Regular City Council Meeting December 18, 2018

0:00:00commerce christmas luncheon today and it was nice i attended the mayor's conference in walnut creek last week and on saturday led by councilman lyman i helped direct the shoddy setup he did all the work but he told me where to put the sheep and that's what we did

0:00:20and finally i may be showing my age but um i wanted to say something at the last council meeting i wasn't able to but i'm reminded of the the bird song turn turn turn as our municipal code rotates our mayorship and council slots here in el cerrito it's now the season for rochelle pardue okimoto to be

0:00:40our mayor and i'm very excited about this i think she'll bring some exceptional energy and heart to the job and i also saw an article about los altos having an all woman city council and i just want to say we're not too far behind with our new city manager and rochelle pardue okimoto is our mayor

0:01:00this is the year of the women here in el cerrito as well so congratulations thank you mayor pretend yeah um i attended a breakfast with at the saint peter's cme church in town with council members pardue okamoto and abelson and it was a interesting conversation about how

0:01:25this time of year we should be open-minded and tolerant and we should remember that it's not about us it's about our overall community and those were those are the words from the preacher that day additionally on saturday as a council member fidelity mentioned the shoddy

0:01:49exhibit was erected and at five o'clock that day we did a memorial service for michael gonzalez who was the owner of el cerrito electric he passed away last year and he was a important volunteer for the shoddy display the first decade he was the electrician that helped put the lights up on a

0:02:11regular basis for us every year so if you do go by the shoddy display it will be up until the night of the 26th in the in the shelter on the wall is a plaque uh commemorating the mike gonzalez's contributions to the shoddy display oh and one other thing we do in january and february we do our

0:02:37board and commission interviews uh there's a number of vacancies so if you're interested in serving on one of our boards and commissions uh please be sure to look at our website for the vacancies that we have thank you today i also attended the chamber luncheon and

0:02:55thanks to the chamber for putting that on it was very nice it's been a busy week already as mayor i also attended the cme church breakfast with my fellow council members as well as on saturday i was able to watch the new officers of the el cerrito branch naacp be put into place

0:03:18and then this week we also did the um or recently also did the pancake breakfast where my kids were able to sing at the community center and that was a really great event as well we've had uh or i've been involved with two press conferences over the last week uh one was today

0:03:38to save alta bates hospital uh in conjunction with mayor eric ian of berkeley city council and it was really great our state senator was there today as well well as our assembly member wix and we are still continuing the the regional fight to keep alta bates open

0:03:59and we were able to announce that the health impact assessment which our city helped to fund the research on is now out and the news is bad as we had expected people from west county people that are on medi-cal medicare people of color um will be the most impacted uh and have the most negative

0:04:21effects if ultibates are were to close so we are going to continue to fight against that hospital closure because everyone here deserves to have care and with that i will move on to our oral communications from the public at this time anyone wishing to speak should complete

0:04:42a speaker card and give it to the city clerk remarks are typically limited to three minutes per person however depending on the number of speakers i may reduce that limit to two minutes please state your name and city of residence for the record and comments regarding

0:05:02non-agenda and consent calendar items will be heard first comments related to presentations public hearings and public public policy items will be heard at the time the city council deliberates on each of these items do we have any speakers at this time we do we have five speakers for um

0:05:25oral communications from the public we have several speakers for a policy item just for your information currently we have five speakers these are mostly on consent items or other items that are not on the agenda and i can start off with howdy gowdy followed by karen fenton and robin

0:05:46mitchell all right thank you all right good evening mayor and council members my name is howdy gaudi and live in el cerrito i wanted to thank you for placing the item on your consent calendar granting a co-sponsorship to the cairo echo organization and in case you're not

0:06:15familiar with what that is it stands for kensington amateur radio operators and el cerrito ham operators and it's a long-standing volunteer mutual aid organization that's been active in the city for probably more than 20 years in one form or another but it's recently

0:06:35been reorganized and is quite active we have six members represented here tonight you can wave if you like um and uh you know we're organizing and training ourselves to provide um emergency communications when there's a disaster like an earthquake and cell phones and other communication are

0:07:00overloaded or non-functional so we're lucky to have some experienced experts from with experience in previous disasters and they're doing a lot to teach us how to to be helpful and so we have network check-ins every thursday at 7 pm on 146.415 megahertz um we average about

0:07:30seven or fourteen stations uh checking in a week and often have eighteen or nineteen um so you can see there's there's good participation um over the past ten months we've got a total of 545 check-ins and 54 unique call signs which is not a small number when you consider

0:07:49there's a hundred licensed hams in el cerrito another 40 and or 30-40 in kensington but we do actually interact you know regionally with other cities you know richmond and beyond so um i handed you some example newsletters of this organization and i just wanted to let you know that we've

0:08:13been doing training exercises in addition to the weekly check-ins so we have in september held a multi-hour simulated emergency training exercise in coordination with a cert exercise in area nine and we're currently planning another uh multi-hour exercise for february so

0:08:37um thank you once again for helping us support this organization thank you thank you good evening mayor council members my name is karen fenton and i live in richmond and i came here tonight to one thank you for your support for the carol echo group and also for

0:09:13cert i would say that i've been a member of cert the community emergency response team in richmond since 2008 i'm currently the organizer leader for marina bay and every thursday night whenever we're in town we we try i turn on my two-way radio this is a ham radio it

0:09:36uses batteries lithium-ion batteries and you know that our cell phones and our landlines with comcast are not the best so this is a party line type of radio so i'll turn it on and hook and key into the carol echo net so anywhere from three miles to five miles away from marina bay we can hear and we

0:10:01can talk back and we're continuously practicing and testing the signal and can we really work together so el cerrito is the regional leader in west county for all the cities in one supporting us the citizen activists citizen volunteers you have very talented very smart

0:10:25citizens in el cerrito and el cerritos government through the fire department health supported cert to organize and now carol echo carol echo meets once a month in kensington and we're being booted out because they're going to do some seismic modernization so your

0:10:44authorization for us to have some time uh whereas we have no budget is just really welcome so again i want to congratulate you and thank you to you and the citizens and the leadership that exists in carroll echo and cert you're you allow us richmond people to participate

0:11:05and there's an element of mutual aid you know it's going to happen and you know we have to help each other thank you very much thank you robin mitchell followed by susan duncan and donald simon my name is rodman mitchell and i'm a resident of el cerrito and i would like

0:11:26to comment on the audit results that were presented at the november 20th city council meeting i was shocked by the conclusions drawn by the auditor while it's true that he returned an unmodified opinion meaning that he found no fraud in the audit he did say that he considers the city to

0:11:42have a 1.8 million dollar deficit because of general fund loans to other programs loans that may never be paid back i have always defended the city as being fiscally responsible based on presentations over the years about the city's financial situation but this audit report makes me think

0:11:58that i was duped into thinking this and that does not sit well with me i attended the recent fab meeting whose members are also extremely concerned about this situation and there were several other residents in attendance who also spoke about their concern it's imperative that the city get its

0:12:15financial world in order as soon as possible this may mean writing off some of the loans that will never be repaid and it may require some austerity measures to be put in place until this is resolved in the past i have dismissed this type of talk as unnecessarily harsh but after

0:12:31hearing the audit report and attending the fab meeting i no longer think that thank you good evening susan duncan el cerrito i have a few questions this evening it has recently been revealed that the city has a budget deficit of approximately two million dollars that has previously been

0:12:59labeled as an asset not having a finance nor budgetary background i wonder why someone besides the person or persons who made these transfers didn't know about them or say something aren't there checks and balances will there be an inquiry into how this happened whether all of it is

0:13:15legal and why it was labeled as an asset for so long where does this leave other budget items now like mitigating fire danger there is a list of prohibited trees that i just pulled off the website yesterday in el cerrito for private property two of them are blue and red gum

0:13:35eucalyptus why are they still on city-owned property if they're not legal on private property and more so as the code reads due to the rapid growth height of maturity dense foliage shallow root structure flammability breakability or invasiveness no person shall plant or

0:13:53allow a new tree that results from the sprouting or other self-propagation on private property within the city how come those rules don't apply to the city itself there's lots of eucalyptus trees up on the hills propagating um and has the city started working on an

0:14:14evacuation plan yet it seems that when it does start it should coordinate with and work with the cities of richmond kensington and contra costa county and burke and berkeley as the arlington runs through all five cities and is a major road out it is narrow and divided in different

0:14:32areas if a plan hasn't been started yet when will this happen thank you honorable mayor city council members my name is donald simon i live on tulare near edwards and and am a long-term long-time el cereto resident wish to speak to consent item number 4e [Applause]

0:15:26regarding the kensington amateur radio operators and lc radio ham operators on this evening's consent calendar as an experienced and recognized disaster services worker with the contra costa county office of emergency services races program the former communications chairperson of

0:15:46the east bay chapter of the american red cross disaster services committee from 1981 to 1990 and a long time communications specialist for the volunteer and prevention program of the california department of forestry i have served in many northern california forest fires

0:16:07floods and the roma prieta earthquake and can thus testify to the considerable value of amateur radio auxiliary communications wind power telephone cell phone internet and others other conventional sources of communications are disrupted overloaded or non-existent during

0:16:32disasters care echo in coordination with the city has maintained and tested the auxiliary radio system installed at tassajara park the el cerrito emergency operating center here in city hall fire station 72 65 harding school hilltop elementary school and the kensington community

0:16:54center in support of the el cerrito kensington's community emergency response teams therefore i congratulate the city council this evening for your support recognizing career echo's certain value to our community thank you thank you that concludes public comment right next we have the

0:17:20adoption of the consent calendar a quarterly investment report b annual review of investment policy c reappointment to economic development committee the classification plan amendment e co-sponsorship application kensington amateur radio operators el cerrito ham operators

0:17:48and f shelter crisis move adoption of the consent calendar a second all in favor aye those opposed extensions motion carries right next we have our presentation of citizen street oversight committee annual reports um is chair kelly available thank you thank you good evening mayor and council

0:18:19members it's great to be here tonight uh my name is matthew kelly and i'm the current chair of the citizens el cerrito citizens streets oversight committee i'm here to present the committee's findings for both the fiscal year 2015 16 and 2016-17 expenditures as summarized in

0:18:36the city's kafir reports for those two years the reason for bringing both years reports uh to you tonight are that the committee uh was without a quorum for uh the past year or so and we were unable to meet uh however we now have a nearly full roster only one vacancy and

0:18:57we have met twice since uh september to review the the two fiscal year reports and address other uh standing items i'd like to thank the new members of the oversight committee paul allen vanessa hill and kathy fleming who's in the audience tonight for their time

0:19:14and commitment to the committee so on september 24th the committee convened to review the expenditures of revenues collected pursuant to chapter 4.60 of the el cerrito municipal code to determine whether these funds were spent uh for the purposes specified in the

0:19:32street repair and maintenance expenditures plan as approved by you the council expenditures for fiscal years 1516 and 1617 were reviewed by the committee along with the auditor's agreed upon procedures report which indicated that the city complied with the terms and

0:19:51conditions of the master installment sale agreement related to the bond issuance at the september meeting by a unanimous vote the committee found that the fiscal year 1516 and 1617 expenditures were an appropriate use of the pothole and local street improvement and maintenance

0:20:11transactions use tax it's a long one as approved by the council the committee is hereby reporting their findings to the council and the citizens of el cerrito pursuant to section 2.01 dot 320 c of the municipal code additionally the committee acknowledges and supports

0:20:30that council in their resolutions authorizing fund expenditures as budget amendments are thereby confirming that the expenditures are an appropriate use of the pothole and local street improvement and maintenance transactions and use tax and that completes my report thank you

0:20:47thank you does the council have any questions all right um our city cork are there anyone from the public that wish to speak on this item no one signed up to speak on this item your honor all right then thank you very much for your report all right so next um we are going to

0:21:08switch the order here we are going to skip number six uh public hearings and that will become our number seven and our number seven will become our number six which is policy matters tenant protection ordinances and the human relations commission resolution um let's please have our staff report

0:21:43thank you good evening council members mayor members of the public my name is isa shuri i'm an affordable housing analyst i am joined by our community development director melanie mintz and tonight i will be presenting the tenant protection ordinances for your consideration as a

0:22:08result of our study session on august 21st we realize this is a very difficult topic and there's not a one-size-fit-all policy to address this issue so just want to give you a quick overview of tonight's agenda we are going to quickly touch on the project schedule that has brought us to

0:22:28this point and give you a little background introduce the four tenant protection ordinances in your package which includes the rent review program the minimum lease terms tenant termination of tenancy as well as tenant relocation triggered by residential demolition

0:22:44projects we're going to speak to our data collection efforts implementation and we will turn it over to our partners at the human relations commission and we will then open it back up for public comment as you know you adopted the affordable housing strategy last summer august 2017

0:23:07this position affordable housing analyst was created i was bought on board in january we were successful in getting the inclusionary zoning ordinance adopted in may that was pillar a and pillar b which is addressing displacement we did outreach during the spring and summer and

0:23:26actually through the fall we came forth to you with the study session on august 21st followed by a public meeting on november 8th and here we are tonight in front of you so just to give a little background on the affordable housing strategy it does identify tools to

0:23:43actually preserve produce and protect our affordable housing stock it lays out specific objectives key considerations and implementation actions that the city can undertake over a five-year period within the strategy it does contain timelines those are identified as

0:24:01immediate terms that should be examined within a year or less short term one to two year project terms and medium term three to five years so part of the affordable housing strategy actually included significant community engagement as well as technical analysis

0:24:19comprised of affordable housing experts so we held two public meetings um the technical advisory group met twice we presented the strategy to the planning commission and of course to you council and it was adopted so the four policy pillars tonight we're going to be specifically

0:24:37focusing on exploring and implementing policy options to reduce displacement the high priority implementation action items in pillar b are specifically strategy six which states explore tenant protection policies the specific objective is to continue to study potential tenant protection

0:24:59options and evaluate the success of existing programs in peer cities and then strategy four is implementing policies to preserve our low-cost housing stock so in front of you tonight is going to actually be an order an ordinance enacting the regulation of demolition of existing

0:25:17housing units to require relocation assistance obviously you know there was the great recession that happened and in 2013 the economy began to change um so of course housing production stalled during that time and we realized that rents are a challenge for people

0:25:40especially people who are low income so affordability predictability stability inventory displacement eviction income diversity these are all very important things for us to focus on and we want to bring forth this range of housing package for you to be able to address these

0:25:58housing types of course as you know we're primarily about 73 percent of our housing stock is single family and about 27 percent is multi-family so it's about 2 800 units of multi-family units our owner to renter ratio is 61 owners 39 renters so we talked about that before but i

0:26:23thought it would be good for us just to recapture that and also let folks know who might be tuned in and hear in person so currently we have a condo conversion ordinance a rental inspection program on the books as well as state law we cover those back in august at the study

0:26:44session so tonight for your consideration i'm going to actually jump into the four ordinances so it's the rent review the minimum lease term the termination of tenancy and tenant relocation assistance i know that there are those that you know rather we do nothing um

0:27:02but with your approval we'll be able to put measures in place that actually seem fit for el cerrito as a first step in the right direction by no means will this cure our housing shortage but as i mentioned it will provide avenues for tenants to dispute rent increases and also allow both

0:27:20parties to actually come to the table and have dialogue and also be able to lock in rental rates and for us to really understand any displacement that may be occurring as well so the first program for your consideration is the rent review program so it is a program that

0:27:37requires landlords and tenants to participate in the conciliation and may include mediation for rent increases over than five percent so it's a mechanism for tenants to dispute rent increases it's also an opportunity for the city to collect data and it sets a threshold of five percent and it's

0:27:56actually based on five percent of the actual rent it is complaint based so what that means is if someone wishes to dispute a rent increase over five percent that would be on a complaint basis obviously you we're not at this point doing a rental registry so that's why it

0:28:15is complaint based and a business license of course is required to have a rental unit in el cerrito as well outside of the rental inspection program it is non-binding so reaching an agreement with tenants is based on immediate recommendations it's not mandatory but i know that the

0:28:33non-binding thing is very controversial but there is evidence in your packet that it has been effective in other cities it does provide a disincentive to give rent increases over greater than 5 and it creates a platform for both landlords and tenants to come to good

0:28:53faith negotiation efforts so what properties would be eligible for this program are those with two or more rental units there are obviously some exceptions so any properties that would not be subject to this ordinance or those with a certificate of occupancy issued after january 1st 2015.

0:29:13that date is tied to the adoption of our specific plan in december of 2014 so in essence new development would be exempt from this ordinance obviously with new development there's construction costs construction loans that we took into consideration with that um we are also exempting

0:29:33single-family units um if a room is rented out by a property owner that lives on site that would be exempt we want to obviously increase the production of adu so those would be exempt as well as hotels condos town homes a manager's unit so for example an apartment manager on site

0:29:52or if a unit is a condition of employment um and those rents that are controlled by another government agency so such as our project next door at hannah gardens or units acquired by the city for public purpose what does the process look like um it's actually the rent review program is a

0:30:10three three step process um and it will allow individual assessment of each situation so anytime that rent increase is over five percent and um it's triggered then what would happen is currently under state law a landlord is required to give a tenant a 30-day notice if the rent

0:30:29increase is less than 10 percent or a 60-day notice if it's greater than 10 percent so accompanying that notice would come the notice of availability of rent review so that would be new so what would happen is anytime a landlord gives a rent increase they're going to have to

0:30:46notify the tenant that this program exists through the city it will be on a city prepared form and it will be translated as well and failure to provide that form voids the rent increase it would be required again at the time rent increases are given and at the time

0:31:06a lease is signed so anytime there's a new tenant moving in they would be notified that this program exists so if the rent review request for rent review is triggered if the rent increase is greater than five percent or if there's one or more rent increases in a 12

0:31:23combined that equal greater than five percent so if you get three percent you know one month and then two months later you get three percent again you would then be able to also access the rent review program the tenant would be required to make that request within 15

0:31:40calendar days from the date the notice is received and again the request for rent review is on a city form so um after that's done um i'll jump into the conciliation and mediation process so what that means is step two is the program administrator so these are this

0:31:58is actually i'll talk more about the program administrator it's a trained neutral third party um that administers this for several other jurisdictions so if the property meets the requirements of the ordinance um then the form is completed and the actual service

0:32:13provider will then contact the landlord within five business days to initiate the conciliation process um the landlord must respond in 15 calendar days and failure to respond will avoid the rent increase so during this process it's more of an informal by the phone by the email with the again

0:32:34the third party facilitating the conversation between the tenant and landlord for them to understand what's happening um and so that process can generally last no more than 10 business days but it's like i said it's informal so it's normally done quicker obviously if

0:32:51people reach an agreement before they get to conciliation that's of course achievable and the process stops but if there's not an agreement actually reached within that time then the tenant has five business days um to actually request to move on to the next phase which is

0:33:09the mediation process so this is the third step in the process and it basically again this is generally it's different because what will happen is once the request to mediation is filed the program administrator will schedule in-person mediation within 45 days now

0:33:28the service provider is generally able to do that sooner than later because they like to address these situations while it's fresh and while everyone's attention is you know very focused and just coming out of the conciliation but we put the 45 days and the process just to allow

0:33:46for time if people are traveling especially you know during the holidays so the participation again is mandatory and then the program administrator will give both the landlord and the tenant notice 10 calendar days before the in-person meeting and that would happen locally so

0:34:02people wouldn't need to travel to a different area to actually be able to participate in that process again it can be resolved prior to mediation and if one or more tenants are affected by the rent increase then what will happen is multiple multiple people can participate so again

0:34:24the dialogue is done through a mediator so the mediator and the conciliator are not the same party they're two different people so it's gonna again bring another neutral third party who's trained in facilitating these negotiations so things that the mediator will

0:34:43consider is of course the hardship to the tenant they'll look at historical rent increases and the frequency of rent increases um so it won't just be like for a 12-month period um they'll look at documentation from both parties so that again they can come to a resolution um to avoid

0:35:02unaffordable rent increase that may result in displacement and it also looks at the landlord's cost to you know look at the property um of course if the landlord doesn't appear the rent increase is void and if the tenant doesn't appear the case is dismissed so if an agreement's made great

0:35:22if it's not then the rent increase remains in effect so what the city can actually do is this is actually also going to allow us to understand each specific case on an individual basis and understand each situation and actually have data for these rent increases so we can

0:35:40understand you know the property profile the tenant profile all of the things that really relate to what the outcomes are and the effectiveness so i mentioned the trained service providers so echo housing the eden house eden council for hope and opportunity they're they were established in 1968

0:36:00they're actually the fair housing provider to the county and they provide services including the tenant landlord mediation relocation assistance part of the rent review program services that would include inquiries general inquiries from the public counseling program reporting

0:36:18they're currently working with albany concord union city unincorporated alameda county and we're looking at a contract not to exceed 30 000 with echo housing so i'll talk more about budget a little later on in the presentation so the second one is just the minimum

0:36:38lease term what that does is it provides a minimum lease term requirement to prospective and current tenants with a mandatory one-year term so it is required by the landlord but it's optional for the tenant and there will be language in the ordinance that specifically is the notice of tenants

0:36:54rights to minimum lease in terms of eligible units it's the same as the rent review program it's properties with two or more rentals and it's the same exceptions again buildings can who've received their certificate occupancy after january 2015 single-family homes condos etc

0:37:13so those are the same so what does the process look like the first step in the process is the offer must be made so the offer must be made by the landlord using that required language um that's in the ordinance and included in your packet um if the tenant accepts and

0:37:30they'll sign a one-year lease that's considered an exception if the tenant rejects that's fine the landlord and the tenant can negotiate a shorter term um however at some point a rental agreement will be signed and again it will be based on whatever that final term is that they

0:37:48negotiated so if they want to lock in at the 12 month rate um at the end of the 12 month term then there will be the renewal of lease and it's at that point um that a rent change can be negotiated because when you lock into the 12 month rent then your rent would be locked in

0:38:04of course if there's any like violations of the lease or anything of that sort that process still stands so termination of tenancy um what termination of tenancy currently does on under existing state law it does require a landlord to give a three-day notice to vacate if a tenant has violated their

0:38:26lease or hasn't made a payment outside of the three-day notice there's also a 30-day notice to vacate if the tenants lived in a unit for less than a year and it's a 60-day notice if they've lived there longer than a year and then for example if someone's in subsidized

0:38:42housing like they might have a section 8 housing choice voucher then that timeline is a little longer it's actually 90 days the termination of tenancy process it is going to be a way for us to understand how many tenancies are being issued city-wide and it's also going to require the

0:39:04landlord to deliver the city a copy of that notice within 10 days again this will be on a form provided by the city and will also be encouraging the landlords the tenants to provide us with information as well should a termination of tenancy be issued so this one's a little different

0:39:24in terms of eligible units eligible units would include all rental properties so it would include single family units and units that were constructed after january of 2005 but it would not include you know renting a room out the adus again condos town homes tenants on-site managers you know

0:39:46government controlled units so that's the termination of tenancy in a nutshell and of course i imagine there might be questions later on the fourth ordinance is our tenant relocation assistance so i mean we had a we had you know some displacement occur a couple years back and as a result of

0:40:07that we wanted to bring forth this ordinance um so that we can actually provide relocation to tenants who may actually be displaced and that are earning less than 120 of area median income so for a single person that's about 87 thousand a year currently and for a family of four it's about a

0:40:26hundred and twenty five thousand a year it's triggered when an application is submitted to the city to um change land land use or approve a prop improve a property that will result in displacement and there are some exceptions and special circumstances so i'm going to

0:40:43talk about the terms of the relocation assistance so the terms include requiring a full refund of the security deposit these are all again resources to help the tenant would alleviate some of the financial burden again a 60-day subscription to the rental service agency to help them seek

0:41:04housing it would also provide them three months of rent that's based on federal number that hud publishes annually for contra costa county and it's based on a similar size rental unit so currently for a three two bedroom unit it's 2109 so you would in essence be looking to

0:41:24get about 6 300 um under this ordinance if you're qualified as an eligible household within that income range and then you may qualify depending on if your special circumstance for an added month of relocation and so what a special circumstance household is is anyone who

0:41:43meets um any of the following so if you're over 62 if you're disabled if you have minor children or if you've lived in the unit for over five years so what units are eligible for tenant relocation it's the vacating of two or more rental units upon notice from the

0:42:03landlord as a result of or to enable the following the landlord seeks to recover possession to demolish or otherwise remove a rental unit from the market after obtaining all the proper permits the landlord seeks to recover possession of the rental unit to remodel renovate or re

0:42:23rehab the unit resulting in permanent displacement and i'll talk more about the time frame for that and a change of rental unit from residential use to non-residential use that requires city approval so again these are changes that for which application would be required

0:42:38to be submitted to the city in order for this process to initiate so that's how we would monitor it is based on those applications what would happen is upon filing an application the property owner would be required to give the tenants within 30 days the notice that basically i've

0:42:58filed an application with the city and i just want to let you know this is going to be the process and you may be eligible for this program they of course meaning the property owner has to provide verification to the city that that actually happened and then once the application is actually

0:43:16approved by the city through um whatever approval process it goes through whether it's going to be through planning or building then the tenants must be notified within 15 days that hey the application was approved and then at that point preceding that then the landlord can

0:43:36begin the notice of termination process which is generally going to be between 30 and 90 days to notice to vacate so it is a pretty extensive process and filing an application with the city it can take depending on you know if you're just demoing it or going through planning

0:43:56approval it can be you know anywhere from 60 days to maybe a year or longer for payments um this would all be handled by a third-party agency so again it would be someone such as echo housing so it's really going to be a non-profit housing provider that is able to

0:44:15actually respond to tenants help them look for housing and also provide language access as well should that be needed the funds are going to be required to be deposited into an escrow account of course controlled by a neutral third party the tenants would then be able to submit

0:44:32relocation claims so they'll work with a non-profit service provider to document their income and determine their eligibility and payments to eligible households once they're deemed to be eligible for this program half will be paid within 15 days of the claim and then the remaining will

0:44:49be paid when they move out and if there's any back rent that is owed then you know that can be deducted from the tenant reload relocation payments and the city will of course verify that those payments were actually issued and received through the through the title companies generally

0:45:06the escrow account holder ineligible units are properties that are compliance with an order pursuant to health and safety costs buildings that are red tagged there's currently state law for buildings that are red tagged buildings that were destructed due to a natural disaster

0:45:24like an earthquake those would not be subject to this ordinance tenants that are displaced for a period of less than a year that are you know offered alternate housing and owner move-ins so if a owner is moving back into a property that would not be subject to the tenant

0:45:41relocation assistance ordinance so data collection is important because in order for us to craft um the best policy for you know the greater community we need data to understand what's happening i mean obviously we know that there's a regional statewide housing crisis but we

0:46:00really need to understand the specifics for el cerrito and what that means for us so what this proposed package will do we will be able to actually collect data through the rent review program so anyone who is actually disputing a rent increase will access the program if

0:46:19the rent increases are less than that threshold of five percent then we might not even have any contact with those people so we won't really know that that obviously isn't a problem right no news is good news um and then through the termination of tenancies we'll actually be able to as

0:46:37well monitor any tenancies that are going to be ended and as a result you know the units available we're obviously going to work with our business license process currently our business license process we are not permitted to collect rent but we we can definitely ask the question um

0:47:00so we will be utilizing that process to actually do some data collection on getting rents um over you know a period of time ideally you know over the last three to five years we want to get an understanding of the properties the property profiles and we also want

0:47:18to work with our tenants to understand their situations as well so we will be doing a series of outreach workshops so it will be a fluid process so in terms of implementation obviously getting these programs off the ground does it's going to require a citywide mailing we're going to have to do

0:47:41workshops to educate both sides both tenants and landlords we'll use our social media accounts we'll create websites and faqs for both landlords and tenants we'll host quarterly housing workshops we will do a lot of things to support these programs and in terms of financially

0:48:02what it means for us it's we've budgeted to be about thirty dollars per rental unit and the landlords will pay that annually through their business license registration um the budget that is included in there and it assumes that there's gonna be a high number of 40 conciliation cases

0:48:21with 20 of those going to mediation we're also including you know staff time both the finance department the city attorney other community development program developing program materials so again adopting these ordinances are a step in the right direction they've been

0:48:39effective other places and if the data doesn't support that they are actually effective we will come back with you and continue to explore alternate tools that we can consider so at this point before i turn it over to the human relations commission i would like to open it up to you all for

0:48:58questions and answers council member quinto do you have a question no questions member abelson um i have a few questions um one of the questions i have um is the question i don't know how to ask you might say and what it is is trying to figure out if everything is

0:49:20covered by everything so are all of the different for example pillars are are they have you checked it out to see if everything all the different underlying issues are covered have you spent some time doing that yeah so we definitely um studied all of the for pillar b

0:49:47specifically what we're covering tonight um we did do several interviews with other jurisdictions um we talked to richmond we talked to alameda we talked to albany so we've definitely looked into all of those things and as a result we actually came up with the five percent threshold

0:50:06as a lower number so that we could be able to better capture those there's some other programs that do between seven and ten percent so we wanted to really be able to understand more closely what's happening and so that's why as a result of those you know meetings and informational interviews we

0:50:25came up with the five percent one one of the reasons that i'm asking the next question has to do with my involvement with the disabled community and [Music] over a long period of time and i hear oftentimes from the disabled person who's not in fact the tenant but rather

0:50:49you might say the landlord and so i'm wondering if you've looked at it from that point of view to make sure that there weren't demands being placed upon that disabled person uh for example that would be something they could never in a million years fulfill because for example they might

0:51:10be on ssi or you know themselves you know they might be severely low income themselves and have you looked at it that way yeah so the rent review program will actually take into consideration all of those factors so if there is a rent increase greater than five percent

0:51:28and the tenant wishes to dispute it um that individual um that property owner who as you're referencing may be disabled and have that very fixed income and maybe some repairs came up those all all of those factors would be considered in this program because it is

0:51:47it's part of the dialogue and part of the process through the conciliation and mediation as long as they had the dialogue uh you're not requiring that they implement anything that's short of um or maybe it's the other way to say it that isn't a matter of health and safety

0:52:06uh health and so the health and safety so you would exclude health and safety from what i'm asking health and safety from the rent increase or from it would be required well no not the rent increase but rather the um the repairs would be required right the habitability yeah we have the

0:52:26residential rental inspection program which does ensure that the property is up to building code including health and safety regulations i mean i would expect that but you wouldn't require a person on ssi for example to do some of these provisions like um rental assistance

0:52:49the rental is this the rent review right i thought you know when they they're moving there there's a requirement that somebody that the landlord pay the um oh the relocation assistance yeah so if the property is eligible under this ordinance they would be required to pay

0:53:10relocation assistance if it's going to be demolished or repurposed so that that's specifically what the tenant relocation it's triggered by basically an application with the city to change the proper either the property from residential or non-residential or to

0:53:26tear it down so that would be would you retrofit it for disability well retrofitting wouldn't um fall under the tenant relocation assistance ordinance but well they might have to do yeah unless they were being displaced for longer than a 12-month period um i don't know if there would or wouldn't

0:53:49be such an example but we are going to be exploring retrofitting at a later date if that's a topic of interest we are going to look into part of the affordable housing strategies mentioned studying retrofitting so we will be studying that in the future okay because

0:54:06[Music] people on ssi can't afford any of those things um so i'm i'm wondering if you could be putting the very people you're trying to protect into the category i'm wondering if you've kind of thought through all the angles of it to make sure that you're not in fact doing that

0:54:25that's really what i'm worried about they're concerned about so for the property owners who might be demolishing who might be dis disabled and so they're trying to set it up so that the person can continue to live there in the future of disabled person but the disabled person might be the listed

0:54:48owner for example so the disabled person if it's the disabled tenant under the car i'm talking about the disabled disabled property owner they would still be so they would still be subject to the relocation assistance assuming that the household's eligible their income

0:55:06eligible and assuming that the property is going to go through you know the demolition or if they're going to result in permanent displacement because it's going to be substantially rehabbed and they're going to be displaced for longer than a year so that would be that would be a

0:55:22requirement so that would prevent a disabled person from being able to get the rehabbing of the facility that enables them to live there with their disability so they can rehab the property and offer replacement housing and if it's less than a year i'm not talking about a

0:55:42major landlord you're talking about like a small property owner if there's an exception process when you're ending up when the process is ending up damaging [Music] either side not just one side well if the owner lives there and the the actual tenants don't apply for

0:56:07relocation then the then the property owner wouldn't be required to pay them it's the relocation assistance that i'm one yeah oh yeah so this if they're renting a room though from the house if they're renting a room that's a different story then they're if they're actually living there

0:56:30living there and renting it without being like if they live elsewhere then they would be subject to this but if they're renting a room that's completely different i was thinking more of um like there's a triplex or if they're i don't know if there is such a thing but you know

0:56:45something like that that gets into the category that so that it's covered um then i'm just wanting to make sure that there we don't end up in a situation where we're requiring payments from a person who will never in a million years have them well generally this process is going to be triggered by

0:57:07an investment in the project so generally when you trigger an investment in a project there's some cost factors that are built in the investment in the project is covered by disability resources but it won't be covered for this particular type of thing is what i'm thinking

0:57:26okay i'll have to research that yeah i'll have to look into that because it can be either side that is that person in that special category thank you i've heard lots of people um talk about situations like that okay let me hurry on because i know there's lots of people who would

0:57:49want to speak and i personally would love to hear them if you have a current lease is it ever covered by any of this if you have an existing lease meaning it's month to month no everyone's covered by the so um anyone who's a renter an el cerrito with the exception of those properties would

0:58:11be covered under the rent that's not actually what i was thinking but i was thinking of let's say that there's a lease and it's at a thousand dollars a month and now all of a sudden the person wants to for whatever reason increase it and they want to increase it

0:58:33by in two examples um fifty percent and in another example one percent is it covered yeah so though all of those properties would be covered so anytime a rent increase is issued even if it's one percent they're required to give the notice however if it's one percent they

0:58:52wouldn't be eligible to access the rent review program but if it's 50 then they can absolutely request for rent review okay and um can't read my writing um on that one let's see i was writing some of this down when we were in the dark here uh i think those are the questions at the

0:59:21moment thank you all right mayor pertin yeah thank you um thank you aisha for your presentation and all the hard work that you and staff have done over a long period of time on this i do have some questions um you you said if i heard you correctly the five percent was selected as a

0:59:46result of research of of other communities who potentially have higher or lower can you talk to why five percent was selected yeah so we really we really on we know that ten percent can be a lot so if your rent you know is already let's just say two thousand dollars and that would be a two hundred

1:00:05dollar rent increase so by going lower at five percent we'll be able to understand more so the program could be accessed by more tenants who would be at a at a lower threshold so we'd be able to get a better understanding whereas if it's 10 and the rent increase might be let's

1:00:23just say eight or nine percent we might not see those tenants access the program and so we wouldn't be able to have an understanding about you know those rent increases between that number that that are greater than five percent so it is one way of collecting data

1:00:39at a lower threshold yes um one of the things that you said in one of your responses to councilmember abelson is or maybe it was during your presentation is that we're for example through the business license renewal period we're not able to get detailed information

1:01:00it can be optional an optional question but it's it can't be a mandatory part of the business license process you can you expand on that i'm just trying to figure out how we would collect the data that we potentially need in order to make good sound decisions um so we're going

1:01:17to actually incr with the business license process we're going to include a data collection form and we're going to encourage property owners to fill that information out and also in our interaction of people you know come into the city to renew their business license or contact the

1:01:34city we'll also be reaching out to them so when they do renew their business license if the forms not return we'll be reaching out to them to get more information but we're really the purpose of that is to collect that data to understand like property profiles for

1:01:51the landlords such as you know any capital improvements that may have been undertaken historical rent increases the age of the unit the size of the units so we're going to incorporate that into the business license process but it would be an optional requirement right it's vulnerable

1:02:08understand through the business license it's voluntary can any of the ordinances we're considering tonight be it beefed up to provide us with additional information because if i was listening carefully we only get rental information potentially about a unit when either the

1:02:26five percent rental review is triggered by the tenant they could potentially accept a 10 percent review and we would never get that 10 increase and we would never get the information or if it if a tenant is terminated we wouldn't get the information if a tenant as a result of an increase in

1:02:43their rent decides to move away or or is a result of a new job they decide to move away so we get a very very very small amount of data through this voluntary program the tenant tenancy determination program and the you know rent review program that doesn't help us make decisions so

1:03:04i'm just curious how we get more data it you know to help us make the decisions we we're trying we're being asked to make i want to add uh taise's previous answer which also the california apartment association represents about 1300 units in town is that right asa

1:03:22um we will also be partnering with them to encourage their affiliates to participate that it's really in their best interest to help share this information otherwise we don't know what's going on and our next policy making is that makes it challenging so i just wanted to add that

1:03:39similarly we want to create forms online where tenants can also provide that information and i can let aisa talk about there's the possibility of future rent registries and other mechanisms so what i'm to to reiterate my question none of the ordinances we're considering tonight can

1:03:56be beefed up to collect the additional information potentially necessary for good decision making so we could what would be required is a rent registry so we would have to explore the costs for that and also um the enforcement of that so for by having the rent registry we'd have to have software

1:04:17to be able to actually implement that so i don't know what the cost is on that but i can definitely look into it and then we would also if if no one registered their rent increases then we would also have to have an enforcement mechanism which would require additional staff time as

1:04:32well and and so the rent this may be the same reason why the rental inspection program has not collected this information because we've not put it in place to to require this information it's potentially been in a voluntary basis we we have had a rental inspection program

1:04:48i'm assuming that that third party has some [Music] amount of information regarding the age of buildings the number of units in town is is that is that an unfair assumption so we actually brought the rental inspection program back in-house in 2015.

1:05:05that job is um there's one full-time person who staffs that job and half of their job is code enforcement and half of their job is rental inspections so in terms of like age of buildings and that data we do have that available currently just through our property our

1:05:25profile of housing stock throughout the city but it's not a mandatory requirement currently under those ordinances the thirty dollars per unit that we're voluntary currently right now exactly that's that is that's what my assumption was which is why you're not able to pull

1:05:43a whole bunch of information from the rental inspection program to help us understand at a minimum what units are in town you wouldn't know the rental information through that data you you just you presented that the thirty dollars per unit uh is there and i think

1:06:01during your presentation you said that that assumes the 30 it's part of it's the 30 000 part of it's the halftime and if i heard you correctly it was 40 conciliations and half of those go to mediation yeah it's assuming that 40 people are requesting the rent review process and that

1:06:21of those 40 let's just say 20 of them go to the next phase so the budget does include that so that number could obviously fluctuate after the program's been an effect and we really understand how it's being utilized but yeah that 30 dollars is assuming that of course with other things and and that

1:06:43extends over approximately 4 thousand units so it's about a little over a hundred thousand in in revenue it's actually just our multi-family housing unit so it's about twenty seven hundred units okay thank you um and multi-family in this case is greater than two units yes

1:07:04so all eligible you know units would pay that fee through the business license registration in in my reading of and i believe the tenancy termination is 200 is that if i remember correctly it's three 300.

1:07:19um what is the penalty of a landlord that doesn't report their tenancy termination in ten days or ever what what's the how do we how would we ever know about a tendency termination if it's not reported so again we're also going to be relying on you know tenants

1:07:35to provide us with information um but if we discover that um there is a violation there's administrative penalties um that range from 100 to 500 um so we would it would trigger you know an enforcement process and those fees are in another ordinance yeah they're on our administrative

1:07:56um one point something i'll trust you i didn't see them in here that's why i was asking um is just cause eviction ever implemented implemented on its own is it ever i mean because i know when we considered the housing element back in 2014 uh just cause eviction was brought to us

1:08:16in it on its as a standalone and i just wanted to we may have covered this in august but i was hoping it would be worth revisiting just cause eviction on its own the city of emeryville has the just cause eviction stand-alone ordinance and union city has just caused paired with

1:08:35their rent review program that was those were both adopted in 2017.

1:08:42okay so it is something that it is a tool that could be you know utilized in without necessarily going to the full rent stabilization other tool that you provided us as a as a list yes um again i know we covered it somewhat in august and was hoping that you could reiterate why binding

1:09:01mediation and it's in is in your other category to tonight and not something that was brought forward tonight so um if we remind if we find that non-binding mediation is not effective we binding mediation is definitely an avenue that we can explore so we will be able to outside of

1:09:22reporting back in 12 months report back um even more frequently if you wish um just to kind of let you know how things are progressing um whether you know it's a quarterly thing or however you imagine that to be for you to understand what's um happening um should you choose to move forward with

1:09:42what's in front of you tonight right thank you um oh yeah with the binding it does it's subject to the cost of hawkins properties which are those built you know before february 1995 doesn't include single-family condos that explains one of my questions was why are

1:09:59we using january 1 2015 because that's certainly after the costa hawkins date you answered that the january date was selected as a result of the san pablo avenue specific plan non-binary the ones we we you offered up tonight none of them over none of them conflict with costa hawkins and none of

1:10:20them um are governed by the cost of hawkins dates as if i read all my materials yeah so if we were to look at the binding then obviously that would kick in under the uh displacement um [Music] 110 1 400 the displacement ordinance tendency tenant relocation you the

1:10:44definitions of displacement are all ones that are triggered by building permits what what if there was displacement as associated with and we have many letters that talk about double digit increases there's one woman who talks about 56 or 53 percent over the last three years

1:11:08what about displacement as a result of of double-digit increases in rent would is that something that can be covered by this ordinance uh we can explore that there is other cities i know that san leandro has a similar ordinance um for huh and portland portland has it as well

1:11:30so that so they have the it would obviously be triggered by the tenant similar to the uh tenant termination uh one it would have to be a tenant-driven process we wouldn't know if somebody was leaving as a result of large uh double-digit 50 40 raises so it would be it would be incumbent on

1:11:51somebody to report it to us because unlike the building permit process it does not have a natural trigger that we can monitor yeah so i think san leandros might be triggered i think at 12 over some period of time yeah under the special circumstances special circumstances households

1:12:14uh the ordinance proposes one extra month for for those uh constituents those tenants why is one extra month the right number what what had you choose that number three months is generally modeled after first last and security deposit so the one extra month um just gives them the added

1:12:38month so it's it's generally a best practice to do first last and security deposit so the extra month would just give them a little more um to be able to make that you know adjustment to to look for new housing and the rationale for potentially changing that number would be that um

1:12:59though that's a very limited segment that you know i'm thinking specifically of a friend who teaches in town and uh her home is being taken her rental home is being taken away from her as a result of the owner wanting to own or occupy and she's she's wheelchair bound and

1:13:20her husband is also disabled and as a result they can only move into a certain type of housing stock so there's a very limited amount of housing stock that's available why one month to try and find that that limited resource um so the extra month is just as i mentioned when you move it's generally

1:13:43calculated this formula is calculated assuming the three months the first last in security deposit and so the extra month is just an added on top of that it's assuming and it's based on the fair market rent at that time when that happens so again it's it would be about

1:13:592100 for a two-bedroom so it's just adding an added basically four months to incur like i said encourage incur that extra expense but the owner move-in wouldn't be covered under this ordinance but just to clarify that yeah no i'm just using a real life example of of why

1:14:18one month may not be adequate um so that could change um and you answered that one great thank you council member fidelity thank you um you had a good discussion with councilman lyman on what i'm going to ask you now but i do want to ask it again because i want to hear the answer

1:14:45again what is the data that you believe will be valuable to the city from non-binding rent review so we'll really be able to understand the rent increases that are happening in el cerrito so we here you know in my 11 almost 12 months here i've gotten about 15 inquiries

1:15:06but we really will be able to understand actually the tenant profile and the landlord profile rather it being a blanket policy citywide through another you know for example through a rent stabilization program so we really which requires added resources so we really want to be

1:15:24able to understand the profiles of both that the tenants are facing and the landlords are what type of rent increases they're actually instituting is it is it a city-wide problem is it specific to a certain property owner um we just want to really have a better picture um

1:15:45and by adopting the non-binding mediation we'll we will be able to understand those stories did you have any feeling about what the universe might be the numbers that might come in to you make it a valid body of data i don't know i can there's been other reports in larger

1:16:08cities that for example like in a six-month period fremont got 40 inquiries um some of those were eligible some of them weren't so again we'll have to really be able to actually put this program in place and really understand those rent increases that are taking

1:16:26place and when this program's triggered be able to actually report back to you with the specifics on each case um on the minimum lease terms a tenant at any time an existing tenant at any time can request of a landlord a year-long lease so under the proposed ordinance the

1:16:49landlord would be required to offer that to prospective tenants so if they're on month to month right now they would be the landlord once the ordinance goes into effect would be required to provide the tenant with that offer to sign a 12-month lease so for new tenants and existing

1:17:09so a tenant that's been there five years can approach a landlord and say i want to do this minimum yeah well the landlord should actually be approaching them if the ordinance is adopted but as far as initiating can a tenant go oh yeah and the landlord does not have to

1:17:26provide that or does yes under the current ordinance you have to offer assuming it's one of the eligible properties yes and so that the term would begin when they decide that new lease would happen correct that 12-month term they would sign the lease and it would be in effect on the tenant

1:17:44relocation i'm really glad that the city is dealing with this when i first came on as a city council person um and we were talking about housing there wasn't a lot discussed so i'm glad that you took this from city council and asked to move on this um what does earning less than 120

1:18:04mean and why put that in real terms for yeah so um i get relocation yeah so as i mentioned it's a for example single person earning like under 88 000 a year um generally most of affordable housing programs um cap out at 120 of media consistent with addressing those

1:18:28who are most in need some programs are have a lower threshold of 80 of median income but we felt that the 120 percent while you know 80 something thousand seems like an a lot it's not that much but um in the bay area at least um so we crafted that with the understanding that

1:18:48we want to be able to aid those who might have just a little bit of a harder time you know finding replacement housing and give them a cushion to get out there and be able to pay you know the first and last and so that's why we actually set it at the 120. most of the

1:19:07non-profit developers build affordable housing you know up to like let's just say 80 ami there's just some averaging and things certain buildings can do and then um generally between 80 and 120 that's generally more of like the inclusionary below market rate units

1:19:23that are in mixed development so we want to be able to kind of mirror what's already in place and say you know if you're below 120 percent of the median income and you're going to be displaced and you're eligible then you could qualify for some financial assistance i think it

1:19:40gets to the same issue about the the one month where we draw our lines are pretty important and there are people that make more than the 80 000 that if you're displaced that's still a big burden and what are you going to do in this environment in the bay area it's

1:19:57you know so i mean is that some of the data you'll get back about concerns about that that's not enough money yeah and we don't imagine it happening occurring that much but if if a displacement should occur um having this as a starting point with the 120 we we do feel like it's a it's

1:20:17it's good and it's going to base this on some precedence yeah at lower yeah that that were all lower there was some that there was one program previously that was at 120 but most of them have been kind of more geared towards the low income at the 80 percent of area median

1:20:32income the last question i have is uh would the city ever be responsible for relocation costs if the city is responsible its decisions for taking down a building moving people so i think owning the actual apartment but um a city decision that might create displacement

1:20:59rely on you uh we might need to consult with the city attorney but i don't not from a land use decision land use uh decision standpoint if we owned the building and it was subject to certain and we had certain financing and for example resources for community development when

1:21:15they rehabbed the the homeless housing at idaho apartments they're subject to hud regulations so they had to find a re uh they had to relocate them or pay i think it's up to actually so a city decision on land use wouldn't trigger relocation and i'll turn this over to the city

1:21:32attorney but i don't believe so no just a decision on land use typically wouldn't there are some others narrow circumstances under state law where um where city action on a property might result in location assistance requirement but it again it's a pretty narrow set of circumstances and what if

1:21:48the landlord doesn't have the revenue to supply the money for displacement well then they won't be eligible to move along in their process their application with the city i see it's it's related to the permit it's the condition yeah thank you okay um so i have the question of if a tenant

1:22:17decides they want a rent review and they make that public and the landlord knows about it can the landlord then say all right get out and evict the tenant then when the tenancy is terminated we'll know that and also so they'll be required to let the city know that

1:22:38they're terminating tenancy and echo housing will also be doing surveys after the process ends so they do follow back up with their clients do all of them respond no but do they follow up yes so that would be um through both of those avenues we would have that understanding if that

1:22:56was taking place so is it possible then that maybe the tenants would feel uncomfortable participating in the rent review because they might be afraid of being evicted by their landlord so there's currently retaliation laws on the state level so if they are being retaliated against

1:23:17they can work with legal aid to actually go through that process and through that matter with actual legal representation how long would an eviction normally take it can take up to 180 days but um going through the eviction process has you know part of the eviction

1:23:39process is they do do a mediation because obviously before someone goes through eviction and actually if there's a judgment ordered against them then you know that's a whole nother thing that it's going to prevent them from getting housing so yeah that's why we would encourage them

1:23:56to seek legal aid to be able to work through those issues and with the realization of you know following the law and also just making sure that they're not heard along the way okay so if the tenant was evicted by the landlord and then they tried to find new housing you're saying

1:24:13it would make it harder for them to find new housing because they had been evicted if they were evicted through the court proceedings oh through court proceedings yeah okay thank you and then i believe that mayor pro tem lyman touched on this but i i just wanted to i guess reiterate

1:24:35so what happens if the landlord chooses not to participate in providing the information with uh the business license renewal is is it a possibility for the city to actually require the information be provided instead of just having it as a suggestion yeah we would we would have

1:24:59to institute a rent registry as a requirement of the ordinance okay um all right and how and if we would we be able to change that by emotion today or is that something that would just be brought back to us at a further date we could bring him back because we would have to figure out you

1:25:24know the costs and the software and how long it would take to actually be able to purchase that software and get it up and going and also on enforcement so if it's not reported what that would look like and you know the role of staff to take that on as well okay

1:25:43um and then why are we exempting single-family homes if this uh the rent registry is not actually something that would be prevented by costa hawkins the reason why we're exempting single family is because a lot of single-family homeowners unlike multi-family homeowners they're not

1:26:03didn't necessarily purchase a single family unit to actually become a landlord a lot of times people have just moved on to other properties and generally that's just more of a kind of single property that they own whereas the multi-family is generally even if it's a

1:26:20mom-and-pop landlord they're generally into the rental business and they have multiple units that they're running so we got feedback and we decided to collect if any of those people are being displaced from single-family units but to exempt them from the ordinance at

1:26:36this point in time but isn't the percentage about 40 of single-family homes that are being rented in el cerrito of all the rental properties so the actual percentage so we have about 4 000 renter households and 2 800 of those are multifamily 27 2800 and then there's about 1200 units

1:26:59or so that are single family rentals it seems significant okay and single families are generally rent for a higher rate than multi-family units as well um so those generally kind of start off just a little higher than you would have like your two-bedroom one-bath apartment

1:27:19right but they also probably would be more likely to house children and it would be children being evicted if they weren't able to pay yeah honestly it was something that we were considering and we carried in there um and maybe isa remembers more of the reasons when we started kind of getting

1:27:39through some of the challenges of implementation so you can see when we did accessory dwelling unit we did keep those out and we oftentimes we you know if obviously when you're renting a room so there were many but it is one going back to binding versus non-binding mediation

1:27:58it is important to note that when it is another thing that not non-binding mediation and maybe aisa can speak to which of the cities that we know that do this program um do exempt versus don't exempt single-family homes but it is because if you did binding of course costa hawkins

1:28:14applies and then you couldn't include single family but non-binding mediation could and it was something we were considering and as we went into some various maybe you can remember some of the details but as we went through the various kind of permutations of how it

1:28:25works it started to seem to have a lots of kind of issues in implementation but it is something that non-binding mediation can include and do you know the cities that so union city and albany they do include single family and their rent review programs okay um there is one

1:28:49one part in here that i find found a bit odd um let's see it was page nine it says here in the staff report just cause ordinance as it is opposed by the landlord and real estate community was not um introduced i just was wondering is i just thought that was a strange reason for it so were

1:29:23you also meeting with renters groups when talking about just cause yeah we met with renters groups as well as property owner groups um and so again to have a better understanding of we got a lot of pushback on that side but to have a better understanding to see if it's actually happening how

1:29:43often people are being displaced we thought that no other cities have the notice of termination so we wanted to really understand how often tendencies are actually being terminated um i could i want to go back to the single family question just for a moment because i remembered some of the things

1:30:01that came up we thought for example there's often times that someone might for example go on a sabbatical and rent for two years rent for a year so we just started to get into the way that single-family homes that there's so many exceptions to the ways that they're

1:30:14so those are some of the things that came up going back to the just cause and that statement some of the things that we heard were and again um we decided that getting the data to seeing how much this occurred so we've heard in albany it was taken out of theirs they did we're going to do a just

1:30:32cause and they decided not to and talking to different landlord groups we've heard and it seemed a legitimate enough concern in terms of unintended consequences that we wanted to see first how much is it is it occurring so that if these unintended consequences are true

1:30:49that we're savvy of it so some of those that we've heard are there's more intense screening that occurs if you cannot evict um problematic tenants then you might do screening that is more intensive um i think that and maybe this is landlords who might be able to speak to it but there

1:31:12were enough um examples of why it was um it seemed like there were enough unintended consequences that we wanted to see how how much is eviction really occurring um because it seems at its face that it's a i think we agree that it seems like it's a it's a good policy um and then each

1:31:30time when we've talked about it with um with landlords and property owner groups it seemed like there were enough um examples of ways that it played out that it seemed like we wanted to get the data first so from that's from staff's perspective well i am a bit concerned though about

1:31:48the data collection if it's if it's not required and you made a comment which was no news is good news and so i'm not really sure if the renters are going to be producing the kind of data that you're thinking about i'm not sure if all the renters are going to fully uh know that they can that they

1:32:10can present their data by going through mediation and i'm not sure if the renters would feel comfortable doing that so i'm i'm a little bit afraid that we could get to the end of the year and say look no one stepped up everything's good and i'm not sure if that would be accurate so i was

1:32:28wondering is there another way of i mean i guess you're saying the rent registry would be a way of of getting more accurate data for collecting yeah yeah yeah for collecting rents okay through the rent registry yeah and then collecting terminations through this

1:32:48ordinance okay all right thank you all right so i believe that's all of our questions i had a question that uh came up as i was listening um and it has to do with the what i call special populations such as students visiting [Music] professors and graduate students

1:33:15some of whom i've housed the students and like for just erratic periods of time you know that correspond maybe to to something it's really hard for them i know to find housing at all and certainly for anyone that has the student label attached to them it's they

1:33:37probably are low income so they would be in this cat i think in this category but the um have you thought about uh what happens to that category given the odd um i'm thinking of the word lease and the one-year lease which would not work well for as a denominator for any of them that i

1:34:00can think of because it's some other denominator and it might be longer it might be shorter but in prescribing the one year that can be lowered it seems to me it's opening it up for people want not not wanting to even rent to that group so people can so offering it is required

1:34:25but if you go month to month you you would still be offering them a month-to-month lease so you can't eat the ordinances and say you can't no you can't negotiate a shorter term and by going month to month um a lot of people don't want the commitment of going on to the year but

1:34:41for the people who want to lock in free or you can and for people who want to go let's say six months then they can negotiate a shorter term but what i found happen has happened as a parent of some of these students is that there's 20 people if not more for every

1:35:00unit and so if there's anything you know that you're putting up that's different about what you want you you just won't get the apartment probably it's what will happen some someone else will get it um because the because of the slide supply and demand being so off right now

1:35:23uh so i'm not sure how helpful this is going to ultimately be on that particular term just on my own you know being around when these things were happening one of the main things that term was trying to address was the stability component and families and people with children in schools needing

1:35:45to know that they would have the ability to stay longer so but a year is not the term for school year either right but so so that is what i was trying to get at was stability um is what the the intention of that requirement is and i think often first year leases are often

1:36:07a year before they often even transition to one month so in terms of getting a new apartment they often um start off as 12-month leases um [Music] okay i mean i haven't seen it that way but anyway it's just i'm not sure how what worries me is they just won't get

1:36:30the apartment because there's so many it's another example of a a big supply problem um that we do hope obviously the increased production in all of the cities on the east bay corridor help address because that's you're right that is so important but that's a different

1:36:46issue than tonight so any anyway it's it concerns me because i've seen so much that being so much of a problem that way but um i don't know if there's anything you can do about it but um putting the one-sidedness on it taints the person who's in that category so

1:37:11they may want to have somebody who has no children so that they won't want a nine-month lease for example or whatever you know i think it's something to deliberate on on on that luckily you know each of these ordinances run separately um so you could act differently on different

1:37:32um ordinances okay thank you thank you for your report so we're going to turn over to hrc yes the hrc representatives the human relations commission please come up thank you good evening mayor and city council members my name is jess laird and i serve on the el cerrito human relations commission

1:38:02i'll be speaking tonight on behalf of the commission it is the opinion of the hrc that housing is a human rights issue for many months we have heard stories from members of our community who have come to our meetings consistently we have heard these things long-term residents of our community are

1:38:19being forced out of their homes and out of el cerrito entirely community members who rent are afraid to attend or speak up at city council meetings such as this one or city workshops on this issue out of realistic fears of landlord retaliation renters in our community are living in

1:38:37appalling conditions because they are afraid of antagonizing their landlords by requesting the most minor of improvements otherwise marginalized members of our community such as our neighbors of color those who are not native english speakers our non-citizen neighbors our neighbors

1:38:54with disabilities and those living on a fixed income are the most drastically impacted and vulnerable lastly we have consistently heard that the measures that were just proposed are not enough i want to make that last point very clear without exception the four

1:39:10measures proposed by the city staff would have been insufficient in protecting the many community members that we've heard from had these measures already been in place community members feel that they would have experienced the exact same outcomes while we went to acknowledge the hard

1:39:24work being done in regards to the previous presentation we feel obligated to report but we have heard from community members about its limitations no one we spoke to or that came to our meetings would have felt safe even initiating the mediation process out of fear of agitating their landlords

1:39:42our commission understands this completely because the mediation process is non-binding and tenants are not protected from rent increases or eviction in any other way the risk is too high to even seek out this service from a practicality standpoint that makes it fairly useless both as a

1:39:59protection measure and as a means of data collection as the mayor mentioned it's a cosmetic band-aid on a dire problem we want to be clear that the resolution that we are proposing is in direct response to the feedback we have received from the community regarding the insufficiency of the four

1:40:14measures that were previously proposed the goal of this resolution is to give voice to those who do not feel safe speaking up at those meetings and they are numerous in preparing this resolution the hrc consulted scholarly research on the topic to consider how housing insecurity

1:40:30impacts the well-being of our community what we found is staggering those who spend more than 35 percent of their household income on rent which is the majority of el cerrito renters are twice as likely to be hospitalized for hypertension and twice as likely to be

1:40:46hospitalized for mental illness and are three times as likely to develop mental health issues children of housing insecure families again the majority of el cerrito renters have lower parental involvement in school have lower rates of attentiveness in school have lower rates of homework

1:41:02completion are more likely to engage in adolescent substance abuse are more likely to experience teen pregnancy and are 50 percent more likely to not graduate from high school in fact research has found that one of the most effective ways to increase public health is to increase housing

1:41:18quality and decrease housing and security because of how directly housing insecurity has been found to impact both physical and mental health it is well established in the san francisco bay area that we are experiencing a housing crisis perhaps we've used that term too frequently that

1:41:35the reality of it has lost some of the impact but it is indeed a crisis crisises are not resolved with meager measures that do not have the necessary level of practical value the members of our community need more from those whom they have elected some of the stated values that have been

1:41:51claimed by the city council are integrity responsibility inclusiveness and respect for diversity innovation and creativity responsiveness and sustainability on behalf of so many members of our community the human relations commission believes that in light of these values

1:42:07it is the responsibility of this council to wholeheartedly tackle one of the greatest challenges threatening our neighbors in ways that actually and practically make them feel secure in their homes and within this community to that end the human relations commission is recommending five measures

1:42:23to the city council number one to establish just cause eviction policies number two to establish a measure to prevent rent gouging something community members are already experiencing in light of this issue being on the table number three establish a permanent citizen board or commission represented

1:42:42equally by renters landlords and homeowners to advise on matters of housing number four to establish a temporary citizen-led task force specific to the topic of tenant protections to provide a direct and consistent access point for citizen input and advisory on matters of tenants rights

1:43:01and protections and number five the feedback from these measures should be reviewed incrementally by the city council this resolution was voted on and approved by the human relations commission at a vote of five to one we strongly believe that these measures are

1:43:16achievable and necessary to begin to address the housing crisis facing this community next month the hrc and the city will be celebrating the life and values of martin luther king jr and so i'll end with his words human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable every step toward the goal of

1:43:35justice requires sacrifice suffering and struggle the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals thank you to the mayor to the city council members for your time and your consideration on this issue [Applause] your honor i believe there are other

1:43:58members of the human relations commission that would wish to speak as well please come forward um mayor perdue okamoto council members my name is gabriel ganette i am the resident of el cerrito i'm also the vice chair of the human relations commission i voted no unattended production

1:44:20protections ordinance being presented and wanted to address city council on my rationale for my vote i voted no for two reasons number one is that i don't believe rent control ordinances are within the preview or scope of the hrc mandate number two is that i don't believe that

1:44:36the tendon productions specifically rent control as they are currently written would actually address the housing issues in alcerita regarding hrc's mandate as stated on the city website the purpose of the human relations commission is to initiate educational and cultural programs

1:44:52promote tolerance and mutual respect between all persons this is why i jumped even though we live in such a progressive city a number of events over the years i've lived here indicated that there was still some actions needed to promote tolerance and mutual respect and

1:45:06i wanted to be part i wanted to do my part to make el cerrito one of the most tolerant and accepting cities when this ordinance was first brought up at the commission the rationale that was provided for addressing this topic by hrc was that housing is a human right

1:45:21to me that comment dilutes the purpose of the commission and minimizes what i think should be the focus of hrc focusing on reducing and eliminating discrimination and racism and promoting tolerance and acceptance if housing is a human right then shouldn't medical care or food also be

1:45:39should education also be a right a human right i'm assuming that many of who support this resolution as you're hearing would say yes to these questions and if food and medical care is also a human right then why would we not want price controls on those goods and

1:45:54services as well should the city allow grocery stores like whole foods to charge customers whatever they want or should the food prices be regulated why do we allow starbucks to charge seven dollars for a coffee the second reason is that i don't believe tenant protections as they are

1:46:13defined in this resolution will actually help the housing crisis in el cerrito or the bay area the resolution might fix the problem for a few but i feel that the city should be considering options that will address the problem for a larger group of stakeholders those that require the most

1:46:27assistance and take a much and take a much more longer term approach to this issue for example i would be more accepting of rent control measures if they included some sort of income verifications or mean testing so that those that have the least options gain the benefits

1:46:41i also don't see cities that have rent control such as richmond and san francisco as jurisdictions that el cerritos should emulate as i as their housing issues don't seem to be improving fundamentally the issue here is that there is not enough housing for everyone

1:46:55and this gives more power to landlords to set prices i don't think that the solution is to create fewer i don't think that the solution is to create fewer jobs as summers are advocating because there's more jobs in housing or to prevent people from moving to this

1:47:12area i think the shitty should do two things build and encourage subsidize or below market rate housing and support the building of all types of housing especially transit oriented development build more housing and the balance of power will shift from landlords to

1:47:25tenants however i feel rent control would have the opposite effect and that that effect would be felt disproportionately by small landlords the cost of building and maintaining rental units will only keep growing and if you impose controls on the landlord's revenues but not their expenses then

1:47:42there will be there will come a point when it is no longer makes financial sense to rent out a house or a unit i thank the council for taking the time to hear me out and i appreciate all the effort that the council and city staff have made in addressing this housing

1:47:56crisis i asked council that the rank control not be one of the initiatives that el cerrido implements thank you thank you is there anyone else from the hrc thank you good evening mayor and council member my name is natalia aga and i'm one of the commissioners who has voted for this

1:48:20measure i want to begin with a quote from one of the greatest human uh being on earth one of the great leaders denzel mandela he said to deny people their human rights is to change is to challenge their very humanity housing is a fundamental human right so when one does not have a roof over

1:48:43his head or a bed to rest his head on it is actually challenging his basic humanity when hard-working people cannot afford rent anymore because of some landlord's greed something is wrong in many cases these days this is how homelessness begins this does not have to happen if

1:49:03the city does the right and human thing by its residents organization like global citizen is one of many working with collaborations and support of different organizations celebrities and governments around the world to eradicate homelessness and poverty if nothing is done

1:49:24this is one problem that the city is going to have homelessness and poverty mandela also said poverty is a stain on the consciousness of humanity so what the hrc has put forward the recommendations to ease the stress on families and children which is an urgent matter for renters in el cerrito

1:49:50and now is the time not tomorrow or next year therefore i ask council to take this matter seriously and turn this unnecessary nightmare into a positive outcome thank you thank you is that everyone from the hrc all right we will move on to our speakers all right

1:50:14your honor we have 30 speakers that are signed up to speak all right we will change it to two minutes all right protest the limitations i was at a concord city council meeting where they were assessing a similar um it was such an important issue all right i believe it's an important issue i

1:50:47believe you can say what you need to say in two minutes thank you let's start with our speakers thank you your honor and i would just like to actually ask the um the audience if they would please refrain from cheering or booing anyone speaking we want to make sure that we get through this process

1:51:03as efficiently as possible so that everyone has time to speak we also don't want to unwittingly intimidate people or make them feel uncomfortable while they're speaking so i ask your indulgence in that thank you so much i will begin with the public speakers again there are

1:51:1830 starting off with william wong followed by ruby wong followed by janet galvin and i apologize in advance if i'm bad at reading these handwriting or if i mispronounce your name william wong ruby wong okay if anyone knows them and sees them they can come back janet galvin followed by sherry drobner

1:51:54and howdy gowdy i'm janet galvin el cerrito um i'm just wanted to address the rental situation in el ceweto i grew up in el cerrito and i have been renting here for more than 30 years and recently i've been having the building where i live has been on flip for the second time so i

1:52:22don't know what type of rent increase i'm facing in 2019 i believe leonard should be protected from such this situation and convince continual rent increases i'm glad to hear that there are some programs going into place to protect us and help us even though renters do not have homes we

1:52:46still contribute by the use of goods and services to the economy of el cerrito lastly i believe we need more affordable senior housing not just long waiting lists and on cumbersome regulations i have been turned down twice for senior housing in el cerrito and it's difficult to understand the process

1:53:13that they use and the type of regulations and all the questions that you get about your income it seems like you can fall through the cracks for minor details so i hope the city can come to implement some positive solutions to the plight of renters and uh and to all the renters and

1:53:39in el cerrito so thank you thank you sherry dragner followed by howdy gowdy and zach liu hi good evening my name is sherry grobner i'm a resident of el cerrito there's a renter who could not be here tonight she asked if i would read a letter i've edited it and i'll submit the original copies

1:54:03but she writes i've rented the same 1920s apartment on kearney and fairmont for 20 years for most of the time i've lived here my rent has risen in reasonably steady and affordable increments however since i retired four years ago my landlord has raised my rent three separate times for

1:54:19a total increase of 57 percent the last increase was 300 a month my social security check originally covered my rent and most of my medicare now it doesn't even come close to covering my rent i don't have car cable tv computer wi-fi and my only internet access is my

1:54:37cell phone i know that other elsa regions must cut back on actual necessities such as health care heat food clothes for their kids etc as they try to keep up with their soaring rents those who aren't lucky enough to have my options are already being priced out of

1:54:54community that no longer seems to have a place for them el cerrito's mandatory residential rental inspection program is supposed to offer basic protections but it's failed me completely dry rock caused one of the treads in my wooden back stairs to collapse in 2010 although dry rot has

1:55:10been clearly visible all the time the rip has never held my landlord accountable to meet safety standards set by the city i know i can lodge a complaint with the inspector but i'm afraid i will get evicted i left wondering what kind of responsibility the city feels toward his

1:55:27residents who are renters where is the sense of urgency about protecting el cerrito tenants from rent gouging the city plans to build new affordable housing are gradually becoming a reality but why not also preserve the affordable housing we have left before it disappears place

1:55:46a temporary cap on the origin unreasonable rent increases and provide renters with just cause eviction protections while the city works together with tenants landlords and homeowners to develop a viable plan to stop further displacement displacement of renting residents treat us like first class

1:56:05citizens we are thank you we need to summarize okay i'll summarize the longer it takes council to initiate decisive action the more of a hostile environment el cerrito becomes to average working families and seniors and in summary i just want to say that the rent mediation program will not work i

1:56:26think it's toothless this is my own opinion about it and i don't think it's a protection howdy gaudi followed by zach lew and eric good myers mayor and council members my name is howdy gaudi i live in el cerrito um so i appreciate the attention um to this critical housing security crisis

1:56:50faced by our el cerrito tenants however the non-binding rent review program is not a sufficiently helpful way to address this problem um perhaps unless you apply it to single-family residences because that's the only thing that can't be addressed with costa hawkins in place the other three

1:57:11ordinances are small but are something but i think i really want to applaud the hrc's resolution that was presented to you and i think their message is right on point that these are really you know stressful and challenging impositions on our community and we owe it to

1:57:33to them to you know improve housing security um so i urge you to adopt a urgency ordinance that is a a method to temporarily impose anti-gouging on rents you can cap it at the five percent annually um just to give us some space to really get into these details and we

1:58:05can't do it tonight in two minutes we can't you know the the public process for these topics had one poorly attended meeting and we really need to engage everybody and and and work through this and you need to provide protections for people to do that um i've spoken a lot

1:58:27several previous meetings as one person but i want to speak as 6840 people and specifically those are the 6 841 people who bought it voted yes for prop 10 in el cerrito it was pointed out that that proposition failed in the staff report but it passed in this city

1:58:46the city is not averse to rent control and it bears a bigger discussion i don't have the right solution i think we need to discuss it but um you know unbinding mediation is not going to solve this problem it's um it's really an insult and there's so much more i need to say but i

1:59:06only have two minutes um i guess i'll start with why do we think we shouldn't apply this to buildings after 2015 why does a landlord need unbounded rent increases that's you know a toxic thing to invite into our community that we're going to say yeah it's okay that you can run you raise

1:59:28rents whatever it's a bait and switch i mean it's basically housing is you know you can't just choose another store because one store raised their prices you're moved in you're really invested in in the place and it's it's time build a balance of power between landlords and tenants thank you thank

1:59:46you good evening city council members mayor and staff my name is zach liu i live in oakland but i'm currently a graduate student in public policy at uc berkeley i've been researching the influence of real estate interest groups and politics and i wanted to speak to what this means

2:00:08in the context of el cerrito organizations like the california apartment association do not represent an honest perspective on how to solve the problem of affordable housing they represent the moneyed interest of those who stand to profit from their actions they have nakedly promoted falsehoods in

2:00:22housing-related efforts throughout the region and poured huge sums of money into local politics they have also actively pushed alternative solutions such as the non-binding rent remediation program that is being proposed this evening i recently attended concord city council

2:00:35annual annual review of the rent remediation program which they adopted at the suggestion of the caa one resident told of an 89 rent increase where the landlord just dismissed the board's recommendation because it was non-binding other tenants spoke about how their

2:00:49mediation program did nothing to help them because they were simply evicted residents spoke of their fear of angering their landlord by going through the remediation process in el cerrito the city's deference to real estate interest groups is blatantly exposed in the report for tonight's

2:01:03agenda item as noted by the mayor under the proposed termination of terminancy the report states quote currently the city is not proposing a just cause ordinance as it is opposed by the landlord and real estate community understood to potentially trigger unintended consequences

2:01:18we must assume this is meant to be preferable to the intended consequences of allowing tenants to be evicted for no reason el cerrito has many good and ethical landlords who want to be fair and also make a profit in fact this is completely compatible with rent stabilization

2:01:32measures all rent control measures are required to allow landlords a fair return of profit on investment so if it's not about taking away profits from landlords why are real estate interest groups so against long-term solutions that protect tenants because they are motivated

2:01:45motivated by the most powerful among their members to not just make profit but to make as much profit as possible when that motivation comes into tension with people's ability to afford living in their communities when it causes people to be uprooted from their lives

2:01:57and families when it prays on the most vulnerable residents of the city that is injustice i urge you to put people in your residence first thank you eric myers followed by peter campbell and robin mitchell good evening madam mayor fellow council members thank you for giving me the

2:02:16opportunity to speak my name is eric myers actually coming to you wearing three different but related hats tonight my first hat is i practice real estate law in el cerrito in berkeley all of west county alameda county contra costa county solano county most of my practice is landlord-tended

2:02:34issues i do a lot of eviction work i represent both landlords and tenants i'm also a realtor i've been a realtor for 18 years i'm president of the local association of realtors this year i'm also a landlord i manage property for other people i manage property that i

2:02:48own i'm intimately associated with this issue i understand both sides we could get up here all of us speakers and give our philosophy one side or the other site statistics talk about different regions what they did why we support this why we support that in my experience most of my eviction

2:03:08cases are settled most of my tenants aren't evicted why is that because mediation works education works communication works what you're getting proposed here tonight by your staff and i'd like to commend the council and the staff that it directed for bringing forward these

2:03:25suggestions tonight because they do work in my experience and what's more is they've said you know what we're going to collect data and if it doesn't work we're going to come back in a year we'll tell you whether or not it works and then we can get up and we can talk about everything

2:03:38we've still left on the table we haven't taken just cause off we haven't taken rent controls off but we're just saying that look el cerritos el cerrito we need to understand el cerrito we need to get the data that we need so that we can make rational decisions decisions that

2:03:53are rationally related to the problems that this community has not an agenda of people who don't necessarily live here or that may have a philosophy that they feel in their heart is right but it's not borne out by the evidence that we have in this city so i would encourage the council i heard

2:04:08three council people tonight really get on that data collection issue i encourage that i can tell you the association of realtors is on board helping you with that i know the caa is i'm sure a lot of the landlords would willingly give information if it meant letting you have the information you

2:04:23need to make the right decisions thank you i'm peter campbell i live in albany california and i have rental property here in el cerrito first of all i'd like to chastise the city for not notifying me that this meeting was occurring this evening i heard about it from a friend

2:04:47and i pay you hundreds of dollars every year you know who i am you know how to get in touch with me you did not tell me about this meeting i had no way of knowing about it if my friend hadn't told me so that being said nothing i've seen here does anything to provide new housing and it looks like

2:05:04one of your goals is to provide additional housing nothing you presented here will present provide new housing for the city absolutely nothing you've proposed it's it's a disincentive to the construction of new housing i have a friend who's in who develops what they call

2:05:23manufactured housing and i said why don't you make some low-cost housing he said i can't why because the fees that the cities charge me is amount to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per unit now how can somebody provide low-cost affordable housing if the fees before

2:05:42you put a single shovel in the ground are a hundred and fifty thousand dollars so that's one side of what i want to say i also understand that many residents have a hard time affording to live in el cerrito um but no one has a god-given right to live in el cerrito

2:06:02if they do it's the responsibility of the city to provide that housing for these people it's not my responsibility to provide housing for somebody i do it because it's part of my income i'm on a fixed income this my rental income is a supplement to social security basically

2:06:22and it's what else can i say there's not enough time here there have been so many points given out here that need to be rebutted but there's no time to do it this format is not conducive to solving the problem or really discussing the problem what there needs to be is a workshop where

2:06:41you can have one-on-one dialogue with you folks and us folks property providers and tennis both and really get into the issues and understand what's going on so i encourage you to do that robin mitchell followed by peter pan and jane london so i'm handing you out my three-minute

2:07:08prepared speech and i'll try to turn it into a two-minute speech or comment so i'm robin mitchell i live in el cerrito in a recent u.s circuit court ruling the 60-page opinion against the u.s forest service included a reference to the lorax by dr seuss it said we trust the united states

2:07:26forest service to quote speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues end of quote and the opinion continued that the forest service abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources the story of the lorax is that greed destroys a keystone species of the

2:07:42ecosystem the truffle of trees which results in the unraveling of the entire ecosystem this concept of keystone species and an ecosystem is worth considering in the context of the affordable housing crisis engulfing the state of california including el cerrito we can consider our society to be an

2:07:58ecosystem when it is healthy the inhabitants of that society have a secure place to live enough to eat school for their children and a steady job with a good wage they are able to participate fully in society and form its strong fabric however when one of the keystones of that society such as

2:08:13affordable housing is removed the entire society begins to unravel to the point that there is no longer healthy or function it is no longer healthy or functioning properly it is the government's role to speak for the renters who cannot speak for themselves i have attended all of the meetings

2:08:27about affordable housing and renters have always been underrepresented the meetings and workshops were held during the week in the evening sometimes so late that is way past the bedtime of working household with children the very well represented faction is always the california apartment

2:08:40association which has spent millions of dollars defeating rent stabilization programs across california they brought their power to bear at the august 17th city council meeting where they turned out landlords mostly from richmond to speak out against rent stabilization

2:08:53this exemplifies the imbalance of power between landlords and renters it is extremely important that elsewhere to develop a real solution to the housing crisis by instituting an immediate rent moratorium along with just cause eviction to allow time to develop a

2:09:04thoughtful meaningful rent stabilization program rather than the current proposal for non-body mediation which is useless i will end with a quote from greta thunberg a 15-year-old climate activist from sweden who recently addressed the u.n climate change conference in poland

2:09:18she spoke truth to power and although her words applied to a different topic i think they are very relevant when we are discussing the disturbance in our societal ecosystem brought on by our current housing affordability crisis she said until you start focusing on what

2:09:31needs to be done rather than what is politically possible there is no hope if solutions within the system are so impossible to find maybe you should change the maybe we should change the system itself we have not come here to beg world leaders to care you have ignored us in the past and you will

2:09:48ignore us again we have come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not the real power belongs to the people peter pan followed by jane london and leticia good evening everyone my name is peter pan i have been a hospital resident for 21 years

2:10:11i'm small and low i owe a duplex behind ranch 99 on the santa clara avenue it's a it even has 750 square foot with an attached garage now i'm currently charging one early for 1750 the other is 1900 i know that look at the coil list the rent is at least 2300 for two bedroom

2:10:42why am i doing it so low because they're good tenants and um long term so even even every month i have about 500 negative that's without you know my mother's payment is forty one thousand and forty one hundred and sixty five dollars and each month even without the repair i have five

2:11:05hundred and fifty dollar negative i still you know refrain from raising too much rent because one of the units that had 70 150 dollars when they have a young family going the wife goes to graduate school and the boy they just give birth to a boy in in today uni and the boy is

2:11:26growing up to be a very handsome boy you get this sec sacrifice you know satisfaction of of doing something that you feel that you know it's good but if i feel that this kind of relationship is going to be present if the city is going to get in and if they're going to put tons of bureaucracy

2:11:47over this relationship they're going to tell me what i can do what i cannot do if my daughter wants to move into the union i have to pay tons of money for the location god forbid if my income goes down i cannot no longer afford this negative i want to raise the rent i cannot and this

2:12:04low layman becomes becomes the base for rain increase and everything and plus tons of paperwork and all this stuff i think that you know this is this is really bad you know brain control i mean price control is never going to increase stigma it it doesn't help so

2:12:26i just this is my example i just hopefully that you know thank you so then jane london followed by leticia soto and richard bell my name is jane lundin and i'm a middle-sized land lady i guess i have great sympathy for the people who get something ridiculous like a 57

2:12:56percent rent increase that's an eviction notice oddly handled it makes no sense but i don't think it's frequently happening there isn't the kind of crisis in my experience i thought well maybe i'm renting too low i should try a higher rate and put have the manager

2:13:19put the rate up a couple hundred dollars nobody called we dropped it the next week nobody called finally when we got it down to where we knew it should have been in the first place a couple people came and one of them rented it we don't have 20 people lining up for an

2:13:39apartment it is maybe they do in san francisco maybe they do in berkeley when it's time for students to come but i don't find in albany and el cerrito we do the other thing i want to talk about is just cause evictions no sane landlord evicts anybody that they can stand having because it's

2:14:00costly uh if you have to state a reason you get into a a litigious situation back and forth is that true is it not true i don't i don't think people are being evicted in large quantities for no reason so i i would say i think it's an unfortunate policy when richmond

2:14:33passed its rent control which applied just cause to single-family houses and condominiums just in the sample of a small hallway of condos where i lived with maybe a dozen units two of them were taken off the rental market that kind of rigid rent control policies tends to reduce the housing

2:14:57stock not increase it thank you leticia leticia leticia soto richard bell followed by mayna wu and marlene george good evening mayor city council my name is richard bell and i rent a home in el cerrito i'm glad to have a prepared statement because you know obviously tensions are

2:15:26a little high people feel very strongly about this and there's a lot of ideology but let me read what i said um let me begin with a little background i rented in san francisco for about 25 years when the landlord decided to sell the house where i was living in the late

2:15:431990s during the first tech boom my partner and i searched for a new place there was nothing remotely affordable after a short stint in the sacramento valley we really wanted to be back in the bay area um and relocated to el cerrito we've lived here for 10 years

2:16:05this is not about good or bad tenants or landlords this is about what kind of community el cerrito would like to be now that el cerrito's housing element is well long well planned with lots of developments already happened many and still in the pipeline to increase the

2:16:30housing stock in [Music] in el cerrito i think it's time to look at help stabilizing existing neighborhoods and existing residents of el cerrito i'm fortunate and grateful to be able to have the resources that i can relocate if i need to not many people can do that particularly

2:16:56not in the current climate so i would urge the council to adopt something substantive and substantive and real as opposed to just a lot of um you know no no offense this was a lot of work went into this but the end result seems to be something that's not really very meaningful um in

2:17:19any sense a lot of what i heard was about communication and doing yeah and that won't that's helpful if people will come to the table but you know as we've heard a lot like tenants will not be able to do that so thank you maina wu followed by marlene george and

2:17:43bill coolman good evening uh my name is mayna young actually i hope it is no i think you were in another part but that's okay i'll move you there was someone else that's right all right thank you um okay i want to um mention that san francisco has the most strict rent

2:18:15control but you don't see that it's helping the renters at all okay it has the highest rent in the market and it it has urged owners to to actually to exit the market about 40 000 units available that are not being rented out based on the census so my so i want to say that tenants and owners

2:18:48are the same people my parents had really low income like when 27 years ago they were like making a few dollars an hour and we chipped in i joined with them and bought the house because we knew that you know we have to secure the home is the most important thing

2:19:08they work three jobs okay they work they to clean house night janitor and weekends to help at the restaurants so that's how we kept up the house and um the rent control actually helped cause gentrification because when people are under a lot of legal risks they

2:19:41are likely to look for the best possible tenants so the most vulnerable renters are going to lose out so san francisco you can see the extreme there are a lot of homeless people cannot find place because nobody wants to take the risk um please summarize okay okay so

2:20:05do not pass these uh ordinances so think think it through and look at the places have brain control they are not working so please look for solutions that would encourage more landlords and help more provide more housing thank you thank you just to clarify maina wu is

2:20:27not in the room if you could please not do that thank you maina wu is not in the room okay thank you just to verify marlene george followed by bill coleman and judith tannenbaum good evening i'm marlene george i reside in el cerrito and i'm here tonight i didn't know that

2:20:45this matter was on the agenda unfortunately i happened to be here but i think that i'm here tonight to speak against these ordinances at this time i think that we need to study the issues more carefully um it sounds from the report of the staff that we really don't

2:21:07know the magnitude or scope of the problem yet and the solutions that are being proposed from all the reading that i've done i don't think that they are really going to um address the problem of rent stabilization that especially the rent control what i've read in terms of the

2:21:27prop 10 is that rent control actually increases shortage of housing and increase in rents so i think we need to kind of pull back and look at these issues i'm more than happy to participate in any kind of citizen review to really look at this but these requirements look very onerous

2:21:47to landlords and i think that we need to think about it and study the problem and the solutions a little bit more carefully thank you good evening members of the city council my name is bill coleman and i live in el cerrito um and let me start with an apology if you're a renter in el cerrito

2:22:20we failed you i was on the planning commission for eight years i've been involved in economic development for the city for another three we've approved one housing project the one next door in the eight years i was a planning commissioner you asked me what the problem is we

2:22:38don't have enough inventory if you're a renter you have to live in fear because if you get evicted you know where you can go and that's not any way the people should have to live we need more housing for everybody the other thing i want to talk about the staff has done a great job of

2:23:01reaching out different constituencies including the property owners renters and surrounding cities to craft an ordinance that does a good job of meeting everyone's needs it's going to hurt mom and pop property owners because they feel the burdens of regulations

2:23:23more than property owners who have large properties so i'd encourage you to do things that will minimize the impact on those most of whom are seniors on fixed income who are trying to support their their lifestyle with rental units and i think that if we increase

2:23:49the rent increase threshold to 10 percent that will greatly minimize the burden on small property owners thank you thank you judith tannenbaum followed by steve barton and nicholas galoro mayor's city council staff judith tannenbaum and i live in el cerrito and um el cerrito needs a plan that

2:24:15doesn't allow bad landlords to get away with unfair practices and also doesn't punish good landlords or tenants i always appreciate city staff working on the community's behalf but in this case i feel that what they've come up with doesn't provide what we need there were maybe 15 people at the

2:24:37november 8th tenant protection workshop some were landlords some were community members who've been very active on housing matters i think richard and i were the only renters in the room i've lived in the same el cerrito apartment for 21 years because no one could be more decent fair and

2:24:55compassionate than my landlords but whatever our experience every one of us in that room november 8th was clearly disheartened at as the plan before you this evening was presented to us as many of your questions um you know revealed as well the proposal presented for non-binding tenant

2:25:17landlord mediation would likely penalize good landlords by demanding more fees and paperwork cause problems for tenants by offering a mechanism that has no power but might make a bad landlord retaliate and would have zero power to stop bad landlords i doubt i doubt again like as many of

2:25:38your questions indicated as a renter my whole adult life i doubt many tenants who were concerned who didn't who had bad landlords would be take part of any of that so the important uh uh goal of getting data is not going to be met certainly by not by that renter

2:25:57that non-binding mediation process so i urge you to take in the comments of people tonight who've done research and the people who've had a lot of experiences and uh to reject the city's proposal and instead you you see what's possible in the in the human relation commissions um

2:26:20resolution which i think there's a lot there that we could work from thank you thank you steve barton followed by nicholas galoro and wendy louie hello i'm steve barton i live on king drive i'm among other things the co-author of opening the door for rent control

2:26:43published by uc berkeley's haas institute for a fair and inclusive society which is in the bibliography that you received i'm also on the board of the bay area community land trust we have some rental properties which we are working on converting to limited equity cooperatives so i'm also a small

2:27:07non-profit landlord i do understand about the costs of operating rental housing and let's start with that market rents in the bay area and el cerritos rents are fairly typical they're not the the lowest and they're not the highest are roughly double the rents the average

2:27:30rent in the re in the rest of the united states of america you don't need a lot of additional data to know that there's really a crisis it's a crisis and i've never worked on an issue where people didn't say oh gosh if we could only get more information and data then we would be

2:27:50able to come up with the solution that somehow nobody would object to it's not going to happen and the longer you delay the more gentrification takes place in el cerrito the fewer people are left for whom the protection would really be particularly valuable i hate to say it but

2:28:12what mediation programs do is they give you the elected officials the ability to say uh we're doing something without having very much actual effect when some a horrible case comes to you and you get to refer them to the mediation process and cross your fingers

2:28:34and hope for the best so what you really need is rent control with good cause for eviction to cover those people that costa hawkins will let you cover and you need to look into extending the relocation ordinance protections which i think are a valuable thing produce uh

2:28:55proposed by staff to those properties that are exempt under costa hawkins to at least give the people who can't be covered by rent control that much protection thank you very much thank you my name is nick galoro and i live on lexington street and el cerrito the tenant landlord relationship is not

2:29:25a benign social relationship the property owner has a great many legal rights tenants have very few a friend of mine about my age who grew up in south vietnam describes his town when he was younger in the 50s and 60s as one where a few wealthy landlords owned most of the land while the vast

2:29:42majority people were poor and in debt in debt and we know where that lit in the united states many former slaves became tenant farmers continued to live in the same housing conditions that they lived in as slaves their former owners went from being owning them to being their

2:29:59landlords in ireland before independence the majority of land was owned by a small minority of the population the majority of the population were landless peasants and tenant farmers absentee ownership was common so there's there's a kind of a history there similar conditions in much of the

2:30:18world including here in the us continue to exist how can we expect people to prosper when over 50 percent of their income goes to pay the rent often to an absentee landlord working through a management company we aren't going to get how can we expect children who grow up with

2:30:35housing and security to perform well in school we now have a whole category of homeless children attending our schools we aren't going to get the change that is needed from measures that seth has proposed tenants need more rights and landlord grade has to be contained i

2:30:51mean it's a it's a it's a good adjunct to more laws that have more teeth but because they don't provide teeth because there's there's no binding commitment on a part of anybody landlords can increase their rent by state law to whatever they want it to be they can also give a person a

2:31:11termination of tenancy uh whenever they want to so uh if that starts the eviction process there's an unlawful detainer there's a possible court process but the reality is that tenants generally don't understand what's going on they feel hopeless they they don't have a lot of

2:31:27real legal rights they know that in the long run the landlord is going to win and uh that becomes it so just another thing please summaries oh and there are 40 inquiries in fremont fremont has a population of 255 000 people right now 40 require inquiries like one for every 5 000 people in

2:31:49fremont actually it's a little more than that thank you wendy louis followed by jeff nal nali and eva chao hi my name is wendy louis my family lives in el cewedo for 40 years and i see the area how it grows i can see we have a lot of residents for single-family home

2:32:19we only have about 18 for the multi-family homes but we have 39 percent of 31 renters so we're talking about whatever we're doing 25 of the renter is not being taken care but the most important thing is el cerrito has always been a friendly environment we have an elderly home owner

2:32:52we also have elderly tenants because we're so stable in there so the landlord actually are reliant on their property right now because there are no fixed income so we cannot just looking at the tenants and not looking at the landlord side and i also want to mention to you is

2:33:18el sweethoe is always a middle class neighborhood as our our residents getting uh older and older we actually have more below of the middle class family based on current income but they have equity in their house so we need to keep this environment continue to be

2:33:47flourished and to be nice to keep such a good environment for the young family can move the in when we're getting older we'll sell our property and move on in there instead of having a tenant state in here like like a berkeley the berkeley the problems is they have a

2:34:10tenant stay here they can stay there for 30 years they can stay there for for 20 years in the meantime america's owner has to sell the property and so they don't stuck with the tenants i have one example of rent relocation fees actually the taste finish your sentence

2:34:34okay the tenant i paid for owns a property in el cerrito but he was a hold on to my oakland home my kids cannot move in i pay them i want to report to the city of oakland they don't want to report it because they feel embarrassed thank you okay so but i'm willing to help in the

2:34:59city to do it because i'm in realtors also your comment i have all the records to show you 30 years ago the same amount of money center of amount of rent for the berkeley thank you very much how much is the differences i'm willing to do that for you i have all the records

2:35:26hi i'm jeff nall i live in el cerrito and i'm here to speak in um in favor of the hrc resolution uh i'd like uh i like that it could allow for a good return on investment for uh rental property and i think it's very important to establish to just cause eviction

2:35:51while we collect data so the we can make decisions that work for everybody and work to increase housing security for our neighbors eva chao followed by amy chang and jeffrey levin good evening thank you for allowing me to have this opportunity to speak we have a duplex in el cerrito where my

2:36:18family lives we've had a great working relationship with our occupants due to the fact that the current laws are balanced and fair and allows us to work in collaboration as a result we are able to continue to provide below market rental units because we feel very safe

2:36:41however with this introduction of the new law it will create bureaucracy and will remove goodwill in units off of the market in san francisco and berkeley where we know many of our friends who own properties they fear their tenants because many of the tenants have learned

2:36:59to leverage and abuse the rent ordinances to make money by suing the property owners due to restrictive codes so many property owners have removed their rental markets off of the market rental units off of the market the introduction of the relocation assistance also will invite abuse many

2:37:20property owners work two jobs to support their house they should be allowed to do as they see fit on their properties restrictive rental laws will remove the availability of the rental units especially when a property owner knows the relatives coming within the next one year

2:37:41and will not want to rent for the full year thereby removing the available housing stocks also renters who only want to rent for let's say three six nine months because of their personal situations will not be able to find housing so instead of requiring payments for

2:38:02tenants to move out we should ask for 60 days notice and keep housing floor flow organic by not imposing 12 months minimum lease which will definitely remove housing stocks and finally i'd like to mention that housing is a human need which i greatly understand we all need it but

2:38:23as it's not a human right a right is something that you are you earn and such as also liberty pursuit of justice happiness but not what you take away from hard-working others thank you amy chang followed by jeffrey levin and joanna because my i need a transfer okay

2:39:08and okay i have worked very hard all my life to earn a property i pay high mortgage due to the low down payment uh insurance and property taxes and many other taxes i also improved my property which the city also earned uh more taxes on your full citizens face more faith

2:39:50yeah and on top of that pay the uh utilities for the tenants we try to help our tenants and we like to keep the relationship well while also hoping that you will understand that we also have a lot of expenses to cover like kaizu young woman yeah yeah poor woman yeah

2:40:29women's and moguls please reconsider the proposals and think about all the small property owners thank you so much for watching and the property tax increase it's it's a [Music] persona foundation thank you good evening my name is jeffrey levin i'm a 29-year resident of el cerrito

2:41:20living on stockton avenue i'm also the policy director with east bay housing organizations and have spent 35 years in the field of affordable housing we've heard a lot of talk tonight that tenant protections won't solve the housing problem and they won't build more housing but nobody is claiming that

2:41:37tenant protections are the sole solution for the housing crisis they are a part of it which is why tenant protections are one pillar of your comprehensive um strategy we agree production of housing and especially of affordable housing is absolutely necessary to solve the

2:41:53housing crisis but it's going to take years and far more resources than we have to get there and the question is what do we do in the meantime for our most vulnerable populations remember that pillar b of the strategy is titled reduce the risk of displacement and help stabilize at-risk populations

2:42:15the measures before you tonight are not going to do that and that is our deep concern the issue of a temporary moratorium on excessive rent increases should have come before this body weeks and weeks ago you have not even been able to discuss it because it hasn't

2:42:32been agendized and we think it is time to have a discussion about the need for a temporary interim measure while we figure out what the long-range solutions are because displacement and rent increases are going to continue for people who make less than fifty thousand dollars the renters who do that

2:42:51eighty percent of them already pay more than 30 percent of their income 50 percent of them pay more than half their income you don't need a lot more data to know that they are vulnerable and at risk of displacement it's absolutely clear and so we're greatly concerned about the

2:43:08limitations of what's come before you tonight we were told by staff that one of the advantages for example of non-binding mediation is it's not subject to cost of hawkins and could cover single-family homes and yet we find tonight that they're proposing to exempt it and therefore provide zero

2:43:25protections for 40 percent of the renters in this city we need just cause protections we need a temporary rent cap we all agree that there needs to be a full discussion of policy alternatives that we need more data to establish permanent policies but we have to do something in the meantime

2:43:46or what we're going to find out in a year is that we've collected a bunch of data on how many people have been displaced and forced out of el cerrito and we will be closing the barn door after the horses are out we need protections now while we work on long-term solutions thank you

2:44:03thank you joanna valley volley followed by jeff bloomfield and ronnie polonski hello my name is johanna valle and i've been a resident of cerrito for four years now i moved out of albany after my rent was increased from two thousand dollars to three thousand dollars

2:44:30i found me a fixer-upper house on craigslist that they were advertising that whoever takes it the way it is could beat on a rent price and i did so and i got it for two thousand dollars which was i was really happy because i could stay in the area in 2017 my rent was increased to 2500

2:44:53and just this year my landlord now wants another 500 so i'm going almost three thousand dollars for the last year i've been driving to vacaville american canyon fairfield because i cannot keep up i have three kids two of them in high school and the one thing that

2:45:14keeps me paying that rent is because they are very worried they get depressed they get angry they don't want to leave their school even though i'm promising them i'm going to drive them to el cerrito every day from whatever i find housing so i'm one of those people

2:45:32that is house insecure every month that i'm late i have to pay an extra 10 percent in late fee and this is just the way the landlord gave me the contract so i think it's important that single homes are included and because we also need protection and this person that i'm renting from

2:45:57has multiple properties so not everyone is just a senior who is supplementing their income with this rent some landlords are greedy and they're taking advantage of people like me thank you jeff bloomfield followed by ronnie polanski and michelle menzone el cerrito has the chance

2:46:28to implement housing protections in a fair way learning from both the successes and failures of cities around us i don't think that we should reject measures that have teeth simply because other communities have had bad experience in the way that they have implemented their particular

2:46:58programs we have the opportunity to learn from others mistakes and also to innovate here but really the bottom line is about power differentials and when i'm talking about power differentials the elephant in the room well maybe the elephant is slightly visible uh property owners

2:47:28and there are differences among property owners but property owners who you know are renting property have the law on their side if i'm a property owner and i was in the past if i were renting property if i don't like a tenant all i have to do is follow the state law and give them the

2:47:51appropriate 30 or 60 day notice and i'm done also in thinking about voluntary mediation um probably the population of landlords that would be willing to go into a voluntary mediation are people who are basically nice persons you know there's no obligation to show

2:48:21up i'm a trained voluntary mediator in the small claims court in alameda county and i know about binding mediations and how mediation that has teeth works please summarize thank you okay so i would like to see workshops where the city cons considers proposals i'd also like to see these workshops

2:48:53have non-disclosure agreements that have teeth i don't know how you'd implement that so that tenants can come forward and data can be generated so that el cerrito can create meaningful programs that have meaningful enforcement provisions thank you ronnie polanski followed by michelle

2:49:24manzoni and lori wilkins hi i'm ronnie polanski i've been up here about five times on the same issue everybody knows what side i'm on so i just want to say i listen to everybody and being the kind of person i am i was kind of swayed by some of the landlord's um arguments and i'm not sure

2:49:44that i believe the landlord should have to pay somebody to relocate or that they should be totally controlled about what they do but i also think that there is a tremendous imbalance between what the landlords have and what tenants have and that's really what we have to address i

2:49:59was listening to melanie and aisha present their powerpoint presentation which was well done and well well researched i thought you guys did a good job but i don't understand how you're going to implement some of these restrictions so that are you going to come and arrest

2:50:16landlords who don't tell you when they're going to evict somebody or they don't tell you when they're going to have a rent hike or they don't get a business license i'm kind of picturing them being carried off to jail i mean i i don't think there's any way to kind of

2:50:28enforce some of these rules that you're talking about so um i don't once again i think that binding arbitration that non-binding mediation isn't going to work and we need to look to other solutions but we need to make everybody happy and i i've been listening to the people around me some

2:50:45of whom are landlords and i don't think anybody's trying to keep any landlord from making a reasonable amount of rent and if we capped rents where they are right now all the landlords would still be doing well so i i think that it's i hate to see us pitted against each other

2:51:00because some of us have owned property some of us have relatives who are property owners so i don't think it's them against us all the time and i wish it weren't like that i'm sorry to see that it comes down to that thank you good evening mayor council staff mikhail

2:51:22manzoni three hats as well like my colleague i am a realtor property manager and um owner i'm just going to say a couple things a lot of things have been said tonight so i don't need to reiterate i just want to tell you that i hear i am here to represent the mama pops of this town i

2:51:36was born and raised in el cerrito okay this town consists of mom-and-pop landlords like this lady over here to the right said it takes 30 days now to rent an apartment they're not flocking at the doors there's not 20 applicants anymore rents are actually decreasing so when i

2:51:52talk about the data that a lot of people don't agree big data is a big thing in real estate it's data let me get you data i've told staff i'll get you data i guarantee i'll get your data it doesn't evaluate what zillow tells you that an apartment in el cerrito that's two

2:52:08bedrooms is twenty eight hundred dollars i don't get twenty hundred dollars from a two bedroom apartment and none of my mom pops that i manage are related to or anyone gouges or does anything of that nature so i just want to tell you give us the opportunity to get you guys the data staff's here to

2:52:22work with us and we'll get you that data that you need because that data is important because it's going to tell you the truth that's going on el cerrito that you're not seeing as many price gougers that you think there are not an el cerrito thank you my name is lori wycliffe and i'm

2:52:46actually from richmond so we deal do we do deal with rent control and i guess what i'm asking this board is to do is to take your time on making a decision about this take into account what the renters are saying and what the landlords are saying there's nothing on our table to take

2:53:06care well on your table to take care of the bad landlords i've had people from el cerrito come to rent property from me and they tell me they're paying not only as a landlord raising a rent two or three times a year they're paying a garbage 100 a month he's making him pay

2:53:24um insurance insurance that he's supposed to carry that's put on the tenant and a hundred dollars a month that's way above what garbage is supposed to be and um i think rent rent control just just to me separates the city and separates its residents it doesn't put nobody's going to be

2:53:51happy about what happens but i have a a senior renter and when this came along i still haven't raised his rent i know i'm losing because if you don't raise the rent then when a time comes up to raise the rent you can only raise it from what it was before so since i

2:54:11haven't raised it in six years if if i want to keep up with what the city says i need to raise it and i i can't i'd rather pay it myself or work extra day at work i just can't do that to him it makes you into a landlord that you don't want to be all of a sudden you're looking at

2:54:28applications and unless they're perfect you can't give that person a chance i can't give you know young couple maybe they only been working for a year or two compared to the person that's been working 10 years i would have gave that couple a chance before but i have to look at the the um

2:54:47the eviction process the eviction process is not as easy as people think and also the i think you guys were saying there's a year lease if that year lease is going to make a that's worse the year leases even worse than everything else because after the year then they can kick them out and reset it

2:55:09it's summarized yeah right okay so i mean our lease in richmond is a fair release you lease and until the tenant wants to move you can't get out a bad tenant at all they keep they they're allowed to stay okay ralph banello followed by roe v lynn antonio hi ralph boniello el cerrito resident

2:55:33i came here tonight to speak to the need for more rental protections and specifically the need for just cause evictions and i want to share my story to help impress upon you why we need this i lived in a house in el cerrito for eight years on el dorado street owned by

2:55:52a mom-and-pop landlord as far as i know it was their only income property it was not maintained while i lived there and as a result small drainage problems blossomed into a large mold problem when el nino hit was it last winter the winter before last i'm sorry and

2:56:14it created a huge problem a health problem for me and my family my partner had to quit her job over the health problems when we went to the landlord we were thrown out of our house because there's no cut there there's no they don't have to give a cause they did not remediate the house they turned

2:56:36around and rented it so now there's a new el cerrito resident living in a toxic environment that nothing can be done about i i almost went homeless over this whole thing we had to get rid of all the all of our belongings and start from scratch i had to give up custody of my son for

2:56:53three months looking for housing for us i think it's ridiculous that el cerrito doesn't have any protections whatsoever for renters we're left to go to the legal system which is an undue burden on renters that that are already you know nearly at the poverty level with these

2:57:11rents i now pay more than 50 percent of my income in rent my rent has gone up 42 percent in the last two years i can't really afford my rent right now i'm kind of struggling hoping that i don't become homeless in the next few months so i i stress that you look for look to stronger renter

2:57:32protections and are included in this ordinance i support the protections put forward by the human rights commission and specifically just cause evictions need to be on the table thank you thank you and at this point this is the last speaker slip i have rovilyn antonio

2:57:54good evening mayor and staff um my name is roby lynn antonio and i'm the government on public affairs for california apartment association um we are an association that represents rental property owners and operators here in el cerrito and we're here to provide you with some

2:58:09comments on the proposed policies um first when i just commend staff on the wonderful work they've done and getting the renter protections package moved quickly to present you guys with tonight we believe that it's reasonable and that is not punitive and extreme unlike rent

2:58:23control just cause eviction or a rent moratorium we believe that the staff has the right approach um to looking at our issues they want to gather data they want to verify the data and they want to analyze and assess whether the current data warrants new regulations

2:58:39i think this allows the city to truly understand the current market in el cerrito and learn the impacts new laws could have on housing providers city resources and current and new residents by collecting the data and verifying the stories of outrageous rent increases and

2:58:54alleged mass evictions it will help mitigate the unintended consequences in the city if you choose to move with any policies forward we want to encourage you to continue working with the housing providers and looking into getting a phase in or a grace period to allow some time for

2:59:12property owners to understand the true impacts of this policy and how to actually implement it we also want you to consider taking a look at the rent review program and increasing the threshold to 10 percent because this actually is consistent with some some programs out in the bay area

2:59:31that has mediation at ten percent and it also is consistent with what this state considers as a acceptable um reasonable increase under circumstance special circumstances like emergencies um it also allows the 10 percent allows for property owners to cover the costs

2:59:47associated to implementing a rent review program um given that you guys are charging 30 per unit for that and um whatever policy that you choose you know we do ask you to please provide some safeguard to the mom and pop owners um in el cerrito 87 of property owners here are we what you

3:00:05consider mom and pop who are on fixed in income and relying on their rental properties for their livelihood um [Music] look into some type of consideration into um giving some waivers i think a waiver on before the program is implemented allowing them to do a catch-up on to

3:00:24current market and some um to give them some more time of a phase-in period but again thank you so much and we encourage you to continue working with us thank you those are all the speaker slips i have your honor all right um are there any further questions from the council

3:00:43to the staff or anyone else that spoke from the human relations commission that is um you have a question council member abelson i'm just looking fast to see if i do okay um okay um why don't is it okay if we go with uh mayor protem first oh please okay aisha and melanie we heard

3:01:48many impassioned pleas from both sides of this topic and some that were in the middle um and one of the things that i think uh and i wanna that my attorney tells me i need to do this let me find it first real quick um i want to do an ex parte uh discuss uh disclosure that i've had over the last

3:02:16years actually um multiple conversations with uh rental advocates like makaya aga who's howdy gowdy jeffrey lim levin and sherry drubner and realtors you know todd hodgson marian hennen jeff wright i also had a meeting with rovi lynn antonio from the california apartment association and

3:02:35heather schiffman from contra costa associated realtors i also want to make sure that those that are out there know that we at least i read emails from uh jeff blumen bloomfield who spoke tonight carol lamont robin mitchell uh brenda carter may wong rich martini al wong phoebe

3:02:52poon dan pan ed crowley sandra talbot yonah clark and ray chen and as well as i will say uh that i watched a video that mr barton was in so [Music] about his report so i will say that that i've spent a lot of time on this um and and that's just a preface to this

3:03:18question i just want to make sure i got all the the small print out of the way um we we heard from ms tannenbaum that that this there's nothing in here to stop bad lord landlords from being bad landlords uh that there's we've heard that there's no teeth in this to

3:03:36for enforcement what is what is your response to to that criticism is that do you have a some thoughts on on how this would be enforced against the not you know we we heard from many good landlords tonight and there's lots of testimony about good landlords but certainly we've also heard many

3:03:58heartbreaking stories about landlords with very large increases that that for whatever reason they have um but is there in this characterization of bad landlords getting away with something what's your thoughts on that the enforcement aspect of the ordinances you're proposing tonight so the

3:04:18enforcement aspect um obviously there's administrative penalties that come along with a couple of the ordinances and for the rent review program failure to participate will void the rent increase so there is actually in your packet it shows other cities where it's actually been helpful and

3:04:37it's actually working so that's why we included that information because those presentations and those reports do show that it does actually have teeth and there actually has been successful negotiations it's unlike a rent control rent stabilization where there's an absolute

3:04:54fixed number that's applied uniformly across the board the rent review program looks at each individual specific case scenario so that's what we're looking to achieve is like i said to understand all of those things before we can consider programs such as a binding mediation

3:05:12program if the non-binding mediation program's not effective but again it has been shown to be successful in other cities so go ahead um the other response to that i think for me is two pieces one is we think that a lot of those transactions right now happen not in the daylight

3:05:30and so we're hoping that the fact that every increase over five percent has the possibility for a complaint and if there was a registry we would know about it um that that would create a disincentive so i think you've seen in this in the reports from other places that there

3:05:45we hope that some of the cases we don't hear about is because people stay underneath the five percent threshold so i think that's one answer to why we think that a non-binding has a potential to have an impact on those that might be going higher than uh potentially than necessary and again

3:06:01as isa just said if it is necessary because there's been a lot of cost increases or the rent has been behind for a long time then that's something that would come come forward in that um so i think that's another piece of that the other to build on what i just said

3:06:15is again we don't know we definitely know that it happens and i think we've heard stories from individuals who've experienced that what we don't know is the magnitude of it and that's what we're hoping to gather through having the data so that we know whether a more stringent policy

3:06:31to get at those problems is needed um okay so let's let's tackle the data collection topic i i certainly had questions about it beforehand and and um it doesn't sound like we will get data that we need to to we won't get data i mean if there's only 40 uh reconciliations

3:06:58um they're let's say there's 120 people who call and because of whatever reason there's people that don't call whether their rent increases less than 5 or their fee they fear uh retaliation let's say there's a hundred people that that that's only that's out of four

3:07:17thousand that doesn't even represent five percent so my question is how do we make a decision with only five with less than five percent of the data about what's going on in the marketplace and and it's skewed data because it's only the data of people who report who who either are

3:07:35having high you know rent increases and have the wherewithal to you know to report it to us so so again i guess i'd like to find out more about this rent registry that you talked about and you i heard it was going to cost money it's a software and i mean i i like

3:07:54struggle with old-fashioned ledgers pieces of paper i mean i don't know why it would cost i mean it's only for 4 000 units in in in the city at 30 lines of page it's less than 150 pages of college ruled paper so i'm still trying to figure out you know what what it is that we're

3:08:14trying to uh you know how how do we get to that data how do we get to that data because because the the what you're proposing tonight doesn't really get to the data that that mr levin spoke of or even miss roe v spoke up miss rovi your last name i'll get it eventually

3:08:35that you know they both have talked about getting data but i don't hear how we get to data without some some sort of rent registry so we can definitely look into the rent registry and come back with you in terms of what that cost would look like and how it would be implemented by

3:08:54staff and enforced so that way it would be mandatory citywide is what i'm hearing it sounds like we want to know the whole city versus the complaints that would be received through the rent review program that that concludes my questions at this one council member abelson yeah um

3:09:19the um sort of related i guess to what councilmember lyman or advice um council members fine and said about what i would loosely call statistics that have you got something in mind that will be able to analyze the data and see that it's accomplishing what's intended because

3:09:48there's another level even too which is the level of ability to pay so some tenants have it and some tenants don't and are we um putting into place a program that handles what you know one one of those groups all both of those groups um and um then there's the part about the good guys versus the

3:10:19everybody reporting and um so it makes me wonder how easy it's going to be to get data out of the this kind of a system that does what we're wanting it to do you have any thoughts on that yeah so i hear there's two different things that we're tackling obviously the

3:10:41collection of rents and then also the understanding of mains testing so people's abilities to actually whether they can afford those rents to make that correlation between those two so we can we can definitely brainstorm further how we can better design a program that could meet

3:11:04both of those goals because i think it's if we're going to get some value out of the whole statistical side of this that's what we need to be doing one of the things that you said and i've talked about in as a reminder the city has not had any of policies like any of this in place

3:11:25before so there is a building up period and it's also um you can tell there's only so many models in so many cities and there's not that many cities our size doing kind of a suite of programs like this so trying to figure this stuff out i think is important we just talked also when isis

3:11:42smiled about brainstorming we welcome i think that council member member lyman said it last time and we've heard members of the public like this isn't our last kind of toe in the water on this um i think you saw nice's last slide we want to continue to do workshops

3:11:58workshops where both tenants and landlords are talking to each other where we are brainstorming and finding potentially something uniquely el cerrito that we do find ways to combine means testing and finding mediation and we look at the different types of maybe

3:12:14ownership situations that there are you also heard from i think the apartment association the realtors and we're going to take them up on it we've heard from others that they want to voluntarily give us data that we don't have so i think that as we have stated in the report we hope

3:12:32that this is a disincentive we've also heard from another city that there are landlords um reminding the other landlords if you're if you don't play fairly you know there's other tools that the cities can employ um so we feel like it was a good first step but figuring out more robust

3:12:49ways again you know we would have to figure out there's some cost whether it's a database or somebody with college ruled paper but there's definitely some cost to um to doing to doing a registry so we'd like to look at what that is in staff time so again asa calculated these

3:13:02programs will take about half of her time um so i think we just have to remember with a small staff that's it's just something we want to be able to bring you um you know realistic information on what the i guess my biggest point is that when you bring me data and you say well there

3:13:18were 20 cases of this that isn't really telling me anything right so i understand what i think we heard what we're saying is what's the universe out of 20 cases out of how many cases right i mean it just tells you about the program it doesn't it just says that that's just raw data

3:13:37and what would be more most interesting i think would be to know that it's a certain percent of the whole whatever that you know the data is about and um then there are pots of data that um are are garbage because the the the amount of data being collected is too small

3:14:00i don't know if we have that situation or not so we need to be able to uh look at it data that we think we're going to be producing statistics from and make sure that it's valid and useful um and um so some of the things that were said tonight by eve i'm not talking about our audience

3:14:24but us we're we're really not looking at data that way and we don't have the data to look at it that way either so the um any anyway the um there's a lot at stake here and i think we want to get it right and i don't think we want to use bad data to get it wrong i guess is what i

3:14:47would as a reminder the termination notices should give us a valid data set about how many terminations there are in a given year and collect as much information about that as we can um and we will i don't remember if i used to mention we'll be disaggregating that data from the owner versus the

3:15:07occurrence so that uh we've worked with the city attorney on on on thinking through that um in terms of the mean incomes of of renters and their rents i think this is going to be an ongoing kind of process of how we figure this out and maybe rent registry is the only

3:15:25way to get something that we think and again we'd have to look into that further um i think that do you know anybody who has a rent registry that doesn't have um a rent control ordinance i can't remember if you said i think it was unusual is why we didn't bring that um forward but again unusual

3:15:41doesn't mean it's not doable thank you all right so we'll move on are you having a question not a question okay so we'll move on to discussion uh councilmember quinto just like uh council member lyman i wanted to also say that i spoke to the same people so uh know that i have read

3:16:02all of your emails phone calls letters i also spoke to the apartment association and to many of you here face to face so i know what a difficult decision it is when this hasn't been done here in this city but i also believe uh as someone who has grown up here and as who lived here many

3:16:29many years we've always had mom and pop landlords and i want to make sure that we protect our mom-and-pop landlords so looking at that and looking at what other cities have done richmond made a bad move in uh the way they put their uh rent control in and and they told me they did so

3:16:50they're dealing with the mistakes that they had and i want to make sure that we don't go that way because we are not richmond we are little el sarita we are not berkeley we are not san francisco we are not santa monica uh we're a city with 87 percent mom and pop

3:17:08landlords and i want to make sure that our landlords are taken care of but i also want to make sure that our renters are taken care of so i want to go forward with the recommendations with staff and we'll go with this for now but i also want to have more discussions

3:17:27when it comes to binding mediation so right now i'm supporting non-binding mediation and when we go and if it's not working we'll change it so in the meantime we don't have rent control we're not going to have rent control in el cerrito but we will have strong ordinances to

3:17:53protect both sides so i do believe in [Music] non-binding mediation but i also believe in just cause eviction so these these are things that i want to support so looking at that and looking at what we have discussed this evening we've discussed this for most of this evening

3:18:21i want to support what staff has recommended to the council council member fidelity yes thank you and thanks for the citizens our residents coming out and speaking thank you to staff i really appreciate the report that you've done and as melanie has said this is a

3:18:44journey we've we're walking into uncharted places and we're it's going to be a longer journey than getting things done immediately it would be great to be able to solve everything immediately but we're going to learn we're going to move forward on this i want to talk my comments just a little

3:19:02bit about that journey and the fact that we have broad issues that we have to deal with when i was meeting with the same people and discussing and reading some of the same material that we've all read i always ask three questions along the way do we have enough affordable housing

3:19:19the answer is obviously no will developers be less inclined to invest here in el cerrito with if we do get tenant protections maybe but probably not are tenants at risk right now in this increasingly unaffordable bay area absolutely so in dealing with tenants and housing

3:19:44we need to deal with all these things at the same time it's not just tenants it's not just housing it's all of these things at the same time we speak tonight about steps that we're just beginning in our in our city to propose about affordable housing and this is one of the strategies of our

3:20:03four pillars and this comes in the context of efforts that are already under underway in sacramento to address this it's a state crisis and maybe even more important increasingly it's a regional crisis and i think regionally is how we're going to have to resolve this i'm sure many of you have

3:20:22read recently about mtc the metropolitan transportation commission and casa coming up with the bay area plan that not only streamlines construction and allows for greater growth and greater heights to that growth but it requires just case just cause protections

3:20:42and allows for emergency rent caps and legal assistance to those tenants that need it and that's exciting this is a full package with all of this stuff working together all of it and talking together about all of these things so we need to keep all these things on the table as we move

3:21:01toward 2019.

3:21:03our first step here in a a theme that we've been talking about obviously is data and i believe we need more data i'm concerned about the amount of data we can get but we're beginning this journey and i've been promised that we will have a lot of ways that we can get that data

3:21:21i did attend on november 8th the community workshop here and i was actually impressed with the discussion and the agreement the conversation among the realtors and the tenants that they all agreed we need data and to put it in the proper context as cong councilwoman abelson has mentioned

3:21:42um but i uh and and that's to verify and tabulate rent increases evictions and other problems and i and i support this as long as we keep all of the options on the table the program i don't want to create busy work for the city because we're giving it direction but we

3:22:07really need to help the tenants and and the landlords in a fair way and this brings me to my concern is that my instincts are always to provide a variety of tools to get things done and to get that data and to to assure a fair tenant environment in a growing problematic bay

3:22:28area but i'm not convinced about implementing this first proposal on cerrito i have concerns everyone i've talked to says it's not going to work that non-mandatory mediation simply doesn't have the strength to move forward and in fact if tenants don't believe that

3:22:47non-binding mediation will work they won't use it and we won't get any data we won't get any numbers that are valid so i'm not going to be supporting that tonight i'm going to be supporting the other three proposals brought to our city i think those will are valid they're not great strong

3:23:08it's beefy proposals but they're important proposals and i just want to say to the to the members of the uh human relations commission i i was i've been the council liaison to them and and they've worked in earnest with the public and the public members that have

3:23:27come to provide options for this city council and the city to move forward on and um i had some issues with some of the wording and i would have changed a few things in that resolution i know we can't i've been informed we can't change those those the wording in that resolution

3:23:46tonight but i want to assure them that those the things you identify should still be on the table as this region and as a state moves forward and we're going to get that done it may not be immediately but all of us all of us in this room tonight and the city council cares about this we

3:24:03care about our landlords we care about our tenants and in this environment in this bay area we have to do the best we can and el is unique and we're on the road to getting that done thank you madam mayor i was going to do that thank you very much just want to remind the

3:24:20council that you have a policy of ending at 10 30. so a motion would be necessary notion that we extend the meeting by one half hour till 11 pm i will second that all in favor [Music] motion passes all right i was going to start my remarks with that motion but uh

3:24:39i you know i want to thank staff and i actually want to thank the public both advocates on both sides for all the time you've put in whether it's in your testimony tonight or through written uh letters that we've gotten of some of which were seven pages long um

3:24:56uh so i i definitely think of it stability and security seem to be the words of the day whether you're a landlord and you want to know that your tenant is a a good tenant and they'll be there and they're going to pay you and or whether you're a renter and you want to know that you have

3:25:17a safe place clean good place that doesn't have rental increases that are 20 and 30 percent a year um the woman's letter that uh ms strugner read um you know was 57 over two years the young woman who spoke and said her rent went up by 500 a year that was 25 the

3:25:40first year and 20 percent the second year that's 45 over a two-year period so that's not what i would consider stability or security um so those are those are certainly the key words um you know as a council and and we get supported by staff so thank you for this

3:26:01we are tasked with crafting legislation that best balances the needs of our community that includes landlords and renters so to me the best strategy and i think council member fidelity touched on this in his comments um the best strategy is one that promotes long-term property ownership

3:26:24and investments through maintenance and long-term tenancy the city benefits from stable housing both on the having stable population and stable landlords who know their property and they know the city and there and they're there to do what they need to do as a council we want to preserve the

3:26:47culture and fabric of el cerrito that's that's in our policy statements and so we want to develop policies that discourage turnover of both renters and landlords so the council member quinto talked about the fact that we have to to talk to both sides and understand both

3:27:10of these the challenge we have is that uh is that we have the the i think mr barton talked about it this in his book rental property falls into uh young rental units units that have been built recently that still need to cover the cost of construction and so they

3:27:33have to charge higher rents but they also offer higher amenities they'll have elevators instead of walk-ups they'll have you know parking garages that are fancy and automated but meanwhile older units older units rental units are where the rental units no longer have to carry

3:27:56their construction cost and the older units only need to carry the maintenance cost and and therefore by definition the older units should be below market rent and we heard landlords talk tonight about how they're offering below market rent and and and that's that's the way it should be

3:28:19you have different you have different cost parameters that that are out there the i've so many notes the the biggest problem for me is that there is so much information going out there and and we only have a limited amount of time to talk about this the the and and i what i hear and i agree

3:28:46whether you're a landlord or an advocate for renters there's not been enough dialogue on this there's not been enough opportunity for communication and and the challenge we have is that we have and staff has done precisely what we've asked them to do in august we asked you to come back with

3:29:07these types of ordinances and you've done exactly what we've asked to do and and so i'm i'm struggling with all of the information we've gotten tonight uh all the information i've collected over time um you know there's there's wonderful books out there like how to kill a city

3:29:30okay and and then and the sub subtext is gentrification equality in the fight for the neighborhood you know that this this talks to and and mr levin and both mr barton have said this you know the long-term solution is to produce more housing new housing will make more

3:29:53make the old housing less desirable and therefore more affordable so so that's but that takes time it takes a lot of time mr barton's smiling because i think that's a direct quote right um but in this book it talks about expand protect and make accessible public lands

3:30:15so basically save public land for the purpose of this type of need to housing give people an actual say in what happens in their their city there was a miss mitchell quoted a 15 year old saying the public is coming essentially the public has the power the third one in here is heavily

3:30:39regulate housing and it basically says rent regulation law and or tax or land speculation could help with with the crisis fourth implement a new new deal which is basically is get more public housing and protectionism protectionism which is to allow for all communities all parts of a community

3:31:04to be developed and wouldn't apply necessarily to el cerrito and fine is is raise taxes raise wages which we did on september on january 1 we will be at 15 an hour for anybody working in el cerrito and spend that on the poor so so when you look at the wealth of

3:31:26information that we've we've been uh able to tap into over the last year you you stand there and you say are we doing enough mr fideli is saying that the rent review is is not adequate in his opinion um and so he's he's supporting the minimum lease term the termination of

3:31:45tenancy and the tenant relocation but it won't be supporting the rent review the rent review program will not collect the data that we hope i mean i've talked that through tonight and so i certainly understand mr fideli's position on on that is it enough you know it and and so to talk to the

3:32:10landlords in the room for a minute um you know landlords purchase property for a variety of reasons some do it for cash flow some do it for the long-term property appreciation and some do it for some combination of before of the of the two potentially depreciation

3:32:31they do it for a tax depreciation it and they also exist along a spectrum we've had people testify tonight about how much they love their landlords and how much uh some landlords are doing to support them so there are those that care about their tenants there's those that care about renters in

3:32:51general but don't think they necessarily have an obligation to to to protect those renters and then there are those that don't believe it's their responsibility at all that to serve or provide the service the housing service that that's there landlords by state law are allowed a

3:33:13reasonable rate of return and and that definition is really vague and each landlord as i've talked to several landlords each landlord has going to have their own definition of what a reasonable rate of return is based on the reasons of why they purchased the property

3:33:33so there is no there's not going to be one answer to this solution because as was discussed earlier and i don't know there's 4 000 units that average 20 or less units per property let's say we have 100 landlords in town every landlord is going to have a unique reason of why they bought their property

3:33:56what they think is a reasonable rate of return so one answer is not necessarily going to fit everything as i said in august el cerrito can come up with a solution the question is are the landlords out there not all landlords again i think the issue is a handful of landlords

3:34:19if there's a hundred landlords it might be three or four maybe it's more i hope not you know good landlords provide safe quality housing and only charge what they need in these older rental units good landlords and there are many of you in the community understand the community

3:34:43service you are providing to our residents and you limit your rent increases to the to those that rank increases that are necessary to cover your annual costs and a reasonable rate of return therefore the rent review program may not even be necessary for you for you the

3:35:03good landlords so um we talked we have heard testimony that housing is a right i'm not certain it's exactly a right but i do believe it's a critical service and it's a critical service that the whole community benefits from not just the renters because as somebody said the homelessness is a

3:35:34problem i didn't hear anybody i mean actually a couple people did bring up the health impacts associated with a unstable or uncertain rental community that's an impact on the community whether they're going to the emergency room or they're a burden to our police force

3:35:53because they're homeless so affordable housing landlords you do provide a critical service you're already very heavily regulated whether it's state law or the rental inspection program but you provide a service that's essentially like any of our other utilities

3:36:14whether it's pg e which provides power and gas or east bay sanitary that picks up your garbage just imagine if we didn't if we had garbage done by ad hoc as opposed to a regulated system therefore we should be considering additional regulations and and the regulations where i've heard

3:36:40several landlords whether it's through letters including seven page letters tell us that we're overreaching by putting any type of regulation on i don't believe so as mr barton will say the value you are getting from your property is due to and i'm going to quote

3:37:00many realtors location location location take your apartment to the midwest do you get the same amount of cash flow your costs are lower too don't i understand it your taxes are lower everything's lower but location location location the services the parks we talked about centennial park opening up

3:37:20this week bart which we hear go by every once in a while these are amenities that drive your property value up and you wouldn't necessarily get the rents that you're looking at without being here so that that public equity that all taxpayers have invested in your

3:37:45property as a result of being here is the reason why i think we can in good conscience add additional regulation to you mr coleman testified don't be too burdensome and i i actually i definitely understand that um which is why i don't know what the answer is i don't know i mean i came in tonight

3:38:12not knowing what the answer is and i have not heard anything tonight that helps me answer it um so outside of moving forward with what's on us today on the table all i can do is make the same plea that i made back in august get us your data several landlords wrote to me and said

3:38:32yes we will provide the data but i stand here and have the same problem i had back in august we don't have the data to make a decision we don't have the data to understand if rent stabilization is something we need to implement i i will say that the rent review seems

3:38:53like something that won't be successful it's a lot of burden and it's not necessarily the answer i understand that binding mediation is limited by costa hawkins and so that may not be what we want either this is a long conversation it's a long monologue unfortunately

3:39:12because i'm not sure if anybody's even listening to me but i'm i'm i'm not happy i'm not happy because we don't have an answer we don't answer for the landlords and we don't have an answer for the tenants tonight and and so like mr fideli i definitely would move

3:39:33forward on the and 400 and because the rent review does not actually accomplish what i think the staff sought out to to do for that i i will probably uh not vote for the rent review because it seems like a lot of work with very little data capture so all right council member abelson

3:39:57well greg as usual has said a lot and covered a lot of topics and i kind of got a sense that [Music] it's interesting because when i came in i was thinking some of this stuff is kind of that we might do that's proposed here although it was again what we asked to

3:40:22be prepared so we cannot fault staff at all and we appreciate all the work that staff has done and i think staff i mean i think staff did a really good job in doing what they did and i i want to say thank you very much for that but um it perhaps all also did a good enough

3:40:43job that we realized the shortcomings of what it is we thought we wanted and so um if we're in the the marketplace here for talking about what we like and don't like i think i could pretty well agree with council member lyman um in terms of that i act except let's

3:41:06see could you repeat it so i can make sure that's true which sections you mr mr fideli and i are supporting uh the um i'm gonna get the it's 200 300 and 400 which is the minimum lease term of one year because that does create stability the termination of tenancy which

3:41:31does provide us with a lot of information about why leases are terminated and then the tenant relocation package although frankly i would boost the special group from one month to two months additional so um i guess what i would say is i particularly the the rent

3:41:58two of them i agree with and then one of them the um termination of tenancy which was about reporting uh when i think of when i terminate a relationship either for just because it ended or for a good bad or indifferent reason i may or may not turn in something so i don't know if that's going to

3:42:24provide as much good data as we would like because our universe might not even be large enough to do that because we're a small city and you know by the time you get if you look at it statistically um i guess i like statistics a lot but um you know it may or it may not actually

3:42:44be enough if we were feeding into some larger universe i think it would potentially be really useful data but i don't know that it actually is the um end-all answer so um i would feel good about the two the termination of ten let's see it's the the one i don't like

3:43:12is the reporting at the end of the relationship and council member abelson i can i can give you a a good strong argument as to uh why you don't like that one and it and it's actually on page uh of this of the staff report staff thank you i will agree with council

3:43:32member abelson that you've done a great job of you did what we asked you to do the first paragraph of the the first sentence of the last paragraph on page nine says this ordinance attachment one nope no staff report page nine of staff report last paragraph on page nine

3:43:55first sentence this ordinance is designed to track and inventory actual displacements so i think what you're saying is it's after the fact it's the displacement has occurred uh-huh it's after the fact and not only that some people may not report act accurately on either

3:44:17side and and then some people may just give up because they are dissatisfied or they may not report just because they're busy my usual reason is i'm busy so i don't bother to do the assessment report at the end of the conference because i need to go catch an airplane or

3:44:43something so things you know just reasons like that that are kind of unrelated to the actual event itself but caused the data to be skewed i've looked at the ones from conferences that i just referred to myself and it's amazing how few people respond to things like

3:45:04that one in particular and um how most of the results say everything's 100 perfectly okay i mean that's kind of all they say with with a couple so it takes a so i'm not sure how useful that one will be really because i don't i just don't think it's gonna it's not done in a way that it's it's

3:45:31something that people just write on a piece of paper and turn it in i believe right is that right the response that people will give yeah so there's a form um that is going to be accompanied by um the the traditional form that goes with terminating tendencies so the

3:45:50landlord would fill out the form and attach a copy of that the landlord and the tenant right yeah the tenant can we're it's required by the landlord but the tenant can provide it so i i just i don't know i mean it does maybe it's easy enough to do but it's i don't think we'll be

3:46:09providing a lot of data um anyway that's my thought on on that all right thank you so there are 2 234 people experiencing homelessness in this county and i feel as though on the council we have not done much about it we kind of shove it off to the county as saying it's a county problem

3:46:53today we did pass a resolution that will hopefully help out the county there is a shelter crisis going on in contra costa county and greater california so i had a hard time sleeping last night because i was thinking about that and i was thinking about the people that

3:47:18could potentially be displaced over the next year while we're trying to figure out what we're doing here how many people here have been homeless it's not a good feeling i was five years old when i was homeless and it was only for a small period of time but it was the worst time in my

3:47:42life it's a time that i have run away from the time they were talking about earlier where if you're homeless you can't concentrate in school you can't attend regularly i missed a large part of kindergarten and it wasn't until i had a home that was stable with my

3:48:00grandparents that i was able to thrive and that i was able to go to college on scholarship and i want to know what we're doing potentially to some of our young children here by doing nothing that's a that's the feeling i couldn't shake last night when i was lying there

3:48:25in bed i feel like we're doing nothing nothing to help people and i ran for office because i wanted to help people and i remember a political consultant told me that's not a good reason to run and i said i don't know what is if that's not what it is so as we gather data how many evictions

3:49:00are enough how many rent increases are enough do we get extra points if we find out there's children being displaced can we do better can we do something now one of the landlords that spoke last time told me that i should recuse myself because i'm a renter little did he know that i'm not a renter

3:49:36i own a home that college scholarship did me a hell of a lot of good i own a home here in el cerrito and all the people that are sitting up here own homes and we are all making decisions on behalf of renters i wonder what the decisions would be if there were a council full of renters

3:50:02instead of a council full of homeowners because i do have rent control it's called a 30-year mortgage i know exactly what my rent is going to be every single month and i can sleep in my warm bed knowing that i will not be kicked out i know because of prop 13 that my taxes

3:50:25will not go up significantly i have an extreme amount of security if i were a renter today i would be scared out of my pants i won't say what the word i was thinking of i'd be scared and i know that there are a lot of good landlords here and i believe you and i trust you

3:50:54and i'm hoping that we put policies in place that will not hurt you in the slightest bit especially if you haven't raised your rents at all for a long time i i don't think that just because we're going to impose some regulations that it means that we're going to hurt you

3:51:14i don't want to hurt you and what that landlord did not know about me is that i'm actually considering buying a rental property my husband and i have been talking about it i may be regulating myself so maybe i should recuse myself but i don't have one yet so i won't

3:51:36but i think we could do more one of the first things in the rent stabilization in the ordinance it talks about the whereas clause about how we want to preserve diversity and so that's one of the things that i think about if we do nothing so what will el cerrito look like 10

3:52:08years from now if we aren't able to somehow preserve the diversity that we do have here we recently interviewed someone for a commission and he told us that the reason why he lives in el cerrito is because of the diversity here he said he could perfectly afford to

3:52:29live in marin or on the other side of the tunnel in one of the fancier neighborhoods but he's here in el cerrito because of the diversity so are we going to put policies in place that will help preserve the unique character that is el cerrito i don't feel like what we've been presented with tonight

3:52:55was designed to help renters it was designed to collect data and as we've talked about that may be insufficient so it's been hard i i i agree with council member fidelity to a certain degree maybe we should just you know if it's not going to work just throw it out

3:53:22but we also have done nothing and i don't want to pat myself on the back for something that's not going to work but maybe just maybe it might help a couple of people and that's a maybe and that's a might but i do think that we need to put more protections on people if

3:53:44they are going to come forward and say yes my rent is going up too much i worry that if they come forward they will get an eviction notice so i think we need to move forward with a just cause eviction ordinance in this city and i will leave that as direction to

3:54:07the staff to look into a just cause ordinance in the way that the city of emeryville has maybe it will be stand alone maybe that's all that we need maybe we will need more but i know that right now doing nothing is still hurting people i feel as though we are morally

3:54:30failing the most vulnerable amongst us so in addition to the just cause eviction that we should thoroughly explore talk about hopefully vote on i also agree that we need a rent registry to really know what's going on because i feel like i'm i feel convinced of what

3:55:02is going on but it sounds like my fellow council members will need some additional data and with that i will have to make another motion to extend the meeting you can you don't make motions i can't make any motion no but i can okay go ahead okay i'll make a motion to

3:55:24extend the meeting by 15 minutes i'll second all in favor so you can't ever make a movie okay you can but keep going with your finished conclude your comments i was actually at the end so it kind of ended at a a proper point so i'd like to see just cause i'd like to

3:55:50see the rent registry and i'm not taking anything off the table that the human relations commission spoke about i think we need to do more and i want to do it in a way that's fair and just to everyone here so with that we will move on to see if any of these ordinances will pass

3:56:20do i have a motion on the first ordinance i'll move uh ordinance uh i'll move the second one which is oops i had the head in front of me an ordinance of the city of el cerrito amending title 10 of the el cerrito municipal code chapter to add chapter 10.200 minimum lease term to require landlords

3:56:46to offer tenants a minimum lease of 12 months second that um hang on i might need to i had some other let me see if there wasn't no i have no changes to that one no changes though so i'm i'm having trouble as usual finding attachment two working yours it's not there

3:57:38all in favor aye aye those opposed abstentions the motion carries uh i will gladly move an ordinance of the now i'm on attachment for an ordinance of the city of el cerrito amending title 10 of the el cerrito municipal code chapter to add chapter 10.400 tenant relocation assistance

3:58:08related to tenant relocation payments before i conclude i i did um i one of my questions to staff was uh adding a a uh under the definition of displace or displacement was a uh displacement associated with accumulative rent increase greater than say 15 percent over

3:58:38two years or something to that effect so i would like to see something the staff to consider adding a number five under it's oops this is the numbering system again uh under point 10400.0 two zero definitions f for displacement displacement under for the purposes of this chapter

3:59:05displacement does not include well that's not where i wanted i changed the derivative right above yeah right above so it would be an at potentially consider adding a number four right above that and then also uh if adding uh under 10.400.040 relocation assistance

3:59:26i'm on page six adding that to increase number four special circumstances households to be paid two additional months for rent for a maximum of six months rent um councilmember lyman was the were those amendments to the ordinance yeah that's part of my motion you're

3:59:47you're you were saying you that you wanted to step you let in with you wanted staff to look at them so i wanted to clarify whether or not those are amendments they are proposed proposed amendments um where the increase over two years would be 20 exceeding 20 percent

4:00:03and that the amendment to 10 404 relocation assistance for special communities would be an additional two months for a maximum of six so that's my motion i'll i'll second all in favor of a discussion yep yeah um i have a question in in uh when we get to talking about the mom and pop

4:00:28um six months rent doesn't necessarily seem to me like something they would be able to come up with i'm wondering about that i don't know would they they would be sorry it'd be five months it would be a total of five months two additional with with five months but it

4:00:52would be just for a very limited population no no but the but the person paying it isn't that the landlord three months which section are you looking at isn't this the um i'm looking at page six of yes attachment four correct okay isn't that our the person who's

4:01:14coming there the the place that the tenant is getting the money from is the landlord right okay so it's the landlord paying it correct right on if if they are oh what i'm wondering about is um whether or not a mom and pop um landlord would necessarily be able to

4:01:38make those kinds of could come up with that kind of of money they would only need to come up with that kind of money if they're displacing the tenants um okay i thought and maybe i'm getting the categories confused but i thought one of the reasons for displacing the tenant is there's

4:02:00something wrong with the the unit this happened to my daughter that is not that is not included yep the tent if a temporary displacement where the tenant uh up let's see it was required vacation solely to damage from earthquake i'm sorry you are correct if they are

4:02:21renovating or rehabilitating it would be it would cover that are you proposing to well i'm i'm just i'm thinking we ought to think what we're doing here uh in in terms of that one my daughter actually was a tenant in a situation uh where first they closed her apartment

4:02:42and and kicked her out uh and then just because there was something wrong with the pipes um and then they ended up closing the whole buildings so if if this were uh something approaching a mom-and-pop operation and they didn't have a lot of resources how are i'm just wondering how

4:03:02in the world they could pay this um you know what i'm saying so let me read this to you and see if it covers your daughter's situation the tenant is required to vacate the rental unit due solely to damage resulting from an earthquake fire flood natural disaster civil disturbance or

4:03:21accident outside of the control of the landlord does that i don't know what plumbing problem your daughter had i don't know how and i look at plumbing problems as often outside of the control of but i don't really know what it was in her particular case i'm just thinking that

4:03:40[Music] people may not be able to come up with that much money that's what i'm thinking and just as a reminder this ordinance does apply to households um under 120 ami as well just to add that to the mix and remind right not not to households over that okay i'm just pointing out that not all

4:04:08people who are landlords can make them come up with a lot of money and i guess my my goal with this is that uh affordable units that are currently older units that are of a certain uh rental category we should be doing our best to preserve that and this would help preserve that

4:04:34by by limiting uh convert the incentive to convert an old unit to a new unit oh is this the version where there oh i was thinking this i guess this is not the part where there's something wrong with it it has to be fixed i'm sorry uh can i interject for a moment so this one was intended and we

4:04:57can read the language it's not when something's wrong it needs to be intended for tear downs because somebody's building okay decided to build a new apartment a major yeah so this is not okay minor and this is not if there was a natural disaster which state law already never mind okay

4:05:18i do need to restate that it's two additional months for a maximum of five months i think i misspoke and said six by accident for the special cases okay has that been moved i moved you seconded or actually gabe seconded okay yeah all in favor aye as opposed extensions

4:05:40motion carries now on well that was just the amendment right no it was the whole the whole the whole ordinance with the two changes made by council member lyman all right thank you then proceed i wanted to uh movement ordinance adding chapter 10 point three hundred

4:05:59title uh the else read a municipal code chapter to again 10.300 termination of tenancy related to the requirement that landlords notify the city when terminating a tenancy i'll second for the purpose of discussion um there um there is the definition of rental units in this

4:06:22is handled differently than the definition of rental units in some of the other ones and i would like to speak ask that the consistency be put across those and it deals with things like capitalization and where the exemptions are listed the exemptions are actually

4:06:41under the effective date and applicability as opposed to under the definitions which they are in the other two so i i will i will um second this but not changing the content but where the content is located um i would ask for that that change okay all right i'm sorry council member can

4:07:05you clarify are you moving that because i need to be able to capture the motion i am seconding it with the understanding that uh item c exemptions under ten three hundred zero three zero will be uh standardized with the uh similar to the other ordinances and be placed under

4:07:24the definitions section 10 300 020 definitions in addition to where it is located now no moved it would be moved is that a is the motion maker acceptable to that so then the motion would be by council member fidelity um seconded by lyman with the amendment as outlined by council member lyman

4:07:49correct thank you you guys got that there any further discussion all in favor all right all right those opposed abstentions motion passes there's one left you guys want to move does anyone want to move the final i'm not going to move that that's one i think i don't like isn't it it's one of

4:08:16the ones you don't like you were going to support all right well seeing as there is no motion on the floor can we move on to item 6a doesn't happen it doesn't happen okay and with that we can move back to item 6 and go to our public hearing thank you thank you all

4:08:42thank you everyone thank you thank you people ms ortiz i'm about to make a motion to extend how much time do you think you need i'm going to ask you um mayor i'd like to move an extension of this meeting to 11 30.

4:09:05all right is there a second i'll second all in favor aye opposed motion carries 15 more minutes oh it's 11 30.

4:09:22so total of 15. yes 15 above our previous motion all right this is our public hearing for establishment of transportation impact fee program and amendment of master fee schedule before we move on i i feel like there's one item i'm just discussing with the city manager for me i feel like there

4:09:53was one item that was introduced but there was not um sure i i will i will i will build on that go ahead so um uh mayor pardue okamoto you said that you would like to see um staff do some more investigation of a just cause eviction correct ordinance none of the other

4:10:10council members specifically supported that and i just wanted to see whether or not there was support from a majority of the council for staff to um expend effort on that so i will i will echo what uh the mayor said and say both i support both the rent registry because

4:10:28she did she identified two additional pieces of work rent registry and the just cost eviction yes that's at least two of us three perhaps emotion would be appropriate to provide staff direction to conduct those items yes i will move uh that we give uh i will actually make this motion a little

4:10:51more comprehensive i move that we acknowledge that there is a housing shortage in el cerrito that does require an emphasis on production preservation and my third p i've forgotten what my third p is protection and um that as a result we direct staff to move forward with just

4:11:23cause eviction ordinance and a rental registry i'll second that all in favor those are those opposed abstentions the motion carries oh all right that's uh four eyes and one abstention from council member abelson the motion passes okay and now on to our public hearing

4:12:01good evening mayor council members i am ivette ortiz the city's public works director here with me tonight are bob spencer of urban economics um julie morgan with veron pierce and melanie mintz of community development tonight city staff is requesting that council take two actions to establish a

4:12:20transportation impact fee we have prepared about a 10 minute presentation but we can make it five minutes given how late it is so if that's okay with you we will proceed with that um just to to open it up don't leave anything out though okay we'll zoom by it you'll see it you'll

4:12:40see it the transportation impact fee will help finance transportation improvements needed to accommodate new development in the city and will help implement several goals and objectives in the city's general plan and related master and specific plans so i'll turn it over now to bob so he

4:12:59can go through the presentation good evening council and again we'll move through this quickly uh but of course we're here to answer any questions that that may come up we're going to give you some background walk through what's called the nexus study present the proposed traffic impact fee

4:13:18schedule consider the economic impacts and then we'll open it up for questions in terms of background on the uh on impact fees um they're enabled by the state mitigation fee act that's the authority you have to adopt the proposed ordinance and resolution tonight

4:13:48other agencies impose fees at el cerrito on on new development within el cerrito such as the west county sub regional transportation impact fee sanitary district fees school fees there's a range of other fees uh that are collected um that are imposed on new development in

4:14:08el cerrito the city collects an inclusionary housing in lieu fee but has no impact fee program for city public facilities so as far as the nexus study we put together a growth forecast this comes out of the san pablo specific plan area work uh but but represents growth

4:14:29city-wide we added an increment to to represent city-wide growth we then looked at transportation plans and the particularly the capital improvements identified in those plans city's done a lot of great planning over the last um 10 years and we drew out of those plans those

4:14:50projects that represent enhancements expansion or uh in any other way uh an increase in the capacity of the transportation system across all modes to serve development we focused on just the what we call the city-wide multimodal transportation network shown in this slide

4:15:14so expenditures of these fee revenues would have to be for projects on this citywide network not for neighborhood streets this is to facilitate travel across all modes bike pedestrian transit vehicles throughout the city so it has to be on the citywide network development impacts are based on your

4:15:38current investment in the transportation system which equals 33 000 per equivalent dwelling unit that's basically what you've got today in the ground based on the number of trips that are occurring in the city so all we're simply doing the maximum justified fee is simply based on the

4:15:59impact of development simply based on the notion that hey for every new trip added we want to maintain that level of investment per trip or as converted to an equivalent dwelling unit very similar to a park fee very similar to public safety fees very similar to

4:16:15other public facility fees uh but that's the maximum what we wanted to focus the fee on though is what's the the funding actually needed so we did analysis of the projects from these plans improvement projects we looked at other anticipated funding both grants that have been approved and

4:16:33reasonably anticipated over the course of this planning horizon to 2040 and there's about nine and a half million dollars of unfunded costs in that 31 or so million dollar plan so the fee is calculated to fill that nine million dollar funding gap you can see it comes out to um about

4:16:56thirty three thousand dollars per single family year but most most all of the units uh in l street are like to be multi-family going forward so it's um uh probably the predominant uh effect of this fee is is on the multi-family cost of twenty three hundred dollars per unit

4:17:11plus the commercial and and motel and other uh uh a non-residential uh development that will occur over time uh we did look at the economic impact uh of of the fee particularly given the length of time this evening spent on affordable housing i can appreciate how

4:17:28that would be a major concern kaiser marston's you may remember another economic consulting firm did an economic impact analysis your inclusionary zoning fee you adopted a fee that was within the range that they suggested would not have a significant negative impact on real

4:17:46estate investment in town and the fee we're proposing particularly for the multi-family unit when you take into account changes in both the wic tac stim fee and the the transformation fee that kaiser marston estimated the city would be adopting for multi-family units is actually the

4:18:06the the the wic tax fee proposed and the um proposed multi-family unit for the transportation fee for el cerrito actually comes out less than what was assumed in the kaiser marston analysis so there's some some comfort level there that this is not going to have a

4:18:22significant impact we also looked at fees in other cities uh you can see in this slide um el cerrito would be with this proposed view with them would be within the range of of fees that um are adopted in other cities in the region uh so with that i'll turn it over uh

4:18:42back to avetta for um for any questions and answers does the council have any questions yes okay go ahead and council member fidel yes i have a few short questions so i some of you know i used to work at bart and this is a big deal for bart too any expansions that impact stations skyscrapers being

4:19:02built next to a bart station there's an impact fee the new legislation that just passed sb 2923 will bart will have the opportunity to build and zone it in and of itself could they be hit up for the uh impact fee as well okay interesting the answer was yes for those that are

4:19:22watching tomorrow yeah yeah the answer the the answer is yes um those projects uh would have to come and pull building permits at the city and this few would be imposed at the building permit stage um so i know this is the goal of mtc and they've helped with some of the grant

4:19:38money just as el cerrito is getting to an economic development growth period here is there any negative impact that you see in this fee you know i i i've also been working with the wic tech board on on their fee and that stim fee is also going to be going up and and i uh uh spent about an

4:20:00hour with the hercules city council on that issue and and i i tell you the same thing that these are i would say relatively modest increases in the context of total development costs i think if you were talking if i were here in front of you talking about some of

4:20:21the housing impact fees or even the inclusionary fee that you adopted earlier those are much more significant and i might uh come to a different conclusion in discussing those but i would say these fees in the realm of a couple thousand you know way less than ten thousand even

4:20:39combined relatively modest not gonna have a big impact when you're talking about production costs of half a million dollars per unit these fees could change though over time when that amount of money that we don't have funded changes oh yeah you have the uh in fact the

4:20:55mitigation fee act requires you every five years to go back and i would recommend every five at least every five years you go back and look at all the assumptions in this program including the funding assumptions and consider whether there needs to be adjustments my final question is in this

4:21:09this is a separate pot of money this will go to a separate fund is that correct yeah yeah by state law this has to go into a special revenue account segregated and interest earnings on those account that account balance has to be credited back to that account and

4:21:23the funds can only be used for um the the the the uses indicated in the nexus study now those uses are indicated um by that list of projects but you're not restricted to just that list you can substitute because things are going to change the capital improvement plan is

4:21:43going to change you can substitute projects in and out as long as they are expanding enhancing or otherwise improving the multimodal transportation system on that citywide network not use the funding for any other purpose you can't use them to repave streets you

4:21:59can't use it for any maintenance you can't use it for any operating cost thank you very much councilmember yeah uh thank you very much for your report i did read it as everybody knows i i was fascinated by it i actually calculated the numbers out and it's 9.6 million dollars worth of revenue you're

4:22:17two thousand dollars short on your two percent markup um i did get the bia letter and i did review it and i'm i will say their um their their comment it i don't quite understand their comment based on the way you calculated the fees and i do do see that you have a

4:22:38a response to that can you in a minute uh tell us why the bia comments are are not uh something you something you found it easy to respond to which you did happy too um and i must say that uh your counsel and staff assisted in in drafting that response so i appreciate their help as

4:22:57well um many transportation impact fees are based on a forward-looking analysis using a tr what's called a travel demand model that tries to estimate future vehicle flows on streets and the capacity needs of those flows you know how wide do we have to make our streets

4:23:21to accommodate those flows to keep what's called the level of service typically in a to f and and so i think the bia was coming at this report from that uh more typical transportation impact fee whereas our nexus approach is taking really the typical approach that used

4:23:39that's used in almost every other public facility arena like a park impact fee you have three acres of park per thousand so we're going to charge new development to maintain that standard of three acres park so they were just coming from a different perspective it

4:23:53wasn't a wrong perspective it was just not quite understanding the way we did it in this case great thank you any other questions no i'll make a motion ready for a motion um we don't have have we done the public hearing it's a publication [Music] do i have a motion to extend the meeting

4:24:20remember that we extend the meeting for five minutes i'll second that five minutes and mr spencer thank you very much for for being staying so late and watching us go through our imaginations i'll i'll second that extension of five minutes all in favor aye all right opposed

4:24:36motion carries okay um so with that the public hearing is open do we have any um speakers from the public i have no um request to speak your honor all right um do i move to close this time i will move to close the public hearing right all in favor all right that's opposed

4:25:02motion carries great um any additional questions from the council nope um all right do we have emotion on motion the first ordinance um the first just said there was one looking in the place it must be the wrong place no you're in the right place introduced by time

4:25:26there's just one motion right another read number one under 6a oh i'm sorry okay introduced by uh let's see here oh there's a two part and you know i'm not used to this format may i may i or do you want to go i introduce uh by title and waive any further reading and approve an ordinance

4:25:52adding chapter 4.54 transportation impact fee to the el cerino municipal code title four dash revenue and finance i'll second all in favor aye is opposed extensions motion carries i have a motion i'll make a motion okay a resolution to the city council the city of el cerrito adopting a

4:26:15transportation impact fee and amending the master fees schedule their second oh i'll make a second okay all in favor those opposed abstentions motion carries all right now we will move on to some of our last items of business here the council liaison assignments we have

4:26:43handed out the council liaison assignments to the to the city council um are there any comments on this and if not um will someone make a motion to approve the list i will go ahead i'm just going to say i'll make a motion i make a motion that we approve the list

4:27:04that was created is in our packet second second quinto second all right all in favor aye aye abstentions knows all right motion carries all right and then last um for the reports from our council liaison assignments um well i'll do it next time okay and then um

4:27:33as clerk you did receive the health impact assessment um a website that the people from home can go and look at the health impact assessment for alta bates hospital yes i will include that in the minutes on the website all right thank you very much and with that i will adjourn my first

4:27:53meeting our next meeting will be scheduled for january 15th at 7 7 pm thank you okay good you