City Council — 2020-04-28

Right, James? Are

we on, James? Yep. Good to go.

Okay. I will call the meeting of the Ojai City Council to order. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Nope.

If not, we will consider the agenda approved as submitted by the city manager. We held at 730 so we'll go to consent calendar. Is there a second?

Second.

I'm glad that Randy is enjoying council for the first time since I've

Well, you gave us that little heads up about what your wife was seeing and you stood up.

All right, something

happened I

guess. I'm glad I could bring a smile to your face. Let's go to the discussion item number two Mr. City Manager. You have an update on the virus situation or pandemic?

Yes thank you. Take one second here to pull something up.

Oh, I lost my picture.

That's me. What you should be seeing is a presentation. So we're trying something new. No, I see Zoom. I don't see anything else.

Try

turning your camera on again. There's little icon. I do that sometimes at the bottom.

What should be showing on the screen right now is, it should say coronavirus impact slash or dash cash flow. Right. So I'll give you a second.

Bill where's the camera? Right there? There's some kind of an icon down at the bottom. Yeah

let me go back

I think if you turn it off sometimes there's an icon at the bottom, you can push that. Randy is back. Yeah, I see Randy.

He can't see anything now. Oh he can't see anything? I think he may have muted the app. So how do I change that? Look down on your taskbar on the bottom and you should see a window for Zoom and click on that.

A window for Zoom? Or an icon.

On the left hand side at the bottom, there's a microphone that says mute and another one that said stop video.

Yeah I have Windows, I have the mute, I have Wi-Fi full charge. Oh is this it here?

Okay so you're seeing it until we share the screen let's see. There we go. I'm gonna hit share. There you go. Can you still see it Randy?

Cool. I don't know, it's dangerous to let Dara take a walk, Randy. Tell me.

Let's thank everyone at home for putting up with that. She found her way to Johnny's house. Thanks everybody for your patience. This is a tutorial on Zoom rather than council meeting.

Yeah so we recently on Friday we had a budget committee meeting so we wanted to start by talking just quickly about what high level What we talked about at that meeting. I think it was useful and the Budget Committee, I think appreciated the information so we wanted to make sure to provide it to Council as well. So we'll talk about this which is more budget focused but then we'll also talk about some of the actions that the city's working on. We'll start with just a high-level overview And so I just want to start. We've talked about this a little bit, but obviously right now many businesses are closed. Hotels are closed. Restaurants are limiting their operations. Everybody in the city is impacted which includes the City of Ojai. We expect revenues for the city to be reduced $1.2 million through May 31st and as we start moving through this you know the question is going to be how long that continues or if things begin to reopen So we're looking at right now, you know, conservative estimate of $1.2 million reduction in our revenues if June were to remain closed, if things were to remain closed through June which we don't know yet but it would be another $500,000 impact on the city and so the other point just to make is that we all know that TOT is a big revenue source for us but Other thing we're seeing right now is that sales tax revenues are going to be reduced.

And many agencies, the state has talked about deferring a collection of even the revenues that we would typically receive. So we're expecting to be impacted. We're always looking for ways to communicate with the state and the federal government about the needs of small cities I think Everybody's heard by now that the funding that the CARES Act provides has been identified for cities larger than 500,000 people which we are obviously not but also no city in Ventura County is that size. So Ventura County cities thus far have not received any support so about 20 minutes before this meeting we were talking to the League of Cities and we are planning to put in a letter of support State requesting funding from some of that funding, but at this time we don't have any guarantee of receiving any of that.

We also noted that property tax may be impacted because we're expecting some people there's going to be a lot of deferral requests and perhaps non-payments. And so the other point we want to make is that if hotels and stores return in June which would be a good scenario, we'd still need We plan to not receive any revenues until August because it would take time. They'd have to collect taxes in June, and then they'd have July to remit them to the city so we'd likely get them in August.

So there's definitely a time period we need to make sure that we are able to continue to provide services for without revenues coming in. One thing we did at the Budget Committee was we talked about...we always talk about our annual budget being $10 million But we realized for a short term problem like this, hopefully it's a short term problem that it really is not useful to talk about our $10 million budget. It's more useful to talk month-to-month costs and revenues.

So we went through our budget. We put together this average monthly expense sheet. And it gives you a feel for what the city typically spends and what it's spending those funds on. The average monthly expenses are about $830,000 per month. 340,000 goes to employee costs and 275,000 go to sheriff services. So those two items alone account for over 600,000 of the 800,000 we spend every month. So it becomes very clear very quickly if we end up needing to make cuts or reductions there's not a lot So, you know, we laid out some of the other things. We spent about $18,000 a month on average on recreation programs, $50,000 on miscellaneous operating expenses, $80,000 on our contract building services and a little bit on planning and public works there, $46,000 13,000 per month on community organization funding.

So that makes up our expenses. We came to council a couple... Our last meeting and we talked about 150,000 in cuts. And so again, we wanted to show that monthly because monthly that's 150,000 annually. So what really that comes down to is about 50,000 a month that we cut which again if you go back to our total expenses being 830,000 That's a decent reduction, but it still means we're spending $775,000 a month.

James real quick just if you don't mind, but we're showing $81,000 in contract services yet we're only showing a $15,000 reduction would that be an area that you would look more closely at?

So one of the challenges with our contract services are our building fees are the bulk of them and The arrangement where every dollar that they bring in we split. So it's a challenge because if you reduce those services, it also means we're bringing in less revenue, if that makes sense. They're only getting paid if they bring revenue in I guess is kind of the way to explain it. We've looked at reducing things like our contract planning because that's just an extra cost Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His): With building if they're bringing money in. They get a percentage of it so that you know and some some ways we don't want them to reduce too much because that means we're bringing lesson so Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His.: : And that's those are the fees charged on, you know, building permits and things which the one point I would make from that is that we are still offering all services at the city besides the recreation programs which can be operated currently But we're still offering all services at our city.

We're still offering building and planning, building and safety public works services which is something we're proud of a lot of cities have gone to minimal services. So potential savings, we brought the savings last month those savings the 23,000 per month for the hiring freeze, the 15,000 per month for kind of a miscellaneous category there A $20,000 per month saving for part-time employees. So we've made some reductions. I think it comes out to about 8%.

There's other possibilities. We talked about these at the budget committee and started talking about them at a high level but we aren't recommending any drastic cuts at this point. The challenge is we're anticipating this as a short term issue and so making long term Cuts to resolve a short-term issue would not be the optimal situation. We are hoping with these cuts and with the reserves that we do have, that we can weather the storm but it's going to be tight.

And to that point, we have about $5.3 million available and we've always said, we've talked about this a lot recently, we have $3.4 million in reserves so that is still true We had 1.9 million in our various checking accounts, essentially. So we have about 5.3 million when you start doing the math. If we're spending $775,000 or so, we have about five to six months cash flow.

But to remind everybody this emergency began in mid-March. So six months from mid-March puts us in mid-September. So if everything resolves as we expect, you know, we'd weather the storm. But we need to stay diligent and continue to monitor it. We're not complacent with this for sure. And then as mentioned before and I noted here that we're continuing to advocate for emergency funding. A lot of cities are running into issues where they have one or two months of cash flow going to be advocating aggressively. So I think if we can all work together on that, we'd be likely to get some funding for small cities.

Mayor may I ask James a question on that point? Sure Bill go. James you know the county it's not it's not cities its jurisdiction under the CARES Act of 500 000 and more I believe and of course the county is the only what over 500 000 all the cities are under 500 there's a lot of counties like that My understanding is Ventura County has made it very clear, it's not gonna act as a fiscal agent to distribute some of that relief that the county is getting to the cities. Is that true of every county in a similar situation? Do we have any information on that? That's a

good question. I will say we asked our city or accounting leaders meeting with the other city managers in the county. We asked the county if they planned to distribute and the answer was to distribute to the smaller cities which Again, to be clear all of the cities in Ventura County are considered small. And the answer was no that it's not going to be distributed to those cities at this time under this round of funding.

We don't know if that's universal or common in other counties and the same situation? I haven't looked into other counties to see what they've done. You've got enough today. I was just wondering if you heard anything. Thank you. It's worth looking up we'll look into it. Santa Barbara is in a similar situation. I think every city in Santa Barbara County is below 500,000. Yeah

i think so

and so it's only the county that would have the uh meet the 500 maybe just one call to Santa Barbara and see what they're doing see if this is time

we could do that yeah we'll check in with them

yeah

um

Mayor

Nancy Pelosi said over the weekend that there's supposed to be another round of funding appeared for cities that the federal government is looking at passing again they purposely And the word was they purposely didn't touch cities in the last round because they're expecting another round. So we'll see, but that's supposed to be I think where circumvention of that county issue is supposed to be taken care of in another round of funding.

Yeah, we've heard that too so we're gonna we're starting early getting letters in and things like that just to get the funding

Mayor, can we go back a page? I just wanted to have James expand a little bit on this other savings and we have negotiating something with the sheriff's contract. I don't know what that would look like. Community organizations so you're looking at what the museum are we looking All the Green Coalition, things of that nature. Chamber of Commerce and then what do you when you talk about 10% reduction of each department? How would you is that just furloughs? What are you doing? What are you looking at there?

Yes, there's several different options we would look at other cities have gone to furloughs. Some have limited office hours, things like that. At our at this point We're starting to think about those things and putting a plan together if we need to. But with the current discussion about the timeline for reopening, we don't think that we'll need to go in you know will need to do any of those ones but it's just everything with this changes so quickly that if there is a change immediately we'd have a plan in place You know, depending on how much we need to see.

Randy at the Budget and Finance Committee, we asked the finance officer James to as the beginning of our budget deliberations to enumerate all the mandatory services that we provide and the things that we have to either provide or that in some cases the funding is restricted so that can only be used for certain activities. And then there are things of discretionary And they're kind of two kinds of discretionary. There's level of service on the mandatory side, but then there are...

Oh, Johnny you muted, Mayor Johnston you muted I'm sorry. Can you unmute him? Oh, I think we lost Mayor Johnston

I'll send him a note.

Okay,

who turned my mic off? Okay, where was I in my little diatribe there? I was just saying that the Finance Committee asked the staff. Am I still on the air? Yes. We asked the staff if they would start working on lists that distinguish between the activities that we have to provide and then we can analyze those as to the level of service that we provide under the mandatory side and then we have the discretionary side Which is the stuff that we choose to do that we may or may not be able to fund. And then when we get into the budget process next month, we'll be able to kind of hone this down and then eventually it gets down to contracts and payroll.

Well, I guess what I was looking at and thank you for that explanation Mayor. I was also looking at when we talk about 10% reductions, we had just this year on this fiscal year moved everyone back up to 40 hours. So I was looking at if we did a 10% reduction on those 40 hour employees now we're back to 36. And if we wanted to achieve 20%, then we'd be down to 30. So we're not laying employees off. What we're doing is reducing hours of Employees working so it's I was just wondering if that how you were looking at that James.

Yeah, that's something we've analyzed and considered um right now like like i said i'm repeating but the with the timeline that we've all been kind of hearing you know from uh recent state updates in the county taking some steps towards reopening as they as they called it last week where You know, we had prepared for the worst case scenario but it's sounding like it's not the worst case scenario. But we'll keep watching it and adjust as needed. We do have our first budget workshop is scheduled for May 12th.

And one of the funky things that happened with this is that we're in April 28 today I believe and we're about at the end of our fiscal year so In some ways, it's bad because there's not a lot of savings we can meet in one month this year. But on the other hand, it's good timing as far as allowing us to consider all these things in our budget discussion which will begin at our next council meeting.

The last slide that we talked about is that we have contacted our bank to investigate a potential line of credit for emergency usage if this continues longer than expected. And so, we've started to look into that. It's purely for cash flow. So, we will continue Look into that and determine if that's an option. We talked about it at the Budget Committee, and the Treasurer and Finance Director agreed to review our investments which are these $3.4 million here listed as CDs.

We believe that our interests that we receive off of those investments are lower than what we would pay for a loan so you know we would anticipate The line of credit would be a worst case scenario, not to be used unless this really continues long. But we wanted to let everybody know that that's something we're looking into. And so essentially after all this the message we're trying to get across is the key issue right now facing us is cash flow issues. It's facing every city in the county no matter how well off it is having these same kinds of issues and discussions We're going to keep watching closely, monitoring and adjusting as needed.

One point I'll make is these reductions here that we've already implemented, I think come out to about 8%. So we've already made some significant reductions and we're looking at other options. So we went over that with the budget committee as well. And we wanted to give a high level overview of that here If there's any questions on that, I'd be happy to take them. The second part will be focused on some of the actions that we're taking in the next couple weeks.

Okay do we have any other questions for James on this before he gets into the specific actions being taken during the

pandemic? My comment, Mayor would be thank you James for your thoughtfulness and thanks the finance committee for looking at this and working with James and the director. I really appreciate the information and i'm sure the community if they're watching enjoys it too and it's much needed so thank you guys.

Thank you okay so with that we had a whole Timeline from March 13th to now, but I know it's in the report and people are probably tired of hearing it. So I'll just skip to the items that are upcoming. We're continuing several actions. One thing we wanted to mention because it's a resource that became available last week that I think would be really useful to certain people within the Valley is we've been communicating with the county Chamber of Businesses about some of the programs available.

They just announced that the County Area Agency on Aging is offering a full service food and supply pantry at no cost for residents that are 60 or older, and people with disabilities. They'll provide a two week food supply by delivery and information is available at 805-477-7300 so We just wanted to get that out. One of the questions we get a lot is how seniors are gonna be able to get food under these circumstances, so that I think is a critical need. Moving past- Oh, I'm sorry. Would you repeat the phone number for those listening at home? Yes, it's 805-477-7300.

It's open to Ventura County residents 60 or older. But moving past that some of the things we've been working on One thing we've been working on currently is the county's order from April 20th encouraged certain exercise activities such as golfing, tennis, pickleball, walking, hiking, running, bicycling, pleasure driving and working around places of residence such as gardening.

Now the reason why we're bringing this up is In the order they had laid out specific requirements for golfing to be reopened, which was helpful. And Sewell Park reopened immediately because those requirements were in place. They did not lay out requirements for tennis and pickleball. It's more complicated than it sounds because of questions like are we going to allow doubles play? How many people do we allow on a court at one time?

How do you maintain six feet of social distancing? So what we've done to address that, we've done a few things. We plan to reopen on May 2nd which is Saturday and when we reopen on May 2, we are going to have hand sanitizing stations in place for each court. One at Upper Libby, one at Lower Libby and then one at the Pickleball Courts. And we are going to have signage and I have an example here in front of me I don't know if it'll show, but we're going to have signage posted that has rules and guidelines.

And one rule we wanted to note that maybe not everybody will be happy with is we are planning to allow single play only to start with doubles. And we looked into it. We looked up the US Tennis Association guidelines And the Pickleball Association's guidelines, and they each noted that doubles play is not encouraged at the moment. So we're going to follow that and go with single play only. And there's several other requirements, but that's I think the key one.

So we're going to reopen the courts on May 2nd. As I mentioned, Sewell Park has reopened We are opening, we are planning to open the parking lot at Serzotti Park but the barbecue pits shade structures and playgrounds will remain closed. The skate parks and the children's playgrounds at both Sarzotti and Libbey Park will remain closed. And the reason with those is the shared equipment in the groups you know encouraging people into small groups so we have put some time into trying Make sure that social distancing can be followed in those cases.

Oh, yes?

I have a question

too. James, are the signs going to cover how people should queue to wait to play and also are we going to have some guidelines so that people don't hog the courts if there's a lot of excess demand for playing the courts so people just are nice about it and take turns?

We do have guidelines in asking people to leave the court as soon as they're done playing and to not congregate. So we'll keep that in. How

about how long they

play? We didn't have a time limit, so that's something we can add to it. So we've developed these signs, and we're going to print them, laminate them, and post them in the next day or two. Just trying to avoid conflicts. Yeah.

Mayor, may I say something

please?

James. Yes. Just a couple of comments when I was in Libbey Park, I think it was Friday night, Saturday night all I saw were out-of-towners they were not social just you know there's no they were just in little groups and homeless people. I actually didn't see anybody I recognized, but there could have been some locals. The unfortunate thing about all this is the closure of the playground is impacting all the children that live in apartments that don't have a yard and they're cooped up. If there was some way to keep out-of-town people out of Ojai that would do more good and open the playground. We're in a dilemma.

I just wanted to say that. I don't know what to do about it, but I find it very sad that the kids can't go in the playground.

Thank you.

And I have one more comment if I may, unless James wants to respond.

The one response I'll say to that is we've kind of had Look for ways to try to, you know leave amenities available for residents and do it creatively. So that ties in with the North Signal Street closure which we still do get a lot of questions about but and we're planning to continue it but the idea there is encourage people to walk to shelf and discourage traffic coming from hours away to use shelves So we're trying to get creative, but yeah we don't have all the solutions on that.

Yeah I mean it's a dilemma it really is to see we're trying so hard to do the right thing and then we see groups out of towners who seem you know maybe not all but the ones I saw seemed pretty what's the word nonchalant Yeah, so and the other thing I want to say about the pickleball. I just find it unfortunate that we're resuming that with all the impact on the neighbors when we haven't tested. I thought we were going to test some kind of noise mitigation equipment and let us consider that these people are also urged to stay home And it's going to be, the noise is going to impact them even more and add to their stress. And I wish that the pickleball people out of consideration from my perspective, I wish that we could postpone that until this pandemic is over.

We do have the right, James, don't we? To be more restrictive in the county if we choose to.

Yes and that's one of the intents of this item is you know where we're looking at the county order and trying to think of the best ways to implement these in Ojai but I am looking for council feedback if there are concerns of opening certain services too soon

Well, that's why I'm expressing my concern that during this stressful time we're going to add to the stress of the neighbors by opening up the pickleball court. That is my opinion. And then a related question is, did the noise mitigation equipment arrive or what's happening with that?

Yeah. So we did test equipment on Friday. It was a small reduction maybe a decibel or two depending on where you stood. We don't think that the equipment that we tried is the solution which I will say We haven't determined that there is an actual noise violation, but we are trying to be responsive to lower the noise and the reduction was not substantial with this

equipment. Can I add to that Mayor?

Yes certainly Bill.

Okay well first of all James and I have talked about this and there's some iterations of how we could test that fence in a different way than it was I think we're going to have it up. If we open up the courts, we can arrange a test. And I would just say I do not agree on this matter with Susan because it's so important for People that have physical activity and that helps their immune systems. And this is a large group of people that I think we're serving in that respect, so I think we should treat them the same as we treat tennis.

Well, I disagree. I respectfully disagree. I think that the people that live there deserve more consideration and there's plenty other ways people can exercise. So that's okay. Okay. Randy?

Mayor, I'm not gonna touch the pickleball issue because there's just no reason to go there. What I am looking at though is we have a recreation staff that isn't operating at Sarasota programming or managing or monitoring programming and I was thinking what would it take to take a recreation employee and take them over to the skate park? And maybe open up, have them take a bean counter or do something.

But maybe we limit 10 kids per hour, 10 kids for something but I agree with Susan and the fact that we do have a lot of children that really they're not in school and they would like to recreate just as much as the adults in our community. And I think maybe Renee could come up with a plan that we could open Certain hours during the day to accommodate some activity. And again, treat it the same way as we would pickleball or tennis and restrict the amount of kids in interacting in there. But you know what? We gotta give these these Children something to do so that I think we have staffing debt to accommodate them

on the pickleball thing James. Uh, I don't know what hours you've got it set up for, but the idea of restricting it to singles playing only and maybe limit the hours from 10 to two or something. So people who are sitting on their, what was it? One of the neighbors said that they like have their coffee and read their paper and that thing is annoying but mostly you have your paper in your coffee before say 10 o'clock. And if the hours were somewhat limited part of this thing was sold for people like Randy and me, the elder set But, and we're not supposed to be out there anyway. So-

I agree with the mayor. I can see something like two hours in the morning nine to 11. And then you know the problem is as we head into summer no one's going to play at midday so you're gonna have a little more evening activity. So maybe you do two hours in the evening six to eight and you do you know 9 to 11 in the morning and see how that works. You could also limit your court activity. Instead of having four, you only have two. I mean, you could open the lower tennis courts and keep the upper courts closed or vice versa. There's ways of working with individuals that might be impacted as well as accommodating the adults in our community that enjoy that sport

so- And I also agree with exploring a limited trial opening at the skate park too. I think it's a good idea.

I support that as well.

The only challenge we have with the skate park is there wasn't an exemption for that, that we could find in the public health order. But we have our regular call so we can follow up and see if there's a public health concern behind that or not. With

controls?

Right

Yeah. And is there a limit on the amount of, you know, is it five or did we up it to 10? The amount of people in a confined space right now. So that's what I'm trying to say is you could start with five and work your way up with that and just accommodate how long they can stay in their things of that nature. I think it's doable. The allowance

for 10 people. I'm glad you brought that up because we actually wanted to save that. We wanted to make sure to state that the allowance for 10 people that was assessed on the 18th ended up Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His): Not occurring. So there is there at this point the county has not said that there's you know that groups of a certain size are okay they've just identified specific activities that are okay. Yeah.

John Gerstle, PB – He, Him, His.: : When it comes to the skate park right now with things being as quiet as they are. I know down and My neck of the woods, I see skateboarders come over and they do it in the parking lot. Maybe one or two and they're not around each other but you put them all in a small area like that where control is more difficult. I think that we wait until we find out what's the next steps gonna be before we open everything up.

Well, I agree with you Johnny. I'm just saying things through the process right now but I agree with

you.

And we'll reach out to the health officer on, on the playgrounds in the skate park specifically. But that was why we hadn't opened those up. I think, I think that they intentionally left those out because of the shirt equipment and the smoke and the grouping.

Mayor, can I ask James one other question too? I made the same observations. In fact, I actually asked people where they were from when I was at Libby and I only talked to two or three people, but they definitely did not live in Ojai. The three I talked to lived in Santa Barbara. But the interesting thing was James is there any way we could talk to Captain Rivera and find out if... Is there any way that we can operate some bicycle police on bikes? And actually do a little more enforcing through the community with that activity?

They have been walking at least when I've been around Libbey Park, I've seen the officer.

Yeah, actually, I was at Libby the other day investigating something and ran into the officers so I know they've been walking up so but we can talk to the chief he's here but I won't put him on the

spot. This probably don't need to be on horses that video on Oxnard Beach of the sheriff's deputies is going worldwide viral.

James, I'll ride horses. We'll go down

and

keep everybody in line.

Well they were the horse John if you didn't see it what happened was two sheriff's deputies on horses came up to two 90 plus year olds sitting by themselves away from everyone else on chairs and the video shows them saying you can be here but you got to sit on the sand you can't sit on the chair and that kind of went viral. I heard about that today

I'm sure we could say something that would get us in the news too. If we want the publicity, okay James where are we here?

A couple other things one is um i think everybody this was probably a foregone conclusion but I am announcing now that there's only one concert scheduled in May at the Libya Ball and so I've talked with Sterling that's canceled it was the May 9th Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Concert That, or I should say that will be rescheduled. It's postponed. The next concert scheduled currently is July 11th so that hasn't been postponed yet but we'll continue to monitor.

City commission meetings, we're gonna start holding those in May as well with if a commission has a time sensitive item, we're gonna hold them via Zoom. So we expect to have a planning commission, a historic preservation commission and an arts commission meeting Next month. We're still going to try to limit if something's not time sensitive and it's something the public is interested, we're going to try to limit those items so the public can participate once this is over.

We also have been in contact with the 4th of July committee they are continuing to prepare for the fourth of July parade and we just talk to them and let them know you know obviously this all depends on the public health order and they are aware and they will work with us on that in the future.

James, they have publicly stated that they are say on social media that they think they're that their go ahead like they came out and said no fireworks whole thing parades going on and it was kind of a surprise to me so I just want you know that's out there i hope i hope they're right but i don't know if that i i think it's probably we should probably say it's not officially right i don't think

yeah yeah They were very optimistic when we talked to them, which right now we want people to be optimistic. So so we told him we'd stay in contact and if an order is in effect that it could impact them but we all hope it's not. So we'll see the one of the interesting things in the county's recent order as they talked about one of the next phases will be preparing for potential child care need. And so we are planning with I have a Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the public. We have asked our Recreation Department to start investigating options there so we will try to have either determine if it's something we can do or if it's something we can't do but we're looking into it to try to get ahead of this next phase.

What we are doing in the meantime is we're preparing virtual recreation programs that will be aired on Channel 10 Short videos with the instructors that kids and everybody are used to seeing. So we're going to try to work on that in the next couple of weeks. And then just as an ongoing thing, one more thing is the face covering requirement is in effect. The confusion that a lot of people are having right now is it's only, the only area requiring it is the city of Ojai. The county is not requiring it yet, but they encouraged it. The public health officer this morning encouraged it at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

But we get a lot of questions of you know I'm confused. I went to Oxnard and it wasn't required. The answer is the City of Ojai, the requirements in it is in effect but other cities it's not required yet.

And it's only when doing essential business transaction or business transactions.

Yes

exactly. And not walking around exercising you

know.

We want to point out that since inception Which is, I believe April 8th is when we put this in. We have flattened the most of anywhere in Ventura County.

You know one other thing along with that though yeah you know I'm out and I'm out in Auctioneer in Ventura quite a bit and again it's the same thing essential businesses actually are posting that to enter their facilities to protect their employees right asking you to wear face covers So whether the county is dictating or not, I'm telling you that it's an accepted practice that everyone's doing. And from my perspective-

It's recommended by the CDC and I continue to be perplexed why Dr. Levin doesn't want to follow CDC guidelines.

Hey, just a pile on 100 compliments on our move and zero complaints.

Right? Exactly. Absolutely Ryan.

And then lastly, we mentioned earlier we're still operating all essential city services and we're planning to continue to do that. So if you have building or planning or public works needs or any other, we're still here at City Hall and we're still available. Well I think that's really it for the coronavirus response update

Does anybody else have a question for the city manager? Because if not,