UnGovr Transcript
iHow this transcript is madeUnGovr transcribes the official recording with automated speech-to-text, separates speakers by voice, and matches voices to the seated roster. Names and attributions are AI estimates and may contain errors.Verify any quote yourself: click anywhere in the transcript and the official video jumps to that exact moment, so you can check any quote against the recording.0:00 – 0:021 turns
. . you You. You. You. Yeah. .
Roll call — called by City Clerk
Show transcript
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So just to let you know that we have simultaneous interpretation available between Spanish and English for today's meeting. If you'd like to follow along in Spanish, participate in Spanish, we have some listening devices available for you to do so. You can raise your hand if you'd like a device or you can come up to me, let me know. We will be in the room right next door for the entirety of the meeting.
It's time for public forum. Anybody that wishes to speak to anything, that is not on our agenda this evening.
Do we have any speakers? For those of you in the Zoom webinar, please use the raised hand icon and I will call on you. I do have three speaker slips. Our first speaker for a public forum will be Dave Roman.
Hello.
Well hello. Trying something new out, coming to the public forum and just sharing some thoughts and ideas so never done this before a little uncomfortable but you know what can I say? Starting with just how I see the City Council and the role which is to preserve at minimum and improve when possible the quality of life for the citizens of the city of Goleta.
And that's how I approach you, that's how I think of you and your function so just there's that thought. I came tonight to talk about the Lake Los Caneros area, a beautiful treasure within the city. I like to walk there a lot and it's very close to where I live But for those of you who've been there, you probably have noticed that there's a footbridge that has been closed down for a number of years.
And I've been thinking about that and wondering, imagining, I guess I'll say why it's taken so long to get that restored and operational again. And I think I have an idea, and I think it's because when you consider the cost of consultants and experts and contractors and making plans to make a plan, the costs just seem can go through the roof. And so the suggestion I had for you tonight was to consider bringing the whole project in-house and consider just using city staff, public works staff, and do the job that way. I think by doing that probably save more than 50% of whatever the cost would be otherwise.
I think it could be an intimidating project when you just look at all the links in the chain you could create. So, I'd also suggest looking at some of the local organizations within the community that might want to partner on something like this. In the old days this could have been a Boy Scout Eagle Project. They're up to that level these days but It's surprising what pools of talent and knowledge there are to maybe collaborate, but the bottom line is I think we really need to get that done.
That link creates a perfect loop walk around the lake and it's been missing for a number of years now so I'm here to say I think we need it.
Agenda Discussionitems moved / continued / pulled — click to expand
Thank you so much and as you may know because it's not on the agenda we cannot respond but thank you and we'll get in touch
Yeah, and just thanks for the opportunity for
sharing
these
thoughts. Thank you.
Our next in-person speaker is Richard Foster.
Evening Council. I have seen you all holding shovels before so you could be the perfect work staff for this project. If our city's ever gonna catch up on the backlog of infrastructure maintenance, we need to drastically rethink our priorities. You cannot tax your way out of it. If you raise the tot tax 2%, that's only gonna bring in approximately two million more a year at the current collection rates. Yet on road repair this year alone, we're behind another 6.9 million despite having spent 12 million this year and that's just road work.
We need to do less not more to finance our infrastructure backlog We need better judgment on the selection of our projects. Projects should be chosen not by desire, but by need and by affordability. Consider our train station which has already left the station I understand. In 2024 85,300 people rode the train in or out of Goleta. That means there was 234 people who rode the train each day from our city with five trips in and five trips out that meant each train served 24 people To serve that demand, we've built a $32 million 8500 square foot train station which was to have a restaurant and now last I heard was a grab-and-go with showers for commuters.
Though this might be a fun project where money no object the 12 or 15 million of city money we spent on it could have well been spent on maintaining our infrastructure The council needs better demand, better projections for projects. The San Jose bike path started out at an estimated 22 million and ended up at about 48 million. Our library model began at an estimated 5.1 million, the last number I saw was closing on eight million. And the list of budget inflation CIP projects goes on and on and on. Lacking better estimates you will consistently be surprised by hits to your budget which will mean less money for infrastructure.
Pending future capital improvement projects need to be eliminated largely. We do not need a list of 95 possible projects where, gee wouldn't it be nice if lists for public works to spend time writing up and having. For to afford to maintain our city's infrastructure, programs will need to be cut. Boutique projects need to be avoided and eventually jobs will need to be eliminated which means less staff and lower staff needs means more money freed up for work. And then you can raise tax where you can but you're not going to tax a way out of it.
It is possible, which is true of many cities in California, for a city to have a balanced budget and to have good credit rating and still be going bankrupt because infrastructure costs and deficits numbers show up on our budget. Thank
you.
Our next
in-person speaker is Fred Sleeman
Madam Mayor, Council Members. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you again tonight. I'm a representative of the President of the University Mobile Home Residence Park in Goleta and it's regarding The 55 senior designation of the park to remain as such. I see that it wasn't, it's not on the agenda for tonight but I was just wondering according to the last meeting we attended here that that was going to be, the issue was going to be given to staff members and then it would come up again at this meeting.
But I don't see it on the agenda. The residents are concerned about this change to our park. So I was just wondering if there was anything new that transpired since the last meeting?
I'm not aware of anything at this point. No. And I know that we're working on it.
We're working on it?
Yeah, and we'll get in touch with you absolutely when it's going to be on the agenda, I would think. Yes? Yeah.
Okay. Absolutely. Thank you very much.
That concludes our in-person speakers. For those of you on the Zoom webinar, please use the raised hand icon and I will call on you. Our first Zoom speaker is April Reed. Please unmute yourself and you'll have three minutes.
Can you hear me?
Yes thank you.
Good so once again i want to talk about Transferring any building on Kenwood Village to Shelby. As I said before, Council Member Kuriakou stated to me it was well over a year ago that the one way that we may be able to stop building on Kenwood would be to build on Shelby. Apparently that seems to be happening there is a notice up on Shelby indicating they intend to build although there hasn't been any Information about any meetings, or any of the 3.
Departments for you guys planning commission or design board although I have spoken to each of these departments in the last few weeks. Um, I will state that I do think that Shelby is a better. A place to build than Kenwood. It's got more lanes, better streets than the one lane in each direction street for Kenwood. It'd be much easier for an emergency vehicle to get in and out of Cathedral Oaks than it would on Cali Real.
As you know or should know because I've sent you many, many emails about all the accidents Including fatal accidents that occur on the Cattery Island near Kenwood Village. It was, it will just get worse and then I know some of you don't really care much about the animals but Kenwood Village does not have a wildlife corridor for the animals to go anywhere so essentially they would all die unless you gathered all of them up and move them which I don't see happening With Shelby, the animals have the opportunity to go across the street and into huge mountains.
I don't have a timer so I'm just going by what I think is still okay. The independent said that with Shelby you guys have enough buildings to accommodate this state So I would assume that, I would request that you all make sure that the Kenwood properties are transferred to Shelby properly so we don't have to destroy Kenwood. Thank
you.
And that concludes public
forum. Okay amendments or adjustments to the agenda?
No changes tonight Madam Mayor, but I can jump into City Manager update. And I do have a few announcements but want to start with the one that's listed on the agenda under CM updates. This is kind of yeah the closing of a door and opening of a window moment for us we have some changes in our policing personnel and so we want to acknowledge that tonight So I'll start with the outgoing Chief of Police and then I'll turn it over to you, Mayor. And then maybe after that we can do an introduction of our new Chief of Police if that's okay? So we see Frank here. Frank Vasquez has served As the Chief of Police, Lieutenant Frank Vasquez from the Sheriff's Office for over 18 months.
He was just a joy to work with. I would say he was very Goleta. Very calm, very easygoing, great smile. I can see him smiling right there. He was very responsive. I tested him one time at 3 30 in the morning. He texted me right back Yeah, I'm up too. Are you? Very decisive and he was just great to work with. We have weekly staff meetings. He attended all those meetings.
He was a great addition to our staff meetings that run on for two three hours sometimes but he sat through all those meetings and he was just a great chief of police and so it's sad to see him go but with that I'll turn it over to you in the council and mayor I think you have something for him
Well, you didn't stay with us very long. But I hope on your next journey will be something you'll enjoy as much as you enjoyed Goleta since you are Goleta. Good to hear and we so, I'm so honored and privileged to present you in special recognition of the Sheriff's Lieutenant Frank Vasquez Chief of Police Services, August 20th 2024 to December 21st 2025 with your tile in appreciation of your dedication professionalism and commitment to the city of Goleta January 20th 2026. No one works harder
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than the deputies and our sheriff and our lieutenants and our chief of police you guys work so hard every day and we're so honored to have you So I'll present you with this tile. And is somebody going to take pictures with all of us? And then if you'd like to say a few words, please do.
Well, kind of a lot going out there. And I didn't really prepare a speech so I'll just speak from the heart. So it will probably be really short. Thank you. My time in Goleta was absolutely amazing. It flew by, the people of Goleta were amazing, staff was amazing and their leadership in the city is amazing too. They really care about the community and make public safety number one but I mean above that it's really the community is number one.
You guys have been a who to work with and work for. You really have been. Robert, great times. It really is. Isaac, our Dutch brother conversations. Flavor of the week. Jaime, we were thrilled to use. And everybody else. I see you back there hiding. Absolutely amazing. I think this will actually be the highlight of my 22 years career thus far, and I'm not really sure I'll find another assignment that's going to show me as much fun and joy as Galeta has because you guys truly are a city that cares with staff that cares in community that cares so I'm definitely not having as much fun now as I did but I will hold these memories close to my heart and I say thank you thank you everybody
Thank you.
And Madam Mayor, like I said you know closing the door opening a window and Frank is really indicative of the quality of the personnel that we get from the Sheriff's Office. We just get great personnel and some of them are seated over there but our newest member from the Sheriff Department is also seated over there. Over the end of the year this all happened towards the end Lieutenant Jarrett Morris was picked To succeed Frank as our chief of police, there was some shuffling in the sheriff's office. As you're aware retirement of the undersheriff leads to a chain reaction of events and out of that Jarrett Morris came our way so he's only been here six weeks yeah looking at his watch so maybe don't give him any tough questions yet but I did want to acknowledge Jarrett Morris and ask if he would come up to the podium maybe introduce himself to the community
thank you
Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you Robert. Hello City Council. First I want to thank Frank, had big shoes to fill we've been together at the Sheriff's Office right about the same time and like he said he's not going to a place as much fun as Goleta but I'm coming from a place not as much fun into Goleta so I'm happy to be here sorry Frank Anyways, good evening Mayor. Good evening City Council members, city staff that I've been getting to know over the past few weeks and Goleta community members. I'm happy to be here.
Thank you for letting me say a few words tonight. As I said, I've been proudly serving the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office since 2005. I am honored to be transitioning into the position of the Goleta Valley Lieutenant which effectively allows me to step in as the Chief of Police Services for the City of Goleta. Sheriff Brown and our department have long been committed to keeping the peace since 1850, as you see on the side of our patrol cars through professional fair and community focused service. That aligns perfectly with how I approach this assignment being accessible, responsive, and fully dedicated to the safety and wellbeing of the city of Goleta.
My team and I which consists of our patrol squads, our traffic unit, our community resource deputies, and all of our sergeants and deputies are here to partner with you We'll continue building on the strong relationship that Frank and others have already established and put in place, listening to your concerns and working together to keep our neighborhoods safe.
I'm excited about this new chapter. I'm grateful for the trust placed in me, especially by Robert and Jaime right off the bat at our first lunch when they found out in one afternoon that it was me. And I look forward to serving the Goleta community please and this goes out to everybody. I believe my email and phone number have been posted but please feel free and don't hesitate to reach out to me. Thank you again and good evening. I appreciate it.
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And welcome to the team.
Thank you so much. It's been a blast so far, those meetings are something else.
Do we have any speakers?
For those of you who wish to speak to this item please use your raised hand icon and I will call on you. I'm seeing none.
Okay thank you. Thank
you Mayor. Thank You City Council. Madam Mayor, I do have two more announcements if that's okay. Relatively quick reminder that it's our first coffee and community event of the year. It's coming up January 31st from 9 to 11 and it's at the Goleta Valley Library Express behind us. It's on the corner of Las Canarias Way and Hollister Avenue. Says here it's right across from the Goleta Valley Athletic Club. I guess it is but it's also just over the parking lot from here So Join the Mayor will be there, but Councilmember Carriaco will also be here. This is in his district and our new Chief of Police I'm reading right here, Jarrett Morris you just met will also be there. Spanish interpretation will be available and Slow Dough Co. Coffee & Donuts will be there also so Go Slow Dough Co., see what I did there?
Goleta Slow Dough Co.? Activities for kids, tours of the library. Again this is Saturday January 31st 9 to 11. Hope everyone can attend that event and then the second announcement is that our LEAD did kick off. Our LEAD Academy kicked off this past week On Thursday, 35 members in this class and attendance all 35 were there. I was there just made a few remarks so was Hami but every council member took a turn introduced themselves to the group.
And it seemed like it was a great session and everything went well. This is a six-week class, and they already got a homework assignment apparently from Ms. Hoover. They were asked or told or invited to watch this meeting tonight as their homework assignment. So there may be some in the audience, and there may be some watching in Zoom. If there's anyone in the LEAD Academy in the audience, please raise your hand. One, two, okay.
Some of them spoke. They got extra credit.
Yeah, extra credit! So great class, as you guys all know. Thank you council for all going to the first one and I know the staff and the group is excited to proceed with the five sessions. That is it.
All right thank you. Exciting. Moving on to consent calendar.
Yes, thank you Mayor. That's item A1 approval of the City Council meeting minutes of December 16th 2025 and the special city council meeting that's January 12th 2026 acceptance of the November 2025 investment transaction report. Item A3 purchase of fleet vehicles. Item A4 second reading of an ordinance amending section 17.4 030 of the Caledon Municipal Code regarding accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling units to comply with recent changes in state law on finding the actions to be statutorily exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act under section 21080.17 of the Public Resources Code.
And that is to conduct the second reading and adopt ordinance number 26 next order entitled an ordinance of the City Council of the city of Goleta, California amending sections 17.4 and .030 of the Goleta Municipal Code relating to accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling units and finding the action to be a statutorily exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act under public resources code section 21080.17 case number 25-0005-ORD item A5 ratification of Santa Barbara County ordinance number 5269 in resolutions 25250 and 25251 regarding the fire codes And item A6, resolution and agreement for a donation and relocation of artwork to the San Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center.
Thank you. Council wish to pull any item from consent? I'm not seeing any. Do we have any speakers?
Any member of the public who wishes to speak to consent item please use your hand icon and I will call on you. I'm seeing none, Mayor.
Okay then I'm looking for a motion to approve consent.
I'd move to approve the consent items A1 through A6.
I'll second.
Roll call vote please.
Roll-call vote Passed 5–0 move to approve the consent items A1 through A6. I'll second. Roll call
Show transcript
There you go, okay. Okay moving on to our presentations.
Yes our first presentation item is Item B1 a proclamation of the City Council of the city of Goleta California proclaiming Joanne Meade Young as the 2025 Congressional Woman of the Year.
I have the honor of presenting this one so Joanne Meade Young if you could come up to the podium
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I
feel like it's a full cycle, full circle of our relationship. That goes back a long ways. Yes, okay that's another story. Okay so this is a proclamation of the City Council of the city of Goleta California proclaiming Joanne Meade Young as 2025 Congressional Woman of the Year Whereas Joanne Meade Young, born and raised in Hamilton, Ohio earned her BS in elementary education from Ohio State University. And began her education career as an elementary school teacher including positions of primary language development specialist, library media specialist, and instructional consultant Whereas Joanne received her MA in tier two supervision and administration from UC Santa Barbara. And served as the director of Goleta State Preschool, principal in four elementary schools in Goleta California and retired as principal of Elwood School after a 17 year career in June 2007.
Whereas Joanne serves on the board of the Democratic Women of Santa Barbara County as treasurer and co-chair of membership. The commission for women, he served on the commission for women representing district two and was founding member of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Committee and served on the board of the Family Services Agency. Can't keep a good woman down.
Whereas through her career, Joanne broke racial barriers becoming the first black principal of Santa Barbara County in 1990. And whereas serving as principal for Mountain View School, Brandon, El Rancho and Elwood, Joanne insured low income children Children of color and students with learning disabilities receive equitable access to learning and support. And whereas her work has enriched generations of students, and continues to strengthen the Central Coast.
So now, therefore be it resolved that on this 20th day of January 2026 the City Council of the city of Goleta California does hereby proclaim Joanne Meade Young to 2025 Congressional Woman of the Year. Approved the 20th day of January 2026 and signed by Paula Perotti mayor for the city of Goleta. And I know some Brandon folks, Brandon and Albranto folks are here. So yay! You want to take a picture with me and Joanne and then all of us? And then you can have a few words to say.
Then I'm done bossing you around.
Oh, thank you.
First of all, I'd like to thank the mayor and all of the council members for this wonderful acknowledgement. And... The thing that I really am excited about saying and I, may I turn that way? Sure. Yeah. I know you. I wanna talk to the people of Goleta I want to say thank you to the City of Goleta and thank you to the Goleta Union School District. In 1990, I was blessed to be hired to work as a principal in Goleta that wasn't even a city yet but now you are and I have to say it Goleta is so amazing I served at four different campuses and there was one consistent thing with each school.
I had amazing teachers, incredible children and parents that would go the extra mile not only for their child but every child in that school. I just feel like I was so blessed to move from Connecticut to this beautiful, beautiful state and get to work in this amazing city. I can't thank you enough. And I've been retired since 2007 but I have One of the teachers that worked with me, she was an Isla Vista school teacher and she was on the Brandon campus.
And now she is the principal of El Camino School. So it's just so wonderful to continue to see the teachers and children and parents that I was so blessed to serve with here and continuing to do that great work. Thank you all so much.
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Do we have any speakers?
Yes, those of you on the Zoom webinar please use the raised hand icon if you'd like to speak to this item. I'm seeing none Mayor.
Do we have any speakers from the audience? I don't want to put anyone in a spot. Oh, okay! Uh-oh.
You're in trouble now, Joanne. I just wanted to congratulate Ms. Young on this award. My daughter started her teaching career at Goleta Union School District. So she taught four years here and then went to San Diego but my boys did their entire career which is kindergarten through sixth grade at El Camino so Goleta Union School was in good hands during that time. Thanks.
Thank you for that. I'll just say one little quick story. When my youngest daughter was starting kindergarten, I went to check out the school. It was Brandon and it was being reopened after being closed for 17 years. And I met Joanne. And there were a lot of folks, not a lot but there was several that were concerned because they were moving their children out of El Rancho, Elwood and they were concerned. And Brandon needed so much. They needed a library with books. They needed playground equipment. They need desks. It was a lot. And Joanne said we're going to make this happen We're going to make this happen. I met her in the first day, she said and you and Marsha Hill and Cindy Armstrong who are in the audience are going to start a PTA and we're going to make this school fabulous.
And you know what? We did. It's a fabulous elementary school and it was a lot of hard work but thank you for me seeing something in me I didn't see in myself so thank you. Okay
moving on to the next presentation.
And that's item B2, a proclamation of the City Council of the city of Galeta California proclaiming January 19th through 25th 2026 as e-bike safety awareness week.
Yes Mayor Pro Tem will present this.
Okay, hello. All right I am thrilled to proclaim that the City Council of the city of Goleta California is proclaiming January 19th through 25th 2026 as e-bike safety awareness week whereas riding an electric assisted bicycle also known as an e-bike continues to increase in popularity for all ages Whereas there are many benefits of e-bikes. They can help cover longer riding distances, climb steeper terrain, travel at higher speeds and enable users to travel by bike instead of car and thereby helping to encourage physical activity and reduce traffic congestion and pollution.
And, whereas e-bikes are heavier and faster than standard bicycles. And without the proper safety education and training, e-bike riders have a higher risk of becoming severely injured or killed in a crash. Whereas as e-bikes become more commonplace it's also important for drivers to familiarize themselves with sharing the road with e- bikes And whereas in an effort to improve public safety, the state of California has passed e-bike laws that regulate who and where each type of e-bike can lawfully be ridden. And that riders 17 years of age and under must always wear a helmet.
And whereas e-bikes can bring joy and a sense of freedom. And some collisions can be avoided by practicing common sense safety including checking your battery, brakes, chain, and tire pressure before you ride Wearing a helmet and visible clothing, whether you are a rider or a passenger. Watching your speed by riding slowly and respectfully on multi-use paths or where pedestrians are present. Riding predictably, using hand signals and keeping eye contact to communicate your movements to other vehicles.
Avoiding texting, talking on the phone, or listening to loud music while riding. And obeying traffic signs, signals, and roadway laws just as cars are required to. And whereas e-bike safety awareness will take place January 19th through 25th and will include e-bike presentation and helmet distribution at Goleta Valley Junior High, Dos Pueblos High School and San Marcos High School. And a community skills class group ride at the Goleta Valley Junior High on Saturday January 24th 2026 So therefore, be it resolved on this 20th day of 2026 that the City Council does hereby proclaim January 19th through 25th, 2026 as eBuy Safety Awareness Week and encourages residents to learn more about this emerging popular activity.
Yay! It's official and it's signed by Mayor Paula Perotti. One photo, and then one photo of the whole group.
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Everyone take one big step that way.
Very good.
Okay, thank you Madam Mayor and Council Members. My name is Laini Jayakasuma and I'm an Education Coordinator with Move Santa Barbara County. My lovely colleagues Barry and Hannah keep coming in lieu of my absence and telling me about me so I finally came. I wanted to say thank you for your support of E-Bike Safety Awareness Week. Move Santa Barbara County works to make walking, biking and public transit a safe option so that residents can choose active and sustainable forms of transportation Our education program at the schools focuses on teaching students how to be safe when they're walking and biking to school and around town, and reminds them to always wear a helmet.
The eBike Safety Awareness Week events are an extension of our education program but with a few extra perks. As the proclamation said we're distributing helmets and bike lights to improve safety and visibility. We were at San Marcos and Goleta Valley Junior High Earlier today, and it was a hit. The students really liked it. As a part of the rest of our upcoming events, MOVE is also hosting an e-bike skills class and group ride this Saturday. We're going to be covering basic e-bike maintenance checks, any rules to follow when you're biking on the street, and how to safely interact with traffic.
While we teach students about how to take responsibility for their safety when they're riding bikes, we can't talk about bicyclist safety without mentioning the responsibility of car drivers to keep cyclists safe. So our quick PSA, drivers please slow down and be aware around bicyclists and pedestrians. Many of us are already familiar with the benefits of e-bikes, including allowing us to travel longer distances, climb steeper hills, carry heavier loads and travel at higher speeds.
You know many of the car trips that we're able to make are being transferred to e-bikes and we save money and we'd reduce traffic parking demand and of course air pollution. We're really thrilled that more people are riding e-bikes around town and we're excited to share What we know about bikes and how to get around safely to help everyone be a safer rider. We look forward to continue seeing students and the general public at the rest of our events.
So once again, thank you to this city for your support of these activities. And if any of you guys are e-bike riders I hope to see you this Saturday. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Lainey. And we just want to take an opportunity while we have this moment to introduce for the first time our brand new executive director who's joining us today as her first day on the job. So it's putting it a test Sarah Ayanarone.
I don't usually get a proclamation on my first day of work. That's great! No, but the team at Move Santa Barbara County is amazing and I actually relocated here to Santa Barbara County from Portland Oregon this week so I'm the newest resident of your county and believe at least the newest resident in Santa Barbara I just wanted to extend our organization's not just gratitude for this proclamation but the recognition of e-biking is such an important transportation option for so many of our community members who are facing challenges, not just with mobility but household affordability. And we know that the burdens of car ownership it's very expensive right now and making sure these families And the students and their families who are also having to access school and jobs can avail themselves of this transportation option with safety.
I also want you to know that Move Santa Barbara County is at your service if you need any support advancing public and active transportation initiatives, infrastructure, education or encouragement programs please do not hesitate to call. My name is Sarah Ayanarone and you can reach us I'll leave my business cards behind with the clerk so you can reach out. Thanks again for the proclamation. We really appreciate it.
Thank you. Do we have any speakers?
Yes, those of you on Zoom who wish to speak to this item please use the raised hand icon and I will call on you all. No one on Zoom but if you would like to make your way to the podium to speak.
You could fill out a speaker slip later. It's okay, I know who you are. I
know where you live. Only a few words or something, okay. No, I think this is great to have the proclamation. Every morning I walk past the apartments on Cathedral Oaks there's two boys who come out with their helmets on but guess what? Straps down here, straps behind so I'm hoping that the safety staff will say guess what you need to do. Thank you.
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And I have no more speakers for this item, Mayor.
Okay thank you.
Moving on to the next item.
Yes thank you that is Item B3 a proclamation of the City Council of the City of Goleta California proclaiming January 2026 as Human Trafficking Awareness Month
and Councilmember Kasdan will present this one
So this is a proclamation of the City Council, City of Goleta proclaiming January 26th as Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Whereas human trafficking is a form of modern slavery that occurs in every state including California Where victims are forced to work in various forms of labor exploitation, including but not limited to commercial sex acts and other services that are induced through force, fraud and coercion.
And whereas due to its isolated and discreet nature many individuals across the globe are unaware that trafficking exists in their communities. It is estimated that more than 28 million people around the world are victims of human trafficking, and whereas human trafficking victims face a cruelty that has no place in a civilized world. It is a crime that can take many forms and one that tears at our social fabric, debases our common humanity and violates where we stand for or what we stand for as a country.
And whereas increased education about how to identify human trafficking along with increased knowledge of in-state resources and services for those affected by criminal exploitation can help decrease the number of future victims And whereas the Santa Barbara County Human Trafficking Task Force is committed to using all applicable laws and resources for investigating human trafficking and prosecuting those engaged in it. And whereas the Santa Barbara County Human Trafficking Task Force has worked diligently to bring awareness to the fact that human trafficking occurs closer to home than one might think, That California ranks number one in the country for reported human trafficking cases, and that Santa Barbara County is home to hundreds of survivors of trafficking and exploitation.
And whereas Human Trafficking Awareness Month is an opportunity to recognize the crucial or critical role all Santa Barbara County residents play in preventing reporting and adjudicating these heinous crimes Now therefore be it resolved that on this 20th day of January, 2026 the City Council of the city of Goleta California does hereby proclaim the month of January as Human Trafficking Awareness Month.
The 20th of January signed by Mayor Paul Perotti and I guess
Take home.
Good evening. My name is Tiffany Carty, and I have the honor of serving as the victim witness program supervisor with the Santa Barbara County District Attorney's Office. Human Trafficking Awareness Month is a time when we bring attention to the reality of human trafficking within our own community. People often think of human trafficking as something that happens out there in larger cities, and it does.
But they think this without realizing that our neighbors, friends, students and at-risk youth in our own backyards are frequently exposed to the pain of this trauma. In recent years the risk factors for human trafficking have grown exponentially. due to risk and vulnerability factors, such as the ever-rising cost of living and housing instability, mental health issues and addictions, the increased online exposure of our youth to predatory behaviors, the incorporation of AI in cybercrime tactics, and the lack of social support systems and unmet basic needs for struggling families.
From 2017 to 2024, I don't have the 2025 stats yet, so keep you posted. 283 human trafficking investigations were conducted within our county, 90% of which involved sex trafficking. Of these 283 investigations, 94 human traffickers were identified and we were able to arrest 59 of these individuals for human trafficking related crimes. Of these cases, 53 were able to be criminally charged. 37 have pled guilty for these offenses. Many of these perpetrators are still working their way through the criminal justice system.
What I want to focus on is the many survivors that our Victim Witness Program has been able to serve. In this same time span, we have identified positively 261 survivors. 85 of which are children and teens. 40% of these survivors, so just under half, are residents of Santa Barbara County. An incredible 92% of these victim-survivors are United States citizens and legal permanent residents.
These survivors often look just like you and I. It's the child who's regularly truant, and can't stop falling asleep in class because they can't stay awake after a night spent in sexual exploitation. It is the college student who believes she met the love of her life when she was actually a target and a commodity to be sold later. It is the person experiencing financial hardship who simply wants to survive and be able to put food on their table It is the teenager who ran away after his family rejected him for disclosing that he is gay, now desperate for a safe place to stay when he meets an older individual at the bus stop offering him acceptance.
The Santa Barbara County Human Trafficking Task Force was established in 2013. We are a multidisciplinary coalition of law enforcement agencies, community service providers, community advocates and our own DA Victim Witness Program. As a team we provide training, public outreach, survivor-centered services, assist with investigations and prosecutions of offenders, and equip local leadership with research and relevant data.
I am particularly proud of our hard-working, empathetic victim advocates who provide emotional support, information, referrals, accompaniment during court hearings and critical testimony and advocate tirelessly for survivors' needs. Thank you for recognizing this critical issue within our own community. Please know, our task force is always ready to provide prevention and awareness training for education, for youth service providers, businesses, local faith-based communities and nonprofit organizations.
It is our hope that you will find ways to lean in to the issue of human trafficking within this county that we call home. As stated best by Pauline Keezer, when you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better. Thank you.
Thank You. Tiffany
I was wondering if I could ask a question? I know in the last year there's been some restructuring of funding at the federal level, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of State. How has the local task force, how has the victim witness program adjusted to any impacts that you may or may not be feeling from those changes?
I will say at least within Santa Barbara County, we have been very blessed in that our funding comes from a diverse set of sources. So while yes, we do receive federal funding, we also have a lot of organizations that donate. We also receive state funds as well and in fact when federal funding was cut, was it Last year I think, but the governor actually built in a three-year safeguard for all of the victim witness programs in the state to make up for that money.
So while we are starting to feel some of a pinch and Some of the extras that we would want to do, we might not be able to do. I will say as of right now our needs are still being met but if anyone in here feels the desire to just send funding our way, we will never turn it away. But yeah, we're working on it.
Well thank you and thank you to your partners like DVS, North County Rape Crisis, STESA and others. Thank you for your work.
Of course! Do we have any other speakers?
Yes, those of you on the Zoom webinar who wish to speak to this item please use your raised hand icon and I will call on you. I'm seeing none Mayor.
Moving onto the next presentation.
Yes thank you that is Item B4 Galeta Valley Library interior design presentation
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Well good evening Mayor and Council.
Good evening Ms. Plummer.
We are so excited to be here tonight and so excited to talk to you about the Interior Design Project. I'm just gonna share a couple words of where we're at. I believe that we do have our architect on the line We have Jeffrey Miller. So David, Mr. Kataya will move him over so he's available if we have any questions when we're done. We'll let our City Librarian Ms. Saucedo take you through the presentation but I wanted to share with you that once we came to in the fall and we started working on the interior design presentation we've had Lots of activity, lots of happenings and so much behind the scenes going on. And we're right now kind of right in the middle of everything trying to make sure we're headed in the right direction or really close to the final stages looking at understanding where we're at right now With spacing, with how the library is laid out.
And then once we get through this phase then it's the fun exciting part with putting the bursts of color in and choosing our final color palettes and choosing the exact furnishings that whether it's going to be colored, the types of colored chairs tables and the exact furnishings that are going in so these are all Blockings for everybody to see. And I share that because as you look at the slides, we know they appear kind of bland and we've heard that comment. We gave the same presentation to the friends in the library but unfortunately because we're not there yet to drop those colors in it's kind of the artist sketch and then the artist comes in with the color at the end. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Lacedo and let her share the most exciting part of the evening
Thank you.
Good evening Madam Mayor, members of the Council as well as all of our community members joining us today. We're so pleased to share this with you thank you Miss Plummer for that introduction we'll go ahead and we'll dive in and just share an update on where we are with the interior design layout for Goleta Valley Library This is what we have in store for you today. So we'll start with a brief project overview, just to recap for what brought us to the point where at this evening and then for anyone who's unfamiliar with the project will bring everybody up to speed in 30 seconds or less and then we'll talk a little bit about the input process for how the interior design layout that we're presenting this evening how this was created. A lot of input from a number of different parties went into the creation, so we feel that it's very well-rounded and representative of many different voices and interests in the community.
So we'll touch base on that. And then really the heart of the presentation will focus on the virtual interior design tour. So I'll walk you through slide by slide with renderings created by the incredible team at JMAD Jeffrey Miller Architecture & Design who's on the line this evening. So pleased to share this with you and we'll finish, I'm so excited I skipped ahead but we'll finish with a capital campaign update just to share how we intend to bring these incredible visions to life in the very near future and we'll end with a room for discussion. We'd love to hear community feedback and receive guidance from council and answer any questions.
So with that, we'll dive in. And so the construction is expected to begin very soon on the 500 North Fairview facility and so there's an infrastructure project that is going to seek to bring the building up to current code standards and regulations to improve accessibility and focuses on infrastructure. But this interior design project that we're presenting on this evening is really a project within a project. And so, this really was born out of an opportunity that was identified when the library is closed and vacant.
We have this moment in time that we're able to do really a once-in-a-generation refresh of the space and get the interior design as well as the facility's bones itself upgraded and ready for generations of library joy to be discovered. So going about that is certainly a far-reaching process. We wanted to make sure that we were designing something that was relevant and responsive, that it was something that really met the unique local needs of our patron base here in Goleta. And so we asked our community directly. We held a community visioning survey last summer We shared our interior design vision and sought input from the Library Advisory Commission over multiple meetings. In August, we brought an initial concept presentation to this council and incorporated feedback received there.
We've also met several times with our board at the Friends of the Goleta Valley Library both on their specific space but then also as a group who has been such a part of the library's history, we wanted their thoughts on its future. Next, we did meet with the Boisal family as the Jake Boisal Reading Room will be rededicated. We met with them a number of times over the past few months and we are very pleased with what we can share for that very special space in the library.
And we also met with our library team themselves so the workers who are our frontline library staff who really have that sense of this is how the library is used. That was something that was so important to hear their voices on, was this is not only how it will operate on paper but how it operates in real life with human behavior as that sort of driving force behind these visions.
So next, join me on a virtual tour inside the library. So just to start with a note, I know Ms. Plummer mentioned this earlier but the renderings you'll see today are really in the phase two that's illustrated on this slide so that the phase of the interior design process that we're presenting on this evening focuses on the placement and the layout and so in the renderings you'll see that there's a little bit of a muted color palette but that's not representative The point in the process we're at right now, you can see in the diagram it looks a little bit like IKEA furniture but that isn't representative of sort of the eventual furniture that will be included in the library.
In phase one, you can see we were really looking at the overall space. The border of the facility in that darker black line represents the exterior walls which within the scope of this project could not be adjusted and so we're working within that footprint and then the phase of the project that we've just completed is the layout of furnishings. And just, I know there are so many people with construction knowledge in this room this evening but I myself had quite a bit of construction knowledge to learn in this process and so understanding that in order to have the electrical and the lighting be finalized was dependent on where the bookshelves will be so that the lights didn't illuminate The first thing I want to talk about is the being able to finalize the construction specs, and then also pre is the step before the last step which is the furniture selection which we're so excited.
Those will be this is the color of wood that's gonna be on the bookshelves. This is the rug we've chosen for the story time area. And so that is all coming in the next phase. So we're right in between those two. This is at a glance of the entire facility, so we'll dive into each zone very specifically in the slides to come. But just as an overall snapshot, anyone who's been to the library at 500 North Fairview and loves the facility as much as we do will recognize a lot of familiarity in this space. So when you walk in through the doors, you will still see the Friends of the Library sale area When you walk into the library, the adult side will be on the left and the children and teen area will be on the right.
Our staff area is still going to be in that footprint in the lower right corner of the screen but there are a few changes so we wanted just to highlight those before diving in to give a little bit of preface to those slides. The first area of note is that when you walk into the library, previously the circulation desk was what was the initial So I'm going to be talking a little bit about what we're doing.
Great for connecting, there will be some short-term seating. So we were really envisioning sort of how our community uses the space and this is really what we envisioned like yeah meet me at the library at three o'clock okay I'll meet you right in the middle or oh I picked this up just to have five minutes to spare on my lunch break so I popped in there's a space right in the middle and they have so many great things right in the middle that was kind of what we imagined that user experience to be I'm going to start by saying thank you to all of you for being here today.
Whether you get further into the adult side or further into the children's side sort of the longer your stay will be and so we'll focus more on the placement of the Adult study pods as well as the interactive areas and the boys all reading nook for children in our further slides And then lastly I wanted to highlight that our teens will finally have their own space. We're so thrilled being adjacent to We're right across the street from Junior High School, as well as so close to Dos Pueblos in San Marcos. We're so excited to be able to really have that space that feels designed specifically for teens where there's a lot of interactive seating and shopping which we'll cover.
So heading into the library, We see something that's very familiar, which is our books for sale. So our Friends of the Library will have a designated sorting area in the lobby as well as browsable stacks. These are mostly received from donations and they're priced for sale at very affordable price points. As much as it's important to borrow materials in a library we're also big advocates for building your home library and so with materials priced as low as 25 cents for children's book we want it to be very accessible for families to come into the library And pick up a big stack of books that are theirs to keep. Their children can read them and color on them, and they can really make them their own and not have to worry about replacing them if something happens.
It allows families to build their home libraries.
And I just wanted to point out, you see this slide says updated. The previous slide the architect had inadvertently put books in our display case and we know how beloved the display case was so he since then had just returned the display case. So it we wanted to make sure that community saw that their display case will remain. So that's the only thing that was updated in that slide.
Thank
You This is another view of the lobby, but if you were to turn around and look back towards the doors you entered in from. So we are looking at an updated door and window layout throughout the facility. And so these are sliding doors that are a little bit further back so that the grade leading up to the entrance meets ADA accessibility requirements. And so we do still have that beautiful storefront so that you can have lots of natural light The community room entrance will stay just as it was, and then just to the left of the community room entrance there's a door that will be the Friends of the Library designated sorting area. So our Friends of the Library, a completely volunteer-driven organization, will have a place to process and price donations and to accept membership forms and complete other tasks as needed so they will have a space that they can Prepare materials to bring out and stock the lobby area.
So we're very excited to continue this This was the updated slide with the display case feature Next as I mentioned when you walk right into the library center area, this is our rendering for that community hub area right in the middle. So you can see the adult patio straight ahead so you could walk directly across the library and enjoy outdoor seating on the patio That will remain. The doors and windows will also be replaced throughout, so those will be upgraded windows and doors.
And then this is our highly browsable area that has lots of displays, and you can see that there's a variety of shelving to allow multiple users to browse the space at any given time. You'll also note the updated lighting and ceiling. So although these aren't final colors and furnishings for this space, this helps to illustrate a lot of those upgrades that contribute to the overall accessibility with upgraded lighting that helps to make sure that the spaces are very easy to navigate and just provides that interior design refresh throughout.
If you were to turn around and look back through the doors you came in through, you'll get a peek at the service desk location. And so that is where we will have the staff available for assistance with creating a library card account, to troubleshoot if you need help downloading an e-book, if you want to learn how to use your tablet to access library materials, if you want to hear about the programs That was something we heard so much in our community visioning survey, that our community really values the feeling of this is your friendly neighborhood library with staff. If you call the library, you get a person on the other end of the line.
So really wanting to keep that, that we know our patrons so well and Thank you for joining us today. And so we do have the lower counter height for ADA requirements. And then also on the children's side, which isn't featured in this photo, there will be a lower side as well. A lot of children would eagerly sort of stand on their tiptoes and peek over the counter to try to talk to a staff member. And so we just want it to really feel that anyone who is in the library can come on up and chat and ask for help, and we will help you find those dinosaur books.
So moving into the adult area, if you were to head to the left in the library this will take you into the adult side of the library. And so just a few quick notes on the layout is that we have shelving around the perimeter again a big takeaway from our community and from our staff really from every group who we spoke with has emphasized that we want it to feel like a library. We want to walk into that facility and know that we're home at our library and that it's full of books And so wanting to make sure we had ample shelf space and a variety of shelving to keep the area feeling very much a classic library was important to us. We do still have computers as well as some updated seating areas, as well as our study pods. So you'll notice in the lower right corner of this square, this is sort of two study pods that are adjacent to each other.
I want to start by thanking all of you for joining us today. Thank you so much for being here. They will also have a combination of opaque and transparent sides so that we can still maintain easy line of sight throughout the pods as well. But still having that privacy and the acoustic sound absorption, so that we're still making sure if you are on a telehealth appointment your privacy is protected.
On the far left side of that image on the screen, you see our group study pods. These can seat groups of up to six. So this we see being able to be utilized for meetings, for larger group projects, for tutoring sessions. We received a lot of in-person questions as well as responses to our visioning survey about needing a space for smaller private uses, as well. And I was just at Lompoc Library on Friday for a Black Gold meeting and they have a study pod and it is so popular. I almost stayed just so I could take a meeting in it but they're fantastic! So they really enhanced the space within the existing footprint which was something so powerful in this project specifically.
I'm variations of seating options in the library. And so this allows for there to be reading areas again, our community really wants to have a space that's conducive to reading and so the first groups of seating that you see those will be right next to the periodical shelves And so we do still see patrons come in, and we love to see our regulars. They come in and they want to read the latest copy of The Independent. They want to sit and read a physical copy of the newspaper. And so really knowing that usage of our space was integral in developing seating to help support that function.
So we have some very comfortable seating that will be going in that area, as well as spaces for laptop use. Our tables did not all have outlets directly next to them so that you could plug in a laptop, sit down, work on your paper, work on your book, work on a job application. We do still have public computers available for free for patrons to access the internet and word processing but now you'll be able to come in and you'll be able to sit at a laptop bar essentially and bring your own device and have a space that feels designed for that type of work and usage. Lastly, something I'm so excited about are the steady carrels sort of 2.0 in our redesigns. So right in the middle you can see those curved lines look sort of like an X. These are steady carrels we'll show you an example of in our renderings But these allow you to have a back to your study carrel.
And there's been a lot of really fascinating research about human behavior in public spaces, specifically libraries and how we do our best work when we feel most comfortable and are more inclined to actually use the furniture when we feel more secure. So if you have your back in a study carrel but can still kind of see your surroundings outside of you. That's much more appealing to us, just in terms of using spaces. And once I learned that, I look at spaces everywhere I go now and it's really fascinating to see. So we're so pleased to share some renderings of this in our presentation this evening. You can see our very comfy lounge-style seating for reading and for periodical browsing and usage right near the front of the library. On the adult side, and then again as you get deeper into the adult side.
Maybe we will have sort of a few be sitting there for a few hours maybe you wanted to hunker down for a rainy afternoon or oh I have a paper due tomorrow I just want to sit and focus for a little bit bring your laptop sit at our laptop tables and really enjoy using that space You can see a little bit further here as we get deeper into the library, we're approaching our study pods on the opposite side of the building.
So we have those two modeled areas. These are the larger pods where you could fit a group of six and so these are also visible from across the library. The infrastructure upgrade safety and security is part of them. And our interior design project really aligns with that and matches it, that we wanted our interior design to also be accessible and safe. And so maintaining line-of-sight across the building was important to us. So all of these areas that we'll show you are visible from our service desk as well.
I also wanted to point out that the door to the right of the larger group study pods is now an emergency exit. Right now as it stands, it's a window so there are two windows on either side of the library on that side facing Fairview and one will be an emergency exit for safety and security. So if you're at the study pause and you were to turn around and look back towards the children's side of the library that you walked in from, you can see this view. So we'll have our computers straight ahead. You can get a closer look at some of those new and improved study carrels that allow you to have a workspace as well as a little bit of privacy as well.
Next we're heading into the children and teen area where there are a lot of changes, but really I'm so pleased to share that it not only keeps the things we loved about the children's area, but it takes into account the trends we saw in our visioning survey. So we are so pleased to be able to line this up directly next to our survey results and say that we're so pleased to share this with the community. We're able to bring these to life And so you can see our service desk right there, right where the new books used to be right outside our supervisor's office. And you can immediately see these really beautiful curved shelves which we'll look at in the next slide. These allow more interactive browsing and for some seating to be interspersed so that children can sit right down with their book and dive in, open it up and turn those pages and really start to just discover the magic of reading in a place that feels exciting And it also allows for adults to sit with children too, whether they're caregivers, older brothers and sisters, grandparents, parents or family members.
I also wanted to point out on this layout that as you walk into the children's area, you will see the teen area is in the upper left corner of the square. So this is adjacent to the adult patio. When we had the opportunity to reposition the teen area, we wanted to make sure that it felt very appropriate for teens. We didn't want them to have the experience so I have to step over building blocks that my little brother and sister are playing with to get to my area. We wanted it to feel still very separate but on the youth services side of the library. And so by having it not sort of buried deep within the children's area, but more on the exterior side we felt that it really does accomplish that space that feels separate because teens are a separate user group of the library and so they deserve a space that helps them feel that we have them in mind.
We want them to come use the library. Teen activity in our space. And so we're looking at some lounge style seating, some shelving that will house our entire collection with room to grow as well as some opportunities to charge their devices, to sit together, to play games and to use the space and make it their own. In the middle of the far side of the wall, there is a performance area. So for anyone who's come to a summer reading program event and seen our juggler or our magician, we will be able to continue to do those for many years. Everything in the children's area is designed to be movable and mobile so that we can transform this space And so, the chairs that you'll see are lightweight and they can be collapsed and folded up. And our architectural and design team has heard me thank them for this but I'll do it again now that they actually mapped out the footprint needed to fold all of this up and tuck it away into a corner.
Those are not technical architectural terms. But just explaining that that's how we use the space, that it transforms. That we need to be able to move everything around, have a magic show, have a big story time, put it all back together and then have the library be a library for the rest of the day. And so they mapped out the capacity needed to do so and they said yes, it will all fit. What we've designed will all fit. You can have the performance space and you can put it all away and pull it back out.
And so we do have some shelving in the lower right corner, as well as some activity tables adjacent to the patio. Opportunities for children to be children, to learn through play, to have our early literacy research come to life in the library where children learn by exploring, by playing, by reading and by using their imaginations. So really having a way for children to have that interactive experience at the library too.
And lastly, the first thing that you will likely see when you come into the children's area will be in the upper right corner and that is the re-dedicated Jake Boiselle space. It'll be a reading nook. In speaking with Mrs. Boiselle we learned so much about Jake about how he loved to just curl up with a good book and the word she kept sharing with us was cozy. She said Jake loved to be cozy and to curl up with a book be able to explore a new world through reading. And so just in working with Mrs. Boisel over the past few months, we received some very special and enlightening input on this space and so we are really pleased to be able to share that in this rendering as well.
We'll not only have interactive seating and shelving for exploration but we'll have a beautiful centerpiece tree that you see that really invites you into the library. So we'll show that in an upcoming slide. But to really illuminate a couple of the items I've described, we see here when we walk into the children's area, we'll have some curved shelving that's child height.
The taller shelf in the middle will be three high. That one is a little bit higher than it will be. It will be three rows high and it will be something that you can walk through and you can discover new materials to read to really spark that love of reading from a young age. And you can see the teen corner, just sort of the outer edges of it as well as little pieces of the boys' all room. So let's go a little bit farther into the library.
As you go across the library, this is the Jake Boisel Reading Nook. So this will have plenty of books. We're leaving ample room for our collection. The linear feet can support the prior size of the collection plus room to grow so we won't be reducing our collection capacity. We'll actually be setting it up to continue to grow for decades to come but this space will be specially curated with a beautiful tree in the middle of the space and I'll let Ms. Plummer share more about that.
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I just wanted to point out that the tree is just here for placement purposes right now. It is being designed for the space, it will be nestled in the corner and climb the wall and go up so this is not the exact tree, this was just dropped in place so you can understand that. So it won't be sitting in the middle but it will be nestled in the corner and it's being designed for the space.
The design team is to have a carve out in the center of the tree so that a child can sit by themselves inside the tree and sit and read. Just like Mrs. Boyzell had said, Jake likes to sit and read alone and have a quiet space. We also know some children don't want to be with other children and want to sit in a quiet space alone. That will be our quiet space. And just so that you understand why we're having this rededicated space, the infrastructure project needed the space in the Boyzell room for current building code standards. So we lost that space and so working with the friends of the library and the Boyzell family, we were able to identify this location.
Thank you. Our next slide shows the view of the children's area from inside the Boise reading nook, so this is in the corner perhaps sitting in the tree looking out into the rest of the library. So you can see placeholders for the activity stations just outside the Boise Reading Nook as well as our children's collection in that corner straight across from the reading nook.
So this really helps to capture what it will feel like to be on the far corner of the library, perhaps curled up with a good book as one of the generated images shows. That's sort of the spirit of the space we're hoping to capture something that makes you want to jump right in and so on our next slide I am so pleased to share this. I love this one. It is a conceptual rendering but it has a little bit more of our color added in So future renderings as we move into the next phase of interior design will more closely resemble this. And so this really helps to capture that warmth, that excitement wanting to come on in and just really enjoy the space as a community.
I'm so pleased to share this. This is one of the views that our architectural team put together to share with you this evening and I think it really captures just the heart of the Children's Area experience. Lastly I'll touch briefly on our service desk and workroom. So we did just to sort of describe how the service desk would be reoriented, and I do have a photo in an upcoming slide about sort of its original location just for comparison with our expansion of the public restrooms to meet ADA regulations Our work room square footage was reduced and so in order to make sure that our friends of the library still had a space to conduct all of their operations, that was where the origin of having that sorting room in the lobby arose from. And so with that our workroom itself is a bit smaller and so we were able to already Thank you.
We're very thankful to already have these in hand and to bring them back so that our workspaces are more ergonomic, they're more streamlined. And so staff are able to complete all of their tasks with ease. So I did design this with staff input both for the desks below and then also this is something that is a little bit of the behind-the-scenes library work that occurs but Goleta Valley Library was originally constructed as a branch and without getting too much into sort of the workflow of it When we became a central home library, we are now a hub for our courier service. So when you request an item that's on the shelf at Paso Robles and it comes to us through our twice-weekly courier service, it does involve a sorting process. And so before, we had converted our conference room into a room to sort our courier delivery but now we have this incredible opportunity to really outfit this library We had lots of input from our staff on how to do so.
And so the image on the screen is sort of standing in the courier sorting area looking out into the workroom, which has ample storage and provides really a good modern work environment for our staff. That's something we're so pleased to be able to integrate into this space. And then on the next slide, you can also see this is what it looks like looking into the courier area from our workstations.
And then just very briefly a comparison to our original layout and we can see that the center of the library did originally have that same hub feel where it was a place together, to browse, to connect. We won't be bringing back the card catalog, unfortunately. Although I do love to see the original card catalog in that image. But you can see the service desk is sort of returning home to its original placement and then our children's side of the library will look much different but still accomplish the same look and feel where you are welcome to come in to read, to do homework, to just discover a world that awaits for you.
So how do we bring these visions to life? We wanted to end with an update on our capital campaign. And so, we're very pleased to share that following our authorization received in the fall, we have executed an agreement with the Santa Barbara Foundation for fiscal sponsorship services for our capital campaign. I had our first onboarding meeting with them on Friday and we are finalizing what will be our project page with the foundation which will allow us We are excited to announce that we will be launching a new campaign.
really inches away from being able to launch. And so we're right on track with our updated timeline to finalize our campaign launch this month and then throughout the course of the year, we've broken up our timeline into a strategic approach that aligns with our programming, our phased rollout as we've studied other campaigns and tried to adopt a timeline I'm so excited to be here. It's been a long time coming.
I want to start by thanking all of you for joining us today. and members of the community reached out to us and wanted to actually get a head start on supporting. And so, a few of them to date have included the Patricia Bragg Foundation who donated $20,000 to the campaign. Cox Communications reached out and donated $1,000. Individual patrons reached out and wanted to contribute. So we've been so touched that even without the infrastructure being finalized our community has wanted to know how they can help bring this to life because the library It means so much to them and has meant so much to them throughout their time in Goleta.
Most recently, our friends of the library connected us with Susan Torrey with the John C. Miffin Foundation. We presented a proposal to them or a presentation to them specifically with regards to the children's area. Earlier this month, and they wanted to know what it would involve to bring the children's area to life. And so we worked with our project team to finalize some figures and to finalize the areas that we needed support with to make this a reality.
Our presentation included an ask of $550,000. And I think it was perhaps two days later, one day later we heard back from Miss Torrey who said that they were prepared to fund the entire ask for the children's area. So prior to our campaign launching we have received a commitment of a gift from the Methuen Foundation for $550,000 and on behalf of the library we just really want to thank them for their generosity for approaching us and for being committed to what the library represents for the community.
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Great, thank you. It's a perfect time to have this discussion. People have been asking a lot about the library so thank you. Do we have any questions? Council Member Kariakou.
Well way to bury the lead! I really want to compliment you for all the work that you've done to get us here in terms of not only Preparing the library for the next phase of its useful life. But all the capital campaign work that you're doing, all the work that you're doing to reimagine this important piece of built but also human infrastructure for our community. It's really easy to talk about infrastructure as just being roads and bridges and roundabouts and that kind of thing.
Creating a built environment that nurtures minds, creates a safe space, creates a place to belong, to gather, to find acceptance, to build relationships. And it's really hard to put a price tag on that. I'm really glad that we didn't turn down that state grant several years ago because not only are we getting all the value in terms of the physical changes but The opportunity it created to inspire our community, to bring our community closer to the city. To bring community members closer to our city. I was also just reflecting on the Boy Scouts and it's a reminder of how different things the city is doing go together and support each other.
Bike safety is a very important thing. Creating safe spaces for people to be able to walk and ride their bike, to be able to get to places like the library. To make it so that someone doesn't have to get a ride or heaven forbid take an Uber or Lyft or something but to be able to have that independence and to know that they can safely get from one side of town that was blocked by the freeway and be able to get there safely without having to dodge a lot of cars going on a freeway overpass or going along, you know, a narrow stretch of road. And so these investments complement each other and they're all infrastructure and they nurture the mind, they nurture the soul. I'm just so proud of the work that y'all are doing over there and bringing our community in.
It's great work. Thank you.
Thank you. That's such an exciting note to end on, and I'm sure you will extend all of our thank-you and appreciation to the Methun Foundation for that very generous commitment. So that is very exciting. I'm so glad to get this presentation, and you really addressed most of the questions that I had coming in. But I did want to just give my input on the design. And I know that it's all very conceptual, so I totally understand that. I am not an interior designer nor do you want me to be.
So I will leave that to the experts. So, I'll just speak to kind of the feeling that I know I treasured about the Goleta Library. It has meant so much to me and my family. My experience is mostly in that children's area. But you've used some of these terms, cozy, warm, inviting. You know the ability to as a parent to see your kid, you know anywhere they are so I was thinking about that with the different heights of the bookshelves and being able to still spot spot your kid if they're running around.
But also you know I hope that there is consideration when you're choosing the actual Furnishings to things like durability and maintenance and cleaning. My first pass of the slides, I know it's conceptual but seeing everything in white, that's a terrible idea for the children's area. But I'm sure you'll think about that. And I loved part of what maybe I do tend to lean more towards kind of traditional I think what I loved about the Galeta Library was that the furniture and the design, although outdated, was timeless in a lot of ways.
The furniture was comfortable lived in. And so I hope you think about that too. When I look at like the high, I think maybe in the adult area there's a photo with maybe high stools. Those are not my favorite. Mostly because I just think about older adults or anyone with any kind of mobility challenge, those can be difficult to get in and out of versus what used to be the lovely wide comfortable chairs.
So just thinking about the comfort and also just you know that warm and inviting feeling that it brings, I have no doubt that you all will work with the team to bring bring that color and life back into that space And it's just, it's very exciting. And thank you for all the work that you've done thus far and please once that page is ready to go make sure you share it with us so we can help get the word out so that we can close that gap of the rest that's needed.
So we can all enjoy it once we're ready to reopen. Thank you.
1:45 – 1:5210 turns
Thank you. So first, on the picture in the adult room you had a patio adjacent to it and I wasn't clear if the children's area also had some kind of patio. You showed an area kind of extending. What is the outdoor space there?
Yes, thank you so much for bringing up this feature of the library. The patios will remain and so in the series of renderings we provided this evening, the children's patio wasn't featured explicitly but it will still remain an outdoor space particularly close to those activity tables for children who maybe just got out of school and they have lots of wiggles and they want to go get a little bit of their sillies out on the outdoor patio Thank you very much.
And then the patio just outside the community room will remain as well, although that one will have a little bit of modification where the bike racks will be. So there will still be a patio space but previously the community room patio space was fairly underutilized because it wasn't readily accessible unless you were already in the community room so we're hoping this will expand usage of the outdoor spaces as well.
Well, part of the reason I ask and that's good is that I remember going back 10 years or so, something like that. There was frequently concern that the library was too small, that there wasn't enough space for the need and there was discussion at the time about should we renovate it or should we move to find a different facility? And I guess I was wondering if those sort of concerns are now dated Given how the use of the library has changed, or have you actually expanded in essence with this redesign? Expanded available space including outside space.
Or are we still space constrained and it's still going to be an issue?
Council Member Kasdan, the space you can never have enough space. Of course if you gave us more space we would take it and use it but we did not expand the space. We will continually look at those patios as opportunities become available to see if we could do something to either enclose them or something at a later date. In this project, we reenvisioned the space. We've been able to look at different trends. The use of the pods really answers a question that our public has been asking and that is for the opportunity to have a smaller space that they can use a private smaller space because the only thing we had was the community room. So trying to look at how our customers were using the facility, what the natural trends were in the library, what's being asked of our customers and Re-envisioning how we can maximize the space that we have.
So, the layout that you saw this evening does that and also has opportunity for growth in our materials and growth in our programming as well.
Okay. Was there ever, and maybe this is a question for the next presentation but one of the things that had been discussed previously was adding a second story or something like that. Is that something? I don't know if that was ever serious at all but I remember hearing it raised. Should I save that for you?
Save that one for Mr. Foer. That was not a discussion with this current grant process, so that one is off the table. So we went with what we had and we're very excited about it.
Yeah I am too. An excellent presentation. I recall some libraries had coffee that they sold or other sorts of snacks. What's your thinking on that kind of thing? I mean, I know potentially you could just park a food truck in front. But what's the thinking on, I don't know if it's just people getting coffee and sitting and reading or something like that. Have you thought about that? Talked about it etc.? ?
Council Member Kasdan, I can honestly say we have not. And I would assume that there would be health department regulations which would require commercial kitchen which we do not have so but it would be worth looking into but we do not have the means to put in a commercial kitchen. There's no space to do that. But we would be looking to your point likely a coffee cart or a coffee truck third party vendor if we were gonna pursue something like that.
Yeah, I remember going there was a coffee shop in D.C., or excuse me not a coffee shop but a bookstore in D. C.. I can't remember the name of it and they sold various things and it was very popular you know in comparison especially to other less sort of gifted shops One last thing, the Boisel room. Could you clarify? I think I saw in the pictures were there stools because like Councilmember Reyes-Martin, not so crazy about stools there. I know obviously a stool isn't exactly infrastructure and once you buy a stool you're committed where we have to live with that stool.
But could you talk about that? But the other thing too is, will that tree have levels so people will be able to be on different points in the tree like lemurs basically.
Council Member Kasdan, as much as I want children to be able to climb that tree, I have promised everybody that nobody will be allowed to climb the tree. We're hoping that children may be able to sit on some of the roots but it will not be climbable because that takes us into a whole other breadth of infrastructure so the stools that you saw as I had indicated on that slide the tree was just plopped in place so you could have that vision That was part of that picture. So it was little mushrooms to establish like a little reading nook, but we'll be working with the architect to design the types of furnishings that will be going in there and their little seats for children to sit down on.
1:52 – 1:588 turns
Before in the previous incarnation of the library, as I recall there was like a little, in the children's room I guess it was kind of a pit. Right? And it was padded and they could go in there. Is that going to be recreated or you decided no, it's not... Was it not really that popular or that successful? There are better things to do with this space?
The Boiselle room was the conversation pit before, so that was closed up because of safety concerns and other concerns. And that's how we created the Boiselle space way back when. So that was not there when we entered into this project. So it was not envisioned at all to bring that back because it was closed up for a reason.
Okay. But you could always put in a, no, you can't really once it's like... No. All right. Okay, those are my questions.
Thank you
Thank you just a few brief comments I share the concern at least on the adult stools I shared that concern and then I'm just wondering because I'm thinking about how you know one of the primary purposes of the larger facility upgrade is ADA access. And I'm wondering how much feedback staff has received from groups that are either, you know, serving adults or children with disabilities and if that's been factored into the interior layout considerations?
Thank you Mayor Pro Tem Smith. I've made note of the concerns regarding the stools, thank you for that valuable feedback and so with regards to our input method we did receive some survey respondents from it was an anonymous survey I'm going to start by saying thank you to all of our panelists. or too narrow, and so we did receive some feedback about just accessibility pain points throughout the facility. And so that was something we paid particular care to in terms of integrating that.
Our input methodology, while it hasn't included focus groups, we did also hear in addition to the survey responses, we heard from our staff during our visioning workshop that we did last year I'm going to start by saying thank you to all of you for being here. an observation from staff who see a variety of users in the library. And so those two forms of input helped to inform our decisions for the next phase, which will be those selections of furnishings, making sure that if it is a chair, well what kind of chair? Because a chair can really be something that everyone in the library can use or very few members can use and even in designing our pods we made sure In looking at the offerings available from this particular vendor, that there was an option for an ADA pod so that there could be the turn radius for a wheelchair.
And so big thanks to the architectural team who's on the call for really helping to take that feedback into account At all of these different points in the process, the team has been so responsive. If we share this is something that we've observed or heard during the next set of slides or renderings, that change was incorporated which is incredible. So just being able to share with them those sort of unique needs or those observed needs we feel has helped to inform the outcome and will continue to inform absolutely That next phase that we're looking at where it's what exactly will those furniture selections be?
Great, wonderful. That's good to hear. I know there's always something whatever I work on if you know that there might there may be additional input whether it's from other nonprofit groups special education teachers others who may think about things that we haven't thought of who may have input to share so I just put that out there And then maybe just the only final observation, you know obviously technology is constantly changing and sort of thinking about I guess the balance between what a library may offer years from now versus now.
I don't know that there's any answer. I guess it's just sort of an ongoing challenge, but one thought that crossed my mind though was thinking about the way libraries are serving to provide things, right? The library of things. So I don' t know if that's been factored in as well in terms of this interior design
Yes, thank you. So something that we're really excited to dive into next is really laying out the placement of all of our collections and so that's something that's come up from our staff when we've shared even our friends have asked well where is this particular collection going to go? And so that's something that will come in that next phase as well We are planning on retaining the library of things collection.
In terms of building for the future, we have looked at that in a number of areas. Making sure our pods are outfitted with screens and chairs. I'm going to jump in real quick.
1:59 – 2:038 turns
A lot of the questions obviously and comments I agree with. I especially want to thank Council Member Cariocco for bringing up that connection between the bicycle and pedestrian path to get everybody from safely over to the area instead of having to go over Fairview. That'll be a great route for them, and that's fabulous. I also want to acknowledge what Council Member Reyes-Martin said about thinking about the seniors and furniture. I am a senior, and I just had a knee surgery, and I can tell you there's not one piece of furniture in my house that works for me.
It's all too low. So even sofas, or chairs, think about seniors. They all don't have to be high. You know, it's worth thinking. I would have never thought about that until I looked at my husband and said we need to go shopping. There is not one but my knee will be better and I'll be okay but yeah so things like that in the high stools make it cozy and of course somebody must have, I'm thinking maybe Mr. Nisbet said something. I said oh it's so white and gray. I like color you know? And I realized that that's to come So thank you, thank you so much for your report and your excitement. It shows. Thank you.
Yeah, I guess one thing is that I don't know if you are going to have areas that you're going to paint and paint pictures inside the building of lemurs or whatever might be the thing that strikes you. But I'll bet there's ways that we can solicit artists and get some support for something like that Because that certainly makes it more joyful to have happy paintings on the walls.
Thank you. Council Member Reyes-Martin. I was just gonna quickly share, because Council Member Kazan and I share a love of coffee and for it to be available in every possible space. Coffee vending machines have really come a long way so just to park that in the back of your mind for the future, it wouldn't require kind of this other person or cart. I've seen them more frequently and they really have come a long way
As
long as they're putting in our plugs I still would really like a Laptop vending machine that you know kids or seniors could check out and use on those laptop tables that we're talking about Or if they want to check them out and take them home and bring them back. I saw those when I toured the library space at the National League of Cities in San Antonio, and they were really popular. And I would love to see something like that here if we could find a way to make it work.
Okay. Do we have any speakers?
Yes, those of you who wish to speak to this item please use the raised hand icon and I will call on you. I do have Robin Cederloff. Please unmute yourself and you'll have three minutes to speak.
Thank you, and that was a great presentation. I've been interested in knowing how things were going to come about with the library so I can't wait until it's actually open again. That'll be exciting. I have to say that I made a huge mistake this evening because I really wanted to speak on the item 26-022, the artwork. The Chumash artwork that is being I don't know if I'm allowed to speak on that right now or not.
Well, the art came from the library. So that's why I hung around until maybe I could speak. OK. If I can ask one question then and I don't know if you can answer it during this public comment time. Who can I speak to tomorrow about the art? Go ahead.
2:04 – 2:1615 turns
Hi. Good evening, Robin. Thank you so much for your comment. I'd be happy to be your point of contact if you'd like to reach out to me with any questions.
And I'm sorry. I don't have an image, so I don' t know
who you are. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. My name's Elizabeth. Yes. My name is Elizabeth Saucedo. I am the city laborer and I'd be happy to chat with you further.
All right. I will reach out tomorrow. Thank you very much. Thanks. I look forward to it, Robin.
Do we have any other speakers?
No further speakers for this item, Mayor.
OK. So this is just a presentation, correct? So no motion needed. Thank you both.
That takes us to our first discussion action item. That is Item C1, Approval of the Conformed Plans and Specifications Award of Construction Contract Budget Appropriation and Adoption of Categorical Exemption of the Goleta Valley Library ADA Safety in Building Improvement Projects, CIP number 9130.
It's always the hardest part of the presentation. Good evening, Madam Mayor, City Council. My name is Matt Fore. I'm the General Services Director. With me is Cassidy Laird who's a Senior Management Analyst with Neighborhood Services. Used to be with General Services and then she got snagged away but I get to continue to work with her as a Project Manager on this exciting infrastructure side of the library project So we're here this evening to cover a number of actions. This is an action item and that is to consider the award of the construction project for the Goleta Valley Library ADA safety and building improvement project, to allocate the last tranche of funding to the project budget, and then to make findings in support of the categorical exemption under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Just by way of background, in August of 2025 we were here at the City Council and you all authorized us to advertise the bid for this capital project. It includes a number of critical elements. The first is a whole slew of ADA upgrades that you saw at the previous presentation most notably Widescale restroom renovations, path of travel requirements under ADA. But what you also saw in the previous presentation were non-legal accessibility upgrades. Things that aren't legal mandates but things like lighting improvements that will make the site more accessible.
Spacing layout, things like that and a lot of thought that went into this circulation of people around the facility. We're also upgrading safety and security systems, including a sprinkler system for fire safety access control to separate public from staff areas. Upgrading HVAC and electrical systems, in fact a wholesale replacement of the electrical system.
We're modernizing the ceiling design and with that LED lighting upgrades, door and window replacements as you saw. And then finally fascia repair and exterior paint. So the bid process that we undertook, we opened the bidding in October of this year. October 14th it ran through November 18th. We posted the bid opportunity on the city's website. We published it in the Santa Barbara Independent.
We issued one addendum and we answered about 70 questions altogether on that bid package. We spent a lot of time in the fall putting this package together, two primary elements. One was integrating the interior side that you saw with the infrastructure because as Ms. Saucedo said they are so integrally intertwined right? And then secondly, really undertaking a robust quality control review of the entire plan and spec package.
It paid off. We received 12 bids which is fairly extraordinary for a capital project. We got good pricing as a result. Out of that, EJS Construction is the lowest responsive and responsible bidder. EJS is out of Carpinteria. They're local which is very nice. They've done a lot of work for school districts, UCSB and other public sector entities so they're familiar with public sector construction.
The lowest base bid was $5.18 million. That's the base bid. That what we awarded on was the strict project We did include three bid alternates, however. And those bid alternates are in support of other initiatives and other uses of the building as you saw in the previous presentation. For example, carpet replacement. Carpet replacement we added that because again it's under competitive bidding right? And we're there each of these bid alternates are efficient they're not mandatory but they're optional But they are conducted with competitive bidding. And there are a variety of efficiencies that come with considering them now while we have a general contractor on site, while the building is empty and it's closed to avoid future temporary closures.
So one of those is carpet replacement. The second is entryway tile replacement For any of you who've been in the library in the past, it's the raised tile where we're pushing carts around and it's very loud and very echoey. And so this will be much more low profile and actually easier to walk on tile in the entryway. And then finally really related to the furniture and fixture plan that you saw in the previous presentation was was including electrical and data infrastructure to serve all of that furniture and fixture that's a part of the capital campaign.
The cost of these alternates in a lot of cases are not allowed by the Building Forward Grant, but they're complimentary. And they total $214,156. We're recommending that we go for it now. We're recommending that you consider that and that would bring the total contract amount up to $5,394,156. Lastly, we have an appropriation request to make. It's not a new appropriation request. It's one that we discussed at the capital budget discussion as part of the adoption of the FY25-26 budget. At that point, we had identified a budget need of about $457,000.
Council working with, well council and then in concert with the finance director set aside this funding as part of the funding of the big six capital projects. So this is a known appropriation and it's been reserved already so we're not asking for anything incremental just what's already been set aside. And then we have a whole slew of recommendations for you to consider.
Before we do that, I'd like to go to questions and then we can come back to the motion.
Questions? Mayor Pro Tem Smith. Okay,
Council Member Reyes-Martin. Thank you, thank you so much Mr. Forr. I wanted to ask a couple of questions. You know some of the most frequent questions I get from the community is one are we on schedule and if if you could give us a reminder of what what on schedule means? What is the timeline that we're thinking of right now?
Thank you Madam Mayor Councilmember Reyes-Martin Yes, in the end yes. The primary deadline, the one that we have our eyes on and where we are completely focused on is the grant deadline, the building forward grant deadline June 30th, 2027. We are on track to meet that. You know, we always start with that and work backwards and when we applied for the grant you kind of take your best forecast but we're definitely on track
Wonderful. And then if you could, the other question I get most often too is if you could talk to us a little bit about what has been going on right now in the building and why that was important? Some of the comments I get are One, why did we need to close it when we did? When it's only now that we're awarding this. Or I drive by and it doesn't look like there's anything happening there so can you help walk through what has been happening at the building and why we did need to move out in order to get this project going?
Absolutely, yes. Be glad to. We've been very busy and I will say that should council approve this contract tonight and we start construction early next month, that's when you'll see all of the outward work There's been plenty of work going on since we closed. First, we had to open the Goleta Valley Library Express site. That was a massive undertaking. That was its own capital project in the midst of a capital project that involved packing up the entire library moving it over to the GVL site doing all of the tenant improvements within the GBL site including Very intricate untangling of an electrical system that spanned five different suites. It was very difficult. Secondly, because it was vacant, because it was empty we tented and termite treated the GVL which is a great thing to do.
The other thing was to get to finish the plans and specs there have been a lot design specialists in and out of the building on a regular basis. We had to do some selective demo, we had to get down to where the plans and specs were airtight. That limits our change order exposure dramatically. It results in a much tighter bid and again, in our case it paid off in that we ended up with 12 bids.
Which is about three times as many as I thought we would get, to be honest.
Great thank you so much those are my questions.
2:16 – 2:2220 turns
Councilmember Cariocco?
Oh thank you yeah just a couple of
follow-ups.
You know just kind of following up on Council Member Reyes-Martin's line of questioning If you go back to when we accepted the grant and we started talking about our initial timelines, first question is how are we doing in terms of this base bid compared to what we had projected the initial cost would be? I think we're pretty close.
The bids were right in line with the engineer's estimate. Very, very close. I think where we probably underfunded the project was on the front end, the design work and this has been a difficult project and it's a 53 year old building and it's been a heavier lift but in terms of the engineer's estimate and the construction costs were very solid.
And in terms of the timeline to getting to going out to bid for construction, how are we doing in terms of that initial timeline? I think we're within like a month.
We're probably within two months. Two months. Yeah.
That's not too bad. All right thanks all my other questions have been asked
here.
Yeah I guess the question I had before which was You know, I don't know if we still have any space issues or not with the library. That was something 10 years ago that was identified as a concern but it may not be the case any longer. But are there opportunities for expanding? Could you put stuff on the second floor? What flexibility is there?
Council Member Kasdan, the addition of a second floor was not contemplated as part of this grant scope. That would be the subject of a pretty extensive study and a lot of work to make it happen. Parking would be the really limiting factor on that. The way that we scoped this was given the current footprint, and again, this was a building that had not seen a whole lot of attention in decades.
What can we do under this four-year period to bring it up to not only code, but improve the safety and security? And then set the stage for things like the visioning process that you saw in the prior presentation. That was about all I think we could bite off with this cycle.
I wasn't anticipating that we would be, you know, just plopping on another layer. It's just curious as far as whether it's even a relevant question anymore that we have, we think the space that we need more or less, more is always better but that it's... Anyway, I just thought I'd follow up on it. Thank you.
Twelve
bids though, pretty impressive.
I'd like to see if there's any public speakers?
Yes thank you Madam Mayor. I have no speaker slips those of you on the Zoom webinar who wish to speak to this item please use a raised hand icon and I will call on you. I'm seeing none.
We have quite a few motions here who wants to take a stab at it
I move that A, we approve the conformed plans and specifications incorporating Addenda and bidding clarifications from the bidding process for the Goleta Valley Library ADA safety and building improvement project. And B, award and authorize the city manager to execute a construction contract with EJS Construction Inc for the Goleta Valley Library ADA Safety and Building Improvement Project in the not-to-exceed amount of $5,394,156 subject to the requirements of the contract documents.
And C, authorize the General Services Director to approve contract change orders for the Goleta Valley Library ADA Safety and Building Improvement Project in an amount not to exceed $809,123. And D, authorize a budget transfer of $457,300 As described in the fiscal impact section, and E authorize the city manager or designee to apply for an enter into any necessary utility and service agreements associated with the Goleta Valley Library ADA safety and building improvement project at any amount that is supported by the project budget.
And F, adopt resolution number 26 next in line entitled a resolution of the City Council of the city of Goleta California finding the Goleta Valley Library Americans with Disabilities Act ADA safety and building improvement project CIP number 9130 categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act CEQA pursuant to state CEQAs guidelines section 15301. Okay do I have a second?
Second okay any more discussion? Not seeing any, roll call vote.
Roll-call vote Passed 5–0
Show transcript
Are we good to go on? Take a five minute break.
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2:30 – 2:379 turns
We're going to bring this meeting back to order.
Yes, and that brings us to item C2, Goleta West Sanitary District sewer spill and the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board proposed settlement of grants.
Thank you.
Thank you Madam Mayor, members of Council. Yeah I'll make a short staff report and then turn it over to council because this is a little bit of an odd item. This item started about 18 months ago February 16th and 17th of 2024 there was a A spill, a discharge of waste water about a million gallons into the Goleta Estuary, Goleta Beach. And that was because of a break of some sort of 24-inch main pipe, sanitary district pipe that's managed by Goleta West. Sanitary. It did make the news, you all remember it but it was quite a while ago.
Fast forward or slow forward I guess to October of this year and it came to my attention and I think it came to others' attention too. It certainly was not an email that probably would have normally found its way into my inbox but I think Council Member Smith shared it with me where the Regional Water Quality Control Board put out a notice to the public And it's a notice of a proposed settlement, of a settlement of this discharge into state and federal waters. And so I suppose that's the way they determine what the appropriate fine or punishment is when there's discharge in this case. And so that investigation must have taken a year, I suppose, and certainly wasn't on my radar anymore. But Mayor, I know you kind of followed it on and off for awhile.
And then as I said, Council Member Smith, They sent the notice to me and just kind of question mark, you know, do we have any reaction to this? And so that notice did require any input from the public be – any written comments be sent to them within 30 days. So that just kind of swam around for a couple weeks, and then through conversations we also heard from Supervisor Laura Kaps' office that they also had received the notice. And they had been very involved when the spill happened in February of 2024 And so they were also concerned and we're looking into the reading and kind of the settlement that was being proposed by the Regional Water Quality Control Board. And at that point is when the two of you, Council Member Smith and Mayor Parodi teamed up with Supervisor Laura Capps to put together a letter.
You guys determined that hey, we feel some comments are in order let's send a letter in the 30 day period that were offered And so the letter is attached to the staff report. That notice was sent out approximately October 16th or 17th, and comments were due November 17th. So it was a pretty quick turnaround. And so with assistance of staff that letter was put together. The three of you signed it. It was sent in November 17th I think we had a council meeting either that night or the next night and so for full disclosure it was announced to your colleagues that that was done And there was head nodding and there was some agreement that next steps might involve putting an item on the agenda like we are today.
And also we found out after that letter was sent, that the Regional Water Quality Control Board would be having an official hearing to decide whether or not to move ahead with the proposed settlement. And at that time it would be considered a final settlement if they were to do that. So we have heard that that meeting is I believe February 26th and 27th in San Luis Obispo.
And they will take public testimony either in person or through Zoom. So the purpose of this meeting is to share the letter that was sent with the community and with the rest of the council, talk about the letter and decide whether any comments should be provided at the Regional Water Quality Control Board. I would just say again the letters attached there's probably three essential points included in the letter.
Point number one is a point that there was delay and notification this is something that was in the news quite a bit after the spill happened, the communication how it worked how it did not work and so forth and so on and so that is one point that's made in the letter The second point is the size of the fine. The proposed fine in the settlement agreement is about 1.5, 1.6 million and the letter that was sent indicates that the feeling was that that fine is not enough and if that the normal processes and laws were followed, the appropriate fine should be more like five times higher than that or around 7.75 million The guidelines indicate that for per spill it should be 10, the maximum fine should be $10 per gallon and only under special circumstances should the board they can or may consider a fine of lesser amount.
So that was the second point in the letter and then the third point was how the proceeds of those about those monies should be used And in the settlement agreement, there is a proposal on how that money would be used. You can certainly find that in the proposed settlement agreement. But the point was made in the letter that you all sent that there should be a nexus to where the damage was done. The damage was at Goleta Beach. It caused environmental damage and it caused a loss of recreation, which is pretty hard to put a value on but the beach was closed for 23 days and so the point of the letter was that that money should then be used to public improvements either restoration or public amenities in close proximity work to where the spill happened or at Goleta Estuary or Goleta Beach So those are the three essential points of the letter that you guys can certainly discuss.
I will note that there are members of Goleta West here tonight, today the general manager Joey Hilliard reached out to me and we had a short conversation and he indicated that he and some of his board members might attend tonight. I do see them in the audience and I talked to him briefly so they are here and they do plan to provide some comment after the council discusses it So with that, I'll turn it over to you Madam Mayor.
Okay Back to council for questions comments. Well, let's start with questions at this part point Councilmember Reyes-Martin?
I don't have my light
on. Well, it just keeps popping up your name. Let me try it on and off. Did that happen? I don't know. Councilmember Kariakou? No.
No, I can go
okay
2:38 – 2:447 turns
So I guess my first question is, who do I direct my questions to? Do I address the city manager or do I... You certainly can. Okay, I'll do my best. I guess it's a precedent question. I definitely have a lot of A lot of feelings and frustrations about what happened and how it was handled. And spoiler alert, I've already addressed them directly to the district because I attended their February 27th special meeting out at UCSB which was very hard to find incidentally.
But do we have precedent for weighing in on on proposed actions on other agencies. Please don't take the question to portray a viewpoint one way or another, but I want to know is what we're considering kind of unprecedented or is there precedent?
Madam Mayor and Councilmember Kariakou, I certainly don't know of any. Certainly not during the three years that I've been here and I'm sure there's other people that might have memories of whether something like that has been done in the past. I can't think of any but I will say as the mayor and council member Smith Mayor Pro Tem sorry about that Worked on this. It was clear that it was something that they wanted to do and they wanted to do on behalf of themselves, knowing that the time frame was short and there was not going to be the opportunity to take the matter to full council, to have that exact discussion. Is this something that council should weigh in on?
So they can certainly speak to that, but it was signed on behalf of them on separate letterhead from our normal letterhead. The idea of this item was to then share with everyone else in the community that they did this so you guys could have the exact discussion of your question.
Okay well I want to express appreciation to the mayor and now Mayor Pro Tem for the actions that they took here I know there are times where kind of individually we put things on our own letterhead or we affix our signature to other letterheads. So that's certainly not unprecedented, but I do want to express my appreciation for bringing this before us today so that we can all talk about next steps. I think it's important that the community hear from all of us and that the community hear what we think and I think anything that we can do to better educate the public about what happened here. It's been almost two years now. It's been almost two years. I mean, I remember being out there with the general manager and Council Member Reyes-Martin and Supervisor Capps touring the site and seeing firsthand where the pipe broke and getting some narrative from the district about their version of events in terms of what they knew at that time.
This was shortly after the spill had happened. The beach was closed at that time. I'll never forget after the site visit, we went out to Goleta Beach and I was out there with Supervisor Capps. And we actually had to turn some students away from running down the sand toward the water. They were heading toward the water. They had just started putting out beach closure signs but not everyone was seeing them. There's like three kids I remember super clearly And Supervisor Capps had to yell, no don't go out there. The beach is closed. There was a spill.
So I think anything that we can do to draw attention to this so that we don't have this kind of thing happen again is important. So thank
you. I just have a quick question too. The letters pretty much says as we feel we need to express along with Supervisor Capp's My understanding is that this meeting tonight, this item is to discuss if council wants us to go and testify. Is that part of the discussion? I mean, I'm prepared to go on the 26th and 27th.
Madam Mayor, it's really up to your prerogative. I just indicated that I would put it on the agenda so you could have this discussion.
It's really up to you all. That's what I thought we were going to discuss because the letter says that...
Yes, I think the mayor and I would seek that feedback in terms of if there is testimony either from the mayor or myself Is it from an individual perspective or is it from a full Council's perspective? Recognizing that we know the comment letter is individualized but to the extent there are still the potential for future public comment, we're seeking direction as to whether or not that should continue to be on an individual basis or on a full council basis.
And I want to acknowledge that at least I can speak for myself that this wasn't something that I undertook lightly. You know, I think the nature of our city is right, To sanitary districts, we have Isla Vista. We have the airport city of Santa Barbara and and inevitably we have to work collaboratively with so many different entities but you know I think the really the serious nature of this spill You know, knowing that at least half of our city is served by Goleta West.
That we know that our residents expect accountability and want to ensure that this doesn't happen again. So that certainly informed my decision to sort of bring this for the preliminary discussion and then for follow-up.
2:44 – 2:498 turns
So first, I realize on the top of my screen it says Luz Reyes-Martin. That's why every time I push mine we see her name.
And mine says Jennifer.
Okay,
mystery solved. Technology. Good job.
Thank you. So just let me know if you want to speak.
We can do it the old fashioned way.
So first thing to keep in mind, so I have questions. I have a bunch of questions that I need answers for us to understand where we go. But the first thing to recognize is that when we look at things like the penalizing firms or organizations for pollution runoff or discharges etc., Supposed to act as an incentive or a disincentive by penalizing them, especially when it's a private company. The shareholders, the owners, they lose money and by virtue of the fact that they lose money, they want to avoid it in the future. It's a stranger situation when it's a public entity and the people who are penalized are going to be the rate payers. If that's how it comes out, we're not delivering an incentive to the organization if they just pass it on to the residents of the area and have a surcharge.
You know, there would be an incentive by imposing fines and so forth. We make it so that this doesn't happen again, that they don't want, they want to avoid it, that the penalty is going to be something that motivates their behavior. I don't know if there was negligence involved in this. If there was negligence involved, the board should take punitive action for the managers, no offense.
If there was something that they should have done and they didn't do, people should be fired. But going forward is two years now and so I assume whatever the issues were have been kind of adjudicated. Here are some of the questions I don't know and maybe when the speakers come up they can answer it. I understand that it's both federal and state law, I assume Clean Water Act, I haven't heard anything about the federal government. Are we only dealing with the state government here and the state is the agent for implementing Clean Water Act?
So that, I just want to clarify there is no federal involvement other than just the state. And second of the fines that are collected whether it's the smaller amount or larger amount where does the money go right now under current law aside from what people might prefer? What is the requirement under the law for where the money goes? Who collects it and how is it spent? Is there some mandate in the law for where it's supposed to go?
I also would like to know, one of the things that come out of this is we don't want this to happen again. In inspecting the pipes, the relevant pipes is there a price tag? Have you done an assessment and you know what the costs are and you're able to say we are able to fix that. That we're not going to have degraded eroding pipes this won't happen again. Whether this funds or other funds can go to that.
I guess those are the main questions right now that I'd like to know about. And I guess one other question is, it's uncertain but at various points we've heard that you guys have a big bank role in a sense in the Goleta West that there's a big balance available. Is that the case? You guys still have a big balance that whatever is charged is able to go there or do you immediately or frequently – not frequently but you would have to turn to rate payers very quickly add a surcharge to fund whatever it was. So thank you. That'll be helpful for me. Mayor
Pro Tem? Yes, I can only, I think respond to one of those items but I could say at least in terms of the action that we took and may take, at least our scope in this discussion tonight is just as it relates to the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. There certainly might be other entities that take certain actions, and Goleta West may be able to share more about that. But at least the scope of our request today is focused on this one item.
So to the extent that's helpful, our request is limited to that.
2:49 – 2:5412 turns
One question I had that I don't know if anyone knows the answer to this, but when the outreach was done by Supervisor Kaps, was anyone from the City of Santa Barbara also approached? It certainly impacted their airport property. Do you know if they were reached out to also be part of a letter or send a letter? I'm not quite
sure what the question is.
Did anyone from the City of Santa Barbara also get asked to sign on to a letter or send a letter? I
can't answer
that. Not to my knowledge.
And then, I have one question. I'd like to know since that spill, has there been any other spills on that pipe? Okay. Go ahead.
Mayor, may I? So Madam Mayor and Councilmembers as Mr. Nisbet noted we do understand we have several speakers tonight including a number from The sanitary district. So I would just note that all speakers will be provided the same opportunity to provide three minutes of public comment during the general public comment period and before the City Council closes that general public comment period, and since the item involves a sanitary district if there's brief follow-up questions maybe those can be addressed by a representative. Okay
so we'll go to the public speakers
Yes, thank you Madam Mayor. For those of you on the Zoom webinar please use your raised hand icon and I will call on you. And to note Council Members, I did move your swap the names around so it should be in the right spot now. I apologize for that. So our first in-person speaker will be Brian McCarthy.
Good evening Madam Mayor, Council. My name is Brian McCarthy. Co-general manager of Goleta West Sanitary District. I was the general manager at the time of this bill. I have over 30 years experience with public agencies in water and wastewater, and I've been with Goleta West for 22 years. So I'm here to take responsibility for this, and our accountability is You know, certainly we're taking responsibility for the spill. It's the largest spill in the history of the operations of the district and we're taking this very seriously.
This can be seen by our comprehensive response, where other agencies may have wanted to avoid the situation and move on as quickly as possible. We've owned and responded to the circumstances. We've hired and worked with several technical experts and continue to evaluate the best steps for our operations infrastructure and our rate payers many of whom are city constituents as well.
As far as transparency, throughout the spill response investigation reporting corrective action implementation. The district has been transparent about findings and updates. Spill updates have been added to press releases and on the district website. I have responded to inquiries as I've been able. As you can imagine, with a small agency we've been spread pretty thin and a lot of resources being spread to many different Aspects of our operations.
Days after the February spill, I coordinated a site visit with Santa Barbara County Second District Supervisor Laura Capps and City of Goleta Council Members James Carraco and Liz Reyes-Martin. We also met with Heal the Ocean at their request, along with several other local agencies that are also responsible for wastewater responsibilities in this area. One of our directors attended the Goleta Slough Management Committee just after the February spill and answered questions and offered updates to that group on our response actions.
I'm not aware of receiving any inquiries from the City of Goleta No one has reached out to clarify information during the public comment period. On the February spill settlement, the comment letters signed over a year after the February spill is the first we are hearing that the City of Goleta has concerns. If the City of Goleta and I quote, has many questions about the management of the district why is this not been voiced until now? And why second-handedly not directly to the district?
Thank you
for your time and I will let the rest of our group here talk.
2:55 – 3:019 turns
I'm going to try to address some of your questions. I don't remember all of them off the top of my head because you had quite a few. One of you did ask if there had been a spill since then and there was a spill on the same pipe on the airport property in October of 2024, that specific spill was caught very quickly because of the improvements we had made since the February spill.
I've worked closely with Brian through this entire reporting process and we've worked very hard to determine the next possible steps and this is not just a repair the pipe do we need to replace the pipe? Do we need to look at a longer term solution We have received as of today, we had our board meeting and there is a force main assessment report that was finalized and adopted by received and filed by the Board of Directors.
That is a culmination of all of the research and investigations that we have done including electromagnetic testing on the pipe leak and air detection through acoustic ball sensing physical excavations of the pipe to determine if there's severe external corrosion as well as soil corrosivity testing We did work very closely with the county after the spill happened to do water testing throughout the slough and at the beach site. The county was performing a dredging operation and beach nourishment project at the same time, which was prompting a beach closure without our spill.
This spill happened the Saturday prior to this beach closure, and that is what confused a lot of the beach closures because the county was unsure of how to have two beach closures and which one was affecting the other. After the rain event that happened after this spill through technical experts we were understanding that essentially the atmospheric river flushed the slough and flushed most of the wastewater to the Pacific Ocean where it was diluted We continued water sampling throughout the entire slough at the spill site upstream, downstream and down to the beach. After the rain event, the bacterial indicators were dropping quite rapidly but remained very elevated at the beach where the beach nourishment and the slough dredging material was being dumped.
We continued our water sampling for the better part of six months and that, actually probably longer than that. And the beach nourishment project seemed to have the biggest impact on bacterial indicators as far as a beach closure. We do not believe that the spill is responsible for the 23-day closure. Perhaps a shorter closure, but the beach nourishment project seemed to severely impact the indicators that we were using. To determine with the county if the beach could be reopened.
I know you have some more questions Councilman Kizan and I don't, Kasdan sorry, and I don'y know if I can address those but...
You only have nine seconds left anyway.
Yeah. I appreciate your guys time.
Thank you.
Our next speaker is Eva Lorenchuck?
Good evening Mayor Parodi and council members. I think most of you know me as a land use consultant, that's my daytime job but I am also one of the directors at the Goleta West Sanitary District and I actually served as the chair for the ad hoc committee for the spill which we implemented immediately after the spill to allow us to be flexible and nimble in responding to the spill.
So I'm here to speak about a few things. As Joey mentioned, we did have our assessment report at our we had our meeting this evening as well and so Jim Fisher from Fisher Compliance which is our consultant that has helped us through all this was in town for that so he is also here and he'll speak after me and he can answer some more questions too but we're all available for questions after I do want to address and I think it was Mayor Perote that asked the question but actually I think it was Council Member Kastan.
The fine money can do one of two things. It can be paid straight out and goes into a state fund that the California I'm sorry, that the regional board then kind of allocates as they see fit or it can be applied to a SEP which is Supplemental Environmental Project Which is what we have chosen to do. That is a lot more work on our end. We need to make sure the project happens, we need to spend resources and time and money in the implementation of that project. In this instance it's actually a pilot project that the regional board is very excited about.
I will be honest with you, I shared your concerns. I mean, I think clean drinking water is great but we didn't affect drinking water, right? The spill affected the Goleta Slough. As a land use consultant, I work with a lot of nonprofits that do restoration work. I myself work on a lot of restoration projects. We reached out to the Goleta Slough Management Committee and had them give us their management plan which has A ton of projects in there. We reached out to Dr. Lisa Stratton, who does a lot of environmental work in the SLU. We reached out to non-profits like South Coast Habitat Restoration that have restoration projects in line for the Patterson area and the Goleta watershed.
And unfortunately, the limitations that the regional board puts on SEPs limited us and we couldn't make any of those happen but we tried four months and spent a lot of time and money trying to get that to come to fruition. So I just wanted to address that. And then transparency, you know, I personally attended two meetings of the Goleta City Management Committee, gave updates, had questions asked of me, offered to do other questions.
We did have Council Member Carrico come, I think maybe to two meetings, After that, we assumed there were no questions. So we were a little surprised to see this on the agenda today. We were a little surprised to see the letter that was submitted without having had more discussion and so again, we're here. We can answer anything that you still have after today's presentation.
Thank you.
Our next speaker
is James Fisher.
3:01 – 3:109 turns
Thank you Mayor and honorable members. I'm James Fisher, Fisher Compliance LLC. I worked for about 32 years for the state of California 11 of those years being in charge of the statewide enforcement for sewage bills And so I'm pretty familiar with this. Now, I'm on the other side. I have my own firm helping people with compliance and district's been a great resource or example, I would say here. I just got a few notes I wanted to point out here.
The main that broke they started assessing that way back many years ago which many agencies I've seen have not. I have not done so. I was very pleased to see today the board moving forward with approving a plan to address the main and expedite that. The lifespan of the pipes, you know they're still within reasonable operational life however the district is moving forward now this has happened they know that things have happened here. The beach closures on the regional boards use uh... duration to assess the harm they have a person policy i'd walk me over to look at that policy because it's didn't we go out there and just make up a fine deal throughout systematic scoring process with about ten steps everything from where we had to harm of the volume and so forth so it's a complex system but it does normalize them and come up with a fair penalty and that's how they come up with that so did you go through that uh...
And so the beach closure too, Joey mentioned there's also three days. The lab turnaround time is another thing. A lot of times the labs take longer to get the results back and so that confuses the argument. In the last couple minutes here my experience with the Regional Board of Policies is they absolutely want to do the right thing. They don't want it to take blood out of a turnip. They wanna make sure that what they're doing is fair They know they're going to impact rates. It could impact people paying their sewer bills that could go up $2 a gallon is really kind of a typical amount for a sewage spill I just there's I have like four or five you might look at Monterey mushrooms men's colony the city of Salinas see Greenfield and Montere one they're all in the region here I work with the team here to come up with some reasonable amounts but they range in $2 a gallon to $10 a gallon.
But again, that's really up to the regional board to decide and we think that they've done a reasonable job in this case so happy to answer any questions at the end.
Thank you.
Our next speaker is Richard Foster.
And what do I know? This sounds a little bit like distant relatives showing up when the will's being read. Goleta suffered no direct damage from it, none of this happened on Goleta property we don't control Goleta Beach in fact the only thing Goleta contributed to this was the influence from their residents. We brought the pollution So now we want to punish them because there's a failure of the infrastructure. I would think we had plenty of knowledge about failing infrastructure within this city itself, so now if we get a more punitive fine for them, we can degrade the opportunity for them to upgrade stuff later or to increase our sewer rates. You're supposed to be working for the citizens of Goleta and looking out for our environment, so I see how you do no service to people if you manage to squeeze blood out of turnip.
That, and I don't even know how you measure this. The airport property just flooded the hell out of everything out there. Are we out there measuring up how many aircraft exhausts have washed into the water? Because I'm sure those runways are covered with stuff. The county wants to start dumping toxic waste or at least what they call reclaimed stuff at the beach right now. It seems very selective. I'm really not sure why Goleta's even trying to meddle in this unless you have some solution or you just want to help drive up our rates which I don' particularly care for.
I think the folks out there are probably doing a pretty good job and maybe we're disappointed, but I think we've all found things around town that we were disappointed in at times. Thank you.
Mayor, council members. Thank you. My name is Jenna Acos. I am district counsel for Goleta West Sanitary District. I'm just here. I know there were a couple of questions that did not get answered during the rest of staff and Director Turnshalk's comments so I wanted to try to address some of those. So first, I think there was a question about whether there was negligence found.
And the answer is no. That is really a function of the prosecution team for the regional board. They did look into that and have found no negligence. The next question... Sorry, I'm trying to find my notes. Is whether or not the federal government was ever notified because there are Clean Water Act issues and so yes the federal entities were notified but the Regional Water Quality Control Board has been delegated authority to enforce the Federal Clean Water Act as well as state law which is what they've done in this situation.
The other thing, and I apologize if I'm being repetitive here but I just wanted it to be clear that the condition assessment report that we were discussing having our board approve this evening was started years before the February spill occurred. And there was a draft that was ready for review at the time of the spill and it was actually the district, the general manager In conjunction with district council and Jim and the board who decided, hey wait a minute we need to look further into this. We're going to invest more funds into this. We want them to go back take the findings from the spill that we've gotten from our different experts who have come in to try to analyze this and incorporate those findings into the assessment report so that we actually have an assessment report that comes back to us, that's helpful, that's useful.
That's gonna let us move forward so that something like this doesn't happen again. So I do want, I think that's a really important point here is that this was something that was put into place years before there was ever a spill and Gleda West was ever on the map for this reason. And it's just, you know, we have been trying our best. District staff has been working very, very hard to make sure that they have crossed all their T's, dotted all their I's and is doing as much as they can to make sure something of this magnitude doesn't occur again in the future. We are happy to answer any questions if you have them, we just found out about this agenda item this morning and so in the future if you all do have any questions I know that both of the general managers would love to hear from you.
I have a question right now as far as help me understand who made the decision on the settlement agreement and are there two separate boards? The regional board And then there's an enforcement board that made the decision. How does that play out here?
So thank you, that's a great question and mayor because you asked me that question I will respond please do so they the prosecution team is from the state board but we are in the regional boards are split up into regions of California. So we're within the Central Coast Regional Board. Our prosecutor is actually from the state board. He comes in, prosecution team can't I believe interact directly with the regional board because there's an ethical wall that they have to abide by so although and I think that is the reason that we have the prosecutor come in from the state board because you can't have a prosecution arm as well as a decision making arm talking to each other, there would be an ethical issue with that. Does that answer your question?
Yes but on the 26th and 27th who's making the determination final? Where are we at
with that? Thank you for that clarification so The hearing will be before the regional board, the Central Coast Regional Board. We have been negotiating mainly with the prosecutor so they will be the ones presenting the settlement agreement. It's their settlement agreement that we have I wouldn't even say negotiated as much as discussed with them and so they will be presenting the settlement agreement to the regional board We will be there as well.
3:10 – 3:1615 turns
Good evening Mayor, Parody and Council Members. My name is Molly Troop and I am the Science and Program Manager for Santa Barbara Channel Keeper. I wanted to thank you for having this discussion regarding the proposed settlement agreement between Goleta West Sanitary District and the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. Channel Keeper also reviewed the proposed agreement when it was released for public review in October of last year and submitted comments highlighting many of the same issues that were raised by Supervisor Capps, Mayor Parodi and Councilmember Smith in their joint letter.
Channel Keeper shares the concerns that the agreement may not go far enough to address both the devastation caused by the over 1 million gallon sewage spill, but also very clear management shortcomings by Goleta West Sanitary District. To that end we disagreed with dropping the penalty from the maximum $10 per gallon to $2 per gallon and we also raised questions about the nexus to this spill area.
We appreciate the Mayor, Supervisor Capps and Councilmember Smith for raising the importance of upholding the public trust through transparent governance and rigorous accountability. We remain concerned about the delayed notification that occurred which ultimately resulted in a delay in the closure of Goleta Beach that finally happened six days after the incident.
Channel Keeper supports the City of Goleta speaking formally at the upcoming Water Quality Control Board meeting in alignment with the issues raised in the attached letter. Thank you for your strong support for protecting our coastal environment and community health. Thank you.
And
that concludes public comment,
thank
you. So first Mr. Foster
The difference between what happens at the airport versus what happens here is a violation of the law. That's the biggest difference. One is violating the law, the other one is not and dumping raw sewage when you're not allowed to do that is a problem so there's a reason we're having this conversation but we want it to be productive You know, ultimately to me we want this to be a productive outcome. And I guess one question I have is with that condition assessment that was done of the pipelines What was the costs that were involved in restoring, rehabilitating, replacing? Whatever it is. Was a cost identified?
If I could hear from somebody what that amount might have been in the condition assessment. Is there something? Was there something identified as here's what is needed?
Thank you Councilman Kassin. That is where we are at right now. Estimates as far as cost to, there's many options ahead of us. Realignment, rehabilitation, replacement. There's different techniques that would be there should these pipes be replaced. The assessment essentially points us to the fact that we need to replace these pipes within the next five years or an imminent failure is very possible. So, we're trying to essentially fast not fast track because there's a lot of environmental concerns it is preliminary estimated that permitting and environmental review would take and planning would take about two to two-and-a-half years so we're trying to get this off the ground as soon as possible.
There'll be more failures unless it's replaced.
That's essentially what the report tells us, yes. Obviously we didn't like hearing that but that's also what we need to hear in order to get this project off the ground. Originally prior to the spill we were looking at potential rehabilitation and slip lining the pipes which can increase their lifespan for years to come but we would lose hydraulic capacity which we weren't looking to do in the way that we pump wastewater to the sanitary district across the way of the treatment plant So after the discovery of what's true condition of these pipes through the electromagnetic tool and also excavations in digging up the pipe and doing soil analysis, it's understood that replacement is the smartest way forward. And it's just a matter of alignment to try to be protective of the environmentally sensitive area and also the engineering side of it because it does need to get from point A to point B.
So what is there a range of potential costs that
this? I
mean, you have different options.
If we're sticking to straight replacement costs, I would say a minimum of $8-10 million and a maximum of $20 depending on the technique in which you would like to... if it's a horizontal bore that goes under the ground, that could be quite expensive. It's a dig and replacement. more manageable and cost effective. But that is where we're at, we just received the assessment report from M&S engineers and immediately following that action there was approval to engage with M&s engineers to dive into all of these different options and really give us hard numbers and a clear picture of how we should move forward. We're hoping to have a draft of that before the board within the next six weeks.
And is there no, there's no way to create what you called a SEP. I believe it was a special, what does SEP stand for? Supplemental. What's that again? Thank you. Right. So there's no way to create a SEP in which if there were additional penalties or something like that, it could be directed to this particular project that you're describing here?
May I ask upon my council because I do believe there is another option but I don't want to... Yeah can I please pass that to council? Of course.
3:16 – 3:2311 turns
Thank you Councilmember Kasdan, through the mayor. So there is that was originally a possibility that the district could pursue. The concern was there are very specific timelines with which money has to be spent and started etc., and the whole plans would have to be provided before the settlement could be in place. And so the district was concerned about going forward and coming up with a plan for rehabilitating or replacing the pipelines without doing sufficient due diligence.
So that's your short answer.
So it's a matter of the regional board giving you enough leeway with a SEP in order to make it, I don't know, in order to make it practicable. That the concept of having that this is eligible for a SEP, the problem is just the logistics of it and so forth, the timing of it and to the extent that if the board were flexible enough or could make some sort of arrangements then we could have the money dedicated towards replacing the pipes.
So I'll, um, council member Kazdin through the mayor again, let me back up a little bit and try to parse through some of these things. So first, um using the money to go towards infrastructure improvements at the district that would no longer be called a supplemental environmental project. I can't remember the special terminology but it's It's something like a capital project, something like that. And there are different regulations, enhanced compliance project is what it's called. So there are specific regulations about how this money that is the penalty of the fine has to be used. It can either be paid to the state general fund, it can be used in certain circumstances. I'd like The new pipeline.
Sorry, the prosecution team recommended that the district consider steps and I would like to echo director turn chalks Comments that we did spend a lot of time and also a lot of money looking into potential steps That would benefit the Goleta Slough area. And unlike other districts around California or other regions around California there weren't actually any kind of off the shelf steps that we could do and so we had to in order to create a SAP we had to create a SAP from the ground up.
I guess you know to me at least it's not a not just a question of is spending going to be in the general area where was affected but to know that The problem that existed before as far as the high potential for sewage leaks and spillage is going to be ameliorated. That the money, as much as we can, is going towards that particular project. That to me is an any kind of proposals Deposit more funding, direct more funding towards that outcome is what I want to see regardless of whether it's an official fine or whatever else. To see that accomplishment occur so we don't have this again.
Fully understood, Council Member Kasdan. If I could make one final comment through the Mayor. I will assure you that over the past two years, the entire process as we've been having discussions with the prosecution team going through and finalizing the assessment report, going through our independent studies on why the pipe failed, that has all been... The district has been spending funds and investing in The district and its infrastructure and its staff in order to ensure that something like this does not occur again. And that the district is, and it is, in a much better place than it was two years ago. So all of that time, you know, to get us to today and to the hearing next month has been put towards making sure that the district is better equipped.
Thank you.
Okay. Council Member Kariako, I kind of feel like we've gotten off the main idea of what we were trying to come to a conclusion this evening but if you still have questions?
Yeah, I still have questions and I was specifically mentioned by a couple of them so I really want to ask some questions. So a couple of public commenters specifically mentioned that I came to a board meeting. I think one of them said I only came once or twice and never came again. And it really kind of felt like there was a sentiment being expressed that because there was not any further communication perhaps from me, or perhaps proactively from the city up until now that somehow y'all just thought well we're all good everything's fine.
So I have a couple questions so my first question whoever wants to take it from the district is How many Galeta households approximately are Galeta West Sanitary District customers? About a third of the city, a quarter of the city. 10,000 households, 8,000 households? I'm asking this in particular because another public commenter, Mr. Foster specifically asked like how does this affect Galeta?
Thank you Councilman Chiarocco through Mayor Perote. Households, I know how many parcels are in our
district. Customers?
Roughly 39,500 customers that includes the Isla Vista area and also Rancho Embarcadero. Roughly
if you had to put a guesstimate on it how many would be in the City of Galeta?
3:23 – 3:298 turns
Guestimate 25,000
And when did the Goleta West Sanitary District first proactively communicate about this spill to their customers? I assume their customers would be concerned because if the pipe isn't reliable, that could affect their rates. So they would be concerned, I would imagine.
Thank you. There were press releases released within days of the initial spill. Days of the initial spill
or days of the spill being first publicly reported?
The spill was publicly reported the Saturday afternoon that it was discovered. It went through the proper channels of notifying the county, notifying the regional board and notifying public health. It was mentioned in this report that that was during a holiday weekend so there were some communication errors that were, I hate to use this phrase but somewhat out of our control and then there were press releases released onto our website.
Wednesday or Thursday of the following week to identify what had happened.
Yeah, and I know there were press releases that went out about this meeting a couple of times and I know the agenda was publicly released you know compliant with the Brown Act so I mean along the same spirit when did the sanitary district first proactively contact City of Goleta leaders either at the city manager's office or council members?
Councilman Caracco, I wish I had a direct answer to that. And to be fair, that's typically not in our protocol and I understand communication can be improved there but while we're dealing with a massive sewer spill and reporting it to the powers-that-be, it's never been part of our protocol to notify the city. That could be something we could address absolutely.
So I think one thing to kind of just take away for the future is if you're gonna come here and say we didn't know about the meeting and we didn't think you guys had any problem Communication goes both ways, and I took the step of actually coming to one of your board meetings. I expressed my concerns face-to-face. I expressed my concerns directly to the general manager at the site of a spill.
I was concerned about how did the reporting consist of a voicemail on a Saturday morning to a phone number that they thought was public health And like no other phone calls were made. That's a concern I expressed. I didn't do it in a public forum at this time, you know at that time because I was trying to do positive two-way intergovernmental relations not trying to make anyone look bad catch people doing something wrong trying to be solution oriented.
I also had concerns I believe I expressed the time about how did a thirty thousand gallon initial spill get characterized to OES as 1,000 gallons. That's not like a decimal point error. Like how did that happen? I know I'm being told it wasn't negligence and I know mistakes can happen but that's a big honking mistake because that would have triggered a whole bunch of other actions that could have led to the closure, you know, to other actions that could have better informed the public sooner that could have led to different types of interventions. So, I mean these things matter.
So, you know, I feel like it's okay if you're a little frustrated that we're having this conversation and I know it's unorthodox but by the same token this is the first time you've come to talk to us about it. We came to talk to you and what did we get after I don't remember seeing a single email. I don't remember a phone call. I don't remember a text message. It's not like you don't know who we are.
When the public health voicemail was contacted, why wasn't the next call to the county supervisor? Why not to Mona Miyasato? There's so many things that could have been done differently and I think it's one thing We took accountability and I believe that accountability was taken. I saw the Board of Supervisors meeting, I know there's been some transparency and I know there's been some accountability but what we're really talking about to get back to what the Mayor is trying to say is we're debating whether or not to empower the mayor and a council member or council members to weigh in on whether we think it's appropriate to cut a break on what the fines should be because there's the regular amount and then there's the reduced amount for a certain kind of good behavior.
This was illustrated by the channel keeper public comment, and I think it's an appropriate question for us to consider otherwise we wouldn't be here so I appreciate you coming. I'm sorry that you only learned about it today but I did not appreciate when I went out of my way to come to your meeting to express my concerns that somehow got turned into the fact because I didn't do some follow-up after, that somehow meant not that concerned.
You guys can call us too. You can email us too. You can also communicate to our residents. You can also communicate to our staff leadership. So I'll stop there.
3:29 – 3:342 turns
Okay. Where do we want to go with this? Do we want to, I guess back to the original question, do we want to okay the mayor or mayor pro tem or a council member going and speaking in February, the regional board, or do we want to go as From the public and not from the city of Goleta. For me, the biggest problem I saw and which I encouraged to be put into the letter was an action plan moving forward that there's an action plan that really spells out how you notify the public. And if you don't do that, you're fined heavily because I think what I'm hearing is it happened on a Friday, maybe a holiday weekend and nobody knew about it. People were in the water.
That's what I'm hearing because I heard that Laura Capps asked them to get out of the water and go home and take a shower. That's unacceptable. Unacceptable. So what would this board like to do? Any comments from the board? Because I think we're seeking your approval, all of us. Do we just send the letter or do we actually go and speak or not?
Thank you. And thank you to everyone who's given public comment. I think I learned a lot more tonight and had a lot to consider. And I know that we got a copy of the letter when it was first sent back in November I think for me there's like a couple of things that can and are true, and then I still have some discomfort around some of what is in the letter if it's coming on behalf of the entire council.
So first I do want to just very much reiterate that any council member is fully within their Right, to give a public comment on their as an individual. So what you and Mayor Pro Tem and the mayor sent was absolutely appropriate. And I'm, you know, you spoke with the supervisor and talk through that letter. You know, I do recall going out to that site visit and it was devastating.
And I want to say that I could tell from the staff, Mr. McCarthy, I think you were out there with us, I could tell that you were devastated. None of you ever want something like this to happen. No one does. So I really got that sense and it definitely impacted more than just what the boundaries The spill were everyone I know around that time in the in our community, our residents were concerned and upset and wanted to know what happened. And how do we make sure nothing like that ever happens again? So I think our community deeply cares about this.
I think where I have some caution is you know I am in no way an expert in what the fine should be or having an opinion on that. I think that's why these organizations and these agencies have that expertise, and have a process that they follow. So while I think we can express surprise or disappointment that that fine is on that lower end, I think it's appropriate to You know, say that you know we think that we express our concern that it's on that lower end. But to take the additional step of saying what we think it should be I think that's where I'm not there and saying that I support that. I don't have you know our city staffs expertise to tell us that that's appropriate or that we should do that So I do have some discomfort on that.
So at this point, you know, I'm probably more inclined to abstain from saying that it should come from the full council. I fully support if you or any of the other council members want to go and make your own individual comments and share concerns that maybe you've heard from your constituents, I think that's absolutely appropriate. But with the absence of more of that kind of expertise or knowledge on what is appropriate for us to say in public comment. I think, you know and I want to hear what everyone else has to say but I don't know that I'm quite there on saying that it should come from the full council with what's in the letter right now.
3:34 – 3:4116 turns
Thank You. I mean, to me our goal is to see that this doesn't happen again and that the new pipeline is invested. That a fine where the money goes elsewhere, but the money is not spent on the immediate issue, the immediate concern But goes out to Kuyama or wherever, doesn't help us. And there's no, I don't see any benefit that's derived from pursuing a fine that will help Kuyama's clean water. So if an increased fine ends up diverting money from the pipeline that we want, We're shooting ourselves in the foot by asking for a higher fine if it just means it's spent elsewhere. To go to the point that the mayor made, what we do want is that action plan.
We want an action plan for the pipeline. We wanna see that that pipeline is gonna be completed in a certain time frame and that would be success for me, that we would know this won't happen again And so notification, I don't disagree with if there are protocols for notification. I don't know if they exist already or that they need to be laid out. You know here's going to be our notification process and a public sort of recognition of who needs to be notified how fast and all of that. That could be valuable.
But so I guess an action plan, a notification perhaps. Ask for that and an action plan or a schedule or something like that with respect to replacing the pipeline but just asking for a higher fine won't help us, won't make us better off. That's my concern. So that's it.
Excuse me, Council Member Kerrioca.
Thank you so I just want to make sure I get clarification on something. We're not being asked to endorse the letter as a council right? What we're discussing is whether or not to empower the mayor and the Mayor Pro Tem to go and speak at the meeting on behalf of the city. I support that Where I would want a little bit more kind of precision and clarity is on like which things should be said.
And the action plan 100%. Expressing surprise at the, how do I say this? Frustration with the response. Calling for accountability and ask, I would say asking for the highest, most appropriate fine. We can wordsmith it if we need to wordsmith it. I don't need to get into amounts but I think at the end of the day, I think it is appropriate for us to weigh in.
I don't want the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem to feel like they have to kind of just speak on their own behalf. I think just from the comments I've heard on the dais, I think we're all frustrated. We all want more from the district than we've gotten And so I think it would be appropriate to say something on behalf of the city. And I would say that if you're comfortable saying action plan, frustrated with the response, frustrated with the communication, want them to do better on behalf of our residents, please deliver the most appropriate fine, then I'd say yeah, do that. And I think if you wanna go any further than that, I would say speak on your own behalf.
Mayor Pro Tem, do you have a
comment? I'm comfortable with that feedback. I don't know if others have any follow-up thoughts on it in that regard.
Yeah, do we need to make a motion on that?
Mayor and Council Members, I do think it would be helpful just to specify to the extent the council is going to empower a member to speak at the meeting just the scope of...
It reminds what we are empowered to say.
Just the main points of the
scope. Okay, do you want to make that motion? Well you kind of did. I don't
know, I kind of like the way Luz said it better but I'm happy to try. I move that we provide sanction to the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem to represent the City of Goleta at the upcoming Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board meeting about the proposed settlement agreement and authorize them specifically to speak about the need for an action plan in the need for an appropriate fine.
And to also speak about the disappointment that we feel on behalf of our residents and our agency about the response from the agency in terms of public noticing and communication. I'm open to friendly amendments.
Yeah, well especially with the latter one, I think to go to the mayor's point you want – I think it should be looking forward rather than just looking backward that we were disappointed but to say there should be some sort of plan or
implementation. I did mention – I think it was the first thing I mentioned was a need for an action plan.
Well, I want – I mean my interest would be the action plan for the pipeline, the action plan for seeing that get implemented That that to me is the ultimate goal. And not, you know I don't know the meaning of the words additional appropriate fine but I want to see the money spent on the pipeline not as a fine per se and heading out to Kuyama.
Again open to friendly amendments. Okay I don'y know how to say that. I think you just did. Okay. I
have a question before we vote. One is, do we know that this board that is considering the settlement even has the authority to require these things as part of the settlement? And two, do we know that the local district hasn't already I would hope that you've already thought about public notification like how to improve that and an action plan. I think we heard a little bit of that but I guess I would hope you wouldn't need a settlement to do that. I'm
3:42 – 3:4728 turns
going
to close public comment. The fact that there was another spill, did anybody hear about that? So that's why I was requesting my language in this letter is just an action plan moving forward You'll do better at us notifying mainly the public using the beach so they don't go in the water immediately as soon as you know. That's what I considered an action plan.
When I say action plan, I mean both in terms of better communicating in the future and better pipeline safety.
And that can
be
addressed at the meeting.
I'm trying to remember Council Member Kasdan's words but any fines being used towards prevention and improvements? Is that how you?
Well, I don't know what's legally, you know from what they've said. But
yes. Nothing we're telling them they can say is legally binding. I mean you're just expressing an opinion and a request whether they are empowered to act upon it or not. I mean it gets it under the public record.
Yeah.
So Mayor and Councilmembers, we do have a pending motion on the floor but not yet a second. So just to reiterate the motion... We need
to have a second.
I'm sorry?
We need to have a second to be discussing
it. I think it's permissible to still have the discussion now. I can read sort of how I've tried to capture the motion to see if there is a second for it. Um, I have from Councilmember Kiriakou uh, to provide authority to the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem to represent the city at the upcoming Central Coast Regional Water Quality Board about the proposed settlement, authorize the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem to specifically speak about the need for an action plan appropriate future plan. And to also speak on the disappointment on behalf of Goleta residents in terms of public noticing and communication with a revision to specify that the action plan relates to pipeline safety and that fines should be used towards prevention and improvement So that is broadly what I have down as the motion, but I would ask Council Member Kiriakou if that sort of broadly encompasses.
I think that broadly encompasses it and in fairness I thought Council Member Kasdan's comments were meant as a second with a friendly amendment, but
perhaps they weren't.
No, that sounds good.
Okay and so with that clarification in mind, so Council Member Kasdan as well, that is consistent with your friendly amendment and a second on the motion?
I think so as long as they're not pleading for higher fines that would, you know if that being the case then I'm good.
Okay so we do have a pending motion and a second on the floor as read into the record.
Okay let's do a roll call vote.
Roll-call vote Passed 4–0 motion and a second on the floor as read into the record. Okay let's do a roll call · 1 under review
Show transcript
It's four with one abstention.
I think we're on the same page, I mean I think it's good.
Okay is everybody ready to move on to the last item which may take a while anybody need a break no you're all good okay all right
That'll bring us to item C-3, City of Goleta Transportation Advisory Structure Evaluation Report.
Good evening, Madam Mayor and City Council. If you could give us a couple minutes just to set up. I
know how to clear a room. Yeah.
3:48 – 4:025 turns
Good morning, everyone. Yeah.
Okay, let's bring this meeting back to order.
Item C3, Certificate of Transportation Advisory Structure Evaluation Report.
Thank you
Good evening Madam Mayor and City Council. Tonight Public Works will be presenting on the Transportation Advisory Structure Evaluation Report. I'm going to give us a little history on why, oh before i get to that I should probably say who's presenting so we'll have Teresa Lopes who's the principal in charge of transportation and development engineering and myself Nina Buolna the public works director While we're here tonight, on April 15th 2015 the City Council considered the formation of a proposed Transportation and Circulation Standing Committee and directed staff to evaluate potential city board commission or committee options related to transportation and circulation in return to council with a recommendation.
So in response staff developed the Transportation Advisory Structure Evaluation Report Which is included in attachment one of the council report provided. The evaluation applied a structured objective and imperative framework considering the city's current practices, models used by other jurisdictions available organizational options and staff analysis based on consistent evaluated criteria.
Tonight's outline will go over the city's current transportation planning and operations, regional research of other jurisdictions' transportation advisory structures, present City Council with transportation advisory structure options, discuss potential organizational structures and procedural differences, and present staffs findings in implementation considerations.
So the current transportation planning and operations, transportation planning and policy directions are established through City Council approved plans studies and policy actions. Public Works implements transportation improvements consistent with these adopted directions. Public Works implements routine transportation and traffic operation administratively within the existing curb-to-curb roadway.
This includes striping, safety improvements, signage signal timing and phasing, lane configuration adjustments and intersection operations intended to improve safety in traffic flow. These actions represent routine data driven operational adjustments made by professional staff to respond to observed conditions and improve system performance. City Council action is required for policy level transportation decisions, funding approvals, changes that material effect parking supply, property access or the intended use of the roadway.
Public engagement and coordination are integrated into day-to-day transportation planning, operations and project delivery. Coordination and outreach are scaled to project scope and occur through maintenance activities, capital improvement program projects, development review and city council process. Existing coordination and outreach practices would remain in place under all organizational options and would supplement not replace any new advisory structure.
The current transportation approach and plans and studies, we have the Vision Zero Approach adopted February 2024. A safety-focused framework that prioritizes reducing fatal and severe injury collisions while maintaining efficient and reliable operation of the roadway system for all users. The Goleta Traffic Study and Local Road Safety Plan evaluates citywide collision trends and identifies potential safety countermeasures The Bicycle Pedestrian Master Plan identifies a connected multimodal network based on community input and technical analysis.
And the general plan establishes the overall transportation and circulation policy framework. These plans and studies collectively inform transportation planning, project development, and operational decisions. Transportation actions guided by adopted city plans and policies and implemented in accordance with applicable engineering standards including the California MUTCD, Caltrans Standards and nationally recognized best practices.
Coordination and outreach. Public works approach to transportation engagement is grounded in the three C's, community, communicate and coordinate. This framework reflects the city's established practices and supports early engagement communication and consistent coordination while maintaining flexibility and efficiency in project delivery. Ongoing coordination led by Public Works as part of the day-to-day transportation planning and operations. Coordination with Santa Barbara County Public Works, SB MOVES, County Fire Department, MTD, Caltrans, the City of Santa Barbara and internal city departments including Planning, Neighborhood Services in the City Manager's Office as needed.
City is a participating voting member at the Santa Barbara County Association of Government, SBCAG Technical Advisory Committee which meets monthly to discuss regional transportation policies, programs and funding priorities. Quarterly traffic operations and safety coordinations with the Sheriff's Department and City Manager's Office. Quarterly coordination with utility providers and Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District. Bi-annual coordination with local schools on circulation access and safety, project-specific outreach conducted through capital improvement program maintenance development projects with outreach scaled to project scope and potential community impacts.
Multiple outreach methods used as appropriate, including public meetings, open house, mailed notices, door hangers, website updates, construction notification, press release, email and text notifications, and direct coordination with affected neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and stakeholders. Public engagement through the City Council agenda process including published staff reports, public noticing, and opportunities for the public to comment at council meetings.
This framework reflects the city's current operating model and represents the foundation of transportation coordination and public engagement. These practices will remain in place regardless of which advisory option is selected, any additional advisory structure would build upon this approach not replace it. So city staff did regional research and we looked at all the cities in Santa Barbara County and Santa Barbara County itself Most jurisdictions manage transportation through staff-led or technical coordination, not a standing public commission.
Transportation items are elevated to the governing body only when formal approval is required. Staff or technical advisory groups are commonly used for traffic operations, safety and control devices. So the examples that we reviewed, the County of Santa Barbara has a staff-led technical advisory group including public works staff, highway patrol, sheriff and county fire departments as representatives They meet on an as-needed basis, and the Traffic Engineering Committee reviews operational traffic matters. The City of Carpentria has a staff level committee that meets on an as-needed basis and includes public works and public safety personnel to review, coordinate transportation related issues.
The City of Santa Maria has a technical advisory group composed of staff and technical experts that meet monthly. They provide recommendations to the City Council on traffic operations, controlled devices and safety improvements The city of Santa Barbara is the only jurisdiction in the county with a standing public transportation advisory committee which makes up seven members, five of which are city residents and two can be city or county residents.
And they're all appointed by council. They provide recommendations to the City Council on multimodal transportation traffic calming neighborhood safety and pedestrian and bicycle policies and selected project concepts. We also looked at four other jurisdictions in the state. The cities reviewed represent a range of transportation advisory structures used by California jurisdictions with different sizes, land use contexts and transportation needs.
So we looked at the City of Davis and they have a single advisory body addressing multimodal planning, traffic safety and sustainability. And it's a transportation commission. The City of Manhattan Beach has a Parking and Public Improvements Commission focused on parking public improvements in right-of-way activities And the City of San Luis Obispo has two groups, one for Active Transportation Committee and the other is for Mass Transit.
And then the City of Seaside has a Traffic Advisory Committee. City Staff Committee reviews traffic safety and operational matters and forwards recommendations to the city council. So with the end of the research I'm gonna turn it over to Teresa Lopes.
4:02 – 4:1910 turns
Okay. So four structure options were considered in the study. Option one, the current process or status quo. Option one continues the city's existing approach to reviewing, analyzing and addressing transportation-related items. Issues are reviewed internally by Public Works staff. Public Works consults with other city departments including Sheriff's Office and external agencies such as County Fire and MTD on an as-needed basis as part of the current process.
As mentioned earlier, staff has regular touch points with law enforcement utility companies and Goleta schools in school district personnel to help inform issues and decision making. Public outreach is part of the current process and opportunity for public input and or public noticing is conducted on a case-by-case basis as appropriate. Findings, recommendations and proposed actions are presented to the City Council for review direction and approval.
And an example of this current process in practice is the current Red Curb Review and Implementation Procedures. No additional workload or staffing resources are required with Option 1 As we go through the other options presented here, please note that this process identified in option one remains as the base condition. The steps identified in option one will still take place as an initial effort with all the option structures.
The changes proposed in options two through four are incremental and intended to build upon this existing framework. Option two, the internal working group. Option one and two are very similar with some minor changes. Option two would create a formal staff level working group made up of the different city departments including Public Works, the City Manager's Office, Planning, Neighborhood Services and our partner agencies including Sheriff, Fire Department and MTD.
This group would meet on a quarterly basis to monitor transportation issues, share information and coordinate across departments. Staff would work together to review issues, conduct technical analysis and develop potential solutions. As with our current process any findings recommendations or proposed actions would be brought directly to City Council for review direction and approval as needed Council's role in the process would not change.
Public works would continue to seek public input and provide noticing on a case-by-case basis when appropriate. As far as workload, this option requires a small amount of additional staff time to coordinate the working group and refine materials internally It does not include public meetings or any changes to formal meeting requirements. Option 3, Council Committee.
Option three would consist of a Brown Act compliant council subcommittee which would include two council members and the committee would serve in an advisory capacity to the City Council Other members of this committee could include staff and regional partner liaisons, including MTD sheriffs and county fire. The committee could meet quarterly or as needed to review transportation matters and provide policy guidance and recommendations.
This committee would provide an additional opportunity beyond the current baseline process for public engagement with elected officials as part of the legislative process. Workload wise this option requires more staff time for agendas, meeting support and committee directed revisions and adds steps to the current process that could require additional time and may delay items reaching City Council.
Option 4 public transportation commission in this option a Brown Act compliant advisory body composed of no more than five members would be formed The commission would consist of council-appointed residents who must live in the City of Goleta and representatives from key partner agencies such as MTD, Sheriff's and County Fire. The Commission would review transportation matters and provide policy guidance and recommendations.
This option would provide an additional opportunity beyond the current workflow process for public engagement. This option also requires the most additional staff time and adds extra steps that can also delay when items reach Council. If Council decides to pursue either Option 3 or 4, staff recommends that certain recurring transportation items be reviewed first by this advisory body rather than coming directly to the Council.
This includes items like the annual pavement management update Bicycle and pedestrian master plan updates, and the transportation related capital improvement program. These items would be reviewed in detail at the advisory level and then brought to council on the consent calendar to reduce duplication and improve efficiency. All policy decisions funding approvals and actions that significantly affect parking access or transportation policy would continue to require full council approval. An important thing to note is that any increase in workload that may come with option three or four would compete with staff's ability to address existing workload priorities.
So staff evaluated the four structure options using the criteria outlined in this slide. The evaluation was conducted by a team of staff consisting of three from Public Works and one from the City Manager's Office. Each structure option was assessed in a consistent way considering factors such as public transparency and engagement, how well programs and projects could be delivered Interdepartmental coordination, staff and administrative capacity, and cost efficiency.
The main focus of the evaluation was on staff's ability to implement projects, programs, and routine work successfully and efficiently. The evaluation wasn't specifically a review of how the options would impact policymaking or council engagement. Council review requirements were consistent across all four options. The staff effort required to prepare and present an item to council remained the same across all the structure options.
For fiscal impacts, there's no immediate fiscal impact from receiving this report tonight Option one, the status quo uses our current staff-led process and doesn't add costs. Option two, an internal working group would take a small amount of additional staff time which could be managed within existing resources. Options three and four, the Council Committee or the Public Transportation Commission would require more ongoing staff and administrative work and add costs not currently budgeted.
A detailed fiscal review would be recommended before moving forward with either of these options. Based on the application of the ranking criteria, option one which is to maintain the status quo ranked the highest overall. This option best fits the city's current operations staffing capacity and project delivery And it doesn't add any extra administrative complexity.
Option two, the internal working group also scored well in the evaluation and could be a good alternative if council would like to formalize additional internal coordination without creating a new advisory body. Options three and four rank lower because they come with more administrative requirements, take more staff time and involve additional procedural steps.
As a result of the study and evaluation, staff recommends continuing with option one, the status quo to manage transportation and circulation issues efficiently with current resources. would prefer a more structured internal coordination without creating a new committee option two, the internal working group could also be implemented efficiently within existing staff capacity.
And that's the end of our presentation and so we'll welcome any questions.
Thank you for putting this together. Thank you. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem Smith?
Yes, thank you and I want to thank staff for all of their research and efforts in bringing this back per council's direction. One question I had it sounds like it's too early to say yet but in terms of looking at option three or four it sounds like there was a presumption that this would be additive. It would be an additional council committee Commission within our current it sounds like it wasn't contemplated that there could be a Swap or so for example the council could make a choice to Eliminate a different committee or a different commission To help in terms of fiscal impact
Mayor Pro Tem Smith, that's correct. It was building on existing staff procedures.
Great thank you and then so I heard the comment about bringing back items for consent so with that would be contemplated under a commission
model? For the commission and the committee, the idea is that we'd go to those governing bodies first. And then any recommendations they have or iterations that we would have to do, we'd go back and do that and then present it to the council after that.
Okay. I thought I heard that it would come back on a consent calendar but there would be some flexibility there?
We just recommended those three items to come back on consent calendar. It was just one of the ideas we had to make it more efficient. Okay thank you.
Council Member Kessin.
Yeah, so I don't really have questions as much as some initial comments. So the first thing is that you know our your public works transportation and so forth there are the most public facing activities the city conducts nothing else is impacts people as on a daily basis in the same way They might know or not know whether we're doing a good job with green energy, or creeks are watershed. But they know the roads and they know about all the lane re-striping and so forth.
There are also projects that are geographically specific, so it's not just let's say childcare across the city for example but stuff that is in people's neighborhoods. It's stuff that is really important to them on a specific basis and so for instance we might talk about traffic calming options Choosing which one isn't just an engineering question. It isn't just a matter of having somebody in their office and analyzing an issue, whether there's choosing bull bouts, a single lane on the road, vegetative islands, those kinds of things, all of those things People have preferences for it. They'll react and it's helpful to get their input, to let them participate. So one of the values of these ideas is to give people a forum, an opportunity where they can weigh in on particular things.
And so a lot of the purpose of this is is getting public feedback, getting public engagement. And I would point out, public engagement and outreach is not just administrative red tape. It is essential for us to be able to get that and to know what the issues are, for people to be able to say the things that are of concern for them. So, you know in weighing the benefits and so forth one of the things with especially the commission model is that opportunity for public engagement and outreach and education and so forth for people to hear the issues.
The other thing I wanted to just comment on is the idea of, you know, that this is a workload burden and so forth. And when I read the comments there about the, you know, here's all the workload there it struck me that the same comments that are made there could be made for the Planning Commission, Parks and Rec, Finance committee, etc. And I don't know if turning this down suggests we should be eliminating the other committees and commissions because they're all subject to the same workload, the same burden.
And you know, maybe that's the case. I don't know but it gives the public and depending on which one, the public or the council members the opportunity to participate. As far as well, I would just note as far as workload planning has three commissions uh... and one standing committee that they have historical preservation planning commission design review board and the committee of energy green issues city manager has four committees or commissions one commission three committees neighborhood services has four two commissions into committees public works has committees or commissions. There are no commissions and one, I guess Public Treaty Advisory is a commission and the Watershed and Waste Reduction is a committee but of those two the Watershed and Waste Reduction has met I believe just one time since it was created so as far as on a departmental level public works compared to the other departments is not excessively burdened Okay.
I will not go on and on, but I would add one last point, and I can talk about it later, is that there are ways to limit the burden for whatever is set up. If there's a commission or a committee set up, a commission especially, you can set a threshold that it's got to be projects above $3 million or $4 million, there's ways to make it so that it's not something that is quibbling about tiny little things and meeting incessantly or something like that. There are opportunities to make sure that they focus on the things that are important or controversial that are significant And having the people weigh in on the bike and pedestrian master plan, how that can be better implemented for instance. That's valuable.
So I think it's some of the benefits of this sort of approach of something like this aren't captured with the current arrangement and there are opportunities that we can do better with it so thank you.
4:20 – 4:302 turns
Council Member Reyes-Martin. I also have just some initial comments and then I'm sure we'll have public comment, which will be great too. I think just my initial comments from the presentation and thank you and thank you for the report was a very thorough analysis that I'm sure a lot of folks spent a lot of time on but I appreciate it. It seemed to me were very deliberative in thinking through in evaluating the different options. I will start by saying, you know, the idea that I agree that many of the topics within transportation and circulation and that's a really very broad term but from what we've talked about so far they are hugely important to the city.
Often said they are among the top things that I hear from my residents, whether that's roads or bike safety or pedestrian safety. All those things absolutely agree with that. I think the idea that those topics would come to the council as a consent item is a nonstarter for me. I think I would 100% want to have a full council discussion about any of those topics. I think council is where we have, if I'm looking at all the public or Brown Act committees we have and including council, I think we probably have the most public participation especially when it's a really big item and I would not want to close the door on that.
And so then I agree that then it would be very duplicative to then be presenting the same thing I don't think that is a great use of anyone's time. And if I'm a member of the public and, you know, I don't have all the time in the world to go to meetings, I'm going to go to the Council meeting because we're the actual policymakers. So I struggle with that. I'm also not at all convinced that we should have A commission just because the City of Santa Barbara has one, or because Public Works doesn't have one. I don't think that's enough of a reason for me. I think Public Works has a lot on your plates. I think you all work incredibly hard on Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
Your crews are out working so I know that you're working hard. It is absolutely not that you need or have all this extra capacity to take A commission. So when I look at the option of the council subcommittee, I think it's the same where I just think these issues are so important that they end up needing to be discussed at the full Council level anyway. So then I just go back to what is the problem that we are trying to solve for?
And I'm not real clear on what that is, because if you ask me what do we think the problems are related to transportation, I know what they are. We all do. I don't need a commission to tell me that we need to be investing way more in pavement That's a decision and something that we as a council need to hold ourselves accountable to actually finance that and have a plan to do that.
I don't need a commission to tell me that. If we're talking about making progress on some plans that we have in place, I think that's a really valid point. How do we as a council ensure that the bike ped master plan and all these other plans, Vision Zero, how do we ensure those happen? And what is the accountability structure for that? I think those are really valid points and would be really valid and productive conversations. I don't know that a commission is the right solution for that.
It might be but I don�t know that that is the right solution for that issue. Same with CIP. I think that's a really important topic for us as a full council to digest and take the time and give input and give policy direction on. I don't want to, I know abdicate sounds really serious but I don't want to like abdicate that responsibility to a commission or another body when I think we're going to want to do that ourselves anyway.
So I think that just takes me back to if we're going to look at, if the issue though is that we want to have more opportunity for public engagement. I love that. I think that more public engagement and more public input is almost always great. Again, I don't know that a commission is a way to achieve that. If we're going to look at investing additional resources on a plan to do that in a more regular or systematic way, then I'd want to have a discussion about that. Is that more regular council items where we have presentations on topics that allow for the public to weigh in? We've talked about this before having neighborhood meetings not here in the Council Chambers but out in the community about transportation issues in different neighborhoods I would be very interested in discussing, you know that kind of model.
It's almost like a version of the coffee with a council member where we go out into the community and talk about transportation issues that affect your neighborhood. So again like if those are kind of some of the issues that we as a full Council are identifying You know, I don't know that a commission or council subcommittee is the way to achieve that. But there might be some other things we can and should be doing.
I think option two is a good one. I always think it's great to have better options. Coordination between departments, and I think that's a good option. It seems like one that I would support staff doing anyway. The last point I will make is I know some of the options also talked about having agency representatives And so then I wondered how does that fit in with we all have various liaison roles as council to those agencies.
So then I was just wondering, like, how does that work? Like, you know, whether it's MTD or SPCAG or these other groups, like, we have a council member that sits on their board. So then how does that work with and now we're on their board but then now we're also asking one of them to be on potentially a committee. So maybe that would have to just get fleshed out later, but those are my comments right now.
I'll stop. I've been here a long time and I can remember discussing having some kind of, it's been called different things but it's some kind of a transportation circulation committee. Some sort of group that meets with the public And they're part of the group and as an advisory group. So it's been going on for a long time, and it's been no, no, it's not going to work. No, it is not going to work.
I can understand why your report said what it did, and I truly understand that you're busy. But first of all, I don't think status quo is working because What we would have if we had an option, and actually if we had option four there's no reason why we couldn't have five to seven community members right? Residents. We don't have to have five I don't think that's not enough. I know the more you get the harder it is so I'm not suggesting you know 13 or what no. So I'm just saying there's no reason we only can't have to have five But what this offers, if you were to do and correct me if I'm wrong. If we were to do option four as an advisory And, but we would look at as a council interviewing people to be on that commission.
It would be somebody that is familiar with bikes, somebody that is a pedestrian, somebody that rides the bus, somebody that drives their car all sitting together and that's what we don't have. You know, you're looking and I respect what you do. You're fabulous and you give us the tools to help us figure it all out. You're engineers and you're looking at through that lens and we're looking at it through a policy lens but what we're missing is the community lens and it's also another opportunity for engagement to learn from each other in a very informal setting. So that's what I like about it, it's informal. Yes they can come here, yes we can go to them but this gives them a little bit more ownership of having input.
It's really for me about education Seeing what others are experiencing, and it's not just about the roads. It's about circulation. It's about how to get from point A to point B to point C. I think those things are all really critical and maybe even having somebody representative from the schools. There is a lot of possibilities how we can mix this up. My question though, I do have a question, I kind of gave you where I'm coming from but On option two, don't we already do that?
4:30 – 4:424 turns
Mayor Parodi, option two would fortify what we already do. We currently have a meeting with Sheriff's Department and the City Manager's Office every three months but this would make it more deliberate and we would meet regularly and have agendas and have other departments and other stakeholders like fire in those meetings
Okay, I think that's... Like I said we've been talking about this a long time and it is one of our largest budget. And to not feel that the community can be engaged and educated a little bit more as my concern is a disservice so that's where I'm coming from. Yeah,
a couple of things. First I think of it at least similar to the Planning Commission in terms of the model and with to go to Councilmember Reyes-Martin's observation about the consent calendar obviously when something significant enough to go to the Planning Commission it comes to us on the regular, you know, policy making not the consent. So anything that's important enough would go in essence to us not on consent unless I don't know. But it strikes me that one of the things that you would think about in terms of controlling the workload is to both larger projects, would be subject to larger projects. Projects where there might Citywide sort of things like Vision Zero, Bike and Ped.
I don't know with pavement they're all smaller and if there's a quantitative process that determines. I don't know how quantitative it is but if there is a quantitative process then it's not as amenable. I guess, you know, nobody is looking to create like I said a burden including me strangely enough. A burden or red tape or anything like that but there's a value here that we're not able to accomplish right now and I just can't see that having quarterly meetings or something is going to be such a game changer in terms of your workload or anything like that.
You know, there are ways you can make it so it is not essentially inherently burdensome. I would also concur with the idea of having meetings and things like something like if it's the community center or some schools or something where there's things that are local especially important in a neighborhood have them out there. The public engagement is one of the best benefits we can get there.
And okay, that was, that's it. But you know given how important these projects are, is it really? You know we have, I look, is Public Tree Advisory Commission more important to have as a commission than our transportation system. We've got a whole bunch of commissions and committees, and there's a rationale for it. It's hard for me to see why there wouldn't be a rationale for something that's as public facing and as important as the transportation circulation and safety.
Okay. I'll stop with that.
Thank you, Madam Mayor and thank you to everyone that helped get us to here tonight. I want to thank staff for spending some time doing a deep dive on this. I want to thank the council members that have been consistently trying tried to push the idea forward of having, for lack of a better phrase, a better mousetrap. You know, a comment was made earlier Maybe it was a rhetorical question of like, what's the problem that we're trying to solve? And I think that's always a really good place to start. And I think for me the problem that I'm trying to solve is how do we get to a place as a city where the public feels like the problems they see on the roads align with our priorities for what's being fixed and when?
The great thing about public engagement is you can never have enough of it. Where I think I'm less clear is what's the best model to achieve solving that problem and are we ready for the best solution right now? Do we need some time, do we need to maybe kind of do an interim solution now and then maybe take the longer term I'm not really in love with any of the options.
Option four is where I eventually want to get to. And to be clear on the reason I want to get there is because I think, you know, the housing element is an important part of our general plan. Our zoning ordinances are an important part of our city governing documents and I think our transportation element is a really important part of our general plan. There's a reason why every city in the state of California is mandated to have one.
It's called a circulation element in terms of what the state code requires, we call it the transportation element. And I do think there is value in having a public facing, public embodied, public member group of citizens that weigh in on how are we doing at having our transportation element be implemented, and that can be complemented later on by council direction with that input.
I don't know that I'm convinced that we're there today right now with where we are as a city with all the things we need to do with the public, and I'm hearing some kind of different thoughts from other council members on like where they seem to be on that notion. One thing that I'm familiar with, and I think it's a really good model is the county's roadmap process The county has obviously a much bigger staff and they have a lot more resources. But they also have a process that I think is a really good one where they basically on an ongoing basis every year, they have a process with the public and with their staff where they identify needs, they set road maintenance priorities, they hold public meetings, they develop a draft plan that gets adopted And then they repeat the exercise.
And it gives the public the opportunity to say, hey well what about this street? Hey and you know what about this area? It's great to have all the different tools that are referenced in the staff report and boy, were there many of them. You know, the traffic safety study, this systemic safety analysis report, the local road safety plan. These are not documents I think the city public sees too often. I'm not sure the council sees these documents all that often.
And I think that if we could find a way to where the city is taking all of that information, but then is also opening our doors to the public a little bit more and bringing them in and saying this is what the data's telling us. This is what our PCI is telling us. This is what our systems are telling us. These are what our documents are telling us should be the priorities. But what do you think should be the priorities? I think at the end of the day we'll collectively be better off having had that conversation and then you come to Council and then we call balls and strikes, we appropriate, we implement. And so I don't know if that would be option two but I like the idea of having something where on a regular basis before we do the pavement program perhaps before we do one or two other things we do bring the public in and we talk about What the you know from staff's perspective these are the things that we're identifying as being the priorities based on our plans.
Based on Vision Zero, based on the Bike and Pedestrian Master Plan, based on the circulation element, et cetera. And then you give the public an opportunity to weigh in this is what we think should be a priority. We might learn something and reprioritize something based on that input and then we'd be better off. So I can get behind the idea of option four. I don't know if I'm sold about it right this second.
But I definitely think something akin to option two, that's really more of an annual workshop that's out in the I like what Councilmember Reyes-Martin was saying about out in the community. I like what Councilmember Kasun said maybe at the community center. Let's go out into the community and neighborhoods and solicit their input rather than just looking at our governing documents and saying this is what we think we should do and then we have a council meeting Sometimes it almost kind of feels like it's too late at that point, the cake is already pretty baked. So I would like to find a way to get more public input at the outset of the process as opposed to at the end of the process at a council meeting.
So I think that's where I'm at right now. I think I could get to option four, I'm just not sure if I'm sold yet like right now today on it but I like the idea of having direct public input on the pavement plan and having a regular recurring meeting before we roll that plan out and just do that plan where the public could weigh in So that's where I'm at, I think right now. I think I could still be persuaded at option four but I would need more information.
I'd wanna be really clear on what the scope would be because, I mean, I've heard Planning Commission mentioned a couple times they have a dedicated staffer if they have a dedicated clerk and so if we're gonna do that, I really feel that should be part of the work plan because then we're really talking about appropriating money and that's a budget decision. Better processes lead to better outcomes. I just want to make sure we get the best outcome by doing the best process here.
4:42 – 4:527 turns
My question would be on the rating system is, do we suffer from confirmation bias because we're rating ourselves on what should be done and if the option number two is the one it would tend to imply that option one isn't really working yet completely. But I would suggest something more along for option five which would be an aggregating committee. They're not here to supervise until public works you know, how to build a project, how to do a project, what's best on a project. But what we see a lot of times is people get done with the project they look and go, how the heck did we end up with stripes like that? Now yeah, the public somewhat default for that but with a committee where you could have preferably not council members because then you get into Brown Act things, you could have some give-and-take and somebody could come in and say, I live around Del Norte and there's not a bus stop within 20 miles my house You know, that's a concern for me and somebody else says you know I'm really worried about the e-bikes.
They're not there to solve the problem they would be there to aggregate this information and sort of put it together in a ranking and then we could have an agenda item for the council that says here is the concerns from the community. Here is what we are hearing as troubling them so that you know I don't how many people told me what the heck happened with the striping on Berkeley? And I think I know why it ended up that way I think a committee like that could serve several functions. One, people can come in and start listing things that they think there's a problem. And so people from different neighborhoods would come in and you'd start building a list that is not just by district by district but people spoke about concerns about bad roads here or they'd like to see this paving done or that there's no transportation here.
Then the second thing that they could do is staff could come in when they're going to have a new and novel idea that's kind of out of the norm, such as whether it's back in parking on Cathedral Oaks or someplace else. You put it into play earlier with a committee that meets regularly, that's open, that can collect information and get feedback on it. Not on the night when we're having the meeting to vote on it. And because too often in this public's own fault, they don't become aware of it until it's up before you. So the idea would be to aggregate information from the community and not have some kind of ruling or judgment or whatever Hand it back to you then, that's freed you up somewhat from public comments where you get a comment this week and next week you have two comments here and whatever.
You'd have somebody actually putting this together into a cohesive list sort of like an annual report. And then Public Works could come in and say we've looked at this agenda item and we think these are things and we're addressing them. It would be a way of engaging the community but not with any kind of oversight authority because nobody wants to be micromanaged especially by people who actually don't know all the facts Thank
you. Thank you.
Our next speaker is Barry Remes.
Good evening again, Barry Remes with Move Santa Barbara County and as you know we empower and educate and advocate for those who walk bike and take public transit in rail. We do want to first of all really give kudos to the Public Works staff for this diligent and detailed and thoughtful analysis. And we attended the original City Council, well the first City Council meeting last year where this was brought I believe by Council Member Kasdan as a suggestion and I think that from what Our interpretation there, the initial desire was to be able to enhance a conduit by which the community's voice was relayed and provide more of an opportunity for The public and those more vulnerable folks in our communities, children, seniors, et cetera, mobility challenged that can amplify that voice and provide that way that the public can relay the sentiments of what's important to them.
So we've heard a lot of good thoughts tonight about how can the public's voice give that opportunity to be able to help prioritize things. Certainly, it's no doubt we all realize that there are a number of high-cost major CIP projects that Public Works is very diligently managing. And we also realized that as a result of that, and understandably big projects like Project Connect, bridge replacements et cetera, crib wall refurbishment, those rightfully need attention. But at the same time we understand and realize that as a result perhaps the bike ped master plan has kind of fallen by the wayside a little bit.
I think while no one is suggesting Redefine that master plan or for example, redefine the Vision Zero approach. But to take a touch point at it and see where are we at? And so move Santa Barbara County, we want to be able to help bring the voice of the more vulnerable users in our society and community for you. If we were to suggest something, the approach to perhaps the number option one I mean that's not going to achieve much if you're trying to get more public input. Option two doesn't seem to really collect that public input so moving towards either three or four does seem to achieve that but also in addition When you're going to consider a Brown Act type of commission, you are also limiting the time that public can give like this. For example, the three minutes.
So getting out to the community really is a good idea and doing that more often gives that more informal approach but we would support a full public appointed committee but we also understand the limitations in the cost constraints that you may have so no. Good luck. It's a good decision.
Thank you for hanging in there. Mayor Pro Tem Smith?
Thank you and I want to thank the members of the public who commented, you know, and I think what I'm hearing both from my fellow councilmembers and the public is this statement that these, you know, public works and transportation issues are of great Great concern and I want to acknowledge that. I'm also hearing from our staff, you know they have a very full plate and particularly our public works staff which we have tasked with this council has tasked with some of the biggest public works project in our city's history so I want to acknowledge that as well.
You know and so In thinking and then in hearing about public engagement. I am still wondering if there might be ways, you know through Agenda council, agenda management. You know that there might be ways we could agendize the bike ped master plan and have an item. There might be better ways that we could utilize our current meeting structure to have more engagement or potentially with the way When we get to the CIP projects each year, there might be a maybe we could look at how that unfolds.
So I think with all of that in mind, I would lean towards option two. You know, I was looking back at the bike ped master plan was finalized in 2018 and then of course a couple years later we have a global pandemic And I think there is this kind of collective sense of everybody sort of coming up for breath and like, okay. These issues are important and we wanna kinda get back to it.
So I would continue to lean there. And then my only additional comment would be if but if I don't have full council support, I would recommend if we did look at either A council committee or a commission. I do think it is a budgetary question so either that come back but we should consider eliminating another committee or looking at committee assignments Just I know my my committee assignments are light. So, you know, I think that that could be looked at but I do think there is a financial Question and or we could look and we could look at our full scope of commissions Is there a trade-off? Could we you know eliminate one Commission and bring in another?
So so those are my thoughts Thank You
Yeah
4:52 – 4:593 turns
I mean, you know we've got well. I guess what I thought I kind of had heard to a certain degree is that there's some sort of interest broadly speaking among council members for commission type approach and the details need to be clarified and so what I would suggest is to say to staff give us what the details would be and try to make it something that's workable.
That is, something that is going to be not too expensive, not too burdensome, that will give us in essence the benefits of outreach, the benefits of public education, the intake of concerns, of trying to reach out and do it in as cost-efficient a way as possible. I don't know what the costs would be so that would be relevant to whatever that report is. In other words if it comes out, let's say it's quarterly Does that mean if it's $30,000 does it mean we should cut out a committee? Because we don't have a cap on committees.
Obviously it comes from somewhere, it's just a matter of priorities. But could I find, could I look and say do we need the PTAC anymore? Could PTAC be rolled in with Parks and Recreation? Yeah, it could. Do we want to do that? It's a separate conversation, I guess I'd say. It's one that could be addressed independently but for now Well anyway, I won't go on. That's...I think there's a foundation there for accomplishing the goals that people have but as Councilmember Kuriakou said we need to see the details, the specifics of how it would work and so forth and so they The staff has accumulated a lot of examples of different types of cities, different works that they've done. There's gonna be some that seem like yeah, that works really well, others where you think ew!
And to come up with an amalgam of something that looks like it would work well. So that would be my proposal.
Okay, Council Member Reyes-Martin?
Thank you. Just in responding to what I've heard from others and public comment, we did get some e-mail to public comment as well which are included in the public record. So part of what I'm hearing is, which I agree with, is how do we structure a process and more opportunities for public input? And take in that information in a way that is really accessible And that then can be compiled and presented to council as a piece of advisory information from the public. I think there's validity to that, and I think we would all welcome more public input on this topic. I guess then my question is could we not task our Public Engagement Commission with doing With having a process where they have a series of meetings, where they have maybe some presentations from staff about different topics and take in that information.
Could that be combined with a series of neighborhood meetings where there's even more informal spaces for people to give input? I think we've had so many examples of those neighborhood type meetings where we're seeking input that have been wildly successful, like the Stowe Park meetings were always packed and plenty of neighbors walked out in a more informal setting.
Give lots of really great input and that process absolutely led to a great and probably better product than if they hadn't done that. I'm just trying to think through some of this. I think I'm along the same lines as Councilmember Kuriako where I'm not opposed to a commission, you know, an advisory commission. I just want to have like really thought through Is there another way to achieve what we want to get and if we're kind of zeroing in on this public input through some of our existing processes or streamlining other processes that we have?
And then shouldn't that also be in the bigger context of our department work plans. You know, if we move forward with any of you know especially option three or four tonight Does that then automatically become, you know, one of those top priorities in the work plans that are coming to us in a few months? And have we then displaced something else that was on that list or then we have to figure out how to allocate additional budget to that.
You know, again I had the same comment when Human resources committee where I would rather have a process where we're looking at all of our commissions and committees more holistically and identifying, you know, does this fit within something we already have or does it need to be something separate? So like I said, I'm not opposed to a commission. More and more accessible ways for the public to give input. I think we have a Public Engagement Commission, and maybe there's an opportunity to utilize that or leverage that in a different way. That's a very diverse group of folks. And I do still continue to think that more public neighborhood meetings would be beneficial.
4:59 – 5:064 turns
I'm wondering if we could all look at the possibility of moving forward with option, first of all, I have concerns about option three of the Brown Act. Complicated I know I sit on the housing, the homelessness task force and it sometimes does get complicated because we can't We have to each take a turn at RAP, the meetings that are every Monday because we can't go together. We can't sit in on the elected leaders' task force on homelessness. We have to decide who because one can go and just listen but we can comment. So I have concerns about option three.
So I'm not a fan of three, but I'm wondering because I'm kind of hearing that we all think maybe a commission or committee of some sort where it's very informal. I don't know about public engagement and they're kind of tasked with a certain...I don't know if we'd be able to put circulation and transportation in I'm not sure.
It wouldn't be tasking with that, it would just be the conduit to get the public they would be hosting the workshop or public meeting. That was more my question about that maybe that doesn't work but you know we already have something that's called public engagement if that's part of the goal of what we're trying to get right
It's just another, what I'm concerned about and why I'm thinking so much on four, support of a four because I think it could get a population of different diverse people if we selected them. We'd have to interview so that we know somebody that drives all the time and is problematic, the streets are issue. I'm and offer their expertise as a whole. And my thought was, maybe I'm being naive here but my thought was that they would learn from each other about the needs and also the expense of what we are all facing. We'd love to do everything that you know they like but we can't financially, we can fix our roads Thank you very much.
That was for you Rich.
I think we're largely trying to solve the same problem. I think we're largely in agreement that, you know, we need to engage the public more. I could argue it both ways on whether or not the Public Engagement Commission is the appropriate vehicle or not. At the end of the day, I think I'm less concerned about the vehicle and more concerned about just What is the thing that's going to happen that leads to the better end product? And I think at the end of the day, that is a meeting where the public can come.
The public is specifically invited. They're specifically asked we want your input and you know, I don't think we necessarily have to limit it to just the pavement program. I think it could be periodic updates You know, updates to the bicycle and pedestrian master plan. It could even be input on the capital improvement program. I mean you can basically just have an open house that is just like a structured thing that you do every year. And it informs these programs.
To me it's less about who gets a title and a specific invitation to come and it's more about making it a discussion that all those groups would want to come to. So I guess I'm less, you know, I can do option four or some kind of hybrid version of it if we feel we really need to have people specifically appointed to be at the meeting and have some kind of a voice that goes beyond public comment.
I guess I could get behind that but I guess more interested in the short term of just facilitating Having that open dialogue out in the community, not necessarily in chambers where the public can come. And then give staff direction to add this option for kind of idea as a work plan item and then we can actually have a conversation as a whole council where You know, a public transportation commission is weighed against all the other things that we're telling staff to do with the limited resources we have. I think that would be the fairer thing from the standpoint of all the other things that we've met and talked about and deliberated about over the years. I mean God, I can think about Old Town Visioning and how it just kind of kept moving up and down the list and there are always trade-offs things that happened, but that was a public process.
And so I guess my preference would be sort of like option two plus where it's basically what option two includes but then also dedicated public meeting on those three items pavement, bicycle master plan, capital improvement once kind of an annual thing And that would start us off. That could be scaled up pretty quickly because we're already largely doing it. So we can show action and we can show interest in public input right away, and then that can better inform where this option 4 would be on the work plan if We have one meeting and it's a disaster, that might make us think no we've got to really get going on option four. And the next year's work plan, that thing gets expedited. Or it could say oh this seems to be working and then maybe option four slides down the work plan because it's less of a priority because the meetings seem to be working.
So I guess that's you know, I was asked my opinion. I think that's where I'm at right now.
5:06 – 5:129 turns
Well I guess you know, I don't see a lot of...I don't think there's a problem in a way because with option four There's, it has to go on to a work plan for, you know, to flesh out the details. It's still, I mean even if we agree yes option four commission makes sense how it looks, whether it's five people, seven people, all of those details still have to be worked out. How often they meet? What projects they cover and so Anything that we do is going to be a work plan item that would come back to us for further discussion.
And I certainly support, you know, having some interim thing of, you know, a public meeting of some kind or another but... So yeah, I mean that sounds, I see.
Thank you. I want to try to maybe restate and refine what I heard from Council Member Kuriakos, so it would be supporting on more of a short term and I would look to staff on the timing on that but we have some really big meaty topics coming up with both pavement management program, CIP and other updates Some kind of public meeting, maybe that is like an open house.
But really an opportunity where people aren't just sitting and then coming up and doing their two or three minutes but really being able to talk to staff, learn about the projects, give input opportunities for them to give input. And then that information is compiled for the council and presented back to council. I do really like that idea And then I do think that if there's enough of a support to continue considering an advisory commission, that should be evaluated in the public works work plan for us to determine what the priority is for that.
The timing for when it should be implemented, because all of the startup time to create a commission involves not just public works. And we should look at that in the context of the full work plan. So I could support that.
But just to clarify, I wouldn't, I would support that except to, I don't know if you were saying postpone. You know it's conditional the commission. I'm good with what you said if we're putting it on the work plan.
Well it's going to, the way that I understand the work plans come is You know, the staff will say here's what we have heard from Council is a priority and then we have an opportunity to affirm
that.
Put it higher or lower? Affirm that but I think I would like to at least try this interim step of a public meeting to see if that does start to achieve some of what we've identified are the challenges Before we say okay, start tomorrow to set up a commission.
I'm going to jump in here. I have a question for you, Council Member Reyes-Martin on a workshop where they come here. Are you envisioning like stations where they go around and they learn information? And the only thing I worry about that, I personally don't like them Because they're not at a table with a group of other people all talking about it. They're talking one-on-one with staff and then they're moving around. They're not having a collective, collaborative conversation with others.
Well then I think my question back is again back to what are we wanting to achieve? Is it that we want to facilitate dialogue amongst neighbors on the topics or are we wanting them to give us input? Because I do think that, and I would not envision an open house or workshop happening here. It would be somewhere out in the community. Community center, an NPR at Brandon. I'm thinking of like big spaces where you could have that are inviting, that are known to the community It could be stations, it could be presentation with an opportunity to then ask questions or give input. I think if the goal is to get input from the community, I don't think ‑‑ I think that we should try that. Since I've been on the council, we have not done something like that.
And I'd like to do that and we might still end up in the same place where a top priority is to move forward with a commission. But I do think that we should do something like that.
I would just note that a commission, I think that's fine for us to do that in the intervening interim period. That's certainly good but a commission potentially long run offers benefits that sort of an ad hoc meeting doesn't offer because there's going to be particular projects that come up, particular issues that come up over time. But anyway, I think we're in a good space.
5:12 – 5:1712 turns
Madam Mayor and members of Council, I have a couple clarifying questions before you make the motion. So on this idea of a workshop is the assumption that we would start this year? Because we are moving into, and I think Council Member Reyes-Martin mentioned it. We are moving into our annual cycle of the paving program coming back. So if we could jump on it, you know otherwise we're waiting a full year potentially.
So if that's the direction I mean I'll certainly confer with public staff after but we would jump on that and do it relatively quickly then because again we already have a calendar of events that leads to the approval of the budget which includes CIP paving program et cetera so it'd be like within the next three weeks potentially months So that's one question. And then the second question, and I'll wait for the motion, but what I'm hearing on the idea of option four was simply when Public Works' work program comes forward next time it would be just highlighted there for you to consider so we won't place it on our priority list, we'll place it there and you the council still then will be deciding whether to proceed with a commission or not at that time.
I think it's where it falls if it's one that is placed. I mean, I can't remember how but you know whether it's something that we likely get to in the year or whether it's something we don't likely get to in the year but you know that will debate how important it is at that time. Yes,
I'm saying the same thing. We will just set the table for you and you will tell us if it is important for us to get to in the next year or not.
Okay. Who would like to make that motion? Because I think there's a motion needed.
That we move that, let me see if I can get it right, that Public Works organize some sort of community meeting in an external space to talk about the various sort of issues and work plans of the larger projects, so the larger citywide things and issues of concern to the public. And to do that In the short term, and it just strikes me actually also if there's something with respect to all the housing coming up you guys have been working on a transportation master plan kind of thing. If that is if there's a timing where that can be revealed that might be helpful but as a way of sort of harvesting public of public concerns and interest as well as feeding it back. And that, as far as a commission goes, that it be placed on the-as one of the action items or one of the-yeah, one of the action items in the priority list for us to consider when we do the budget stuff and you know where-what things to go forward with.
Can I make a friendly amendment to that? That when we do have a workshop somewhere, it'll probably be at the community center, I'm guessing. That we have tables set up to discuss if a group wants to talk about pavement. If a group wanted to talk about transportation, busing. You know, any topic that maybe instead of just having stations where you're not with a group that may be interested and you have no one else to communicate with your peers in your community. Maybe I don't know how you set that up but because I've been doing enough workshops where I don't think, I'll be honest, it's just you go around It's not a presentation, it's just you go around and they talk but they're not collaborating with each other.
There's no public engagement.
I think you're kind of describing like it's sometimes called like the World Cafe model where it's like a facilitated discussion amongst people that are interested in a specific
topic. Yeah something like that.
Yeah I think we understand. We would still have the stations I think so people could get their wheels turning? Sure. and they walk around and talk to staff, but then we would have these tables. Okay now you found out what you're interested in the next half of the meeting if you want to talk about pavement go to table one. And
I would add on this part of the amendment just as observation if you can think of a model that works for you you know of a commission that really doesn't seem burdensome that seems like it could be We have
a motion on the table.
Mayor, with that friendly amendment is that also your second to? Okay. Thank you.
Roll-call vote Passed 5–0 motion on the table. Mayor, with that friendly amendment is that also your second to? Okay. Thank you. Council members, please lock in your
Show transcript
5:17 – 5:181 turns
ayes have it. Do we have any council comments on standing committee reports? Oh gosh, I knew it was going to be a long meeting but I didn't think it'd be this long. Okay any no standing committees? Okay so okay Mr. Rosen the attorney? No you're out of here all right meeting adjourned