Special City Council Meeting and Regular City Council Meeting March 6, 2018

0:03:07michelle may have broke call certainly councilmember abelson here councilmember fideli president councilmember lyman present councilmember pardue okamoto president mayor quinto thank you stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance and to the republic for which it stands

0:03:36one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all uh council staff and communications i i'll do one this last saturday i had the the pleasure um to represent el cerrito down at the tom bates sports field the this is a project that um ex that i have experience with

0:04:11extending back to my pre-city era this is a project that started in the year 2000 during the east shore state park planning period and through a lot of hard work and cooperation with the sierra club and audubon society we worked through a long process that allowed us to get

0:04:32sports fields on an old parking lot for golden gate fields eight years ago we cut the ribbon and and we started playing on those sports fields an artificial turf with a the warranty on the artificial turf was eight years i think and um we went through it faster than any other

0:04:55artificial turf on the west coast our fields at gilman are used more than any other recreational facility on the west coast fortunately we had the foresight to put away money for this time when the carpet needed to be replaced and but for small amounts of money that

0:05:16were added by the various cities to bring the padding up to modern standards for concussion protections and infill organic infill the the organization the five cities richmond del cerrito albany emeryville and berkeley had enough money for the project so it was a great pleasure to see these

0:05:43fields reopen reopen with a concussion pad and cork infill and see almost 200 and plus uh you know youth running around playing soccer on saturday so i i want to thank this council for their continued support uh on that project uh since again i've been party to it for uh it was a shock

0:06:0718 years and it's it's a great pleasure to continue to see that field achieve the vision we had 18 years ago so thank you um it's been a very uh busy month um one of the things i was able to attend was a housing seminar that was put on it's actually a webinar put on by the

0:06:33league of cities and it's talking a lot about what they will be what they are proposing at the state level in terms of addressing the housing crisis and if you haven't been paying attention to what's been going on there there are several bills um that will definitely

0:06:54if implemented affect our city here in el cerrito they are pushing a lot of transit oriented development i know even this week they're coming out with new development protocols that would encourage or at least give more freedom for the bart stations to to do things on their land and i know

0:07:19we will be definitely discussing those issues with them so something to very much pay attention to as as they are trying to do what they can to solve the housing crisis and how that impacts us here at the city i was also able to go on the 17th to the police officers crab feed it was a very

0:07:39successful event they did a charity raising money for their canines i believe correct yes um and there were very there are a lot of community members out there it was it was a very nice event also another community event i attended here in el cerrito was the opening of

0:08:02the black panther movie at the cerrito it was a really great event many people came dressed up in daishikis and dressed up as superheroes and it was really fantastic and if you haven't seen the movie i suggest that you go out and see it and learn more about wakanda

0:08:25and then finally today right before our meeting here i had a meeting with the save ultibates task force and at our meeting we discussed as i mentioned before that we had a community forum that was held in berkeley last month and we are going to be planning another community forum to be

0:08:48held here in contra costa county and we definitely are looking for groups that may be interested in attending if anybody's interested in having their group attend the forum you can certainly contact me through my through the city website i have an email address that you can

0:09:07find there and also there will be some canvassing going on on april 11th and 12th i believe it is and i will give you a more of an update on that when i get more details but if you're interested in actually going canvassing door-to-door that is raising awareness

0:09:27of the hospital closure you can also contact me through my city website and i can give you more details on that as well so thank you very much janet um thank you i um also attended a number of events um and i um don't want to overlap too much the but i did attend uh

0:09:50two crab feeds that were city related crab feeds and i want to thank all of the um people who worked on both of those crab feeds the first one was the parks and rec department crab feed i think that's what it's called right and the other one was the police employees association

0:10:11uh crab feed and they were both really wildly successful i think and i'd also like to thank the members of the public who came out and supported those events and it really does make a difference and to help to raise community spirit as well as raise much needed funds for the projects

0:10:37in the case of the recreational crab feed that was scholarships for the david hunter memorial fund which goes to help those who are unable to pay for our programs in the both the youth section and the senior section of our rec department and for with the um uh police employees association

0:11:06it uh raises money to help buy a new dog as i understand it or pay for that's yeah i got it right um so i think that's um you know a much appreciation uh towards the everyone who worked on those events they were great events and um i could still go for a third one

0:11:29if there were one out there the crab is good [Laughter] once you get into eating crab you kind of can't put it down but i also speaking of eating i went to the chamber luncheon where our mayor was speaking about the city and that was well attended also and um the

0:11:59rest of the time i've just been out doing my regular uh stuff and that's really not for this section so i'll just stop there okay paul fideli uh yeah i was uh honored last week to attend with our mayor the annual elks event to honor police in the many cities in the east

0:12:21bay and our honoree with sarah perez our el cerrito police officer also attended with our mayor the contra costa mayor's conference in antioch also i'm pleased to announce that our local chamber of commerce that's been looking for a new place to be found a place to be and it's

0:12:46a throne stoke uh throw across the street at dougherty's reynolds upstairs above doherty's are two or three rooms that they're vacate that they're uh doing their work in and it's a great view of the city actually the hills the city hall san pablo avenue so it's great to

0:13:04have our chamber doing their important work out of a real real place with the roof on it and finally i know some of you may know that for some time we've been having in on san pablo avenue play land not at the beach which has been a a place that has had many relics

0:13:22from ocean beach in san francisco and many of us grew up here and i spent a lot of time at playland at the beach but they're having to move there's going to be some development coming to that block in el cerrito um here's our flyer here but just to say that they're they're we're kind of

0:13:40looking for a place to put all the relics that they have the museum pieces whether it's the oakland museum of california history or other places keep yours open people that may be listening there's a lot of nice stuff about the bay area and california history there so

0:13:56hopefully we can find a home for them as well thank you you had one more yeah mayor thank you um i i want to make sure that uh during this part it's it's sort of a update for agenda item nine but i'm gonna do it now because i wanna make sure it's uh that people who are tuning in from home uh

0:14:14let hear it uh the charter committee is still meeting we met on february 12th and reviewed the charters of other cities including auburn carlsbad emeryville lafayette palm desert and san ramon and we discussed the terms in those charters and gave direction to staff to draft attack

0:14:38draft a a draft version on february 26th the the committee met again and we reviewed the actual draft that the city attorney had prepared and more importantly this coming saturday march 10th here at city hall at 9 00 a.m we will be having another uh charter committee meeting so so people can come

0:15:06and review the next version of the um the draft uh charter and uh get caught up on some of the ideas of what the charter is uh going to do so that's this saturday so and and also are you going to do this or do you want okay um also in front of us and this saturday here at city hall in

0:15:30the main chambers here uh 10 a.m is the screening of tomorrow this is an environmental quality committee presentation that's a free film and discussion and uh the film about tomorrow is an inspirational film that showcases the creative solutions to climate change in

0:15:53local communities around the world so again that's uh 10 a.m to 12 30 p.m here at city hall so it'll be a busy place saturday morning okay i'll give you my update now on february 8th i attended the west county forum and i spoke with my colleagues in hercules chris kelly and san pablo's

0:16:17mayor geneva callaway and we spoke to the forum regarding our plans for our prospective respected cities and uh and it was great to see many of our former leaders here in el cerrito including i had a chance to meet one of our former uh fire chiefs so on the 20th

0:16:42um i was able to i was invited to speak before the el cerrido chamber of commerce and at that meeting i i spoke about our plans of development uh for this year uh including our affordable housing next next door which will be uh opening uh coming up and in the summer time

0:17:05we also had someone from fiona ma's office who gave a uh proclamation to a limebike who just opened here in el cerrito on the 21st i received our a resolution from senator nancy skinner and i'm grateful to senator skinner and the lambda dems for inviting me and it was great to be

0:17:34to see my peers and to be honored by senator skinner's office and the california senate legislature on the 22nd i attended the west county mayor's conference in richmond and it was a small group with tom butt and myself and the mayor of hercules where we heard from a non-profit dealing with

0:18:00dealing with climate change in our rising waters we had a non-profit by the rockefeller foundation that has a they're working on several areas including north richmond to experiment on ways to survive uh the the floods that will be happening in the lowlands there in

0:18:23north richmond they'll be experimenting on new types of housing new types of roads and different types of greenery and plants that will be able to survive the the change of weather and climate change and on the 22nd i attended the ribbon cutting for a new dental office at the el cerrito

0:18:53plaza the dentist in el cerrito plaza and i congratulate uh el cerrito plaza's newest uh dental office there right next door to uh see's candy so it was great to uh see uh a big crowd for that and uh there's photos in the latest uh uh chamber uh newsletter um and article on uh the

0:19:22opening so i know al miller was there and he got to carry the the big scissor there so thank you al on the 22nd as well i did attend the league california city's east bay division i'm on the board of the east bay division this year and we spoke about several things including

0:19:42that some of the housing measures that we will support and some we will not support so i will be sending out letters on the ones that we are supporting next time and on march 1st i attended the mayor's conference in antioch with mayor pro-tem pardue okimoto and council member paul

0:20:06fideli and quite a drive over there but we were able to meet with our our colleagues there and it was a good talk on the things that we're dealing with including a new radio system that will be online next year and i have uh today i met uh with the group sakurakai

0:20:38at alvarado school and i received this letter um about a half hour ago and i want to read this to you this is from the sakurakai senior center mayor dave quinto city council members tom panis superintendent matthew duffy and principal paul shatwell sakura kai senior center greatly appreciates the

0:21:01concern and support you have shown us in securing a site for continuation of our programs after june 30th 2018 to assist the 150 plus local seniors who attend two days a month at el cerrito senior center for education educational and socializing purposes sakurakai's senior center has been

0:21:23associated with the el cerrito community and el cerrito senior center for over 40 years so it will be difficult to relinquish this friendship and association however with regrets and after much consideration of various options we have decided to accept the west contra costa

0:21:42school district's offer for their new for their alvarado school thank you so much for your assistance throughout this difficult transition and this is signed by ms kimi honda from sakurakai board of directors and kimmy is here she asked me to read this so know that

0:22:04after uh speaking with so many people in the school district and tom panis and i were able to meet with sakurakai and the school district and they will be at the new location at alvarado school at richmond annex which is not far from here and i just want to thank everyone for

0:22:26helping us do this and and know that sakurakai was stuck in the middle of this and i'm grateful that tom panis looked at this and said that uh we need to get this done so uh uh it was a group effort and kimmy uh all the best hugh and sakurakai uh at the new location

0:22:50so next we're gonna do oral communication from the public all persons wishing to speak should sign up with the city clerk remarks are typically limited to three minutes per person finally state your name and city of residence for the record um i have four requests to speak there

0:23:10may be others in the audience michael fisher followed by al miller dave weinstein and howdy gowdy and we do have a comments are typically limited to three minutes per person and there's a timer up here that will um indicate it's green when you start to speak and it'll turn yellow when you

0:23:30have one minute to sum up and it will turn red when your time is concluded okay and so with that michael fisher and then al miller my request to speak were on two different agenda items yes this says 4i which is part of the consent calendar right okay very good

0:23:52good evening mayor members of the council um i'm here to speak on measure four i item four i on the agenda which requests that the council authorized the mayor to send a letter to our representatives to have them to our federal representatives to have them oppose the attempts to cut to zero

0:24:20the funding for the institute for museum and library services budget this is the second time in two years that that proposal has come from the federal administration last year it was able to be defeated and we're seeking again to have that defeated and it directly affects

0:24:46this city and this county because of in excess of a hundred thousand dollars of the money that goes to the institute um it eventually makes its way to contra costa library system for its programs so with um you know the the good news is we're told that it probably will not succeed again this

0:25:15year to do it but it will only not succeed if we all take our efforts to make that happen thank you thank you mr miller good evening mayor quinto council members and staff i'm al miller from el cerrito you all remember that was last june when you approved additional funding to

0:25:42expand library hours well the county library has done their magic and hired and we have been told that the new hours as you know will start on the 2nd of april that means that april 4th wednesday will be the first wednesday the library has been opened as far back as we can

0:26:01track to 1998.

0:26:04so the library foundation and other supporters decided to have a celebration a first wednesday celebration at the library i'd like to read the press release that we sent out about it and you've seen this before first one day celebration coming to the el cerrito library april 4th

0:26:23the el cedro library foundation and partnership with the city of el cerrito el cerrito library friends of the ill cerrito library and the contra costa library system are hosting a free party to celebrate the start of expended seven day per week library service in el cerrito

0:26:43the first wednesday celebration will be held between 4 p.m and 6 p.m wednesday april 4th at the library 6510 stockton avenue first wednesday celebration will feature free frozen custard cookies music with games magic face painting and button making for children and adults of all

0:27:04wages attendees will be able to get their free library cards meet new friends and enjoy the el cerrito library services join us to thank the el cerrito city council members for providing funding for seven day per week library service for all library users with the expanded schedule

0:27:25persons who wish to use the library can now make plans knowing that the el cerrito library will be open between the hours of one and five p.m seven days a week some days earlier some days later but every day from one to five holidays accepted the new library schedule starting april

0:27:492nd will be sunday from 1 to 5.

0:27:54mondays and tuesdays from noon to 8.

0:27:59wednesdays and thursdays from ten to six fridays and saturdays ten to five so now you got three things to remember each for two days right a business sponsor for the first wednesday celebration is the east bay sanitary service of el cerrito so we'd like to invite everybody within

0:28:21seeing or hearing a distance to join the celebration of the new era of library service in el cerrito we've sent this information and invitations to all of the schools in el cerrito thank you thank you good evening mayor and uh members of the council i'm dave weinstein uh speaking

0:28:46today as president of the el cerrito historical society i thought i'd stop by near the beginning of the year to tell you what we did last year and what we're up to during the centennial the society put on 17 of approximately 78 events so we were rather busy during the year and a lot of

0:29:03them were really well attended we started a speaker's bureau where we would send speakers out to any group a school a church group any group that wants us to speak and we're continuing that you know as an ongoing thing we coordinated a visit of the founding family in um el cerrito villa castros

0:29:23there must have been 20 or 50 members of the castro family visited the town 50 not 20.

0:29:30uh let's see what else do we do archiving we got the collection of the uh chamber of commerce in our archive right upstairs in the shading room i like to say that the society is a historical society but we care just as much about the president and the future as the

0:29:48as the past you know more so really because the past has passed it's our position that paying attention to the city's history and its culture and what it has really adds a lot to the character and the quality of the life quality of life in the city and we're hoping to continue to promote that in

0:30:052018 we'll have at least six to eight programs during the year on march 15th in the community center will be a program about the native american heritage by bev ortiz i invite people to come to that we'll be having tours of the gambling and nightclub sites will

0:30:23be having another visit to a beautiful mid-century modern home perhaps even two this year tom panas will be leading a tour of sunset view cemetery always a popular event we're increasing our public our publication schedule with our printed magazine the forge well it's a

0:30:40newsletter really coming out four times a year each time featuring original research and original historical articles we're increasing our email newsletter to come out monthly with upcoming news and all kinds of interesting things we're also starting a program of oral histories and we're

0:30:58creating a youtube channel linked to our website where movies about the history of the recycling center movies are some of our programs and all kinds of good stuff we'll have a whole set of movies that you can watch online we're continuing research to encourage more people to use

0:31:16our archives we're beginning an initiative that probably won't see life until 2019 to get more involved with young people perhaps through mentorships or something like that but that's an ongoing thing and i do want to say that one of our goals we really love being in the shoddy room and we want to

0:31:34stay there forever and ever but it's not that big of a space so we're looking for extra space to store more of our archives the el cerrito democratic club for example recently gave us a really well organized archive going back decades we also really believe that paying

0:31:51attention to the historic resources in town is important and it makes for better it can help for economic development and it can really help the town be a strong place to live so we're hoping that the city council will eventually consider surveying the cultural resources and

0:32:07creating a historic preservation ordinance thank you very much for letting me go a bit over time thank you good evening mayor quinto and council members my name is howdy gowdy um so this is just a quick reminder that it's been a little over six months since you passed your affordable housing

0:32:30strategy and there's been some good progress in that time i know that you have a new staff person and a contract out to study the nexus pricing and inclusionary ordinance possibilities so that's really really great progress but there were a number of other high

0:32:55priority items that were identified in that strategy document and you know the goal was to get to them in the the first year i'm sure that was ambitious but i just think it's important to remember back what we were committed to do in that year including you know

0:33:21working to maintain existing affordable units that might have their deeds expire exploring tenant assist assistance or relocation for buildings that might be demolished for new construction the possibility to study other tenant protections like you know run stabilization and just

0:33:48cause for eviction there was interest in looking at the you know wider county wide bond funding opportunities for affordable housing so um i'm just hoping that as we progress with some of the steps on affordable housing that have already been making progress that we include

0:34:09some updates on these other topics that were also identified for that immediate you know first 12 month period after you approve the affordable housing strategy so thank you thank you and we have another speaker rabbi bell good evening and honorable council members

0:34:35i presented a proclamation for the agenda tonight i just wanted to say a couple of words about it march 27 will mark the 116th anniversary of the birth of the leba shereby menachem of blessed memory right now he was a spiritual leader and a tireless advocate for youth around the

0:34:52world the rabbit dedicated his life to the betterment of mankind arriving from water in europe not 75 years ago and he understood that the youth is the few is the future of america he was a tireless advocate for youth in this country and throughout the globe emphasizing the importance of education

0:35:08and good character the rabbit thought that dedication is not just that education is not just about accumulating knowledge in areas like math science and history but that our educational system must pay more attention to building character with an emphasis on moral and ethical

0:35:24values one must not stress just success for the individual but also for society to honor his great legacy in 1978 u.s congress and president jimmy carter set aside the day of the rebels birth as a day of reflection in areas of education since then every single year

0:35:43the presidents of the united states have signed proclamations declaring his birthday as education and sharing day usa the rabbit took special interest in promoting the importance of education in the state of california and especially in the bay area sending his representatives here in 19 in 1971

0:36:02and through his inclusive vision and unconditional love for humanity leadership and dedication countless lives have been touched and inspired especially in the east bay with through the work of the east bay and more recently by with the establishment of khabarov

0:36:19with the arrival of me and my wife here to open what we saw happen a couple of weeks ago in parkland with the terrible shooting and loss of 17 lives emphasizes how crucial and important it is to provide our children the best education possible teaching them to be kind and loving citizens

0:36:36united uniting all of us as one nation under god therefore i think it would be very timely that the city of el cerrito following this great tradition of our country to set aside a day of reflection and importance of education thank you thank you i have no other request to speak okay

0:36:55at this time thank you adoption of the consent calendar items 4a through 4j a is approval of the minutes b california office of emergency services cal oes form 130 designation of authorized agents c support california prop 69 and opposed senate bill 1 repeal d recognizing tibetan uprising and

0:37:22affirming support for the people of tibet e international women's day and women's history month proclamation f prescription drug awareness abuse awareness proclamation g education and sharing day proclamation h support for prop 68 the california drought water parks

0:37:43climate coastal protection and outdoor access for all act of 2018. i support the reauthorization of library services and technology act and funding for the institute of museum and library services j cash and investments report for quarter ending december 31 2017.

0:38:04like to speak on 4-e so i just wanted to point out and recognize international women's day and women's history month one of the things that inspires me to be sitting here today is the fact that we don't have enough women represented in our government we have less than 20 percent at the federal

0:38:30level and less than 30 percent at the state level and so i would encourage you women sitting out here in the audience you women at home we do have some commission vacancies that are still going to be posted so please step up apply and get involved and that's what i encourage all of you

0:38:54to do thank you okay we're here okay second i i had a couple comments too to make on two should i move it adoption and then you make the comments yeah i don't have problems with them but i had a question and a suggestion on on two you want to change one yes oh two

0:39:16no two of them two of them oh which ones um or c and 4h okay i move adoption of the remaining items for a b d e f g i and j second okay all in favor all right okay and again i'm supportive of both of these i just had a question and a suggestion for one of them on 4c

0:39:48where we talk about um you know sb 1 is very important and we're moving toward the potential initiative proposition on the ballot my question was maybe it's to the our city attorney is we talk about a repeal if it does not come i mean if it is put on the ballot and there is a

0:40:08number assigned to it do we have to come back and re redo our opposition to this because we we don't all we don't um name a specific proposition in this no we don't need to because it's identified by the number that's been assigned by the attorney general that's

0:40:23what's that's what's in the parenthetical there so as part of the referendum process when a referendum submitted the attorney general assigns a number to it and that's how the measure is being identified now so we don't have to wait for that number to make that official

0:40:37okay and on that same theme on agenda item number 4h um there is a real number for it for this one proposition 68 and we refer to this whole resolution simply to sp5 and i think that there ought to be some a little recrafting to talk about proposition 68 in the title in the

0:41:00beginning you have you have to get all the way down to the bottom to talk about um that proposition that we support it's in a really important parks and water proposition we need to get the number out there to our community that we support this and not talk about sb5

0:41:16anymore so i would just make that suggestion for change okay so in your motion for 4-h why don't you make a recommendation for the new title yes i moved uh for agenda item number 4h that we changed the title resolution of the city council in the city of el cerrito

0:41:36supporting proposition 68 the california drought water parks climate coastal protection and outdoor access for all active nc 2018. you do see right now and you can move c as well and and move and move prop uh uh agenda item c as well that supports the california proposition 69 and will

0:41:58oppose senate uh the senate bill one repeal effort okay is there a second second okay all in favor aye hi hi it's unanimous no surprises [Applause] a presentations we first have a environmental quality committee work plan [Music] it'll be easier for you you can sit you can do whatever you want

0:42:35[Music] good evening good evening thank you mayor and council members i'm rebecca milliken co-chair of the environmental quality committee known as the eqc for short i'm presenting tonight with mark miner who is the chair of the eqc and while council may be familiar with

0:42:55our committee we'd like to take this opportunity to inform our community members about our work and encourage them to get involved i will present on the eqc's mission roles and past accomplishments mark will then talk about our work for the coming year let's see if this works

0:43:10great okay um we're really fortunate to have several long-standing members including uh howdy and dave weinstein who spoke tonight and we also have four new members since last year's presentation they include allison kittleson becky miller jeff sobel and neil tsutsui they bring professional

0:43:28expertise in library and environmental science entomology the solar industry and marketing we also wanted to make a quick shout out to will provost our new staff liaison this year he's responsive collaborative upbeat he just gets things done and eqc is really thrilled to work with him we

0:43:46also want to invite the community to attend our meetings often we bring in outside speakers to educate the eqc and the public on a range of topics for example last month a local el cerrito resident who works at epry the electric power research institute presented on

0:44:02opportunities for electrification in residential and commercial properties through heat pump and other technologies which will help california cities reach their climate action goals so the eqc looks for opportunities for municipal action in regards to policy and program development but we also look

0:44:22outward to our community to raise awareness and engagement with a range of sustainability efforts this one's pretty text heavy my apologies we have many goals as sustainability touches everything and that includes infrastructure open spaces transportation energy etc

0:44:46our work is guided by the 2015-20 el cerrito strategic plan and an excerpt is highlighted here our efforts really helped to make the strategic plan a living document we've had ongoing successful programs for many years these include the green team eco film and lecture series but

0:45:09every year we've also contributed something of significance that's new and i'm going to highlight some of our 2017 accompli accomplishments for you so last year we really enjoyed a presentation by the city's civic spark fellow justin marquez he presented on the climate action plan and the current

0:45:29inventory justin shared that we are on track and have exceeded goals of one percent greenhouse gas reductions from the 2005 baseline to achieve 15 reductions by 2020 and 30 percent by 2035. the eqc really enjoyed working with justin and this year with gabriel ruxin the current

0:45:50civic spark fellow eqc's contribution to our centennial celebration was our year-long outreach to promote 100 clean energy through mce's deep green electricity service our 100 by 100 efforts started a conversation with the community that slowly built momentum over time

0:46:11we got a big boost when our municipal accounts opted up to mce's deep green service we want to thank council for your leadership in choosing 100 renewable energy for el cerrito inspired by fairfax's campaign el cerrito was the second community to launch intensive opt-up efforts

0:46:31deep green movements are now in kensington lafayette and concord uh an mc staff member who happens to be an el cerrito resident that you know jr killigrew he said to me recently the eqc has started a deep green movement here in el cerrito this picture is with council member paul

0:46:49fideli and mco ceo don weiss with eqc members when we received an award this fall for our 100 by 100 efforts and to our community members it's never too late to celebrate el cerrito's birthday you can opt up at any time just hop online mce el cerrito uh 2017 was a busy year with ongoing and

0:47:14new programming there are a handful of top talks and tours as contributions to centennial year festivities the hillside festival which you see pictured here raised money for maintenance and restoration the ongoing green teams helped with litter and invasive plant

0:47:30removal new outreach efforts included collaboration with neighboring cities the green homes energy upgrade california event was hosted by stopwaste in albany in conjunction with the cities of el cerrito and berkeley our drive electric event week was hosted by berkeley with participation from

0:47:49multiple espace cities and several community non-profits eqc member howdy gowdy who's in the audience wore a asked me about community choice placard that i placed upon him while he talked about the benefits of driving electric vehicles i'm going to turn it over to mark now

0:48:07thank you very much rebecca we have great teamwork on the eqc and accomplished a lot in 2017.

0:48:15i'm going to tell you about our plans for 2018.

0:48:19we have green team volunteer events scheduled throughout the year we had a broom pill out on madeira open space last month a cleanup on saturday around the el cerrito plaza and we'll partner again with pg e along moser to stake out native plants on earth day i will show you our calendar of events

0:48:39at the end of this presentation and we invite council to any and all of these events a particular good one and thank you very much greg for giving us a shout out is our film on saturday here dumas tomorrow we it's a french film that discusses what can be done about the climate

0:48:59crisis and we will have a discussion groups led by community leaders after the movie it would be a great chance for you to meet and discuss these issues with the public we also have a butterfly pollinator workshop on march 27th and will partner with surrounding

0:49:17communities including berkeley albany and richmond on drive electric week and the east bay electrification expo later this year to follow up on our 2017 centennial 100 for 100 campaign we are going to do outreach on mce's new living lightly initiative living lightly will include encourage

0:49:40community groups to make a commitment together to opt up to 100 renewable energy community groups could include churches schools or other groups or organizations and i'm going to encourage my church ucb unitarian universal church of berkeley to opt up kensington will enroll in mce this year

0:50:03we made great progress last year with justin quantifying and reviewing our progress on the climate action plan as rebecca told you and in 2018 we will continue to support city staff to move forward one focus in 2018 will be multi-family most of our past programs were focused

0:50:24on things that homeowners can do we have long wanted to do more environmental justice and serve the entire el cerrito community regardless of income investigating multi-family policies might be a way to do that it is also much more cost effective to build in sustainability from the

0:50:42beginning than it is to retrofit existing construction and we have a lot of transit oriented development going on in the avenue now the fifth annual hillside festival has been expanded to a three-day event this year the first friday saturday and sunday in may and we will have a detailed program for

0:51:02you guys to see and plan out your weekend very soon the eqc is coordinating with a park and recreation master plan uh on long-term plans for open space maintenance and restoration and development wayfaring signage will be in place in the hillside natural area this year and

0:51:20that will really help people to know how to get around this detailed map provided by city staff shows where every single one of these new wayfaring settings is going to go so we are well on our way for getting that done and also in my role with trail truckers we're working with the el cerrito rotary

0:51:41club in the city to build an interpretive trail in the hillside natural area we have already raised seventeen thousand dollars to complete this project which will be completed in 2019 and we continue to work on trash mitigation strategies thank you very much for the new trash cans on the

0:51:57ohlone greenway [Music] one of our mantras is to keep past master plans alive and this includes the urban greening plan as well as a climate action plan there are a lot of good ideas that have been vetted in these documents and we will continue to review and work

0:52:17that into our work plan we were successful in acquiring the madeira open space a few years ago and that kind of collective effort could happen again the eqc reviewed the city's new creek stewardship plan with a focus on cerrito creek the long-term plan of friends of five

0:52:36creeks has always been to transition out of regular cerrito creek maintenance and in tucson 2017 the city took two full responsibility to maintain our section with sea level rise and we were alluding to that earlier in your presentation flooding along belmont could become a

0:52:53major issue especially if a king tide and a major storm event occur at the same time that belmont area is a lower level elevation than the shopping center further to the west and it could be a major problem no single agency is really looking at the whole picture part of the cerrito

0:53:12creek or el cerrito part in albany part in richmond and this is another area where the eqc can help bring together our broader local community and come to our pollinator workshop on march 27th next here are the dates of our upcoming events put them in your calendars

0:53:33and one more slide for our calendar of events the events with dates are firmly planned the ones without dates we're working to put together so we have a full year of great stuff for the city of el cerrito for 2018. thanks so much thank you thank you do you have any questions for them

0:54:00i don't i don't have a question i just did the comment i guess you have a question i just have a comment too i want to thank you guys so much it's so nice knowing you're here and el cerrito and you're literally in the field out in the field doing the work for making life better here with our energy

0:54:17our creeks our earth day the booths everywhere you're seeing everywhere so thank you very much and i want to really want to thank you for your involvement with the rec department efforts to preserve our open space thank you jen i just wanted to say that i think

0:54:33what you're doing that's expressed through this plan is to absolutely terrific and it's it's really uh rewarding to see just how much you're getting done and how much you're following the original intent of the program so thank you very much and thank you to all the members

0:54:55i echo what my colleagues have said and i uh this is going to be amazing and know that the sierra club will have a table there and uh and also know that uh i look forward in uh attending the the hillside festival at that uh i know uh greg lyman and i have been there in the past and uh it's an amazing

0:55:18event and uh and i look forward uh dave weinstein to uh the trail trackers event there at the hillside festival uh that was an amazing event uh the last couple of years and uh it will again this year so thank you for being here thank you very much for your service um

0:55:39i'm really sad that i'm working this weekend because this looks like it's going to be a great movie um but you'll have to tell me about it i'm going to be attending your next eqc meeting and i can't wait to see more about what you're doing thank you thank you so we have a next is a presentation on

0:56:01contra costa county library commission activities the presentation is by michael fisher commissioner welcome thank you mayor and members of the council i've given you a report that talks about various activities i'm i guess at this point well up until tonight at least i've been

0:56:30an advisory group of one i understand we may soon have another another member um that will also serve as the alternate commissioner i had promised the council when i first met with you for consideration this appointment that i would report to you periodically this is another one of

0:56:57of those reports and i would like to just focus a little bit on one part of it namely if you remember way back it seemed very early last year the council took the position of authorizing the expenditure of money for increased hours of the librarians al miller has

0:57:23already pointed out that's finally coming to fruition on april 2nd it you can't as i'm sure you all know you can't simply say okay we're going to spend this money on this project and tomorrow it's going to hit the ground running in this case since it's the county that

0:57:46hires the people that was a matter for the county to hire the extra people i'm pleased to say that we now have nearly a full staff for our library for all the hours including the increased hours something that's made a little bit harder by the fact that when library staff is hired they are

0:58:13hired on the county payroll and the the county payroll for library staff which is among the lowest in the bay area so that makes it sometimes harder to acquire staff we do have staff i've met many of them they're great they're wonderful i think you've all met heidi

0:58:41goldstein our branch librarian and she's just absolutely fabulous and we will actually be a bit over um [Music] over employed with people for the next few years or next few months you may all have heard about the fire at the el sabrante library that library is going to be closed for

0:59:11probably a good six months and as a result one of the staff from that library will be assigned to the el cerrito library for that period and other than that and i'd be happy to answer any questions and i hope i will see all of you at our first wednesday celebration that the

0:59:38foundation is starting on april 4th thank you any questions just to comment okay thank you michael for your efforts you will have an alternate soon and i just want to say i'm happy that the city is moving forward in this new year on a variety of library fronts and the community advisory group

1:00:02will be established sometime soon too help us move forward on that library thank you janet any questions uh no i don't but i just do want to thank you for all the work that you're doing and uh and your dedication to the library thank you thank you thank you very much i'm excited about

1:00:28the expanded library hours and i look forward to using it with my kids thank you thank you thank you commissioner i appreciate uh your long hours traveling over there to uh pleasant hill and uh finally we have the additional personnel and took a long time but it's happening now

1:00:47and congratulations thank you so we're going to do a public hearing on the proposed new user fees for the community development department and recreation department good evening good evening mr mayor members of the city council my name is margaret cavanaugh lynch i am your development

1:01:17services manager and i'm going to load a presentation here good evening um with me tonight is mark sultans our building official melanie mintz our community development director eden o'brien brenner our youth services supervisor and christopher jones our recreation director i want to start

1:01:52tonight by giving kind of a brief overview of tonight's topic uh then i'll introduce tony thrasher with wild and financial services who will give a presentation on the formulation of user fees and how they were established here in el cerrito and then all the people present will be ready to

1:02:09answer any questions that you may have at the end so to start off california local governments may charge a fees for a number of services that they provide fees in california are required to conform to the statutory requirements of the california constitution particularly

1:02:23provisions added by proposition 218 26 and the california code the proposed fee amounts may not exceed a reasonable estimate of the cost provided for services tonight for your consideration is a cost allocation study and a new proposed user fee for the community development department

1:02:43the user fees are broken down into planning and building fees the proposed planning fees were developed using a standard unit cost build up approach whereby the reasonable estimated costs of each service is based on the direct cost of staff to perform the service

1:02:58using time estimates and direct costs of labor and materials as well as a pro rata share of the departmental costs including indirect costs of the city's central services like city administration new planning fees were also added to offer business categories that to better

1:03:13reflect the cost of processing permits for smaller incremental improvements and there's a few examples of that in your agenda bill almost all the planning fees were recommended are recommended to be set at 100 cost recovery with a few important exceptions that were noted in your

1:03:30packet tonight appeals and pre-application fees the building fees were further divided into two categories for the core services that we provide daily to our community the residential editions the kitchen remodels the commercial tenant improvements those were also established at 100 cost

1:03:50recovery um based on the same basically uh the way the planning fees were set up the cost recovery for the time it takes to typically do them that is two-thirds of those very large exhibits in your resolution and included in the community user fee study report for building permit fees for new

1:04:12structures staff and wilden recommend the use of a valuation based approach to calculate the fees this is a method that's used widely in other cities in the bay area using this approach the fees are charged for different tiers of building valuations and are considered a

1:04:28reasonable estimate for the cost of providing the building program services for those projects in each tier conceptually the valuation approach is based upon the understanding that the larger more complex project or the more complex a project is the more time and

1:04:41effort is required to provide building related service and there are greater efficiencies in the inspection of a larger project staff is recommending the use of the 85 cost recovery level as a preliminary step until july of 2019 and then rolling the fees up to 100 cost recovery

1:05:00both of those uh charts and are in your uh agenda packet this evening the reason for the stepped approach are twofold it's attended excuse me it's intended that a market friendly as a market friendly mid-step increase um well that is 33 the 85 level is 33 higher than the current fees

1:05:23fees at the 85 percent cost recovery level will still be similar to those for the products that are currently submitted when a project submits to the city of el cerrito very commonly they ask us to produce a estimated building permit fees so we want to um for a limited time kind of incentivize

1:05:42folks to continue their entitlement process and come in for their building permits giving them the next uh 19 months to do that before we bring it up to 100 of cost recovery staff notes at either the 85 or the 100 level el cerrito building permits will remain highly competitive with our

1:05:59neighboring cities and that chart was provided in your packet as well staff notes that some members of the public have suggested that there are several fees that could be subsidized to some extent as they are for specific class tasks that the city would like to

1:06:13incentivize including accessory dwelling units items such as electric vehicle chargers the fee presented to you this evening identifies the cost of providing each of those services so if the council desires to incentivize through subsidies these certain activities the actual cost would

1:06:31provide like a starting point for your conversation if the council desires uh to add subsidy to some of these tasks staff suggest that those items could be brought back during the budget process an update and updated with the citywide master fee schedule which will be before

1:06:47you in june also present in your packet tonight um as and just as importantly the recreation department is bringing child care and preschool fee changes to the council so that when next year school fees are online they can be approved in time to advertise for the

1:07:032018-19 school year registration period staff is proposing to switch from an hourly fee model to a monthly fee model the monthly fee model is based on the annual cost of child care divided into nine equal payments for before and after care and the 12 months of preschool

1:07:21finally on the diocese evening is a revised or an exhibit b that exhibit was omitted from your original packet but it was included as attachment for it's the recreation fees so that was rather quick as an overview i think the next thing would to be helpful would be to

1:07:39allow mr thrasher to come up to the dice behind me or the spokes podium behind me and i can run his presentation from here okay thank you good evening good evening thank you margaret thank you mayor and council i'm tony thrasher with world end financial um yeah i'm

1:07:58part of the community development portion of the fee study that's here before you uh so let's go ahead and dive right in margaret's already covered kind of a lot of the ground there but just a general overview user fees and so these fees that we're you have before

1:08:12you are the fees for service provided uh solely in the best way to say this there's no benefit provided to the public as a whole these services are provided solely to the individual requesting the service so you can consider these private benefits i'm going to kind of touch on a few

1:08:32times here but just keep in mind any subsidization of any of the fees means that these costs still exist to the city and need to be made up for by other kind of general fund or not obligated funds such as your general fund right uh they go to pay for recreation services or you

1:08:48know other kind of public services that you have so the state law requires that the use of these services be voluntary and that the city set them up to the reasonable full cost of providing the services and let's go ahead and go to the next slide and so that's kind of our our

1:09:02overall writing goal of the entire study itself is to determine what the reasonable full cost is and so that we can identify kind of set a a limit to what the city can charge because we can identify as a full cost so each fee is determined on an individual basis so we can identify a

1:09:20cost on a per service basis per request basis the we used fully burdened hourly rates and calculating what the costs are tied to time data so how long does it take to provide services now the fully bernoulli rates are made up of the salaries and benefits information we use a bill

1:09:39billable hour calculation or productive hours as you may know to kind of reduce the amount of workable hours from 2080 down to the amount of times they're actually working so that those benefits they have through you know pto holiday pay is part of their cost structure within those hourly

1:09:55rates we layer on direct and indirect overhead the direct overhead is your departmental operational cost the indirect overhead is the cost allocation plan which we performed prior to the user fee study and just a tiny bit on that what that is is the central services of the city

1:10:12so clerk finance so on and so forth how they support and provide kind of uh support to the other departments of your city so we can identify exactly how they for lack of a better word burden the central services and so there is a portion of that also layered on top of

1:10:30that so they can recover the direct benefit being provided through the services right now up to 100 of the full cost can be recovered and for developmental services that usually is the overriding goal is to get 100 recovery because these are private benefits uh the city may choose to substitute

1:10:49subsidized fees um on a one by one basis or in general as a whole it's that once we determine what the full cost is it becomes a policy decision on where you set the fee yeah so with that overriding goal of developing what the full cost is we we kind of go into the study to

1:11:08determine exactly what your cost structures are the positions that are involved and then only after the cost is determined we identify what subsidy amounts that you currently have and you want to maintain so that's a lot kind of a policy discussion of exactly where

1:11:21you're going from to where you're going want to make sure that any local pulses you have in place um are kind of translated through so as was mentioned if you have you know kind of uh charging stations those kind of things at the in-home type stuff you want to do then

1:11:36we want that to be reflective within your study the model itself is built in just an excel based model it's easily updatable as you have new budget or personnel cost it can just be loaded into it it gives us updated hourly rates and it kind of flows through to show you what a new

1:11:51cost would be okay so the scope of the study the departments that we looked at where planning building and the building permit program which is kind of it's a big piece of it right and we'll touch on a little bit but most of what i've been discussing is has been

1:12:08the fully burned hourly rates and how those go into fees for the building permit program as mentioned we did use a valuation-based approach which allows a lot more flexibility when you get service requests that are outside of what your current fee schedule is set up to accommodate

1:12:22it causes issues it can cost it can cause both undercharging or overcharging if it's not built in a way that's adaptable to service requests that's what valuation kind of provides so depending on what type of construction it is what the valuation it is it can kind of give you a range of

1:12:41effort and kind of flows through that way and we tie it to the city's cost structure to make sure that is recovering the cost of providing the services okay so we use department budgets selling benefit information staffing structures so we know exactly who's working on the services

1:13:01as i mentioned we put in the cost allocation plan the billable hours we wanted to track the direct effort that is related to the fees there is indirect support that is provided if it's not direct involvement on a fear or service it's accounted for through the cost allocation plan since there's

1:13:17already some overhead there but if there is direct involvement we want to make sure that we have time data in there and it's in the model itself the activity level revenue data that kind of plays into the building permit piece to make sure that we are showing what your

1:13:30current cost recovery level and just and projecting to where you are going and throughout the process though we wanted to make sure that we didn't give any type of fee structure or fee schedule that didn't fit to el cerrito's situation we want to make sure this is

1:13:45your fee schedule anytime that we work with any city they never look the same because we don't come in and tell you what it should be we just kind of tell you here's how we can get to make sure that it fits your situation okay so the steps of the area were first to

1:14:00kind of come out meet with your staff do some department interviews so we can determine what the time estimates are so we could build in those labor costs and through that kind of real world practical data then we can layer on the direct services indirect services and

1:14:13overheads through that next that second column there and only after we have determined what the full cost of the services are do we talk about a policy decision or talk about where you want to set a suggested fee uh that so the make sure that we get to that full cost

1:14:28state is before we get into a talk of where you you might want to set fees right the bulk of the cost within a fee is going to be the direct so the personal cost third party costs that's involved but just kind of want to show you we do have the central service piece that's also in there as well as

1:14:45departmental overhead which is operational cost so pens pen pencils computers that kind of stuff is also included okay and now another way to look at a fear service is that there are a lot of people involved across departments we want to make sure that everyone is

1:15:00involved in the fee it does have time inputs on there but if there's indirect support they don't necessarily need to have time that's where the cost allocation plan comes into play but it's just kind of this representation just to show make sure you understand there's a

1:15:11lot of different people that are involved so anytime you're kind of looking at anything in your paper you might have a list of 10 12 people that are involved in a fear of service and that's kind of it just builds up over time through the use of those full bernoulli rates

1:15:26so as i mentioned the general standard is that if you are receiving a hundred percent uh private benefit or mostly private benefit you should bear the cost right so if you subsidize a fee to me that means that other general taxpayers would have to pay for the benefit being

1:15:41provided to me but it is it's completely up to council right and uh the staff has already put before you some considerations for that like the pre-application fee so there might be some services you want to provide as uh you know as a general benefit to make sure they come in the door and ask

1:15:57questions and they get it done right the first time right so there's many situations you might want to answer might want to subsidize which encourage the participation if there's something that is going to be cost prohibitive uh this is a way that you could subsidize you could still you

1:16:11show what the full cost is but you can still subsidize that to make sure that you uh you are allowing your ac giving access to that service we do recommend that you have an annual inflator uh personnel and operations costs do grow over the years and you don't want to do this kind of

1:16:25study every year your staff has been a tremendous help and they put in a lot of work and effort into this it is simply not possible without their without their attention to details i want to thank them for that and also recognize that they don't want to go through this every year so some

1:16:40kind of cpi inflator would kind of keep you on track so that when you do this every you know whatever term you have four to five years or what have you you aren't looking at big jumps and fees it kind of keeps you going okay and i'm here for any questions you have

1:16:55about methodologies what you see kind of out there and staff is here as well thank you for your time thank you start with questions sure um on that last slide i'll actually start with that the last bullet the last slide where you make a recommendation that we have a cpi adjustment factor

1:17:17what it what where is it in the staff report or in the resolution more importantly in the resolution i do not see a cpi factor or any recommendation for periodic inflation in the resolution the cpi is the um action we take when we do the master fee schedule every year um

1:17:36there are years that the uh city of illinois has chosen not to make that adjustment um when it's very lean if there's a recession going on for example but that would be the idea is these fees roll into the master fee schedule and that would be updated as one so even

1:17:51though this recommendation was in the report it's not necessarily in the resolution correct it's just the best practice okay um that's that's fine because i i did go looking for it in the resolution and was not there so i just wanted to make sure we we were sensitive to that

1:18:05um and uh two where do we start the valuation tables both in the wild in report and in the resolution evaluation tables have make no reference to this as staff did make no reference to new construction so having done a couple of projects on my home one of the projects increased my value

1:18:34by about five thousand dollars and the other one increased the value by a thousand dollars boy i don't see why i can't use these valuation tables because fifty dollars one of one of my fees would have been um a hundred and seven dollars as opposed to almost the 300 that i paid so where is

1:18:54it stated that these valuation tables are strictly for new construction because i could not find any reference to that in the resolution i'm i'll look i'll take it from staff well dan didn't it wasn't clear in the wild and report either but it it's not clear in the resolution at all that

1:19:11those that i mean i'm certainly just trying to figure out how how we implement what you're proposing well i think and that gets to i think a larger question the building fees and the planning fees um are something that folks in the building trades in the planning trades and such

1:19:31would be familiar with no one no homeowner no small business would be handed these as a document and and um been left to interpret them um so when someone comes in for a kitchen remodel the permit taxes for them talks about what it needs for submittal uh what the fee will be and we would we

1:19:53would we would walk them through that as a level of customer service i guess i'll ask mr thrash to come up then why do they start at zero one dollar to eight hundred dollars tell me what new construction is done for less than eight hundred dollars and so the kind of the building base for

1:20:09these is a uh they're it came out of the code in 1997 where they established kind of a range of fees to start with which went from zero to 500 now since then uh the valuation increase has been about 50 percent and so those fees have grown since then now city to city there can be a

1:20:27determination to use evaluation basis to apply to smaller projects typically these do apply to new construction though so while there is kind of that added smaller value which may never apply to anything it serves purposes if you have a kind of a structure built

1:20:42around it so if you do have something that you say you have a fee request that does not apply to one of your other categories it is kind of a fallback you can use something like this in order to give some kind of fee or evaluation base because it ties to the personnel or the departmental cost

1:20:58okay so so we it it is a tool it's a flexible tool that would allow staff to say oh you're putting in one window yeah yeah that you know that window is a 500 window and our fee is 363 i think it is for one window that's a tremendous ratio a 500 window you could conceivably do 107 fee through

1:21:22the valuation is that what i'm hearing it builds flexibility for staff to to administer a permit fee that's more commensurate potentially more commensurate with the valuation of the project that's going on i'd kind of need to yield to your uh kind of your staff

1:21:39and exactly that the purpose for use of it specifically for any specific case but in general yes if you don't have something that is built into your fee schedule to accommodate something that doesn't tie to what's being requested and this goes for any kind of fear

1:21:52service if someone comes to your city and wants to do a project that doesn't conform to your fee schedule you can develop a deposit base where you can develop a fee to provide that service because it goes outside of the scope of the services that are listed right so

1:22:06these fees while they're listed at a certain rate or at a certain amount that's based off of a certain amount of time assumption or project size assumption correct a new window is actually on the schedule so i'm assuming that that that would be prohibited to be

1:22:19using a evaluation technolo evaluation methodology i'll defer to staff on that good evening um yes the the evaluation table has always been intended to use on new construction especially with the larger projects as we were discovering that our couple of larger projects that have come

1:22:45through haven't been fully covered with the current v tables based on square footage we tried to go through each and every one of those miscellaneous fees and assess how much time it would take and and on many fees they were reassessed downward from what they currently are

1:23:07and i think you'll find uh on the windows especially that the fee for a single window is a hundred and ninety three dollars uh in the proposed schedule yeah i'm trying to find it it's one of these beautiful things about this schedule i would i would strongly recommend that the um

1:23:24that the table's page five you said 25 page that's 20 of the weld that's of the weld and i'm i'm looking at the attachments to the resolution it would be item number ninety seven maybe seven uh ninety eight nine i'm sorry yeah ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine

1:23:40yeah so so uh i wouldn't it certainly doesn't say window anywhere on 97 98 99 uh yes we need to make a clarification on that on the descriptive part it does on column three reference windows sliding glass doors and solar tubes for um on page 25 it does that or pi or on page

1:24:07three of the resolution i'm uh i'm looking in the welding uh yeah and so that was one of my questions just generically why are we not just using the will dan tables as opposed to revamping them into a into our own tables uh just to respond to that one question they in essence are the same numbers

1:24:34there might be some additional language that was added to clarify a permit but it was certainly meant to be uh in substance it is the same to that bend at my house i did put a deck in uh it was a 800 square foot deck um and so i'm looking at page one of exhibit a

1:24:54um and again the comment would be great if these sub tables all had separate subtable numbers so that you could get to them but in this case the very first page of exhibit a line items 16 and 17 i think these are supposed to be additive at least that's the way they interpret it when i paid

1:25:15my almost thousand dollars for my 5 000 deck so i just curious um how how is somebody supposed to figure out one of your staff people eight years from now trying how would they interpret six lines 16 and 17 if i had 16 is basically a base fee for a deck between 100 and 500 square feet

1:25:37right and then you go above 500 square feet then you would add well under the current schedule you'd add 177 dollars per every uh 500 square feet of duck additional correct it doesn't say that currently so this is another example where the going from the wildan report to this

1:25:55exhibit it's not carrying some of that information that will dan had in their report because that's not what this says currently line 17 says new deck greater than 500 and square 501 square feet is 230 dollars so it's actually cheaper to put a 502 square foot deck in than a 499 square

1:26:16deck no that's not the way it should be interpreted i'm just reading what's in the page so i'm just i'm just trying to tell you that if if that's not what you're what you're saying verbally and what will dan has in their report is potentially what you want but that is not the way i

1:26:33would interpret this piece of paper right well i would agree that the language needs to be improved in the column three to indicate that it's for each additional 500 square feet beyond the first 500 square feet okay um attack okay and then uh going through this and so you've you're

1:27:01you're at some point you will change exhibit a to say that the valuation tables are just for new construction because right again right now it doesn't say that certainly we could make that amount um and when i get to page four the third page four maybe the second page four

1:27:26of exhibit a it's planning fees line items 16 and 17 appeals and it says and actually line 15 says half of permit fee i'm assuming that's half of whatever permit fee i paid that's correct so that would be the applicant if the applicant chooses to appeal an action of the planning

1:27:50commission they would pay half the original permit fee and then what's half of current fee what is current fee how's that defined um it's again maybe that's something we should clarify in language but it's the um application fee so that makes it sound like you're going to

1:28:08change that to half the permit fee um i'm sorry i'm looking through these different what can you tell me which number fee you're on because um there's a lot of pages to look at it once and that was one of my comments is that it's really hard to tell you what page i'm on

1:28:24i'm on page four the second page four of exhibit a um it has no header uh it has no header but the very first line is number eight unspecified or research hourly okay so i believe it's a continuation of the development fee table okay um yeah so there's two kinds of appeals fees

1:28:51there's an appeal fee that is called out and described in the agenda bill and in the resolution and then there's appeal fees on behalf of the applicant the original projects come in different sizes and that's reflected in the original permit fee and if an applicant then wanted to

1:29:06appeal the decision of the commission the board the council well the commission in the board or the board they would pay half of that original fee so it's a proportional effort um to capture that so so the definition of current fee is whatever they've paid up to that point

1:29:24well so for example if they did a tier two uh project um and paid the tier two fees of a certain size of building they were proposing and they were denied and they wanted to appeal that decision they would pay half of that tier two fee so it's not half the secret fee it's not it's the

1:29:41application fee okay i think um covered this one um so going back to the valuation uh methodology that may or may not be used for um something other than new uh construction house valuation established who who sets the valuation is it the county who is it the valuation of the

1:30:17parcel as as the county might said it because they do come in for example when i did my project i gave the valuation at the counter as the materials that i bought was spending to put the deck in the county came out and said oh no this is worth about four times that so my property

1:30:37value went up a lot more than potentially what the prop the value of the project was so who is it who sets the valuation well valuation is uh just to clarify is is what it basically what is that work or improvement worth in a fair market system so regardless of who supplies the labor

1:31:01or who supplies the materials that work or improvement has increased the value of your property by a certain dollar amount so in the case of new construction we what we've what we will do is use a valuation table that was established by icbo or the international conference of

1:31:25building officials back in 1997 and then we will re-index that using the engineering news record cost of construction index increase for the past 20 years and adjust the numbers accordingly and then each year as that cost of construction index increases then we increase the uh

1:31:49numbers on the evaluation table so so finishes like a marble finish versus a tile finish would not necessarily make a difference in that because you're using you're using standard construction numbers these are average costs of construction or average valuations of

1:32:04construction based on the occupancy and the type of construction involved so it would be a fairly level playing field we won't have to rely on what the contractor or the applicant tells us they think the valuation is or whether they're doing the work themselves or having their

1:32:23brother-in-law do it or whatever right yeah i i did my own deck and was hoping to not to avoid some of the the fees that i actually end up paying um one more one more question the permit revision fee which is 107 108 minor and major and this is i'm assuming this is

1:32:55based on a set number of hours based on the way you did your build up evaluation process is that correct well a minor revision is a flat fee and uh honestly that wouldn't be assessed for uh something that was really minor if you just wanted to add a couple plugs

1:33:12uh here and there or you change something in your bathroom and move the toilet from one side of the room to the other that kind of thing that fee wouldn't apply but anything that we would have to change on the plans that would require someone to re-examine the plans a new

1:33:28review so to speak on that section then we would apply the fee for the major revision which is [Music] quite a lot of changes in a plan set that requires uh examination by either our plan reviewer or the consultant who did the original review then we would go to uh the major plan review and that's

1:33:52per hour okay i will um again ask you to to make that click that clear because when i look at 107 it looks like oh sorry 108 and here the will dan report does talk about per hour the will down report says 175 dollars per hour three hour minimum correct but that information is not transferred

1:34:16over at all to the exhibit a that you are asking us to approve tonight um what's in exhibit a for tonight is a major and a minor are equal at 208 dollars so i would point out that it's not quite exactly where you're you're representing so but i want to take us to the good news

1:34:44if i can uh which is attachment 3b uh which is in the middle of our or fairly close to the back of our packet um it it and this actually when i looked at this i found out something that i've not heard in a long time and i know this is for the new construction um

1:35:04because i've been told by many people that berkeley permits are less expensive than than el cerrito but um so but that's not what this table says but i want to get a layer of land on this on this colored table um lot the green line is using our current permit fee schedule this is what

1:35:30we would charge for permits uh correct and so if we approved this tonight for the next 60 days one of these major projects could come in and pull their permit for the green line is that correct potentially yes okay and the yellow line is based on the resolution and the fact

1:35:48that the 85 goes to 100 on july 1 of 2019 the yellow line is what the 2019 the july 1 2019 fee would be uh correct or whenever we approve or adopt the the new schedule but no the future schedule features well yellow is 100 not 85 right okay and so and so between

1:36:12if we adopt it tonight between 60 days from now and june 30th of 2019 it would be 85 of the yellow line uh actually we have two diff i guess you could look at it that way we do have another table on there that's at 85 percent with the same green and yellow markings

1:36:40ah 3a okay um excellent but what i really wanted to point out on this was that the berkeley fees are almost three times what we're proposing whether it's the um the 85 fee or even the the 100 percent fee berkeley runs at about three times what we're trying to move towards

1:37:13richmond is almost twice what we're trying to move towards and you do compare to the median and we would be below the median although part of that is because albany is certainly um not uh you know is not very expensive and that might be because they don't have a lot

1:37:34of opportunity for new development so they've not necessarily looked at their pricing schedule uh you know recently so so as we look at the increases going from so for example hana gardens going from 85 000 under our current schedule to 114 000 under the 85 percent

1:37:58schedule 135 000 under the future uh schedule those 85 to 135 000 is a big increase but we're still way below median and way below some of our neighboring cities of emeryville berkeley richmond um and comparable to walnut creek so that's the good news is that even though our permit

1:38:21fees are going up they're not going up they're not going up to significantly above what our neighboring cities are so i just wanted to make sure that people took a moment to to look at that schedule so that we recognize where we stand in the overall process um great that's it for my questions thank

1:38:49you paul fideli oh darn it um so i'm going to be a little more general here um and and this was a this was good news here i think that there are some we're comparable to other communities um i know that we rely on these costs for our own general fund and budget but

1:39:12um it's good to compare us to these things i i want to thank the staff and i want to thank you because this is this is an ongoing issue with with el cerrito citizens that come up to elected officials and talk about a fee or talk about it's too much to remodel and there's a delicate balance between

1:39:33getting people to participate in the city program or sidestep it so i want to focus a little bit on public opinion and i was wondering in the process of developing this study how much input was taken from our public in other words asking the staff what is the biggest

1:39:56complaint that we've had about fees and the cost and how is that addressed here in this report i think one of the primary ways you'll see it addressed is the creation of some new fees showing lower increments so um in the building fees the for example we went down to a 400 square foot edition

1:40:21the the one of the tricks we have is when we have a base fee set sometimes we can't go below it even if the actual project is smaller so um in the residential side we added more incremental fees to capture some of the smaller improvements i think a lot of folks

1:40:36finance things in different ways and i mean i know with my own home we have a 20-year plan so you chew things as you can afford them and we wanted to establish fees that recognize that level of effort so you're saying the smaller efforts people tend to not go to the

1:40:50city to try to get um well we were one of the complaints we received is that the fee was um larger than the amount of work being done right we would have um so we've lost those people in the past well i don't so the trick of it is is we don't know what we've lost right i um

1:41:09i've had folks talk to us talk to me at expressing that you know my building permit fee was over a quarter of my entire project and we we want to cover the costs of the services provided as mr thrasher explained but um how we can tune that into the projects is to look at smaller projects and make

1:41:33sure we're in alignment with what they're asking to do so in residential editions that's something you'll see um the other comment we received from a few folks was the commercial tenant improvements were higher than many people expected them to be so we revisited that

1:41:49i will say so we also stepped back and looked at the time it would take to do all of these building permits on the what i call the meat and potatoes the core services so um as said in the agenda bill the last few study was done a long time ago and when you started to wonder how many

1:42:07hours did we think the inspector was out there we've now went back and checked that we've been back and talked about it the plannings i talked among planning staff the building staff talked among building staff we set these numbers based on our current understanding of how we do what

1:42:20we do so i think in that case many numbers went down so that was the first thing a lot of going down directions things yeah and then so it so that and then we added additional fees to catch different types of effort or more incremental types of effort that folks do both in the small

1:42:36commercial and in the residential so that was another response to the complaints that we had received so the last question in that area is if you could about a substantial increase and a substantial decrease can you identify for us in the city lots of pages of things here is there

1:42:54something that stands out that we really needed to increase or something that we really needed to decrease the fee on well i think um without having the numbers in front of me i know i mean well and without taking the time to look at them um at this moment the um

1:43:12commercial tenant improvement fee changed um and it i think substantial to who right when we're talking about a commercial tenant improvement we meet an existing business that's trying to improve them they're they're they're they're in they're inside their their

1:43:24floor plan they're adding something else they're doing a small addition um and that feels substantial probably at any rate because they're looking at their construction financing um so that's one example that would come to mind quickly um and something that we had to lower that

1:43:42oh we we added and i'll let the building official describe it more but we added uh more layers to it as well i believe which fee commercial ties well commercial tenant improvements we've got three different uh fee categories one for office tenant improvement one

1:44:00for retail and one for restaurant uh all of them are much lower than what we were charging before i worked up a an analysis earlier today and at 1200 1250 square foot office tenant improvement under our old schedule was i think if i'm remembering correctly seven hundred or seventy five hundred

1:44:29and fifty dollars um just to get you in the door and uh your per basic permit under the new schedule the same uh office tenant improvement would come in about 29.50 so there's a over a 4 500 decrease in the cost of a permit for that same uh tenant improvement uh if you're

1:44:57if you happen to be a smaller company or a mom-and-pop type of thing that that's a substantial savings allowing you to spend more money on your business instead of giving it to us okay i would also like to point out that all the categories for residential room additions and remodels actually

1:45:18have a 300 square foot base and the cost for the base plus the cost per 100 square feet afterwards or 300 square feet afterwards i'm sorry is much lower than what we have currently so that should take some of the burden away from the homeowner if they want to improve their

1:45:39property and that also relates to things like accessory dwelling units okay good i understand this news needs to get out to our citizens so they are not quite as afraid to come to city hall and say they're going to make these improvements right there's less less

1:45:55cost um council member lyman addressed my cpi issue so um i was wondering how that might apply to us in the future my and it's on this last slide here um the subsidy issue is something that i had a concern with because i was wondering how in the effort in the process of coming up with this report

1:46:19how you isn't it logical that based on our the goals that we have as a city whether it be climate change or sustainability or other that we prioritize and subsidize those things that involve that can you describe how that process went and how you identified those things

1:46:35yes and that's where we should be investing in in subsidies for less so we will encourage action right that's correct um the the two that were included in your uh proposal tonight um appeals um that's uh in any city i i've worked in a couple different cities in

1:46:53in california and beyond um as stated in the staff report the full cost of a de novo appeal um is extensive yeah right and the balance um is a robust democratic process so you would never um the so the number we put out there was a high level of subsidy compared to the

1:47:15costs and if you think about some appeals that have come uh that the council's aware of whether they came to the council or not 1715 elm street went on um pretty for many hours in this prep time for not only the staff but the planning staff but for legal staff right there's hourly

1:47:35considerations for lots of folks on an appeal we're basically preparing a record that is an administrative record that could go on to a court case so it's um it's pretty extensive i think to summarize that um it would be um would have a very chilling effect on the

1:47:55democratic process if we actually charge that full rate so that was something that we could easily identify that uh and you knew that going into the process right you had right the other what about the other goals the environmental goals that we have as a city and so i mean uh

1:48:12this this process has been going on for many months and um staff had said in different groups and discussed um not only how many hours go into a particular uh task but what are the priorities of the city um what we did in summary uh uh the community development department

1:48:34has a role in implementing the urban grading plan the active transportation plan certainly the climate action plan when you think of transit and housing and all of that all of that is something we touch daily and it's it's very it's a high priority to us and it's adopted documents from your

1:48:50body the idea of subsidizing uh the cost to provide those services with general fund money was something that we decided to go conservative on it's well within the right of the council to say what level of subsidy you'd like to provide for certain tasks in line with those documents

1:49:12it felt like it was uh premature or assumptive uh at least from my point of view to bring that to you already done so um i think that it's uh something that each project you would probably going to weigh up uh into and think about what level of subsidy you might want to add um and we could

1:49:33definitely bring back uh more information um especially if we run to the june meeting when we're talking about the rest of the fees so we would have to identify those tonight it's really demeaning to um there's a lot i mean like eevee those it does seem rather expensive if we're

1:49:52encouraging this in our community if i could jump in i would suggest um i think one of the challenges work we have in regard to this subsidy topic is the timing of doing the fees now and there were certainly staff goals and this had been worked on for months and

1:50:09getting this done sooner rather than later as councilmember lyman mentioned earlier about projects particularly larger ones that we actually hope to come in sooner rather than later so there was a desire to get this to you as quickly as we can having said that if globally

1:50:25the council wants us to give more thought and consideration to using the fee schedule for goals like as you recall we at one point lowered the solar installation fee almost i think to zero and then ramped it up as the industry changed a bit and i would prefer to do that as part of the

1:50:47budget process because as staff and our consultant alluded to it's well first of all it's a zero-sum game and while you may be subsidizing something in the building division you may not be filling a police officer position in order to accomplish that so rather than sit here and try to debate

1:51:11what it is we already have enough of your documents that you've already approved whether it's the climate action plan your strategic plan and on and on if if the council feels like they would have liked this to include that then i think what we would do is go back and at

1:51:26the time we timed the master fee schedule to come back as part of the budget process we could identify based on these plans and based on a desire to do that sort of i guess i would say a range but also what are the cost what are the potential cost impacts of doing that and

1:51:44how are we going to pay for it and then you may have to make some choices between furthering those goals may have to be paid for by not doing other things that don't have nothing to do with this because it's all ultimately coming out of the general fund so i think that would be very helpful

1:52:02but that's you know we're happy to do that but that's if that helps explain why as margaret said it was sort of conservative we wanted to kind of have blinders on and focus on building and planning and obviously a little recreation tonight but we haven't forgot

1:52:16about all those other things it's just a little bit out of context i think that's very helpful because this is where we can encourage the goals that we set out as a city so so thank you for that i will follow up on that and then i just have a couple more um questions the you have an 85 percent

1:52:34recovery and 100 graph here but you're proposing that we seek the 100 is that correct that's the preference cost required that's how you've based the whole plan for the new for new projects we're recommending uh in 60 days to start with the 85 cost recovery model and then in july of

1:52:562019 roll up to the 100 model just for new projects that's correct okay um okay and then i just had um can i ask a recreational question of chris or is that for a separate time okay i just um [Music] a couple points you mentioned you move um to the the monthly price uh setting can you describe that a

1:53:25little more closely and and then the second thing is that the result of our wage increase is probably the reason that we're not quite balancing our books on this anymore well yes i'm chris jones the city's recreation director uh to your first point um what we're trying to do is move away

1:53:46from uh an hourly base fee to um a monthly fee that is um the same over nine periods of time and it's it's basically the annual cost divided by nine and that really it streamlines things to so that your families know exactly how much they're gonna pay every month you know sometimes there's months

1:54:10like march and october where there's no holidays and there's lots of weekdays and all of a sudden their bills higher than they're used to and and so following really um how pretty much everyone else charges for child care that's why we're proposing move to the monthly fee and

1:54:26also it's it's very common that right before the school year starts one of the elementary schools may change their release time by four minutes and all of a sudden we have to redo 100 bills so so it's easier for us easier for them and that's what everybody else is doing correct okay

1:54:44yeah and and then um to your second point yes um you know we are proposing what amounts to some fee increases for for most users in their current schedule currently um if someone attends for example five days per week and they stay until six o'clock they're not really going to see

1:55:04much of an increase but what we're trying to do is gain is is tier our our rates so that if you stay less than five days you're paying a percentage more than if you divided the five day rate by five and multiplied it by four and that's really to reflect the fact that we have certain fixed

1:55:31costs that don't really change depending on the days that children attend the program if they come less and also that if somebody has a three or four or two day schedule it's likely that those days that they do not attend um someone's not going to fill that space exactly

1:55:51so it's just trying to be better about cost recovery in a more direct manner my other question was the minimum wage yes and so the reason why we're trying to increase fees is that the minimum wage this year all of our aides now have to start at the third step of the

1:56:11pay scale as opposed to the first step so automatically they cost about 10 percent more and then within six months they're eligible to move on to the next step so within six months they're costing about 15 percent more than they did uh in previous years and so the human resources division is actually

1:56:29working on uh creating the new um pay scale but what it amounts to is that our costs are going up and will continue to go up as the minimum wage changes because it will uh peak in 2019 at 15 an hour but then it will continue to raise by uh cpi uh in subsequent years we have to deal with

1:56:53that so we have to deal with that yes okay councilmember wilson um just while you're there chris uh i i have uh three grandchildren in uh preschool day care and so i think that what you say reflects a lot of what i hear from my own children about costs and um the

1:57:22the one i don't think you fully uh expressed one thing that i hear which is that if you get paid monthly well maybe you did it some i think but i think it's kind of an important issue is that if you get paid monthly you know and it's a fixed amount say that to one month have the cost of child

1:57:44care be one thing and then another month have it another thing is a big deal so if it's just stable then you know it corresponds to the checkbook of the family that's that's getting that daycare and i don't know if it applies here or not but maybe you could answer that question my

1:58:11kids have told me that when that there's always this thing called vacation which is vacation for the child care workers and when they're on vacation you still pay the monthly fee is that how do we do it here so we based our fees off of the 180 days that school is actually in session

1:58:36and then those but part of those fixed costs that i was talking about could include vacation and other things so rather than directly relate the pay to hours that the kids aren't there we just kind of folded that into the our fee calculations so they're um so what we're you know so a lot of in

1:58:57that model it would be you pay the same every month pretty much no matter how many days you attend um and so it's a daily rate or you know close to a daily rate what we're really doing is just trying to take the annual cost and divide it by nine and so it's not necessarily like when

1:59:15you pay in december for january you're not paying for like all those days in january you're just paying january 1 9 of the annual cost and uh if what if you you want to be uh look i'll make these things up don't they're not necessarily true but let's say the fourth week of december

1:59:38you're closed okay but the fourth week of december the parents of a child still get to work then what happens well so during those big school breaks we do provide break camps but they are for an additional cost so so in fact you the the parents are paying um just like my

2:00:11it's exactly like my kids do it for their own children's day care um i i guess it depends on how you interpret it i mean the the fee that we derived is based on 180 school days like we started with our origin with our hourly rate and kind of built from there so we looked back at what we charged per

2:00:31hour and then so but yes it's not just direct costs that are in this fee it's kind of all costs associated with because in order to operate the program you do have all the costs we do yes our workers are entitled to sick and vacation leave and right we have to pay for it somehow right you

2:00:50know you know and you can't have a program for free you know i mean it you know for uh whoever just wants you know there's there aren't the funds to do that perhaps unless we took from other needed services such as police and fire yeah correct which so for uh what was said earlier about for

2:01:16something for services that an individual gets which is what would be happening in that case just like in the building cases yes thank you okay so don't go anywhere yet [Laughter] um so i'm a little confused by the nine month thing because my child is in this for 11 months out of

2:01:41the year and particularly i'd wonder what you would do in june where they're only there for a week so am i going to be paying for a whole month when the kids are only there for a week so the payment periods that we're envisioning is basically combining august and september and combining may

2:01:56and june and so that would be nine nine payments okay thank you because i was like 9 11.

2:02:04that's a big difference when it's you know 600 um a month so the other question i had is is there still going to be a separate fee for extended care no so the new schedule would basically be from the time the bell rings until 6 pm okay and then let's see uh and there's there's still a

2:02:32discounted rate for kids in haystep and mesa um we actually eliminated that uh this school year oh okay yeah and it really came down to it was it was a nominal cost and and really our our costs in the child care program don't go down just because the kid leaves for haste up

2:02:56and comes back like nobody's going home you know or taking a break for 90 minutes then coming back like our costs remain the same despite the fact that they go to that those programs okay yeah and is it is it possible then if they are doing haystep or mesa to switch their schedule to like a two day

2:03:14a week or three yeah as long as space space permitting but yeah we we will make allowances for when the new sessions come out to make uh adjustments as long as it's feasible i mean our our programs have a certain cap and [Music] right they do not always work out yeah

2:03:33so theoretically you could lose your spot if you if you reduce the hours well yeah theoretically yeah if you change your schedule for a haystep and then the next uh session it would you took a class on a different day and so you tried to get your old day back theoretically it could be gone yeah okay

2:03:54thank you thank you let's open up the public hearing we have two speakers mayor howdy gowdy followed by robin mitchell good evening mayor and council members my name is howdy gowdy um you all should have received correspondence with a number of comments on this topic and um i'm a little

2:04:24puzzled that i mean the very basic questions that came up earlier about missing information from exhibit a that that wasn't corrected um it's it's really obvious stuff that's needed the resolution refers to exhibit a exhibit a is what you're enacting and it's missing vital

2:04:41information to actually you know execute these fees properly so you should feel very uncomfortable approving this without amending it so it includes the column called units which is in the wild and report and specifies whether it's in each hours or square foot costs there's a lot

2:05:05of vital information there that that fee structure just doesn't make sense in exhibit a so that needs to be corrected and you know there's been this discussion about you know subsidies um i actually think if you're inclined to do it you should do it now rather than have you know three different fees

2:05:26over the next few months instead of two different fees um but the other way to look at it is are we even confident that these are the right fees um frankly i am not um i have very low confidence in the accuracy of some of these fees they just don't make sense to me and they

2:05:44um you know don't actually speak well to what i think some of you were describing that you know the public has you know negative reactions to some of the fees they're charged when they come into the building department because they seem out of scale i mean paying

2:06:04you know 300 for a solar permit or 250 for an ev permit when other electrical work of similar complexity you can get an electrical permit for you know pool and spa work which is very safety you know high demand and it's 120 dollars so none of this makes sense you know we have a 60 dollar

2:06:27permit for an electrical sub panel and feeder that's complicated electrical work why does an ev charger cost you know so much more than that four times more than that so i think there's just fundamentally you know i think maybe there was good effort on the larger projects that's what you're

2:06:47really focused on but the a la carte menu is still a mess and it really needs more attention but there's a lot of other important issues the appeal field going from 300 to 1000 is totally you know detrimental to public process there needs to be a low income waiver

2:07:06and that needs to be announced at every decision we should look at uh you know deferring or waiving fees for affordable housing was in the affordable housing strategy i hear no discussion of that now that's definitely something we should be considering um and you know frankly this just needs

2:07:27a lot of work it's um i have a lot of comments i hope you read them um but it's just this is not something that's ready to be approved like this i i understand you've had a lot of time but it hasn't include included public impact to your our input to your comment about public input yes

2:07:45it was posted on thursday night the resolution says it would be on review for 10 days before to the public i don't know how that 10 days was available to people because it was thursday night was when it became available and i gave public input and i see no evidence that it's

2:08:05been adopted yet so thanks robin mitchell i'm robin mitchell i'm an el cerrito resident i just wanted to follow on howdy's um comment about the application the non-applicant appeal fee going from 373 dollars to a thousand dollars and um the report says that the full cost is

2:08:33five thousand dollars and i actually find that hard to believe because in general the staff report is just you know a regurgitation of what the original staff report was so i doubt in most cases that it's really five thousand dollars so and i participated in a few appeals

2:08:51and even though our arguments didn't actually have any um any result in the decision i still think it was important that we were allowed to give that appeal that we had a venue that we could express our opinions about the decision and at the time that we did those appeals it

2:09:12was about 300 which you know seemed possible to pay i think if it's a thousand dollars that puts a very different spin on things and i really think that it does actually impede the democratic process as margaret was alluding to because it means that you have to pay

2:09:32a significant amount of money in order to speak to government and i think that's wrong and the other thing that i wanted to just touch on briefly was this whole discussion which i may not have totally understood or gotten right but the valuation based on construction cost if

2:09:48you're doing the work yourself you're not paying a contractor so that's very punitive to someone that's an owner builder and i think in general this building department is quite is not very interested in accommodating bill owner builders and i think that's something

2:10:03maybe you can't address it now but something to think about for the future thanks can you save a motion to close the public hearing i move that we close the public hearing second all in favor aye aye aye aye five steroid unanimous mission carries um discussion yeah um

2:10:33you know as my comments uh alluded to the attachment a um and well attachment b we was in our package and i didn't have any comments on it when it was attachment four uh attachment a um one of my questions of course to staff was you know why not just use the will dan

2:10:54tables because obviously the will dan tables do provide a higher level of specificity that's not in our our resolution so you know there's a fee slash charge column a unit column a notes column there's quite a bit of information in um in the will dan report that did not

2:11:17necessarily carry over to the resolution resolution tables so it clearly i would move that we carry that a lot of that information into any exhibit we carry forward tonight there is discussion about subsidies and i would ask um about the subsidies i mean as one of my comments in or questions sorry

2:11:47it was a question uh indicated when we were looking at uh attachments 3a and 3b and the in the yellow line compared to the green line and and the yellow line compared to other cities i would i would say that maybe we don't do the full 85 percent of staff recommends maybe we consider 90

2:12:08uh for that 15-month uh incentive to try and get some of these um parcels developed um and the rationale for for maybe not doing 85 and doing 90 is to allow for staff to put subsidies into other areas so right i hear it's a zero-sum game and that we are not able to

2:12:32we may be denying child care services or police services fire services if we choose to do subsidies in other areas so that's why i would i would propose that we instead of an 85 subsidies by the way the difference between 85 percent and 100 percent and i hope these developers are

2:12:52listening is for almost 400 000 so when we are talking about changing it from 85 percent substitutive 90 subsidy we're talking about allowing our staff another third of that or about a hundred thousand dollars over that time frame to to provide subsidies in other

2:13:14categories to promote stimulus stimulate some of the other policies that they're out there so this isn't a random uh recommendation or random request would be to give our staff some fiscal room to to move towards some of our other policies that we're discussing tonight

2:13:37i i'd be remiss in thank in not thanking staff i mean when i read the will dan report and i can't remember what page it's on when they enumerate the amount of work that you guys put into this over the last nine months it's real i know it's real and i want to thank you guys for the work that you've

2:13:55done on this it it's much greatly appreciated and when i launch into the precision that i'm trying to get out of our documents it's not out of the the respect or care for the work that you've got you've done it's actually to make sure these documents the last time we did this was over 15

2:14:16years ago you guys are going to be living with these documents for 15 years so it's it's you know it's my goal or my intention to try and get these to be as accurate and precise as possible so that you guys can implement them in a way that's that's usable and our residents understand what

2:14:32it is and where we're going with these so i'd be remiss in saying that i'm not opposed to the fee schedule i'm not opposed to the i've been the first person to ask for the fee uh schedule revisions for the last three or four years um i i will say that it's good to see that

2:14:50some of them went down it's i understand it's a zero-sum game so some of them potentially had to go up as they did um i it'll be interesting to see as council member fidelity just said i will say that one of the things that we use we do hear about is the cost of fees as a

2:15:08percentage of project um you know i did a i did a calculation wouldn't surprise anybody if there was a bathroom remodel that was valued at ten thousand dollars and the permit fee if we were able to reduce the permit fee by 150 dollars the 22 cents of two percent of the new value

2:15:36of that assessed property is about fifty dollars so that hundred and fifty dollar reduction in a fee would pay for itself in three years okay so three years but then that 50 that comes to el cerrito as part of a parcel reassessment is perpetual so to to be short-sighted and say that we need to

2:16:00be funding ourselves with our permit fees potentially is driving the low-cost projects away and we're not achieving one of our goals which is to build safe housing stock we're not potentially incentivizing people to use um to put in skylights that allow them to release

2:16:24heat uh open operable skylights that allows them reduce solar gain when we get our nice foggy summer days so we lose sight of potentially some of our goals at the expense of trying to recover all of our costs and i understand until the property assessments are put

2:16:46in place until we get the valuation in place until the the assessor who um is variable in his capriciousness but uh until we get those assessments you know back up and we get the the revenue that comes from it we are we are basically um playing with the people's money

2:17:06for pipe private gain so we definitely have to balance that and and that's where um i would accept you know one of the potential suggestions i heard tonight was that we we adopt the policy in some fashion however potentially the subsidies be enacted at a later date

2:17:31um and and i understand the the desire for that um the quick calculation i made between the 85 percent and the and the hundred percent was four hundred almost four hundred thousand dollars of difference but that doesn't count the difference between today's fees

2:17:49and the fees that we would get if we move to that valuation program in in sixty days developers listening um which is almost a half million dollars also so um you know there is incentive to move uh forward tonight to at a minimum put the valuation uh policies in place so that new

2:18:13development uh is is uh begins paying 90 of our uh total cost um you know that that would be something that i would certainly support the missing columns from will dan into the schedules that are here would be useful um i understand i mean i made it certainly made it very painfully clear

2:18:41as we couldn't find line items that that it would be great if there was some more logical methodology by which these are called out i certainly would want to put on the pages that have the valuation for new construction only at a minimum you know i don't know if this is new construction

2:19:04for example the four new homes that went in up on the top of the hill would they be valuation or would they be using something else i'm seeing lots of nods for those that at home so you know if this is for new new construction um and not renovation uh there's a house on right a couple

2:19:25blocks from here that's just sticks right now um that's not necessarily new construction that's renovation so that so at a minimum i would want to see new i i if i move this tonight it would be to add the words uh for new construction only or if that's acceptable to staff

2:19:44on the valuation tables um to require staff to add the wildan um missing columns from the willdown uh tables uh to our exhibits um too purposes of discussion i would like to see the appeals um uh subsidy i don't know which way to say it to increase the subsidy so that the appeals

2:20:16fee was less i'll posit a number of 500 out there and i think i think i've done enough i think that's that's where i'll stop there and i'll um i will certainly put that on the table for purposes of discussion i have a question about it yes uh and this question of staff i'm

2:20:43not sure who um if i did your proposal include changing uh the the discount for a new construction for example a large project for from 85 to 95. eight nine nine zero nine nine from eight zero okay my question of staff is there a way of estimating what that means dollar dollar-wise

2:21:12to the city overall didn't didn't you just say yeah it should be it has the potential to be about a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars it's about a third of depend on the amount of construction i would think right so what what what would the answer be according to staff

2:21:34or vaguely so we have the ability to put together charts just like the charts you have for the 85 and 100 uh cost recovery at 90 percent um we can we can produce those and so it would begin it reflect the the mathematics of going from 85 to 90 um based on the value of the

2:21:56construction of the project so i couldn't give you a specific number out of hand i don't know if my building official could the thing i was wondering about is the order of magnitude is so much different than for a small single family project that there may be other factors

2:22:14that come into play such as for example the the valuation change would be potentially a lot larger right i wouldn't i wouldn't say the valuation as much as um are they going to build it um and when are they going to build it so i think we would look at what's like like you have in your

2:22:41package look at the projects that are in the process entitled likely to be entitled and then basically discount that by some some number to say what are we you know what's conservative that really will come in and get built um because i think what we don't want um

2:23:02maybe what councilmember lyman is doing is you look at everything and say it's 400 000 if everything conceivable comes in and i think that would that might be a little risky so i think we would sort of do best educated i hate to say yes but to some degree it is as we've seen over the last 10 years

2:23:23that a lot of this we're still talking about but no one has pulled building permits yet um so that's that's partly why we brought it this way was again please you know we're trying to encourage people to pull the building permits but we don't know exactly when they're going to do that what

2:23:39fiscal year they're going to do that so but i think we can get i think we can get to an estimate and i'm speaking for everybody else but i think we can get to an estimate that where we'd be comfortable that the downside risk is not it's not anything we couldn't handle

2:23:56if that answered not exactly because i was looking kind of for a ballpark number uh we couldn't do that off the top of our head i mean we'd have to look at all the projects and all the sites for example i don't know maybe we can't do this either but for example

2:24:12um take any particular project you want and and guesstimate what it would be so for example the um if you did 85 or 90 percent five percent uh with the the you know then uh meaning really a 15 or 10 discount right on the rates then the um then what other then the assessment would change

2:24:48uh and you'd either get some reassessment dollars through property tax down the road you would but i think what we're talking about is sort of in that point in time what what's that five percent that if they didn't do the project just yet because they didn't have the

2:25:08incentive of the discount which would be safe for one year then um let's say we had a discount you know this year but but with the statement that we won't have it next year at some level then encouraging people to do it this year and then we would get the property tax a

2:25:30year earlier on the uh that area and i i'm just trying to get a sense of the the magnitude that that might represent for i i don't have a good sense of what a what the um you know what size piece of property it would take to have what kind of uh value i you know that's what i don't

2:25:57really have a clue on i mean we i would hate to even try to guess i mean it just depends on the number of units is it rental is it owner occupied on and on and on i mean we could we could model it to some degree um with our consultant's help and get to a projection of the impact of

2:26:21development on assessed values i mean that's not an issue but i i would be hard-pressed to do it here it just depends is it a 100 unit project it's a 300-year project i mean i don't i don't know okay i think we could get i mean i'm sure councilmember lyman's already got a

2:26:38number for you i bet not that she'll not that she'll necessarily believe it on the mayfair market rate project counting on you doing this while i was stalling on the mayfair market rate project which is 24 million dollar valuation um the the 85 is a 219 thousand dollar

2:26:58permit the 100 000 is 292 000 so that's a 70 000 incentive for us to try and get them to to do it early if you take the 24 million and you multiply it by 2 percent and then by 22 percent their reassessment value if if they were built in in a year you know their reassessed value doesn't exist

2:27:26during construction but once they're full fully constructed their reassess value will be you know over a hundred thousand dollars a year of assessed value so the the whether the incentive is seventy three thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars which is my proposal

2:27:41um yeah they're they they would generate roughly a hundred thousand dollars towards our our tax base once they're assessed now they don't get assessed until they're occupied which you know with creekside that was a two plus year process so um but we're in the same we're in that

2:28:02ballpark for that one project we're in the ballpark of you know i'm saying yeah let's reduce the subsidy by 25 000 to give them incentive their their assessed rate would be about a hundred thousand dollars a year thank you for the excellent job paul um well i i i want to agree with uh

2:28:32greg lyman that this um was an epic journey that the staff took and we appreciate it i know that greg and i had been asking for a re-evaluation of the fees and it shouldn't happen every year thank god i think but because it was epic and sort of as our city manager said hard-pressed to do it

2:28:55all here we got this packet thursday and i had some there was some confusing confusing things in it that didn't make me feel like i had full empowerment of what was being proposed here um i'm i'm pleased to hear the city manager's concept of coming back with us

2:29:17and i just wanted to clarify maybe what that might mean as far as and i don't know if you want to do it now or later but just concepts of what we can compare and contrast and what subsidies might be have the staff give us some options here so we can make those and they are hard decisions but

2:29:32i'm also pleased with the comparative charts i mean we're not charging people crazily compared to other cities around us even though we have to get some revenue ourselves and make it a fair make it a fair and equitable program so i would support uh councilman lyman's 90 i think

2:29:53that's a great idea and i think that's all i have to say right now michelle so i think there's a couple of things one i think it's a good idea to incentivize them to build sooner so that we can get that property tax revenue in to the city sooner but there's also the point of we're

2:30:16building housing so the faster we're building housing we're actually helping out with our housing crisis sooner so i think for those two reasons i would support and also with the adjusted adjusted rate that councilmember lyman has proposed i think that that's fine

2:30:33still provides an incentive while maybe not quite as large that's the end of my comments okay greg do you have comments i have don't no comment so go ahead um so so one of the uh as i'm sorry mayor quinto can i add something before you make a motion um unfortunately we've discovered some

2:30:56errors and calculations and certain fees on your revised exhibit b to the resolution uh the formula is held in the pdf conversion for the first ten but the rest in this on this uh that are in section two that go from page one to page two are off and so i'm wondering if you

2:31:16would uh consider a revision for the uh for your resolution and i can read those prices to you if you'd like sure uh let me catch up to you i've somehow i've lost my schedule could you first tell us what yeah so um i'm referring to the revised exhibit b to the resolution uh which was

2:31:40distributed today it should be okay yeah here i'll find it i'll find it later i'm sure go ahead please yeah yeah and my apologies these definitely should have been caught so the the the fees for the five day and the four-day schedule are are all correct but it's for the three two and the one

2:32:08or which one i'm sorry for the five-day schedules and the four-day schedules are all correct so the first 10 new fees on page one but then starting with the three and the two and the one is where something broke down and so um following the formula that's carried

2:32:27through in the five and the four day the three-day am care would be 178 not 92.

2:32:35the three-day schedule for am transitional kindergarten would be 238 not 122.

2:32:43the three-day schedule for the pm kindergarten care would be 120 not 62.

2:32:50the three-day schedule for the pm kindergarten continuous care would be 491 not 245.

2:32:58the three-day schedule for pm care would be 403 not 202 for two day schedule am care 129 not 66 for the two-day am transitional kindergarten care 172 not 88 for the two-day schedule pm kindergarten care 87.45 for the two-day schedule pm continue kindergarten continuous care 354

2:33:28not 177.

2:33:30for the two-day schedule pm care 291 not 146 and finally the one day schedule am care 64 not 33 one day schedule a.m transit transitional kindergarten care 86 not 44.

2:33:48the one day schedule pm kindergarten care 43 not 22 the one day schedule pm kindergarten continuous care 177 not 89 and the one day schedule pm care 146 not 73 and the preschool fees remain as as we're in your exhibit thank you so these these are as opposed to what or

2:34:18the old piece what what no i think it's just when when we converted the spreadsheet into the pdf i'm assuming some the formulas didn't hold and so resulted in uh dramatically reduced fees for the service what i'm wondering is what are the fees relative to the old fees vaguely

2:34:40the old fees were based off of eight dollars per hour and the new fees are based on the new fees are based on taking the annual costs and and dividing that by nine so the eight dollars an hour um if you um could calculate it the other way is i mean is there overall is this going to

2:35:04bring in a lot more money or a little more money or it for the schedules that are less than five days then it will bring in more money than um under the previous fee structure i mean but it is a lot or a little bit i'm just trying to get a sense of the impact on families

2:35:25well i would say it's not insignificant it's about um depending on the one between uh around six percent for the same schedule okay thank you okay so i guess i've got a question for you chris sorry before you leave since we did advertise in our packet substantially different fees do you do

2:35:59you think there are people when do these fees go into effect are there people that are relying on the lower published fees um no way we were the reason why we came early was before we put out registration for next school year we wanted approved fees so we have not published these other

2:36:21than um bringing them here and then as attachment forward to this council correct okay okay um then i would uh there's one other uh item that i wanted to ask my counselor to weigh in on and um in exhibit three a a let me start that over in exhibit 3a and 3b the multi-colored green and yellow

2:36:52exhibit that that we have there is a um the mayfair the mayfair market rate project is there or sorry the mayfair affordable project is there um and so one of the things that i i um did not hear anybody weigh in on is is sort of and council member rochelle pardue okamoto

2:37:15did the affordability you know getting affordable houses um i just don't know how to practically implement the valuation a different subsidy for mayfair affordable um in our in our rate schedule so i i just curious if there's appetite to try and uh do a um a different subsidy or different

2:37:41affordability rate for new projects uh is is what i'm asking if there's any uh appetite for that and as as i say this obviously staff if you have any ideas on how it might be implemented um i was just curious if if there is uh you know the unfortunately mayfair

2:38:01affordable has to wait till after the mayfair market so they're not necessarily going to benefit from the discount period necessarily uh but but if there's some way to create incentives for affordable housing um we will to to council member fidelity's um comments you you already have a housing

2:38:25plan that says we want to promote adus we already passed an ordinance that promotes adu so you already got a sense of what we want for aid to use but maybe is there any way we can give you guidance on um new affordable housing hi mario you can't see me i'm behind you

2:38:43as melanie mintz the community development director i think it's a really important question one of the main things that we're asked from affordable housing developers is to defer payments which is one of the things that wic tech does for example for the uh stem fees

2:38:59um so just to give a kind of sense of how revenue and expenses work in this when a plan comes in large projects like this are sent out for review and we pay the outside plan check so if we were to defer a fee like that would be something that the general fund would have to carry

2:39:15until those fees came in so that's one way of thinking about deferrals but similarly when we were talking about the zero-sum game we do have to think about the value of the subsidy and i think it's a really important place to subsidize right now as you know we're

2:39:28doing an inclusionary zoning review and that includes development feasibility work so we're doing some pretty deep economics with kaiser marston on this when we do do a um when we start to talk about inclusionary zoning we will likely say that that could also be an in-lieu payment

2:39:44and if those if that payment were there and we were starting we were able to start to grow for example an affordable housing fund we could look at could that be partially where we subsidize this right so would developers themselves be would market rate developers in their

2:39:59in-lieu payments for inclusionary zoning be subsidizing this for example are you unders are you getting so just thinking about where does the funds come to do that subsidy where do they come from right so so to to reflect back what i'm hearing we would not necessarily have to

2:40:15because we have other programs under consideration we would not necessarily have to come up with a separate rate tonight because potentially you we will have other opportunities this this in the near future to weigh in on this matter yes either with something like inclusionary zoning

2:40:38when we actually have some of the data we can also do some outreach to the affordable housing developers and then similarly as the city manager has been saying when we're looking at at the trade-offs and the budget so if you take it from here where do you put it if you so we are looking at

2:40:51trying to increase revenues as i guess my point to be able to create some of those subsidies in other ways as well um and and uh from a timing standpoint we don't have any affordable housing developers coming in right now to pull building permits correct and and

2:41:04the just for point of value uh context here mayfair affordable uh which is almost a eight million dollar project their fee at 100 would be about 120 000 so it's not it's it's a full fte i mean it's a real person um it's it's a real amount of money that is meaningful to

2:41:27to our general fund it's a half percent of our overall general fund additionally it is money that we would pay out because at this point it isn't staff who does that plan check or inspections for large projects like that okay okay uh janet abelson has one question um i i don't know if i had a

2:41:43question but i just a comment really about um what what you said you asked the question um is there an interest in it and i think it's an interesting topic i don't know if we can do it today but i think uh as things move along and um you staff sees an opportunity

2:42:03to include it it it's a a great way to get more uh you know to present incentives to build more affordable housing perhaps and if it could somehow be included in that that would that would be a double win excellent dewey noted we'll look into that in the various pieces that

2:42:21we're moving forward okay thank you i'm writing my motion if you'll give me a few moments you have anything to ask yourself no okay um let me actually go look at the resolution first minute i want to make sure that we we make reference to exhibit b we would be making reference to exhibit

2:42:49b as revised and amended um i would refer to um revised exhibit b as provided to the council tonight with the changes made orally by the recreation director okay and um we would be we've we are proposing a change to [Music] table a2 um there happens to be two table a2s

2:43:27uh we would be making reference change to table a to the first table a2 and making that 90 cost recovery is that is that an adequate reference for the purposes of making that change um i guess i would frame it as um the um the valuation based um building permit

2:43:54fees that are in exhibit a would be um the the valuation based fees that that will go into effect in 60 days would be 90 percent of full cost recovery rather than 85 percent and that those numbers will be adjusted administratively as part of um as part of implementing them in the

2:44:13master fee schedule right so that the be it further resolved would be modified to to reflect that this resolution shall become effective immediately fees for community development department services set forth in exhibit a shall go into effect in 60 days after passage in adoption

2:44:32the value-based fees for building services shall be 90 percent uh and then increase automatic 90 of the 100 value and then increase automatically on july 1 2019 is set forth in exhibit a [Music] and exhibit b as amended and orally revised shall go into effect immediately

2:45:00so that's the that was revisions i'm recommending to be it further resolved um the other one that there's a fee that i do want to change and that was the appeal fee and i floated out 500 i did not hear any any additional comments on that so is that something that i can

2:45:29move forward with i look at my counsel to see nods or a lower number 500 is fine that sounds great i just didn't know if that was something that you were going to bring back to us as part of the package of i think i think based on the overall number of appeals in the

2:45:48comments tonight it's fine okay good and i would support that and uh 90 percent appeals we've adopted the and then finally um as as part not necessarily as part of the res so it would be a separate motion or part of the motion to have staff come back with a revised fee schedule

2:46:15for to implement policies that have subsidies that implement our policies i take it as a separate motion to have staff come back as part of the budget process to with some proposals for the city council about um community development fees that could be um reduced to further other policy goals

2:46:36of the of the city council i i i agree with that approach so i i will at this time move a resolution of the city council of the city of el cerrito approving fees for the community development department and recreation department services and amending the master fee schedule

2:46:52with revisions to appendix exhibit a to reduce the appeals fee to 500 and to change the value-based fee for building service building division services to be 90 percent of the full value and revise the be it further resolved that this resolution shall become effectively immediately

2:47:25fees for the community development department services shall be set forth in the revised exhibit a shall go into effect 60 days after passage and adoption the value the value based fee for building division services shall initially be 90 of the full value and then increase automatically on july 1st

2:47:472019 as set forth in the revised exhibit a recreation department fees set forth in exhibit in amended exhibit b as orally revised tonight shall go into effect immediately second second i just wanted to to make sure that it was reflected that you also wanted information from the tables provided in

2:48:17the fee study report to be included in exhibit a to clarify the manner in which they would be charged thank you it is all my notes that i scratched out but yes it exhibit a should be revised to reflect the missing information from the wildan reports second okay move by

2:48:36lyman second by pardo okimoto all in favor motion carries i would like to make a motion to direct staff to bring back to us as part of the budget setting process revised building department fees that um subsidize uh fees to promote the policies that we have uh provided

2:49:07over the years and have emphasized tonight second second okay uh motion by greg lyman second by abelson all in favor hi hi danimus 5-0 thank you thank you so much okay next we have uh alameda county transportation commission san pablo avenue corridor project charter

2:49:54evening good evening mayor council members i am ira ortiz the city's public works director i will try to keep my presentation brief tonight staff is requesting that council adopt a resolution authorizing the city manager to execute a project charter with the alameda county transportation

2:50:16commission actc and several cities transit providers and regional transportation agencies for the san pablo avenue corridor project as well as designate a city council member to participate in a policy advisory committee if necessary alameda county transportation commission

2:50:37commission is the lead agency but this project affects two counties alameda county and contra costa county the project is a multi-agency effort to improve transit performance implement pedestrian bicycle improvements and accommodate planned higher density mixed-use development along the san

2:50:56pablo avenue corridor which is all agencies are calling for that as part of basically san pablo avenue is a priority development area for all the jurisdictions in the corridor the project will identify near-term and long-term multimodal transportation improvements and seeks to build upon

2:51:16unreconciled pass playing efforts basic basically all the agencies and cities along the corridor have adopted plans and prepared studies that have looked at improving the corridor and what this effort is trying to do is reconcile it and identify improvements that are implementable

2:51:34as you can imagine this is not going to be easy because different cities have different goals and specific planned improvements for example the city of el cerrito adopted the san pablo avenue specific plan in 2014 and that included a pretty detailed complete streets

2:51:52improvement plan we're actually one of the agencies that has the most specific type of plan that addresses the public right-of-way so the project would have to reconcile all those efforts as a result because many agencies have different responsibilities for operations

2:52:13maintenance and ownership of the corridor the alameda county transportation commission is asking all the agencies that are involved in this effort to sign a project charter basically to commit to working cooperatively to identify improvements that can be implemented

2:52:30more specifically the charter cause for collaborating on developing and selecting a set of improvements active participation on a technical advisor advisory committee at the staff level also if necessary to facilitate decision making and issue resolution to identify a staff member that will

2:52:54serve on the executive leadership committee team elt and finally also to identify an elected official council member to serve on a policy advisory committee again the policy advisor committee would only meet if necessary to resolve issues that can't be addressed at a

2:53:16staff level one last thing the project charter is asking for the city's willingness to enter into a memorandum of understanding at a later stage so that again all the agencies along the corridor can work to implement those near-term concepts that are identified

2:53:35the city manager will make the staff appointments for the technical advisory committee and the executive leadership team at at this time we expect that i will serve on the technical advisory committee i have attended the first meeting and that the city manager will

2:53:50be on the executive leadership team and at this time we're asking that count that you identify council members serve on the policy advisory committee that concludes my presentation and i'm here to answer any questions you may have okay there are questions where should we

2:54:06um council members i i don't have so many questions because i'm familiar with the background of the project because we've talked about it at both ccta and at wic tac i would like to say i'm interested in doing it because i'm interested in furthering a lot of the work that we've done

2:54:27that i worked on historically that it's now a new day and we need new activities going on along the corridor the old system is very worn out you might say and we really do need to update it and i've done a lot of work in in that area thank you okay discussion questions

2:54:59there anyone else that's interested anyone else interested not i i'm fully extended okay are you interested no okay paul fideli are you interested i would like it but it sounds like janet is you got out there first and you do have an experience with i'm particularly interested in the bus

2:55:21riders partner which is the cargo avenue the question i had is the authority that this would take would a city lose any authority for its own plans that have already been made i mean are there decisions that could be made that would change what we have already made decisions on that's not the intent

2:55:40of the project charter that the intent really is to just get everybody to the table and identify a decision-making and conflict conflict resolution process but it's not binding the city to implement any improvements that would be a subsequent um contract the memorandum of understanding

2:55:57would bind if the city chooses to enter into that contract would commit the city to work on implementing near-term concepts but at this point really the project charter is asking for the city's commitment to identify to develop and identify concepts that could be further pursued

2:56:22i would like to nominate janet abelson uh we coming out look at the the do we need can we do this in one motion i'd do it as two motions just to just sure second all in favor aye aye that's unanimous thank you [Laughter] uh i'll move a resolution do we need public comment on this

2:56:54i have no request to speak thank you i'll move a resolution of the city council of the city of el cerrito authorizing the city manager to execute a project charter with the alameda county transportation commission as the sponsoring agency and the california department of transportation contra

2:57:07costa transportation authority west contra costa transportation advisory committee alameda contra costa transit district bay area rapid transit district and the cities of richmond san pablo el cerrito albany berkeley and oakland collectively the partnering agencies for

2:57:24the san pablo avenue corridor project and designating a city council member to participate in a policy advisory committee if necessary second that's a motion by lyman second by rd loki moto all in favor aye aye next city council local and regional liaison assignments

2:57:49greg lyman yeah i've got two to report on uh one is recycle more um i'm pleased to announce that uh in february we elected our chair and vice chair our current chair is ben choi from richmond and our vice chair is cecilia valdez of sao pablo also i'd like to report that

2:58:10ab 1826 which there was some back and forth with the state as to whether we were in compliance whether the recycle more was in compliance the good news el cerrito was always in compliance just this last week we got correspondence from the state that now declares recycle more in compliance so

2:58:31that's the good news is that at our last meeting it was still up in the air as to whether we were in compliance as an agency in compliance and we are now i'd like also like to report out that february 15 i represented us at the marin clean energy the mce board meeting

2:58:50there we reviewed uh the draft budget that their fiscal year is april 1 to march 30th so we will be probably adopting the budget uh this month uh for the next their next fiscal year which is april 1 to march 30th and also i wanted to point out to both the city manager and ms ortiz who just

2:59:12walked out and the city attorney that item eight on the february 15 mce bill agenda was about streamlining public works and wanted to at least point this out to something that potentially el cerrito could look into as something we might adopt at some point in the future

2:59:41michelle i attended my first urban forest committee meeting and um we had a presentation by uh pg e and it was very interesting to see the efforts that they are making to work on uh urban and non-urban forestry to try to deter fires and it was a very good presentation

3:00:09also of note arbor week will be march 7th through the 14th and that's the conclusion of my report okay thank you janet i'm just going to um say that in january we redid assignments for wic tech and i think i announced that maybe in february but in february ccta

3:00:42did reorganization and i was again appointed to the planning committee okay very good paul uh yes human relations committee is created a subcommittee to review the last martin luther king celebration in march and there should be some recommendations coming back to the

3:01:03the commission and they're also we're in the process of discussing loving day plans for the coming year in june and also as the liaison to the arts commission i just wanted to remind anyone that's interested in a lot of history we had a discussion of history tonight

3:01:21the rosie the riveter annual benefit dinner will be at el cerrito's own berkeley country club this year on april 7th the theme this year is victory gardens so people that are interested in gardens and history and the richmond waterfront and world war ii you can get tickets and more information

3:01:41on the rosie the riveter website thank you okay for me i attended the economic development committee and we had a lively conversation and exciting talk on the plans on san pablo avenue so i'm adjourning this regular council meeting our next scheduled council meeting will be on tuesday march 20th at

3:02:057 pm have a good night thank you leave something there red you