Good evening. I'm Cindy Darling, Mayor of the City of Walnut Creek, and welcome to the regular
meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council. The City Council is conducting this meeting from
the City Council Chamber. This meeting is being video streamed and can be viewed live or later
on the City's website. As some attendees may be participating in their first Walnut Creek City
Council meeting, I wanted to welcome everyone and talk briefly about the public comment process.
For each agenda item there will be an opportunity for public comment
on that item. Thus, if you desire to speak to an item on the agenda this evening,
please hold your comments until the City Council considers that item.
Additionally, we have a section on the agenda titled Public Communications,
which is for public comments for items not on the agenda. Any comments during public communication
should not relate to an item that is on the agenda this evening. Consistent with
Section 9.5 of the City Council Handbook. 30 minutes will be initially allocated for
public communication for items not on the agenda. Additional time for public communications
for items not on the agenda will be provided at the end of the open session portion of
the meeting if necessary. If you desire to provide a public comment, please complete
a speaker identification card and line up behind the lectern at the appropriate time.
your turn and then when you approach the lectern please state your name, city of
residence for the record. You will have two minutes to address the City Council.
Please keep in mind that this is a city business meeting. The City Council has
adopted rules of decorum to ensure that meetings are conducted efficiently and
effectively and that all members of the public have a full fair and equal
opportunity to be heard. The City Council Handbook outlines decorum expected in
the Council Chamber and can be found on our website.
All remarks should be addressed to the City Council.
Please do not use threatening, profane or abusive language which disrupts, disturbs
or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of the Council Meeting.
Again, each speaker will have two minutes to make your remarks.
Written comments submitted and received up to two hours before the meeting have been
posted to the City website for public review and are included in the meeting record but
will not be separately read into the record good evening i'm sydney darling mayor of the city
walnut creek and welcome to the tuesday june 17 2025 regular meeting of the walnut creek city council
why don't we all stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance
city clerk susie martinez would you please call the roll council member diviny here council member
francis here council member silva here and i'm tending the meeting from columbus ohio where i'm
attending a summer leadership meeting for the League of National Cities.
Mayor Pro Tem Wilk? Here. Mayor Darling? Here. Alright, that brings us to our first order of
business, which is the Port Chicago Remembrance Day. You know, Port Chicago
was one of those things that happens that makes you realize that we are not
yet truly a country of equality. For those of you that haven't been exposed
this before, there's at the Port Chicago Naval magazine about seven miles north of here was
a site where African American soldiers were assigned during World War II to the dangerous
task of loading explosives onto cargo ships and on the night of July 17, 1944, a catastrophic
explosion resulted in the deadliest homefront disaster of the war, killing 320 people, most
of them, African-American soldiers, or sailors, and injuring 390 others, and widespread damage
to the nearby town of Port Chicago. And this is where the story even takes a dark turn.
You know, the surviving sailors said, we don't feel safe going back. This is not safe. We
don't want to go back in. They ended up court marshaling them. 50 of the sailors, known
as the Port Chicago 50 were wrongfully charged and convicted of mutiny.
Well, thanks to Congressman Mark DeSaulnier and a lot of other local folks on July 17th,
2024, President Joe Biden authorized the Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro to exonerate the
Port Chicago 50 and all 258 soldiers involved, affirming the injustice of what they suffered
and recognizing their actions as a pivotal moment in civil rights and military history.
And this is, again, one of those things.
We are bending the arc.
We have come a long way.
We have a lot more to go.
And I would like to invite the executive director of the Port Chicago Alliance up to accept
the proclamation.
I'll meet you over there at the—or I'll go ahead and come on up and I'll meet you
there in a second.
Okay.
Thank you.
Good evening, Mayor Darling, members of the City Council, and fellow community members.
My name is Louis Thrower and I serve on the board of the Port Chicago Alliance.
On behalf of our organization and the descendants and families of the Sailors that served, I
thank you for this proclamation recognizing July 17th as Port Chicago Remembrance Day
here in Walnut Creek.
An official Remembrance Day does more than mark a moment in time.
It restores dignity.
It ensures that the names, the courage, and the sacrifice of the Port Chicago sailors
are not forgotten, so that future generations understand the value of service, the strength
that it takes to stand with integrity, and the enduring importance of fairness and justice.
This proclamation holds special significance for me, as I've had the privilege of working
closely with Mayor Pro Tem Kevin Wilk over the years in efforts to preserve this important
history and recognize the sacrifice of our veterans.
Thank you all for your commitment to truth, to the memory, and advancing justice through
remembrance, integrity, and later-ship.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Do we want to do a picture?
Can we have a picture?
Okay come on. All right next I would invite Contra Costa County supervisors Candace Anderson
from District 2 and Ken Carlson from District 4 to present to us. Candace, lead it off.
Okay and I will lead off and Ken and I both have very short presentations, slightly different
districts. We talked about trying to merge it interestingly what came to mind. Ken and I went
went to the same university.
And I don't know if you remember the Pat and Jeff show?
And so the president of the university, Jeff Holland,
often brought his spouse next to him.
And they would both talk back and forth.
We're not doing the Pat and Jeff show.
So I'm going to quickly go through my presentation.
You'd be more like the button guy.
So anyway, and oh, and I even get a clicker.
And where am I pointing?
Allegedly.
Let's try.
Oh, there we go.
Okay, so here we are, map of the county.
I always love to talk a little bit about our districts.
Ken and I, of course, as you know,
get to share Walnut Creek,
and I also get to represent Lafayette,
Moraga, Orinda, Danville, San Ramon, Alamo,
and then these wonderful unincorporated communities.
Not everyone realizes there are 19 cities
in Contra Costa County,
but 38 unincorporated communities of significance.
And some basic facts right now,
We've got about a $7.1 billion budget,
but most of that comes from the state and federal government.
That goes toward our health services.
I'll talk a little bit about that.
We've got a little over 11,000 county employees,
county populations just under 1.1 million.
And we were established 175 years ago.
We're one of the original counties in California.
So where is this $7 billion spent?
56% does go to health, 22% to public safety,
And public safety is the sheriff, the district attorney,
the public defender, our chief probation officer,
and then a conflict counsel and animal services.
13% goes to public assistance.
What many people might see as welfare and helping
the indigent.
I will say much of our health budget
also goes to helping those who are living at the poverty level
as well.
5% general, 3% facilities ways, which
is kind of our public works.
And so impacts from the federal government
We're seeing, for example, a grant from the EPA
for a North Richmond Community Resilience Initiative.
That was terminated.
We're anticipating other projects
like that being terminated.
We're seeing significant changes,
how the state decides to fund Medi-Cal,
particularly with those who are undocumented.
And so at the end of the year,
those who are sort of able-bodied adults,
not children, not seniors, will have a cutoff,
and they will no longer be eligible
to participate in Medi-Cal.
And then with changes from Medicaid
from the federal government, there
will be even less revenue available to reimburse
the state for anyone who is not documented as well.
And so we anticipate those costs being passed on to us.
We are seeing reductions in SNAP, which is food.
This is our CalFresh program.
We anticipate that we're going to really need
to be stepping up with our nonprofit partners
to ensure that people don't go hungry.
We're seeing housing vouchers disappear,
some that were supposed to be for 10 years
just for 18 months, nonprofit refugee settlement funding, which is cut off without any notice
to those refugees, settlement agencies where we already had refugees, we were able to restore
some funding to them, and groups like Civil Corps that really are out there helping as
AmeriCorps funding gets cut, that as well.
We're anticipating many, many more once we see finally what the federal budget's going
to look like, but we are being very prudent fiscally to not spend down our reserves right
now because we anticipate worse days ahead. We are going to though be looking at allocating
to each supervisorial district one million dollars of money that used to be ARPA money.
We did not spend all of our ARPA money because we were waiting for FEMA reimbursement on a lot of
things that we put out during the pandemic. Fortunately most of the FEMA money came in
prior to the administration cutting off FEMA funding and so we do have some money that is
now in our general reserve but each supervisor will be in the next couple of months talking
about where would the million dollars in their district best be spent.
Property taxes went up a very modest 4.18%. Walnut Creek you're about just a little bit
below that at 4.04% and similarly unincorporated Walnut Creek 4.12%. I know that impacts your
general fund just as it impacts our county general fund we're just not as
dependent upon it. Recent changes in county departments hopefully everyone
paid their property taxes this year and saw they were not writing it to and it
wasn't really going to Russell v. Watts. That's who your bill came from it's now
we appointed Dan Mearswa when Russell v. Watts stepped down prior to the end of
his elected term. We have within in the last year and a half our new animal
Services Director Ben Winkleblak who's doing a really outstanding job working with our nonprofit partners trying to help rescue groups as well
And we have an interim health director
Ory Zvele is acting in that role as we do a nationwide search for his replacement
And we also have an interim auditor controller. I'm hodge nathal who was who is acting as his interim director
We're doing a national search for that because Bob Campbell the elected interim or the elected auditor controller decided to step down
as well. So we have some interesting positions that we hope to get filled.
They're very important positions and two of them are elected office both the
auditor controller and the tax collector. Urban limit line that's coming your way
next year. It will most likely be on the June primary ballot. We don't anticipate
making significant changes to the urban limit line and for anyone who's not
familiar with it we first approved it as a county in 1990. It was then extended in
in 2006, with it expiring in 2026,
and essentially it's a way to control sprawl.
And it's to say we want 65% of all of the county
to be in open space, agricultural land,
undeveloped areas, 35% can be urban,
where we have businesses, where we have housing,
and we've been able to really stay within that
as we've looked at it.
And back, you may recall, in 2016, 2017,
we did study the urban limit line
just to make sure that we felt there was sufficient
buildable land within the urban areas
that we didn't feel the need to expand it.
Family Justice Center, I've gotta thank Kevin on the board,
the Family Justice Center.
We got that open back in December of 2024
and Ken used to be on the Family Justice Center board as well
and really just, it's something that continues
to grow in use.
We always, I know the Concord is close by
for Walnut Creek residents, but we do have the center
right off Diablo Road, right off the freeway.
We're finding interesting a lot of adult protective service
cases coming forward, but we are hoping
to continue to expand that.
Family Justice Center, it's a one-stop place
for someone who's facing either interpersonal violence
or abuse, or whether it be elder abuse, child abuse,
where you don't have to pay any fees,
but you can get the help that you need.
Point in time count, this is really exciting news
to see that this one night, this one point in time in January
we counted our homeless population we were down 26% in Contra Costa County and
that's a huge decrease needless to say I do always want to thank your council
because you are one of the few cities in Contra Costa County that steps up and
does a lot for our homeless population and despite some of the negatives that
come with having shelters having services you've really stepped up so I
want to thank you for that and as you can see from these numbers Walnut Creek
And 2024 you were at 64 you dropped to 50 people and again
This is just a snapshot on any given night and while we see it in the
2000s the number we do know that close to 10,000 people access some type of homeless
Services in the county in a given year, but this is just the snapshot we had and we're very heartened by this data
A lot of it is by rapid rehousing and that's where you get people into beds both temporary
Permanent beds that really helped reduce these numbers and it just is showing what's working
So we're looking forward to continuing on that path as well
Something I'm working on right now is dual tracking on the Iron Horse Trail
As you may recall Iron Horse Trail was bought by the county from Southern Pacific
There was an edict that said you need to maintain that Iron Horse Trail that someday
were going to magically drop down a light rail, a train,
a bus way, never really was going to materialize
when the cost and, too, when I became even a council member
in 2003, when I bring this up, people would say, well,
my dead body is not going to happen,
because it's been used for recreation.
Senator Glazer said, excuse me, what's Senator Glazer?
Senator Grayson, at the time an assembly member,
brought forward legislation that let the county out
from an adetect, recognizing the importance of it
as an active transportation corridor,
and so as San Ramon is finishing,
having their groundbreaking this Saturday
of their overpass on Bollinger Canyon Road,
that's where we're gonna start,
and where we're in the design phase,
of having a pilot dual tracking
from Bollinger to Crow Canyon Road.
I'm hoping that the transportation expenditure plan
will be able to include that.
East Bay Regional Park District,
which manages the trail, is very interested,
But of course they need to have their expenses covered.
And right now with the issue of eBikes, I don't know if it's an issue with any of you.
I'm being a little facetious here, but it's something we all need to address in having
eBikes going at a reasonable speed that's permissible in a specific bike lane would
be a great improvement.
With the topic of eBikes, it has been something where even the county, you know, is there
a countywide ordinance that we should all be adopting?
I know that a lot of people are discussing it.
I was just talking to Tim Hale this morning
from the Contra Costa Transportation Authority.
It's something we need to look at
because unfortunately, youth who do not
have driver's licenses are racing around on e-bikes.
It's dangerous for them.
It's dangerous for all of us who may encounter them.
And Contra Costa Fire Protection District continues to grow.
We did last month annex in Rodeo Hercules.
We are not planning, as I say whenever I talk about this,
to taking over the world.
San Ramon Valley Fire has an excellent fire district as does Moraga or Brenda
but this is an opportunity to make our community safer by providing services to these communities that no additional cost or
Detraction of services that we have they were able to bring their funding their property tax a parcel tax
They have and with the efficiencies of joining confire were able to do that
Sign up for the community warning system
We're continuing to work on improving it.
Ken and I are doing that in our public protection committee
that we serve on.
But it's so important that people go in to cwsalerts.com.
Sign up so you get text messages, you get emails.
Find your evacuation zone because in a fire,
you can go to the community warning system.
You can see which zone you are in as to what the instructions
are when you should evacuate.
And finally, my office is always here
to help you either in our D'Amel office or our Lafayette office and you don't
get my e-newsletter you should and I'm gonna turn it over to Ken. And now you
can take a deep breath. Thank you. Ken take it away. Well good evening Mayor
Darling, Mayor Pro Tem Wilk and council members. Appreciate the opportunity to be
with you. I'm sorry it's been a been a little while but I'm glad to share a
little bit more. You got a lot of information there and I'll try to do my
best to keep it from too much. But again, we cover in District 4, the cities of
Clayton, Concord, Pleasant Hill, and of course Walnut Creek and all the
unincorporated communities within there. I'm proud to say I have the majority of
Walnut Creek. Just saying. Again, we are split in half, but again we have
everything but really the park meeting, the Saranat neighborhoods. So we cover
over the two unincorporated Seven Hills
and the San Miguel, Walnut Heights area
as well in the district.
25% of district five population of that 250 some thousand
people, 25% of them are Walnut Creek residents.
In a lot of times, when I go out in the community,
it's like, what does the supervisor actually do?
And me transitioning from city council
just a few short years ago,
it was a little bit of a transition.
As a city council member, I did not hire
and appoint the department leaders.
Those are done by the board of supervisors.
Well, of course, we handle the budget,
we approve ordinances just like you all do,
and we do have a team of great staff members
who help our constituents navigate
all the different services within the county,
and we are a resource for not only you, but the residents.
We get to the boards and other activities
that I engage in, and of course, like tonight,
and I'm really grateful that you recognize
the Port Chicago 50 and the event last year
was truly amazing and an emotional experience
to be a part of.
Thanks to the chair.
Have a significant change in my assignments this year,
and I'm very proud that I chair the Airport Committee,
the Equity Committee, the Sustainability Committee.
I serve with Chair Anderson
on the Public Protection Committee.
I'm also serving on the Medical Services Joint Committee,
which really manages the hospital and the health system,
not the health plan.
And then I also am on the Los Modernos Healthcare
Operations Committee.
But beyond that, I also serve on many regional bodies,
and I serve on the Board of Directors for ABAG,
the Association of Bay Area Governments.
I serve on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
I have a privilege this year of chairing
the Stationary Source Committee,
which really deals with our refineries
and other pollution sources within our communities.
The Solid Waste Authority, Recycle Smart,
with my counterparts here.
And of course, the Transportation Authority
and the Regional Transportation Planning Committee,
TransPac, and then the Pleasant Hill BART JPA
in conjunction with BART, that is county jurisdiction.
And there are many more besides that.
Across all the departments like Chair Anderson mentioned,
a significant part of what we do
is the social safety net, health care,
and of course our first public protection,
public defender, DA, and the sheriff's office.
Some of the things that I'm really proud of
that over the course of my term on the board,
we were able to, with the help of Department of State
and immigration support services,
We actually held the first naturalization ceremony
within the supervisors chambers.
17 different countries represented by over 30 people
took their oath of citizenship there.
And we had kind of a little bit of a fair afterwards
in the sense that people could sign up
and get registered to vote.
They can apply for their passports
and they could get connected to county services there.
Very proud that the board has been able
to approve balanced budgets each and every year.
And we have expanded health care prior to what we're dealing
with now to make sure that everybody had access
to health care who resides in the county.
We've also allocated an 8.5, it's actually 8.9 million
to our African American Holistic Wellness Resource Hub
to expand services to provide culturally competent services
to our African American population across the county.
We have invested several times over in the last three years
now to stand together Contra Costa to provide immigration and legal support services to
those who are facing the challenges of asylum and going into our immigration courts. One
of the things, pets are near and dear to my heart, so I was very glad to champion a three
quarter of a million dollar allocation at a Measure-Eck fund to support pet retention.
Basically, we pay in neutering clinics, vaccination and microchipping in partnership with our
community organizations out there
looking after our pet population.
I won't go into the county budget
because Chair Anderson covered that exceptionally well.
The other thing I'm really proud of
is I led the charge for the safe center,
services and accesses for everyone,
and some of the challenges we're facing
with our immigrant population,
27% of the county's population are immigrants.
That doesn't necessarily mean undocumented or documented.
is just 27% are immigrants to this country.
So with that $5 million,
we're gonna provide support
to the immigrant community as a whole.
We will trying to locate that in the Concord area
and potentially that was,
it will provide services across the county,
but the idea was being we had the benefit,
I say that in sarcasm of the immigration court
springing up on us in Concord
and it's been, if you're watching the news,
kind of the center of attention for the last few months,
but we're looking to provide that service
a little closer proximity to the court
because a good part of what they will be doing
will be legal support,
but it'll also be connecting them
to economic opportunity, job opportunities,
healthcare access, and other resources that we can provide.
Really proud that we did.
The Board of Supervisors allocated 5 million,
15 million total across three different districts
for youth centers.
We found a great opportunity right in our backyard
in Concord, knowing that we couldn't really build
and throw up a youth center on $5 million.
So we were able to partner
with the community youth center in Concord.
They were recently given the OBC Athletic Club.
They are currently operating.
They're serving a little over 2,100 kids
in three like commercial buildings and in Concord.
But they were given the Big C Athletic Club,
which is 75,000 square feet.
So with help of Concord, state dollars,
and then our $5 million contribution,
they were able to meet the $9 million need
to convert the Big C Athletic Club
into a large youth center.
Construction is ending this month.
Services are expected to move in September.
and then they will be again,
trying to serve over 3,800 kids.
It is intended to be district four,
but they are serving kids across the county.
I just received an update from them
that next month one of their graduates
who is 18 years old, still in high school,
beat out college students across the nation
to represent us in I believe Bulgaria
in the World Wrestling Amateur Championship.
I don't know the specific, but yes.
So they're producing not only great athletes,
but they have mentoring programs, access programs,
and they're gonna expand their programming
based on moving into the new center
where they now have a pool
and they have other dance studios, so cheer.
It's for all ages, from three on up.
Anywhere, any one, any time, a three program.
And I'm sure, you know, the county,
we've made a significant investment
in reducing the interaction between law enforcement
and those who are facing behavioral health crises.
So with A3, we've already, and we started slow
and continue to ramp up and continue to add staffing,
but we're already, in those few short years,
reached almost 37,000 calls.
So we're getting almost 500 calls per week.
Just for your info, 1,231 of those calls
came from the city of Walnut Creek.
And you can always go to our website at cchalth.org A3,
and actually see that dashboard and see what we're doing there.
We continue to move forward to trying to open the 83 campus,
which is at Oak Grove Road in Concord.
We are very, very close.
Somehow challenges with electricity perhaps,
sometimes delay things.
I think we've all here experienced that.
So I don't want to call anybody out.
But we're getting there and we're really excited
because there will be that peer resilience.
there will be a sobering center, a wellness clinic.
There's just so many services that'll be there,
as well as the call center.
For you all, not that it's within the city,
but those unincorporated neighborhoods within Walnut Creek,
we have our service treatment and overlay program going.
We have just over $6 million
between the overlay resurfacing or other treatments.
They're gonna be starting this summer.
So residents in those neighborhoods will be notified.
If you want to look for it, it's at cccounty.us
and our public work projects page.
And again, we are here as a resource for you, as a partner.
And as Sherry Anderson mentioned, with the $1 million,
wow, they get the double dip.
There is a benefit to having a split city
when it comes to districting.
Sign up for our newsletter, because we
are going to be putting out the parameters and outreach opportunities to engage the district
on how we might best allocate those ARPA dollars. So sign up for my website or sign up for my
newsletter and we'll keep you posted, as well as we will interdate you anyway with the information
to get you as partners in the plan. So I really am grateful to be here and work together with
you all, I thank you. Well, and I know we all appreciate everything that you guys do for us,
Just give them a round of hands.
No, and I'll answer any question you want.
I know, I was gonna give you the applause
and then I was gonna let people ask questions.
Any questions for the supervisors?
Not questions per se.
I work with both of you on several committees as well.
And I've gotta say, I don't know how you get out there
and get about all that you're doing.
You are so responsive to me and to I think all of us
and the residents of Walnut Creek, I really appreciate that.
You both make our jobs easier too.
So thank you for all you're doing
Councilmember Silva. Did you have anything? I waited till you got your coffee
Oh, we're good
Yep, I pushed my button, but I'll think I work anyway, all right. I'll see you day bag
Anything else? All right. No, I was just going to say thank you for all that you do and
It it runs all the way across the nation to bear our admiration for your work. So, thank you
Councilmember Francois. Thank you mayor. I will echo that
Serving with both of you on the recycle smart authority is a privilege and we feel very fortunate to have two of the five
supervisors
Representing Walnut Creek, I appreciate you mentioning
The ARPA funding and if we if someone were to go on your website that get more information about that too, I imagine
It's coming. It's coming. Yeah wait for it
With it what we're asking our county administration staff is to actually have surveys on our county website
Because we always sort of hear from the same groups who are sort of in the know of this is what's out there
This is what we want to see money spent
But there we know there are a lot of needs in the community oftentimes from a small nonprofit a small business
Whoever it is who don't always have that same access or even ability to come lobby the Board of Supervisors
So that's where an online forum where we can push it out. You can push it out through your city newsletter as well
We can get that input
That's great. And just an one last question about the dual tracking
Because I wasn't aware I was out on the iron horse this morning and it's such a resource and it's so it's so it's such a nice
Really treasure record treasured recreational amenity. I wasn't aware that it was there's gonna be proposal for light rail down it at one time
But that down in San Ramon, what does that project consist of that?
That project really is just from Bollinger Canyon to Crow Canyon and this just is a pilot example
because of
Queen water requirements other things it has to be a little bit over engineered
But essentially as you come off the new bridge
There's a little bit of a roundabout that would either direct you to the single slow track
move at your own pace to then a different way that would take you right to the dual track where you would be able to
Go be a lane that has sort of a dotted line down the mill where bicyclists can go in a much room
Sort of the bicycle expressway just really taking advantage of it. Of course, we've got a lot of underground
Utility lines under their jet fuel. I mean, it's something not to be trifled with but the requirement
literally from the statewide you had to maintain this 15 foot wide berth down the middle and you could not touch it because you were supposed to magically place
And so and it was studied multiple times. We even looked at putting Bart down there even
undergrounding Bart there
I mean you're talking billions and billions of dollars besides the over my dead body. Will you do that to my favorite Iron Horse trail?
Just real quick ad North Kong or North Walnut Creek the Schroeder bridge
going to be undergoing repairs because we identified an issue with it and the
issue is that it needs these repairs because of overuse. It was engineered
for a certain amount of pedestrian and bicycle traffic. It is so well used that
we're we're ahead and have to do actual repairs. Is that the one near the Pleasant
Hill Park? Treat Jones. Yeah. Yeah. So there will be repairs coming there as well as a
a new paint job one other one in terms of the urban limit line I know you
recently adopted in your housing element and general plan did you have
any issues or constraints with accommodating arena numbers given the
urban limit line or because we because we had our existing urban line limit
line we really made sure that what we were putting in for our arena numbers
which was about 7,500 for the county, for unincorporated Contra Costa County,
that nothing even came close. And it also helps that we now have the high fire
severity maps. And so a lot of the tweaking that you will see will be
taking high fire severity areas out of the urban limit line because we don't
want to see anything going in there. So no fortunately it won't impact it. Really
It's sort of cleanup as opposed to and we joke that when it was originally drawn
They used a really thick Sharpie on the map and sometimes you just have to clean a little of those areas up when parcels were
Divided or it just wasn't making logical sense
Thank you
Quitting up based on zoning designation as well
The fire severity zone huge impact
otherwise
Queen up around some of the harbors on the shoreline and simple really minor minor changes
And that'll go to the voters next June you said
More more outreach it has the our county staff has been going out making presentations
We just had a hearing on it a couple weeks ago to receive any input
But it will and we'll put on the March primary just in case it doesn't pass so we can make sure
It passes in November, but we anticipate most people are really like the urban limit line
Some of our cities do have their own urban growth foundry that is is independent of this
But overall it's going to continue to protect what we have right now in our County
Terrific. Thank you both
Yeah, just thank you both for being here tonight and updating us on what you're doing
And I just want to say as someone who's new to the Council and reached out to both of you and had coffee and I just
Really appreciate how accessible how engaged how easy it's been to work
With you and and I wrote down some questions, but I'm gonna reach out to you on the side. So
Really here is a resource and I've got to say one of my favorite parts of being a county supervisor is working with the city
Councils and figuring out how can we help you make your job any easier when it comes down to exciting
things like environmental health or restaurants or you know unincorporated issues that back
into yours again I really over the last 13 years that I've been a county supervisor the
partnership I've had with those of you on the council has really been something fun
I really enjoy working with each of you and I think from our perspective as we recognize
that as the federal funding challenges become clear that you guys are facing a much tougher
lift than we at the city are and we want to offer to you if there's anything we
can do any message we can I don't know put in a bottle and send out the ocean
but if there's anything we could do to help you make the case for the federal
funding we recognize how important it is and we value that partnership to keep
our population safe so thank you guys all very much for coming yes thank you
you guys. All right. At this time I'd like to invite Donna Labriola, the Director of
Events and Community Relations with Walnut Creek Downtown to present the Summer Arts
Program. Hello everyone. Let me raise that up a little bit. I'll take that. Well thank
you very much to the Mayor and the City Council and city staffers to allow us to have this
time. Normally I just get up here and I have about two minutes to run through everything.
So hopefully I can slow myself down here and give you a little more of a detailed run through.
Just one thing.
So the summer arts in Walnut Creek program started actually as the arts around August
program about five years ago.
We are in our fifth year now.
And that was a collaboration started by Cindy Silva and the arts and nonprofit community
here in Walnut Creek.
So we're delighted to be in our fifth year and watching the program continue to grow.
And I have to go back and forth.
I'm going back to bifocals because I can't see that if I'm looking at this.
Anyway, we have just a lot of programs that we run.
We have 12 different arts and community organizations that participate in our monthly meetings and
putting together programs throughout the summer months,
so June through August, and on the screen,
there are some highlights of some of the events,
but I'm just gonna talk a little bit about the purpose.
So basically, the purpose for the summer arts
is to highlight and show our city to outsiders
as well as locals and to be able to allow local artists
and audiences to come together.
It started as a program to be able to offer
more arts opportunities for everyone,
more free programs, more opportunities for people
to come into the Lesher Center to see the performing arts.
And it's really grown.
We've actually seen over the five years
a 14% increase in attendance for downtown events,
and the, which just basically translates into more
foot traffic into our local businesses,
more people going into restaurants,
and really more people having access to the arts,
which right now with all of the funding cuts
and difficulties in being able to offer those
it's nice to be in a community where we can still do that and bring people in.
Some of the highlights so far, so the program runs through August, so this is kind of a midway
update. We've had several events go on so far and the top
Attended events are the Locust Street festival, it helps that we're doing four.
The Walnut Creek Art and Wine Festival, the Pride Day at Bedford Gallery, the Fiesta Cultural,
the street festival, Opera in the Park, and the Makers Market at Broadway Plaza. Those were the
top attended event so far and we're looking forward to getting into the
remaining ones. I do want to just call out the program partners right now. So the
Ballet School of Performing Arts, the Bedford Gallery, Broadway Plaza, the
California Symphony, Center for Community Arts, the Community Partnership for
of Walnut Creek Downtown, Diablo Magazine,
Diablo Regional Arts Association, Festival Opera,
the Lesher Center for the Arts,
the City of Walnut Creek, thank you,
and the Walnut Creek Downtown Association.
And Visit Walnut Creek is a huge program sponsor
as well as the community partnership
for Walnut Creek Downtown and the Diablo Magazine.
So this is the calendar that has already,
we've pretty much gone through these events.
There's one event left on there,
which is the Locust Street Festival,
which happens tomorrow.
So certainly come out and support that.
Some of the highlights for the events,
what they've been able to bring
in terms of community impact,
specifically the Locust Street Festival,
Over the course of the four festivals,
we'll have had over 50 artisan vendors
which come out and be able to gain exposure
in our community as well as offer direct sales opportunities
for those vendors.
Again, the purpose for hosting these events
in the downtown area and in our community
is really to increase the revenue opportunities
to our downtown businesses
and to create a vibrant downtown.
We appreciate the city's support
in the street closures that we do,
especially because it creates
this pedestrian-friendly opportunity,
a block party feel.
If you haven't been out to one of the Locust Street festivals,
do come out tomorrow.
It's a lot of fun, a lot of families,
a lot of young people and music and food
and our restaurants are participating,
so it's a great time.
The other thing is a one that I've already
sort of talked about a little bit
is the opportunity to make the arts accessible.
Some of those free events that opera in the park,
the Art and Wine Festival, the Fiesta Culture All,
these are all things that are opportunities
for people to come into our community
and really enjoy what we have to offer.
One of the things that's been especially nice
is to hear some of the community comments
and testimonials from the events.
One specifically was from Opera in the Park.
Young woman was, it was like,
so I'm just gonna read what she said and not try to.
Opera in the park was magical, standing on a blanket,
under the sky, on a beautiful day,
it felt like the whole city was singing.
Which just, it's somebody who wouldn't necessarily,
I don't know if you had a chance to see any of the photos
that were posted from that, but the park was full.
I mean, I like opera, but it's also something
that people don't necessarily go out of their way to see
if they haven't been before
or someone hasn't introduced them to it.
And it was just such a great day.
It was a beautiful day.
The sun was out, people on blankets with picnics,
and of course the performance was wonderful.
So just a great free opportunity
to bring people back around again to the arts.
And let me go to the next one.
There we go.
So some of the events that we've highlighted
with some pictures are the Locust Street Festival.
One of the great programs that the Ballet School
of Performing Arts does is they do a demonstration,
a ballet demonstration, which is great
to get more people engaged.
Students are just, they're so enthusiastic
and there's actually one of the pictures
from the opera in the park there.
Then we hosted the Unquirked event,
which if you had an opportunity to be out
and even just downtown, so much positive feedback
about the stores that maybe people hadn't gone into before
and then Fiesta Culture All, year over year,
they've brought in additional people.
That street festival has just been really exciting
and so it's, again, a lovely opportunity.
Those are past those, so you can't go to those.
But you can still come out for these that are on this.
We have the summer sounds at the Leisure Center,
free concerts there in Rodney Plaza.
And I have a list of those.
So the three are July 17th, which is this Thursday.
There's one, and that's Tom, Rigney, and Flambeau.
And on July 24th, and I may have butchered his name,
so I'm sorry about that.
July 24th, there's another one.
These concerts are from 5.30 to 6.30.
They're free.
They're seating there in Redne Plaza available.
And it's just a fun hour to come out, catch dinner afterwards.
And then on July 31st, there is the summer sounds.
Anthony Paul Soul, and I'm sorry, July 24th is VUP,
which is a Funkin' Soul band.
So those are some fun things to do.
Also, we'll have the concert series for the Broadway Plaza
is going to be starting on that day as well.
And actually, you can hit both of those concerts.
So you could do two free concerts in one night,
one on each side of town.
So and that is going to be a Taylor Swift called Swift Nation kicking off the summer
or the Broadway Plaza concert series. And then those three are all Thursday nights
and in a row. And so then there's two more in August and it's all female artists and female
bands. So it should be exciting. And those are all of these are on our website as well as
additional events that might not be listed on this,
because we're adding them as they come up.
There we go, and there's some of the additional ones.
The Ragdolls are on August 7th for that summer concert series,
and on, oh, 14th, I'm so sorry,
is the Three Queens of Motown.
So that should be fun too.
Just and in conclusion, as we look ahead
for the coming years for this program,
we are meeting regularly.
And at the end of August, we'll have a meeting
where we go back and just find out more details specifically
from each of the participants who hosted events
during the summer arts and come back
and do a complete recap and hopefully
have some more economic impact numbers for you at that time.
But again, moving ahead for future years,
we are looking to expand some of the programs.
Obviously, we'd love to see more opera in the park
or more free festivals where there's music and or access
to the theater and the Lesher Center and the DRAA really
make a point of offering those opportunities.
And again, we have a month and a half left.
So if you haven't come out to any of these events,
check out our website.
It's under Summer Arts.
And there's a whole list of all of the additional events
coming up. And I encourage you to attend, invite your neighbors, and always sponsor
and volunteer opportunities for all of the different organizations that are involved
in this, not just during the summer, but throughout the year. And also, if you do come out, take
some pictures, share your stories. Lots of people are looking at social media, and it
really helps just to continue the story that people can see and feel what we're doing here
in Walnut Creek. If they've missed out, they'll come back. And just feel so much gratitude
to be in a place working with such a wonderful community that we really spend time and energy
to make sure that it's accessible to everyone,
that we have offering art.
I just know, personally, how excited I am
about all of the things that we get to do
and how it's changed people's lives that I know,
just having that opportunity to go and listen to music
or to see artists or to take a class.
So thank you, really appreciate it.
Thank You Donna and thank you for all that you guys do. So you've heard the
stories now go check the website get it on your calendar and we want to see you
all downtown. With that unless there's any questions we'll move on to the consent
calendar. Does any council member wish to pull any item for discussion or any
staff member. I'm actually going to pull item 2p. 2p. You don't feel you have to do this.
Yes Mayor. I would like to pull items 2c through i but I will talk about I
will just make some comments on the collective. So all the policing contracts
and so actually all the side letter all the employee relations related. Okay and
Would it work to, okay, when we get there,
I wanna do C through G and then H and I separate.
Councilman Daffinney, are you good with anything?
Yeah, you pulled them already, yeah.
H, I, and P, yeah.
I don't think there's anything left to pull.
That's good.
Okay, so at this time, does any member of the public
wish to comment on items 2A, 2B, 2J, K, L, M, N, O, or Q?
Anyone? Seeing no comment, I'm ready to open for a motion. Move to approve items
oh my gosh what were those? 2-A-B-J-K-L-M-N-O and Q. And I will second. Okay we have a
motion and a second. Roll call please. That with the notation that that would
include the items that had the corrections. Yes, yes there were a couple
that had a rata on them. So Mayor Pro Tem Wolk? Aye. Councilmember Silva? Aye.
Councilmember Davini? Aye. Councilmember Francois? Aye. Mayor Darling? Aye. Motion carries.
All right going back through let's take C through G and I'll turn to council
member Silva. Well I'm going to try to phrase this recognizing that you have
comments or questions on the other two but I just want to take a moment to
I want to thank all of our employees for the work that they do on behalf of the community.
We have seven associations of employees representing about 370 plus employees.
And whether you are filling cocktails on the road or making ball fields look beautiful
and having them safe, whether you're helping those who are homeless or those who are seniors
and need extra services or managing programs for kids.
You do a great service for the community and you make Walnut Creek a place where people
want to live, work, visit, and that makes Walnut Creek very special, so thank you to
all of our employees.
Okay.
Any more comments on this?
Any public comment on C through G?
Seeing none, open for a motion?
I'll move to adopt item C D E F N G from the consent calendar
We'll call please
All right now we'll do two eight and two I
I
Think all of us, you know, I was gonna pull these all start because I'm the mayor I can do that
We all recognize that doing contract negotiations,
especially in a year where our budget has been tight.
And we really appreciate all the hard work of HR
and the representatives for the two unions coming together
and coming up with an agreement that works for everybody
because we wanna make sure that we are investing
in public safety and investing in a cost-effective way.
So I just wanted to say that.
Is there any specific questions that anybody wanted to ask?
I was going to comment on the same items.
Did you want me to comment?
You may feel free to comment.
No, I too very happy that the city reached an agreement
with the POA and the PMA.
And I think it looks like it's going
to be a nice package for the department, the police
department.
Hopefully that will raise our competitive edge in the market
and help us to get as close to fully staffed as possible.
I just want to say that, you know,
value the work that the police department's doing.
I think there's a good culture in the department
and now with this package of compensation,
it will really help us in the recruiting side of things.
I also wanted to give a shout out
and the congratulations to Captain Slater
for his promotion to Captain.
Any other?
Council Member Silva, you're good.
Yes, I'm fine. All right. Anybody want to come up and talk on 2H and 2I? Any
public comment? Good evening, Shane Blatz, POA president. First I'd like to thank our
bargaining team, Joe Luchia with RLS, Officer Mike Sizz, Officer Ryan Bamer,
Detective Nick Olson, for all their hard work and countless hours put in behind
scenes to put this contract together. Secondly, I'd like to thank the city's
representatives Jesse Lad, Trish Raver, and Kelly Gerten, who also worked very
hard to get us to the finish line. Our membership is very pleased with this
contract and our hope is that it will help retain our current members as well
as rebuild our ranks. And then lastly I'd like to thank the City Council for
approving this contract and it is be sorry and it's continued investment
towards public safety. Thank you. Thank you so much Shane and congratulations to
you too captain Slater from all of us. Any other public comment with that? I'll
look for a motion. Move to approve items 2, G and H.
Second. Move to approve items 2, H and I. Second. All right roll
call please. Councilmember Francois? Aye. Councilmember Silva? Aye. Councilmember Davinney? Aye. Mayor Pro Temwall? Aye. And Mayor Darling? Aye.
And now we're down to 2P. 2P, alright. 2P. Oh that's, you pulled this one. I pulled that, yeah. This has to do with the crossing
guard services and I guess part of the whole public safety area that we just
discussed as well. So I had a couple of questions. Obviously we are for crossing
guards and I'm going to want to have crossing guards but rich if you're able
to come talk to this on staff or whoever is on staff's behalf that'd be great.
Evening council members my name is Brianna Byrne and I'm an associate
traffic engineer here at the city. Great thanks Brianna so just a few questions
here because this has to do with the the contract to a school crossing guard
services and I know there's been discussions over the last several years
and I think there's been well there have been changes at some point probably a few years ago so
just so that we understand better and the public understands better um does Mount
Diablo school district pay for any crossing guards in any other city? To my knowledge they do not uh
in similar situation for the Walnut Creek school. I'm sorry actually um council members oh oh great
thanks uh Brianna could you speak up a little bit please yeah so to my knowledge the Mount
around Diablo Unified School District
and the Walnut Creek School District do not participate
or host their own crossing guard programs.
I believe there might be a cost share
with the city of Martinez that has one school,
but when I followed up with that question,
I did not get a response.
Okay, and is this typical in California
that we see that cities usually bear the costs
of the crossing guards and not school districts?
So it can depend.
Locally, it is a lot of the school districts.
Several agencies nearby Pleasant Hill or Concord
have gotten away from their program.
So it does depend jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Okay, all right, thanks.
So obviously money is tight.
Cities, school districts, everything,
but crossing guards and the safety of our kids
are certainly most important.
That's all the questions that I had.
Thank you, anybody else have any questions?
Yeah, I was gonna pull the same item,
so I had a few comments.
Yeah, just one of the things that I was asked frequently
during the campaign process was how can the city
of Walnut Creek collaborate and support our schools?
And I think that's a really important item.
And when you look at this item, $1.6 million
to provide crossing guards, I mean, it's not a small number.
So I just, I'm happy to see that we're supporting the schools
this way I know to Mayor Pro Tem Wilkes point
not all cities support their schools that way.
So, you know, I think this is a great program
and then I also just look forward to finding other ways
to collaborate with the school district
to try to support them.
Yeah, and I too wanted to thank primarily the voters
for passing Measure O because we're able to fully fund
the crossing guards because of the extra revenue
that we get from Measure O,
take a little bit of the load off the school districts
that have a lot of other competing uses for their dollars.
So I'm happy to see that we're able to do this
thanks to Measure O.
And I repeat, I would reiterate that.
Measure O was a great accomplishment
and it really has helped us
meet the safety needs of our community.
So thank you.
And at this time,
is there any member of the public with comment?
Okay any public comment? Okay I'll go to Councilmember Silva. Thank you very much
and I just want to thank staff for working through with this contract. We
started this as a collaborative with Concord and the Mount Diablo School
Districts and the Walnut Creek School Districts maybe ten years ago and
finances have been tight since then both for schools and for the city. So Measure
always a great help, but I also want to say it's particularly challenging in
Walnut Creek because we have five school districts that this children of Walnut
Creek go to school in, so we have to make sure that it is equitable across these
multiple school districts, so thank you to staff for working on that as well.
Thank you, and I'm open for a motion. No, I move to approve item 2P and authorized
city manager to execute a consultant service agreement with our crossing
services. Second. We got a motion a second we'll call. Mayor Pro Tem Wilk. Aye.
Council member Divani. Aye. Council member Francois. Aye. Council member Silva. Aye. And Mayor Darden. Aye. Thank you guys. Now next on the agenda you've all been
waiting with baited breath it's for public communications this portion of the
meeting is reserved for comments on items not on the agenda under the Brown
Act the council cannot act on items raised during public communications but
may respond briefly to statements made or questions posed.
We may request clarification
or we may refer the item to staff.
Consistent with section 9.5 of the city council handbook,
30 minutes will be allocated,
so that will take us to 7.37 for public communication.
Additional time for public communication for items
not on the agenda will be provided
at the end of the meeting if necessary.
We have had a number of written comments submitted
and they have been posted on the city's website
for public review and are included in the meeting record
but will not be separately read into the record.
At this time it is 707 and we will take comments to 737.
I sense that there might be a few people in the room
that want to talk and I urge you to remember
that you don't need to repeat everything
that somebody said before you.
So feel free to use things like, I agree with that.
So anyway, go ahead and line up here.
All right.
Step forward, state your name, city residents.
I'm Ilana Weissman, I live in Walnut Creek.
And I'm here on behalf of 350 Contra Costa Action.
Big oil remains one of the most profitable sectors
of our economy without, oh, it's too high.
Yes, I'm a little shorter.
Big oil remains one of the most profitable sectors
of her economy without having to contribute a cent
to recovery from disasters from which they
are partially responsible.
It is well established that climate change resulting
from the burning of fossil fuels is making wildfires
and flooding more frequent and more intense.
It is well known that big oil has been aware
that their product causes global warming since the 1970s,
while at the same time denying that climate change is human driven.
Big oil must pay their fair share towards recovering from and preventing future California
climate disasters.
We, the California taxpayers, are shouldering most of the financial burden of wildfires
and flooding.
Our taxes have to cover the huge costs of infrastructure damage
and whatever isn't covered by insurance.
Our insurance premiums have to cover the enormous payouts
to the victims of climate disasters.
These premiums, as we all know, are rising along
with the insurance companies' increasing liabilities.
Walnut, 350 Contra Costa Action asks Walnut Creek
to join San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego
in passing a resolution in support of the Polluters Pay
Climate Fund Act.
Your support will help our legislators withstand pressure
from big oil to do the right thing.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Margot Thelander, I'm a Walnut Creek resident.
And a former resident has mentioned some of the things
I would say, but I would also mention
that these disasters are costing California taxpayers millions
of dollars every year and are driving a crisis
of affordability in our state.
So I'm here to strongly urge the City Council
to pass a resolution endorsing the California Climate Superfund
Act, also known as Assembly Bill 1243
and Senate Bill 684, companion bills.
On the purpose of the Climate Superfund Act is to require the largest oil and gas companies
to contribute their fair share to a dedicated fund within the State Treasury, and then this
fund would be funneled into projects crucial for California's survival from rebuilding
after devastating wildfires to fortifying infrastructure against floods, fires, and rising sea.
the entire burden of responding to climate change is borne by
California taxpayers. The Climate Superfund Act could generate
billions of dollars to offset the current state budget crisis.
It is a rare opportunity for the state to recoup some of the
costs of the climate crisis in California and allow us to
continue our trajectory towards a cleaner, greener economy. At a
time when budget cuts are threatening critical services and federal funding
for disaster recovery is in question the climate super fund would provide a new
long-term source of revenue to protect our communities from climate change. It
could provide Walnut Creek with the funds needed to implement our
sustainability action plan as well as to fund Cal Fire to continue to
develop firebreaks. Thank you very much. My name is Patricia Sheriff and I live
at 3441 Golden Rain Road in Rossmore. I want to use my two minutes to urge the
council to pass a resolution in support of the California Climate Superfund Act.
I want to address the oil company's erroneous propaganda that California
regulations are the cause for refinery closures.
First, it is increasingly expensive for big oil
to do business in California for technical reasons
in the refining process, thus eroding its profitability.
Unlike oil extracted elsewhere, California crude oil
is unusable as it leaves the ground.
It is A, dirty, and B, thick as peanut butter
and must undergo an expensive extraction process
to be usable.
To enable it to pass through pipelines,
lighter crude oil is imported from elsewhere
to dilute the dirty crude.
The new tariffs on Canadian and other foreign oil
also increase the cost.
Valero and Benicia and Phillips 66 in LA have, as a result,
been losing money for several years.
Secondly, the demand for gasoline in California
has been decreasing for many years.
There's not a shortage.
California exports a third of the oil it refines each year.
Despite all the costs of extraction,
the California fossil industry has made increasingly
larger profits in the last years.
The California oil majors reported a profit
of over $1 per gallon in 2023,
as a profit of over $1.68 billion in a year.
Should the Climate Superfund bill pass,
there will be just a 5% maximum cap
on the fee that can be charged to the huge oil company
profits.
So we needn't worry about the poor California fossil fuel
industry.
I urge Walnut Creek to pass a resolution in support.
My name is Carol Weed.
I live at 1277 Avenida, Sevilla, and Walnut Creek.
I'm urging the City Council to pass a resolution
in support of the California legislation
entitled Polluter's Pay Climate Superfund Act,
as several other California cities have done.
I believe our city has the ability to influence
our Assemblywoman, Rebecca Bauer-Cayham.
We need her vote on the Assembly Judiciary Committee.
I want to personally thank Mayor Cindy Darling
and Mayor Pro Tem Kevin Wilk and Councilmember Craig D'Vinny
for signing on to the letter
by the California elected officials
supporting this legislation.
The letter is being sent to Governor Newsom
and leaders of the California Assembly and Senate.
Its first paragraph states, quote,
''We the undersigned California elected officials
urge you to support the creation of a California Superfund
to protect California communities and taxpayers
from the climate emergency.
At the time when Californians face ever-increasing costs
from climate-driven disasters, we must make polluters pay
for the damage their products have wrought," unquote.
I also want to thank Walnut Creek's sustainability
manager, Candace Rankin-Mumbie, who supplied a wish list
of items the city council could invest climate superfund money
in.
At the top of her list is increasing the number
of city facilities with solar energy and battery storage.
At present, the city has no emergency energy storage.
The city of Walnut Creek has an extensive sustainability
action plan and has voted climate change and the environment
as top concerns for several years.
This is a timely opportunity to follow through
on your promises to residents and businesses.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening.
My name's Valerie Ventre-Hutton.
I live at 475 Summit Road in Walnut Creek, California.
And I'm respectfully asking the city council
to pass a resolution in support of Climate Superfund Act,
which you've just heard about from many others.
Polling from last year shows 70% of California voters
support requiring fossil fuel companies
to help pay for climate disaster costs
through a Climate Superfund bill.
The problem is that oil companies are spreading a myth
that the Climate Superfund will raise gas taxes.
and we know this is a great concern to people. California has
high gas prices. We know that. The problem is the Climate
Superfund will not raise the gas taxes, and I would like to
explain a few reasons why.
I have also entered something into the public record because
this is a very lengthy talk, and I have two minutes, so I am
not going to share that with you.
Why is it important to hear this? Well, global markets set
the oil prices. Individual companies and groups of companies
do not do that. Even OPEC, while they can influence global
can supply cannot dictate prices in specific reasons or for specific companies. Competition
drives gas prices. It may not feel like that when you're filling up, but they do. Seven
major oil companies provide gas and oil gasoline in California. Chevron, Marathon, you all
can probably name them. These are called branded companies. There's also unbranded companies,
and you know these, too. Costco, Rotten Robbie. If Company A charges a Superfund fee, raises
prices, people will go to cover the sea, which may not be charged
the Superfund price and wants to keep its prices low. The market
will help regulate the gasoline prices.
Finally, the California gas price gouging and transparency
law, very long name, passed a couple of years ago, is intended
to protect Californians from price gouging. The law prohibits
the refineries from passing on nonoperational costs to
consumers. A Superfund fee would be a nonoperational cost. It
would be charged to headquarters, not to the refineries, and not to the gasoline distributors.
Oil companies love to say, Cal, please pass the resolution.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Wow, that's far away from my bifocals, too.
Honorable council members and fellow residents of Walnut Creek.
My name is Ellen Lang, and I'm a physician, and I do live in Walnut Creek.
I'm here seeking your support for a Climate Superfund resolution, and I get to focus on
the human health impact of greenhouse gases
and their associated costs.
The burning of fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases,
and these are responsible for climate change.
These compounds mainly cause,
directly cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease
such as asthma, chronic lung disease, heart attacks.
Climate change also impacts human health
due to increases in wild flyers, flooding,
and extreme heat events.
Studies of the health-related economic costs of climate change in California are not plentiful.
However, there is some available data, and that includes a study from the UCLA Fielding
School of Public Health, which found that from 2008 to 2018, more than 52,000 premature
deaths in California were attributable to fine particulate matter from wildland fires.
The economic impact of these fires has estimated to be more than $430 billion that we as California
taxpayers have paid out.
The health effects of extreme heat were studied by the California Insurance Commissioner,
yay, from years 2013 to 2022.
These findings shows that seven extreme heat events resulted in nearly 460 deaths, more
than 5,000 hospitalizations, more than 10,000 emergency department visits, and associated
total costs of nearly five billion dollars. These effects and costs are
directly attributable to the largest fossil fuel polluters. In my opinion,
these polluters should be held responsible for damages, mitigation, and
cleanup as stipulated in the climate superfund bill. I urge you as city leaders
to pass a resolution in support of this bill. Thank you very much. Thank you. My
name is Karen Perkins. I live at 1935 Golden Rain Road, Walnut Creek. I also am
here to urge you to pass the resolution for the Climate Superfund Bill, and I want to
point out some of the good things that this money will go to, and I think the oil companies
that just got a huge tax break can afford to pay a little bit because otherwise the
taxpayers, us, will be paying for these things. But these are some of the good things. In
addition to paying for costly wildfires and health-related damage, the revenue generated
from this one-time tax will help generate resources our state needs to respond to climate
catastrophes and build climate-resilient neighborhoods.
Forty percent of the funds will be directed to disadvantaged communities.
Some examples of projects, including the creation of new jobs that revenue generated from this
bill could help pay for, include making schools more climate-resistant by upgrading air conditioning,
Californians now will spend an extra $200 million per year for more frequent air conditioning
and $1 billion per year on road damage, distribute air filters to homes in wildfire-prone areas,
help local governments manage the impacts of sea level rise along the coast, and direct
additional resources to our firefighters and first respondents.
So I really hope that you pass this resolution and thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Hina Fuller.
I'm not a resident of Walnut Creek.
I live in Alamo, but I have been working as a psychiatrist in Walnut Creek for
the last nine years and currently I'm at 1910 olympic boulevard.
And I am here also for the same reason that I really want to urge the Walnut
Creek City Council to pass the resolution
in support of California's Superfund Bill.
As a psychiatrist, I have been seeing over the years
that how many of my patients are directly affected
by climate change, especially young individuals
with a lot of anxiety, a lot of risk of their mothers
who have a hard time sleeping or having panic attacks.
And it's creating so much destabilization in our community.
there's also overall risks.
You know, like the existential concerns
in young individuals, which creates a lot of anxiety.
And I think Walnut Creek City will show
not only a symbolic support,
but also the promise of the revenue
that this bill can bring will give us hope,
like all my patients, and our way in the community,
that we care about them and mitigating
what these big fossil fuel industries
are doing to us in our future.
So thank you, I just hope that you support that.
I appreciate it.
Good evening.
My name's Herb Solomon, I live in Rossmore.
A letter was sent to Mayor Darling
and to a lot of us from Heidi Harmon,
who's the past mayor of San Luis Obispo.
I'm gonna paraphrase some of her sentiments.
She is a longtime climate advocate
and she urges you to pass a resolution
in support of California's Make Polluters Pay legislation.
It would create a super fund
to help pay for the damage that's been done.
As a former mayor, she understands firsthand
how challenging it is to keep a city running,
even in the best of times.
The growing impact of climate crisis
and the immense financial strain they place
on local governments can be terrifying.
The Make Polluters Pay Bill is designed
to help communities recover by ensuring
that fossil fuel companies bear responsibility.
Passing a resolution is more than just a symbolic gesture.
It's an effective way for cities to communicate
to the state legislature that local governments are
demanding meaningful financial support in the face of escalating climate disasters.
Waiting will be too late.
This is a critical time to influence legislation that could bring long overdue relief to communities.
She urges all of you to move forward and join the growing number of cities like San Diego
in Los Angeles standing up for fairness, accountability and climate change.
She signs it in gratitude, Heidi Harmon.
I think that all of us understand that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My name is Marsha Lieberson.
I'm the one that has written most of you and called you to ask you to put this on the agenda.
So again, I'm here to support this bill and I want to invalidate an argument against this
bill. The argument is why bother with this when California is already engaged in cap
and trade? Well, we know that this cap and trade program has generated great revenue
in the past. It's a program based on allowing polluters to subsidize their pollution in
buying allowances. So basically, it allows them to continue to pollute, but yet funnel
the money into programs, environmental programs that do benefit California.
But recently, cap and trade has lost up to $3 billion in potential revenue from a plunge
in these allowance prices, which are the cost of permits that polluters can purchase in
exchange for their emissions.
There's no signs that there's a recovery ahead for cap and trade.
the August 20th auction this year. So, again, another loss in revenue from cap and trade
yet will allow the polluters to continue pollute. I also want to mention again in summary that
cap and trade is not a valid argument to say that since we're engaged in it, then everything
is okay. So, another city that has passed a resolution is Albany and we know that the
States of Vermont and New York actually passed the bill last year. Please, please
pass the City resolution supporting this. Thank you very much. Thank you. My
name is Laura Bernan. I live at 2841 Golden Rain Road in Walnut Creek. I
also am here to urge you to keep working on the passage of SB 684 and AB 1243. We
We are grateful that the bill will be studied in the next two years.
You all know that with the federal government at this time doing all that it can to dismantle
the EPA and other safeguards for clean air and water quality, that puts the burden and
the onus and the responsibility more and more at the state and local level.
And as you all know, California has led the nation in clean air and water for decades
and decades.
So all I want to add to this is that we cannot stop holding polluters accountable.
And we have a way to have them pay for some of that pollution that will benefit our clean
air and clean water efforts.
I trust and we trust, all of us here,
that Walnut Creek will continue their part
in this noble and essential work
to protect the air and water quality
of Contra Costa County.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Evening.
My name is Philip Mertz,
living at 1209 Skycrest Drive,
Rossmoor, Walnut Creek.
And I'm not gonna repeat everything that was well said
by members of Sustainable Rossmore Club, in most cases.
Thank you, those on the board, council,
who have already voted for this,
and please consider voting for the resolution
and also empowering Rebecca Bauer, Kahane, to do the same.
Thank you very much for looking out
for our future and our children,
and stopping the destruction of our environment.
Thank you.
Good evening.
My name is Elliot Curtis, and I live at 2601 Tarmigan Drive in Walnut Creek.
I'm urging you to support the polluters pay climate fund act, and I listened to everyone
say what I was going to say, and I decided to say something personal.
I moved here 10 years ago and I moved from Connecticut and I come out here and I see
wildfires, floods, and all other kinds of things that are going to ruin our life.
So I took it upon myself.
I have 48 units in my entry.
And I decided I'm going to have a team,
and I joined the emergency preparedness organization.
And I got eight people to come on my team just for our entry
to make sure everyone in our entry does everything they can
and know what they need to know about saving our Earth
and saving themselves in any kind of event that can harm us.
And that has sustained for eight years in the same team I started with,
except for one person who moved away.
The same team has stayed intact.
And we, anytime anyone has a question, one of us is there to answer it.
And I urge you, I urge you to support this act.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Any additional public comment?
You guys are good.
You made it, you had six minutes left.
As we've explained, we can't take action on things
from public comment if there are any brief remarks
from the council.
Anybody feel so?
I think that we have a legislative committee, right?
And maybe we could take this to the legislative committee
for discussion and see if it's something
that needs to be brought back to the,
or that could be brought back to the council
for discussion on the agenda.
Yeah, I see the value in doing that.
I think the legislative committee would be a good resource
to consider the item.
I just wanted to commend all the speakers too.
I didn't hear you duplicate one another,
and as the questions were kind of going in my mind,
each of you sort of answered them,
and so I appreciate you being prepared and organized
and comprehensive in your presentation.
I was just texting Carol Weed.
I was gonna send you a text that said the exact same thing.
You guys did a good job getting yourselves organized.
Absolutely, thanks for coming at well-organized.
Being on the legislative committee,
I mean, so it sounds like we've got the two members,
at least two of the three members
that are not on the Ledge Committee
that have suggested that this be reviewed
by the legislative committee.
So certainly far be it for me to say that that shouldn't be the case.
Yeah, I think do we need, if we refer this to staff to discuss with the legislative committee,
do we need a vote on that or?
You certainly could, otherwise if there's consensus amongst the five of you, direction
would be fine to do so.
I think direction to discuss it with the legislative committee would be a fine outcome there.
So thank you all for coming tonight.
And now we will move on to council member and staff announcements, reports on activities
and requests and city attorney, any closed session?
There are no reports from closed session.
City manager.
Yeah, good evening, Dan Buckshi, city manager.
I do have one update this evening.
I'm pleased to report that the project to install new lights at Tice Field was completed
on July 8th and the lights are fully operational.
So, thank you to all of our staff
who have been involved in that project.
And also, thanks to our partners at PG&E
for getting it electrified sooner than later,
which is a very nice relief to get that done.
The fields are in need of a little bit of repair,
so they're recovering, and shortly,
in the not-too-distant future, rather,
the fields will be back open for play.
And I should highlight that
in terms of capital projects, anyway.
This is the first of the Measure O-funded capital projects
to be fully completed, so it's another milestone
in addition to some of the other services
we discussed earlier being funded by Meturo.
Thank you.
Council member reports on activities.
Council member Francois.
Yes. Take it off.
All right, thank you, mayor.
I saw you scribbling.
I was scribbling, I was gonna scribble some more,
but I will continue.
Along with council member Silva,
I serve as the city's representatives to Recycle Smart,
which is the Joint Powers Authority with responsibility
over composting, recycling, and landfill trash disposal
and hopefully in that order.
And we are in the process of narrowing down a list.
We had two proposers that made bids
for our collection services contract
for the next 10 years from 2027 to 2037.
And we will be making a final decision
on awarding that contract at our July 24th board meeting.
That meeting will be here in Walnut Creek City Hall.
It'll be on the third floor, not in this room.
So July 24th at 3 p.m.
If you're interested and wanna provide public comment,
of course you could provide emails
to the Recycle Smart Board Authority before that hearing
or of course public comment is accepted
at the hearing as well.
I think we've reached, you know,
based on environmental concerns and cost concerns
and sustainability and all these various different factors,
I think we've made a good, we'll serve on the ad hoc committee
on the collections services contract.
I think we'll be making a good, strong recommendation
to the full board for action.
Some of the items which are currently add-on items,
but I think the full board will support the committee
and including them in the contract,
include items like equalizing the accessibility
to composting services in multifamily
and commercial establishments,
to allowing for each residential unit
to get an extra green bin and a blue bin on request
that that will be provided free of charge,
and that there'll be also on-call extra service pickups.
So we'll be discussing all those items.
I hope I've been, I know I've enticed
maybe some of the people in the audience here,
but maybe some of the people out watching on television too.
So July 24th at 3 p.m. will be awarding that contract.
And if you have any public comment, please come and see us.
I also serve as the council liaison
to the Walnut Creek downtown.
We had a great presentation from them this evening,
so I won't repeat a lot of that.
I just want to highlight that they do have
a new interactive website, walnutcreekdowntown.com,
all one word, and it's really very user-friendly
and kind of night and day from the website before
that you can get access, you can find restaurants,
you can find retailers, you can find public art
on their website, in addition to all the events
they're hosting, with an interactive map
and then links to the establishment's website.
So really excited about that.
And then along with, they are underway on a vision,
a three-year vision plan for Walnut Creek downtown,
which is a close partnership with the city
and Council Member Davini and I were interviewed yesterday
on that and provided feedback.
And that's my report.
Thank you Councilmember Silva from the wilds of Ohio.
Oh yes, from the wilds in Columbus, Ohio.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the meeting,
I am in Columbus, Ohio for a three day meeting
of the National League of Cities.
It's their summer leadership meeting
and I'm a part of that leadership team.
There's probably 300 of us from around the country
that are here but I'm part of that team
as the vice chair of the NLC committee,
policy committee on community and economic development.
One of the things we'll be doing this week
is a series of mobile tours in Columbus.
And I'm looking forward to the mobile tour
that is a visit to a company that is taking
a modular approach to the building of affordable housing
and seeing how that's working
and how it actually then comes to fruition in the field.
and I want to see how it compares with that Hope Solutions did with the building industry.
Also we're slated to get an assessment on how the, I don't even know the name of that budget bill,
but the budget bill will actually be impacting cities, towns, and villages across the country
and that should be really important and I look forward to being able to share that.
The on June 20th, I attended on behalf of the city of Walnut Creek, the Association of
Barrier Republic, the General Assembly, I was the alternate delegate, but I was able
to represent there were two items on the budget.
One was the approval of the annual budget and the other was the approval, some changes
to the bylaws of a bag.
There was also a presentation done by Chris Thornburg, who is the head of Beacon Economics,
and it was very interesting because he presented perspectives
on what's good, what's not, and how our,
I think his perception is that the media
is giving us all different perceptions
of what's happening economically across the country
and it may not be as bad or as good,
depending on your perspective, as we all think it might be.
The Cal Cities Board will have its summer meeting
on Thursday and Friday this week
And I will be there as well.
And I was just reappointed to my seat for two years
as a at-large director and member of the Cal Cities Board.
The ABEC Administrative Committee meeting met,
what Administrative Committee met last week.
And we have two interesting reports just for information.
One was on the progress on electrification
and what, you know, really what we see in the future
in the next 10 years, given what's happening
at the federal level.
And then the second was on wildfire hazards
and ABAC was asking the question,
what can they do to help all of our cities
to address the wildfire issues?
And would it be resources, consulting services, et cetera?
But I think the majority of us were really trying
to point out to ABAC that the one issue
that's really critical is the loss of housing inventory
as a result of wildfires and what that impacts
to our goals to address the housing crisis
and the housing affordability crisis in this state.
And I just want to mention that thanks to our small
and mighty team of the city manager,
the assistant city manager, and my husband and I,
we represented Walnut Creek well at the City Pack event
two weeks ago and we won the cornhole tournament
and we were all shocked.
So next year, come out and help us
because it's actually very important
that we raise funds to support
the Political Action Committee
of the League of California Cities.
And thank you very much
and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Thank you.
Councilor Dapini.
Good evening.
I thought that Supervisor Anderson being here
and talking about the Iron Horse
was timely, two of the meetings I had
were about bike infrastructure and our trail system.
I met with John Mercurio,
who's our East Bay Parks District Representative
for Ward 6, that covers Walnut Creek
and a large portion of the Mount Diablo area,
the Iron Horse Trail, Regional Trails and Parks,
and then also met with some of our boardmen,
our city engineer and Matt Redman, our traffic engineer,
to talk about our bike master plan.
We talked about the Shadelands multimodal plan
and the Olympic corridor trail,
trying to connect the Arinda Moraga bike system
to the Iron Horse bike system.
And it looks like the city goals
and the East Bay Regional Parks goals aligned there.
John was very enthusiastic about the Olympic corridor.
And in addition to that,
another project that's been proposed
is connecting Oak Grove over the Lime Ridge open space
to New Hall Community Park.
A portion of that runs through Walnut Creek,
so that would be something that we'd
have the opportunity to participate in.
There's a Homestead Park to the Iron Horse Trail,
and then improvements to the YVR Canal Trail
through that corrugated steel tunnel.
And there were a number of other projects as well,
but those are just a few.
So these are opportunities for future improvements
in our bike and walking infrastructure.
Also met with the Wellness Alliance Committee
last Wednesday at the Chamber of Commerce.
They are working to establish Walnut Creek,
further establish Walnut Creek
as a center for health and wellness.
It was very well attended, the almost standing room only,
and where businesses represented there,
ranging from massage and chiropractics, wellness coaching.
We had a lecture on pulsed electromagnetic field therapy.
So this is an alliance that's growing quickly.
I think the website is still in construction,
but I think it will be another great resource
for the community.
Attended the opening of Beyond Color at the Bedford.
That's a black and white exhibit.
It was quite a contrast to their last exhibit,
which was extremely colorful.
And so just seeing the room in a different light
in a different space was cool.
This particular showing is done by jury selection.
So it's blinded.
They have the art pieces there.
The jury votes on them.
And so there are a lot of local artists represented
and a lot of the artists for sale.
So an opportunity to purchase top notch art,
if you're interested.
I recommend going by to see it.
My favorite was a picture of a dog face,
kind of looked like it was looking down on you,
this big dog, and it was called Dad It's Time to Wake Up.
And also, as council member Francois mentioned,
we were interviewed for our Walnut Creek downtown
vision plan, and I thought that was a really productive
conversation, and I look forward to seeing
their vision plan in the near future.
Thank you.
Mayor Portem.
All right.
A few things over the last week, week and a half that I was able to attend.
One was the City Bike Rodeo that Walnut Creek PD and Public Works was involved in.
And really it's addressing e-bikes.
There was an obstacle course out, well, not so much an obstacle course, more of just a
course so that whether it's children or even adults could get familiar with the rules of
the road when it comes to e-bikes.
Along with speeding in our streets, these are the top two issues that I get from phone
calls, emails, what I see on next door in social media is e-bikes, and we've talked
about that before where when people are riding e-bikes, they're not licensed, and they can
be a hazard to drivers and themselves and pedestrians.
So thank you to the police department for really helping to organize that.
This is not the last you're going to hear on this.
I think we have a lot of discussions that are coming up about this as well.
And Walnut Creek's not alone.
Cities up and down the state are having these same conversations because this is an issue
that we're all dealing with.
I was also at the Bedford Gallery beyond color opening.
It's bring your best black and white glasses, I guess.
It was terrific to see.
And congratulations on staff for what looks like it's going to be a great exhibit.
And then I was, I'm a member of trans PAC, which deals with a lot of the transportation
issues in Contra Costa County.
And we're going to bring up a topic just so that people are familiar of what's being discussed
in long range.
Don't inundate our centers with calls, and this is something that is years in the future,
but I do think it's important to bring up, and that is that there's a lot of discussion
right now with bus on shoulder and how we can help to enhance public transit.
So there are statewide bills that are being discussed about having buses be able to drive
along the shoulders of freeways, especially during commute times, to be able to get to
point A to point B and point C faster.
CHP is having discussions about this as well.
They've got concerns, but these conversations are continuing to evolve.
So I'm hoping that we see some good, productive bills that come out of this and how this will
eventually work.
One of the other things that's being discussed is how this could also work with regional
roads like Treat or like Ignacio Valley Road and potentially using one lane to be for public
transit only.
Now that got my hairs on edge because I think we all know what it's like on Ignacio Valley
Road when one lane is shut down during non-commute times for maintenance work.
And so I made this known to the people that were at CCTA that were presenting this that
this has to be a discussion that involves our own city, that involves multiple different
entities because there's no way right now with the way things are that we could look
at Ignacio Valley Road or any of these major regional roads shutting down a lane for public
transit only. As much as I want public transit to continue to do well and
people continue to take it, we also have to be realistic of what that would mean
to traffic, whether it's commute or non-commute times, in our cities and in
our region. So just putting that out there so that people at least are paying
attention to what's going on at the county and the regional levels for these
kind of conversations. That's my report. Alright, thank you. And I'll finish up a
A couple things, MCE, a while back,
the California electricity market is very much in flex.
We did hit two thirds of the power used in California
in 2024 was from renewable sources,
which was a great milestone,
but we're still struggling with the duck belt curve
and the hours of four to nine when the sun is not shining
and people are still using electricity.
One of the things that we are going to be looking at
with MCE is whether we roll out,
right now we have a light green option,
which is predominantly renewable,
a deep green option, which is 100% renewable,
but it's not guaranteed to be renewable 24 hours a day.
They're looking as they upgrade their technology
and as they better understand the market,
they are rolling out as a trial product power
that you can purchase that is renewable 24 hours a day.
that will probably first only be available
to municipal customers.
Many cities have a lot of different types of accounts
and so they're looking for just some test places to do that.
We are hoping that the market stabilizes,
we've seen some good signs that the peaks in power costs
in the four to nine time period have died down a little bit
but they're still, we're struggling a little bit with that.
They also are going to have,
They have some additional money available
for energy storage projects and city staff
are looking at whether or not any of the projects
that we might bring on board would be eligible
to compete for that money.
The mayor's conference, district attorney Diana Becton
came and gave us a great presentation on the work
that her office is doing and on everything
from organized crime to restorative justice
for the juveniles in the system.
That was a really good presentation.
We had the council member, or Mayor Pro Tem and I had the breakfast with the chairs of
the different commissions last week, and one of the things we talked about is one of the
pieces of state legislation that got passed exempts a lot of different types of projects
from the California Environmental Quality Act, and we are, you know, we got a strong
request from them that we get some guidance to them on what this all means, and I think
We're all still sorting through that.
And now my phone just went dead.
So, as part of our economic development plan,
the staff and I go out and do mayor's visits.
We did one with UCSF and Children's Hospital, Benioff.
They have a children's center here in Walnut Creek.
And we got to go out and tour that.
It really was a great opportunity to see a space
that they had designed around the youngest patients
so that kids coming in to get chemo
can get it in a safe space
where their family can be with them.
They have PT that is designed.
They don't have to go in there and do PT.
We all do PT all the time at our age,
but kids that are doing PT, they have juvenile PT.
The other one that we got to do as a mayor's visit
was Joy Bound People and Pets.
That was this morning.
And I think I still have the cats in my bag.
don't tell my husband I'm bringing them home.
But we got a great tour of their facilities.
They do a lot of great work out there
and talk about their expansion plans.
They're talking about building a new facility that
has boarding opportunities for it.
They already do grooming on site as a service
to the public, a paid service.
And then they'd have boarding in the same kind
of high quality care in the new Joy Bound facility there.
So that was fun to see.
We've cut a bunch of ribbons.
The Book Friends, which is the Library of Pleasant Hill,
has a great bookstore out by Pete's on Ignacio.
And it's their one-year anniversary.
And they had a lot of great books there.
It's all run by volunteers.
And the money goes back into the library system.
Rivian is one of our new electric vehicle companies.
And they moved into Broadway Plaza.
So we got to go down.
I got to sit in one of those and spell the letter.
It was really good.
Highline jewelry, has jewelry that is Highline.
It was interesting, it was a great family story.
They started out with just a jewelry cart at a mall
and they have built a very successful company.
They cater to members of the Warriors,
Niners, other folks like that have shopped there.
So I didn't see anything that my husband could afford,
but that's okay.
And what else?
I went to be on color at Bedford
and throwing my husband completely under the bus.
There was a really great painting.
It was only $2,000 and we decided not to buy that,
but it was a really good exhibit.
And then we got to do the new hire event.
I think you were there for that.
And I think council member Silver was there
and it's always great to meet the new city employees
and bring them into the Walnut Creek family.
And so it was great to meet our new employees
and really appreciate so much work
that the staff does in every which way.
And it's always great to have new members
of the team coming on board.
And that is my report.
And now we will take a short break
and be back at eight o'clock.
All right, I'll call us back in.
Next on the agenda is a public hearing
for the consideration of waving,
reading and introduction of an ordinance
amending various sections of Title 10 and other things.
and I will turn to staff for a presentation.
Okay, thank you.
Good evening, Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem
and members of the Council.
I'm Crystal DiCastro, Acting Principal Planner
for the Community Development Department
and the proposed item tonight
is a general plan amendment
and various amendments to the zoning code.
As a note, an errata sheet was provided
prior to this meeting,
so if approved, the amendments to the zoning ordinance
will also incorporate the revisions
provided in the errata sheet.
So just for some background, California or the state of California continues to pass laws
to increase housing production and streamline local land use regulations. As a result,
cities must update their general plan and zoning ordinances to stay in compliance.
The purpose of these amendments are to ensure compliance with the state law,
streamline our processes, and provide greater clarity. The proposed amendments are primarily
administrative and procedural in nature. They align the city's general plan and
the zoning ordinance with current state laws and reflect the city's existing
practices. So the first one we'll begin with is the general plan amendment. This
general plan amendment is to our existing general plan policy 9.3 and 9.3
is a growth control policy which limits residential development by placing a
housing cap. So under Senate Bill 330, cities cannot impose residential growth
control policies that conflict with their obligation to provide housing. The
city's housing element also calls for the removal of this growth policy in
order to comply with state law. So the proposed amendment would remove this
policy from the general plan and then aligns and it would also align the state
law, align our general plan with the state law, and support the city's goals
to promote the production of housing. So the next five slides addresses
amendments to the zoning code and this first one relates to bedroom additions.
Currently the existing code provides that a minor use permit with a public
hearing is required for bedroom additions evolving non-conforming
structures or uses. Under AB 916 cities are prohibited from requiring a public
hearing for any project that adds up to two bedrooms within an existing home.
This would be reflected in our zoning code by amending the code to allow
non-conforming bedroom additions to be reviewed ministerially, meaning at staff
level with no public hearing. In addition, if the project triggers any
related parking requirements, such a project would be subject to review and
approval by the community development director which is still staff level and
no public hearing. The next one is permit expirations. So under Assembly Bill
2117 the time spent in a lawsuit or a legal proceeding cannot count towards
expiration or timeline thereby extending the expiration date of that project. This
amendment updates the zoning code to reflect AB 2117 pausing the expiration
timeline for approved projects that are delayed due by legal proceedings or
actions such as an appeal, litigation, or lawsuits. The timeline would then resume
once the the action is resolved. So noticing requirements have also been
updated by the state law. Under Assembly Bill 2904, the noticing period for a
zoning ordinance or an amendment to a zoning ordinance is increased from 10
days to 20 days. This only applies to Planning Commission notices and not City
Council noticing. Accessory dwelling units on multi-family residential lots
have also been affected. The city's current code has been superseded by
Senate Bill 1211. The 1211 bill expands a number of detached ADUs allowed. It now
depends on whether the multi-family lot has a proposed development or an
existing development. So a proposed development is allowed up to two
detached ADUs. This applies to lots where a multifamily development has
proposed plans, under review, was granted approval, or has been issued a building
permit. The key factor here is that the development on these lots have not yet
been built or finaled, as opposed to an existing development. They're allowed up
to eight detached ADUs or one ADU per existing unit,
whichever is less.
This applies only if there is already
an existing unit on the lot.
An existing unit would be defined
as an existing primary unit or an existing ADU unit.
And finally, the minor code cleanups
for internal consistency.
These changes will clarify objective standards
for all ADU lots.
And then the word junior is added to development standards
for JADU or Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit Parking and lastly clarifying the
fence heights for homes on corner lots. In conclusion on June 26th the Planning
Commission considered and approved recommend recommendation to Council for
these amendments. So staff recommends that Council waive the first reading and
introduce the zoning ordinance including the changes on the erotic sheet
provided, adopt the resolution approving the general plan amendment, and then
finally make CEQA exemption findings. This concludes the presentation and
staff is available for any questions. Thank you very much and thank you for
attending to all the detail. I appreciate organized minds looking at this.
Questions for Council Member Dafini. Thank you. I have a question about the
detached ADUs you said that for an existing property you are allowed one
detached ADU per structure or per dwelling unit and does an attached ADU
count as a unit for you then to be able to build a detached ADU? No it wouldn't
it wouldn't be part of the existing unit count.
Okay.
So it's multifamily,
it's for multifamily homes, duplexes, triplexes,
things like that.
Okay.
Council Member Silva.
Council Member Francois.
Sure, why not?
I saw some of the nice presentation, by the way,
made it very simple to understand.
There were some revisions, I think,
to add the word appeal in the tolling period for the permits.
And I just wanted to confirm that my understanding
of that state law was that it tolls the permit life
during like a legal challenge,
but not an administrative appeal.
Is that the intent of the changed language there?
I would have to refer to legal on that.
That's correct.
Okay, that's all I have, thank you.
Okay, Mayor Pro Tem, I think you've done a great job here
and I appreciate the clarifications that came out
and all the work you guys did on that.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Go ahead now and open it up for public comment.
Seeing nobody, I'll bring it back up here for discussion
and or a motion.
I'll move to, unless there's a lot of debate on this,
to waive the first reading and introduce a proposed ordinance
amending the zoning ordinance,
including the changes on the errata sheet
provided this evening.
Can I keep going?
And I'll second that.
Adopt a resolution approving the general plan
to remove policy 9.3 and make the CEQA exemption findings.
And reflecting the changes that were in the staff report,
there was a couple minor things.
I think that was just for number one.
And yes.
Okay, I second.
Roll call.
Council member Francois.
Aye.
Mayor Darling.
Aye.
Council member Davini.
Aye.
Mayor Pro Tem Wilk.
Aye.
All right.
That was fun.
So now we'll move on to the next one is consideration of the adoption of a resolution approving
the guidelines for the downtown permitted outdoor dining structure otherwise known as
PODS incentive program and I invite staff to come up here and give us a presentation.
Good evening, Mayor Darling, Pro Tem Wilk, members of City Council, members of the public.
I'm Mike Nieman, your economic development manager.
And this item in front of you is the incentive program
for the outdoor dining pods.
As you may recall, we have had quite a history
of outside dining here in our downtown.
With over 120 restaurants,
there's always been an outdoor dining component
even before COVID.
COVID brought light to that in particular
because a lot of retail was closed.
So that put a lot of emphasis and pressure
and an opportunity to go outside.
And that's where there has been a surge
in outdoor dining via parklets on the public right of way.
That has been very successful here and vibrant
during early COVID in 2020.
But that has gone away after the ending
of the emergency order by the governor.
And given the popularity of that concept in downtown
and positive input, there has been an emergence
of what we call the ODP, the Outdoor Dining Program,
that has taken over a year to develop.
There's been a robust input process.
A lot of stakeholders came together.
There was a city council ad hoc subcommittee,
and that gave way for this ODP program
that is a multi-faceted program.
It includes a lot of different components.
And that was adopted in December of 2022
with components including land use requirements,
parking impacts, there was building and traffic safety,
design and considerations,
a number of other enhancements
and the process of how restaurants were to go about it.
That program includes the downtown core
as well as some of the broader downtown areas.
You can see the map here in the north and south parts
of downtown in particular.
And it includes a number of outdoor dining components.
So it's important to point out that it's
more than just the park lots.
It includes the tables and chairs,
which are also called sidewalk dining.
Those are on the sidewalk.
Many restaurants have those.
There are city patios.
There are what we call PODS.
And PODS stands for Permitted Outside Dining Structure, which
could be with or without a roof.
And that's the crux of the incentive program
we'll talk about tonight.
But also there are private patios and private parking
lots that are all part of the ODP as adopted in 2022.
Most of these components have been successful since.
And you could see various examples
as you walk through downtown.
But interestingly, the pods component,
there's only been one restaurant that has delivered a pod
after the program adoption.
So we've gotten some input as to why that is the case.
And the biggest input that we've received from restaurants
is cost.
And there is a cost to construction of these pods.
And then there's an ongoing cost because the program
includes rent to the city.
So both of these add up to the total cost
for some of the restaurants.
So given that in May of 2025, council expressed interest
in looking at various incentives to bring more pod activity.
And on June 3, council directed staff
to set aside $100,000 for incentivizing pods,
as you'll see in the proposal in front of you tonight.
And June 17th, the last meeting,
those funds were appropriated
from the Downtown Parking Management Fund,
and I'm here to share some of the guidelines
reflective of this input.
And as you can see here,
we're talking about $100,000 program.
The program would be consisting of 10,000 per restaurant
on the first-come, first-served basis.
By first-come, first-served,
we mean the pod would need to be completed
in order for the restaurant to apply for the incentive.
We would apply retroactively going back
to the adoption of the original ODP,
so a restaurant that has already delivered a pod
would be eligible to apply.
There would be a time limit and we envision
through the end of this calendar year
for restaurants to apply in order to incentivize
the timeliness of delivery of the pods.
The eligibility would be basically good standing
as defined through whether it's having
an active business license, having proof of insurance,
which is a requirement under the grant,
good standing with the police department
and code enforcement and no outstanding city obligations,
tax liens or debt.
The use of funds would be for business expenses
related to rent, working capital, inventory, or payroll.
And the application would have a self-certification area
for that.
And the process would be via a signed grant application
that would be submitted to the economic development.
And we would deploy the funds upon the final inspection
of the pods subject to.
And the overall spirit of this proposal
is to try to make it as simple as possible
to really streamline the process.
And with that, the recommendation from staff
would be to adopt the resolution,
approving the guidelines for the PAWS incentive program.
And we're here to take your input
and answer any questions.
Thank you, Mike.
And thank you for turning this one around so quickly
from the budget adoption.
Questions?
Your pro tem?
Sure, thank you.
Thank you, Mike.
So question, what do we hear is the main reason
that restaurants are not building pods currently?
Well, it's the cost.
It's the fact that it's, and it's always more than the cost.
But primarily, the cost is the fact
that revenues have been a little bit lower than before.
There's been a lot of turbulence in the broader economy
that created uncertainty.
So kind of given that background,
restaurants are particularly sensitive to the cost.
So is it the cost of building or what they feel
will be the ongoing cost afterwards?
It's both.
So it says maximum $10,000 per restaurant.
I assume therefore that some would get 5,000,
some would get 10,000.
It would be 10,000 across the board.
It would be, okay.
The way that it's currently envisioned.
And is that predicated upon the kind of restaurant
than it is if it's a larger restaurant versus a smaller one
or versus a coffee shop?
Yeah, the idea here is, and this certainly can open
for interpretation and input from council,
but the idea from staff would be to make it
as simple as possible.
There is a number of considerations that we've made
in order to incentivize delivery of pods.
We started with outreach, and to do outreach,
we shared what the design standards are.
We made sure that we have dedicated staff
to guide restaurants through the process
that's been well received.
There was a dialogue, we've learned
that there are some considerations related to the cost.
So we've worked with restaurants to potentially come up
with some designs that would produce
some of the construction cost elements.
So that's been well received.
And then we see this as being kind of the last component
of being an incentive.
So we thought that it would be a simpler process
from the implementation standpoint
to make it 10,000 per restaurant
to kind of bridge the gap because that gap
would really vary, and to your point,
there's a number of considerations, right?
Some restaurants may want a larger pot.
Some may want it with a roof versus without the roof.
There is a range in building materials.
There are considerations about location.
So the thinking from staff was that if we start introducing
some of those complexities, it kind of makes the program
a little bit more challenging and potentially less certain
for restaurants to understand how much they would get.
So having a $10,000 incentive would not only be simple,
but hopefully enough to bridge the gap.
Given that we're working closely with them,
we're engaged in a dialogue.
where we're working through creative designs that would help them reduce costs.
So that's that's the rationale.
OK, and lastly, then, would this money is the idea that it would be given
up front or as a reimbursement after it's built?
Yeah, the idea here that it would be given as a reimbursement.
So first of all, we would have a restaurant apply that would get
the application would get approved and they would build a pod.
and then upon the final inspection of the pod,
they would be eligible to apply for the reimbursement.
Gotcha, okay, thank you.
Any other questions?
Council Member Silva?
Yes, I have some questions.
Thank you very much for the presentation
and for turning this around so quickly.
So actually, I wanna start where you left off
with Council Member Wilk was asking about,
so it's going to be a flat $10,000.
So basically it's up to 10 restaurants.
Yes.
Okay, so one of, sorry, it's almost midnight here,
so I'm working on a little less energy than,
so you just said they would apply for the grant,
receive approval of the application,
but in order to receive the money,
they have to have the construction completed
signed off and the you know basically open for business before December. That's
correct they would they would be eligible to apply for the grant after
they have applied and been approved and completed the pod and both the
completion of the pod and the application would be before the end of
December of this year. Okay do we have any idea I mean we have one pod that's
been completed and we heard comments and feedback that it was too expensive to
build and to operate. To what extent did we look at what the costs, the actual
costs were, do we have any proformas done, any samples done, do we have any data
because, well, yeah, on behalf of it, on behalf of the taxpayers we should be
asking those questions and I'm sure you all have so would you be willing to tell us what it is?
Yes, absolutely. We do have data and we use data as the basis for this decision. The main caveat
before I talk about the data is that it happens to be all over the place because of the range
and some of the variables that are at play here. So first we got a pro forma from an operator
And we reviewed that carefully.
And what that pro forma showed from the operator standpoint
that it would take about seven years
to recoup that investment.
So, and it was to justify that it was not a really,
it was not a very robust investment from their standpoint.
Now, there is a number of assumptions in that pro forma.
One of those assumptions was they would only be able
to use that pod, the value of the pod,
would be during the busiest time,
which was several hours Friday, Saturday night.
So that was one of the underlying assumptions
that's really critical.
What is really the value of that pot?
Is that kind of a marginal space
only when they're pushing capacity inside?
Or is it really what we've heard from other restaurants
and then the answer to the quality
of the service altogether?
There's a marketing component
because it activates the storefront.
There may be people walking by
who see the food showcased.
So it's not necessarily just an additional operating space
as much as an overall enhancement in guest experience.
So if you look at it through that lens,
perhaps it's something that could be utilized more
and that really shortens the return on investment
from the operator.
So running some sensitivities on that,
we thought that it would be conceivable
that the return could be made back much sooner
within a several year time frame,
which would be much more in line with other types
of investments.
We also looked at it through different plans, which
is what is the cost for someone to build a pod,
even with the addition of the rent,
relative to the building space?
And how much are they paying in the rent for building space?
So it's almost like if you were to look
at expansion of the existing building,
And it seemed to have been, again,
that there is a range of rents.
But depending on the type of building,
it could be more cost-effective to build a pod,
even though it's not the same apples to apples,
because it's not necessarily adjacent building space.
But if you look at it as an enhancing dining experience,
it's more cost-effective.
And then the last caveat, I would
say that there is a range of pod costs that
could vary substantially.
And that's what I mentioned earlier.
If you were to have a pod with the roof,
if you were to have nicer features,
the cost of it would be substantially higher
than if you were to build a lighter design.
So that's where some of the considerations of the Proforma
have been substantiated with some of the conversations
we had with restaurateurs, where it's something
that they're interested in and they were looking at it,
but because of the uncertainty and some of the priorities
and their investments, it's just something
that they are interested in, but the financial return
is not that great that it's something
that they would jump on.
So that's where we see that this incentive
would potentially breach that gap
of being in that marginal area.
Is that something they invest in or not?
And we hope that that would make it worthwhile for them.
Mayor, let me just offer up a little more context
and history on this.
So one of the challenges from my perspective
this program, there's been a lot of inaccurate information
that's been floating around about costs
and how things may cost or not.
As we're aware, there's one restaurant that had a pod.
It was rumored amongst a lot of folks downtown
that that cost over $100,000 to build.
After reviewing that in more detail,
it was found that it costs roughly half of that to build.
So that I think has stalled this program a bit.
What I want to give a lot of folks,
including some of our downtown partners
and certainly our staff is looking at our design
of the pods and the requirements,
balancing safety with aesthetics,
which was really the direction from your council
to strike that balance.
We want these to be safe,
but to look for ways to drive some cost out.
And we have come up with some alternate designs
that we think still meets the aesthetic
that's desired by council,
still offers safety, but does so in a less costly manner.
And we're thinking the ranges, we'll find out here
if restaurants pursue and get some actual quotes,
but anywhere for a pod without a roof
could be in the 10 to $25,000 range.
So down considerably from what was rumored
to be 100,000 down to considerably less than that.
If that proves to be the case,
that coupled with this incentive program,
hopefully we'll see many more pods being built.
Other questions?
Yeah, thank you for the answer to that question.
I'll try to put my hand over the microphone.
I can't control the ambient noise in this hotel lobby.
So, I see that there's an assurance in here
that to be eligible to receive grant funds,
you have to be in good standing with the cities
in terms of finances.
So, I assume that they don't owe us any money.
And then the subject would be,
is that also include that we're in good standing
with respect of our license.
Sometimes we've had, during the outdoor dining period,
during COVID, we had some establishments
that were being very loud and very uncooperative
with their neighbors.
Do we have the ability to consider that
as part of the knowledgeability criterion?
Yes, we do, and we have,
and that was the spirit of that criteria,
and that eligibility requirement is actually consistent
with the requirement under the ODP.
So the thinking is that in order to even be eligible
to build the pods, you wouldn't have to be in good standing
and therefore you would also be required
to be in good standing in order to be reimbursed.
So those two are consistent throughout.
Okay, thank you, Mike.
My last question has to do with coffee shops.
What came up a couple of years ago
as we were discussing the program,
was that for those restaurants that are coffee shops,
they are daytime operations primarily,
and more significantly, they do not sell alcohol.
And so therefore, that dampens their revenue stream,
so to speak.
Did we consider, for example, taking 20,000 of the 100,000
or 10,000 of the 100,000
and making those strictly for coffee shops
and at a lower price
because they don't conceivably need as much.
Did we have any conversation about that,
just circle back to that issue
that came up a couple of years ago?
We have not had that conversation
and that certainly could be a way to modify the program.
I would just kind of caution that to the extent
that we start making modifications
and getting into the granularity
of different types of businesses.
The trade off is really with some of the,
with some of the complexity
that makes the program less simple.
Therefore, it may not be implemented to the same extent
where we really use it as a response
to the most interested parties who would deliver pods,
hopefully within the short timeframe thereafter
as an incentive that we understood
from counsel to be to incentivize delivery of pods.
But certainly that could be an option.
And I would perhaps consider having more conversations
with coffee shops in particular to try to better understand
the distinction in economics of the kind of business
relative to restaurants, which has not been done
as part of this proposal.
And just if I could add to that,
just as a refresher for everybody,
We did vet that a while back when the outdoor dining program was created, and as Mike noted,
trying to really understand that the business model and share of revenue derived from the
different types of sales of businesses would be very difficult, as we know some coffee
shops, if we're using that example, truly just sell coffee, others sell coffee and food,
and interestingly, some of those coffee shops that came forward before now sell alcohol
as well.
So if their model changes over time, it seems like it'd be really difficult to monitor that
potentially adjust the program hence the reason we are trying to take a more simplified approach.
Thank you for answering my question. Thank you, mayor. Okay, councilmember Dafeni.
My question is about the construction and needing to be finished by December 31st. There's always
delays in construction. Is there any, I also understand the desire to incentivize
someone to move quickly but are there, do we have a grace period or we think we'll be flexible if
they're near completion but not quite completed that type of thing? Yeah the thinking for this
end of the year timeline was because the the goal for this program is to incentivize completion
of pots before the end of the summer because that's really the busy time for restaurants
And we thought that if we were to get it approved,
we could really create momentum now.
So we only extended it until the end of the year
in hope that the program would be successful enough.
Certainly, there is a discretion as to when the timeline is.
And it somewhat depends on how successful we are,
which is a little bit difficult to tell
based on some of these preliminary conversations
we have had.
will be very successful hopefully will deploy the funds well before the end of the year.
Councilmember Francois. Thanks mayor. Following up on Councilmember Davini's question about the
time limit can you kind of shed a little light mic on I know we've only had one
formal one under the program. What was the time frame from application to construction on that one
generally in terms of months?
Yeah, I think for that particular one,
it's a little bit of an anomaly
because there were some unique factors,
but going forward with dedicated staff
and commitment to try to guide applicants
through the process, we envision that once the application
is approved, construction could be done fairly quickly.
So for some of the lighter designs,
probably within a week, and it really depends
on the construction type, because if you're adding a roof,
it makes it a structure.
So then it would take a little bit longer.
It makes it a building.
So then the certification of completion
would take a little bit longer.
But I would imagine that if everything goes well,
even in the more complex design scenario, well
within a month.
Just thinking, too, though, on the front end,
right before an application is even submitted,
they'll have a restaurant would have to hire an architect,
get a contractor on board.
So there's, I mean, I imagine,
and that's not city time, but time,
it's still time that would go into this process
before they could even submit the application, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
Okay.
The design changes that the city manager raised,
are those already in effect
or are those shortly to be in effect or?
they are in effect because they're within the existing ODP program design guidelines.
That's great. That's good to hear that and know that in addition to this financial incentive
program, staff's already taken, made some efforts to fine-tune the design parts of this.
And then last question on the incentive program for the pods, it would apply whether the pod is on
private or public property, right? Well the way that it's currently structured,
it would apply for pods on public property
because I believe all pods that we envision having
would be on public property.
I can't think of a scenario where anyone would build
a pods on private property right now.
Think of one, but okay, the way the program is structured,
it's just for pods on public property.
Yes, correct.
Okay.
And not, we're not talking tables and chairs
or something like, we're talking about the structure
through the formal program.
Yes, the incentive is specific to the pods.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks, and thanks for making this a fairly simple process.
I wanted to walk through timing though.
So now if somebody wanted to build a pod,
would they apply to you now to reserve the $10,000
and then not get the 10,000 until the end of the construction?
So, the way that the program is currently structured is they would only be able to apply
for the incentive after the pods is already completed, and the thinking behind that is
because we want to incentivize completion of the actual pods rather than just taking
applications if something changes, their financial priorities may change.
We really want to see the pods completed, so that in our mind creates an incentive for
them to actually see that to completion, get the final certification, and then be
able to apply for the reimbursement. And so you run a little bit of a risk, say
you have 11 pods going and the last pod comes in, they'll miss out. That's true,
that would be a risk, although from the delivery of the pods standpoint, that
would certainly be a good problem to have. Yeah. And then as far if somebody was
interested in pursuing a pod you know the conditions that you have lined out
are relatively clear-cut except being in good standing with the police
department with somebody if somebody is considering doing a pod it would behoove
them to have a conversation with you guys to make sure that that is true yes
absolutely in both of these things with a number of applicants in the pipeline
and good standing this program is really premised on the idea that we will
will continue having an ongoing dialogue with restaurants.
And having relationships, having a dialogue,
having a flow of information is really
the crux of the success of this program.
So that's something that we have been able to prioritize
several months ago, and we'll continue going forward.
So if somebody is doing one of these,
it would probably behoove them to be in communication,
even if they don't formally apply until after it's
done, in conversation with you guys
as they're going through the process.
Yes, absolutely.
And maybe we'll have the good problem.
Mayor, if I can just add to this,
there's two pieces to this.
There's the incentive portion
and there's the actual application to build one.
Yeah, they have to talk to us about that, don't they?
Yes, so if somebody's not in good standing,
we wouldn't issue the permit to proceed with construction.
Okay.
Oh, that's a good point.
I hadn't thought about that way.
Okay, thank you.
Any more?
Looks good.
Why don't we go ahead and open it up for public comment now?
See who's racing up to the front here.
Good evening, Cathy Hemmenway,
Walnut Creek Downtown Association.
I just wanted to thank staff
for continuing this conversation
on behalf of the business community.
This has been months in the making
and we've been able to incorporate a lot of the feedback
from the business community.
And then staff has also been able to get creative
with the build-out,
with creating this less expensive option
that can be fortunately expedited
through the permitting process and speed up the build out
and then also to council.
Thank you for providing the funding
to assist the restaurant owners and operators
with adding the much needed funds
to create this activity particularly
that's needed within our traditional downtown.
So it's very important and we look forward
to continuing conversations to grow this program
and create some additional vitality
to the downtown dining scene.
Thank you.
I had one quick question.
Have you heard concern?
We obviously are looking at the December 31st deadline.
Have you heard concern from restauranters
that that's too soon that they won't be able to do it or?
No.
You're feeling good.
No.
Okay.
Yeah, there's enough interest, I think,
that this has kind of spurred them along
to be able to move that forward.
So at this point, and ideally, as Mike mentioned,
they'd like to capture those summer months.
So those that are seriously considering it
can are able to move forward with that timeline.
Good. Thank you.
Good evening.
My name is Rola Gabin.
I'm a business owner downtown, property owner as well.
Also on restaurants.
I'm here to say thank you for an amazing design
that was created through the city of Walnut Creek,
obviously through COVID.
Disappointed to see no pods really have been built
except for one.
I personally know the person who has the Main Street Kitchen.
He's actually a war landlord, and we
have discussed intensively of what it's taken him to build it
and why and for many reasons.
Actually, the design that Mike is talking about
and the original design that the city had developed
is the design that should really be the one that everybody
should consider because it's unique.
There's three different pods.
Everybody can kind of mix and match.
Mike's other design is great as well.
But roofs are important for restaurants and what we need.
But the cost is huge.
And even for restaurateurs like us,
most restaurants pay anywhere between $5 to $9 a square foot
and rent.
And now we're adding the fee of the outdoor pod
and also about $75,000 in fees to building one.
So this would obviously help, but I
think what's more important is to also save
the traditional downtown.
And how do we do that?
We kind of try to launch this program
and get as many pods as we can to have activity
from the Broadway Plaza into the traditional downtown, which
is super important, especially now
that we are seeing an activity kind of shifting
into the original Joes
and kind of on the other side of town.
This is even more crucial for the division of downtown
to kind of activate the pods.
So thank you.
And I hope it goes well.
Thank you.
Any questions for Rola?
Since you're here?
Yeah, I think we're good.
Thank you.
All right, we'll go ahead and close public comment
and bring it back up here to the council for consideration.
Does anybody have any remaining questions?
I do.
Council Member Silva.
Both of our speakers said the word traditional
and formidable word downtown in their comments.
Is this restricted to the traditional downtown
or is it to the entire downtown area
that was designated for the outdoor permitted dining program?
Yeah, this program would be for the original outdoor dining
program overlay that I showed a slide for which includes
the north and south extending beyond the traditional downtown.
All right.
So we have not established any restriction, a smaller subset
of that area that would be eligible for this.
No, that's correct, Council Member Silva.
Thank you.
Any other remaining clarifications?
Well, as somebody who's been a proponent of outdoor dining
and doing what we can to make sure
that restaurants can do this,
it's like we've approved them for doing outdoor dining,
but if they're not doing it,
then we need to do something else.
So I'm glad that we made this proposal
for doing this incentive program.
And I'm very hopeful that this will be received positively
and the restaurant community will get up
and look to build some of these as quickly as possible.
So I'm in favor of it.
I'm happy to make the motion to approve it.
Any other comments?
Yeah, I agree.
I was initially concerned a little about the time limit,
but I appreciate the feedback from Walnut Creek downtown
that they're ready to go.
And of course, if we need to extend it in December,
we can do that too.
But I say let's move forward with the program as it is.
I also appreciate Councilmember Silva's questions
about the coffee shops.
And I think that maybe there's a different solution for that
in terms of parklets or activating other parts
of the downtown, but not necessarily
these permanent outdoor dining structures.
So I'm prepared to support this as well.
So with that, I'll make the motion to adopt resolution
approving the downtown permitted outdoor dining structures
incentive program guidelines.
I have comments still.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I was thinking, how many businesses
are interested right now, roughly, do you think?
What's the sort of number that's being thrown around?
We're working with three that are interested in the short term,
and we're still doing outreach and in partnership
with Walnut Creek downtown.
We'll be attending a meeting on Thursday with restaurants.
So the hope is that it goes up, but three already.
Well, because I'm hearing still some larger numbers,
like $75,000, if we want to get a shade structure and the cost.
And I was wondering if we would consider,
I was trying to think of ways to use the money that we've
allocated to be sort of the most potent incentive.
And so one of the ideas I had was, well,
what about taking the $100,000 and saying,
whatever businesses get this done in 2025,
you know, you get the 100,000 split up.
So if it's five, if it's six, if it's seven,
it's a bigger incentive for those businesses.
And maybe that will lure folks that are sitting
on the edge right now, looking at three to five,
and maybe that'll push us up to seven or eight.
What do the other council members think
about something like that?
Can you explain the concept a little more?
Because what flashed in my head was the first person comes in,
does a $75,000 pod, and applies for $75,000 of the funds.
Is that?
No, yeah.
What I meant was, let's say five businesses complete it.
They would each get $20,000.
So if seven complete it, they get something in between.
Just because I think 10 is an incentive.
it's helpful but I might not be enough to push some people over the edge and
since we've already allocated that money to be spent with the hope that it will
be spent maybe that will be in push a few more people into the into the pod
into the pods hang on counselor mayor Pro Tem was graces him for I probably
would not be as much I can't raise my hand out here so I know but but you have
a facial expression I won't be long I probably wouldn't be as in favor of that
just because it comes down to planning that if a restaurant makes the plan that
they're going to do this and get 10,000 or then at least they can plan for that
if they're going in with the idea that well maybe I'll get more it just makes
it that much more difficult to plan plus there is no guarantee that that is going
to bring additional businesses in. I would be more in favor of saying hey if
we get seven restaurants to do this and now we have to do something a little bit
differently for the first three or six months of the next year then we revisit
that but I'd rather have something that's set that there's a plan to do
rather than restaurants guess how much they're going to end up getting.
Councilmember Silva well that was what I was going to say Kevin so thank you
having had family and the restaurant business for many years but the other
aspect is that if we only get five let's say and we spend $50,000 that doesn't
mean that the remaining $50,000 couldn't be allocated toward a different type of
program to incentivize outdoor dining. Yeah I think I'm inclined to agree and I
I will go ahead and second Mayor Pro Tem's.
May I still make additional comments?
I had some prepared statements.
Go ahead if you wanna.
Yeah.
Well, I just wanted to say kudos
to the Walnut Creek Downtown Association,
Council Member Francois, Mike, and the staff
that worked on this program.
I know it was, like you said,
an overwhelmingly positive response
from the community during COVID.
And the downtown is a resource to our community.
It's something that we should continue to invest in.
And I think when we do, it's good for our local economy.
And it results in increased sales tax revenue.
And ultimately, it's a win-win for the city
and for the businesses.
And so I'd just like to also float another idea out there
while we're talking about this, which is I know a lot of thought
went into the rental amount, the $48 per square foot per year
to rent the parking spaces.
Yeah, I just want to point out that that's about $4
a square foot per month for basically pavement,
it's not improved space.
So when you compare that to the maybe $5 a month
that a business might be paying
for the actual restaurant itself,
the space that's already finished and built,
it does seem somewhat disproportionate.
So I wanna look at that.
So it's $2 an hour for a parking meter over a 10 hour day.
So it's $20 per spot per day, assuming full occupancy.
And so when we made that calculation,
I wonder if we considered, did we fully consider
that most folks that don't park in those spots
will stay in Walnut Creek.
they'll park in another meter,
they might wind up parking in a city lot,
like we will recoup a good portion of that revenue.
And we'll also recoup that revenue
in the form of enhancing the downtown
and increasing sales tax revenue.
And, you know, as Roland mentioned,
it's still, it's hard to do business downtown.
The rents are high and a lot of the businesses
are struggling, so I wonder if we could take this time
to put something on the agenda in the future
to discuss when we visit the amount that we're charging now
for parking space rental.
My reaction is, you know, we have $100,000 to do this
and we are, the $10,000 per pod,
which is an upfront investment is,
it sounds like that's our staff's recommendation,
is the best way to just bring this forward.
There is an ongoing revenue issue
that people will have to deal with,
but with the money, the best investment we can make up front
is in deferring, or defraying some of the cost
of construction, and so I'm inclined to move forward
with the expenditure using this plan with the idea
that if we don't get the appropriate,
you know, if we don't get 10 pods out of this,
then we can look at the remaining money
and talk about ways to reprogram it,
look for other things,
whether it's a coffee shop program or something that's,
but we only have, we have one time money,
we have $100,000.
Well, yeah, no, I would definitely say that, yes,
the program that we're working on here today,
go ahead and we'll vote on that shortly,
and hopefully that will be successful.
But this is an opportunity for us while we're together
to put something in the works to revisit that program.
And I think that that will help folks make a decision
and may push more people into wanting to do the pod space.
Why don't we go ahead and vote on the resolution
that's the motion and the second that's on the floor?
And at this point, we don't have agendaized.
Yeah, you do not.
At this point, you have a motion and a second
on the item that is on the agenda tonight.
you can vote on that and then as to council member Davini's comment he I
understand that you're understanding that you're requesting that the council
consider agendizing that for the future and that has been your comment but that
hasn't been seconded by anybody else yet so okay so we'll go ahead and hold the
vote on the first one and then we'll come see if there's anything we want to
on the other one. Mayor Pro Tem Wilk. Aye. Mayor Darlene. Aye. Council Member Davini. Aye. Council Member Francois. Aye. And Council Member Silva. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you.
Is there any other motions that people want to make? I'm assuming that I... You can look at the city attorney for help with... I make a motion to
to agendize the discussion
of the current parking space rental fee.
Can I ask staff what is that current rental fee?
Is it recouping the $2 an hour, so $20 a day?
Yeah, generally speaking, the intent is
to recoup the loss meter revenue from those specific spots.
And most, I understand as most pods would likely use two spaces.
Some may only need one, but probably most would use two parking spaces.
Okay, thank you.
I'm not hearing a second at this point, so I think we will
move forward with the $10,000 program, see how it works, come back
at a future date if we need to revisit the issue and look at the other things
that are going on. Um, so next on the agenda is a
presentation on the Clean Water Program overview.
Staff, take it away.
Good evening.
Good evening, Mayor Pro Tem and the City Council,
members of the public.
My name's Lucille Paquette.
I'm the Clean Water Program Manager under Public Works,
and I'm here to share an overview
of the Clean Water Program.
Thank you for inviting me.
Let's see.
Tonight we'll talk about, I'll make this brief,
regulatory history, some funding,
the collaboration agreement that go along with this,
county and city clean water programs and the permit compliance, program
compliance is permit compliance and implementation and then we'll have some
questions. So to start just a couple of basic things to know about storm water
is the motto only rain down the drain. The whole idea is that if it's on the
ground or in the street and goes into that storm drain,
it's going to end up in our creeks.
It's not traded, it goes straight there.
So only rain down the drain.
I brought one of our favorite giveouts for each of you
to the nice magnet made by our public works department.
And enjoy that in your office or your refrigerator.
Second point I wanted to make for the public and all of you
everybody who uses both. The sewer system versus a storm drain. The sewer system is a drainage
system that goes to a sewer treatment plant. It's treated, cleaned, and then is discharged into the
bay. Storm drains are not treated. They're just straight to the bay. So when people are dumping
any kind of residual stuff, drips or leaks or trash that are on the street are going to go
into the storm drain straight into the creek and, therefore, regulated.
So, we'll go into that regulatory history.
1969 was a Porter-Cologne Act that's our water legislation for the state of California, the
water law, that some of the Porter-Cologne Act actually went into the federal Clean Water
Act. And some of us will remember, 1972, the fire in the Cuyahoga River, councilmember
Silva is in Ohio, the Cuyahoga River is in Ohio, and that was basically a big, ugly,
oil paint solvent mess floating on the river that lit fire, very hard to put out, created
a lot of public outcry. That was the 13th fire on that river, and it was the final.
It was not the only river that had lit fire.
So that created the Clean Water Act.
That was a bipartisan approval by Congress,
and that affected California in a way that
empowered the regional water boards to enact the NPDS
process and the NPDS permit process's national pollutant
discharge elimination system.
was created by the EPA.
That's handed down to the state.
The state issues permits through the water board
and regulates discharges to public waters.
At the same time, the Contra Costa Clean Water Program
was created in anticipation for applying for a permit.
Contra Costa Clean Water Program
is all the cities and towns in Contra Costa,
including the county and the flood control district,
together as a collaboration, cost share agreement.
1993 comes along, the County Flood Control District
decides that they will try to create
a stormwater utility assessment and area assessment,
and that is an amendment to the California Clean Water Law.
That passed, and that was a dedicated funding
that was created for dedicated funding
for the, to implement the permit
and to maintain stormwater infrastructure
for all the cities that were involved.
This pushes us into the municipal regional permit.
There's a number of permits between these.
There was a lot of amendments in the Clean Water Act
through the 70s and 80s.
And we're gonna jump forward
to the municipal regional permit.
We're in the third, this is just a quick timeline.
First, first municipal regional permit
MRP was issued in 2009, again in 2014, again in 2022.
And we are going to be entering negotiations for the fourth permit starting this fall.
So some of the funding and collaboration that's happened, I want to make sure that I'm covering
all the important points.
I'm going right through this.
So the stormwater utility area assessment, this came up in March when we passed the resolution
for the SUA to be collected.
But to go back, this was created as a dedicated funding source for stormwater management.
Now, the flood control district went through a process, legal process, but also a chief
engineer's report that based everything on the municipal boundaries, it's going to collect
a fee from all those parcels, and that money will be used within those boundaries for,
again, permit implementation, as well as stronger maintenance and improvements.
The county ordinance 93-47 established all those rules.
We can get you a copy if you really want to look into it.
It's actually kind of interesting, and I enjoyed reviewing this history a little deeper for
this presentation.
Again, in March, you just approved, again, an annual resolution asking the county to
please collect the fee.
And the measure, you have to redetermine the amount of that fee.
That fee was set when the ordinance was approved.
For Walnut Creek, the maximum is $35, and it was maxed at in 2003-04 when they added
all the development regulations.
That was a top, the first time that it was maxed out and we've been maxed out ever since.
So the Contra Costa Clean Water Program as I explained is a collaboration to implement
the permit and more importantly the shared compliance of the permit. It's very detailed.
There, we have a program agreement and that is also going to be coming up for your approval
soon too. It was the last agreement was 2010 to 2025, so now we're ready to make any tweaks
and re-approve that program agreement. And let's see. So this is, I thought the easiest
way to explain this, this is the table of contents of the MPDS permit that we have.
I cut it off at C-22, the annual reports, there's actually a couple other provisions,
but these are the provisions that we implement.
And just to name a few so you don't have to read the whole thing, how we manage our
municipal operations, how-and these are all pollution prevention controls.
So new development is highly regulated.
Construction sites, illicit discharges, trash, pesticide use, et cetera.
And I'm just going to take you quick into kind of, to me, a more fun way of looking
at this.
Our city and our street maintenance team do the majority of the heavy lifting.
We spend money on their equipment.
We have great trucks.
If you go to your citizen or employee institute, you'll see these big trucks, and you'll see
them out in the streets cleaning the storm drains.
They take care of the maintenance.
trash capture devices which are mandatory and to some extent in the permit, street sweeping.
Our street maintenance team is always out there cleaning up illicit discharges, illegal dumping,
car wrecks, knockdowns, anything that has to do with the storm drain and cleaning pollutants
out of the street. And now one of the new provisions is also discharges associated
with firefighting.
So the picture on the top there is firefighting foam.
Someone has to clean that up, make sure it doesn't get to the creek, according to the
new permit.
Some of the provisions, C3 development redevelopment, many of you know about this deeply.
Some of the words that how this affects the city in the new permit is now roadway projects
are regulated to some extent.
So when we redo a road, certain maintenance,
certain reconstruction triggers C3
and we will have to implement our green infrastructure
in a roadway or offsite.
The city is also required to do an additional 4.2 acres,
retrofit some impervious surface in the city,
say parking lots at parks or roof drains
will go down to the landscaping, for instance.
Some of the things we do for this, this touches on your
priority of economic development where it's very
regulated for the development community.
So you can't always fit C3 on site.
It's expensive.
And so we're creating an in lieu fee program to help
offer sort of an incentive or options for people to be able
to still build.
We do inspections of all those private GI, which the list is
growing, we have over 100 that we inspect over five years.
And of course, we do site development review
for private property plans.
Public outreach, many of you have been involved
in this as well.
We, the Clean Water Program and yourselves,
the city hosts Kids for the Bay over at Civic Park
every spring, where 10 or 12 classes come
to do their outdoor classroom here.
We make a bunch of brochures.
We have some upstairs in the permit counter,
and one of the favorite things is this diorama
that shows how a watershed works, and the kids love it.
We also mark all the drains.
We're required to mark all the drains.
Trash controls, just to update you,
we've met our 100% goal for June 30th of 2025,
and we're also working with private property owners,
mainly commercial to ensure private land trash compliance.
Everybody has to be at a low level.
As soon as we get a call, we go out,
we talk to the property owners,
and we make sure that those get cleaned up
in a timely manner.
Finally, this is one of our big ones,
is the discharges associated with unhoused population.
This is also a new provision in the permit,
and this could be a small tent down in the creek bed,
or it could be, you know, a large encampment under a bridge
that ends up being a contractor cleaning it up,
chain link fences, securing it so that it can't be revisited.
That's another, that's significant permit provision.
So those are the slides that I made you.
There's so much more we could talk about,
but I just wanted to give you an overview, and I want to open it
up for questions from you who asked about this, and thank you for inviting me.
Thank you, and this is one of those things, I know a bunch of us do the cleanup crew,
and having spent my entire career working on water and environment, storm water is always
the poor, I want to say poor redhead stepchild, I don't know if I can say that anymore, but
it's always been the area that is the most hard to fund because it's not a glamorous
new water recycling project or a new dam or, you know, you can't see it and measure the
benefit of it, but it is definitely something that has dramatic benefits for the environment.
Questions from folks?
First of all, thank you for coming and for the presentation and the information.
I don't know that I'd really put it all together, but this program funds the street sweepers
as well?
Correct.
And the money that goes into the program,
the assessments that are collected,
goes to the county and then gets redistributed back out
to each of the cities you apply for the funding
based on the programs we've done every year?
The way it works is that we,
the revenue is about 1.3 million from Walnut Creek
for the amount of impervious surface that's here.
And that goes to the county,
the county clean water program,
that has a cost arrangement with all the cities that are in it. We have an allocation by population,
we pay our bill there, the rest of the money comes back to the city and we use it for our clean water
fund. And it's an interesting kind of combination of city services and then some of the facilities,
the creeks and the channels, I think, are controlled by the county flood control district?
Yes, they may be, or maybe they just have an easement.
Downtown Walnut Creek is very unique in that we have
at least three creeks coming into downtown, right?
And the property line goes right down the middle of the creek.
So for instance, when we have a trash issue,
it's the property owner's job to clean that up.
Now they have to work with the flood control district
in some of the less safe areas, let's say.
But nonetheless, it's an easement by the flood control
district they're responsible for it but the property owners actually have the
the liability for the trash on their property. And then on on the the last
page of the staff report the thing that jumped out was that we have about 1.3 in
revenue and then 1.9 in expenditures so where do we make up the difference there?
That is coming from the city and I will also say that is kind of the worst case
scenario. We've been very prudent in our spending and we generally don't spend our whole budget.
Some of the programs have changed definitely through COVID and so there's money in the account
and there's money in the budget in case we want to revive some of those things like creek cleanups.
Things have changed over even the last five years, right? So the money is there. We're being very
prudent about our spending and yes we do we're constantly watching that and yes
the permits getting more and more expensive that we're negotiating very
hard on some of this stuff because there isn't funding and on that point the
assessment was set in 2003 and is it because of state law now that that can't
get changed without voter approval or that's right so it was set in 93 it
it maxed in 2003 and and it is subject to Prop 218. So it has to go out for a
vote. And I didn't think I'd have so many questions. This is really interesting.
It is interesting. On the on the street sweepers. Yes. Do you have any ideas on
how we can get the word out like because it's like the fourth Thursday of the
month or something. I look out there, oh I gotta move the car. How do we get the
word out to kind of residents like it's street sweeper day you know please don't
park on the street. We could put up signs some cities do that we could send out
flyers we could put it on our website we do have the street sweeping schedule
but it's on the website that's on the website but you know it's not quite the
same as having it on your refrigerator like trash day is Tuesday so we could
investigate any option there, we could do some outreach. Thank you. You're welcome.
Any more questions? Thank you for the work you guys do. It is truly somewhat
thankless and now I know why we call them C3 basins. Yes. And I really
appreciate the work that you guys are putting into the idea of an in-loufie
because back when I used to do permitting back in the the late 80s and
90s we were always after parking lots to do more to treat the runoff and they
were just like yeah we're not gonna get and so there's a lot of those older
parking lots that are probably producing tremendous volumes that if they got a
little bit of treatment or something would really make a world of difference
so I think there's a lot of benefit there you could get not only the
business certainty that we're looking for but you could also get the
environmental benefit to really justify the work so thank you for coming tonight
You're welcome.
Appreciate it.
Thank you everyone.
And with that, do you want to ask there's public comment?
Oh, is there any public comment?
Anyone, anyone?
All right.
Thank you for that reminder about nine o'clock.
I stopped thinking about that.
Um, and with that, I believe we are adjourned.
Thank you.