City Council — March 10, 2026

All right, now we're set. Good evening everyone. Welcome to the regular meeting of Guadalupe City Council Tuesday, March 10th. May we have a roll call please?

I'll make a motion to approve the consent calendar.

Is there a second? I'll second. Any discussion? All those in favor of the motion say, aye.

Aye.

Now's the time to welcome Eli Martinez to the city of Guadalupe. So we're pleasured to see you and meet you here and any comments from the council members or comments from you in terms of?

It's an honor to be here. Thank you for the warm welcome. I think David has done a great job and the team entirely actually has been a great job at welcoming me to the city so I appreciate it thank you.

Good to have you aboard. Moving right along management reports interim city administrator,

David. Right Thank you Mr Mayor council members staff and public. So I'll go over the public works first all the speed bump. The new speed bumps, the less aggressive speed bumps are complete over in Pasadena. And the ones on Ninos have been removed so now it's kind of smooth sailing in there now you can still feel them but they're not as instantaneous as they were before That's good.

Um, let's see the engineer tech is working on the close out with the urban forestry program and she is also gearing up for an inspection with Cal recycle. So she's been going around to different businesses and then even government facilities has been over senior center several times making sure that we're doing what Cal recycle has told us to do. There has been a roll up door fixed over at the fire department.

Some downed trees and storm drain cleaning due to the storm last week before, so that's all scored away now. We're still working with Um, Santa Maria transit as well as 1 of the companies that we got an electric transit bus from. Because of the merger, we're still working the title stuff out with that to get that transferred over to smart. Everything is looking very good at the water plant.

The SCADA system is like 99% complete. All we are waiting on is IT to come in and connect the computer, and then we'll be 100%. I talked to IT yesterday. They expect that they will be out there by next week. So come next council meeting, we should be squared away out there and be able to remove that emergency staff report from the system. With wastewater, everything's running pretty good out there.

There has been several power outages that have been causing the pumps to go out. They are doing some troubleshooting with the generators generators aren't firing. And the last one was over here, over the weekend on Galarte. That lift station started backing up because the pump wasn't pumping out the effluent so or the influence. But that's all squared away and operating normally now that power has been restored.

I guess this last week there's been quite a few issues with power in PG&E especially in this little area right here On 10th Street all the way into Galarte. The power went out and they shut down the repeaters for the fire department comms, so we had to track that down and figure out what breaker that was and get that squared away. But a couple of different things have happened. We have been receiving phone calls from people outside the community wanting to bring businesses into Guadalupe.

One of the big ones was a gym, a guy looking to bring a big gym for like a 3,000 square foot facility. Trying to primarily focus on already built which is a little bit difficult in Guadalupe as far as that size. I did push him over to Craig Smith over at Pasadera But it looks like they're not going to start selling any of that commercial until a lot of the 166 is complete and all the power lines are kind of undergrounded. So, that's kind of a bummer but...

And then there was a guy over by across from the train station that has a building over there that's going up so yeah. Stu Jenkins right? Yeah.

It's

going up or if that's like for lease

Okay,

so push them over that way too. So yeah, we'll see what progress I guess a little bit at a time as the council member Hernandez brought up earlier the election boxes. We got a notification from the county that they are not going to install any permanent election boxes. What they want to do is put one In the hall area here at City Hall, and then they will remove it after elections. They don't want to pay to have a permanent one installed at City Hall like it was I

guess.

Because of the last election? Yeah, they said they didn't have enough staffing. I kind of called them in and was disappointed in that.

Yeah, okay. But we can continue to look into that if you would like see if they

reach out to them as well. What does that look like for the city of Guadalupe? I don't... are we open? Are our facilities open?

Yes so there is the maintenance department starts work at 0700 And then we leave at 1600, so they'll have a full 9 hour day ish to be able to come in and.

I am too tired

to do

6pm. Is that six?

Oh, four

4pm. That is not that would not be okay. We're talking about Yeah, we're talking about working families. This is a you know our county supervisor race. This is going to be the representative and so as we think about our community they're working class I get off at five. I just yeah, I will reach out as well just to see how we can advocate. Just because I think that would be very difficult for our community to vote. I think that would be a big barrier.

No or it's still more convenient to be out in the street to where they can

Yeah, there's still not enough time. Since December they've been closing it for?

Yeah and previously the election box was right outside the city admin office people can just drop off whenever they like at their convenience I think I dropped off mine at 8 p.m

that's

what worked for me so thank you for that update

And then with the projects, construction at the theater is still moving. A lot of earthwork is done. They're starting to dig out for footers to start some of the additional structures. They're doing layout for HVAC and plumbing. I think we sent out pictures of the front wall So there's a lot of damage on that front wall due to water, fire from 10-15 years ago whenever the fire was.

So what they're doing is they're working with the historical architect that they worked with before to get it put on the registry to see how much work they can actually do to keep it on the historical registry. That's gonna be kinda The big issue as far as keeping it on the registry, it would still be able to be like a historical landmark. It just wouldn't be on the registry if we have to make it not look original.

But based on the damage... I don't know. It's kind of a wobbler, I think. It could go either way but we'll let the professionals decide whether or not It'll be able to stay on the registry. They're doing a bunch of work on reinforcing the north and south walls as well as the brick wall on the east, even though they're doing a lot of work on that back end there's stuff do some reinforcing back there.

They are looking into The Caltrans permits, some of the big issue with that front is going to be the permitting. Caltrans is telling us three or four months right now which really halters any real innovation within the lobby area other than from probably that first wall you get to back and the bathrooms but anything vertical repairing the roof and then that front wall Well, we wouldn't be able to block off any of the sidewalk without permit. So that's going to be the big struggle right now.

And then we have to figure out work on some kind of design for reinventing that marquee so that we can keep that original style. Um, lost my hairs that parks flying. They're doing good work over there. They got I think they're going to be ahead of schedule here pretty quick so. That 1 is coming good. They've done some water times they took out the old. Well, that was there that caused a little bit of issues because it causes a little bit of a.

air release into some lines, but that all got squared away. We had the water department go out and talk to neighbors and the homes right there and talk them through clearing their lines so... We got that worked out. 303, it's moving along great. They've got curbs and gutters going in kind of like in the little bus turn right there so that's going great. Amtrak we got the caboose moved so I think next week they're looking at starting some construction later this week they might be able to start painting on that back end on the track side kind of piggybacking off Amtrak has a permit that we're going to try to piggyback off of and try to get some painting done back there to kind of speed things up.

And then, did we had a briefing with Caltrans? We've been doing them like every week every week and a half or so about the Highway 1-166 and they're just given an early heads up that when they start working there It's going to be night work around the tracks, because it's gonna be the like full road shutdown kind of like from the Talley Farms entrance to the intersection.

But and they're working on a traffic control plan to reroute everybody and everything like that I'm sure that'll get passed on to you as well chief But that's going to be like six continuous working days. They're gonna do it at night, they're gonna try to work 24-7, try to speed it up. But then when they start working on the signaling and all that kind of stuff, that's not gonna be... It's gonna be totally separate. And then when they start working like median work, that'll just be partial closures, you know, go around signs, stuff like that.

And that is all I have. Is there any questions?

Any questions? Thanks for sending the water folks over to those local residents that were complaining about the water and it was explained, and you had staff go out there to let them know what's going on. So that's good. Absolutely. All right. Item 8, Director of Public Safety, Chief

Cash. Thank you, Mr Mayor Council staff and citizens. Far as police. I'll start off with will talk about the gym, the, the current gym we have there at over by 10th and Guadalupe. They're being evicted. I talked to the owner last week, and they're being evicted so that space he's looking for anyone to occupy that space and he'll try to give them like whatever so if you want to give me that information, I could pass it on to him.

Also, before I talk about the GBA. I was invited to a donors retreat, I guess you would call it and kind of learn and connected with some donors we went to the Ronald Reagan ranch. We kind of did that tour. And so, some of those wanted to come back here after I did my speech. So later on I met with GBA. And I talked to them about putting on some kind of event that we could do for donors. And also, I mentioned to the GBA about even though it's mostly for first responders, we could look to add the theater as a possibility but this is something I kinda let them know this will be run through public safety and so they're putting together Possible events, and they'll pass that to me. And then I'll eventually make sure I pass it to City Council.

So we'll look at this as something citywide because it's going to incorporate a lot of people and resources. I've got Shirley across the street she's ordering blankets We're trying to see what that cost is so that if we do the donors, we want to make sure that we really highlight our city. With that, with Los Mujeres Park we've been discussing the surveillance cameras. So I have Captain Schmidt myself and the contractors over there.

We think we found the ones that will best fit that so we're looking at pricing right now and moving ahead on that. Also met with Central Coast Processing Plant We have now finally hooked in to their surveillance camera system. So we have 24 seven live feed on the entire facility there, so that is working out really good. As far as with fire, the ISO rating.

With the help of human resources, I believe yesterday Monday we swore in the new PCF part time firefighter. So, I will reach out to the ISO people and per their prior agreements they should be able to expedite moving our rating from a 10 at the very minimum to a 5 and I was looking at putting a desk over station 1 and a phone and I'd use that as another office so that would give us another point because they're saying no one's answering the phone there's no phone there. So, I'll have two offices possibly and that will help to get a lower rating So, and I'm also be included on all fire calls on their time sheets. So that shows that we have the proper staffing at this time.

And we're going through the medical or the background for the fire captain right now and we hope to have that done by the end of the month. As far as co-compliance, we're looking at a vendor to do cost recovery. One thing we found out and we'll work with our finance director and I appreciate him being here. We've been losing, I shouldn't say losing, we have not been collecting a lot of fines and money.

They've just been falling through the cracks because people have they've just not paying. And we don't have a vendor that does the collections And so we had a couple that reached out to us. So, we're gonna see what really works best. We were hoping the ones that do our tickets but they only do parking tickets and so forth. So we need someone to be able to do like our fireworks and everything else.

We haven't collected a whole lot of money out of that. So we're really trying to push that In emergency preparedness. Right now we're still working with, with FEMA to try to the close out for the 2023 storm. I think we saw a check that came in for 220 something, but it wasn't part of the FEMA

dollars or thousands. dollars

yes

220 yeah

but we're i think it's supposed to be 800 something thousand that we're looking for um i just got an email before i came here uh they're looking for some more signatures on something so I'll pass that to you if they're trying to do that, but we're trying to close that out so we can get paid. We're really pushing that the generator supposed to be the timeline supposed to be this month. So I'll go back and contact the vendor to make sure that he sticks to his word on the generator.

And I think that is my report unless there's any questions.

Any question chief?

I do. Thank you chief for the report, greatly done. I did an event for work this past Friday and we had, I did a new work event this past Friday in Guadalupe and we were approached by two residents sharing how this insurance rating is impacting their, they shared that they are barely struggling to survive so I appreciate you looking at this. I know you mentioned to expedite this to get a rating that's passing Did they share how long residents would see some type of relief in regards to their premiums staying high?

No, she only thing she said she'd make it a priority and expedite to change it and then get it to the insurance companies. And that's going to be on them too, to really kind of facilitate that.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, good. Thanks chief. Okay, next item is regular business. Appointment of two council members to serve as a Royal Theatre Oversight Committee. David?

All right so in accordance with the last council meeting Council elected to nominate two council members to serve as the oversight committee being that bridge between the Royal Theatre Project and the city and assisting in Project alignment and information transparency. So at this time, we would like to open it up for council nominations.

Okay. At our last meeting we talked about it and there was no second council person. I know that Whitney is on it. Is there any change of mind on participating in that? I see a little no, Mr. Costa, no? Christina? Ms. Villegas?

I'm happy to be the only one. Does it have to be two?

I looked at whether we could put one member of council and one non-member of council on it. And the answer is no, but I forgot to look to see if we could just have one member of council. I think we can give me a few minutes and I'll get back to you.

Yeah. I mean, just as, I mean it doesn't have to be oversight, but just more transparency, right? Like yeah. A bridge liaison. Thank you. That's the word. Thank you,

I just want to clarify to the reason I said no is that whenever I have questions I make it a point to reach out to David or our previous finance director and our previous city administrator. Whenever I have questions.

I try to be as approachable as possible. So, even if this doesn't go through anything that anybody has asked, send it to me. That's...I'll get you the answer. I'll do the best I can to get the answer. I'll contact the right people to get an answer or I'll tell you I can't find an answer. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes I can't come up with an answer but It's kind of our job to provide you with the information or a reason why we can't provide you with the information. So, um, you know,

I appreciate

that. We'll have an answer for us and then

I think you've had an open door policy, you and Todd. And so whenever I get the chance, I just walk in and ask my questions. I

agree with that too. I mean, I've had the same well minus a few situations where not you know, I've also gotten you know transparency when I've asked specific questions, I guess my point is I would, I mean I see this being possibly like a weekly check in with the two or one council members Where there's not a specific question, where the progress is not just on the construction but it's shared openly. Because I know that if you're working in an environment day-to-day, you're going to have more insight on what's going on than what we receive even in our bi-monthly reports.

Right and some of the problems are Not even that we well, I can only speak for myself but it's not even that. I don't want to provide information. It's just sometimes there's a lot of information and it's what information is. Adequate for this setting, and then which would be better off in sitting down and having a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? Or having a conversation over the phone because some things we could go in the weeds when one thing comes up and then next thing you know, we're here for two hours. And it's about one thing. And trying to have respect for everybody's time and the community's time and not try to seem like we are hiding things or trying to be nefarious of some way. It's just sometimes we just don't have time, right?

But to be able to provide the information in my office alone, we've started. A Royal theater continuity binder, just so that we can keep track of everything from invoices from consultants to contractors to. Just so that we have information readily available and that's a big shout out to want to putting that together. So, um, you know, we're making efforts for making strides but we can only provide so much information in as it comes or.

As time permits, so, um. Yeah, so whatever Phil comes up with or if not then phone call or email away.

Quick question. David we had talked before at another meeting about whether or not it would seem feasible to have when you call it a community forum or whatever to have the community be advised as to the status of the project, whether that's quarterly, whether that's biannually or whatever. And I think that still remains to be important since the concerns were what's happening questions, what's happening with the theater? We saw the marquee go down. What's going to go back up? You know those kinds of questions are coming to me.

And you know, that could be something we do maybe like late April, maybe like the late April meeting Maybe I could put together like a PowerPoint and kind of just give, like, a quick little brief of what's been going on behind the scenes that a lot of people don't know about or what's not going on the website. Just because I am trying to kind of limit some things on certain social medias because it's starting to start feuds and that's not what we want. We want good constructive conversations, You know, finger pointing or people being called liars or anything like that. That's not what we're searching for. We're searching for input from the community and then input back from the city on things that are happening with that project. And you know, the same goes for every project because this one does touch a lot of pull a lot of heartstrings so

Well, in that same vein part of the intention for the oversight committee was to have somebody possibly help with the social media or even having a project website. So I mean somebody to suggest that there should be a quarterly or by annual meeting on this. Some of these items that we're discussing in here, the intention was to have more people to help with these things Um, which is why I've been pushing for this and trying to get people on board to have.

It got called an oversight committee but it's more of a committee to assist in this project because we did lose our project manager isn't that correct or is that not

right so the project managers moving to grant administration for this project. Oh, that's news. Yeah well it's things that are in the works as we currently speak due to things we can't really discuss right now so things are shifting in real time um to be able to adjust for certain situations and then uh as things move forward and more information is available the more information can be presented These are very cryptic, but this

is what transparency. I still it doesn't

have to do with the theater. It just has to do with other aspects of city operations. So you can't chop the head off the horse if you don't have another horse right?

If you had a horse to begin

with. Yeah, well, you know that's

but it was shared at the on the Saturday meeting where you weren't there so there might have been some information that was shared during our closed session where Council Member Villegas was not there. I'm so sorry Council Member. So

the hiring meeting? Correct. Is it is their transcripts for that?

Which are we meeting? Closed session.

Are we supposed to talk about things that aren't on the closed session agenda during that meeting and not have an agenda?

I don't think that's what she said.

Didn't you just say that?

That would have come up in a conversation during the interview. So

it was, yeah so there were things that were shared that I wasn't there for because they got it but we don't have minutes for that because it's closed session. These are the reasons I feel like we need an oversight committee. I'm still volunteering myself, I wish somebody else would too but what did you find out Phil?

Unfortunately, there's no clear case or anything on it but the language of the Brown Act refers to less than a quorum of its members using the word plural and the word committee implies more than one person. And the AI analysis which I stooped to using said that isn't permissible to have one person in the committee. So, and that's partly because a council member can independently gather information And the committee is the idea that there would be more than one person to talk to, or involved in that.

So we can't appoint you as a sole member of a committee.

But if nobody else wants to be on this committee which we haven't asked yet but I'm going to just say I'd be happy to insert myself more into this although I think David would not It would find me very annoying, but maybe we could have a weekly meeting.

So I have, I would rather have you by yourself having weekly meetings than 27 people trying to help on this project and just interfering. I 100%, I will have weekly meetings with you whenever you're available. My personal feeling personally is that I'm

on more committees than I need to be on. Got one tomorrow,

Three meetings tomorrow, I've got a meeting next Thursday. And there's details and all of that. And then from our council perspective, I hear what's going on as you reported. And I do also believe that there's this community out there that wants to know what's going on. So if we can have an actual agenda item on a regular basis for updates That would be to my liking, where we can bring everybody together because then we are decision makers here based on what people are thinking about and with their opinions on what's going on in addition to staff.

I know that social media was shared. I think we have a social media policy that allows only employees, if I'm not mistaken to be using social media which I would strongly recommend we look at again. I know that there is a social media policy and I can't recall the time. Somebody might've shared it with me recently. Okay yeah just because I get worried when we have different individuals.

I think the problem wasn't from the city side posting, it was the comments made and certain media sites-

I personally have seen stuff. I have personally seen and not from residents.

Okay well I haven't seen any of it so I didn't know but yeah we need to comply with the policy

Perfect. Yeah, I've shared with Tom and Todd and David my concerns that I've seen since last year.

Okay, then. Where we go from here just this is basically doesn't move forward and there's no motion. And then we again I would hope we'd have this on a regular maybe every other month updates that we can bring your information and other information from the community as well as updates from from the city staff in the construction company for the specific so it's just like the you know the actual The buildings that we're talking about, what do you call it?

What's the name of that thing? The marquee. People don't say why don't you put the marquee back up or well there's reasons for that perhaps if there's a way we can get around the state historical group then fine but if we can't and we lose that historical designation what does that mean for the whole building so those are things that we need to dig into

And it doesn't appear, you know even if we lost the designation that any of the funding that has been attained would go away. It's just we wouldn't be on websites and things like that that might draw crowds to the site.

All right seeing no action will go to any further discussion on this? Go to item 10. Oops,

I was just going to say let's talk about maybe this after this meeting when we can meet on that. Okay thank you.

Item 10 future agenda items. Any suggestions from staff or

additions?

Okay.

I had mentioned last time about the that MOU for the veterans building And you clarified what I was trying to say, and that to put it on the future agenda item with no specific date. But just so it's not lost.

And Phil and I mentioned this before in others that we need to get that. Yeah.

I have no problem putting it on the unscheduled items. That will remind me to stay on it. OK. I only have one comment about the route 1 fee reduction may not go on the 24th? That would depend on two things. HDL is taking another look at some financial records because there was some issues they had, and Route 1 is cooperating and I don't know how long that'll take.

So it's kind of in their... I've requested that they work directly with HDL so that we're not in the middle of that. And hopefully we're shooting for the 24th, but if not it'll be the first meeting. It will be the April 14th meeting for sure because we're all ready to go on our end.

Okay thank you next item is announcements council activity reports Gene start with you Mr. Hernandez, anything?

I attended the coffee and communications with Dr. Fox this morning. I also wanted to share that Planned Parenthood will be doing an event in Guadalupe Community Care and a food drive March 21st from 2-5 if anybody wants to join us. And there's also an event Learn About Pesticides and the Impacts here in Guadalupe March 18th 6-8pm and I hope anybody that is free to join us. Thank you.

Christina, where is the Planned Parenthood meeting you're talking about?

I can send you the flyer. RSVP, they are still looking for a location. They were hoping to use Guadalupe Cafe and I don't know if that went through. Okay. Whitney?

Amelia?

I had attended the bimonthly housing and homelessness meeting. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my notes with me so I'll report on that next time.

I have a couple of things. One is SPCAG North County Sub-Regional Planning Committee is tomorrow at 10 o'clock if anybody wants to go to it, I'm going to it. Christina you want to go to it? In Solvang what's important I think there's they're gonna talk about the 166 CHP Enhancement Enforcement Program I won't let it out right now. We'll have to, we work on that tomorrow in terms of moving that forward.

There was money put aside to look at the enhancement, CHP enhancement on 166. And then the next Thursday is a monthly meeting of the SBCAG, either in Santa Barbara or here. That's the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments. Food bank we had March 5th, we saw 243 returning families and then 64 first time USDA families and that's families. So there's numerous people under that family system so there was a total of 307 total families who were very busy Just on a side note, regarding this. That's what we do at the Senior Center and Santa Barbara Food Bank has actually emailed recreation people that they want Santa Barbara County food Wants to provide a cooking class for seniors at the senior center. To where, you know, there's good nutritious foods and they're willing to, they want to do that for local seniors and local community.

I don't know if they followed up with you on the forum yet? Not yet but okay.

I haven't had an update from Cynthia from the county

I'm sorry,

I haven't had a received update from Cynthia

County. All right. So that so they want to. I'm talking about the Santa Barbara County, the food bank they want to do that. And another thing, there's a fundraising effort and I'm looking straight at the Kiwanis Club to buy infield dirt for the infielder in O'Connell Park. That infield is like a runway right now it's so hard and so the city is putting some money into it to actually buy infield dirt The closest to this date where you could buy it is in Corona.

And it's almost 200 miles, and they charge you per mile $15 a mile to bring the truck here and then take it back. So we're trying to look for a local provider. So right now the cost for the lowest amount, there's what's called 50 tons of infill and that's $8,200. We put out a call for help and we received $1,000 already toward that. We're going to hit up the Kiwanis Club and everybody else that has money in their pockets.

And we'll be hitting everybody up, including businesses. I just did it last night so we're moving on it. So you'll be hearing from me and others. Let's see what else. Oh, and with that is that the money at the city has a nonprofit 5013 C which is the Guadalupe Community Action Commission so donations will go to that. And Mr Martinez will have to decide for where all this money is going to all the tons of money we're going to get so Anyway, that's all I had.

Anybody else? I need your email, Charlene. Is there a motion for adjournment to the closed session? Is there a second?

I'll second.

Any discussion? No. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. All ayes. Closed session. Thank you all.