City Council — 2021-04-13

Thank you, James.

I hit record.

Thank you. All right. Call to order we have a quorum for City Council meeting April 13th 2021 Gail would you please do the roll call?

I see, I see hands.

Bill, then Randy.

Um, I it's hard for me not get emotional talking about Paul because He just had a way of always staying very well-centered, whether you agree with him or not. He had a great sense of balance and humor and a way of treating people with respect. And I mean he could get frustrated like anybody else but I really viewed him as a mentor when I first was thinking of getting involved with city government back in the days when I started out being involved With as Ryan knows with the flow, tried to help as I could. I wasn't primary but tried to help with the flow efforts and then the building appeals board. And I would really depend upon Paul for advice and again a sense of giving me a sense of balance and what a great sense of humor. I gotta believe I'm gonna miss him.

You know, I could say the same things. First of all he's just a thoughtful man and caring and you know he was our family's personal attorney and recently Ryan has helped us with some personal issues so the Blatts family has been our attorneys for I don't know how many years. And so from the wisdom and the guidance that I received from Paul Me on a Sunday morning frantically driving to his house because I had some major concern that he just elevated it to, are you really concerned about that?

He could just make you feel good about who you were. He made you feel confident. He never wore his attorney hat into a council meeting You just always knew that he was, he was representing the community and and representing himself. He was just a dear friend and just a good man.

Thank you Randy. Susan? I definitely echo what Council Member Haney said and Mayor Pro Tem Weirich. Paul was also my family's lawyer, coincidentally, and I remember how he became my parents' 50th Wedding anniversary and so I saw him in a different light, you know, in a social setting. And again when I close my eyes and I see him, I always see him smiling and he had a perspective that allowed for humor in a situation which is so important You know, keeping the peace when we don't agree on everything. And then as soon as the meetings are over no matter what transpired when I would step outside it was like we were just two human beings there were never any grudges you know it was really wonderful working with them and I miss him I really do yeah.

Thank you Susan. Matt?

Yeah, I'll echo all the comments. When I first started serving as Ohio City Attorney six years ago, Paul was a mentor on the council and he was a great perspective on really what made Ojai great. I think of him as a great champion for the community, its residences, businesses and he always fought for what he felt was right but found a reasonable path forward to do so mindful of the fact that we're all living together in a community and need to continue forward as one He was just a great person to work with and we'll all miss him.

If I can just add, I always think of Paul as like the first Ojai celebrity I ever met. I used to see his shopping carts every week at Vaughan's and then I met him in person it was like hey you're the guy from the shopping carts! And he thought that was weird the first couple times we talked but it's like I always got a kick out of seeing them around town Unfortunately, we didn't get to work together very long.

Although he left us with another solid council member here but when I did work with him he was very consistent. He was always easy to work with and you can always kind of count on him so that's what I remember about him.

Thank you all. Well, let's take a moment.

Sorry Ryan. I just want to say thank you to everybody for your really nice comments. I know he instilled in me a need for not only He's instilled in me a desire for giving back to your community and I take it really seriously. And it's been a lot of, it's been a really tough couple of weeks but I appreciate so much how much he did for this town and he did it knowing that as only some of us in here would understand that it's not a really great gig all the time It's kind of a thankless job. A lot of the time it's really tough, but there's a personal responsibility that certain people have they feel to need to give back to their community by offering themselves up subject to the scrutiny and all the other things that happen, but also to really try and make your community better.

And if the right people don't take on that responsibility even in the face of the parts that aren't always the best, we don't have as good a community as we do. And it is not only myself and my father, but multi-generations of Blatts' back to New Jersey and New York State who have been mayors and town council people and other elected officials on all kinds of different levels.

My dad even when back in I wanna say like 99 when I was still in high school, when Sousa Beat him badly in a race. He was so excited to be able to get onto the planning commission and still be a part of our local government, and I had the real pleasure coming back after college and getting to run this campaign. And it was really cool. The favorite picture I have of us, and I've had it next to my bed for For I don't know how long now, is getting to when I was sworn in on council and it was the day he left. It's one of the really special moments and I just can't believe, I never would have imagined that before my term was over that he wouldn't be here and I will never be as good a council member, ever again because I will not be able to seek his advice and talk to him anymore and he was really.

It meant a lot to me to be able to pick up the phone and have somebody could trust and had all that experience and who could you know talk about things and bounce them off of and understand Ojai politics and I can tell In the last couple weeks of his life, one of the topics that would always get him fired up because even when he wasn't doing well was if I started bringing up local Ojai political anything.

He couldn't help but want to be involved and want to offer us two cents and You know, he really truly enjoyed it and not for any of the egotistical part because he really appreciated an opportunity to feel like he made a difference. And you know I obviously is not here to see it but the outpouring as I mentioned in our earlier but you know that the county supervisors dedicated their meeting today to him A number of the county supervisors commented who've known him for a long time.

It was really nice and really sweet, and he's gonna be gone too soon forever but I think we'll all collectively do our best to carry on his legacy and I just really appreciate all the kind words so thank you.

Thank you. We appreciate you so much Ryan. You will shine for your dad yeah i'm sure you will

And I, and I really appreciate to that we're going to be able to have a service at Libby Bowl. And it is all of you know but probably it's gonna be three o'clock on Friday, the 16th so this Friday at 3pm at Libbey Bowl, and, you know, One thing in Ojai, as council members know is that most of our accomplishments are keeping things from happening more than they are necessarily doing new things. But the Libby Bowl was a real pride and joy of his.

I've had a number of conversations before he passed since then with people who worked with him like Mike Donahue who helped you know was working with the bowl with him and all these other people meetings where we were getting pledges and everything. So it's just really, I just want to thank the city as well for being able to create that opportunity because I think, well, I know he didn't know what would happen.

And he'd be really, really proud and happy that it was going to be at a city facility. In fact, the facility is in our city logo And that's something that he worked really, really hard on because he knew that there wasn't a lot of opportunity to build and do new things in Ojai. But getting the bowl renovated and having a really great local place for our public and for entertainment in a beautiful park was a really big deal. So I just want to thank the council and city for that as

well. Ryan? Well, let's all take a moment of silence here together in memory of Paul Blatt's local icon and let's continue to learn from him as a model citizen. Thank you all.

non-perishables out of our own food pantry and then we began purchasing perishable and non-perishable items so that people could have something other than just canned goods. Once they started going, we went with a partnership with Vesta Food Boxes And Barryman, which the county supported. But through all this what we found and it's the same thing that we found through our Thomas Fire efforts is that we started things and I'm not... I don't wanna make this sound like I'm complimenting us. It's just really the reaction of being fast. We started delivering food literally the second day of the stay at home order. And it really takes other agencies, whether they're government or non-government. It just takes them a little bit longer to react and so that's what we have found is most helpful in these situations is to be really fast and start to address needs immediately.

After still focusing on food after the first six weeks of the pandemic and stay at home order The state started a Great Plates Delivered program. I heard about this just listening to the governor on one of his press conferences, I called the county and said can we start this? They said it's gonna take us awhile you just do whatever you wanna do and we'll catch up.

And so we started this program at the end of April. This is really a cornerstone program not only for the seniors of the valley and but also for the restaurants. And so the goals of the program were to support local independently owned restaurants and to help seniors stay at home. So today, um, we've delivered a $3 million to local restaurants. Um, it's allowed the roast restaurants to stay in business, have income keep their staff paid.

Currently we have eight restaurants still participating and um, They receive about $200,000 a month still currently and right now. Of the program 11 of the restaurants were within the city limits. In the first six weeks, the way this program ran is we actually delivered three meals a day seven days a week, and that was all employees have help of oh hi. After that, we just said this is not sustainable.

So we started delivering for two to three days at a time, two meals a day and currently there are still over 200 seniors on this program. We anticipate the program, we know it will go until May 7th. We anticipate it may go until June 15th when the state Supposed to reopen and so that means that this program will have actually gone on for over 14 months. Originally, it was supposed to be a one month program housing support we have provided 21 rental assistance grants to prevent eviction for low income Ojai Valley residents and that's $54,000 over the last 12 months.

In Project Roomkey, which is when we took the most vulnerable homeless residents of Ojai and helped them get space and locate into the hotels in Ventura and Oxnard. And kept in touch with them delivered food to them and just kept them in a safe place for themselves. So, and then once we transitioned out of that, we went into what we call operation inoculation.

And right now I'm sure you have no, and if not James will probably update you on this 21,000 doses have been administered Valley wide. Ohio is the second highest per capita area zip code in the county for vaccination rates. And that's been a really great effort, not only by the city but by the hospital, by the school district, by help of Ojai. There's been a lot of partners in that.

We did a coordinated outreach effort with the Ojai Valley Community Hospital and also with Dr. Levin. And we outreached primarily to agricultural workers in the valley. We signed up...we personally signed up 240 vaccine appointments And we were really proud to have a 99% show up rate for both the first and the second inoculations. We did 120 vaccine appointments for restaurant workers so that they could be inoculated, and then primarily for seniors, we did 400 vaccination appointments. And then before we had the program at Nordoff High School, we were transporting people to Oxnard and Ventura in the vans And we were doing that seven days a week so that was a, that was a big initiative it still is. It's obviously calm down with Nordoff closed will start having to transport down to Ventura and Oxnard again.

Um, So our financials we we've expended $350,000 in help funds for COVID support. $80,000 in direct business grants to those restaurants that did not participate in Great Plates. We gave them grants also. We've had three full-time equivalent Help of Ojai staff dedicated for 12 months and for the first six months of COVID we had 10 full time equivalent dedicated staff.

So, you know it's been an amazing year in a lot of ways. It's been a year of really ups and downs for all of us, all of you. We feel like we really helped to play a critical role in keeping the Ojai Valley safe and keeping businesses in business, employees employed And so we're, we just want to make sure we share with you what we've done because we've been working so hard that we kept pretty quiet about it. Cause we're really busy and we don't have time to do a lot of other things. So that's all I have. I'd love to answer any questions if anybody has any or we can always, you can always email me and we can answer questions also.

Questions? I'll ask one real quick, Terri. Are people still able to call you to coordinate vaccine appointments?

They can. The funny thing about vaccine appointments is at the beginning we did exactly what everybody else did. We just happened to be faster and better at it, just kind of knowing the ins and outs of the system. And then we actually were given dedicated links so that we could get some of the more vulnerable people in That helped when it was Nord off when it's not Nord off we don't get dedicated links, we still also.

They can call and how we deal with that is we put them on a list as soon as we see appointments available we call them when we get them scheduled right then so we can still help it's just not in the quantities that it was previously

awesome.

Randy.

Gary, I just want to thank you for the presentation. Most of us in the community know what you do but really don't know what you do and so by sharing what you did today allows all of us to really recognize not just the general benefits that we take for granted but the hard work and dedication from you and your staff. In fact, I wish we had time for you to list all these volunteers because I know you're guiding them But they're the workers. They're the ones that are schlepping the food and doing all the interacting, and just being the great face of Ojai. So thank you. I really appreciate your efforts, and I know the community does too.

Thank you. And I do want to acknowledge we do have a number of really amazing volunteers that have helped us from early on. And i will also say that because the majority of our volunteers are seniors We didn't utilize volunteers for about the first five months, and it was only staff because we wanted those volunteers to also say stay safe and stay at home.

Thank you,

Ryan.

I want to echo a little bit of what Randy said and just say thank you, Terry. And thank you to all the really great staff and volunteers and everybody that helps make Hub of Ojai work. Hub of Ojai is an institution in Ojai. It's been here Much longer than any of us really have. And I'm always impressed and thank you, and you can see how important it is. When you look at the demographics of our community, it's a really important public service that HELP provides that is so essential to our community.

And sometimes not everybody totally understands. You know, I've made this comment a lot of times but you know one of the secrets for Ojai working so well even though it's so small is the fourth leg of the chair that holds the whole thing up is volunteerism. 501C through non-profits all these really wonderful institutional organizations that are really fantastic and help is one of those and thank you Terry thank you for coming in and giving a presentation and I think our council needs to do everything we can Thank you for all the really trying, awkward time. One tricky part about COVID is nobody was prepped and you're prepped for everything. It helps quickness as a sign of being prepared more than a lot of those other organizations are.

And it's not just COVID, it's been the fire and I mean so many different things. But thank you really thank you and I hope we can support you guys as best we can. Thanks.

Thank you so much, Terry, for coming.

It's mind blowing what you've done. Yeah, it's crazy. We think it's crazy and we are looking forward to June 15th and what our new reality is going to be. Certainly don't know that either. So we'll be fast and creative and flexible on that as well. So thanks very much. And if anybody has any other questions or anything Please feel free to contact me and I can go through anything you need.

Thank

you. Okay, thank you. Bye

bye. Moving on to public communication.

Yes, and I believe we have two on the agenda are two people signed up so I'll ask Gail to Bring them in one at a time. And just as a reminder, this is the portion of the meeting for public comment which is not on the agenda, item's not on the agenda and the City Council cannot discuss these items but they can refer those to staff so Gail can you let the first person in?

The first person we have is James Olsen. James you should be able to speak please go ahead and unmute yourself if you're muted.

Hello, we can hear you James.

Okay, excellent. I just have a real simple comment about the bike lanes down at in front of the hospital. It's a lovely vision, I think the execution leaves a little something to be desired. I know there's been a number of accidents there. Some of them have resulted in hospitalization. I was on March 26th, another one of those accidents. And I believe so far I am the worst and I'm hoping you guys can look at something to make sure that somebody else isn't hurt worse than I am and I can hopefully be the worst thing that happens there.

Uh, I broke my right shoulder. I turned my right elbow into about a 12 piece jigsaw puzzle which the surgeons were Fortunately, able to reconstruct into something that's at least close to what it's supposed to be. I also broke my left hand on that required surgery as well this last week so it's a really unforgiving stretch of road now you are riding along somebody coming up beside you the lanes are a little bit narrow you try to give way so you got enough room for the person to pass or do other things and it takes you Within inches of these little eight inch high bumpers, I guess you'd call them. I don't know exactly how to describe them but when you hit one it's pretty disastrous and I would hope that maybe somebody at the city can maybe find a way to execute that vision in something that's a bit more forgiving to the general public so that other people aren't hurt as badly as I am or potentially worse

Okay. Thank you, James. Since the item's not on the agenda, the council can't deliberate but we will look into that issue and we'll have staff contact you as well.

Thank you, James and sorry to hear about your accident. Another comment?

The next person we have is Bill Miley. Bill, you should be able to go ahead and talk if you're muted please unmute yourself Mr. Miley, if you're there you can go ahead and speak.

I didn't know if I had a public comment but well I will say that in the New York Times just a couple of days ago there was a featured article on hiking in the northern part of Italy in what was called the Dolomite Trail and they had a picture of one of their mountains Elaborating on how beautiful it was, and instantly I thought about ours. So maybe we should promote it more than we do?

I'm not sure but anyway, you reminded me of how great we have our pink moment which continues I guess to be a draw for Oakland.

Thank you. And that's all the public comment speakers we have. Okay,

thank

you Gail.

All right moving on to the consent calendar motion to approve.

Motion to approve although I'd like to pull G and H. I'll

second. I'd like to pull E.

I would like to pull F and J

You accepting those amendments Randy? Yes, I will as noted. And I will second the amendment.

Okay so there's a to approve everything except G H E F and J could we have a vote for that Gail please?

Mayor Stix yes Council Member Haney

Yes, and Mayor good job on that. That was

Okay all right thank you. All right so the first one that was pulled was E. Who pulled E?

The adoption of updated city council protocols and two things I'm looking at the public comments. There was a concern from Bill Miley. He wrote the comments suggesting that protocols include the option to permit public commentary. Has something changed that made him concerned? Nothing has changed as far as public comments go, right?

No, the only thing that's changed I wasn't clear on that comment either and I meant to reach out to Mr. Miley but the only thing that changes we added language saying that public comments may also be submitted in writing Um, and so there hasn't been any reduction of public comment. It's actually kind of making it clear that you can submit things in writing. So I'm not sure exactly what that refers to.

Okay um this is Gail. I am wondering if i actually Mr. Miley had a consent card in for agenda item one? Wanted to speak about and also my apologies, but I just realized that there's a another public communications comment card. If you want to go back to that after we're done with this and let that other person speak it's up to you.

Sure okay is Mr Miley there to talk about E right now?

Yeah, Mr. Miley you should be able to speak okay is this what you wanted to speak on?

The point I wanted to make was that under the public hearing section which i believe is nine it says that there will be public input but under 10 Which is discussion. It doesn't in any part of that paragraph say that their council will seek public input from those in the audience, and that's my point. Nine says yes and 10 says nothing. That's it.

Okay I I think we can add a simple sentence to that, assuming council is OK with it. But in a simple sentence that a public comment will be allowed during discussion items. We can add that to it.

And we're required by state law to provide that opportunity. So the fact that it's not stated in protocols doesn't mean it doesn't happen and there'd still be reasonable to add.

Then I had one other question. Is it true that we, I don't have a recollection of this and I couldn't find it. I didn't probably take enough time to look. Did council adopt protocols that required the city manager to put an item that's requested by two council members at the end of the agenda? I was thinking he, the city manager should have discretion depending on what it is.

You know, the nature of the comment Could dictate that it should come before the end of the meeting. Like tonight, I'm going to be requesting that the last item be second-to-last. Does it say that somewhere, James? Is there something that we need to add so if the council agrees that you have some discretion? I mean, if this is something that's a great interest to the public and there's 50 people waiting to speak then we might want to move You know, earlier on the agenda it just

depends. It's the mayor and the city manager together that put together agendas.

Yeah but so he's not there's nothing that says that it has to be at the end or is there something in here that says?

It's not on the program code. Okay go ahead. Current language does not require that the items placed by two be placed at the end. It says it's one sentence I'll read it attachment A for this item page 19 Request by council members to place an item on agenda should the mayor or two or more council members request in writing ahead of a meeting or early during the meeting that it had to be agendized. City manager will place the item on the agenda in a reasonable time frame as staff workload permits, that gives the manager discretion to choose where on the agenda the item will be placed subject to confirmation by the council

okay

all right that meets your current language

meets your goal I would say that gives some discretion, but the general practice and how we had done this is that as a standard rule if an item's requested by two, we put that at the end of the agenda after the items that have been put on by the majority of council. So it gives us, it gives discretion but that's been the standard practice and it's most likely how you know it's how I plan to proceed with them so

Okay, as long as there's this it's not written in it's there's discretion. That's all yeah thank you. Yeah

I believe um Mayor that we also have an opportunity at the beginning of our meetings to reorganize the agenda Based again on the majority of council approving it. So there's more than one way to have an item that's been agendized move to the front, to the middle or to the back. Again that's another option for all of us that we have.

Yeah, my thought was just I know that we can do that. But if they have discretion, then we might not have to rearrange things because we also have to consider the public is looking at this. I mean, the more we can make clear the order of the agenda before it's published, that was just my thinking rather than rearranging it at the beginning of the meeting just because the public It doesn't always catch that something that's later is now at the beginning. That was just my thinking. Does it make sense what I just said? Sure. You know, before it's published and we do it, we can. But of course, Council Member Haney is correct. We can still change it at the beginning of the meeting. OK, thank you. I'm ready to move on.

Can we go ahead and vote on that? Yes. On a E Gail, can we have a roll call

I think you can confirm this. So we did the interviews with the arts commissioners so i think the idea was to ratify those two appointments of Christine Steiner and Eric St. James Lopez but the other two we don't know that all the applications got were received by each council member who appointed. So we wanted to pull those to take another look at that and then we'll bring them back at the meeting on the 27th.

Great, thank you James. Okay next is Gee.

So what's on that one? Do I get a move approval of the Arts Commission's appointments?

Yeah.

I will make that motion.

All right thank you Bill. I'll second. Can we have a roll call please Gail?

yeah I started with um Yeah, gee thank you Mayor. You know it was interesting when I was reviewing the packet it seemed like this section in the consent item had to be added. I mean I had you don't know how many notes I had just first of all I wanted to thank staff for the incredible job in presenting what the majority of accomplishments that have taken place in the community for the past year. So I think that's always a good thing.

Some of the questions that I had were where to place some things and maybe some things were missing. In all of the discussion on planning, I didn't see anything on energy I didn't see energy resourcing or energy efficiencies. And so, I wasn't sure when I was reviewing this if we wanted to put something about energy, about solarizing the community or the reach codes, things of that nature. I just didn't know where we were gonna put them.

So, I wasn't sure if we wanted to put them in the conservation element or in the land use element but I just didn't see anything regarding how we use how we apply energy in our community so I thought that was important. That's the first thing and then the second thing was in the housing element program six, the affordable housing development it sure seems like that we're gonna need to actually do a standalone discussion on affordable housing in this community Take this and bring it to the conversation later on goals and priorities. But it sure seems like we've had so much discussions on affordable housing in this community, we've never taken really any any strong stand or any measures to actually do something. So I'm hoping that as we look at affordable housing in this planning section, there's some things that we've done but we haven't really done a lot.