissions that I make appointments to, whether directly
or indirectly, and they're all on the website.
Feel free to check out the website, and if you're interested, absolutely, I'd love to
see a volunteer or two.
The other thing I would just real quick share, as I am chair of the Legislative Committee,
We do have a published state and federal legislative platform, but being a chair and there have
been things that have not necessarily been word for word in the platform, but if there
are things that we can support you on, letters of support you're trying to get out of Sacramento
or Washington, I'm happy to hear about those and bring those forward to get additional
letters of support and jump on board with you.
So please don't hesitate to reach out and knock my door down.
Thank you very much.
Tim, did you have any questions?
OK.
Since we're not asking questions, we're just saying.
I've known Supervisor Carlson for a long time.
But I just wanted to say, for some of the young people
in my family, it is really great to be
able to point to an elected person who's LGBTQIA
and make them feel like, yeah, we don't have to just hide.
We are part of the community.
and it's a very inspirational thing
for a couple of people in my family that struggle.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Thank you all.
Thank you, Supervisor.
Have a good evening.
Our next presentation is the introduction
of the Lesher Center Artistic Leaders
and Strategic Plan Update.
Director Safeen, good evening.
Thank you, Mayor.
Good evening, Mayor, Members of the Council,
for the record, Kevin Safeen,
Director of Arts and Recreation.
Some people are following me, slowly.
It was a year and a half that we presented to you, the council, the Strategic Plan for
the Lesher Center, which you endorsed, and that's a partnership between the city and
the Diablo Regional Arts Association, the DRAA.
And in endorsing that plan, you gave us some direction to focus on some high-priority areas.
They included programming, marketing, development, and staffing.
And so I'm pleased but not surprised to tell you that we are ahead of the plan and we are
making significant progress, which is why we're here this evening, to talk to you a
bit about what we've been doing, some of our new staff, and what is coming for you.
But before I turn it over to Carolyn Jackson, who's the general manager of the Lecher Center,
and Peggy White, who's the executive director of DRA, I want to thank the council for your
leadership and your vision and your support to the Lesher Center, past, present, and future.
There's so much to look forward to at the Lesher Center, and so because we have support
from the council and the city, we do what we do for the community.
So thank you all for your support.
So with that, I'll turn it over to Carolyn to get us started.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Kevin.
Good evening, Councilmembers, Carolyn Jackson, General Manager at the Lesher Center.
To start this evening we have two key staff members to introduce to you.
They join myself and Emily Enders, the curator of the Bedford Gallery and leading core programs
at the Lesher Center and they'll just briefly talk about their personal careers and where
they bring their skill sets from.
First I'd like to welcome our new public art manager, Mariah Blier.
Hello, good evening everybody, council members and Mayor Silva.
My name is Mariah and I'm super happy to be here, very new to the city of Walnut Creek.
This is my third week here as the public art manager.
But art is not new to me.
I've had a long career working in the arts.
I come from the town of Danville just prior to this for nine years.
I was there overseeing all the arts programming there.
And before that, I worked for a private art consultant in Walnut Creek for five years.
So yeah, that's a bit about me.
I'm happy to be in Walnut Creek.
So thank you.
And next is our new artistic director for CenterRep, who, CenterRep being the Le Lecher
Center's resident professional theater company, please welcome Matt M. Morrow.
Thank you, Carolyn.
I am so excited to be here.
I come to you from San Diego,
where I was the executive artistic director
of Diversionary Theatre there for nine years.
Diversionary is the third oldest LGBTQIA plus theater
in the country.
Prior to that, I was the associate artistic director
at Citi Theatre, which is a Lort Theatre in Pittsburgh
that specializes in new work.
And prior to that, I spent almost 20 years
living and working in New York City,
in the not-profit theater community off Broadway,
as well as on Broadway in the commercial sector.
So I'm thrilled to join this family here in Walnut Creek,
and it's just so inspiring that this community
is so invested in arts and culture,
and that there's a theater that is a program of the city.
It's mind-blowing, so it's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for your support.
In addition to Matt and Mariah,
we are currently in the recruitment process
for a marketing supervisor first ever
at the Lesher Center full-time marketing staff member
as well as a technical director
to support the headliner series.
So thank you to the council
for your support of those added positions.
We have a number of exciting projects this year
with Center Rep and Bedford Gallery.
You can see the joyful musical crowns
now through October 6th.
This December, the holiday classic,
A Christmas Carol returns and in February,
we're looking forward to the Northern California premiere
of a new musical, Mystic Pizza, based on the MGM rom com.
There's much more to the season,
which you can see at centerrep.org.
At Bedford Gallery, we open bits and pieces,
contemporary art on a small scale on September 30th,
miniature art, I mean, everybody's excited,
it's gonna be great.
And coming up later in the season,
we have an exhibition of ceramic art,
as well as an exhibition highlighting
the inspiring stories of contemporary indigenous people.
Both Center Rep and Bedford Gallery have pay-what-you-can offerings to expand access to the arts and
allow for anyone to join us without a barrier of cost.
Those are available to reserve at any time online.
There's no discount codes or any hoops to jump through.
You can select the price that works for you, including a $0 entry fee for some programs.
And now I'd like to turn it over to Peggy White, Executive Director of Diablo Regional
Arts Association and my partner in making great things happen
at the Lesher Center to give us an update on the headliner
series.
Thank you so much, Carolyn. Well, I'm so happy to be here
tonight. You know, we kicked off our headliner series, it really
is our headliner series. I love saying that. In January 2022,
with Leanne Rimes, and since then, we've presented 18
headliners, we've brought economic activity to downtown
Wanna Creek, we welcome new and diverse artists and our audiences, and every single headliner
has received a standing ovation, isn't that fantastic.
So I think this has become a whirlwind for our community.
Coming up in 2023, we have 18 headliner series performances coming, including our Women of
Country Mini Festival this weekend and Return of Fiesta Cultural Realm July of 2023.
Check out this highlight video for what's coming.
Take two.
Well, you're gonna have to come see these performance live.
It sounds great.
Yeah, it's gonna be an incredible season.
The fact that we're doing twice as many as the past two seasons.
But what's really exciting this year is none of the headliners
are also gonna be artists in residence.
What that means is these top-notch artists will also conduct workshops,
master classes, their performances at schools,
senior citizens, community events and much more, so that's going to be really exciting.
Many artists are going to be here as long as five days, so that's kind of new and exciting.
And also this march, we're excited to bring Lecher Center in your neighborhood alive with
the contract truck, which is new, so that will be busy all over the place with these
incredible classical musicians.
And our Blood Art Access program returns again this December with a Christmas carol and continues
with many exciting student matinees
for Title I schools in 2024.
And in closing, I just have to say
what a joy it is to work with the fantastic Carolyn Jackson
and the Lecture Center and Jerry Crew
to make all the wonderful things at the center happen.
And I wanted to just share, we are so grateful
to our sponsors, our ticket buyers, our donors,
and all of you.
Thank you so much for your enthusiastic support
all we're doing at the Lesher Center. Thank you very much. We're happy to take
questions if there are any but we tried to keep it snazzy and brief and we'll
send you the video separately. Exactly if he figures it out in the next minute or
so. Questions for staff? Did you mention the fact that if you buy several tickets
for the series, headliner series, that there's a discount?
There is.
You can save up to 25% when you bundle the headliners series.
And with 18 performances as part of that series,
there's a lot of opportunity to find
a bundle of anything from 3 to 8 or more.
Thank you.
Not a question.
Great tease, by the way.
We heard the great music.
They sounded phenomenal.
Just can't wait to get past the commercial.
I've heard that more and more theater groups
are going bankrupt and are losing regional theater.
I am so thankful that we've got a great partner in the DRA,
that we've got a new artistic director
who's obviously excited.
That's terrific and enthusiastic.
A lot of people know that acting is in my background
and I did that many years ago.
And it's just great that we've got
this vibrant theater program here.
But it doesn't exist unless people come out
and get the tickets and support it.
because if they don't support it,
we're not going to have it.
We're, unfortunately, we're one of the last
people standing on this one,
so I will continue to encourage everybody
as also being a liaison from the Council of the DRA,
so thank you very much, all of you,
and your entire department.
Mayor Pro Tem?
I will also add on thank you all for the work that you do.
It has been an incredible first two years
with the Headliner series and coming back after COVID,
so we're so glad that the doors are open.
This audience is coming back,
and I saw crowns on Friday night,
so fun and interesting and thought-provoking,
all in the same package.
So thank you for presenting those productions
and look forward to many of the future ones as well.
So thank you.
Buy tickets, Lecher Arts Center.
Lecherartscenter.org.
Thank you.
I'm just gonna play my bagpipes.
Oh, that should bring them out here, right?
Yeah.
♪ Do, do, do ♪
They're automatic.
Oh!
So that's just a sampling of the 18 headliners programs
that are coming up starting this Friday night.
And thank you to the sponsors of the program as well.
Next is a presentation and conversation with PG&E
about power outages.
I'm gonna turn to the city manager
and ask him to introduce this.
Yeah, good evening.
Thank you, Mayor.
Dan Buchheiser, City Manager.
This presentation this evening is a result of a request
by the city that PG&E provide an update
related to a significant number of power outages
that have occurred in the city
over the course of the past year.
Most notably, there have been certain neighborhoods
and areas of the city that have had, as I mentioned,
a significant number of outages.
And so what we've asked is for an update
because we've received numerous inquiries
from the community over the course
of the past year about what's occurring.
So we've asked PG&E here to provide some context
for the current situation, what's being addressed
and what we could expect in the future.
So with that, I'd like to introduce Sarah Yoll
and welcome PG&E here this evening to Walnut Creek.
Good evening, Sarah.
Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity
to join you tonight.
With me tonight, I have Erin Johnson,
who's our regional vice president
for the Bay Area Division,
and he'll be joining me a little bit later.
My name is Sarah Yoll and I'm the PG&E's local government affairs manager for the Bay Area.
And before we begin, I do want to acknowledge the disruption that the recent outages have
caused here in the city of Walnut Creek.
As we work to strengthen our system and improve your reliability, your feedback is critical.
So we're really happy that you have us here today and invited us to come and talk to you
about what's been going on and some of the improvements that we have made on the system.
I hope our presentation is going to make it clear that we have and will continue to take
steps to improve the reliability here in the City of Juana Creek.
At PG&E we encourage our co-workers and customers to prepare for any natural disaster of emergency.
I'm going to take a moment for safety here.
Just like home security systems and motion detectors, protect your home and family, creating
a hundred feet of defensible space around your property serves as another way for you
to keep what you own and those who you love safe.
We recommend keeping plants while irrigated, maintaining clearances between each and removing
Dead Trees.
At visit PG&E Safety Action Center at safetyactioncenter.pge.com to view our video series Seven Saturdays
to a Fire Resistant Home and it is super helpful short videos and you will get a lot of tips
from that.
All right now we'll go over what's going to be on the agenda tonight so tonight we'll
go over identifying and reducing wildfire risk, vegetation management, the enhanced
power line safety setting program, our public safety power shutoffs and our customer resources
and support.
All right.
So, layers of wildfire protection.
Since we launched our community wildfire safety program, we have reduced wildfire risk from
our system.
You can see here in the image, we have different layers of wildfire protection.
We have accomplished this through a combination of ongoing safety programs, long-term improvements,
and new situational awareness tools, which you can see listed on the slide.
These measures work together to provide customers with multiple layers of wildfire protection,
and we're going to talk about some of those today.
Here you see a map of the city of Walnut Creek.
You can see the high fire risk area that has the enhanced power
line safety settings, the adjacent areas with enhanced
power line safety settings.
We've completed some undergrounding work in this area.
There's some additional undergrounding work
forecasted.
System hardening has also been completed.
Overhead system hardening forecasted,
and then sectionalizing devices that we've installed
throughout and then weather stations that also,
and high definition cameras that help us predict
and prevent wildfires.
So our vegetation management work.
So we conduct annual vegetation inspections
along all of our distribution power lines
to determine the appropriate approach
to keep communities safe.
I know that recently it's been in the news
that we've changed our vegetation management program,
just wanna make it clear that we are continuing
to do annual inspections
and continuing to do vegetation management
throughout the service territory.
This is an important tool for preventing wildfires
and we understand that and we are continuing to do that.
And we work with our local cities to do that.
So enhanced power line safety settings.
It's a technology to prevent wildfires.
The way this works is it turns off power
within one tenth of a second
if a tree branch or other object strikes the line.
Here you can see a pretty significant tree on the line.
this is proven to stop wildfires
before they have a chance to start.
So we've seen a 68% reduction in ignitions
and a 99% reduction in fire size
compared to before the safety settings were on the lines.
So how does it work?
So here's an image here where you can see an object
strike the line, a fault occurs, or a fault occurs.
The safety settings shut off power
within a tenth of a second,
and then we check the line for damage
before safely restoring power.
So here is where some of the frustration occurs
in that we have to patrol the entire line
before we can restore the power.
So something hits the line.
Power goes off.
We get notification that power goes off.
And we have to send folks out to physically check the line.
So if it's in the middle of the night,
depending on where it is, we may have to wait till morning
to finish inspecting.
if we have to send a helicopter out.
So these outages occur without notice.
They're unplanned outages.
We do notify customers during the outage
what the estimated time of restoration is
and what the process for the progress is for that.
So the outage occurs, access power alignment and equipment
when safe, we assess and repair damage,
and then we restore the power.
Next, I'm going to let Erin Johnson come up and speak
to some of the specific EPSS outages
that have been occurring here in the City of Walnut Creek.
All right, we have a little height difference here.
Okay, good evening.
Thank you for having me, council members.
It's an honor to be here in Walnut Creek tonight.
My name is Aaron Johnson,
so I am PG&E's regional vice president
for the inner Bay Area.
I have accountability for all of PG&E's activity
within Alameda and Contra Costa counties,
and then on the west side of the Bay
in San Mateo and San Francisco counties.
that's five operating divisions.
Our electrical service yard that's on Detroit Ave
up in Concord, about four miles from here,
is the service center that would serve most
of the community of Walnut Creek.
And then obviously we bring crews and folks
from other places when emergencies require that.
A little bit just a background, 15 years with PG&E.
I've built solar plants, helped get the company
into an engineer by background.
built solar plants, worked with getting the utility
into the electric vehicle charging business
in conjunction with business customers,
and then helped build a lot of the wildfire mitigation
programs coming out of the wine country fires,
including everyone's, including ours,
least favorite program,
the Public Safety Power Shutoff Program,
which I'm unfortunately able to tell you
a small number of 4,000 of our customers
up more in the Shasta reading area are experiencing tonight
due to the northerly winds that have brought the smoke
into the bay that we've all experienced today.
So gotten much better at that program,
but it is still out there.
And again, very different than the EPSS program, right?
Which is set on circuits every day.
And so that we can take power out of those lines
more quickly when there is an outage,
when something comes in contact with those lines.
But again, we don't know when that's going to occur,
Unlike the public safety power shutoff program,
where, you know, we can see these weather events coming
and we do 48, 24 hour customer notifications
per our process.
So, you know, again, I was struck by,
as I was coming over today, by the wildfire,
the smoke that's come back to the bay.
And it is important that we make these choices
that unfortunately those choices represent a trade-off today in reliability with providing
the protection that customers expect and reducing the risk of an ignition from the utility system
from the electrical lines in the event of some sort of incident.
However, I want to acknowledge that the reliability that Walnut Creek has seen, especially this
summer, doesn't meet our expectations and I'm certain from the feedback we've received
from our customers, your constituents
that it doesn't meet their expectations either.
So I want to apologize on behalf of PG&E,
for not meeting your expectations and we are doing,
I want to talk about some of the things we're doing
to make that better tonight.
So in terms of the outages that we have here,
first I want to just geek out for a second
and just talk about electrical engineering a little bit.
The electrical lines that serve Walnut Creek
are not configured around the boundaries of Walnut Creek.
And so you're served by a number of substations,
one down 680 a little bit more,
the Tassajara substation.
You are also served by the Lakeview substation,
which is here in town, and then the Clayton substation,
which is just on the other side of the Lime Ridge Open Space.
And so circuits come from all different areas.
So we get questions, I think, from the city manager
that are very appropriate about how many customers
have been affected, how many outages we've experienced.
Our lines are not really designed around those boundaries.
So we've done our best to try and look at
the physical footprint of Walnut Creek to specify that,
but that is an imprecise process.
And I would just say that, you know,
I apologize if there's any slight inconsistencies
in the data and the information we provide you.
So in particular, we've seen a number
of these EPSS-related outages.
On this slide, you see 12.
Five of those were,
seven were definitely in the city of Walnut Creek.
Another five of those were further
on the south end of the city
and affected as little as two to approximately 25 customers
when we were often switching customers around
to serve on different circuits, right?
So there's a lot of redundant service
where a customer is served by multiple lines
and depending on work that we're trying to do
on those circuits or other configurations,
we may have things in what we call
an alternative configuration.
And so it's not always, you know,
we can chase it after the fact,
but customers will be moving around
as to what circuit they're served by.
So in really digging in on it over the last couple of days,
asking the team to really look at that,
I think there are seven of these EPSS outages
that have really affected the core of Walnut Creek.
And especially on this, the Clayton 2215,
which is the circuit that serves portions of Clayton,
comes from that substation,
comes over through the Lime Ridge area and open space,
and then in serves the vast majority
of customers in Walnut Creek.
That circuit, I'm happy to say,
we've done, Sarah Slide pointed to a number of the things
that we've done over the last couple of years
to add sexualizing devices.
These are protection equipment
that helps us break the circuit up into smaller pieces
so that when there is an outage,
it can be contained into a smaller footprint of customers.
It also allows us to switch power
onto different routes for customers
so that if there is an outage,
we can quickly restore the bulk of the customers,
narrow it down to a small number of customers,
the smallest possible while we're doing any repair
to equipment that's necessary.
So we've been doing a significant amount of work
on these circuits to do that,
especially with these EPSS outages.
When we see them, I run a meeting every morning
where we review with the operational team,
I review any outages from the day before,
caused by this program to see what the steps are
that we need to take.
In this instance, a number of the circuits here
have had things like bird guard put on, squirrel guard.
We've replaced a number of pieces of equipment
that are like a circuit breaker in your home,
a type of switch with a newer higher technology item
called a Viper, very dramatic name,
but it's basically just a re-closer.
and that acts like a circuit breaker.
And then the big project that we've been doing
has just been completed,
but not yet fully operationalized in our program,
which is the two miles of undergrounding
that we've done over the Lime Ridge area
that will really separate that substation,
the Clayton substation from the rest of the circuit
that really serves the customers here in Walnut Creek.
And what that will allow us to do is there's a couple
of other devices that we've added to that.
It will allow this program to become more precise, right?
We've been able to adjust the safety settings.
We were running a really long circuit
and sometimes those outages were going all the way back
to the substation.
Now, if there's any outages from a wildfire program,
they'll be much smaller and more contained.
And because most of that circuit is now outside
of what are designated as high fire threat areas.
We don't trigger that program, which we look at every day,
the CPSS program, we look at it every day
to decide whether the weather warrants it, right?
So if, you know, coastal fog makes its way
all the way here, right, and we're really socked in,
we're looking at that across the service territory
to make sure we're not doing, you know,
what we started doing early days of this program,
I had a team, you know, patrolling for wildfire safety
in Half Moon Bay, in rain gear, right?
We don't want that.
So we're getting very precise with where we,
where we have the program lined up.
And now it will only really be because this area
is not considered in the core of Walnut Creek,
considered high wildfire threat area,
but it is adjacent to that.
We only trigger this program on really extreme weather days
like when there's red flag warning from Cal Fire
and those types of conditions.
So the program will still have the wildfire protection
on those most extreme days,
but because we know this part of the community
is not as at risk as other parts
where there is more extreme wildfire risk,
we will have sort of raised the threshold
of when the program kicks in for the community.
Let's see.
I want to pause there and see what another thing I just want to mention we did we do send out you
know one of the steps that we'll take and that we have taken here is to come out and do additional
tree trimming right so we have our annual inspections of the lines when we have recurring
outages on these circuits we send out our tree crews again to do further inspections on those
lines and we have done some additional tree trimming in the area as a result of that. I want
want to close on a note of hope before I answer any questions you have. We have
been piloting a program around electric vehicles and it's really important and
we go out and talk to customers they want wildfire protection from utility
assets right they have contributed to a number of very significant wildfires in
California but they also need reliability they need their electrical
service and so we've really been challenging our wildfire team to look at
at how do we provide the wildfire mitigation
that our customers are looking for
while reducing the reliability impacts?
And I'm very excited.
We've done a pilot with two Ford 150 Lightning pickups.
We know the bay is one of the highest adoption areas
of EVs in the country.
And we're piloting a technology with Ford and GM
working in partner with them to provide the potential
for vehicle to home charging.
and those devices are too expensive right now.
They're in the neighborhood of like $15,000,
but those will come down in price and we're piloting that.
And so for those that are working for home
or happen to have an EV and are early adopters,
and we know there are many in this community,
there'll be the opportunity to leave your vehicle
plugged in at your home.
And when there are power outages of a reasonable duration,
we'll ride right through those
because you'll have your vehicle plugged into your home.
That technology is not months away,
but it's not decades away either.
And so we've been piloting that
and working with the major auto manufacturers.
So there is technology on our horizon.
We are obviously communities in the Bay
that contribute greatly to technology in the world.
And those are coming home to us here
working with major auto manufacturers.
So I'm excited to see technology on the horizon.
The engineer in me loves seeing that
and knowing that there are opportunities for us
besides the investments we're making
in the core infrastructure
really have technology help us solve some of these problems in the not so distant future. So
happy to take any questions I can answer about reliability and investment and the infrastructure
here in Walnut Creek. Thank you very much for the presentation. So let's start with a little
bit of rollback here because there was a lot of technical information. So we've had a neighborhood
along the Clayton's circuit that you had a long number for it or SB 15 or something like that and
sound like a piece of legislation, what is the trigger that has caused these basically
single-family neighborhoods that are we don't think are probably in a high-fire zone, but
what has triggered that and can you explain it in less geeky terms?
All right, I will try. Raise your hand if I'm failing and I will I will I know he's an
an electrical engineer of all kinds.
I like to think that I speak regular language as well,
but sometimes I get excited.
So I will say that the challenge with that circuit
is the primary challenge,
and we see this with a lot of communities,
and this is really the poster child,
and I was involved in that undergrounding project
because originally that project over Lime Ridge
was to help mitigate public safety power shutoff
after the big impactful shutoffs in 2019.
We got smarter and better at being able
to target that program.
And so that is not an area that we would target
for shutoff anymore.
But we knew that we'd made a commitment
and communicated with the city
that we were gonna be do that project.
So we followed through.
Now, thankfully, as we develop this new program,
this undergrounding circuit will help us
lessen the impact from that as well.
So what it specifically, what the challenge is,
is that we have communities whose infrastructure
is often underground in the neighborhood,
but is served by a line that went over
through a high wildfire area.
So maybe they don't sit in a wildfire area,
but the circuit that serves them some miles away
passes through a wildfire area.
So that's really what the community has been experiencing.
So does this mean that if they're, it's detecting some reason to shut down on this EPSS,
that it takes out the whole rest of the circuit?
Exactly. And that's what it's been doing.
And unfortunately, this segment that passes through the Lime Ridge Open Space area was very close
to the substation, so everybody downstream,
because electricity flows like water, right, generally.
It's a little more complicated, but it's a good way to think about it.
we get a block right there, we can't get electricity
to anybody downstream.
By putting this underground here,
the Clayton substations here,
we will now start the program much further downstream
and we're able to because there's a lot of different paths
on that circuit from that future area, we can isolate,
we've put in additional of these, what I call Vipers,
these reclosers, so that we can isolate
If one branch now has an outage,
we can isolate that one, patrol it more quickly, right?
As Sarah said, we've gotta patrol it.
We don't know what exactly happened
and we don't wanna re-energize a line remotely
that has a tree lying over it or a portion of it,
because that could spark a fire.
But again, that program will now also be triggered
only on the most severe weather days
because most of the community is now separated
from that area that is in the high fire threat area.
So we do energize the EPSS program
on really extreme weather days
out of an abundance of caution.
But again, we don't have a ton of red flag warning days
in the Bay Area.
So it would likely be only a handful of times a year
that the program would actually be active.
And then something would have to happen on that day,
like a branch or a bird come in contact with the line.
So, extreme weather days.
Do you mean high heat, high winds?
Yes, yes.
So, you know, a good marker would be red flag warning days
from the National Weather Service.
So, you can get high winds during a thunderstorm
like we were having at the turn of the year.
Do those trigger high?
Yeah, I mean, we can walk you through, if it's helpful,
all of those criteria, I'll probably have to call up
a little cheat sheet I've got here, but-
That's okay.
We can walk you through that, but you know,
we look for things like, you know,
so I use red flag warnings as just a marker
because that's a more publicly visible thing,
but we have high wind thresholds, very low humidity, right?
When it gets super, super dry,
those are the kind of things that we're looking at
to trigger the program.
But again, those would have to be much more extreme
because we're in the edge of high fire threat area.
We're not in the core of high fire threat area.
Okay, other council members who have questions?
Council member?
Council member Byron.
Thank you, thanks for the presentation.
I'm glad that you guys are working on it.
I did have two questions.
If somebody is reliant on a medical device,
do you guys have a program?
Who should they contact?
So we do.
We have a program for our medical baseline customers.
So, any customer that relies on a medical device is eligible for a program we have called
the Medical Baseline Program.
That program allows customers who rely on a medical device for anything, any purposes,
you do need to get a signature from your doctor about that, but then you're eligible for the
program, you get additional allocation of electricity at a much lower cost to help you
manage that.
that's on that program is eligible for our battery program. I think Sarah's putting up the website
on that. So we have the portable battery program. That's at pge.com slash backup power. And we also
have any customer, so you on that medical baseline program, but also any customer that is part of a
that generally, so we were targeting our low-income customers on that program,
but also any customer that's on a circuit that's been hit repeatedly by the EPSS program
and the challenges of operating that program and the decreased reliability
is able to also be eligible for that backup battery. It's not going to run your whole house,
but it will allow you to run, you know, a critical medical device, maybe a small fridge
for some sort of medicine that you need to keep cold, those types of things.
Okay, and then if somebody in the neighborhood looks at a power line and says, wow, that tree
is like really close to it.
How do they go about notifying you?
So we have an app that's available in any
of your favorite app locations.
I'm an iPhone person, so it's on the Apple App Store.
But it's called Report It.
So you can search Report It or PG&E Report It.
And within 30 days, you'll get a response of anything
you put in there.
It asks you to take pictures and stuff like that.
I would just say for the public that might be listening,
Double check that it's an electrical line,
because a lot of what we get reported are the cable lines.
They have very different requirements.
They have to, you know,
we keep a four feet clearance at all times
on the electrical lines,
which are generally at the top of the pole.
The very thick black lines that you see
that are often nested in tree branches
are usually the telecommunications infrastructure.
They have a different standard, right?
It has to really be pressing against it.
They don't necessarily keep the same clearances that we do.
So we get a lot of pictures of that,
But if you're not sure, send it in and we'll double check
and we'll send somebody out to look at that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Councilmember.
Thank you and thank you for being here,
we put the request out because I happen to live
in the area next to Lime Ridge and we've experienced,
you mentioned here was four outages in 2023,
there's been a dozen since September of last year.
So that's within a year we've had 12.
the last one, as far as I can tell,
was in August of this year.
That was 10 hours long.
So these are significant outages.
And I wanna ask, first of all,
you'd mentioned about Lime Ridge.
Is the Lime Ridge project done?
So the Lime Ridge project was completed on September 13th.
So it is just complete.
In order for the program to come out,
we have to finish getting all the system in
to our system of record.
So the physical work is done,
and my understanding is that it is operating,
but until we have mapped it and closed the engineering work,
I can't turn off the program
and it doesn't become official, if you will.
So I was hoping to have a date for you
as to when I can do that.
I don't have that.
I'm gonna make sure that Sarah and I follow up
and we can give you a more precise date
when I get that from the team
as to when that mapping work will be complete
because taking that portion of the circuit
out of the EPSS program that I was speaking of
requires some ministerial closure that we have to do
to just make sure our records are perfect
and that we've got all of that synced up.
And so I've asked that to come to the front of the line
given the impact to the community.
So we are trying to get that mapped into our system
and usually that process takes 60 to 90 days.
I don't think that's acceptable in this instance.
So I wanna see if we can close it much, much faster than that.
So let me ask because living in that area,
I've received hundreds of emails when this happens
and lots of comments on this.
So I'm trying to just get the critical feedback
that Sarah had just mentioned when she had started.
What specific criteria is PG&E using then
to create the EPSS enabled power lines?
Is there something that you're looking at specifically
for criteria for doing that?
So for EPSS, we put all circuits,
there's about 900 of them that are in high fire threat areas
on the program.
So every circuit in a wildfire risk area
is on that program.
We also drew, depending on the topography,
a one to two mile buffer zone around all wildfire areas
and included circuits in there as well.
So we have, on the whole PG&E system,
over 25,000 miles of lines that are in high fire threat areas
out of a total of about 100,000, 110,000 miles of lines,
but we have 120, about 20 of them are underground.
So about 100,000 of overhead lines.
So all overhead lines are in this program.
Again, it's resulted in a 68% reduction in ignitions
off of our system.
It's been very successful.
It has contributed to reliability problems,
which is why we've built this daily cadence
to review those outages and make sure that we're, you know,
going and doing everything we can,
oftentimes tweaking the engineering settings
and getting all these power electronics devices
to coordinate a little bit better.
That can require a little bit of engineering tweaking.
That had to happen here.
We'll be able to be better at that
when we add this segment on the Clayton 2215.
Sorry for my legislative analogy.
But that circuit, so we do things like that.
But yeah.
So let me ask in the last outage that we saw was 4,500 homes.
What is the goal of what you would like to see on an EPSS
where you have reduced it to, I don't,
what is your goal of how many homes will be impacted
if this happens?
So it's a little hard to say exactly.
So it'll take about 2,000 customers out
by moving to this forward point or about 1,500.
And then now, there's a kind of a juncture
of like three circuits that are approximately
about one third of that remainder,
so about a thousand customers each.
So now, ideally, only one of those
would necessarily get triggered.
But again, today, EPSS is enabled on that circuit
almost all days at this time of year.
Going forward, it would only be a handful of days
out of the year that I would expect that to be enabled.
So, the impact will be reduced significantly to about a quarter of the size, depending
on where the concern is, right?
It could still-something could happen on that program, and it could go all the way back
to the substation, which is what results in the full 4,500 customers being out.
But it should be much smaller, so around 1,000 customers, and much less frequent because
the program has only enabled a handful of days out of the year.
1,000 still seems like a lot to me.
PSPS, we get notified. We say that we get a couple days ahead of time even, we are subject
to potentially a shutdown. Not convenient, but we can prepare for it. If there's only a handful
of days that EPSS would be in effect, why is there no communication up front about this?
In fact, when an outage happens, and this is one of the big complaints that comes from
the community, is that other than the notification, if you go on the website that there's an outage
and it may be out for four hours or whatever it says, there's no communication of why,
no communication of what's going on, what can be expected, there's just nothing. And if
there's only a handful of days that EPSS would be in effect, we're not notified about that ahead of
time that this would be one of those days? We're literally in the dark.
Yeah, no, I appreciate the feedback. The challenge with EPSS, right, is that it doesn't guarantee
you that the power will be out, right? So I think we do have a possibility, and we'll
go back and look at it, about whether we would want to notify customers of the potential
that were on that, but on any given day where there's an EPS outages, so like the Clayton
Circuit has had, and I want to acknowledge it's had many more circuit outages on it.
As you indicated, when you go back and you consider the, you know, the historical storm
season that we had, as well as other outages that were planned for work that impact customers,
right?
But those like, like PSPS come with advanced notifications so you can plan appropriately.
And they're of a finite duration.
I guess I'd be interested to understand
if customers really want to know
of what the posture is of the electrical grid
on any given day.
It takes another action, right?
So putting it in this program
doesn't mean the power's gonna show off.
It's gonna take someone driving into a car.
It's gonna take a tree limb coming into contact.
It's gonna take a piece of equipment failing,
a squirrel making the wrong leap at the wrong place,
a bird flying into the wrong.
That has to come with the settings.
In most days on most circuits, this program exists
and nothing happens.
It just offers protection silently behind the scenes.
I would speculate, but I'd love to do more research
that our community doesn't necessarily want,
they want the utility to do its job
in the background quietly.
And me sending an email to you every day
telling you about the state of your circuit
is probably more information than you want,
but I'm open to the possibility,
especially in a community where, you know,
the program is very limited.
I mean, I see my job is to improve the reliability
of that circuit so that your constituents,
my customers can stop wondering if it's gonna go out
because the pattern has gone away.
I mean, I think if the website
actually had some information people could just go to,
then you don't have to send out emails,
people can go if they need it.
I will have comments later, but those are my questions.
Okay, Mayor Pro Tem.
So my first question is, in the first set of slides
that Sarah showed us, it calls about hardening the equipment.
I don't know what that means.
Would you explain it, please?
Sure.
I apologize.
We often drift into our technical language.
So hardening is what we started out
doing in the early days of the wildfire program.
And that generally means a handful of things.
Bigger, stronger poles that are more wind resistant.
Wider cross arms so the lines can be spaced out more
and less chance they come in contact with each other
in major wind events.
We also use covered conductor.
So most electrical lines are bare wire.
That's industry standard.
But we are now using covered conductor.
So it's got a plastic sheathing over it
that basically offers protection so that those lines come
in contact with each other or an animal
were to contact two of those lines,
you don't have an electrical event on that.
So it basically just makes it bigger and stronger
and more resilient.
It still requires all the vegetation management,
all of the inspection, it's still open to the weather.
Our CEO had a moment of being on a hardening job
where we were removing a ton of trees,
very large trees up in Napa.
And she looked at it and said,
it's not that the trees are in the wrong place,
our line is in the wrong place.
And that is what launched her initiative
for 10,000 miles of undergrounding
and something that we have been hesitant to do
because of the cost.
In some of the fire rebuild communities,
we've been able to come in
and really reduce the cost of undergrounding
and maintenance goes down.
It's not a full proof protection, right?
Water tends to build up in these underground lines.
We have other challenges with them.
Safety issues as with the gas system
that is underground and contractors digging in
and those types of things.
But it is much more resilient, generally.
And so we have started aggressively
doing more undergrounding in the system.
And we plan to continue to do more undergrounding
in the system.
And in some instances, it will be very hard to underground
in a particular location, prohibitively expensive.
And so we will continue to also do overhead hardening.
And we will do a mix of that.
but historically, we started with a lot of overhead,
and now we've really shifted to doing much more
undergrounding and trying to just,
especially in wildfire prone areas,
just take that off the table.
And then all of these programs
that we're talking about tonight,
they go away if the whole circuit is underground.
To be respectful, I wanna be respectful
for the concerns of the community,
but how recent is this technology
that you're talking about?
Has it been well-tested over thousands of years?
Oh, hundreds of years, well, 20 years.
Or has it, or is it, you know,
you're working kind of frantically to catch up
with the reality of the world.
So these types of settings are things
that the utility industry has done for decades
in certain locations.
At this level of, this is one of the broadest applications
this level and over a geography of this size. But the technology of sort of
coordinating circuits to trip more quickly is something the engineers
already knew how to do and often did in in different circuits. An application
over this broad is is more unique for our business but it's more the
application of a lot of things that we already know how to do and then we have
been doing it for the last two years.
So we started with a program where the whole circuit would
just trip, and we would have to patrol the whole line.
And that was leading to some long outages.
We've now done the power engineering
so that the segments of the circuit where the problem is
are the ones that trip.
It's much better coordinated.
That hasn't been happening on the Clayton circuit.
And that's why we need this undergrounding project
to really help that come together.
But we've been refining this and our response to it
over the last two years.
Can you do a little comparison to what it was four years ago
and how long the outages were before the system was put
in place versus what it is now?
That's a very fair question, but I
don't have that data off the top of my head, just in terms of,
we have a number of indexes that we measure.
And I can pull that information around what's
the average amount of time that a customer spends out
of power in any given year.
We have internal targets that we set for that
to keep driving that number down.
Unfortunately, that average amount of time
that a customer takes out of power
since we started this program two years ago has gone up.
It had been on a historical trend down.
We keep getting more and more reliable as an industry.
And certainly, PG&E has.
this has provided a challenge both this and the PSPS events to, uh,
to driving that average time a customer spends. But, you know,
let me see what we can do to pull information for the community of Walnut
Creek to, to respond to that question. Okay. So, so in,
in, to, to be fair,
I went to the demonstrations that they had in, I get San Ronin and Danville
mixed up. Don't tell anybody I do that. But yes,
I think I had COVID because I was supposed to be there that day and I was on
able to host you all.
You came to the Wildfire Center at San Ramon.
Yes, I did.
And it was fascinating to see.
And it was also pretty technical,
so you really had to have your smart hat on.
But it looks to me, and I think I heard.
And you've not talked about how technical the weather is
and how much time they put in to figure out
whether it even comes to one of the days you choose.
But it looks like it is going to be the standard from now
on, these things that, sadly, this group of people
have to live with while you work out the kinks.
This is where we're moving, and I
am reminded by the recent events in other parts
of our country, and then just coming today
and seeing the smoke blowing in down from Oregon,
that this is the kind of practices
that are necessary in the utility business going forward.
And we do, we learned from some utilities in Australia
in the early days of our wildfire mitigation,
San Diego Gas and Electric down south
had been at the forefront of a lot of wildfire development.
We learned a lot from them in our industry.
It's pretty much open book with each other.
We don't compete with each other for business.
So we share best practices and utilities in Oregon,
Colorado, Idaho are starting to set up power shutoff programs, obviously we saw
the fires in Louisiana this year, I mean they're just starting to happen in very
unusual places. So these practices are going to be with us going forward. I
don't think the level of reliability that you're experiencing is an
acceptable trade-off with that and we have to get better and I can't just hold
out the promise of you know two-way charging from EVs. We have to get better,
that will come and that will help. We have to both support our customers with
things like the battery program that I talked about in ways that are very
non-traditional for a utility and providing those levels of community
support and that type of backup power, as well as, you know, for me it's the
relentless focus on what is going wrong on that circuit, why are we having these
outages, sometimes we patrol, you ask council member, you know, what caused them
specifically in you know in the seven that I looked at three of them couldn't
find anything electricity can be a little fickle that way so you don't
necessarily something happened it was temporary you know in most cases what
would normally happen is there's automated equipment that would wait a
second 10 seconds you see that flicker of lights in your home something passed
temporarily a tree branch a bird and the system will just turn the lights back on
automatically because it can test in and sense that nothing is wrong and let's
go back to regular operating we don't do that in this condition because we don't
know if there is a line down or branch on it and that test shoots power down
that line and potentially causes a down power line to send up a spark and cause
a fire so we need this mitigation the level we're not interested in operating
a utility system where the reliability amount of time customers are out is
is climbing, it needs to be shrinking.
That's the modern expectation.
We rely on electricity for even more
than we have historically.
We have to drive that down,
and so we're relentlessly focused
now that we're building this program
on where do we target investment and changes
in the circuits that are potentially being hit
the hardest by this program in particular.
Thank you.
Do you have any more questions?
So you had some remarks you wanted to make?
No.
No.
you. I appreciate the explanations. Everything you're saying sounds good, for the most part.
A lot of promise and optimism. I hope that is exactly what ends up happening because
obviously this is, it's extremely frustrating. I think that just as a layperson on this,
when I see, and I'm not exaggerating right now, an old dozen of those outages that people
across the streets lights were on they never went out and in fact when I talk
to our neighbor they've never had the lights go out in the last year so it
just happens I understand we're on the different circuit but when there's 4,500
homes on there and it can't be localized so that only 200 homes are impacted
that's a real problem and I know a lot of what I'm gonna say is going to sound
like I'm frustrated with you and I don't want it to be like that personally I
I mean, this is, I think, the community at large in terms of PG&E as having a monopoly
on this.
We don't have another power system to say, well, we're going to try this now.
I mean, it's PG&E.
Electricity is not merely a convenience anymore, not in our society.
And frankly, it is an embarrassment for the power to go out this consistently in the most
technologically sophisticated region, in the most technologically sophisticated state in
the country, in the world.
And it's happening here.
And it takes hours to get the power restored.
Sometimes days, again not exaggerating here, with no explanation as to exactly what happened.
So it's different than it just not being a convenience anymore.
People's lives are now depending upon reliable power, whether it's medical equipment for
seniors not being able to open the garage door.
My mother can't open, she's 87 years old, can't open the garage door if the power goes
out, which obviously in an emergency is extremely dangerous.
Self-service is lost.
Very few people have landlines anymore.
So one of the things growing up when the power was out, we could still make phone calls and
now we can't, since most people don't have the landlines anymore.
At-risk people have no way of contacting anybody during the outages.
The economy is hurt.
In the last outage that I saw, our local stores, mom and pop stores, out for 10 hours.
They had to throw away all of their refrigerated and frozen goods.
There's a large Safeway near where we live, Whole Foods.
They were down for hours as well.
I didn't talk to the general manager, but they told me they were going to have to get
rid of all of their frozen food.
There's three schools in this particular block, a high school, a middle school, and elementary
school, all without power for 10 hours in one instance, 12 in another, and all of their
cafeteria food that had to be refrigerated or frozen had to be thrown out.
This is costing thousands of dollars.
And then, of course, all of our own homes that we're throwing out our own products that
we then have to throw out, which aren't able to be reimbursed on.
So this is a major impact.
It's not just an inconvenience.
I've shoot the powers off. More people are working from home than ever before. And they're
depending upon being able to work remotely. And if the power goes out, well, that's it.
They've just lost all that productivity. So the economy is being impacted. As you mentioned,
more people are buying EVs. There's going to be a state mandate of us moving away from
gas-powered leaf blowers and gas-powered landscaping equipment to electric. There's all of those
people that won't be able to work in services without reliable power. More EVs mean we need
more charging. We are relying on our our homes to charge our vehicles or power
stations but if they're being impacted with a power outage they can't do it
there. So this is impacting everything in our lives now from danger and during
emergencies to our day-to-day lives. It's not just oh shoot the power's out
my I'm gonna have to reset the clocks. It's very different now than it was 20
years ago and I think PG&E really needs to understand that to its fullest. We're
depending upon you with our lives and right now you're letting us down when
it's not just that we want more real reliability we need it we really need it
I want to thank you for being here this evening I know that their company is
working on this appreciate that and I appreciate you listening to the
frustration because as my council colleague says this isn't personal but
get to carry the message back as high up as you can get it. I hear you loud and clear. I don't take
it personally. It is my responsibility though, so I do take it very seriously and I hear the feedback
loud and clear. If I could close on one thought for any constituents that are listening for our
customers. There are privacy laws that prevent us from necessarily giving you the information that
that we would like to update you with.
So please go into your settings in your PG&E account
and opt in to outage notifications, alerts.
Obviously the public maps are available to anyone.
I hear the feedback.
They could use more information on them
about what exactly is happening,
but we'd like to communicate with you directly,
but we need permission from you to do that,
and you can choose text, email, automated phone calls,
whatever you prefer, but we need your help to do that
just because of privacy loss.
so but again thank you for having us tonight and I hope not to be back
because we meet your expectations and we've improved the the reliability of
service but obviously happy to join Sarah for updates and things and and
provide you the information you're looking for so thank you for having us.
Thank you very much Mr. Johnson. Before we close, city manager did you have you're
the one that asked PG&E to come tonight did were there any other questions or
comments that you had. No questions just wanted to thank everybody from PG&E here
from being here tonight. I appreciate the update and obviously you received a lot
of feedback here this evening. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next
item on our agenda is our consent calendar. We have seven items on the
consent calendar this evening. Does any council member wish to remove an item
for discussion? Does any member of the public wish to speak to an item on our
consent calendar besides minutes and some warrants which means bills. We have
resolutions related to the Safe Routes to School program, the adoption of the
CDBG annual action plan, resolutions for the annual performance and evaluation
report related to our action plan, a professional services agreement with the
production company for Mystic Pizza and professional services agreement for
Vergesoft for the Automation of the City's Biennial Budget. Does any member
of the public wish to speak to us on one of those items? If you're on Zoom and
wish to speak to one of those items, please use the raise hand feature. We do
have one hand raised on Zoom. Jake Gosling. Mr. Gosling, which you can bring
Mr. Gosling in, which item do you wish to speak to? Then I'll ask you to wait and
then we'll take it up. 1801 Glenhaven Avenue Walnut Creek, California. I'm sorry, excuse me.
1801 Glenhaven Avenue Walnut Creek, California. Excuse me, why are you speaking about an address?
Thank you very much. Seeing no other public comment if I can entertain a motion on the
the consent calendar with the items that are I have I have them so noted I move
to approve items a through G with the amendments as designated on the dais for
a and C and D second we have an emotion and a second on consent calendar items to
a through G with the corrections presented at the dais a roll call vote
please. Mayor Pro Tem Haskio? Aye. Council member Wilk? Aye. Council member Darling? Aye.
Mayor Silva? Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. I think we need, before we go on to
public communications, I would like to take a five-minute break if that's all
right.
If everyone can please take their seats. So welcome back to the September 19th
2023 regular meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council. The next item on our
agenda is public communications. This portion of the meeting is reserved for
comment on items not on our agenda this evening. Under the Brown Act the Council
cannot act on items raised during public communications but we may respond
briefly to statements made or questions posed. We may request clarification or we
may refer an item to staff. Consistent with our council handbook we will allow
30 minutes at this point during our meeting for public communications. If
there are additional speakers that we are not able to hear during that first
30 minutes we will invite you to come at the end of our regular business and we
will reopen public communications. Each person who speaks this evening will be
limited to no more than two minutes of time. We're going to we have cards from
people here in the council chambers who have submitted them. We will call on
those individuals. We will also call on some people who have asked to be called
upon in the in the zoom and if you are here to make public comments on zoom
please raise your virtual hand so that we know that you wish to speak. I'm going
to call the first three individuals Pete Bennett, Chris Hunter and Diane Young.
Good evening Council, my name is Pete Bennett. You've heard me speak here about
50 times. I'm pretty frustrated with my situation. Every day, every couple of days
I get death threats. I just got one a few minutes ago. Peter, Sully, and Lou Dobbs
don't know you never heard of Pete Bennett. You delusional ill man. Stop
making up delusional stories. Walnut Creek PD should shoot you in the head
30 times and then stop you delusional and the n-word. I get these every day,
every other day. I've requested my police reports for 40 years. I haven't got any
copies. You know, I stood up in front of you over 10 almost 10 years ago and
talked about my friend that was my new girlfriend that got murdered with her
daughter. Her brother was driving the tractor that killed the welders in the
over by the high school.
The other brother worked for the district attorney
that was indicted, Mark Peterson.
It's very complicated.
Do you know that I'm actually a software developer
that worked for PG&E on the San Bruno explosion?
I have not been paid.
I gave my card to the president of the Bay Area,
what he is.
You know, it's gone on so long.
I've lost everything.
I own 10 cars, my sons, family, my nephews were murdered.
It's gone on too long and now I get death threats.
When is my life going to mean anything to anybody around here?
Because this doesn't appear to be the case.
My life is on the line with these death threats.
Thank you.
Next speaker please.
I'm Chris Hunter and I'm a resident of Walnut Creek for about 30 years and I've been here
many times to talk to you about Pickleball. At the last meeting, I realized you had very
little information about Pickleball to make such a huge change to Red Gear Park. I'm
providing that information. You did not have any info or discuss the successful sound study
that was done at the tennis courts. It is still the easiest, cheapest fix. To make the
neighbors and the Pickleball playing residents and taxpayers happy, please reconsider some
of these changes. We residents are now not happy. You've made no assessment about the
growth of Pickleball and how many courts will be necessary to accommodate future growth.
Why? Eight new courts anywhere will not be enough. You'll need to keep the Red Gear courts
as the residents that enjoy this sport want you to do. The letter I wrote to neighbors
after contacting Kevin, Safeen and Lifetime repeatedly to address the parking issues was
sent 9 2119 the city has responsibility for ignoring the problems that were they
were aware of and didn't do anything about until 2023 I believe the
misdirected Arts and Rec director has further cut the hours that still does
not address the managed play issues in the mornings we were told no further
cuts would be made and we feel now that we've been lied to you haven't fixed a
problem, you've emptied a park. What city makes that decision when it was a
recreation success for 12 years there? I'm speaking for hundreds of residents
that play pickleball there. The residents have lost a city amenity. Our
tax dollars have paid for. There has been a disregard of issues which the
city ignored for three years. Walnut Creek has now broken their promise and
stopped supporting that we pickleball players have relied on. The errors you
have cut hurts families working adults and teens that use afternoon hours and
you don't even have any data that supports that position thank you. A quick
question if you don't mind sure the data you've provided us this is a summary of
the sound that was the pickleball sound study that was done at the upper tennis
courts and I know the pros commission got it but you guys seem to have not
have seen any of it at that last meeting so I just thought I would make copies of
provided for you so you had it. So staff has this. Because it was very successful
the sound rapping sorry really works and it does negate the sound outside of the
courts. I've been on a lot of courts in Arizona that use it in neighborhoods
it works pretty well. Thank You Ms. Hunter. Thank you. Next speaker please.
Good evening Mayor Silva, members of the City Council and City staff. Did you lean
into that microphone a little bit.
Sure.
There we go.
Shall I do it again?
Like we're on Zoom?
Yep.
OK, good evening, Mayor Silva, members of the city council
and city staff.
My name is Diane Young, and I am the co-chair of Walnut Creek's
Community Service Day.
So I'm here with happy news.
I have no complaints except every year we build this project,
it takes us about eight months, and then we just
bite our fingernails down to the quick waiting for people
to sign up for projects.
It's the same pattern every year.
So we're here to say we've had really good response
to about a third of the projects,
pretty good response to the rest,
and some of them really need our help as a community
if they're going to survive.
So I wanna let you know of some of the opportunities
that still exist because we have plenty of places left
to help in our community.
From preschool to high school,
there are schools that could benefit
from your loving attention.
But if you don't wanna be stuck in one place,
You could volunteer to take down community service day
banners, which then live the rest of the year in my garage
or Cindy's garage.
You can sign up to do a neighborhood food
drive in your neighborhood.
Or if your neighborhood's taken, you
can do a different neighborhood nearby, perhaps,
or all the way across town if you want.
If you like to paint, the equestrian center
has a really long fence, and they need more volunteers.
And of course, we all know the city has lots of parking meters.
So we're still looking for volunteers
to help paint the meter poles.
My favorite project, we always get some crazy thing
that we've never had before.
And this year we have people signing up
to help set up Oktoberfest, and that's full.
But we also have a project in the afternoon
to help take down Oktoberfest, and that one
hasn't had such a good response.
So if you want to help on the other end after an Oktoberfest,
I don't know, put on your rubber boots
come out and help Community Service Day. Thank you. Can you remind us the date? It is, sorry,
October 14th and you can go to walnut-creek.org-service for more information and to sign up.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And just as a reminder, I said we would have 30 minutes
at this point in time which we will end this portion of public communications just a couple
of minutes before eight o'clock. I'm now going to take three speakers on virtual. Jane Emmanuel.
Good evening. Can you hear me? Speak loudly. Yes. Okay. This is Jane Emmanuel, 624 Shadow
Hawk Way, Wanna Creek. I wanted to tell you that things are always happening at the Bedford Gallery.
Sight Unseen, a very moving exhibit of photographers
who are blind closed on Sunday.
We had great press in the New York Times
and we had an hour program on Forum KQED
with our curator Emily Enders and two of the artists.
Assistive technology and important people
helping these artists allows them to concentrate
on the concept that resides in their mind's eye
resulting in provocative photos that are unforgettable.
Bits and Pieces opens September 30th,
a show about miniature art,
everything from exquisite porcelain tiny tea service
to a video diorama of small town life
with an unexpected lead character,
the artist's pet snail,
exploring the drama of everyday life.
Other works include antique compacts and miniature boxes
that are settings for tiny scenes that are mesmerizing.
We're glad to see that schools are coming back
to the Bedford now and we're expecting
well over 800 students for this show.
The final public art walking tours of the season
will be on October 21st and November 18th.
All tours meet on the plaza at the leisure at 10 a.m.
and they last about an hour, no reservations needed.
I wanna thank the council for being part of Moveable Feast
during the arts around August.
Attendees specifically mentioned how much they enjoyed
having council members along for the evening.
So thank you for your time this evening
and thank you always for your continuing support
of the arts.
Thank you very much.
And we look forward to the opening of the new show.
Next, virtually John Benison.
Yes, hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you, thank you.
All right, I didn't know if I can get video in out here.
I'm trying to get FaceTime camera.
All right, now you can see me and hear me.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
Mayor Silver, thanks so much for the invitation
to come in and make a quick announcement here
about Mountain Shadow Film Society's upcoming program.
Our September program is our annual short film competition.
This is our ninth annual short film competition.
anyone who's not familiar with Mountain Shadow Film Society.
We have a nonprofit film society here in Walnut Creek
for the last 10 years.
We're in our 10th season.
We bring international independent filmmaking
to Walnut Creek, otherwise unavailable
in commercial theaters in our area.
We usually show monthly films at the Walnut Creek Library,
but every September we have an annual short film competition
and we use the Los Lomas High School Theater for that
over one weekend.
And so this Saturday, September 23rd,
we'll have two shows, identical shows,
at three o'clock and 7.30.
We will be showing nine short films.
We had submissions, we had 466 submissions this year.
We had a 22-member volunteer jury
who screened all those submissions
and selected nine finalists,
nine finalists from around the country.
They will come from New York, Philadelphia,
Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles,
and a few bare area finalists as well.
They will present their films in person.
It'll be nine films,
combination of documentary live action
and animated genres that will be presented
in this two hour show with the filmmakers there
to do Q&A after the screening.
And so we invite members of the community
to come out and see this wonderful event.
If you're not familiar with mountainshadow.org,
you can go to our website mountainshadow.org
And you can purchase tickets in advance
for at the show, $13 admission tickets.
Any other questions you can just go on the website
and contact us.
So thanks for the opportunity to let you know
about this annual short film competition we have on Saturday.
So I'm just curious, how short is short?
Everyone talks about that.
We have a criteria, it has to be at least 30 seconds
in no more than 25 minutes,
so that we can bring a variety show in a two-hour show.
So some documentaries will go 15 minutes, 20 minutes long.
Some animated shorts will go three or four minutes long.
So it's a whole variety show that we'll be offering you.
My own philosophy is a short film
should be no longer than necessary to tell the story.
That goes without any film,
but that's our way to find a short film.
Thank you very much.
Good luck this weekend.
Thank you.
Andrea Baldacci, please.
Good evening, Council.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm Andrea Baldacci,
and I'm currently the president
of the Wollin Creek Historical Society.
Shadelands Ranch Museum is located at 2660 Ignatia Valley Road
in the beautiful turn-of-the-century Penament Home
near Shadelands Ranch Business Park.
The home houses
the Wollin Creek Historical Society's artifact collection,
and it's open for tours Wednesdays and Sundays
from one to four.
I have two items that I would like to share
with our Walnut Creek community tonight.
First, we are kicking off our 2023 fall calendar
with our third annual Shadelands October Fest.
That's Saturday, September 30th from 5 p.m. till 9 p.m.
Our beautiful oak set of grotto
provides a perfect ambiance
for a true October Fest experience.
The $60 ticket price includes
a seat in our Shadelands Ranch beer garden,
an authentic German bratwurst dinner,
live music by the Zickety Zach, Poco and Pop Band,
dancing and games, costumes and sign holding contests,
and tickets to enjoy pretzels, desserts, and beer
in our pop-up Bavarian village.
Invite your friends and purchase an entire table
for eight for only $450.
Tickets are available directly through Eventbrite
and via our link on our Historical Society website
at www.wolin Creekhistory.org.
Secondly, we're in search of docents
for our third grade programs.
We have third grade downtown history tours
and third grade living history days at Shadelands Ranch.
over 600 third graders from the Walnut Creek community
and surrounding community are invited each year
to participate in these programs
to help embellish their classroom's
local history curriculum.
Our Shadelands Living History Day program
is an all-day immersive experience
where the students enjoy museum tours,
history lessons, and a day of outdoor fun
experiencing what a day in the life
of an eight-year-old would look like at the Penniman Ranch.
Third graders also enjoy learning
about our downtown architecture and history
on our third-grade history walks.
I've been a docent since 2007.
I worked with Brad Rovin Pera on the original script,
which is now our tour booklet.
We would like to thank the Winnipeg Civic Pride Foundation
for underwriting the printing of these booklets.
And we encourage more people to come on our daytime tours.
I'm sorry, I'm out of time,
but I would like to say that it's super fun
and I've been a Dozen forever.
And if you're interested and you have time to help us out,
give us a call at our office, our actual museum office.
So thank you so much and have a great evening.
Thank you very much. We'll come back to those of us in the room.
I have a card from Bob Linshied, Barbara Guinness,
and Jack Wexel.
Evening, Mayor, members of the council, um,
Bob Linshied representing the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce. Um,
I mentioned several weeks ago that we just kicked off our
38th class of leadership Contra Costa.
And I have to tell you, it's gratifying to see 33 strangers
coming together to talk about our county and the many assets
that we have as a community.
These 33 people from diverse backgrounds
from all over the county were treated to a team building
day at Borges Ranch.
It was a little bit warm for September.
that was the only complaint I had other than we probably didn't have enough water.
We have numerous people in the audience tonight that have been through the class, some of
them I'm looking at right now.
And I have to tell you, we really, really appreciate the city's support for this effort.
Next month we meet in Martinez on the government politics and elections day and we'll tour
the election facilities via the courtesy of Kristin Conley, the clerk recorder, and we'll
hear from August community leaders like Dan Buckshi and Monica Nino and Ken Carlson, to
name a few. But what I'm really excited about, not that that's demeaning to the people I've
already mentioned, is a presentation by EMC, your own survey research organization to talk
about polling and the significance of that in state and regional and federal elections.
So it's going to be quite an interesting day. So I just thought I'd share an update with
you on that. Thanks very much.
thank you very much mr. lynn shied next speaker please hello my name oh okay sure my name
is Barbara Guinness have been a resident of Walnut Creek since 1996 I have some did you
know tonight did you know the city of Walnut Creek plans to build a high-speed mountain
bike flow trail with features such as a rhythm section with rollers and table jumps a natural
wall ride, a natural 180 degree bowl, a starting ladder bridge, a bridge over a seasonal waterway,
rustic racks and benches for mountain bikes to sit and socialize. Did you know the city of
Walnut Creek currently is in the CEQA California Environmental Quality Act review period
for this high speed mountain bike flow trail? Did you know the city's environmental documents states
is that this southwest lime ridge location is less sensitive.
The Mount Diablo fairy lantern, the Mount Diablo sunflower,
the halls bush mallow are all three special status plants
that are right in the Timberleaf Trail area.
And the California Native Plant Society recognizes that.
Did you know the Mount Diablo horned lizard also
resides right in this area?
I've seen it quite a few times off Paraiso Trail.
Did you know the biologists this spring found,
and this is a biologist hired by the city,
found red-legged frog tadpoles
in a pond around Timberleaf Trail?
Did you know the red-legged frog is threatened
by the federal government?
The Alameda Whipsnake lives there.
Also, three have been spotted this year.
It's endangered for California and endangered for the US.
So now that you know I have a lot of things in my node,
if you read my note.
But now you know somewhat about what the Southwest corner
of Lime Ridge open space preserve has in its area.
So it should be apparent even to mountain bike
flow trail proponents that the Southwest Lime Ridge
is not less sensitive and thus it is inappropriate
to build a high speed mountain bike flow trail
in this area.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Next speaker, please.
Hi, my name is Jack Weigsel.
I actually also live in the Marantu Paraiso community.
I'm going to speak about the same thing, the flow trail.
And I've got to tell you, I came in here pretty angry tonight.
That was kind of dissipated, oddly enough,
when I watched a previous presenter handle with such grace
a technical glitch.
So I've calmed down a bit, and I thank her for that.
But that doesn't mean I don't want to make my point.
And the point is you're not listening to any of us.
I'm not going to go into all the different reasons why it's bad of the flow trail.
And by the way, I want to make a point before I go into it.
We're not talking about mountain biking.
We're happy to have mountain bikers.
We want them to enjoy Lime Ridge.
We're talking about a flow trail, a totally unnecessary, frivolous destruction
of a hill right behind our neighborhood that's going to totally destroy parking,
safety, the environment, many other things, right?
you're not listening to anything because you have a committee that is pushing
through a pretty sham process and expects to do all of this without any
oversight by City Council. Now I was woken up to this when a mountain biker
was standing outside my home taking pictures of my house because I had a
sign that says I don't want the mountain bike that the flow trail up in the hill.
That's the kind of thing I don't want to see in the community and I'm gonna say
I've sent you guys emails you don't respond you don't listen and I listened
as much as I share concerns over power outages, you guys pulled in PG&A and I
listened to a five-minute rant about something that nobody's gonna be able to
fix and everybody's working on and you won't give us any time to meet with you
to talk about what the objections are. I think that's irresponsible and I think
it has to end. What I would like is for you to put a hold on the flow trail and
convener discussion about the community's gonna be impacted because we
were kept out of the whole discussion until the last minute. That's not what
City Council oversight is supposed to be. Thank you very much. Three more speakers
from here in the council chambers, Carolina and Jerry Katz, Luis, Maura and
Carmen Lazo. Hi, my name is Carolina Katz and this is my husband Jerry. We've been
residents of Walnut Creek for 30 years. On August 7th we attended a pros meeting
where taxpayers of Walnut Creek were effectively told that our voices don't matter.
And what was shocking to us was that we were trying to raise our voices about situations
that would impact our neighborhood.
So for the better part of three years, the public works manager has been powering forward
to create a mountain bike flow trail, a high speed roller coaster, minimal brake trail
that would traverse through Lime Ridge.
At the August Prose meeting,
we learned that construction of this flow trail
is scheduled to begin in May 2024.
We learned that it would be policed by volunteers,
built by volunteers, and perhaps most disturbing,
the public works manager made it clear
that he had received the green light
from the Prose Commission to go forward,
making unilateral decisions without community input.
Throughout this process, community input
has been ignored and at the August pros meeting,
we were silenced.
It is this lack of community relations,
this lack of transparency that is simply unacceptable.
With only one other flow trail in Santa Cruz Mountains,
we are inviting the entire Bay Area cycling community
into our neighborhood, which would impact traffic,
parking safety, and by the way,
according to the PG&E presentation,
a trail that would traverse a high risk fire area.
The abutting neighborhood, especially those on timber leaf, are especially outraged as
the trailhead at the end of their court has already been redesignated.
And so our request today is that you take into consideration our collective voices.
No one should make unilateral decisions that will forever impact our open space and our
neighborhoods.
I hope we can learn from the red gear pickleball fiasco and take all sides into consideration.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Carmen Lazo?
Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Carmen Lazo.
I am in the 18 years of the carpenter.
I came tonight speaking about the Labor Standards in our areas.
I'm sorry, maybe my language. I'll try to explain more, okay?
Talking about the Labor Standards is being created for important factors.
Number one is the pregnancy programs.
The meaning is, women like me, who make a career into this
treat, you know, and giving more opportunities for more
persons coming doing the same thing in our lives.
Number two is the health care.
What is mean is very important for us.
Why?
In my case, my husband is disabled.
He had Julian Barre syndrome.
He depends for the breathing machines.
He's 24-7 in the bed.
With my job, with my career, I can have the opportunity
to give everything whatever he needed.
Medication, equipment, everything, everything he needed
with my insurance and my job.
So I don't need a penny for any program for the state.
So it's my work.
Number three is the local jobs.
That means be close to home.
I don't need to drive it so far away.
I need to enjoy more time with my kids.
I be close to my husband.
I'll be creating more opportunity for my community,
be in town.
Number four is legally wage,
has means have good salaries, better salary for us.
So I can pay all my expenses.
So I can take care of my kids, I can take care of my family,
I can help provide it for my kids future,
and they don't need a penny for anyone.
In my case, I only work working,
so I need to support my family.
I hope so you consider it about all these steps
I'm speaking with you.
God bless you and you have good evening.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
We have two minutes still available in our 30 minutes.
The last speaker at this point
will be Kathy Hemingway virtually.
Good evening council, excuse me, good evening Mayor Silva
and city council members Kathy Hemingway,
executive director with Walnut Creek downtown
and I wanted to share a second Oktoberfest opportunity.
We're very fortunate in Walnut Creek
to be able to have two amazing events in October,
celebrating the Fall Festival Fiesta
that occurs in Germany, but now will be in Walnut Creek.
Our Oktoberfest produced by Walnut Creek Downtown
and presenting sponsor of Visit Walnut Creek
will take place on October 13th and 14th.
This free family event will take place at Civic Park East
from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday night
and then from noon to 8 p.m. on Saturday.
And the event will include live music, silent disco,
beer gardens, kids' kinder plot zone,
bark lounge and many more activities.
Our early bird ticket sales
ends tomorrow night at midnight.
So you can save up to $25 for tickets
that can be used during the both days.
And then this week is also the last week
for sponsors to participate.
So if there's any sponsors who are interested
in being able to showcase their businesses
to five to 6,000 guests, then we welcome their support.
And volunteers are also needed to make this event
a great success for our community.
So for more details and to register as a volunteer,
you can visit our website at walnutcreekdowntown.com.
Thank you so much and have a great evening.
Thank you so much.
We have now concluded 30 minutes of public communications.
At this point, we are closing this period.
If those of you who are with us here in the council chambers
wish to speak to us in a subsequent section
of public communications,
we will reopen it at the end of the meeting
after our consideration item.
Which takes us to item four on our agenda,
which is council member and staff announcements,
reports on activities or requests.
City attorney, do we have any closed session announcements?
Madam Mayor, we have no closed session announcements
this evening.
Would the city manager give us an update
on what he's been working on?
I've been working on a lot,
but I do not have an update this evening.
All right, Council Member Darling, anything to report?
Not a whole lot going on the last couple of weeks.
I did get out with the cleanup crew,
helped clean up the red gear off-ramp.
They have another opportunity this Sunday
at 8.30 at Quail Court.
That strangely satisfying opportunity to clean things up.
I did my farmer's market duty with a smile.
We had a couple really great openings.
to what about the new restaurant that was that's out at how do you I'm saying
Doba who Doba and the mayor and mayor pro tem were joined me out there to help
celebrate that new business the new mellows Italian table is opening and
that was excellent food and I love that they ordered all of their lighting
fixtures from Italy so it was quite a nice little place and that's pretty much
it oh and we also all let you cover the celebration of habitat for humanity yes
right councilmember Wilk thank you yes I was at the mellows opening as well
along with councilmember darling and mayor pro tem haskew and I heard that
Mayor Silva made an appearance afterwards as well, so we...
After another event.
So great to see another terrific restaurant in town.
Sitting on the board of directors for the county connection as Walnut Creek's representative,
we are going to be voting on this next week a discount on youth clip affairs, that the
discount will be increased to 50% from where it has been with the principal
coming to a vote at this meeting on next Thursday. In addition we'll be making
voting on making all express fares the same as local route fares. So cheaper to
ride the bus especially with gas prices going up. That is the that is the message
on this. I believe all of us are heading up to Sacramento this week for Cal
cities and I'll may or will you be talking about Cal Cities in your
comments? Yes. Okay so I'll let you talk about the general aspect of Cal City so
I'm really glad that we're going up there we're gonna have almost 500 cities
that are attending and I will be participating in one of the sessions on
Thursday called Stop Hate, how local elected officials can combat rising hate
crimes and hate speech. Unfortunately we've seen that we've been targeted in
the past, as well as other of our fellow cities, County Board of Supervisors, and
even school districts with people calling in remotely with hate speech. And
of course we've seen hate crimes throughout the Bay Area as well. So it's
it's very timely. Unfortunately it's very topical. There will be a moderator, Mayor
Pro Tem Tessa Rudnick from El Cerrito, and the panelists will be myself, the
Mayor of Fremont, Lily May, the council member from Clayton, Holly Tillman, and
council member from Richmond, Cesar Zapata. So well represented in the East
Bay, I hope all of my fellow colleagues join on that one, and anybody that's
listening this that's an elected official somewhere going up to
Sacramento, I hope you come too. Thanks. Thank you very much. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank
Thank you. I started out by watching a webinar that League of Cities put in on, and it was
about the DEI program, and it was about three successful programs that are in place. One
was the Equity Inclusion Officer for Redwood City. Another presenter was the deputy city
manager from Sunnyvale, and somehow they led somebody from Southern California, but he
was a city manager.
And it was really impressively done.
And I have a copy of it if anybody of the staff
wants to see it.
I went to a CCTA planning committee,
and we voted to proceed with a countywide means-based fair
program.
That has to do with accessible transportation, which is also
something I'm actively involved in.
Tridelta is going to be running the program, at least for the portion that we're testing.
And it looks like everybody's getting really excited that things are finally happening
in the accessible transportation realm.
We approved a release of a draft, excuse me, congestion management program.
So welcome, staff, you've got new reading to do.
We've approved a release of an RFP for consultants for countywide transportation EIRs, a resolution
to improve the East Bay Regional Park Wildcat Creek Trail, and an award for development
of broadband strategic plan which costs not a considerable amount of money.
to help with linking the traffic information
from the various places.
The side effect is that areas that don't have broadband
are going to have access to it from now on.
The Contra Costa mayor's conference was held
and we saw a commercial by a company working with Clayton
regarding several solar projects.
It did remind us that we should pay attention
our embracing of solar which we have done in plenty of places. Then we I
reviewed the Downtown Alliance for the success of our Arts in August program.
There were some things that were very successful. There were some things that
weren't so and so we're going to reevaluate that program. I attended
Walnut Creek downtown and we reviewed whether to add a 501c3 component
to how they operate.
Mostly, there was a significant discussion
about how people just aren't volunteering like they used to.
That things that were very important to Walnut Creek,
such as the Walnut Festival parade and the carnival,
can't happen this year because there just
weren't sufficient people stepping forward to do it.
And I don't think anybody who is putting
on a performance, an event, that requires sufficient volunteers
up to and including the ushers for the Lesher Theater.
And here's a little trick.
If you like the theater, if you volunteer as an usher,
you get free entree, and you can stay and watch the show.
CCTA proper approved allocating funds
to Moraga for a multimodal project.
That kind of picked them out and gave them
a lot of money, but we got an agreement
that they would give us back some of their Measure J money.
We appointed Newell Arnrich to the Iron Horse Trail
for corridor management and Supervisor Burgas
to represent us on the San Joaquin Joint Powers Authority.
Transpac had an easy meeting.
We're trying to have a meeting with SWOT, another RTPC,
but we're not having a lot of success.
They meet in the afternoon,
we meet in the mornings, et cetera, and so forth.
So we decided to postpone that project.
CalCog, which I am assigned through,
CCTA had an update on state-level legislation,
mostly applicable to the RTP's A,
which is the regional level and that's CCTA.
You'll talk about Kaiser's birthday party, Cindy?
Okay, we're done.
Thank you very much to all of you
for everything you do and reporting it to us
so that we keep up to date with the work you're doing
at the regional and state level.
Council Member Francois and I serve as the liaisons
or the representatives on the Recycle Smart Board,
which is garbage, our blue bins and our green bins.
And upcoming, we are very intently beginning the work
on the new franchise agreements
for the collection, transfer, disposal,
and processing of solid waste, recyclables, and organics.
We're looking at a new approach
to the franchise process this year
in which we basically sole source some of it.
We competitively source other parts of it.
And in order to ensure that we have the most robust,
competitive process for collection,
we are actually doing it in reverse,
and we're looking to lock up who's going to handle
disposal, transfer, and processing of recyclables
and organics first, and then go to the collection step,
because then everybody knows where they're delivering it,
et cetera.
More to follow, it's a many-month process.
As council member Wilk mentioned many of us will be attending the annual conference for the League of California cities this week
it starts tomorrow and I would like to mention for the public that
Calcities was very successful last week working with the legislature on moving two pieces of
Legislation across the finish line and each of these will basically be going to the ballot for state constitutional amendments
The first is called ACA-1, and this would, if approved by statewide voters,
would lower the threshold for cities, counties, and special districts for funding,
for infrastructure, for asking voters to approve funding for infrastructure
and affordable housing.
The school districts were given this opportunity 20 years ago,
and it's been very successful around the state.
And so this would, if approved by statewide voters,
would reduce the threshold to 55 percent,
still a super majority or greater than simple majority.
The other measure that is moving toward
the November 2024 ballot is called ACA 13,
it will have a different number when it goes on to the ballot.
This is basically a measure that is about equity and democracy.
Today, if you want to increase the voter threshold at
the state level for any issue, whether it's a revenue issue or a proposal about changing
immigration practices or a proposal about reproductive rights, you can basically put
a measure before the state level voters that says, would a simple majority of vote approve
the threshold to change to 60 percent or 65 percent?
What this state level measure would do is basically say if you want to increase the
threshold of voting to greater than 50% plus one, you need to achieve that voter threshold
when you put it to the ballot box.
So those two measures are moving toward the ballot.
Last week we celebrated with Kaiser and two events.
Kaiser and Habitat for Humanity have been working together on the 42 units of affordable
ownership housing that is up near the Pleasant Hill Bart station Kaiser
celebrated what they're doing at that project because they're very supportive
affordable housing it's very important for their employee base not many of
their employees can afford to live and work in Walnut Creek they had a hundred
and eighty nine volunteers from Kaiser Diablo service area that contributed
nearly 1500 hours of work sawing and painting and hammering and helping working side by side with
the future owners of those units in 10 build days and we celebrated that on Thursday and then
Kaiser turned 70 years old on Friday September 15th. They opened their doors in Walnut Creek with
74 beds and 20 bassinets, that's my favorite part, in September 15th 1953.
In the location where they are now, you can see in the photos the big oak tree that is in the
center of their courtyard, so we celebrated their 70th birthday last Friday. I am working with the
homeless, the Walnut Creek Homeless Task Force and other members of the community and advocates
addressing homelessness on a housing forum or a homeless forum that will be
held on Monday November 13th so please mark your calendars it will be live here
in the council chambers as well as being televised and virtual and the focus this
year of the forum will be actually myths and realities of affordable housing and
how it impacts homelessness and it should be a very good event because if
we can dispel some of the common myths
about affordable housing,
then maybe we can get more behind it as a community.
And I'll finally mention that next week,
on the 28th, 16 of our local eighth graders
will be traveling to Noceto and Sheafoke,
our two sister cities.
Noceto is our Italian sister city,
and Sheafoke is our Hungarian sister city,
and they will be spending a little over a week
going to school in those communities
and learning all about the culture in an exchange program.
And then their counterparts will be visiting in Walnut Creek
in the spring.
And as it turns out, the mayor of Nochedo,
who has been mayor a long time, his son
is now active actively in the program.
And his son will be visiting.
We're going to have to take really good care.
His son will be visiting from Nochedo here in the spring.
So bon voyage to our students.
And we look forward to hearing about their trip when they get back with that.
We will bring up item five, the item for consideration,
the city council priorities update and the consideration of meta measure,
oh, aquatics and community center center project assumptions and principles.
Assistant city manager. Welcome.
Thank you, mayor. Deputy city manager. I promoted you.
Why thank you. And before the presentation, I appreciate it.
Good evening mayor council members members of the public and staff at this point the item before you is
the City Council priorities we were
before you in June to talk about
the work plans for each of your five priorities and this is the first update on the work that we've done in the last quarter and
The work that we're going to be doing in the next quarter and then the work on the horizon as well
So the you have two recommendations this evening to receive the report and then also to accept the measure of aquatics and community center
project assumptions and principles
So by way of background back in February 2023 you all set new priorities for the next two calendar years
And they are written here for my presentation to you this evening
I'm going to go through each one of these priorities and talk about again the work that's been completed and then the work that's on the
horizon and then I'll pause and we'll take questions on each priority and
although as usual I'm the sole presenter this evening but we do have a team of
staff here to answer questions. So your first priority is diversity equity
inclusion and this is focused on continuing to build a diverse and
inclusive environment in our organization and also in our community.
As part of the budget the fiscal year 24-25 budget you all added a position that
would be DEI focused.
We have filled that position, and this position
will be responsible for researching, developing,
and implementing DEI initiatives within the organization.
We are continuing the ongoing training for all city staff.
Our human resources department is partnering
with a outside consultant that is providing the trainings.
And we're doing these multiple times
a year so we can capture all the new staff that we've hired.
We have been reviewing the work that we've
been doing that we did four years ago on how are we going to get more people
engaged and interested on serving on our commissions and committees. So we're
looking at our recruitment process and how we can broaden that pool to include
a diverse set of candidates. So we're working on this by looking at our city
policies, how we do outreach, and also what some other cities are doing. And
we're hoping to conclude that with some recommendations by March 2024. We're also
also working on integrating communications, DEI, into all of our city communications,
and we're going to start with an audit of our existing website and how we can make the
information there more accessible and user-friendly. And so we're going to be looking at completing
that audit in June of 2024. When it comes to cultural events, we heard
earlier this evening how much the Lesher Center is doing and how many interesting and different
programs they're bringing to the city. One great success was the week-long
celebration of Latin American art and culture that was so successful we're
gonna bring it back next year and we are also going to continue to offer our
city facilities for cultural events throughout the city. Our rising tide
program is a group of employees that is focused on building a welcoming and
and belonging environment in our workplace.
And they've been really busy.
Most recently, they launched a chosen name policy, which
allows employees to be recognized
by their chosen name when it differs from either their legal
name or their birth name.
They also, actually in light of recent derogatory comments
against the Jewish community occurring
at public comment and meetings, our rising tide group
used the Did You Know employee newsletter to help educate
and about the Jewish community in the Bay Area,
about protected speech and unprotected speech,
and the city's zero tolerance for discrimination
and harassment, as well as provided a safe place
for open discussion about the harmful attacks.
Sorry.
With that policy and with the chosen name policy
and this other work that's been happening
with the Did You Know newsletter.
Rising Tint is also looking forward
to expanding other initiatives, including
public noticing, a review of how we do public noticing
and how to better get to renters in our community
about public noticing that we are required to put out,
and also language translation services
throughout the organization.
Lastly, we partner with our Walnut Creek and Ignacio
Valley libraries to understand their DEI efforts
and help publicize their diverse collection
of books and programs.
Do you wanna take questions
if we have any each section at a time?
Sure, yeah, let's do it that way.
I have a couple of questions but I'll do it.
Anybody?
Council Member Wilk.
Thank you, Carla.
Quick question and I love everything you said
regarding everything.
You mentioned about the expanding cultural opportunities.
Is a cultural festival part of that?
Is that something that's going to be planned
sometime in the next six, eight months?
I know that we'd had that at Rossville previously
and some members of our DEI task force
are really interested in having that
be something that was at Civic Park
or a little more public.
Wanna take that?
Go ahead.
We're looking at numerous cultural events.
The initial focus is on many of the programs
that are provided by our Arts and Recreation community,
or department rather that are very community focused.
So that's the initial push and focus at this time.
I can't speak to that particular program in detail
at the moment, but yeah,
I expect to see much more in the future.
Okay, great, thanks.
Council Member.
Thank you, and great work.
I know that we just hired our DEI manager position,
but we're also losing our staffer who was running,
who was chairing Rising Tide.
How are we going to transition that?
That is in the works and is a very timely question.
To clarify, we have about 15 spots on the rising tide team.
So in the very short term,
a few folks are picking up the administrative duties.
Everybody has a role.
The individual you're speaking about,
Collette was really more that kind of helped
handle the administrative side of things,
keep things moving.
So we're distributing that for the time being
and looking for a member of that team
to step up and fill that role.
Okay, and then the new DEI hire,
are they going to be continuing to flesh out this work plan?
I know there was a lot of things like the, you know,
Diversity Festival that Kevin mentioned
that we've always been thinking,
oh, these are gonna be great things
when somebody's here to actually do the work.
Is that the thought?
Yeah, I think once they get up to speed
on kind of everything that's going on,
because we do have a lot of things going on with,
as you heard.
So they're gonna be partnering with Rising Tide,
they're gonna be looking at our city policies,
and also assisting with training as well.
So they've got a lot on their plate,
and so with all of that, and looking ahead to
what does a diversity program look like in the city
and helping build that out.
Great, thank you.
I think it's really good that we're fortunate
that we have the Lesher Center
and the Center for Community Arts
that can basically lean into this issue
Most cities don't have those opportunities.
A couple of questions.
So the training for city council commissions
and city staff, I understand we will do the training
for new staff, but how frequently will we be refreshing
and going back to school, so to speak,
for those of us who are council commissioners
or even city employees?
Is there a plan on that?
That plan's in the works actually.
We are in the midst of reviewing proposals
from consultants to thoroughly develop the program.
We used an initial consultant to do some training initially
in which your council is aware
that the council commissioner's all staff participated in.
We're looking to build upon that
and then exactly to your point.
So as new employees come in,
how do they catch up on the prior training?
And then what's the schedule going forward?
I would say, you know, generally speaking,
we're probably looking at something in the neighborhood
every year and a half, give or take,
there would be some type of new material
for everybody to take.
So give us time to learn it, practice it,
take some new classes and implement that as well.
And as I mentioned, in the meantime,
as we have new folks come on board,
have them take the prior training
in addition to the upcoming training.
Thank you for the clarification.
Thank you, Carla, next topic.
All right, moving right along to economic development
and job creation, there are four components
to this priority, so I'm gonna go through all four,
and then we'll pause for questions.
So the Economic Development Action Plan
is a two-year plan with strategies
to promote economic diversification,
adapt to changes in office use,
and then also capitalize on the city's economic strengths.
You all were presented with this plan on May 16th.
From there, the team that's heading up the plan
has started discussing with our partners
about how they fit into the plan
and what responsibilities they have with the plan,
and so with that, that feedback from our partners
we're gonna be building a work plan
on how to accomplish those strategies
and who's responsible for each one,
and that work plan will be coming to you
through this process, through our council priorities process,
to update you on the progress made.
We are working on developing a definition
for a jobs housing balance,
because we have a strong job center in Walnut Creek
and we have a strong housing sector in Walnut Creek,
but we wanna make sure our residents can live
and work here.
So as we develop this definition,
we're looking at a number of data inputs
to help inform that definition,
including all of the work that we've done
on our housing elements.
So we know our current inventory
and also what our projected inventory is.
We're also studying kind of the potential loss
of commercial land, the evolving office trends,
and also looking at what other cities are doing
with their jobs housing ratios.
So as we develop this definition,
we're gonna bring it to you for feedback fairly soon.
Permit streamlining focuses on creating an easier
and more efficient customer experience,
really with city staff acting as proactive guides
for customers through our various permitting processes
and also offering both online and in-person
permitting opportunities for folks
who are trying to get a permit.
This area has a lot of different work going on, so forgive me as we go through lots of
different topics here.
In April, our community development department launched a major development project map on
our city's website, which really shows larger scale projects and projects of high interest
that folks can go look at, understand what the description is, where the status of that
is and obviously because it's on a map, where it is, maybe in proximity to them.
Also we launched the ability to get your solar permits online as of August 2023.
And we're working on deploying electronic plan review, and that should be completed
by the end of December of this year.
And a big effort that's happening is with our planning, building, engineering and economic
development divisions and departments on a team building initiative and really why we're
doing this is to really clarify and identify roles and responsibilities throughout our
different processes that we have and really the success of this team building initiative
is we'll improve the understanding and ownership and cohesion on the team and then through
that improve our customer service and experience that we have for our customers that are coming
to Access Services.
Another major area of work is enhancing and clarifying our design review process for new
developments.
We're working on objective design standards and refining our design review process.
The goal of this is streamlining and enhancing, sorry, where you all saw the, you all gave
feedback on the design review process in July.
And we're working on these two things simultaneously.
So you gave feedback on the review process in July.
We're doing outreach on the design standards also through this summer, and we'll be back
to the planning commission with the objective design standards in the fall.
And then both of these topics are going to come to you in January for approval.
With that, I will pause there.
Questions on economic development and job creation.
Mayor Pro Tem.
Yeah, a while back, before COVID, we spent a lot of time talking about and developing
a economic development plan.
Is any of that still of any value to us?
Thank you for the question Councilmember Terry Kilgore, Assistant City Manager and Economic
Development Director.
As City Manager Buckshi mentioned, we've had a loss of a key member of our economic development
team and so we are actually still building the plan.
We thought we were pretty close to done, but we're going to be going back and re-looking
at the dates with the kind of reduced staff capacity, but at the same time we are still
awaiting some final input from our partners.
if you recall from the plan,
we had left some placeholders for DRAA,
Walnut Creek downtown and the chamber
to comment on their initiatives
that would be related to our actions in the plan
and perhaps other things they were undertaking.
So we're in the final stages of getting that feedback.
Our hope is to have that finalized by the end of October.
We have some follow-up meetings with them on the books
and then we'll be ready to publish that to you
as soon as we get that sort of re-scoped and re-scaled
given our staffing change.
Okay, we need to be agile in this because nobody knows
really what the workforce and the work needs
are going to be for the next 10 years.
How are we putting our arms around
figuring out how to anticipate change?
It's a great question.
We are actively monitoring regional trends.
We're staying in touch with our brokerage community,
our investment community.
We're sitting on panels.
We're attending panels to try and keep our fingers
on the pulse of the latest and greatest.
One example is work from home.
We've gone all the way from everyone declaring
the death of office to now starting
to see some major employers calling people actively back
into work.
And sort of the consensus, and this
is subject to change at any moment,
is that it's still settling as a trend.
And so right now is a little early to be calling it,
But we will keep our finger on that and figure out,
as it continues to emerge and evolve,
how does that impact, as Carla mentioned in her notes,
how does that set us up for success in the long term,
and how do we make sure that we really are keeping an eye
on that jobs housing balance,
so that we're not exporting jobs,
we're keeping them local so that our folks
don't have to travel as far
and help us meet our sustainability goals.
So we've already patted ourself on the back,
very, very handily over our theater
and all the things we're doing to embrace diversity.
How are we incorporating those other things
that we're doing that make Walnut Creek community
such a special place?
Is that part of our message or what?
Spread answer.
Yes, part of our objective here is to brag on our community
and why you would want to locate here.
We had a great meeting with DRAA as an example,
talking about all the different ways
that we could perhaps link up our business community
with our artistic performances and all the activity happening
at the Lesher Center in a way that makes it easier
for people to plug in.
When they find an event they like,
how do you come and make a whole day of it
or a whole experience of it?
And then on the flip side,
how do we make sure that we're marketing,
that there's more going on in the downtown
and in our community,
even if when you aren't coming in for a performance,
come on back anyways and go shopping,
go hang out with your friends,
go explore in Walnut Creek.
And what we've heard continuously
from our brokerage community,
as well as our major property owners,
is that proximity to amenities and activities
like the downtown is a huge attraction
for people who are returning to office
and how companies are actually incentivizing employees
to come back.
Thank you.
As long as you're standing there.
Jobs housing balance.
That is typically done at a regional,
where we're thinking about Walnut Creek
as a part of a larger region
where we don't want everybody leaving Walnut Creek
to go to work and then coming back.
Is that the kind of definition we're really looking at here?
Yes, and Walnut Creek has some unique constraints.
where with Measure A for every square acre of land
that we lose, we don't necessarily have the ability
to go vertical like other communities might
to make up that land.
So we'll be working with our community development partners
to think through as we add all these new residents
as envisioned under RINA, how many of those folks
are likely to need employment within a proximity?
How does our available office space
compared to other office space available?
And what's that right ratio for us?
So, you know, it's never gonna be a perfect science,
especially as we look at the legislation
in play over the last few sessions.
It could be that we make these great plans
and then, you know, housing could go quite anywhere,
which means we need to carry a little bit of contingency
as we look at our estimates of what type of office space
we would need moving into the future.
So we're looking at this not the jobs housing balance
between one neighborhood versus another in Walnut Creek.
No, we're looking at the community as a whole.
Our assumption is that if you're traveling
within Walnut Creek, that's a fairly reasonable commute
in and of itself.
We're not trying to get to the micro level
of neighborhood to neighborhood.
I also had a question about the permit streamlining process.
The word permit is used, but we are also streamlining
entitlement process as well are we not that objective design standards and the
Design Review Commission changes really at the entitlement level am I correct
correct we're using permit as a sort of a broad placeholder but yes I come to
get my demo permit or my okay thank you did you have a question yeah just
actually what you're talking about before Terry on the office space so I
So I saw the presentation a year ago maybe on what was happening with an office space
here.
It was terrific.
Do we see that the office occupancy space is trending toward more occupied?
Are we seeing any recent data on that?
Yes, actually we just recently posted out our latest data sets on trends in our seven
office subsectors.
We can send that to you.
at www.wallnutcreekconnected.com, and what it's showing is that we're up
slightly, but we're far below the North I-680 trends, and what we're seeing
within those sub-regions is that there is quite a bit of difference depending
on where you're physically located. So the closer you are into the downtown, the
better your occupancy levels. We track Bart, Walnut Creek Bar and Pleasant Hill
Bart and the trend that we talked to you about last time is only intensified
where the further you are away from amenities where Bart used to be a
mitigating force and even an attraction seems to have weakened so Pleasant Hill
Bart is a good ten percent higher in vacancy than our Bart station which is
then again higher than our downtown locations and so and then Shadelands
actually continues to trend about flat. What we are not 100 percent certain on nor have
our brokerage partners called clearly yet with any sort of consensus is how much shadow
inventory is out there, how much we'll be coming back into circulation as occupancy.
But what we know is that this is a regional if not national trend. And so goes the market,
goes we at some level so we're hoping that we're near bottom but I don't
haven't met anybody who knows that for certain yet. Councilmember Darling thank
you so I was glad to hear that you have the development services team working
together to try to suss out roles and responsibilities and as that gets
clarified and and gets better integrated are we thinking that that could get
interpreted into something that people outside of.
Sometimes it seems like it's a bit of a mystery
to people outside of the city,
probably how those processes work together.
Yeah, I'll look to Heather and Erica
if they wanted to chime in on this one,
but at a high level I would say yes.
Right now the work we're doing is on internally
how we want to jointly make decisions
in those areas that overlap
all of our different specialties, right?
So if someone's asking for a tree removal permit,
economic development doesn't need to be participating
in that really.
But if it's a complex project,
or there's some technical decisions
that maybe put the future of the project on wobble,
to use a technical term.
You know, we all want to have a discussion around that,
and how do we help support the project through its paces.
So in some instances, long answer to your question,
in some instances, yes, we'll be able to say,
You go A to B to C to D. But if you have a more complex project, we may put you on sort
of a priority list where we make sure that we're really tightly coordinating across all
the specialties to keep a close eye on those projects with whatever their complexity is.
So even if it's a project that's complex enough that you can't just follow a little flow diagram,
have a way for that person to understand where they are in a person they could go to.
Yes, and we're talking very seriously, it may have even been a council idea to have
some ombudsman function outlined so that, you know, even sometimes the most simple projects
that you think I'll go A to B to C to D, uh-oh, something else popped into the equation,
that there'll be a clear person that they can contact and say, where am I?
I need help or I'm looking at your online portals
and what I'm seeing just doesn't match
with where I think we are.
So somebody they can go to to say I need help
or assistance in some way, shape or form.
Okay, good, that's what I wanted to hear.
Thank you.
Thank you very much and thank you to all of the members
of the organization that are working on making
this process is easier to understand and effectuate.
Thank you.
So what's next, Carla?
All right, three of five.
Environmental sustainability and climate action.
This one will be a little bit shorter
because we've done a lot of work in the last few months.
You all adopted a sustainability action plan in July.
Congratulations.
You also in the most recent budget adopted
and added a sustainability person
to coordinate our sustainability program.
So we have hired that person
We've also brought in a new Climate Corps fellow
who's gonna help do a lot of outreach
about the Sustainability Action Plan.
So at this point, we've got our team together
and we're gonna start building out
the sustainability program
and really taking all of the strategies and actions
that are in that plan and building a realistic work plan
that can get done by the dates and times
that we all said we were gonna get them done.
Questions about sustainability?
keep going. The next priority is parks, facilities, and other infrastructure. And as we all know,
65% of Walnut Creek voters approve Measure O, which is a half-cent sales tax for 10 years,
that's going to fund current and future quality of life needs in Walnut Creek. And some of
those needs are critical infrastructure projects, three of which are on this slide here. And
so I'll start with the biggest one, which is our Heather Farm Park Aquatics and Community
Center. So far, we have hired a project manager, CEQA consultant, and an architecture consultant.
Our team is in place. We've also started the community outreach. Really begins in fall,
but fall is Thursday, so let's just say we've started. We've got everything scheduled.
And the design phase is really going to last from September 2023 to spring 2025. My next
slide is going to touch on the assumptions and principles, so we'll wait on that as
I talked about the last the next two projects. So the lights at Tice Field we will be adding
sports lighting to extend the use of the existing sports fields at Tice. So we bidding and construction
is going to be happening in spring and summer of 2024, but we do have work to do on the
the CEQA side and the design work,
so more to come on that,
but we are projected out for spring and summer of 2024
to begin that work.
And then the ball fields,
we're installing synthetic turf at the ball fields
at Heather Farms, fields one and two,
with synthetic, I said synthetic turf.
We made an architect selection
that will be happening this fall,
and our Walnut Creek Soccer Club
will be involved in that design work,
and we're pleased to say that
They have demonstrated a lot of progress on their fundraising goal for that project, so
we're very thankful for them.
And the next slide has to do, okay, going back to Heather Farm Park Aquatic Center and
Community Center, staff put together some assumptions and principles to really establish
a common understanding of the conditions during the project and also set parameters for design
and construction of the new facility.
So this is attachment three in your agenda packet.
It includes assumptions on the project process, design of the pools and pool deck, building
features, and interface with the adjacent park amenities.
All of these assumptions are based on previous direction that we have heard from the council.
So that includes input from the last July meeting, input on the conceptual site plan,
and then also throughout the process of the year park sure future project.
With that, I will take some questions on this priority.
Council members, questions on the infrastructure
and park facilities.
Just briefly, I don't know if you saw this
and thanks for all of that, Carla.
There was a letter that was sent right before
the City Council meeting from the Aquatics Foundation
just saying that they're committed
to what was their fundraising goal
and the agreements made to the MOU.
I just wanna make sure you saw that
and were able to address that
as this moves into the design phase.
Yes, I think we saw that and also the team,
the working group that's working on this project also
is aware of the letter.
Thank you.
Council Member Darling?
And I guess, you know, similar to Council Member Wilk,
looking at the letter and section three,
the pools and pool deck,
is that where we have the commitment
that we come up with something that works
for the existing, you know, we can still have city meet,
we can still have, is there something more that we could add there or is that?
I'm going to let Director Safeen come up and maybe ask for clarifying on that question.
Well, you pull up the slides that have the reference to the principles that we're referencing.
Yeah.
That's going.
I mean, to me this says it will meet the needs of the community.
Right.
So, again, for the record, Kevin Safeen, Director of Arts and Recreation.
The commitment that the city has made to the aquatic foundation through the MOU that was
adopted by Council last year is that the city will accommodate the programs that we have
today in a new facility, recognizing that today we have three pools and the anticipation
of going to two pools.
So it means that swim meets, swim practices, swim lessons, recreational activities, etc.,
will be accommodated, but the schedule
and the specific allocation of time is to be determined.
So we have also committed to the foundation
that we will work with them on the design concept.
They'll have a seat at the table
for looking at things like pool depth,
orientation of the pools.
The other, I guess, assumption that we're making here
is that something like the all-city meet,
which is the big city meet that we have once here,
can be accommodated in the facility,
which means pool, pool deck, and park area as well
for that one meet that takes place
on a very busy weekend during the year.
So short answer's yes.
We'll continue to explore that with the foundation.
And I was assuming when we put together
the architecture team that the sub-consultant
that is dealing with pool design
would be the ones responsible for making sure
that what we're coming up with
meets this commitment, you know, they think creatively,
they think about how these,
what these types of events would need.
That's correct, yes.
Thank you.
I just wanna add something to build upon that as well,
is the information here is not new.
The discussion about moving from three pools to two pools,
as well as the programs are at play now
that we would anticipate in the future,
that was all discussed when the MOU was negotiated.
So there's nothing new here.
And we've been discussing it here at council
for more than two, three years, I believe.
So a question that I had is when we,
council member Darling and I served on the ad hoc committee
that helped to select the architecture team
and one of the conversations we had as part of that
and it included one of the representatives
from the Walnut Creek Aquatics Foundation
was that it's really important at this phase
to also secure feedback from the community
and input on the recreational pool
because that has been harder to acquire
because there is no club of moms with three-year-olds
wanting to tell us what we should do in a recreational pool.
So that was really emphasized
during our conversations this summer.
Yes, if that's the question, yes.
I will affirm that that was discussed
not just at that process, but here at the council.
As long as you're here, can I ask a question?
That's why I'm here.
You and I chatted offline about the public art
that will be required to be integrated
into this very major project.
And do you want to give us a little outline
of what's about to happen and how it won't impede
or impact the capacity of the facility?
Correct.
Right, so like private development,
this is a project that also requires
a public art contribution,
which is 1% of the construction cost.
If it's a $50 million roughly,
construction cost, you can do the math
and figure out what that contribution is.
So when it's a public project,
the Arts Commission establishes
what's called a selection panel
to help us identify location, artist, and concept.
At the next Arts Commission meeting in October,
They will be doing that, establishing that selection panel.
And then we'll come back to you for council
to appoint somebody to be on that panel.
And then yes, we'll be working with the panel,
with community, with Arts Commission
to identify the best location for that,
which does not have to be on the proximate side
of the construction.
It can be elsewhere within the proximity of the park
because we own that land.
So that'll be part of the conversation
as to where is the best location
for either one large signature piece
Maybe they're smaller pieces. Maybe the council wants to contribute more money. So there's lots of options that will be in play for that
Don't hold your breath
About more money. Oh
I always hold my breath for more money
Thank you. Any other questions about the infrastructure?
Right. Thank you very much. Carla the
public safety and wellness
yes, so this
Priority integrates existing and new programs that are provided across multiple departments
Throughout the city and it really spans across five different areas here. So again, I'll go through each one and then pause for questions
So our first area really focuses on the a3 program, which Walnut Creek was instrumental in developing and advocating for
It's a county-wide crisis response program and it's named to indicate that anyone in Contra Costa County
can have access to timely and appropriate behavioral health crisis service anywhere
and anytime.
A few updates on this program.
As of January 2023, there were two mobile crisis teams in place.
And currently there are 15.
By the end of October, there will be 26 that are operational.
So lots of good progress in this calendar year.
The hours of operations for the Miles Hall Crisis Center are expected to be increased
24-7 by the end of this calendar year and a new youth crisis stabilization unit is planned
to be operational by October and an MOU, Memorandum of Understanding, is being reviewed by all
law enforcement agencies in the county in order to create a shared process for law enforcement
to dispatch, their dispatch centers to dispatch to the Miles Hall crisis call center as appropriate
and Walnut Creek is leading this effort.
Same relative topic, our Walnut Creek Police Department
manages and participates in several programs
dedicated to responding to mental health challenges
and homelessness.
And these areas really do overlap sometimes,
and so we are approaching these in a very holistic way.
Our Walnut Creek PD partners with Martinez and Pleasant Hill
on responding to mental health crises,
and we've added three officers as of 2023, July 2023,
for a total of six officers and a sergeant
on the regional crisis intervention team.
Supervisor Carlson mentioned the county's core team,
which serves as a coordinated system for unsheltered folks,
getting them stabilized and having access to housing.
Staff is negotiating a new core contract
that will include enhanced reporting requirements.
So we understand the work that we're doing
and the progress that we're making in that area.
And the city does provide funding for the CORE program.
The CORE team works closely
with the Homeless Outreach Program, or HOP team,
which is two officers and a sergeant.
And the HOP team continues to build relationships
with the city's unsheltered population
to connect them to services
and work with residents and businesses
to address some of the quality of life issues
that are related to homelessness.
I can clarify one point if I could while we're on that slide
just to tie in Supervisor Carlson's presentation
earlier to this.
When he was speaking about the core program,
I think he mentioned maybe there were eight teams
in reference, the hours that they were working
weren't quite 24 seven, but were pretty close.
So those are region wide, meaning county wide
that are available to all areas.
But as you can imagine, you know,
with over one and a quarter million people
Contra Costa and the geographic area that gets spread thin. So Walnut Creek
is one of the cities that has augmented those base level services by
contracting for an additional 40 hours a week and having an additional two
social workers work specifically in Walnut Creek. So just wanted to point
that out that he was speaking to the general base level service that the
county provides regionally to everyone and that we've augmented that very
intentionally here in Walnut Creek. Our Police Department is working on
proactive police responses to crime trends and they've implemented a
directed patrol response program which essentially is a proactive form of
policing that uses data to map and analyze trends and then deploy officers
where they're needed the most. They're exploring new technology for
intelligence gathering and platforms and applied for a grant to help support
that effort. Crime prevention also takes really strong partnerships and so our
Our police department is looking to develop a formal crime prevention program, and the
City Council did add a position, a crime prevention specialist, in the last budget, and we're
anticipating to hire that person in spring 2024 to help build that prevention program.
Meanwhile, they're going to be continuing to build on existing partnerships in the community,
most recently participated in the National Night Out in August and from
all the social media we saw and feedback we heard it was a very successful event.
The Police Department is implementing the active bystandership for law
enforcement program or ABLE which creates a police culture where officers
routinely intervene and accept intervention to prevent misconduct,
avoid police mistakes, and promote officer health and wellness. Four
Four employees attended the ABLE instructor training course, and then those four will
be training the rest of the department by the end of this calendar year.
And in July, the department deployed a community engagement tool, which allows folks who have
had contact with the police to anonymously text in their feedback and review, if you
will of their interaction of our police department. Moving on to traffic transit
and pedestrian and bike safety. You all adopted the local roadway and safety
plan in August which is a policy that aims to eliminate fatal and severe
injury collisions by 2034 in our city. Traffic engineering and the police
department work together to do a lot of back-to-school safety outreach to make
sure all the traffic that heats up as people go back to school is really people
know how to be safe, slow down, watch out for each other. Our traffic engineering
group also implemented walk and roll interactive maps to help increase the
choices or increase the awareness of choices so people might choose to walk
or bike or roll to school instead of drive. Traffic engineering is also
preparing a safe routes to school study and then our police department conducted
a distracted driving campaign in downtown Walnut Creek and this operation
was focused on drivers failing to use hand-free devices while they were on
their phone. We're probably all guilty of that. Hopefully you weren't one of the
15 citations that were issued along with seven warnings as part of that six
hour operation but in the event people were understood that distracted driving
is dangerous. The department is also exploring a office office of traffic
safety OTS grant for funding to help emphasize programs that combat impaired
driving and distracted driving and I will pause there. Thank you. Questions
for staff on public safety and social wellness. Councilmember Darling. So
So I know the hop team was down a member a while back.
Are they back up to full strength or they still hopping?
Good evening, Madam Mayor and members of the City Council,
Jamie Knox, Chief of Police.
Right now, no, we are not fully strength with our hop team,
but we do have an officer who should be coming back to work.
We're hoping within the next couple of months or so.
Okay, but we've been able to cover the role
through regular patrol without the individual.
Absolutely and and HOP is more of a philosophy that is supported
by the HOP team but everybody embodies that philosophy of
getting people resources that they need and taking
a different approach to addressing homelessness in our city.
Okay thanks and I really appreciate the the coordination that they do with the
core team and everything and I just want to make sure we've got it covered.
Thank you. My pleasure. Other questions for staff on public safety and social wellness? I did have
a quick question. The um and this is the safe routes to schools it says in anticipation of the
beginning of the school year, staff prepared a walk-and-roll to school online interactive maps.
Was that for every school? It's kind of exciting. Uh hello, Smidar Boardman, traffic engineer. So we
We did not produce them for every single school.
We did do 13 of the schools,
including there's a couple of schools
that are actually in the county,
but really do serve quite a few residents
that live in Walnut Creek
just because we have some of those unincorporated pockets.
We also do have residents who go to schools
outside of the city limits as well,
Pleasant Hill in particular.
So we covered most of the schools, not all of them,
but we'll be working on that as we continue
to evaluate additional schools.
That's great.
Mayor Pro Tem.
Yeah, are we using the assets of the 511 team
at the county level and they've got a good resource
in a great website.
Yeah, absolutely.
So part of our outreach that we conducted
with the individual schools,
which actually extended beyond just the public schools.
It was also the private schools as well.
We did provide resources for carpooling
through five-on-one.org and the Diablo Safe Routes to School,
Mount Diablo Safe Routes to School program that they have.
So it's more on the programmatic level.
We're more focused on the infrastructure piece,
but also providing more of the educational pieces as well
and just hooking them up with that
in addition to the discounted youth passes
and transit and et cetera.
So we had all those great links there.
along with a plug for Idle Free
as folks wait in the queue to pick up their kids.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
One more kind of item, right?
Very important, though.
We're gonna talk about things that aren't priorities,
but are taking up lots of time.
But the state says they are.
Certainly for the state, yes.
So again, not an official council priority,
However, it has taken up lots of brain power,
staff time and council time and community time,
our housing element.
You all adopted it in January of this year.
We worked with HCD,
the housing community development state department,
to work on changes and things like that.
You all approved those changes in August
and we've submitted that for certification to the state.
we are still waiting to hear back from them.
But as we look ahead to getting our certification,
we are also thinking about,
what is this going to take to implement?
Because it is a major document for our community.
So really we're looking at six program areas
that have 135 programs within them.
And 108 of those programs need to be launched
or completed by December, 2024.
and a few examples of those programs are on the right side of your screen there. So those bolded
areas are really the six programs and then those are just some of the examples of the programs that
we would be working on throughout the next year to either start or complete. Also not a council
priority, however, something that we are very focused on is the California Housing Opportunity
and more efficiency act, better known as SB 9, which mandates that cities expand
single-family zoning to allow both duplexes and urban lot splits. When this
went into effect in January 2022, I believe, and we adopted interim
regulations that will be expiring at the end of this year, so we're going to be
back to you in October after the Planning Commission is sought in August
and we will be back to you in October with permanent a permanent SB 9
ordinance. Okay now we're done. Thank you. Any questions about the housing element?
Councilmember Darling. So I like your slide about the number of things that we
have to have in progress are done by January 2024 or December 2024 are are
we working on a process to track those so that they're transparent to us but
also to HCD and anybody in the community that are interested in this I know
director of community development answer that the first thing we're doing is and
we're handing out Xanax to most of our staff that have to do all that second
thing is we're going to implement it. No dose. Thank you.
Erica Van and Fran community development director. Thank you mayor and council.
So yes, to answer your question, we are working on a process.
So first of all,
the state has a process that we have to report on the city has to report
annually on the progress.
They haven't told us yet what this next set of Trons of reports is going to look
like, but there will be a state requirement with a template and so forth.
So that's step number one.
Step number two is that we are also
in the process of innovating.
And so as part of the, I guess, National League of Cities
challenge, Capstone Challenge, we
were working together with a partner, Asela, who
is our permitting partner.
And so we're doing an experimental approach
to be able to try and provide a housing dashboard.
And so that's step number two in terms of reporting out.
And then lastly, there are a number of the programs that are more qualitative rather
than quantitative in nature, and so those, you know, we will be reporting to counsel
on, you know, some of them are, yes, no, have you done it, have you not done it?
And then others are, how well have we done it, working with partnerships?
And I think, you know, the last thing in all this is that as we start some of these myriad
of programs you just heard about that as there are quantitative data available, our intent
is to be able to synthesize that into our data dashboard.
Okay.
I've heard of the dashboard, and it's very interesting.
I'll be excited to see it come out of, you know, up out of the ground and turn into some
of it.
So are we.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Questions?
So I appreciate the, there's 108 programs to be done by the end of 2024.
But among those are also the template ADU design, construction ready drawings, that's
in the bin, some updates to our density bonus ordinance, those are all still in the bin
as well, is that correct?
That's true, they're in progress right now.
So those things are a part of these hundred and eight are new.
I know.
these 108 programs, some of them have already been launched,
so like the Permit Radio ADUs,
and then others still have yet to come.
Okay, great.
So at this time, there's an opportunity for public comment.
This will be comment on items, on our priorities,
and what you've heard this evening.
It's up to two minutes per person,
and um i see one person walking toward the podium good evening and if you're on um joining us
virtually and you'd like to speak to this item please be sure to raise your virtual hand using
your raised hand feature so we know you would like to speak good evening hello and good evening uh
mayor and council and beleaguered staff i hope you're treating them to coffee and bagels or
subject for a morning. But thank you. I'm Andrea Kelly-Smedhurst here for the Walnut Creek Aquatic
Foundation. So I was heartened to hear that some of you had had time to read the comments
that we submitted this afternoon, and I just wanted to highlight a couple of things, since
it sounds like there was some time to read it. I won't go through the whole comment.
but I did just want to highlight of course we're very pleased to be part of the process to be
partnering with the city as we move forward towards a new aquatic facility and as we've
stated you know as part of the MOU process it's very important to us and and clearly stated
in the MOU that the new facility needs to accommodate the existing and long-term needs
of the three swim teams and other programming and user groups.
And so we know that it's at this point just a conceptual design, that there's still going
to be community outreach that happens, an important outreach that happens this fall.
But we really want to highlight how important we think it is that the city and the design,
you know, consultants that are working on this project do an analysis to really show
us how the new aquatic pool design and the overall footprint will house the current programming.
How will it work to have the lap swimmers and the water aerobics folks and the swim
teams using the facility?
How will we make all of that happen?
How will we be able to house the existing programming?
And not just the teams, but all the other people who come and use the facility on a
regular basis.
So it's about the day-to-day programming.
And then, of course, also those special traditions.
There's all-city meet.
Yes, that's one time per year.
But there's also, in that same facility, the aqua nuts shows.
There's conference meet.
There are other revenue-generating meets that could happen in that facility, which would
be important, I think, to the city's finances as well as to the other organizations that
host those.
So we really want to highlight how important we think it is before more money is spent
on designs and going through, you know, all the important steps that happen to happen
that we really look and say, okay, this is how it's going to work more, you know, specifically.
We know that it's important not just to the Aquatic Foundation, but to many people.
There have been council members that have reached out to us and said, hey, you know,
about water polo. The chamber has asked us those questions. People are interested in
the community about how this facility is going to be the home for the future of Walnut Creek
Aquatics. And so that's going to be important and especially important in the fundraising.
For us as an organization that has committed to raising $3 million, it's going to be important
that we can show people a design that shows,
that it is going to fulfill the promise
that has been made in the MOU,
that it is going to house the current programming,
that it is gonna house the traditions,
and that maybe it's gonna allow for some new things.
Wonderful things that we all wanna see.
A place for children to play,
a nicer structure that accommodates that,
but that also accommodates these other things.
We're going to need that as part of the fundraising effort
because people want to donate to something that's
going to be better, that's going to be part of the promise.
People don't want to donate to something
that is going to be less than what we've enjoyed for 50 years.
That's smaller footprint, smaller pools.
And so we do think it's really important
for finding those naming donors,
and then all the others in our community
that voted for Measure O,
and really want to see Walnut Creek
continue our wonderful traditions.
And I know you care about that.
I mean, it's amazing to hear how much time
you're spending all of you on all the programs
that we have in the city, not just the pool,
but somehow it's become my role to come talk about the pool.
but you know, so that I'm doing that,
but I know you're all eager to make this
as great as possible, too, so thank you.
Thank you very much.
Does anyone else here wish to speak this evening?
I don't see anyone joining us virtually
who's raised their hand, so I will close public comment
and bring it back to the council.
Do anyone have any further questions?
Let's start, what are we, or just to receive the report?
Great, let's do quick comments and.
I'm gonna call it, talk about, call up the A3 program again.
I was the one that wrote the letter that got the council's
conference of mayors going, but there was a person
who did a whole lot more to make this all happen.
And it is our city manager, Dan Buckshi.
We and the county owe you a great deal of things.
And I can't brag about it enough.
So expect another brag in about a year.
Other comments before we finalize that we've received it.
Yeah, and I agree with Mayor Pro Tem Hasky.
Thank you, Dan.
And I appreciate the update.
This was thorough, it's great to get these kind of touch tones
to hear where we are and we can then speak to that
to our own residents when they ask.
So thank you.
Yeah, and thank you for all the work,
everybody in the room, and I know it's a lot
of different pieces moving all at the same time
with a lot of bodies coming and going,
and I really appreciate the effort.
And I think when it comes to the aquatic facility,
I think all of us on council,
We want this to be the thing that we pay forward.
I spent an inordinate amount of my time sitting
at Clark Swim Center and other places like that.
And we want the new swim center to be something
that people look at and feel good about.
I mean, I will feel good just having a women's restroom
where I don't have to touch anything.
But we're keeping our eye on it.
We recognize that we're constrained.
We can't do everything.
But we want it to be a great facility.
And sitting through the interviews with the architects,
the ideas that came out of the team that we selected,
there's a lot there.
And I encourage you guys to look forward with optimism
as we work on this.
Because we do want to make it something
that we will all pass forward to the future generations.
A bathroom that you could go in,
but you still should wear your flip flops.
Thank you to staff and to all of the teams across the city.
There is a lot of work that we've put in front of you
when we set these priorities earlier this year.
And now we're starting to see the progress
and the baby steps.
So thank you.
We look forward to hearing these updates
and also finding out what else you need from us
as we move along.
I'm going to conclude this item.
And that we're to the end of our business
and we're going to close.
I promised I would reopen public comment
if anyone still has public comment on items
not on the agenda.
This is the opportunity to let us know you'd like to speak.
You have up to two minutes.
There's actually two actions.
You also need to accept the...
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, of course.
I entertain a motion.
Move to approve receiving
the City Council Priorities Update
and accepting Measure O, Aquatics
community center project assumptions and principles second we have a motion and
a second surprisingly we have a roll call vote please
councilmember wilt hi mayor pro tem haskew hi councilmember darlin hi mayor
Silva hi motion carries now going back to public comment on items not on the
agenda if anyone else still wishes to speak to us on an item that we have not
covered on the agenda this evening please come forward or raise your
virtual hand and let us know. No hands raised on Zoom. With that a closing
public comment and concluding the meeting. Thank you all for being here
this evening and we will see you at our next regular meeting which is Tuesday
October 3rd.