City Council — 2020-01-28

The Ohio City Council to order. Will the clerk please call the roll?

okay

Hopefully they won't do it twice or three times but okay. Can we

make sure, I mean do we need to talk to Greg about whether there's any other because we were on a pretty tight timeline some other issues on this? Yeah. I mean I just don't mind moving it as long as we know we're not causing any problems later.

Yeah, the truck management plan where the items that were critical. I want to make sure

of it. Because there was all kinds... If this compiles, I know we had some weird deadlines. It's a report. I think it's a

progress report. Okay. All these good people will be waiting most of the evening if we don't kind of come to a conclusion. Our city manager says that if we move it to the first meeting in February that they can work around the deadlines.

Did you say that? Okay. Alright, thank you.

Okay, you said that. Has anybody...

And at the beginning of the agenda?

Yes we've said that. We've said that too. You're clear. So with those clarifications is there any concern now can we okay so ordered where we will move on now And Bill, you said you were going to pull one item from consent?

Yeah.

K. I

have kind of a housekeeping question on

K. OK. So the public knows that that matter is going to be pulled off the consent agenda and dealt with.

And I wanted to pull L.

OK, so it's K and L. With those changes, is the agenda approved? Yes, no objection. Okay so ordered okay we have a presentation I believe that our next The presentation we do is David in the audience ah there David Maron from the Civic Alliance an old colleague and friend from many years of public service and his mother before him

I

remember him from before.

Yeah, thank you David for coming up and doing this for us.

You're welcome and some of you know me from the League of Women Voters running the forums for some of you. You had to endure that from me before so thank you. Are you doing that again? I will be in the fall. Now that you've gone to districts we'll see how it all works out. Well, good evening to the audience to council staff. My name is David Marin I'm with a Ventura County Civic Alliance and what I'm going to do is take you through a presentation of the report and Gail is passing out copies and for the audience I did bring some extra copies if few people want to pick it up It's also available online at civic alliance org So the Ventura County Civic Alliance is a regional organization that looks at issues common to the 10 cities, tries to look at the business perspective, the economic, the environmental and the social equity.

And we produced this report. We distribute it for free around the county. This is Little feedback there, but One of the things we can't do this without the support of our sponsors So organizations like the community to foundation the Community College District era energy AT&T Channel Islands University Cal Lutheran University and the County of Ventura House Automation Lima Nara and Montecito Bank are some of our larger sponsors We're grateful to them for their help I'm gonna try to get through this pretty quickly and answer questions But one of the things I wanted to point out is that The key statistics show that Ventura County is getting older. In the year 2009 or 2000 our average age was 34, now our average age is up to 37.5 and right here if you look at Ojai's population you can see that 20.7% of our population in Ojai is under 18 That's OK, but you also have 22% over the age of 65.

And you could compare that to how the other cities look. So Ojai is an aging city. Can I interrupt

you for just a second? We're getting little feedback. Is there something we can do about that?

What? Jeremy said I should start over. No. OK. I'll stand a little further back, Jeremy. Agriculture, as far as Ventura County just continues to be an important part of our economy. About $5 billion industry and I'm sorry 2 billion industry 4% of the local economy. And we ship goods all around the world. Avocados, lemons United States sends it to Canada, to Japan a lot of information. We also have a growing organic industry here in Ventura County You're elected officials so I always like to share the information on registration. This is countywide going back to 2000, you could see that the registration for Democrats has stayed about even all of these years. But the Republican registration has declined over the years from a high of 42 down to about 29.

And that's because more people are registering as no party preference, the green color. No party preferences come at the cost of Republicans in Ventura County and that's why it's now becoming much more blue here. City by city, here is Ojai. Registration in Ojai about 48% Democrat, about 22% Republican and over 30% is no party preference so really in Ventura County no party preference is the second largest party as far as registration One of the things that there's a big effort going on in Ventura County is the nonprofits trying to raise the amount of philanthropy around the county. This shows the amount of per capita giving from different counties, Ventura County is on the bottom about $2500 annually.

Los Angeles, Santa Barbara much higher than us statewide average. There's a lot of questions about that maybe people are donating but they're sending it away to organizations outside our community so in the future you'll start hearing about a program called live here give here encouraging people to support local nonprofits In the economy, Ventura County has come back from the Great Recession. This shows the number of people that are working. Often we hear about the unemployment and at the very low unemployment rate. What we're showing here is actually the number of people that are employed and really it took from 2009 to 2017 to get back to where we were in 2007. So we are growing but not significantly.

And one of the important things is where those jobs are. And I know here in Ohio you can't do much to bring in manufacturing industries and high-tech companies, but the growth in jobs since the Great Recession has been in lower paying industries. So groups like leisure and hospitality they've seen a lot of growth that blue bar there is the one that represents pre recession so that's come back But if you look over here it's a manufacturing. This is pre recession, and it hasn't come anywhere near close same with construction big decline high paying jobs like finance and information very low so.

This is not just local, this is somewhat of a national issue transforming from a goods producing industry to a service producing industry. The problem is the manufacturing jobs are the high paying jobs. The jobs where we're growing are low paying. They're entry level and this is a problem for all of our electeds to look at around the county Gross economy, so the green line here is showing the county's average product. We're flatlining, we've been flatlining for a long time. That's good that we're not going into recession but other areas in the state and the nation are going really gangbusters and we're not. That's just a reflection of all these issues, housing, older population, low paying jobs.

I'll move on to education. This is showing the decline in student enrollment, the blue line is the K-8 and green is the high schools. I talked earlier about aging of Ventura County well this puts it into graphic detail what we're seeing is less families having less children and so the decline is going to start hitting the schools. I know that the Ojai School District is actually declining. The top line there is from 2009, about 10 years ago and the green on the bottom is 2017-18 and you can see that decline in the number of students here in Ojai Valley or Ojai Unified School District so definitely an issue we need more babies Land use and housing, it's very expensive to live here in Ventura County. This shows it by city.

The real number up here is the $2,089 is the average rental rate for a two-bedroom apartment in Ventura County. I think all of us old timers remember when that was our mortgage payment. Now that is the apartment rate. This breaks it down by city. You can see the various cities. Santa Paula Fillmore happened to be on the low end. Higher end is Thousand Oaks so what that means You graduate the university, maybe you get a job working in Thousand Oaks but you can't afford to live there so you decide to live in Santa Paula where the rent's cheaper. You spend more time on the road. You're away from your families. All of these things are interconnected.

Could I just ask? So Ojai is actually according to this More affordable in terms of average monthly rent than Simi Valley, Camarillo, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks? Yes. For

a two-bedroom apartment. Okay.

I was just curious about it.

But that says Ojai Valley. Is that obviously a wider...

It's not Ojai City.

I

said Ojai

Valley.

Yeah, it does say Ojai Valley. Okay, I guess it's a little surprised at how much lower

yes

No apartments only in that example two-bedroom apartment two bedroom apartment Natural and environmental sources, Ventura County is a wonderful place to live. I think that's why we're all here the Ojai Valley is spectacular We have the beaches the mountains Our ocean water quality is good here in the area air quality is good. I like to show this one about solar capacity so the blue is the amount of previous solar capacity but the overall bar chart shows you the growth in in solar capacity in Ventura County, and we are now at a point that just people from their homes and businesses with solar is equal to about a third to a half of the Edison energy generating station out there in Oxnard. We've replaced that much capacity with solar here in Ventura County.

So I'm sure for those people who don't like energy plants, that's great news. Public health, just there's a lot of interesting data when you have the chance to read this and you don't have to read start to finish. You could jump around. The data was researched by California Lutheran University Dr. Jamshid Damoui. It was written by Tony Biasati. We have all of the sources in the back so if you're interested in any of this data we give you the websites where you can drill down. This chart is showing teen substance abuse for the major unified school districts The data comes from a survey given to high school juniors every year. And we actually include the actual survey question here so you can see what the kids were responding to. I love the

questions!

Yeah, and there are a lot more. You can visit this website. There's an amazing amount of information but you could see Ojai there in the middle pretty high on the number of kids talking about being drunk or high seven or more times. I think we're looking at over 20 percent for Ojai. Ventura Unified is up there But it is something of an issue here in Ojai.

Yeah I was being, I wasn't meaning. When I said good, I like the questions, I meant they're disturbing.

Yes,

it's... They're revealing and that's good. Yeah,

we assume kids are just playing Instagram when they're actually doing a lot more. This one shows teen mental health on the top. It's showing the number of kids with chronic sadness and on the bottom the actual number of contemplated suicide within the last 12 months so pretty much across the board. We are seeing declines, that is positive In many of the districts, but you can see that even in Ojai we are having a problem with some mental health issues.

It's certainly not your purview but for the audience and others I'd like to share that. I know I'm running out of time Mr. Vague I'll try to finish this up. Opioid deaths major problem in Ventura County 85 people in 2017. This contrasts it with other counties In the area of public safety, Ventura County continues to be one of the safest counties in the state. This is a chart of the top 15 largest counties in the state. Ventura County is the second lowest crime rate across the board. So that's great news and it's been that way for a long time. This breaks it out by city. Ojai has the distinct honor of being the city with the lowest violent crime rate The overall crime rate is third for Ojai. Moorpark is the champ in the overall rate, and Ventura has the highest crime rate so Chief you could go talk to Mr.

Corny about that. Social services homelessness continues to grow. The green bar there is veterans. We do break it out by city, it's a little hard to see but Ojai was showing 47 in 2019. I know you are focused probably laser-focused on this issue so I won't add much but it is here where you could see the other cities. Transportation would continue to have a lot of people driving a long distance to get to work And wildfire, we did include a special thing in the report as far as the Thomas fire showing about $1.4 billion of damage from the Thomas fire and we contrast that with the Woolsey fire 388 million or billion dollars worth of damage. Most of Woolsey was in LA County and that's not reflected in this chart. This is just the Ventura County portion.

Woolsey Fire was about four billion dollars of total damage and one that I I don't have but it is in the chart, is the air quality that I think you all want to look at because it shows just how bad the air quality got in the Ohio Valley. During the Thomas fire you can see the decline over the days. Very severe the number of people that were facing hazardous air quality during that time.

So, Mr. Mayor I'm at my halfway... No, I'm joking. I'm all done.

We took up some of your time so I don't want to rush you off it's

really

important information to share with the public

Right. Again, it is available for anyone watching at home at www.civicalliance.org. We're grateful to all the sponsors and we're sharing this all around the county and happy to answer any questions.

Okay. Our economist, Bill?

Quick question on some construction recovery. If you take out the fire-related permits that are finally starting to flow and the construction purely related because of the construction rebuilding from the fire, do you have any sense of how big a factor that is in the construction recovery? I mean it might be overstating the actual underlying structural

increase. So the data in the report is 2017 showing the number of building permits And we did have a nice growth that went up to 2,565 building permits in 2017 which was 900 increase over the year before. As you all know building permits don't mean actual construction it's just the permit was pulled.

But it's positive news

But if you think of Ventura County as about 800,000 people and maybe growth rate of 3%, that would be about 20 or 10,000 little more 20,000 people. And if you're putting three people in a home, you need like six 7000 homes for them to live in so We're not really doing much on the backlog. If

we're not against that, just the replacement that was built because of the fire?

Yeah and natural birth but yes I don't think the City of Ventura's new replacements are included in that because it was too late in 2017 for the fire they'll be in the later numbers great question

Just browsing through this, it's fabulous. Thank you. It just gives such a great overview and I would like to have... Did you say you're leaving some extra copies? Mr.

Vega has some for the team right back there and I left some for the audience. They look like they're gone so maybe I'll take them with

me

but

now is your chance. What this is, it is an overview of the facts but how we interpret those facts is not part of this. And you know, and we can look if you look at this as far as the economy goes, we're going through such change it's like we need a whole new paradigm for the economy.

You're exactly right. In

the era that we're living in with climate change and everything else but thank you. This is

fabulous. The mission of the alliance is really to provide

unbiased

information so policymakers like you and others can be informed and the audience as well Thank you very much.

Okay, public communications we're almost to that point. We could start right now or do you want to go ahead and adopt the consent calendar with the two that we pulled off? I'll make

a move that we approve A through J.

Okay Many objection to the motion to approve. Okay, so ordered So we'll go ahead and start our public comment and I have five cards but because We're no longer dealing with the safe street issue tonight Someone if anybody has something that can't wait till the meeting in February you would have an opportunity to speak under public comment Jeff Thank you. Okay, Jeff and Joan Kemper's on deck.

Good evening.

Yeah my name is Jeff Otterbein thank you okay it's good to be here I would like to express my gratitude for the meeting that happened on Saturday at Nordoff High School, the committee meeting that allowed all the public to come and have some input into the climate emergency situation. So I was glad to see several of you here there also and that is encouraging also But my Goal or Idea tonight is mostly to speak about the emergency part of this climate situation.

You all were agreed in declaring this an emergency, and so I'd just like to say a few words about what that means to me. An emergency is something that takes our attention and our resources, and focuses it directly on the subject being global warming. So when I see the way we work through things as being more or less business-as-usual, meaning that We take some information, we give it to a committee. They pass it on to another committee. Next week they'll look at it and pass it on.

I think for example in Australia during this fires the fire department and the people running the state of in Australia they didn't pass it onto next week and pass it onto next week. They looked at it said today this is what we have to do. This is an emergency And I would hope as much as possible, you all can take this as that kind of an emergency so that today you look at things and say what can we do today?

And if we need to pass something on to somebody else and say can you look at this. Can we insist that they do it today tomorrow then you know as soon as possible not look at it as something that we can wait for next week or next month. So the last thing is the bicycle situation that we just put off until February, that's just an example two weeks down the line I think is a great project but let's keep it all on forefront as much as possible. Thank

you so much. Thank You Jeff. Joan are you out there? Come on down, speaking to someone else who's devoted her adult life to helping. And I've got Brian Akins on deck.

Good evening and thank you for letting me come to talk to you. I think all of you probably know that I do, or that I have a production company that does plays, stage plays two or three times a year. We raise all the money to fund the productions and each musical or play has a local non-profit as the ticket beneficiary. We give all the money away And we've been doing that for about 10 years. Our show this spring, this March is a wonderful, wonderful comedy prize-winning comedy Harvey.

Now many of you may have seen Jimmy Stewart do the movie. Harvey is ludicrous it's so funny. It's about a wonderful kind man who is very happy his confident and his dear friend is a six foot tall white rabbit And that rabbit lives with him and his sister, and that rabbit goes to the bars with him. Goes to play pinnacle at the firehouse. The rabbit is his main friend. And you might gather that does cause some consternation.

The play was opened in Broadway in 1944. We were at war then, as you remember the Japanese War did not end until 1945 and yet that play was an instant hit became the best play of the year because people needed to laugh. Anyway I think this will...I won't tell any more because I hope every one of you will buy tickets and come to this it opens March 27th at Matillaha And you all probably remember, this is Easter, pre-Easter. Three weeks before Easter this year.

A few years ago we had with a studio artist, we had the Easter egg thing and they decorated a lot of giant Easter eggs and so on that was decorating the town. Well, the studio artist has joined this production of Harvey and this is going to be the Easter of the rabbit. The Easter rabbit not the Easter egg. There'll be eggs too of course for the children to hunt So, I'm here to beg your forbearance with this. We would like to construct ten six-foot tall white rabbits. They would be dressed with a bow tie, a jacket, pants and we would like to place them around in various public places in Ojai.

About the middle of February through Easter and these rabbits would be smiling and they would be, you know just showing the way. They would help the Easter activities as well as a spring show And, for example, a concert in Libby Bowl Easter, the egg hunts, the activities with the meals, breakfasts, brunches, everything. These rabbits could be this way to the egg hunt in Libbey Park or the concert in Libbey Park. The Ojai Valley Inn has that thing and I think there's another Easter Egg Hunt planned at Soule Park. They could be directing people all over to the Sunrise Service.

In addition to standing around, your handouts show how we're going to construct these rabbits. They are 72 inches tall and 36 inches wide where their arms are or paws I guess I should say. Anyway, so we're going to make them out of recycled plastic, corrugated plastic. That's what the real estate people use for real estate signs. It's smooth on the outside so you can paint it And you can print on it, but the backside is corrugated and it is weatherproof. So these real estate signs in the middle, they're impervious to water or wind or whatever.

We'll brace those with 1x3s and some rebar so they don't fall over. Six foot does stand up. So we would like to, the charity that is the recipient of Harvey's ticket income is your neighbor, Help of Ojai. And they're very excited. I mean they want to have a six foot rabbit in their front driveway and they also want one at their store. So I know this is a little different but the chamber, I've run this by the Chamber of Commerce Jimmy Fleming and he's very excited because this could help the merchants. It could certainly help the restaurants with dinners and so on and the tourists. It could be a festive thing instead of eggs bunnies.

So I'm asking you to smile on this project and we're not asking for any money. We're just asking for your blessing

God bless you.

Thank you, thank you I needed

that. My granddaughters can't wait to see them. Pardon? My granddaughter's what can't wait to see them I'm sure.

Well maybe I could give her a preview. You

know

Joan just one more thing that you do for our community and thank you. Thank you pardon? One one more thing that you do for our community or have done or will do I just want to say thank you it's a great idea.

Thank you Randy thank you

Okay, no action can be taken tonight because it's not on the agenda but I'm sure the city manager will... Well,

I've sort of whispered this around shall we say.

Right yeah okay and forbearance doesn't have any there's no evidence of it so

So what would you like me to do? Do you want me to tell you as we get closer to the time? If we can be in contact. James, I'll be in touch with you. We can just make

sure that they're all

appropriately

placed and

everything. A detailed thing to you and to you too sir of course.

Okay. That's

good.

Thank you so

much. Thank you so much.

Okay thank you Joan. Okay Brian you're up and Ron McRae you're on deck.

I'm here with my museum hat. You're going to see me another couple times tonight with that other hat. So the museum just finished the Christian Murti and Ojai exhibit. I hope you had an opportunity to see that at the exhibit opening, I think we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 people that showed up, not all on the same hall at the same time in case the fire chief is watching.

So that has been taken down we're in the process of putting up our new exhibit which is called 22 miles. We have a fabulous landscape exhibition that we can't wait to share with you curated by Jennifer Moses of Miner's Oaks and Gail Piddick of Santa Paula. The reason I say that is 22 miles is the distance between Jennifer's house in Miner's Oaks and Gail's house in Santa Paula. They asked their favorite Southern California artists to paint scenes from around the Ojai Valley, in both small and large sizes so look for the larger painting of the artist as well as a smaller painting of the artist. The results are stunning!

The location of the artists, quite a breadth of artists. The 21 artists in the exhibition are from Carpinteria, Cayucos, Los Angeles, Malibu, Ojai, Pasadena, San Juan, Capistrano, Santa Barbara, Santa Paula, Santa Coy, Sherman Oaks and Templeton. The opening exhibition will be this coming Saturday from 530 to 730. We encourage you to bring a friend, it's open we usually have delicacies however with 280 people showing up the last time if you want some food I'd get there early so thank you all very much. Thanks

Brian. Ron you're up and Diana Blanchard you are on deck.

Did I pass out some of these? It's gonna fall. My name is Ron McRae, I live in South Ventura Street down the block here and I have a serious problem with the pickleball court you've got out here. I think there is a problem with the noise ordinance on that they go on every day Okay, I wanted to do this anyway. I wanted you to hear this anyways. This is right outside your door.

It goes on six days a week all day long. I don't know if he's noticed that or not but... This is outside your door across the street. This is from my house Down the street, it's right here. Every day when they play that I didn't know what this noise was until I walked over there and no one told me there was going to be a pickleball court over there. I hear that in my house. When I close the door and all the windows, I can still hear it's like a ping pong game going in my living room. It's serious problem for me and none of the neighbors over here have been told that was going to happen.

I think you should review that, maybe give them an option to put in their input. What I have here, I think they're in a violation of the sound, the noise elements. Ojai General Plan, November 1991. The underlining purpose of the noise element is to eliminate community exposure to excess noise levels. That's what that says on your thing there. This is your document about noise levels. This is excessive noise levels that you cannot go over in, according to your paper here, 55.2%.

This is Playtimes over there and they go over there from 8 a.m. Till noon, and then 3 p.m till dusk Which is daylight saving time will probably be 7 or 8 o'clock at night and Saturday And they never stop that noise I think it just there's no nope It's done doesn't stop This is a document that I sent in two weeks ago to complain about the noise. I haven't heard anything back from anybody. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do.

The people playing this could actually have several other places they can play, One last thing I wanted to show you here is this is a transfer disclosure statement. I've been a real estate broker here, and I've lived in this town right across the street there for 30 years. I'm a real estate broker, and this is a transfer disclosure statement here that gives out everybody sells a house. You have to give this transfer disclosure to somebody And it says right here at number 11, neighborhood noise problems or other nuisances. You've got to give that to them and if that is a noise problem or a nuisance, it's going to affect the price of property right around here. That's for darn sure. So I would really like you to reconsider this maybe contact these people, the owners, the tenants and let them, even the pickle people, if you tell him That listen you're bothering people around here.

I think some of them might not if they knew that they probably wouldn't they go someplace else There's plenty other places to go but I Got a red light here, and then that's all I can say if you just look at that Documents there and let me know what if he could do anything about it

Thank you, Ron. And the city manager has a copy of it.

I know we can't deliberate but we can bring this up on either future agenda items or city manager report and discuss other specifics about this?

Okay.

Ron, I'll make sure we do that but we have to wait until the end of the meeting according to the rules of our meeting.

Diana Blanchard? Is there a Diana out there? If not, okay that is the end of the public comment cards that I have. We missed anybody? Okay let us go to What is it, K? Is that the one? Yeah. K and L on the consent agenda. So K is the second reading of accessory dwelling units. Bill, you were there.

I just have a little housekeeping issue and that is that there is a deletion of the deed restriction language, I believe on page 10, attachment A page 10 of 14 which I completely agree with. And it's also noted in the staff report remove the deed restriction requirement for accessory dwelling units and junior accessory dwelling My concern is that we make sure that we be fair. In other words, this is going forward no deed restriction after the effective date of this ordinance adoption but that still leaves in place the deed restrictions have been filed to date and just from a standpoint of fair treatment I would think that at least my, I believe, certainly intent as a council person is to have it apply to all.

And Mayor, I would second that. I was gonna speak to the same thing Bill If there's a way to do that,

I think there is. I think we'd have to bring an item back to do that

separate

from this.

I think that could be done as direction here as direction is part of implementation of the state's new mandates regarding ADUs which do include in government code section 65852.2 sub G the power to go beyond you could direct its staff record the necessary documents to lift all past ADUD restrictions That would be within your power as a policy choice. So move, as part of my