Special City Council Meeting and Regular City Council Meeting May 1, 2018

0:04:47yes mayor councilmember abelson here councilmember fideli here councilmember lyman here thank you okay uh pledge allegiance to the flag or observation of moment of silence uh we'll be led by mayor potem rochelle pardo i pledge allegiance to the blood of the united states of america

0:05:16and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay um council staff communications this earlier this evening we did meet and we did interview uh a candidate uh this evening and we have decided to have as our newest member of the

0:05:49arts commission is allison cooper okay anything uh rochelle no okay greg no janet i'm sorry i didn't hear what preceded this do you have any communication uh oh um yes i'm trying to find it in the meantime uh paul fideli yeah i just i wanted to mention that our

0:06:21um our poet laureate um is coming due for a new application process uh through the arts and culture commission we established the poet laureate position for the city of el cerrito a year and a half ago it's been a great success and we're at the point of seeking a new one for the

0:06:41following year interested candidates should apply for the position between april 16th and june 11th of this year and you can go to our the website for more information on that i also want to congratulate council member janet abelson for earth day activities again this year was great

0:07:03a lot of people got involved my back is still hurting from bending over but i got a lot of trash and that feels good and the community center looked great with a great lunch and i also attended with the mayor of the ohlone connector richmond and el cerrito event along

0:07:24baxter creek which with the mayor of mayor bud of richmond and mayor quinto it was a great great moment and it's a great connecting lincoln gateway to our two cities thank you hey greg you had something yeah um i wanted to remind people that this coming weekend friday may 4th through sunday

0:07:44may 6th there is the hillside festival this is a free event locations are throughout the hillside natural area there is a brochure that is available at city hall for pickup but if you end up going up to the natural area you will near the recycling center there's events

0:08:06and there will probably be a map of event of locations at that locate time so it's uh the events are uh 2 p.m on friday to 6 30 p.m on friday 10 a.m on saturday to 5 30 p.m and on saturday and on sunday 10 a.m to 7 p.m so hopefully people can go out and enjoy it

0:08:31okay janet okay um first of all i want to mention the ribbon cutting for the uh richmond aulani greenway gap closure and i know that our mayor spoke at that um what i wanted to mention about it is it's first of all it's the gap that is closed by putting in the signal at san

0:08:57pablo avenue at the greenway and it connects richmond to el cerrito and it's very very significant in such things because it says that we can get from one place to another and that we are both part of the same community which is really exciting to me but what's even more exciting to me is that

0:09:20a long time ago i don't even know if i was on the city council i participated in a review of the overall project and it's it's been a long time coming but it's a very exciting event um and a very ex uh commemorating a very exciting um happening so i hope you'll all go out

0:09:48and look for it it's basically at baxter creek it's where the bart tracks cross over the san pablo avenue and you'll be sure and find it there and i hope that a number of you will both uh take a bike ride there or walk there whichever is um your choice and um i think it's a they did a great

0:10:15job in making it happen but it took a lot of years then i want to mention the that there was a an event thanking volunteers at the community center for recreation volunteers there are many many many volunteers that make the senior center in particular happen and they make it happen by providing

0:10:47services everything from hair cutting to probably toenail trimming to music related services you name it they provide it and this happened on the 27th of april and they had a community center full of volunteers that they uh thanked and i was very happy to be there

0:11:17then i guess earth day was already mentioned so i won't mention again except to say we had a very large crowd and that's always nice to see and um i think that's all i'm going to mention today thank you okay um i'd like to yes i'm sorry go ahead okay um i wanted to mention uh that on this

0:11:44coming saturday is cinco de mayo and uh mayor pro tem and i will be participating at the richmond san pablo cinco de mayo parade which starts at uh 23rd street right by the museum and ends near san pablo city hall and it's one of the largest events in west contra costa and uh

0:12:11and michelle and i are gonna uh try to see if we can have two of us in the in the back of our uh my old miata and hopefully it will make it down to uh the end of san pablo over there and so we're going to do that and also i wanted to mention that on the 18th a number of us attended in sacramento

0:12:35the legal cities legislation day i met with assemblyman tim grayson and scott weiner i also met with the api legislative caucus for uh in sacramento um i also met with the head of the api legislative caucus rob bonta and on the 20th in oakland uh a group of us met with

0:13:08staff from nancy skinner senator skinner's office and met with again assembly member rob bonta and we discussed several issues including housing issues and and issues dealing with uh poverty and and the environment so we do have some amazing uh legislation coming out and

0:13:32i know many of us will either support or not support it and uh i look forward to that um also the the ribbon cutting on the 27th was was amazing and that is uh the part of town that uh i live in and and and i know uh paul grew up there in that neighborhood so i see a lot of amazing things happening

0:13:54and i see bicycles i see lime bikes riding over there between richmond and el cerrito to the bart station and i'm excited about that and the plans of housing right next door and so i hope everybody gets a chance uh to either take a line bike and ride over there in the northern end of

0:14:15town and see the beautiful gardens that we have there at baxter creek and then across san pablo avenue where you'll see the the beautiful gardens that they have there in richmond and i just wanted to share um two brief announcements regarding the november election

0:14:36as part of its outreach education engagement that contra costa county asked me to share that they'll be hosting a candidate workshop at the pacheco community center located at 5800 pacheco boulevard on may 12th from 9 to 12 30 for anyone interested in becoming a candidate for

0:14:54elected office in the november election the workshop will feature panelists who provide information on the nuts and bolts of filing for office including requirements for timelines where to file campaign finance requirements social media and much more in el cerrito there are two council

0:15:11seats up for election this november and potential candidates can also contact me at any time at 215-4305 for information about running for office secondly i'm really pleased to announce that el cerrito city hall has been selected to become a regional early voting center

0:15:29for both the june primary and the november election anyone who is registered in contra costa county will be able to vote here during from tuesday may 29th through june 1st from 11 a.m to 7 p.m and saturday june 2nd from 8 a.m to 5 p.m in addition we'll be partnering with the

0:15:51elections division in its vote and go program and will be having a mail ballot drop-off box here at city hall from may 14th through june 5th finally the deadline to register to vote in the june primary is may 21st and you can register online at the county elections website or

0:16:11or through the secretary of state website or pick up a registration form here at city hall the libraries or the dmv and thank you great thank you cheryl next is oral communications from the public all persons wishing to speak will sign up with the city clerk remarks are typically limited to three

0:16:30minutes per person uh the mayor may reduce the time limit per speaker depending on the number of speakers please kindly state your name and city of residence for the record comments regarding non-agenda presentation and consent calendar items will be heard first comments related to

0:16:47items appearing on the public hearing or policy matters portion of the agenda are taken up at the time of the city council deliberates each action items individuals wishing to comment on any closed session scheduled after or before the regular meeting may do so

0:17:03during this public comment as well we have three requests to speak judith tannenbaum file followed by khaled ibrahim and sherry drobner hi mayor and council members and staff i'm judith tannenbaum i live in el cerrito and i first want to just speak as a member of the arts and culture

0:17:27commission and thank you paul for mentioning the call for poets for our second um poet laureate and in addition to the website as paul mentioned for information karen's showing the material so people can take that if you know any poets in el cerrito who might want to

0:17:44apply please encourage them to do so and meanwhile our first poet laureate ma is going to have her last event on may 20th and it's going to be a big reading at the community center that's going to in have um readings by uh four poet laureates from cities around

0:18:05here um and and a whole big book display a lot of and and um first and a musical performance by a band that's put itself together for this event calling itself moser says it's going to be at the community center so that's saturday i mean sunday um may 20th from 1 30 to 5.

0:18:28um also for the arts and culture commission upstairs in the gallery there's a new exhibit that opened today that's really fantastic that's um the wayne pope who made a lot of the album covers for our hooli records our beloved el cerrito half rousseau half richmond um

0:18:49record store down home music and they're really wonderful and there's going to be the reception for that is going to be saturday may 26th here in the courtyard from 2 to 5 and it is down home in our holy so there's going to be great musicians there and that of course is

0:19:05free and open to the public and since i have to leave i'm not going to stop being a commissioner and just be judith and to speak to the um to the charter city um which i just as a you know i'm an el cerrito resident who wants a lot of who wants services who wants a new library who

0:19:23wants a senior center and i'm very grateful to our staff for really exploring and coming up with mechanisms to make that possible and to sky for the writing that he did on it and to the whole committee that worked on that so thank you thank you khaled abraham so my name is khaled ibrahim i'm a

0:19:53resident of the city of albany i'm a scientist at lawrence berkeley lab and i'm hoping to join the city of history to community by building my vacant lot and i get advice to share my story with with the city from my lawyer basically i'm trying to um to develop my

0:20:13my vacant lot and applied for residential uh review in september 2017 after a lot of effort to make sure that everything is met within the design meet the ordinance after one month of the review the planning division came back saying that they won't subject the project to an

0:20:34environmental review because of the slope of the lot given that i and obviously they required the detailed off-site improvement plan and given that i went through the same process in 2014 and no such requirement was there and also knowing that ministerial projects

0:20:52are situated exempt from environmental review i asked for clarification from the planning division who came back to me saying that well there is nothing in the zooming ordinance or the state law that would say support their decisions is just a case-by-case thing

0:21:12and after going back and forth they agreed to review the project and then they came back a month later saying well you're exceeding height restriction of the uh of the city but how how did you reach that because they want to apply a phrase describing the lore of

0:21:29natural unfinished grade which is supposed to be outside the perimeter within the perimeter such any cut on the on the sloped lot will become part of the height and because the text was a bit different i i asked them for clarifications he said well this is our interpretation if

0:21:46you are if you want to you can apply for or ask for for reinterpretation uh of the zooning ordinance and he asked my lawyer went to him can you help me with this kind of writing a letter because i cannot phrase it as a question the text is clear he said well sometimes it is a

0:22:06miscommunication or let me try to find out what is going on so he talked with the planning division came back to me telling me it is not a miscommunication so um and um he sent a letter to the planning division and uh the city attorney but he said that uh probably i should share this um

0:22:26case with the city council um basically what i'm asking for is um just my my project is being reviewed in accordance with the zoning ordinance and the applicable laws of california nothing beyond that and i know the city council has they have interest in development

0:22:44housing development and um i think i would like to share with you some some tables here that contrast what is in the zooming ordinance and the state law and what is required by the planning division okay um you're out of time so uh thank you okay yeah i'm just going to leave

0:23:14sherry drovener thank you hi i'm sherry grobner city of el cerrito i'm going to ramble about a few things tonight in five minutes or less first i want to thank you all for the resolution that was passed at the last city council meeting regarding freedom for immigrants i

0:23:32understand they had a meeting with the sheriff's department today and it went quite well and i think they're on the road of re-entry back into the jail so that was really good news i also want to support the item on the consent agenda 4d which is ab 1793 on the um resolution for

0:23:53resentencing for cannabis convictions i think anything that we do around criminal justice reform right now is really essential um it ties into the last thing i'm going to say which is i want to thank the fire department of el cerrito because my husband had a medical emergency

0:24:13last week and we had to call the paramedics in the fire department and they came out in a really timely manner and were great when they were deciding which hospital to send them to because of proximity they decided on richmond kaiser because alta bates they thought

0:24:30was too far so we ended up from richmond kaiser and then they needed to admit him to but there were no beds at all debates there were no beds at summit so he ended up at richmond kaiser and then the second night again there was still no beds and then they said well maybe you should

0:24:47just go home of which we did but it made me think about the fact of this the state that we're in in this community and the threat of the aldebates closure and and i'm just wondering at some point maybe there's a way regionally there can be also more community um

0:25:07and city official sort of task force to think about if there's any possibility to have a facility for um for all of us because i know kaiser richmond can't handle being there i mean they i wasn't sure he was even going to have a bed there so it's pretty i think it's pretty dire and

0:25:31i also understand that herrick is closing so um and the way i tie this into the jail was the fact that i thought well there's going to be a jail expansion and they're going to have 200 new beds i guess in a medical facility so well there's the alternative maybe

0:25:49okay thank you thank you i have no more requests to speak at this time thank you sir next is adoption of the consent calendar items four eight through four e a is asian pacific heritage month proclamation b is jewish american heritage month proclamation c is affordable housing

0:26:09week proclamation d is support for assembly bill 1793 cannabis convictions resentencing e is modified city council meeting schedule i have comments on well four of the items which one uh a through d comments okay anything else paul janet no uh mayor do you want a motion and then

0:26:44we would discuss them or do you want to take them up one at a time i don't know which is faster um let's do a motion i also wanted to uh mention that we have someone here um on c affordable housing week so uh yeah i if you'd like to uh go ahead and do the motion

0:27:09so am i doing a motion for e i don't i guess i'll do a motion for the consent calendar for item 4e modify city council meeting schedule is there a second second all in favor aye aye aye okay well i didn't have much to say on a b and c i just wanted to say wish everyone a happy uh asian pacific

0:27:33heritage month as well as a happy jewish american heritage month and it's also we're proclaiming affordable housing week and i hope that we are able to do some good work tonight on affordable housing in the city of el cerrito and then my main comments are on item d

0:27:51which i have brought forward in support of assembly bill 1793 cannabis convictions resentencing this bill is put forward by assembly member rob bonta and what prop 64 did was it allowed for the expungement or reducing of sentencing around marijuana convictions but it left it upon the individual to

0:28:19find the well first of all to have the knowledge to do it and then second of all to have the money necessary to overturn their convictions so um what assembly member bonta proposed was to have the state and then the the jurisdictions also just automatically expunge him and put that

0:28:42responsibility on the state so i wanted to bring forward tonight a letter that was written by the naacp of the city of el cerrito i want to share that with you the el cerrito branch naacp is proud to support ab1793 which will create a simpler and expedited pathway for californians to

0:29:09turn the page by having certain criminal convictions for cannabis related offenses automatically removed or reduced from their records penalties for cannabis related offenses have disproportionately affected people of color and have been obstacles when searching for employment

0:29:28and housing in november 2016 57 percent of california and over 70 percent in el cerrito voted in favor of prop 64 which contained provisions not only to reduce or eliminate cannabis law violations but made those charges retroactive under prop 64 people with outdated

0:29:53felonies or misdemeanors on their records are now legally entitled to petition to the courts to expunge or reduce their criminal records however many people are not taking advantage of this opportunity because they are either unaware of this option or do they they do not have the time or

0:30:11resources to go through the court process ab1793 will help legally entitled californians take advantage of this opportunity to clear their own records by removing barriers and streamlining the process ab-1793 will require automatic expungement of these outdated criminal convictions

0:30:35and will create a path that shifts the burden away from the individual this will allow almost one million people negatively impacted by the war on drugs to finally better their lives as the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization the naacp advocates

0:30:54that the state proactively uphold the civil rights of the people across the state that have been adversely impacted and their rights restored and with that i would like to move the rest of the consent calendar i'd like to discuss uh that letter and okay also with

0:31:16the support for assembly bill 1793 and i did check with the legal california cities they have not said whether they're they're for it or against it we have our police chief here and i wanted to check with our police chief on on their opinion of if the police officers

0:31:43with all the work that they're doing regarding that if if they have any information or if they support this bill evening council thank you for the invitation mayor i'm paul keith your chief of police so this bill is opposed by the california police chiefs association and

0:32:09the california peace officers association as it is currently written i do agree with their opposition and i'll express my reasons i believe resentencing and case dismissal decisions should be given careful consideration review and not be made in mass the current bill would only allow the

0:32:26district attorney to have a 30-day window in which to review and respond to dismissal and sentence review requests from the state the district attorney's office could be facing the prospect of reviewing thousands of marijuana cases in a relatively short 30-day window

0:32:41our officers and task force agents have conducted significant investigations over the years into criminal enterprises engaged in trafficking of drugs including marijuana and i would hate for significant cases to be lost in the torrent of cases being automatically assigned for dismissal or

0:32:55sentence reduction so the california police chiefs do support having a system in place that allows for a thoughtful review and consideration of cases before they are sent for dismissal or resentencing okay thank you thank you discussion i have a question yes for the chief

0:33:20sorry um this 500 000 between 2006 and 2015 um or any of those people still are would those people have been in prison or just in uh jail which would be the county jail well that depends on the type of case it is uh certainly uh i imagine a big bulk of those cases are

0:33:52probably low-level misdemeanors and infractions where people are not still in custody there is the potential that people could be serving sentences that include marijuana convictions where they may still be in custody even from cases as far back as last decade so there are potentially people in

0:34:09custody that could be uh up for re-sentencing and have their charges reduced and have their sentences reduced and could be you know obtaining a release from custody so um in your opinion do you think that 500 cases could be handled in any reasonable amount of time

0:34:30well i think that is uh that is certainly my concern in reading through the possible implications of the law that um if contra costa county is three percent of the state's population and if we correspondingly have about three percent of those five hundred thousand

0:34:47cases we could be looking at sixteen thousand cases that our district attorney's office has to review and make determinations on in what could be a very short amount of time so i uh i do question whether or not our district attorney's office has the ability to manage that amount of cases

0:35:04and really give them the consideration they need i do know that other district attorneys have been proactive in saying that their cases will begin processing those and working through on their individual offices timelines and that does seem to me to be a good way to approach the situation because it

0:35:21gives the district attorney's office the ability to make sure cases are being considered before they're dismissed and re-sentenced so i kind of lost it in what you were saying the so would they i mean i guess i just want a simple answer if possible okay i'll try okay

0:35:42um i'm wondering 500 000 is half a million right it's a lot and the question i have is could anyone handle those i mean could the state handle those 500 000 cases well i haven't actually talked to our district attorney about whether or not they have the capacity to manage that

0:36:05many cases and i don't have any information about whether or not the state has the capability um so what's your opinion about it if i if that's another way of saying it the same thing well i would say that i really don't know okay um and um so if you are um so are these are cases where you go to jail

0:36:36as opposed to prison well some of these oh sorry what i'm really wondering about is if there's if they're still in um incarcerated the uh the cases that the auma addresses uh run the gamut from infraction level offenses for somebody that has a small amount of marijuana on their person

0:36:58where that person never spent any time in jail through misdemeanor offenses where there's the possibility that somebody served some jail time all the way up to cases that involve state prison commitments so it could be as minor as something that somebody got a ticket for or as

0:37:15major as somebody you know transporting 100 pounds of marijuana over state lines into california so the whole it can be the whole gamut of cases okay and so you don't what you really don't have an idea of is how many are in which of those categories right i do not

0:37:31have that information and and which would be i guess understandable um so um i'm just wondering what the impact would be you know i'm wondering if it's it's it's um mechanically possible to accomplish this is there a time frame for doing this i i thought on the read through that

0:37:55maybe it was a year and a half time frame but i'd have to review the legislation more closely but i think there was something along the lines of a time frame for when they wanted it accomplished it says july 1 2019 okay yeah so july that's next year july whole year from july

0:38:16right so it's next year right okay so um and it would be the da's office that has that responsibility i believe i heard said today it would be the district attorney's responsibility to respond to those um re-sentencing and dismissal plans basically if the da's office does not

0:38:42respond within 30 days on individual cases then they automatically move into a dismissal or re-sentencing process with the superior court under this proposal under the proposal yes okay um thank you okay thank you before i go yes all fidelity yeah um on the where we have opposition

0:39:09do you know where porac stands on this i didn't look into porac because i i see quite a bit of support but only the officers association that opposes this and my question may be to i almost said assemblywoman but um to our council member party okimoto is do you know this this

0:39:33bill has passed the deadline what the status is right now because we did have a critical deadline in april for bills to pass policy committee and i'm not sure if there's even our support might have any difference if it it did it passed um it passed the committee at our last council meeting

0:39:57reviews so we know it is still alive and going to yes committee okay thank you the um it passed the assembly committee on public safety okay greg yeah as long as we're having discussion on this um i'm i'm reading the text and i have to say that it's it's fairly vague to me

0:40:18it appears that by july 1 i'm going to use the half million number because that's what it appears in both our resolution as well as some of the supporting tech text here it appears that the the half million cases need to be reviewed by july 1.

0:40:38and then let's say half of those are eligible for re-sentencing re-sentencing dismissal sealing or redesi designation it's not clear that if that quarter million is handed over to the various district attorneys if they essentially only have till august 1 to make their determination

0:41:01because it's 30 days after receiving notice the case it's singular and so it's not clear if they if it would be metered out after july 1 2019 or or something that essentially would be a herculean effort between july 1 2019 and august 1 2019. so i it i have to say that that in

0:41:25in picking this up and reading through it it basically is saying that we need to comply with the will of the people that was put in place however it does seem to not be clear on what happens after july 1 2019 where basically a court that receives notice pursuant to

0:41:47subdivision shall notify the prosecution in all cases under review that the convention conviction is being reviewed recalled dismissed dismissal sealing redesignation within 30 days so it's you know conceivably somebody could using uh chief keith's uh calculation somebody

0:42:07could place 8000 cases on the district attorney's desk on july 1 2019 and expect them to complete within 30 days so um as written it certainly is not something that seems i think uh council member abelson said it well seems herculean um however that the intent is is

0:42:33excellent uh in that it is something that was anticipated or to be done to comply with prop 64.

0:42:42but but as written it seems vague with regards to the timeline for post july 2019 so i don't know if uh council member rachel pardue will come moto if you have any new information or any specific uh knowledge of what the 30-day what triggers the 30 days and is it really a tidal wave that's that's

0:43:08being put forth no i don't um no but i i'm sure that if we wanted to we could um amend our own resolution to reflect that we believe that 30 days is um a insufficient amount of time for review um we would still be saying that we're in support of what is has been presented

0:43:34and and i guess for me it's vague enough that i'm not certain that that is something that i'd be comfortable doing i'd love to uh with your blessing move to the next meetings that will give us time to get uh maybe mr banta's uh you know clarity on that i just because i

0:43:55am did read all this i found it just disconcerting that on page one of the assembly committee on public safety's summary both items one and two said resenting that their jurisdictions are available for resenting or dispersed dismissal and i'm just curious if i mean it should

0:44:18have been resentencing i think but again it seems that this is uh not it's a great idea but it potentially needs a little more uh work um and so i would it would be great if we could bring it up at our our next meeting and have allow you time to potentially work with

0:44:37the author to find out how the 30 days is implemented and if it's by case and if it's going to be you know some large percentage of those 500 cases 500 000 cases on july 1.

0:44:54chief i have a couple questions so with this legislation would incidents dealing with the drug cartel would some of that be included in this could they be released if this passes so it could it could relate to certain types of drug trafficking including drug trafficking

0:45:21involving organized crime organizations it also does depend on if there were other charges associated with the trafficking that may have been imposed so sometimes in cases involving transnational cartels there are um other charges of conspiracy or federal charges

0:45:37that are attached to the case so it really does depend on kind of the individual circumstances okay thank you and i just want to yes i can i mean in the preamble of the bill i i think we're talking about uh it says the bill would require the court to automatically reduce or dismiss the

0:45:57conviction pursuant to the proposition that passed if there is no challenge and that's the 30-day deadline of which there is no challenge so of those cases where there is no challenge those should move quickly and not be a burden so if there is more time to move forward

0:46:15maybe we can find out that situation in that case to carry that thought though if if 500 000 cases are dropped on the challenger's desk do they really have time to go through and i know it's fall five hundred thousand doesn't land on the same thing i mean we're picking a

0:46:31number so i think i think the extra time would benefit us if we could find that out and talk to staff of bonsai to see if what kind of numbers they would assume we might be involved with because if 90 is automatic and there is no challenge this could be done this could happen

0:46:47and i think with uh it's something that should happen and i don't see a lot of um opposition as far as other leases i like the concept of this and i you know i don't see any problem with that my problem is with giving a blanket yes on expunging all uh records of that and and this could be

0:47:12from simple simple you know minor plot violations which which i agree they should be expunged but it can also um be uh you know as as far as uh uh huge trafficking and and that's where i have a problem with this hopefully those would be challenged those would be the

0:47:30ones that would be true i believe those would be the ones that would be reviewed first and then the ones that would be expedited in the process would be the lesser sense sentencing and this would allow people to obtain housing and to go on field ships with their

0:47:46children and things like that and that's why i support it yeah no i support that as well but also you have to look on the other side that you look at prop 47 and the problems that that did with uh letting a lot of people that shouldn't have gone out and and we are having a rise in crime uh

0:48:05regionally now uh statewide so uh you know so i do have a problem with uh this bill i would like to wait until uh our league of cities uh decide that they're going to our lobbyists will decide if they're going to support this or not but right now looking at the bill um i don't think we

0:48:25should do anything with it until we get more information are we okay with that well i don't want to wait until the league of cities gives their opinion because if you want to give your emotion then no but i will i will delay it till the next city council meeting okay

0:48:38with that i would like to move uh items four a through four c a second that okay we have a motion by lyman second by fidelity all in favor all right okay great um sorry mayor do we need to table for d or is there some action that we need to take on 4d uh to move it to a date certain

0:49:03could we specify what information we want um somebody could make a motion to continue consideration of 4d to the next city council meeting i make a motion to continue consideration to the next council meeting second do you have a motion by purdue okamoto second by lyman all in favor aye aye

0:49:26motion is yes we will continue this until the next meeting okay for c affordable housing week proclamation this is to approve a proclamation declaring may 11th to the 20th of 2018 as annual affordable housing week of the city of el cerrita and confirming the city's commitment to work

0:49:46in support of affordable housing at the local regional and state level and encouraging the residents of el cerrito to participate in regional affordable housing week activities and to raise awareness about the importance of affordable housing for families and communities and we have the

0:50:02honor to have lisa here from our planning commission good evening lisa any good evening council members my name is lisa motiyama i'm formerly of the planning commission and i am here on behalf of east bay housing organizations for for the to thank you for the resolution for affordable housing week

0:50:22this year and el cerrito's continued support of affordable housing and it's really exciting that this resolution is being heard this evening when the inclusionary housing ordinance is before you as well and we are strongly supportive of that and i really applaud the cities

0:50:41in the council's work to keep el cerrito economically diverse and providing housing opportunities for everyone thank you thank you for your leadership so we have a we'll do a photo real fast that's what you turn away [Music] okay okay um did we just we didn't discuss

0:51:33modify city oh we did pass that already okay thank you public hearings uh inclusionary zoning requirement for new residential development projects including fee in lieu of on-site affordable units good evening good evening members of the council members of the public my name is isa

0:51:58shuri i'm the affordable housing analyst for the city tonight i'm honored to present the inclusionary zoning ordinance to you for consideration i'm also joined by our community development director melanie mintz debbie kern from kaiser marston and our city attorney

0:52:16although new units are a small portion of our overall housing supply every bit counts and informed inclusionary zoning programs will not stop needed development and when successfully implemented will serve its purpose of creating balance adoption and implementation of the

0:52:32proposed ordinance will deliver new affordable housing options that are aligned with our local and regional production goals aimed at producing housing for households at all income levels just want to give you a little overview of tonight's agenda there's a lot to cover so i promise to

0:52:52give you as much as i can and of course have continue the dialogue through question and answer we will cover our actions today and our schedule as well as some background give you a little context um give you a little more about inclusionary zoning and what that means

0:53:09um debbie from kaiser marston will go into the economic economic feasibility study i will then bring you back to the policy analysis report as well as ordinance considerations implementation considerations and next steps in the process before we open it up for questions and answers

0:53:29just to give you a sense of where we've been it's been a fast road since you adopted affordable housing strategy last august last fall we issued an rfp um so that we can bring a consultant on board we awarded that rfp through council in december and i was actually brought on board in january and

0:53:51i worked closely with kaiser marston from january up until now at which point we were able to go to a study session at the planning commission in march followed by a draft ordinance last month on april 18th and here in front of you today a copy of the ordinance for your review

0:54:11just to give you a little background affordable housing there's not a one one fit solution i try to think of it as more of a triangle it involves both the public the private sector and nonprofits so generally most affordable housing opportunities are created through 100

0:54:32affordable housing developments which are built by non-profit developers and they can generally leverage additional subsidies both at the federal and state level so for example hannah gardens next door that's nearing completion that's an example of a 100 affordable housing development

0:54:50although we just actually received an application for a large 100 affordable housing development for from a for-profit developer so that's just traditionally how it works inclusionary housing is basically driven by local zoning ordinances that require market rate developers to set

0:55:08aside a percentage of units at a below market rate and the unique thing about inclusionary zoning is that it does not require a direct public subsidy and then we have the state density bonus program which in essence is a non-discretion non-discretionary process through the

0:55:25state and its main purpose is to promote the production of affordable housing those in purple are things that are not offered in our city but you will see them in other places with bigger communities usually they might be recipient recipients of the community development block grant where

0:55:42they have you know a larger population but that's the housing authority first time home homebuyer programs which generally bridge the affordability gap so that a home is affordable by way of you know down payment assistance or equity sharing and then we also have

0:55:57co-op and land trust that exists throughout california in terms of our housing policies we of course have the san pablo avenue specific plan adopted in 2014.

0:56:10our phone form-based code does encourage mixed-use high-density residential development we also have our housing element which is our housing part of the general plan of course and it identifies our goals policies and objectives and then the most recent document that

0:56:28you're all familiar with as well as our affordable housing strategy and it's basically our five-year work plan on how the city is going to produce preserve and promote housing opportunities for our residents this is just a snapshot of affordable housing el cerrito for a city of our

0:56:46size um hate to to our horns but we have a lot of units a lot of those projects were created through redevelopment so we do have actually two inclusionary developments out of this portfolio so we have some experience in this program of course and luckily a project that was recently

0:57:08entitled which you all are aware of is the mayfair project and that's going to have 67 affordable units so we're really happy to continue this production so our regional housing needs allocation this is as of march of this year so the state basically sets regional

0:57:28goals for development and considering you know where we are in this period we've made a lot of progress so as you can notice it looks like where we're lagging at right now in our in terms of our regional housing production goals is for low income um looks like we're we're needing about 27

0:57:47units and for moderate income about 56 so a lot of our very low income is again coming from our mayfair project and hopefully we'll be able to fully fund that so what is inclusionary zoning it leverages market rate residential development as i mentioned there's no

0:58:07public subsidy it does require that a percentage of units are set aside to be affordable to lower lower moderate income households it's important to note that it is driven by economic feasibility so keep that in mind as we you know continue this presentation and as debbie

0:58:25dives into the economics and there's actually alternate a means of satisfying affordable housing through in-law fees and those fees are then deposited into a housing trust fund so it's nice that we would potentially have a housing trust fund so as i mentioned we can make some

0:58:43local matches and kind of help our local projects get off the ground and produce more units that way as well so the menu of inclusionary zoning we're just going to cover the menu that we are looking at for our city tailored to our needs on-site is pretty much what it means

0:59:01it's built on the same location as the market rate units and lieu fee are collected in lieu of the fees on site and then that money in turn is taken and used to develop 100 affordable off-site housing and the impact fees in this instance will not apply um you'll notice in your pack in

0:59:20your agenda bill that we mentioned that the governor recently signed ab1505 the palmer fix and that basically allows allows rank local municipalities to set rent caps on inclusionary units so here's our menu there's pros and cons to every situation and we like both we see advantages to both

0:59:46means of productions but i'm just going to kind of walk you through what some of those are for on-site um production the pros is that the units are built sooner so we get them delivered with the market rate units and they're in mixed income communities the nice thing about el

1:00:01cerrito is that we're already a mixed income community um you know our kids all go to the same schools we share the same parks so that's a unique thing for us that i did want to highlight some of the cons are it does bring a smaller inventory whereas you might have

1:00:18six units on site whereas you might see 62 units at an off-site project and there's also an administrative burden that comes with that especially for the rental projects and the developers property owners it becomes an ongoing asset to maintain and also in addition

1:00:35it does become part of the city's housing stock so we are also responsible for maintaining that alongside them in terms of and luffy i think i've kind of hammered down we can leverage leverage leverage those funds to get more resources um there's a lot of things happening at the state

1:00:52level and a lot of different funding opportunities that are coming coming up very soon we are able to then also create a deeper level of affordability so that's where you get to the very low and extremely low income folks someone who might just be making a thousand dollars a month

1:01:11so and we can also reach special populations like i said seniors people with special needs and the con to that is that it does take a longer time to build and that their sites do need to be acquired so that's where our non-profit developers and that partnership really

1:01:27comes into play area median income is really what drives all affordable housing programs ami ami means half of the median income means half of the people make more than that half of the people make less than that so for the median income for 2017 it's about 68 000 for a single person or 97

1:01:48400 for a family of four sounds like a lot in most places but we know that doesn't get you far here what you're looking at in terms of rent levels it varies but um someone who is a very low income would be looking at a rent of about 9.74 a month and it then goes up from there

1:02:09we also have some sales prices in here and these assumptions were prepared in the inclusionary policy report from kaiser marston so i'm going to actually turn it over to debbie so she can speak to you in economics and then i'll be back to continue the presentation

1:02:25thank you good evening um and thank you aisa i'm debbie kern with kaiser marston associates and we are a land use economics firm and one of our services is that we help cities like el cerrito determine the the parameters of inclusionary zoning policies or update

1:02:54programs so we do that for cities throughout the state so just what is an economic feasibility analysis what we were doing here is is not a nexus analysis but it's an analysis looking at the development economics of building new residential development looking at the development

1:03:13costs the revenues the profit margins to see how uh whether or not that there is any uh space in effect to add in an inclusionary obligation on projects for affordable housing to see if that would impact the the overall feasibility of development or if development could go

1:03:36forward because we want a sustainable program so to do that the first thing that we did is we looked at what's happening with new development in el cerrito what projects are in the pipeline what type of development is occurring we interviewed developers brokers other

1:03:53stakeholders in the community we gathered market data on rents prices development costs land values what people are paying for land because that's a big part of the of the equation as well and we looked at the feasibility what the profit margins what land values are

1:04:11supported with development economics today else as well as what developers are thinking what prices will be and rents will be in the future and el cerrito's in a very uh interesting place right now in that you have a lot of units in the pipeline but not much new development that's on the ground and

1:04:33that is generating revenue and cash flow so we don't really nobody knows what rents really and values will be supported by this new development so you don't have a big inventory on which to base this analysis we're looking at the future and then we tested the sustainability of

1:04:52different levels of affordable housing requirements uh infused into the infused into a project to see whether or not that they pencil the the prototypes that we looked at so we we need to look at well what is uh the types of development that's occurring in the city so we identified

1:05:11with the assistance of the city staff four different prototypes of development and two are ownership products and that's town homes and condos and then we have two rental products of wood frame apartments that are four to five stories and then a higher um an eight-story apartment building and

1:05:30most of the developments in the pipeline today is this wood frame apartment building it's where you have a podium and you have fours four stories above the podium and uh based upon our uh review of the market we're seeing that uh prices for townhomes and condos are in the 625 to

1:05:50750 000 range that's for a 1 000 to 1400 square foot unit for the apartments we're estimating that these new units will generate rents of about twenty seven hundred dollars a month and the eight story apartment building with the views etc would be slightly higher about 28.50 but again

1:06:11these are projections uh but we think that they are realistic based upon the information that we've gathered uh so we we analyzed the development economics of those four prototypes and uh and then we also then examined what happens to those pro the economics when you layer in these different

1:06:33affordable housing obligations and we looked at a range of uh requiring a 10 percent low units into the into the projects up to 15 percent and we also looked at a range of impact or more in lieu fees these are in luffy's of fifteen dollars to twenty-five dollars per square foot

1:06:52uh and also we looked at if you did a a fee of thirty thousand dollars per unit for rental projects and for first for ownership projects we looked at a range of 10 moderate to 15 percent moderate requirements and then the same in lieu fees of 15 to 25 dollars per square foot

1:07:10and when we tested the feasibility we used a benchmark a profit benchmark and so for ownership units we used a benchmark that a profit threshold of equal to 15 of sales revenue and that's a pretty standard profit margin in the market today for rental projects we used a

1:07:32threshold of a return on cost equal to six percent of development costs and again that's a that's a a reasonable threshold for feasibility in the market today so that's how we tested the overall feasibility of these inclusionary scenarios as to whether or not the

1:07:53projects would achieve those thresholds given development costs given land costs what we found is that as i just said that you know there's a lot of projects in the pipeline but nothing not much on the ground yet today but the uh development it meets those thresholds what's going forward and so

1:08:17that the the land costs are as we would expect and we also found that there is a little bit of of a margin given the economics that we are anticipated for these new projects to support an inclusionary obligation either on-site or a fee and what we found is that for rental

1:08:37projects uh could support an on-site obligation of up to five percent low in units and five percent moderate so overall ten percent inclusionary requirement and for sale projects could support a higher obligation of 12 percent moderate um and with respect to in luffy's we

1:08:57looked at what level of in luffy would be equivalent in burden to the on-site requirements and we found that for rental projects that in luffy was about 17 a square foot would be equivalent and force for the for sale projects it would be about 20 dollars per square foot and that's

1:09:17applied against the total square footage of a pro of the project so it's not applied against the square footage of just the number of bmr units against the whole project and if you want to um some people ask why are you doing these fees in terms of dollars per square foot and the reason for that is

1:09:36that when you look at the demand or for affordable housing that's generated by the construction of a new residential unit it is uh it is proportionally related to the size of that unit so if you have a large a unit that is only a one bedroom unit it's um it's likely that there are fewer

1:09:58wage earners in that household than if you had a a unit that had three bedrooms and therefore the expenditures of that one bedroom in the economy are less than the three-bedroom and so the amount of jobs low-income jobs and affordable jobs that are driven by those

1:10:17expenditures are less for the one-bedroom units than they are for the three-bedroom so it's a matter of equity in that the impacts of a one-bedroom the construction of a new one-bedroom unit are less than the impacts of the construction of a three-bedroom and so therefore we want to have the fee

1:10:36uh being closer aligned with those impacts and that's what the per square foot does as opposed for a flat per unit obligation and what these translate into on a per unit basis is that the twenty dollar fee translates into for the town home about a twenty eight thousand dollar per unit obligation

1:10:59on the rental it translates into about a a thirteen thousand dollar per unit obligation so the the affordable housing fee would just be you know be added on uh the obligation the onsite to your existing fees in the city and so this this lists what the existing fees are

1:11:24and as you can see they um you know some of them are fees at the city levees and then others are other service providers that the largest component is for the east bay mud water connection and capacity fees the total fees add up between 29 000 and 52 000 per unit when we apply those

1:11:44relative to our prototypes uh and then if you were to layer in these recommended fee levels for affordable housing uh the 29 000 would go up to 41 000. the 52 000 a unit would go up to 80 000 so that would be the total fees then on residential development when you adopt a fee it's also important

1:12:09to understand well what are the obligations in other the adjoining communities and so this is a uh a summary of the inclusionary fees and policies of your surrounding neighbors uh richmond and so richmond emeryville berkeley oakland and we don't have albany on here but i can talk about that

1:12:29too they all have policies richmond has a uh a 10 percent vary ranges 10 percent very low up to a a low and moderate and they do not have a build requirement so the the developer has the discretion of choosing whether to pay a fee or to build on site emeryville has a

1:12:56it has a build requirement for for sale but not for rent and it ranges their on-site re ranges from 12 percent on-site to 20 percent for for sale berkeley as well does not have it has a fee or an on-site program at the developer's discretion it has higher fees than what we're

1:13:16showing but the economics are different there uh oakland has a also does not have a build requirement and it's on site obligations and its fees are our fees are similar to what we're proposing here for uh el cerrito and its on-site requirements are less than what we are proposing for el

1:13:37cerrito and with that i'll turn it back to issa hi again so i'm going to jump into the pal policy analysis which you have a report of the policy analysis this is just a summary of what's in the report you'll notice the different sections speak to on the things that are in the

1:14:04ordinance and what i'm going to also kind of dive into more a little further as i get into ordinance considerations as debbie mentioned these are the things contained in the summary it's much of what she said what our thresholds are and so again as we get to recommendations we'll jump

1:14:22into that more this is kind of the meat of our presentation what our program design will be which is already in the ordinance but i'm just putting it on slide shows more digestible form so what we're looking at for for sale is we are looking at an on-site build

1:14:38requirement for any projects that are going to be home ownership with at least nine units for rental there will be an option of building on-site or paying a fee and that will apply to projects with 10 or more units again these are the on-site obligations um not

1:14:58much of what's in the report it's twelve percent for for sale units with nine or more and ten percent for rental of which five would be dedicated to low income and five percent to moderate income there is a fractional unit obligation um so if the the number and the

1:15:14affordability requirement yields a fraction of less than 0.5 then there's a fractional fee um if it's 0.5 or greater than you you round up and you provide a unit optional in-lieu fees again that will not apply to for sale units unless it's a fraction of that in luffy that is due

1:15:34and for rentals it would be 17 dollars per square foot with the option of building or contributing to the affordable housing trust fund so we're going to jump into our ordinance considerations um this is going to this ordinance is going to actually appear in title 19 of the

1:15:52zoning code it will be a new chapter 19.3 we're basically codifying the city's police power authority to protect public health safety and welfare to increase the production of affordable housing these are the sections contained in the ordinance um it's important um to note

1:16:09the definitions and every other thing that's in there and this is a summary table so this is a lot of what i've covered already but just kind of want to walk you through the applicability that this ordinance will apply to all residential development applications that have not

1:16:27been deemed complete by the ordinance effective date and the ordinance effective date is 30 days from the date of adoption so um assuming you know it's approved um we are looking at a june 14th adoption again the thresholds are what i've already covered for for for sale and rental um the

1:16:48exemptions are accessory dwelling units for ownership projects with less than nine units and rental projects of less than 10 units again the options are different for rental and ownership on site versus fee and on-site we have the percentage set aside moderate income for for sale units

1:17:06is 80 to 120 percent of ami and for our rental projects we're looking at divvying it up for low-income households as well as moderate income households affordability terms on the for sale units they are for 45 years and they do reset upon each resale and for rental projects they're 55 years

1:17:28these are um these affordability terms are modeled off of you know the redevelopment successor and state density bonus programs so that's where that came from again i've covered you know what the end loo fees are what the fractional obligations are but it is important to note what projects will be

1:17:47exempt from this ordinance and it's any residential development project that is entitled or with an application that has been deemed complete by the effective date of the ordinance and for which a building permit is issued within two years of the entitlement so again if

1:18:03we're looking at june 14th as the effective date it's any projects that meet those qualification standards prior to that there is a sunset provision written into the ordinance for any projects that have not had a building permit issued by june of 2020 so just to kind of jump back to the

1:18:21exemption part they they still have two years from their actual entitlement date and 2020 is just if there's some projects that are coming through the door right now that are just complete and it may take them a little longer to get entitled it just means they'll have

1:18:35less time on the back end to get their project in the ground before being subject to the affordable housing requirements so we wanted to highlight the takeaways from the planning commission on april 18th we grappled with a lot of these items ourselves so it was great to hear that

1:18:55um they shared the same um one of the things that they mentioned is the affordable housing plan and the appeal process and the draft ordinance it is the appeal process does come to you the city council planning commission's recommendation was to go back to them but in

1:19:13consultation with our city attorney we're going to stick with the process that is written in the ordinance and that it's appealed to city council so there's no change there they did want to see a longer affordability term in terms of life of the project so we've determined that we're still

1:19:28going to do some more research on this piece it's important to us to get this ordinance adopted and study further what the repercussions of secondary market financing are to these projects so we will continue to study that and we will talk more about reevaluating this ordinance and a few

1:19:48slides later threshold they wanted to see projects with less than nine units for sale and less than 10 for rental but as i mentioned earlier on we didn't do a nexus study a nexus study traditionally tries impact fees to development so we will actually monitor over the next 24 to 36 months how many

1:20:11projects we see of this smaller size coming through as we think about looking at our ordinance once we've got more units in the ground and then in terms of program and administration fees currently the draft ordinance says it may be adopted by council planning commissioners would like to see

1:20:30the fees mandated based on actual staff time so we will monitor the administrative fees and adopt those at a later date as we introduce the 2019 master fee schedule so that is to come considerations so these are just kind of the things we get all excited about getting you know our ordinance into play

1:20:53and getting these units but we kind of forget like oh yeah there's staff time that comes with that um so just wanted to give you a sense of what kind of things we would be looking to maintain for example um owner occupancy on an annual basis for for sale units that's one administrative thing we would

1:21:12have to do an annual tenant income certifications on the rental projects because they do have to certify income annually so just some things to think about as we get this program up and going in terms of the state density bonus program i mentioned that in the toolkit

1:21:30early on because it is part of the california government code section 65915 again it's it's encouraging the production of affordable housing the relationship that that program has to this ordinance is that the inclusionary units will automatically be counted towards the purpose of the state density

1:21:50program so you get to include them all it's not two separate requirements so inclusionary zoning may actually lead to more requests for concessions in forms of waivers or reductions to development standards such as increased height because that is part of what that

1:22:07program allows and we may see fewer tier four applications and there are likely any projects that are coming in under the state density program would be under tier two um so we do think it's a cool way to incentivize developers to build units on site too the affordable housing trust fund

1:22:28as i mentioned the inlue fees will go into this fund and be used to create then create more affordable housing and that's again going back to leveraging those dollars to go further so while we might say oh we only have a million dollars our non-profit partners can

1:22:44actually stretch that dollar a lot further and it would be nice that the city is actually going to be able to have a local match source so that they can be competitive when they're going out for additional subsidies so in terms of what the in-law fee would look like as debbie

1:23:03mentioned it's based on the project's livable square footage so in this slide you'll see a project of 33 units has about 35 000 square feet of livable square footage and if the requirement is at 10 for rental that would yield 3.3 affordable housing units on-site um or if they

1:23:25elected to do a fee it would be a 17 fee based on that number so what would what we would see is we would see if they built units on site we'd see three units and a fractional fee of 54 000 or if they just feed out we would see close to 600 000 and luffy for this particular scenario

1:23:47so the effective date as i mentioned i'm assuming all goes well we're looking at a june 14th effective date this again will apply to any applications not complete by that time however any development project that has already been entitled or has an application that has been already deemed

1:24:07complete by the effective date and they get their building permit within two years of their entitlement date will be exempt from this however this will sunset in june of 2020 so again as i mentioned if there's people who are just now getting that complete application they'll just have a shorter

1:24:24time to pull their permits and you know get their projects going without being subject to this affordable housing ordinance so as debbie mentioned we have lots of units in our pipeline so no the ship has not sailed yet there's still opportunity for future development

1:24:43we know that there's a number of properties that recently sold and for which we expect to see development applications for in which case the rules of this ordinance would apply we know that the former osh site is currently proposing a 100 affordable housing development so that would be a

1:24:59huge win for us and we also know that bart and its transit oriented development policy that they have adopted they actually are looking to do something potentially at the plaza and they have a minimum of 20 affordability requirements so again these are just different means of um

1:25:21getting units through different sources of how affordable housing so what are the next steps the next steps are second reading in two weeks um followed by an ordinance effective date of june 14th and um we are looking to revisit um our ordinance um in the next two or three years um once we kind of

1:25:43have a more proven market and to see um if there's things that we can change or um if we can increase thresholds or what that would look like at a later date so thank you very much for your time and consideration and i'm going to go ahead and open this up okay great isis one

1:26:02last thing i'm sorry um i should note that in your packet there has been actually a change to the ordinance um so it's pretty much everything we covered here in the presentation but you can feel free to look at it it is track change and if you have any questions please let us know as we once

1:26:22we get there okay great uh questions from counsel great thank you uh you said thank you very much for your presentation tonight it was a a good summary of a very good document and a pretty comprehensive ordinance i do have um some questions uh some have uh some

1:26:46i asked in advance so hopefully they won't be surprises to you and one of them the first one may not even be you to answer it might be mr woodruff that answers uh it's my understanding that the fractional uh fee does not apply to the exempted part of the reason why we have an

1:27:07exemption set at nine for for sale and ten for rental as opposed to using some sort of fractional fee for those smaller projects has to do with legal legal matters and i was just wondering if because certainly i would be interested in trying to have this apply to more projects and projects that

1:27:26are smaller you know because we do have quite a few six unit eight unit type projects that might be coming through and and just curious if there's if someone could speak to the fact that uh we are exempting nine and ten for a reason well um i'll i'll i'll start um

1:27:48so for the benefit of the council and the public um the most recent um california supreme court case dealing with inclusionary zoning upheld the city of san jose's ordinance against the challenge and we decided for that reason to use san jose's ordinance as the basis for ours

1:28:08it's significantly different but but we thought that was a good starting point one of the things that was not directly decided in the case but that the court did include some comments about is this idea of [Music] where you have a formula for determining how many

1:28:29inclusionary units should be included in a project where that formula results in a fractional unit before you get to a full unit whether or not you can basically impose whether or not you can require uh the developer to round up and provide a whole unit and then offer them the

1:28:50option to pay a fee in lieu of that um because it was not an a point that was directly decided by the court but because they went out of their way to include discussion of it our feeling was that um as a starting point for the city uh it would be advisable to take a conservative approach

1:29:14and wait and see how this area in case law develops there is ra particularly now that the palmer issue has been reversed and cities are free to begin requiring inclusionary units from rental housing again i expect that litigation in this area will pick up there will be developments in this in

1:29:35this area of the law and i expect that we'll have greater clarity about it and at that point we could revisit it revisit the issue of whether or not to reduce the point it basically require the first fractional unit to be rounded up to a full unit and then offer the

1:29:52option to pay a fee in lieu of that the council can of course change the formulas to impose that kind of a requirement now we felt that the safest approach for the city at this point would be to take a more conservative approach great thank you um and i've got a question about exemptions and i know

1:30:14thank you very much you've modified the exemptions uh tonight so i'll i'll be using the red line version uh page nine of the red line version um where you've made some changes they're consistent with your presentation but i i will say having just heard the presentation and reading them for the

1:30:33first time it'd be wonderful if we could walk through the the implications it seems like we're we are consistent with one of the comment letters we received asked for a six month at you know at least a six effective date of the ordinance six months it looks like the actual effective date

1:30:54for some projects is almost uh two years up to three if you look at the 2021 date as the as you as your last slide said you have to pull your building permit by 2021.

1:31:09um so looking at this c4 and c5 which c5 is a new paragraph if you could help me understand what the building and for which a building permit is issued within two years from the issuance date of the last approval required for the residential development can you give me a sense of what that

1:31:30timeline is for a hypothetical you don't have to use a real project but a hypothetical project if the application was to come in today oh yeah so if it were to come in today it would normally probably wouldn't be deemed complete by the effective date of this ordinance it's highly unlikely that

1:31:50that would happen um so if it's let's just say it got com deemed complete last month then it may take about three months to go through the entitlement process and then probably another six months or so to secure permits to submit for a permit so it would then be

1:32:09based on that actual the conditions of approval and entitlement that would drive that two-year okay so um and yeah the 2021 is just the absolute cutoff so if someone who just got deemed complete now if it took them that long then they actually might have less than two years

1:32:29to get to get their project through so that this isn't subject to them okay so thank you for that and then to that end on page 10 new text and i just want to make sure that it's in red line so it's potentially a little harder for us to read section e so this would be

1:32:54it should be um [Music] 19.30.030 section e as in edward um application of charter to chapter 2 residential development after june 30 21. that's sort of the title the sentence that follows is the actual text of that section is that correct correct okay good um one of the other comments that the bia

1:33:24provided was um uh i'm doing it from memory but i probably should look the other comment they had was in lieu for for sale and i thought that the text in the analysis document and and thank you very much for that miss kern this quite it's nice to have a 13-page

1:33:46document that's easy to read and understand and in there it it gave a pretty compelling reason for why we're not offering in lieu for uh for sale properties i was wondering if you could recap that for us yeah so we are looking it's feasible for a developer to provide the on-site units

1:34:08and we're also there's not a lot of variety or housing options for people who are at moderate income so inclusionary zoning is pretty much one of the only methods that someone of moderate income would be able to achieve homeownership and did you want to add anything to that debbie

1:34:28i think that's that was pretty much you know the policy goal that we came up with is really um because as i mentioned earlier there are other um programs available at the federal and state level that would um help people who are a very low and extremely low income and so it's kind of

1:34:47this whole moderate missing middle conversation that we're able to you know get this small source of units to be able to allow our moderate income households to stay in the community uh 45 years for for sale does seem to be short and i do notice that you did have an action item to

1:35:07evaluate that i can say that many of my neighbors have been in their house approaching that time frame um and so certainly one of the things that that i'm interested in is making sure that they obviously have stable housing but that when that house goes up for sale it's not dropping

1:35:28out of the the housing market that it continues to do serve the community that we've designed it for and so resale is certainly something that i'm very concerned or very interested in finding out how the resale is managed and whether it's 45 years or ever you know if forever

1:35:47so for me 45 years for on the for sales it doesn't make sense to me that you talk about secondary financing and and i since they're selling it at below market rate uh the first time and it's sold and they're no longer in the project uh i'm not quite understanding how the

1:36:08secondary financing market affects the for sale properties and that and therefore driving a 45-year time frame on the for sale so i i certainly would love to have more information on that before the second reading or or potentially you'll be able to change that to indefinite

1:36:25before the next reading um miss kern i'd like to talk about the 17 it's on page 13 of your report you have a a table that does bring up a really nice comparison of your of your analysis and the in-lieu fee of twenty dollars per square foot three out of three out of the four

1:36:54uh development scenarios easily meet the the target returns and um the one that doesn't the wood frame over podium apartment doesn't make the six percent uh threshold but i am i'm curious um why we ended up at 17 as opposed to say 18 or 19. so i'm just curious if you

1:37:19would speak to the rationale for getting it to 17 as opposed to something closer to 20.

1:37:26well the 17 yields i i can pull that i think it was um 6.02 percent and so we felt that that was a a reasonable number um so you did run an intermediary we just didn't see it in the report yeah i just didn't we ran it yeah we ran it and um and so that's why we we chose that yeah

1:37:50it was uh 17 yields a 6.02 percent so which is very close to the six percent threshold and i assume that 18 would then yield just under 599 or something like that so okay all right thank you um and then uh there i did get a response to this and but i must not have asked my question

1:38:11particularly well um in uh 1930 040e is in edward is where there's a discussion of mixed projects a combination of rental property rental projects and for sale properties and i understand that it that the definition of uh residential development uh requires the you know you to look at all of the

1:38:43pro the items that are being developed but it's still not clear to me if if the residential development development project because i read the definition of residential development again and it's still unclear to me that somebody who comes in with say eight for sale and nine rental which is

1:39:1017 units overall is is actually governed by this project so i was wondering if you could speak to to that because it it's not clear to me that the definition of residential development would apply to somebody who's coming in with 17 units divided under to stay under the individual

1:39:34thresholds so it is meant to read that way under residential development because we certainly don't want to create a loophole it's highly unlikely that a single phase project would divide their units that way because for example um they would need to form an hoa if it's a for sale

1:39:58project and of course there's ccnrs that come with that and other responsibilities and also and just financing a for sale project versus financing a rental project it's different so it's highly unlikely that we would see that in a single phase now if there were two phases in two

1:40:16buildings then we would likely see that because one their finance difference they're secure different they're on a different parcel but we can re-explore making sure that it's cumulative to the entire residential development so that it's clear yes unfortunately we're using a

1:40:35two-letter word or as opposed to the three-letter word and and i'm just curious the way i read this the it's it it you could have up to you know 19 units or something or the 17 units we'll stick with that example and it would not apply under this definition of residential development so

1:40:58i i would strongly urge that we look at that language again and maybe i'm misreading it but the way i read it because it says or um you could have a project that's both and fall have 17 units and not and this would not apply so i i would strongly encourage um that

1:41:23re-reading and potentially and i see the city attorney he did a great job parsing others and i may be wrong he may come back and correct me before the night's over i would welcome that um and can i just jump back one step really quickly if i may if it's okay with you

1:41:41council member lyman on the d on the for sale in the 45 years it does reset upon re resale and i know 45 years is not a long time especially if you're buying a house 25 it's not a long time but it does reset upon resale and if if that property owner were to come to the end of that term

1:42:00they wouldn't just be released from the program free and clear they would have to pay a fee and that is traditionally written in their legal documents so if they were to in the event that they were to come to that expiration term it's not like they get a windfall um the city would

1:42:17hate to lose a unit but of course we would see some monetary gain from that as well great that's that is good news despite it i'd rather i'd rather have the we've gotta have the housing stock stay in place but it's at least it's it's nice to get it and it would go into the affordable housing

1:42:34trust fund so that we could of course continue to produce more units my last question has to do with several times you talked tonight about reassessing in two years recessing in two years with the um exemptions that we have in place that that basically grandfather in the existing

1:42:56housing stock that's in the pipeline is two years going to are we gonna have enough information in two years to really reassess we believe so because if not if if projects aren't moving forward then they will be subject to the ordinance so we know that there are some projects really

1:43:13close to getting to that point of getting in the ground great thank you thank you rachelle yes i was looking um mainly at our comparison to other cities and it seemed like we are coming in awfully low on most of our numbers here in regards to um for sale and rental units when comparing

1:43:43ourselves to emeryville berkeley richmond maybe oakland it looks a little more like what's being proposed and i was just wondering usually in our city i see us kind of falling in the middle like there's a low and a high and we tend to go in the middle and here it seems we're

1:43:58low going at the very lowest levels well um you know we did not analyze these programs of the different cities were adopted at different points for example albanese was in 2005 which is not on there but um and some of these were adopted just under a nexus program where you do a nexus

1:44:26analysis and nexus analysis identifies what the maximum demand and then the maximum fee levels and then they backed off for that and so while for example albany has a higher requirement than what we are suggesting for el cerrito but when you look at albany there's been

1:44:44no new construction either so has their high levels impacted the ability for development to occur i don't know we haven't we you know part of our analysis was not looking at what's happened in albany relative to their to their inclusionary program when you look at

1:45:02cities like berkeley the economics there are very different and then they are here in el cerrito and but see this is the two-year thing it doesn't really have to be that the projects are are subject to the ordinance over the two years it's that you will then in two years if things are

1:45:20built you'll know what the rents are you'll know what the values are and you'll be in a stronger position to increase the requirements if if what we have in this report is understated then then the economic you'll know that the economics are strong enough to then

1:45:40ramp up the requirements um it's a balancing act and especially in a situation where you don't we don't know what these economics are going to be of these new projects because we don't have the inventory berkeley now has the inventory and you could do an analysis you know an

1:46:00in-place analysis of what fees are supported in berkeley because you have the inventory in two years i'm hoping that then el cerrito will be in a position to know what the economics are it's not looking at the future it's looking at what's there today and seeing what the um

1:46:20fees could be and so we yeah we're not being we're not recommending real aggressive levels we're recommending things that we believe are sustainable given what's expected of this new development because we don't want to be we elsewhere is just getting to this great

1:46:38position where you have pipeline development happening and we don't want to put a stop to that and so that's why the threshold but we feel comfortable with these thresholds that it it has a real impact when you look at the impact on your you know the overall impact fees it's going to bump

1:46:54those up quite a bit but we don't think that it will be such that it will curtail new development but we just don't know really what the capacity is because we don't have that new development in you know on in the ground today was it taken into consideration at all the

1:47:15the two units both next door and then the one that's been proposed as a 100 affordable and how that would affect our total numbers um could i have some comment on that maybe from melanie or or yeah yes we actually have a slide that speaks to um the 62 senior units next door

1:47:44um as well as the mayfair project which was entitled with 67 units so we did if you look at the entitled um under very low and low we took that into consideration there and then permitted already built we have the 62 units at hannah gardens already factored into this as well so um for the

1:48:10purpose of the analysis we wouldn't consider those because those are like our 100 affordable developments but um the metro 510 creek side that was like our most recent development and it's nearing completion but prior to that it was village at town center was our last

1:48:26development in 2007.

1:48:29okay i'd be interested in what we were talking about before in terms of these fractional units since we are low on moderate income levels if maybe we could use those fractions and bump it up to one whole additional moderate unit that's something i'd be interested in

1:48:54so for the fractional units that are greater than 0.5 is to bumping it up for the rent for the rentals for example is because we have it split five percent low five percent moderate well either that or any fraction above the hole to to round it up to one yeah so we're yeah we if it's 0.5 or

1:49:210.2 any fraction above to bump it up so we get we do allow that option but it it's it's at the discretion of you know the applicant the developer if they want to go up or if they rather just pay the fractional fee and i don't think that that's something that we can necessarily

1:49:40require sky based on the fractional guidelines that are out the general best practices of how fractional guidelines work in these programs i'd actually have to review that i can't answer it tonight but we would be able to bump it up if it was over 0.5 okay all right that's the conclusion of my

1:50:11comments and i'd i'll add an amendment when the time comes um the the one thing that concerns me is the fact that even though these projects are entitled they aren't um nobody's begun building them do you have a comment on that i know that they're coming soon um

1:50:40we're monitoring it and i'm i'm trying to stay in touch with the various entitled projects so one thing we do know is that from and we could look at a calendar but it takes from entitlement a minimum of six months to submit for building permits um to just develop all their

1:50:57construction drawings based on their entitled project the first ones that we expect to come in are the brana projects remember what we call the triplets at um so we i'm actually meeting with them next week they've been talking about it the construction costs as you've been

1:51:16reading in the news every day are are very high right now there's a lot of projects in construction and that is causing um we're not we're not sure exactly when i talk to holiday they still feel really strong so mayfair would probably be the one right after that

1:51:34so we'll keep you posted i think that it's um the time periods are somewhat unpredictable and a lot based on financing and the things that people are pulling together so but we but what we do expect and want to keep sharing is that from entitlement then they do at

1:51:50least delay six months before they submit for construction drawing so if you look at the various um i don't have the map in front of me i think mayor you might have some of those maps in front of you and we can start to put the dates of entitlement for you occasionally and

1:52:01we'll set we'll start to monitor that and see what the actual is which is why we also did um on the affordable on the inclusionary side put in that two-year deadline to somewhat incentivize you know um you know you don't have this so keep moving um that is one thing that we are

1:52:16definitely looking at but they are having to look at the school district fees and the siege we have heard some of them are due up front that's causing um but we do know that there's several projects we do know that brandon is actively developing their construction

1:52:28drawings so we do know that and how much do we exactly know about metro the plaza metro five is it metro 510 we know that they are working hard we think that they are fight their their contractor financing keeping their money going so we hope that they're finishing soon we know that they're

1:52:49pulling together just some very last pieces and that their second phase should be could be ready to go within a month to six weeks but that's it's definitely also been all it's all you know what once we've entitled the project it really becomes the the project owner's responsibility

1:53:06really to finance and finance it enough to keep moving it quickly enough i think it is we we have heard from one of the projects that's about to be complete they've already reserved their contractor for 2020 because it is so hard right now to get contractors so to get your

1:53:22you know we've talked about this when when when the economy's different ways then sometimes you get the a level team um for all projects and other times it's very competitive so we think that that's at play as well so on back to metro 510 do we know how many units have been rented out of

1:53:41how many you know i haven't checked recently so their their first phase i don't even know that they've started to rent their second phase because they don't have a date at which they were moving in so their first phase i could cut we could come back and i could put in a city

1:53:53manager's report and what percent has been rented out in their first phase we did hear from them at one point that they were going to slow down on marketing just because some people were concerned with the act of living in an active construction site but they looking in the garage i'm sure

1:54:06you've seen as you've gone by there as well i think there's a lot of people living there and i've heard talked to some who are very happy living there but i can get back to you with the percent and what is their arrangement on parking theirs is remember it was entitled before the specific plan

1:54:21so it's not unbundled like a specific plan project would be and it's higher levels of parking but i mean um what is that arrangement um i think it's 1.7 parking spaces per unit and uh do we know if that's what has happened is so the when you say it's unbundled uh what do you mean so so remember in

1:54:47the specific plan and i know we want to get back to inclusionary zoning and this is um but the um bundled means that when you rent your unit you automatically get the parking space so the cost is folded in one bundled is what you're saying at it metropolis because we used to that's

1:55:04how we used to do it before the specific plan was adopted so if we went over there in the middle of the night we would expect to see 1.7 i would love to once we're next you know i'd love to do a study once that project's fully occupied to look at actually the car ownership and driving

1:55:18to try to find somebody an intern from cal or something to do a study of what the actual demand and use of cars was but we don't you could estimate i guess by looking i was wondering about using it to estimate how full it is but you really couldn't do that probably not because there's probably

1:55:36some people who don't have cars some have one but you yeah um but we could find that out we again we could we could ask we have a uh ice has been in constant contact with them making sure that they're doing their affordability right and so we could definitely get that

1:55:48information for you and and put it and provide it to you through the city manager and uh the last question i have is um so we did the specific plan and um we pretty much used up this specific plan as i understand is that correct so um that is correct so we have um when

1:56:10we did the specific plan we studied uh one we evaluated with the environmental impact for 1700 new residential units would be and 200 000 net new commercial some of those 1700 were projects that were entitled but not yet built so if you were going to be doing a

1:56:27traffic count out there you still had to count them as not here yet so some of them have been taken up by projects that were previously entitled we thought we were being ambitious but so we're at about 1400 now units that are that are and we have to give them that sequa clearance

1:56:44when they are entitled so they they hold that golden ticket i like to call it um and so we hope they get in the ground but we can't give it to somebody else at the same time um the good news is and i need to get this into a i was going to give this to the next city managers report we did just get

1:57:00awarded a grant from mtc um to update our sequa for the specific plan and to do an amendment to the specific plan so to to increase our capacity so at this point we still have about 300 more units that can be evaluated under the specific plan so we're telling applicants as i said we're

1:57:18in communication with folks who've bought land we're sort of like first come first serve but then in fall we hope to come and award a contract to be able to then do an updated programmatic eir in the meantime each project would have to do its own sequa evaluation

1:57:34you've already answered my question thank you okay and just to piggyback on um one of your previous questions um councilmember abramson one of the things that i will be working on is um an annual report to the council on our affordable housing portfolio so that we would have an opportunity to

1:57:54just kind of update you on these sorts of things thank you great paul fideli yeah thank you a lot of my questions have been answered from the other questions given by the council members but i want to thank the staff i think it was important to this council that we get this report and it's a very

1:58:14good report it's a very as has been mentioned a delicate balance that goes on and it's a formula that you've come up with and it's time we will see if it works for us but it will take a little bit of time so i appreciate the conservative nature of this at this point in time i mean i'm

1:58:35obviously our council was for more affordable units we were for establishing a local fee so that our housing trust fund could be filled um and allowing developers to help us get affordable housing so i'm seeing this plan is moving in that direction again many of my things were

1:58:57talked about i just want to ask a question on the um the exemptions when you talk about a project getting through what do you mean do you mean it built or through the permit process um and the specifically in the exemptions for the two years yes um it would be in the they would

1:59:23need to have pulled their building permits within two years of their entitlement so it's not getting the project built that is the end result it's the okay um so i think some of that leeway room is is a good thing um i wanted to ask um about the appeals and the the um our planning commission what

1:59:46is the type of appeal that might occur that might come to the council in this issue so for example like maybe the designation of some of the affordable housing units or the manner in which they're proposing to market their units it's really their affordable housing

2:00:07plan so it's the contents of how they're going to satisfy their affordable housing requirements how they're going to market them and you know the rules that come along with that how does marketing impact this i mean we have a formula here right that they need to abide by

2:00:22for for their for their obligation yes but they'll still have to get the word out to the public um they'll also have to establish selection screening standards for example in a rental unit like on a for sale unit the lender sets that but on a rental unit so if there's guidelines

2:00:39that go along and actually seeing the units through until the people are in them and then of course and monitoring them um so part of the affordable housing plan does also include um what their strategy will be for ongoing monitoring of the assets okay and on this issue of when we might

2:00:59reevaluate the one to two to three year we're going to get a one-year report back on our total affordable housing plan and strategy but two to three years on this effort to see how it works and what's in the pipeline correct yeah my goal is to give you an annual update on our overall

2:01:18housing stock and then yes this is separately in two to three years and part of that will be our staffing how we staff this and what we might need and the costs associated with that absolutely um the other thing is that with the rental the change in the rental ford

2:01:38inclusionary that economics is it new economics for rental if this hasn't been happening in california is this the evaluation of the per square foot do you want to speak to it it's not new it's one of three methods yeah so we would be the new kids on the block so we would have you know the

2:02:07current the most current standards probably in our program um because yeah there's three different models and so it's been determined that the price per square foot is the most financial financially feasible and equitable thank you were there any challenges on the rental

2:02:28side though as far as determining a formula i think the only challenge was just the comps right but okay but in her in her interviews with the developers she was also able to just get a sense of what their expectations and performance were as well thank you very much i mean

2:02:53with our four pillars of our plan displacement was a big issue of mine but this came in a close second i'm very glad this is there as part of our tools for affordable housing thank you yeah and we will of course be coming back with more things to implement an affordable housing strategy um this was

2:03:12just some more immediate um so yeah you'll see more of me soon okay we're gonna open the public hearing we have three speakers al miller followed by robin mitchell and howdy gowdy good evening mayor kento council members staff i speak in support of the proposed

2:03:37ordinance related to the inclusion of affordable housing units in some residential development projects i believe the housing shortage in the bay area is very real while the affordable housing shortage is at a crisis level so i think your actions are timely and

2:03:55needed and i look forward to them thank you thank you i'm robin mitchell an el cerrito resident and i wanted to also say that i support the inclusionary housing ordinance i went to the planning commission meeting and they had a lot of the same concerns that you did so i do

2:04:19want to sort of reiterate they also wanted to see the less than 10 units addressed they also wanted to know limits to the term of the affordability and i agree with those and you guys have all covered that but i think those are topics worthy of future discussion um

2:04:38and then the only other thing um was that during the planning commission jeff levin i guess from the east bay housing organization i'm just looking at my notes so i can't really quote him but he did i mean i can't say that he said this but this is what i wrote down that

2:04:53he said he said that oakland passed an impact fee which is different than what you guys are talking about but they've still had a huge increase in units and so he didn't really feel that this kind of fee structure is actually a constraint on development so i think that's a

2:05:09that's a that he he was very much in support of all this so and then so i think this is a great step and then the next thing we need to tackle is rent stabilization so thank you thank you good evening mayor and council my name is howdy gowdy and i live in [address removed] in el cerrito

2:05:33um so first of all i just want to thank staff and council for your prioritization of this issue it's moved very quickly and i really appreciate that i also appreciate you know the very thorough detailed report that was provided so i think this is all great content

2:05:52um and as has been said you know this is a first step it's not going to solve this whole problem it's maybe a modest step and it i think so it's important for us to realize this is we're not done you know we have to keep um moving forward and re-um evaluating this

2:06:11to make sure that it's you know matching uh what's what's most reasonable um and along those lines since it isn't you know maybe as aggressive as we could be in in taking on this problem i do want to urge you to at least you know engage sort of the maximum level of

2:06:36of treatment that has been identified in this plan and as councilman member lyman pointed out you know the the scenarios where you know 20 dollars a square foot was looked at instead of you know 15 or 17 um are just like razor thin close to six percent you're talking about three

2:07:00hundredths of a percent that's one part and ten thousand um you just heard your economic analysis person say we don't know so in a scenario where we don't really know the answer one in ten thousand is or three and ten thousand is completely you know irrelevant noise and i think there are

2:07:21good reasons to suspect that twenty dollars is a completely acceptable number and i don't think that that would be a hardship so i encourage you to explore just using twenty dollars for the rental as well as the housing i did a little uh different approach of of calculating

2:07:41these um equivalencies and i think it's it's important to look at the the site built versus the rental equivalency because i'm not convinced that you know the fee as it stands is really economically equivalent first of all they they have the you know administrative burden of of having the

2:08:01on-site unit but the on-site units also involve five percent low and five percent moderate so the you know the dollar equivalent of that is really you know what is the rent over time for 55 years if you finance you know the inclusionary or the in luffy up front

2:08:21and look at what that costs you on a monthly basis the um the rental difference between you know market rate and low income has to be lower than that cost amortized over time and my rough calculations suggest that that's not the case it's basically you know the

2:08:41there's maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred dollar difference between those rents in reality and um you know the in-lieu cost is more like 500 to a thousand so we're hitting low so i urge you to pass this but make it a little stronger thank you do okay hear a motion to uh close a public

2:09:06hearing i move we close the public hearing second okay we have a motion by abelson second by lyman all in favor all right that's unanimous motion carries okay um back to the council uh discussion janet um i don't think i have any further remarks um okay i can make a motion

2:09:32okay a paul do you have that um i don't i think i'm just reiterating what i said before that this is a real balancing act i was at an event actually the event that council member um abelson mentioned where the seniors were being um and the volunteers at the community

2:09:54center sat at a table having dinner with them half the table said we were moving too fast on affordable housing and also the other half said we're not moving fast enough what are you doing about this so it's a balancing act with what you've presented to us it's a balancing act in

2:10:11the public i think there are really three things that we need in el cerrito for more affordable housing and it's the political support which i think we have here we have strong political support we need the available sites and i will take affordable housing not

2:10:30to dis anybody but empty car lots or gas stations and fast food i'll take the affordable housing and the retail on the bottom rather than that and the funding and work finely without redevelopment coming together with a group of funding options and this to me is a good funding option

2:10:49we either get the stock or we get some money in the bank to leverage that and i think it's a good report i'm very supportive of this thank you very much okay um well why don't you have grade go first i know i want to make an amendment okay so um i'm going to echo some of the

2:11:09words that you've heard from our council i'm i'm personally very disappointed that we are unable to do an inclusionary rate that's higher than this but as a engineer and having done financial analysis myself on performance and projects i i really appreciate the science that's

2:11:28gone in behind the levels we're setting we're setting values that are uh on par with richmond they're one in ten for both for sale and rental we're one for nine on for sale and one for 10 on rental the lack of housing that's been built in the area constrains our action we had a

2:11:47speaker say it's a modest step it's a it is a modest step but i look forward to increasing our inclusionary ratios um you know by reducing the size of the exemptions the exempted projects down from nine and ten um and increasing the in-lieu fee i made my comments or questions earlier about

2:12:08the 17 not being higher and so i i would i understand what we're where we are today modest step being the key words for me but i do look forward to changing this ordinance uh in the what two years is near future um so i really uh do encourage us to revisit this

2:12:29and as we start getting sales data and rental data that supports um lower a higher inclusionary ratio by changing the size of the exemptions downward and increasing the in-lieu fee i am comfortable where we are but i certainly look forward to bigger steps in the near future

2:13:01and then i'll just reiterate that um i would i would like to see these uh numbers go up but since we are going to revisit this in a couple of years i'm i'm okay with passing what we have so far i do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater i do want us to

2:13:21build here in el cerrito affordable and otherwise we are so low throughout the entire state on the number of units that we need to produce per year to make everybody's rent and mortgages more affordable so i will be putting my vote towards passing this but i would like to make um

2:13:44one amendment as i had mentioned before we one place we're doing very good on on so many of our our metrics when it comes to our housing needs but we are missing that middle and so if we have one little place where we might be able to sneak in another moderate income

2:14:04unit i would like to to take it out where it just says inclusionary unit that is under let's see inclusionary housing requirements 19.30.040 and then you scroll down to c where it says fractional units under one it says in that event of an additional inclusionary unit shall be provided

2:14:37i'd like to put moderate income unit shall be provided and then in the next line it says under two also the applicant shall have the option of either rounding up to the next whole number or providing an additional and scratching inclusionary unit and putting moderate income unit or paying

2:15:01in luffy uh councilmember that the revision to item two um would require us to also add text that's uh applicable to the rental residential one so although i support what you're saying in reference to um for sale units the the language for in two is universal in order to to do what you're proposing

2:15:37we would potentially need to add additional language regarding the uh rental residential development projects um because they're the if i read this correctly the rental residential development projects are targeting low and moderate and the for sale is targeting

2:16:00moderate so your your edit is fine with regards to for sale but since number two is for both we would need to add language for the rental residential uh development project to have a similar parallel structure to item one just um if i understand correctly because we had

2:16:21to discuss this also and i think somewhere in here it says that it would be at the community development director or city manager's discretion and if we were looking at our arena numbers but it sounds to me like what you're saying is when they do have to provide a unit

2:16:35that you would like it to be specified as moderate so when there is a fraction when there is a a choice on the fractional units after we've met five percent and five percent that you want it which is great to have that direction ahead of time um and we did see this gap

2:16:51in in moderate and middle how and obviously missing middle um so if i'm understanding correctly you're saying when there is a fraction yes when there when it's above 0.5 so a unit is required to specify that it is moderate and agreed with council lyman that would be the case in ownership

2:17:08anyway and with rental what we're doing is adding that clarification oh actually the edit did not do that uh so if that was the intent of the of the motion maker that edit would have to be different and um i think i saw from council member party walcomoto that was the intent is

2:17:27that my intent so where where would we also have to write it in addition to that uh so if that's your intent then in the sense that you selected to edit it needs to be changed in both places that in all three locations that it occurs in that sentence not just the one you selected

2:17:48okay because the one you selected would apply to [Music] um for sale only okay so i would like to add that to the rental units as well and then if that's the case then no additional text would have to be added to item two well i'll subscribe to just make sure there's anywhere else that to reiterate

2:18:21that intent so using the redline version i think i understand that on page 11 um section 040 b2 where it says that uh the for when calculating um the inclusionary requirement for rental residential development projects at the end instead of saying that where it's mixed and it would be

2:18:49either low or moderate income at the description of the city manager would just say that it would be moderate income um actually i understand there's also some text in c that needs to be changed i'm just i was just trying to take it in order but i've i've in two in item two in in

2:19:05b2 that is for [Music] is that for in lieu calculation because in essence what i understand council member pardo okamoto is asking is that frat only the fractional units would go towards moderate okay i thought you had said that the text that the text in two would also

2:19:27need to be adjusted so sorry c2 is what i was talking about okay oh yes so if you're going to require the fractional a moderate unit for fractional units for both uh both for sale and rental then then then ignore what i just said about b about b2 c1 and c2 would both have to be changed

2:19:48so that it states that um where it says uh providing an additional inclusionary unit it would say providing an additional moderate income unit correct sorry councilmember perdue my understanding was the fractionals were to go towards moderate is that correct right okay now um

2:20:06and it would be when they choose to do [Music] inclusionary versus the in lieu calculation so we if they're half they're above a half and they round up yes that would become moderate so actually the the text would have to be slightly different for c2 and we can make sure

2:20:24that that's adjusted accordingly but c1 might even be simplified then because we might be able to take out the ore for rental and just scratch the or for rental resident properties additionally inclusionary shall be provided in the loo i mean you could just potentially

2:20:39scratch that in the event that an additional inclusionary unit shall be provided it shall be a moderate income unit i think that's right well so um except that it two is sorry actually let's let's c1 and c2 are what we're looking at um yeah so but but c2 is actually

2:21:01dealing with when it's less than less than a half but it's there but they have an option in there to roll up to the next whole number and provide an inclusionary unit that that inclusionary unit should be a moderate at that point yes okay so you were i wasn't sure why

2:21:19i thought we were i think we're saying the same thing we are now when i initially started it was because i thought that it was only for for sale units that this was applying to and not rentals but if it's going to apply to both then my comment my original comment on c2 goes away okay

2:21:34i understand i think i understand now and i think i understand what the direction is however following the logic i believe of council member pardue okamoto if you look at b2 it's looking at when there's an odd number that results and so um i say correct me if i'm wrong but i

2:21:51believe that's it was leaving to the city manager right but that's what we get we already but that is that's for whole units not for fractions but if it's an odd number and so you have three units for example that are required okay one would be for low one would be for

2:22:04moderate and we were leaving it at the discretion of the city manager but following this train of thought that we need to increase our moderate we could say that the odd number goes to become a moderate unit i would be in support of that as well i'm willing to make that motion okay um

2:22:23yeah i just want to make sure you're all using the redline version that we need to reference the version that was handed out tonight okay and if i could request one more thing to be included in the motion and on page nine um in the red line changes uh we use the

2:22:36term planning approval and i think in a number of places and i think that that should actually be planning permit so strike it back to its original that's correct that was in um it's in a number of places on page nine so i'm seeing at least two yeah so the changes are just in um

2:22:57section c would be changes to b o four o b two and c1 and 2 and to page 9 the references to planning approval change back to planning permit okay incorporating what was just said is that good enough cheryl i'm actually no it's it's not actually so if you could just repeat what you said sky

2:23:25right now all right so i'll try and recap the changes and i'm sure that uh council members pardue okamoto and and lyman will let me know if i've gone astray um on change on page nine um of the of the redline version of the ordinance um uh as appropriate the term planning

2:23:44approval would be changed to planning permit and we will work that out administratively and then section 19.30.040b2 where it says that the um city manager would have the discretion whether or not to determine whether the additional inclusionary unit would be affordable to

2:24:07lower or moderate income households that would be changed to just say that it would be affordable to moderate income households and in 19.30.04oc both sections one and two where it discusses the provision of an additional inclusionary unit that'll be changed to

2:24:29a moderate income unit do you have that sure i do thank you if i may ask one other yeah one the the definition of residential development sky did you have a chance to look at that was i is there a is it an and or is the or okay what section um this would be definitions

2:24:50um so it would be 10 i think under the definition of residential development and it's i'll declare that administrative if you want to come back i don't for second reading you can make some administrative changes to that if you could include that in the motion i

2:25:18and then maybe i can follow up with you because honestly i've had difficulty understanding the hypothetical that's of concern to you about this issue it would certainly i mean i can certainly it would be as described by staff a two contiguous projects one is rental one is

2:25:36housing for sale and one is the for sale one is eight units and the rental one is nine units and they are they are contiguous but the way i read the definition of residential development it's they would not each is below its representative criteria and even though collectively there are

2:26:0017 units this would not apply so why don't we include in the motion direction to review and revise as appropriate the definition of residential development to ensure that when the project is on contiguous property under common ownership or control that if the total number of units

2:26:22would qualify the project for inclusionary requirements we will make sure that that definition does not allow the project to escape great thank you very much so we capture did you capture that cheryl thank you so um i make a motion that we introduce to introduce by title

2:26:45and wave any further reading of an ordinance adding chapter 19.30 to the el cerrito municipal code to require the inclusion of affordable units within new residential development projects and allow the payment of a fee in lieu of providing units making the changes

2:27:16the red line changes as suggested by both pardue okimoto and lyman does that cover it i hope second okay we have a motion by abelson second by pardo okamoto all in favor all right motion carries 5-0 thank you very much thank you so much for your thorough report okay next

2:27:47review city charter process and city charter committee recommendation this is the first of two public hearings scheduled to receive a presentation from staff regarding the city charter process the city charter committee's recommendation record regarding draft character language and receive comments

2:28:04from the public the second public hearing is scheduled for monday june 18th at 7 pm staff presentation from scotland city manager thank you um we are we're back to give you another update on the city charter process since the city council last discussed this item at the end of the year

2:28:31before i get started i really do want to thank the charter committee including the two council members that sat on it and they put in a fair amount of work in a very short time we had five meetings including a saturday and finished the work even a little bit faster than we had

2:28:49hoped so as i'll talk about in a minute we are still on schedule that we talked to the council about tonight is the first of two meetings uh that are required uh before the council could consider putting a charter on the ballot um so what we're here to do tonight is

2:29:09as is probably all too familiar for the two council members is to to review what we've done to date and talk about what the charter committee's done the consensus and sort of the direction of both the council members as well as um the committee was to continually

2:29:27reiterate what we're doing and why we're doing it almost over and over to make sure that as many people understand as possible so a lot of this will will be repetitive for for those who have been following this but we do want to make sure that we continually go over what we're trying

2:29:46to do so tonight we're going to look at the real property transfer tax which is a primary driver for doing this at this time when we do our budget presentation next month you will have a better understanding of why and and the needs and i'll touch on those tonight

2:30:11and we'll talk a little bit about the charter issues that we've discussed with the council and repeatedly talked to the committee about as to you know what's involved with the charter reiterate the city council direction talk about what the charter committee did and what their recommendations are

2:30:32open it up if there are any questions for discussion and talk about kind of the next steps so with that before i got into the transfer tax i wanted to address sort of questions that informally have come up um including what why now and some of these we've already covered

2:30:57if if you go back in time and you look at why cities do this and when we spent time reviewing other charters and you read their preambles and you read their histories it really does have a lot to do and historically mostly to do with local control over local funds

2:31:14for local reasons in el cerrito the list of unfunded needs continue to grow the senior center is probably the most recent that hit the list and in looking at over the years what are the best way to fund some of these needs you know our research and mine particularly is that the transfer tax is

2:31:38a way to raise the most revenue with the least impact on the residents and business of el cerrito and ultimately if you don't transfer property you don't even pay but you get the benefit it's critical if you ask anybody in our neighboring cities for their sustainability that they

2:31:59currently have the transfer tax and as we've talked about all night there's a fair amount of development that is potentially happening on the avenue but even before that there's been a lot of property that's changed hands and had we hypothetically had the transfer tax

2:32:17number that we've been talking about we would have collected just on san pablo avenue in 2017 over half a million dollars so some of the conversation we've heard about is making sure that the new development pays pays their share related to general services not

2:32:35affordable housing not transportation but just general impact they have on the city and the other thing that the financial advisory board is spending a lot of time on is the fact that the city doesn't have an emergency reserve and that's something we want to continue to talk

2:32:51about is that while we try to have a rolling reserve we don't have money that's untouchable not used for cash flow and it's really hit us harder after the north county fires and you know the need the need to really focus on that so the the issues that continue to come up

2:33:13um as you know we've in all different ways have surveyed residents over the years and we keep hearing repeatedly a lot of the same themes next month you're going to hear from the police chief about current crime trends and some of them are not very good but we constantly hear about public

2:33:30safety being a top priority and as you know last year and likely this year we've had to open police keep positions in the police department open because we just don't have the money to fill them all the parks play fields you're going to be hearing this summer about all of the

2:33:48unfunded needs with the parks master plan that's going on um there's no there's no money as much as we've increased the public works budget back from where it was it's still very low we've talked a lot about the library recently and um after school programs programs for

2:34:07seniors and that just generally that our capital funding is low uh i'm gonna sound like a broken record a little bit between now and the budget but we're but again we're going to keep talking about emergency reserves police vacancies we've talked a bit about the pension

2:34:22liabilities that all cities have and that's still looming out there for all of us and this is a really significant source of revenue that can [Music] you know basically help the city's financial sustainability forever and i don't mean to overstate it but i really believe that

2:34:43so when you go on um i wanted to continue to make sure that um as you know i'm not always crazy about the overuse of the word transparency but we really wanted to make this very clear that a primary motivation of doing this is the real property transfer tax and that's a tax on purchase and sale of

2:35:01real property and that's both residential commercial it's a one-time tax it's not annual like parcel tax buyers and sellers typically work out who pays it and that's probably what we would recommend to the council to be silent on that because that's typically subject to negotiation and that's

2:35:20largely driven by the market at the time if you don't sell you don't pay um and additionally as i already alluded the bigger commercial development um there should make sure that they pay uh into our operations also while we're not going to discuss it tonight when we come back we want to

2:35:44talk about in some other cities that's an opportunity to fund some of our goals around seismic upgrades or energy efficiency so some of this can be rebated at escrow to do that um and typically um certainly i can speak for myself but typically what we hear from realtors is

2:36:01when you're spending the amount of money you're spending for better or worse now in el cerrito you roll this into your into your mortgage essentially um you've seen this chart before uh when you look at what our neighboring cities charge and these are cities that

2:36:17largely are our competitive housing market when people are looking at moving in the east bay this is sort of the net what they're looking at um we as you recall we had the rptt in 2003 and because we're a generalized city we had to get rid of it it was seven dollars at the time

2:36:37um had we had that uh still had it it would have been almost two million dollars in revenue for us a year so a lot of the needs that we've been talking about would have been significantly dealt with had we been able to maintain this over time if we were to do 12 dollars it's about

2:37:002.7 million dollars a year last year because of the amount of turnover on san pablo avenue the number would have exceeded 3 million and in talking to realtors and doing a fair amount of analysis to the cities on the chart the home prices as we know have gone crazy and there's been no noticeable

2:37:24impact for cities that have transfer taxes and you know ultimately if the council decides to put the measure a measure on the ballot they'll decide in july on the rate which is not in the charter it's something set by set by ordinance again this is just meant to be

2:37:44repetitive that the 2.7 million dollars is a general tax and it can be used for all of these things on the list both from buildings to clubhouses to open space to police officers to emergency reserves and ultimately that'll be up to the city council during the annual

2:37:59budget process unless of course if it is used for capital projects it would be part of part of a debt service so to get briefly into again what a charter city is and how it compares a general lost city like el cerrito has the authority to act locally but we must

2:38:21be constituent must be consistent throughout with the california constitution and on all matters whereas a charter city has the additional authority to adopt its own laws on municipal affairs even if they're inconsistent with state statutes we always have to be consistent

2:38:43with the u.s and california constitutions but there are state laws that we may differ if you go on what drives this and i realize this gets a little bit arcane and more in the city attorney's domain but it gets into really home rule which is defined in the california constitution

2:39:03as it relates to municipal affairs and we as a city could ultimately adopt a charter that would replace state laws regarding municipal affairs and again we're still subject to the u.s constitution the california constitution and matters of statewide concern regardless whether your general a city

2:39:23or a charter city the decision really comes down to the ability to have more local control given either in the state legislature or the city council so i brought up municipal affair where this becomes complex or confusing depending on your point of view and um the committee spent a fair amount of

2:39:46time with this there's no definition of what a municipal affair is it's basically just decided on a case-by-case basis when the city takes action and someone challenges the action on if it's a municipal affair or not the law changes over time and there actually hasn't been many court cases on

2:40:09on this so cities seem to be faring reasonably well um in their in the decisions they're making regarding their own municipal affairs examples of municipal affairs that the council talked about and gave direction on are typically around elections finance i.e revenues planning and land use

2:40:33public contracts and prevailing wages and employment and compensation and the city attorney will talk about the framework that the council set out shortly but just a little more overview and a little more background before we get into the specifics there are 121 charter cities 361 general

2:40:54lost cities and you can see a fair amount of cities around us um our charter cities so the the point i think i would make having spent some number of months on this now is there's no there's no real reason that i've determined personally as to the downside of being a charter

2:41:16city um so you know there are downsides to going through this process and it's obviously a fair amount of work and some expense but um i think if you talk to albany and emeryville and berkeley and richmond and all the cities on this list they would tell you that they're glad they're

2:41:33charter cities it may be somewhat more onerous when you have to go to the ballot to change certain things which will be talked about in the charter but other than that um there's no there's no real downside as as i can at least see it but i'm certainly open to questions on that

2:41:53in terms of our timeline uh we are on the schedule we showed to the council back in november this is the first meeting in terms of recommendations to the city council in may and june if the council decides to go forward as we've discussed it would be place in the

2:42:10matter on the ballot before the voters in july and then election day in november so with that i would turn it over to the city attorney to walk you through the framework the council set for the committee what the committee did and then what's come back as a recommendation and where we go from here

2:42:34thanks scott as council recall and members of the public who've been following this and for those who for whom this is the first time they're hearing about it last fall when the city council decided to initiate this process they formed a charter committee of members of the public and included two

2:42:54council members and they gave some direction to the to the committee about what to include in the charter because um as a city manager just discussed the primary driver here is the real property transfer tax the resulting revenue and the things that can be done with it there are also other

2:43:12local control issues but the council um wanted to make sure that um the initial charter was narrow and focused and really just dealt with a few matters and otherwise pushed to the future questions about what else could be done with the charter if the council and the public wanted to do

2:43:33that as a matter of local control so the the the primary elements that the council directed that the charter must contain um would be to reserve to the city council the power to adopt local rules in all matters of municipal affairs to require the city to follow

2:43:53california law regarding the payment of prevailing wages for public works projects and collective bargaining with represented employee groups some cities in california to to just expand on this point a bit um some cities in california have sought to become charter cities um in order to

2:44:13avoid those and so um being aware of that and understanding that that there might be questions about it the council wanted to give clear direction that the charter should say that the city would follow state law in those areas to make very clear to the public that this charter

2:44:30was not an effort to make local rules to escape either paying prevailing wages or affecting collective bargaining rights of of the employees of the city the council also directed that the charter should authorize the city council to consider the use of all available tools for

2:44:48generating revenue and that's expansive but it also said that it should specifically reference the real property transfer tax because as the city manager said we wanted to to um be as transparent as possible that this is a primary driver it's not the only issue but it is a primary one

2:45:06and finally the council directed that the charter should state that the municipal code would not be altered by the charter and so on day one of being a charter city the existing local law would remain in effect so what was the role of the charter committee what did you direct them to do

2:45:27what did the council direct them to do and for the public what what role did they play um they were instructed to review and understand some options about what could be done with a charter to look at alternatives within the direction that the city council gave and

2:45:44to develop a draft charter that would come back to the city council for consideration for placing before the voters the committee itself was made up of seven members as i mentioned there were two council members on it those council members lyman and fideli there was a member of the financial

2:46:01advisory board who was also selected from within the committee members to be the chair there was a representative of um of organized labor and that's local 1230 that was representing the fire fighters there was a local realtor who was also selected to be the vice chair of the

2:46:19committee and there were two members of the public one of whom also turned out to be a fab member and one of whom was a former council member and mayor the the meetings of the committee were open to the public they followed the brown act um they so all of the meetings were open

2:46:38to the public they were agendized and those agendas were posted um as required by state law and the meetings followed standard rules of order and the public had an opportunity to address the the committee on the items that were on the agenda for each meeting and

2:46:53generally regarding the committee's business ultimately the committee voted unanimously to recommend the draft charter that was in your packet um and that we are recommending that the council move forward with the committee held five meetings they were as i mentioned they were

2:47:10noticed and advertised widely using all the city's available tools for providing the public with notice about this type of meeting following the brown act the public had an opportunity to speak and there were a number of public comments um about it um about specific aspects of the charter about

2:47:28the purpose of the committee about the nature of charter powers it was there was very good discussion with the public um the committee reviewed a number of sample charters and then gave direction to staff to um take the the pieces of those charters that they liked and assemble one

2:47:48for an initial review which we then did and came back to the committee with the committee reviewed it commented and provided direction and then get and then went through in several meetings refinements to that draft until they were satisfied with what they had produced and came up with the final

2:48:10version that they recommended unanimously to the council and again was included in the packet the components of the draft charter that the committee recommended included a statement of purpose and they did spend a lot of time on that honing it to be what they felt was an

2:48:26expression of the particular reasons that that they felt that el cerrito was pursuing becoming a charter city it addresses the establishment of home rule and the power of the city over municipal affairs it included some provisions that are common in charters to state that you

2:48:43know that the um the boundaries of the city the existing manager council form of government and existing state and local laws would not be affected uh it addressed the direction from the city council to empower the city to use all available tools of a charter city

2:49:02regarding generating municipal revenue and specifically mentioned the real property transfer tax so that the public would understand that that was something that was being considered um but the i should note as the city manager did also that the enactment of the tax itself would not be in the

2:49:18charter that would be done by a separate ordinance submitted to the voters our recommendation being at the same time with um but but at the same time as the charter it included the directed provisions regarding following state law regarding prevailing wages for public works projects and

2:49:36regarding public contracting it addressed the issue regarding collective bargaining with representative represented employees of the city it includes a provision that was not directed by the council but that through the course of discussions we felt would be important to include to state that

2:49:56the city would be following state law regarding elections including initiative referendum and recalls that the public would understand that those powers were not being affected and then it included some provisions that um are sort of what we lawyers often refer to as boilerplate sort of

2:50:13standard provisions that you include in a document just to provide some clarity about how the document should be interpreted what should happen if allow if one part of the charter was struck down as invalid um and that amid the amendment process would follow um the

2:50:28what's required by state law as i mentioned the committee spent a great deal of time talking about the statement of purpose it wanted to make sure that it reflected the overall reason that it felt that the charter was appropriate and that it was written in clear terms that a lay person could

2:50:45readily understand they want while the charter itself somewhat by necessity includes a lot of text that is legalistic we wanted at least a statement of purpose to be something that any member of the city could pick up and read and get it get a sense long into the future about why the city had

2:51:07chosen to do this the committee also spent a fair amount of time talking about what the current form of government is how it works what the role the council is what the role of the manager is um and that they decided that it was important that the charter itself

2:51:24reiterate that um that the charter would not in any way alter the council manager form of government and would instead leave in place the policy making role of the council and the implementing and management role of the city manager including the the city managers management and hiring and

2:51:44control of all the other employees of the city um other than the city attorney who who is is a direct appointee of the city council and that's also called out in the in the in the draft charter we talked a fair amount about the the real property transfer tax and

2:52:02revenues generally um based on those discussions uh the committee recommended uh broad and flexible revenue language but again specifically refer to the real property transfer tax for transparency but only included specifically a reference that it was something that that could be done so

2:52:22that all the details of the tax would be left to the city council and to the voters as i've now mentioned a few times there there was discussion of prevailing wages and labor relations the committee somewhat debated whether or not to to include them at all since

2:52:41they were going to be unchanged but um since the city council had said that um these were priorities and it was important to communicate to voters that that there would be no change regarding those they ultimately did include text that's in the draft charter there were a few other things that came

2:52:58up that the committee did want to communicate to the council that came out of the discussions they really felt that as part of that if the council ultimately decides to move forward with placing the charter on the ballot that there should be significant public information

2:53:15out to the voters that explained what it means to be a charter city what its full powers are how they relate to the charter as the document itself and what the financial powers are they also thought that [Music] that it would be important to that they wanted to explain to you why they had

2:53:35included the form of government in the charter even though the council didn't provide any direction on that topic and so we've we've included that in the presentation that we're making tonight and finally um they've wanted it to be um communicated to the public as part of

2:53:50um a public discussion about the charter that residents would have the ability to change the charter in the future should there be a need or a desire to make changes so um this is sort of the overall charter process laid out here on this slide um we developed a framework for this process

2:54:16a charter committee was selected the committee has prepared a draft charter and we are meeting here today with the committee's unanimous recommendation to the council earlier tonight you scheduled a special meeting on june 11th 18th 18th june 18th um to be the second

2:54:38hearing um state law requires two public hearings on a draft charter that must be at least 30 days apart and then if the city council decides to proceed with placing a charter on the ballot um there must be at least 21 days between the second hearing and its action putting it on the ballot and so

2:54:57the the gap between the june 18 special meeting and your regular meeting on july 17th provides meets that requirement so we would anticipate that if the council decides to move forward that we would have an item on your agenda for july 17th asking you to place a measure on the ballot to seek

2:55:18voter approval for the charter and for a real property transfer tax and the final step would be the election on november 6th with that we are available for questions and this is an opportunity for the council to make further comments and raise any concerns that they have at

2:55:34this point okay very good thank you back to the council discussion questions yes um the question i have that occurs to me that is that if we were to do this and we wanted it to pass usually we would do some polling uh is there a plan to do that yeah um as we said in one of the city

2:56:02management reports the survey is done it's already been done and the consultant's looking over the data and will be bringing back the results in the future and when was it done oh three to four weeks ago and do we consider that there's a reason to do another one or is that good enough

2:56:25right now that's good enough what do you mean right now i mean right now there's not a plan to do another one i'm just wondering if we think that that is um all we need at right now we do that's all that's yes but that could change okay thank you okay question yeah

2:56:51yes no i don't have any comments yeah and one thing that wasn't mentioned is that this is a majority vote right so the polling i mean just to factor that in it's not a two-thirds but um so i was going to ask i'm glad scott mentioned this point about negatives because i was hit up at

2:57:14the same event that the affordable housing people mentioned to me what's the negative of a charter and i i was dumbstruck i didn't i didn't i didn't haven't heard of any is that that's correct right i'm sure there will be arguments of why it's not a good idea we didn't hear anything i don't see a

2:57:34downside as a general lost city versus a charter city okay um the one thing that i hadn't focus on is one of the members of the of the committee is the great opportunity for the commercial development developers um that's a big ticket item and we didn't really hear from them or talk

2:57:53to them too much but this could be a major portion of that revenue that comes into the city so i think that's a good thing i'm glad to hear that the partial rebate issue will be addressed later that's a that's something again where our goals of our city we can implement a place where we

2:58:09can implement those goals and the amount will be decided later the last thing i just wanted to say on on the question time here is um i'm the word transfer tax will be on the ballot is that something that we need to decide we will decide that okay thank you no no questions because certainly as a

2:58:34suspect in the in the committee i had plenty of opportunities to ask questions earlier i have a couple questions then um i know in the november ballot there will probably be a ballot that will counteract whatever we do has our advisors looked at that the business roundtable i know that have

2:58:58a lot of money and they want to make sure that they win and looking at how the other cities were able to change over did any of them make it at a two-thirds vote has anyone looked at that i haven't looked at that i mean the last city was emeryville and that was

2:59:18early 2000s yeah it was a while ago um what the mayor is referring to is if there's an amendment then an amendment there's an initiative collecting signatures that will likely qualify by the california business roundtable which is a group of businesses this is largely pushed by

2:59:35the beverage industry as a response to cities trying to do soda taxes is my understanding um the the big downside is it's for all cities including those going to the ballot in june that there's a one year there's a retroactivity back to january that all measures would

2:59:53require two-thirds vote so the general tax would go away going forward effective backwards to january 1st 2018.

3:00:02so um we are i i think if it qualifies when the city gets into if the council decides to go forward we would have to push for a two-thirds to be safe which is certainly much harder than a 50 as we've learned yeah and and as we've seen in the past we've lost a couple of two-thirds

3:00:26of votes our library being the last one um and then the previous library measures so i'm concerned about uh you know it's i am supporting uh what our uh committee has looked into it's so important uh but we have um uh the business roundtable that that wants to defeat

3:00:51this uh and i'm sure we will have like other folks that will want to defeat this and i want to make sure that we're prepared for this and has anyone looked at the cost of this on how much we would have to pay and when all this comes out not yet yeah okay i have another question regarding the

3:01:14roles of the council we see issues that other cities are dealing with right now like the city of banal and they have dealt with they decided to put a um a three-term limit now they're trying to undo what they did 10 yeah 10 years later looking at that have you looked at

3:01:41roles that the council must look into so we don't have to get in a situation like that and we can just talk about this freely within the council and the group um so term limits are are actually something that general law cities can do as well as charter cities um so

3:02:00in our view and there was a there was some discussion about this at the committee level um becoming a charter city um it makes no difference about whether or not term limits are imposed um but um we did but but the adoption of a charter does create the opportunity um to

3:02:21make other changes to the form of of city government as i said during the presentation um you know the the recommend the the draft charter recommended by the committee includes provisions to expressly state that the charter itself um would not be changing the council

3:02:40manager form of government that that el cerrito operates under currently if the charter were approved in the future the city council could propose changes residents by initiative could propose changes to alter the form of government so the creation of a charter does

3:02:57make it possible to alter the form of government in the future this charter as recommended would not do that and it would not impose it would not create term limits nor would it preclude the the creation of term limits because that was something that is currently authorized by state law and

3:03:14we didn't want to deprive anyone of the opportunity of considering that in the future yeah but term limits do require voter approval just to be clear so even though um you know there there is a city ordinance then on um um like for example we're not doing term limits right now um in order to do a

3:03:37term limit it would have to go through a public vote like panel then exactly yeah yeah even for general law cities term limits require voter approval so totally separate from being a charter even now if the city council or members of the public wanted term limits it's

3:03:56something that would have to go to the ballot box okay thank you okay any more questions discussion okay um let's uh have a public comment then sure um we have three speakers al miller followed by howdy gowdy and robin mitchell just to be clear this is a public

3:04:19hearing yes sorry good evening good evening again i also speak in support of el cerrito becoming a charter city with the real property transfer tax our needs for additional revenues to provide for the services and the facilities that we the people of el cerrito have asked you

3:04:41over the years demands additional revenues and the sources that are only available through charter cities the process of the charter committee went through to develop the draft charter before you was open and transparent and the draft charter merits approval if i only had one request to make or

3:05:05wish to have happen i wish there would have been more of us we the people attending those charter committee meetings to see how well the city government can work thank you thank you good evening mayor and council members my name is howdy gowdy um so i also wish to support

3:05:31this uh charter process i i really appreciate the um the charter meetings and the process that um got us here i think was was really good the the document is clear and well written and i i think uh it's all you know very well reasoned so you know that said the the

3:05:55disappointment as al just said i mean there was a you know reasonable number of public members who did show up to the um committee meetings but as you can tell from this room you know there's not a lot of people listening to this really good presentation and so i think the challenge remains

3:06:12communicating this you know well-reasoned package to the public because i think if they understand it as it was just presented there will be a lot of support but um as often happens there's you know misperceptions and and things that get in the way so um i think that's really the the task

3:06:32ahead is you know effective communication of this i think the the sub bullets of the the things people professed to want was a very effective slide it had a lot of good content that i think would um you know help help show what we're going to be supporting with this i think

3:06:54the the lower half of that slide with the equally important but more practical things are probably less you know um motivating to people so um i don't know if this is helpful or not but i mean my recommendation would be you know obviously you can't target these funds for anything in

3:07:17particular because that raises the vote threshold but i think there probably needs to be like a political promise a statement that you know this is what where we're going and what we want to support and without you know this extra revenue we're not as likely to be able to do it and so i

3:07:34think you know that kind of message may need to happen but i really appreciate that it was explicit about you know the contracting fair prevailing wage all those things i um i think the idea of a partial rebate for efficiency and um and seismic at the time of sale is is

3:07:58interesting and appropriate and i guess the only thing i i was struck by the distinction between you know the things that the charter allows you to do that you can't currently do without a public vote you know there are a few things that you know are are allowed now and so

3:08:21i think it's worth looking at those i mean some of them were explicitly addressed in the um in the charter but um the one that stands out was um maybe the uh the compensation for uh council so i think you probably deserve more money i don't have a problem with that but um

3:08:44it because it's silent on that people may perceive it as something that you're going to raise your own salaries without a public vote so you might want to be more explicit about what's going on there thank you so i'm robin mitchell el cerrito resident um i obviously want to not

3:09:08obviously but i do want to support the charter um the move to do a chart to become a charter city as i said before i thought the process was really good very thoughtful thorough discussion by the committee good group public participation good opportunities for public participation i agree with

3:09:30howdy that i think it's going to be a major education campaign to get people behind this especially if you have to increase the threshold to two-thirds which i guess is what i was understanding it's going to be even harder and it just made me think that you know

3:09:44i know you're going to link the transfer tax with the charter city resolution i wonder if you have to do two-thirds whether you should unlink those things it just it's just a strategy to think about and i think that um because if if the charter passed then the transfer tax

3:09:58didn't at least the charter would pass and you could come back to it whereas if they if it's if the tax is put in with the charter and because of the tax people vote against it then you don't have the charter at all so i don't know it's just it was a strategy that i was thinking about and i

3:10:11think that you know that the trick might be to get the realtors and the business people behind this because and i think the realtors i had i told somebody told me that a realtor convinced them that this was a good thing when he had thought it wasn't a good thing because

3:10:25you know it provides money for amenities that the city needs and that keeps real estate um you know prices up or whatever you need to provide amenities to your community in order for real estate to be you know to stay high or whatever to stay viable and how do you pay for it if

3:10:43you don't have a way to do it and this is a mechanism that gets funded into or gets folded into the financing of the house it's not that burdensome and so i actually think trying to get the realtors behind it might and maybe end sort of a similar thing with the business community it's

3:10:59it's in their best interest that some of these amenities get funded and this is a pretty straightforward way to do it and so it might be worth trying to target those two groups thanks thank you i know others okay thank you um do i hear a motion to close the public hearing i'm going to

3:11:17close the public hearing second okay we have a motion by ableton second by lyman all in favor all right [Music] unanimous 5-0 okay uh discussion sure mayor if i may yes um it's imperative that uh as a council that we have chart forward a path for fiscal responsibility and fiscal stability for

3:11:43el cerrito um some of my notes resonate well with the last speaker um we the quality of our services in this city our financial reserves our fiscal security our earthquake safe fire station a senior center library affordable housing it it's imperative that we maintain or

3:12:05in in some cases create some of these uh facilities in order to maintain the property values that we have to maintain the quality of life that we have and you know the common complaint is that this is going to suppress property values and reduce the price of sale

3:12:23but if we don't have these services if we don't have these amenities of earthquake safe fire station for example then we don't have the quality of life that is underpinning the value of your property um so it it's it's incumbent upon us to find ways to fund these these amenities these resources

3:12:49these uh services that we provide and if this isn't um one of those ways then uh then then chainman will shame on us for not exploring it so i'm i'm appreciative of all the work that our committee did the members of our public that have worked on this as committees

3:13:11i am very proud of the work product that that they generated and we'll be looking forward to moving this uh forward in our in our actions i'd like to thank the committee for working on this and taking your saturday and all the other time that it took to work on it

3:13:32um for all the mentioned reasons i'm very interested in moving forward with this but particularly when it comes to safety particularly when it comes to what we saw happen with the fires we really need to have reserves we really need to make sure that our fire department and our police

3:13:54department is up and functioning after a disaster and that we are able to maintain services and we won't be able to do that if we lose a giant chunk of our revenue from property taxes if something were happening a fire or an earthquake so i believe that having adequate reserves is in

3:14:18everyone's best interest and for all of the other things that will come along with it i also agree with it and look forward to seeing us keep working on this issue thank you okay jim um i agree that with the comments that were just made and i think that it is um

3:14:42if if we can pass it then i think it can be a real solution to a lot of the problems that we have over time you know over time and i'm looking forward to working on making that happen okay councilman yes it was an honor to be on this committee um and it is indeed timely as we head

3:15:03toward another budget cycle i won't repeat all the various items the litany of things that this city needs but i did want a second what uh council member pardue okumota said about fire that's a great concern we need this city right up at the edge of a park we need

3:15:20to have reserves in case of emergency something we need to reiterate um i was the only council member to actually abstain from voting to move this forward because i thought at the time that it was too narrow a focus being a transparent guy i was writing a charter to me is like writing

3:15:43a city's constitution i thought it would not allow for greater public input and it didn't allow for a broader discussion of what our city should be but i have to admit that i'm satisfied with the process and the scope of what our charter mandate should be uh in our public meetings as has been

3:16:00said there was great education to the public was there but there was very little discussion of other issues that we should address for the charter and i now believe that i think it's a good idea to focus it narrowly toward what we really need it to be the financial options that

3:16:17we need to pursue and the public knows that that's what we're doing so i think maybe separating isn't the best idea let's be transparent about it let's say what it is and let's go for this so i want to praise the city for its efforts and as we move toward a november

3:16:33vote here in el cerrito to get the same kind of financial tools that other cities our neighboring cities have the two things i i think we we have to explain to our residents that the approval of this charter will not disrupt our real estate market it will um require developers to

3:16:50contribute to our city and it will place it will not place undue taxes on our elsewhere ins it really is like a an entry fee to come to the quality of life that we have in el cerrito most of us will not be touched by this in the financial burdens of this and um

3:17:07we have to assure that those who live within our boundaries that those of us up here city council and our staff are doing our due diligence to do all that we can to help finance the projects and the services that we promise our citizens so i look forward to this

3:17:23effort and it's a maybe a long road but let's go for it thank you okay thank you um i wanted to uh thank uh my colleagues here and the charter committee for their time and effort and also uh thanks to the public that are present here i'd like to invite everyone to attend

3:17:43the second public hearing on june 18th and i wanted to let everyone know that my job as mayor is to make sure that we do the right thing and i will uh as mayor for 2018 i will uh push this forward and make sure that uh our community and our community leaders all across uh el

3:18:06cerrito will support this and we will promote this to our business uh people here and uh and all of our residents and all the neighborhoods this is something that uh um i hope that we get all of our community members and voters to to get involved and to learn more about

3:18:27this to make sure that they make their wise decision uh for what's best for el cerrito so again thank you to uh my charity committee members here for all the great work that you've done on this and uh we'll move forward and attend the next uh meeting uh second public hearing on june 18th i

3:18:47urge residents to attend that meeting or to see it on tv it's very very important next is city council local and regional liaison assignments great yeah i'm gonna start with mce and it's a a similar topic um the the highlight from the april 19th mce meeting was um an investment policy

3:19:15mce that we're a member of and and i don't know if anybody remembers the discussion when we joined mce we were very concerned that mce would have a fiscal drain that we would be potentially responsible for their uh fiscal uh failure their fiscal issues well mce is generating about 50

3:19:37million dollars of surplus revenue this year and about 50 million next year and will result in about and fifty million dollars of cash on hand that they actually uh passed an investment policy um so that that's a sort of a highlight from the last meeting is that the

3:19:54that we carry a fiscal responsibility no matter where we are to protect the public and having that type of revenue and you've got to understand mce spends about 200 million dollars a year so they're they're they're targeting um to have enough cash on hand to cover

3:20:15any contracts that they potentially have as a result of of any types of upset so that was the other thing that we passed on the 18th is a risk energy risk management policy and again this was an eight-page policy it's very clear very coherent focused on the risks around energy so i encourage

3:20:37anybody that's interested in good examples of a clear investment policy and a clear risk management policy to go visit the mce board meeting because they they we the 21 oh communities that looked at that um certainly all contributed to making that a those both of those policies strong

3:21:03policies around uh protecting the public and the public assets and the public benefit similar to the our previous discussion michelle no comments okay no okay paul okay great so the next regularly scheduled city council meeting is on tuesday may 15 2018 at 7 pm at same place so

3:21:29again meeting is adjourned thank you have a good night you