City Council — 2023-04-18

Roll call please Weston.

Commissioner Bennett?

He's on his way in from Santa Barbara.

Okay.

Said he might be late.

And Commissioner Starkweather? Here! Council Members, Mayor Stixx?

Here

Council Member Ruhle?

Here

Council Member Lange?

Here,

virtual

virtual correct Councilmember Whitman Mayor Pro Tem Francina

here.

Thank you, Weston and I'm going to read something about Councilmember Lang being virtual. Hi Rachel. Good evening the Brown Act authorizes members of the City Council to participate in meetings remotely under certain conditions Assembly Bill 2449 which was signed into law by Governor Newsom on September 13 2022 is effective January 1 2023 Permits Council Members to participate in City Council meetings remotely when they can demonstrate just cause or emergency circumstances and when a quorum of the City Council is physically present in the city.

Council Member Lange is participating in tonight's meeting remotely under AB 2449. Council Member Lange is participating under the Emergency Circumstances Exception given a contagious illness Council Member Lang will be participating in tonight's meeting using audio visual technology per AB 2449. A council member participating remotely due to emergency circumstances requires council consent I'll ask if there's any opposition to this request anyone?

Okay, seeing none we will proceed. Council members participating remotely under AB 2449 are required to disclose at the start of the meeting whether that any other individuals 18 years of age or older are present in the room at the remote location with the council member and the council member's relationship with the individual. Council Member Lange would you please confirm that you're the only person 18 years or older in the room your teleconferencing from or else disclose those persons over 18 present with you?

I'm the only one here.

Thank

you James, and is there an approval of agenda motion to approve.

I'll move to approve

in a second. I'll second. Okay, roll call please Western.

Yes. Councilmember women. Council, is that a yes or no.

Yes or no. Yes.

Will we be doing a Planning Commission vote?

All right, thank you. And we will move on to public comment. Are there any public comments? And just a reminder that tonight's public comments are on the item that is on the discussion agenda. We have one. We'll begin with Drew Mashburn.

Good evening, I'm Drew Mashburn I've resided in the Ojai Valley nearly 72 years next month. My family's been here since the early 1920s, when this 25-year plan goes ahead and expires, I'll be about 96 years old. Hope to still be here, may not be. You know, I admire any persons that step up into government and fill the various positions, councils, planning commissions, Our chief anybody.

At the last. Yeah, this is a you know I looked at the at this whole package just like 100 pages long it's overwhelming. It's a lot of information for the public to digest and discuss among themselves and. I'm looking at a no vote tonight, if we're taking a vote on anything this substantial for our future. The public needs more of a chance to weigh in on this. I'm a retired guy.

I retired almost eight years ago and I can't have been able to keep up on it. At the last council meeting, I believe Councilman Whitman seemed to be moving towards having each present council member select a planning commissioner of his or her choice. I agree. I don't believe that all the present council members hold the same sentiments about this issue as the previous council.

I'd like to see a planning commission that reflects each council member's likes and dislikes. This would lend to a better balanced planning commission for expressing their advice to this extremely, extremely...I cannot express it enough how important this is And it's going to go ahead and not just affect us right now, it's going to affect future generations. Please keep that in mind when you make your decisions tonight.

Thank you Drew. Next we have Bill Miley then Brian Eakins and then Wayne Maynard. Yes, that's correct bill.

But I want to hear it first.

Well we're taking public comment first and then we're going to have the presentation

may ask a question Mayor can the public asked questions after the presentation as well. I think that's what Bill Miley was asking.

Okay, good evening. I'm sorry Councilmember

women.

Well,

presentation

with that would you prefer bill I mean we have two other cards.

I intended to speak on the safety issues transportation and usually There's a presentation, administratively first people hear about it. You ask questions, and then the public speaks that's what I came for.

Okay, would you like to make your comment now or later? Okay, thank you. Brian Aikens.

Hello Planning Commission Council staff. Our chief and others. There were a lot of pages I pulled it out, pulled out 19 pages that I'm focused on. They are mainly focused on the Ojai Avenue area and I'm interested to see how housing will intertwine with a downtown historic district and whether that will be supportive of that or distractive of that so thank you very much.

Thank you Brian next we have Wayne Maynard

Wayne Maynard, I'm a resident of Ojai. My specific interest tonight is with the safety element provisions on the general plan The current safety element that we have was developed in 1991 and it's like 57 pages. Reviewing the information in the agenda item package, it appears to really only focus on wildland fire and we have a lot more safety issues that we need to be addressed just look at the existing plan. We've got seismic hazards flood hazards geological hazards with you know With soils, a bunch of things that are covered. And so I don't know if you're just haven't progressed that far yet or if you're intending on leaving all that kind of stuff out.

I'm also have a specific concern with regards to just our fire protection in the community as a whole for building fire protection not just

wildland.

We have a very Long time it takes to get enough firefighters into our valley to actually make a good aggressive attack on a building fire. And that needs to be addressed, I believe in our plan as well. So that's all I have.

Thank you Wayne Weston any comments on zoom.

Yes Mayor we have one on zoom two on zoom now. First we'll have Renee, followed by Becky. Pardon me everyone, James Han it appears I don't have the ability to let them in. We'll just need some technical assistance. There we go. It's fixed. Renee you have the floor.

Hi, this is Renee Roth. It's so nice to see you all together in the same room. I'm sorry I can't be there today. I've got a conflict. So is this the

public comment for the general plan.

Okay, all right. So hold on let me get access to my document here I just printed it out

Mayor, I think we should also make sure the public understands that they can also comment after the staff report. The present you know the presentation just to make sure yes.

Okay, I have a conflict so I would like to talk now just briefly.

Thank you.

Okay thank you are small town. Has basically been relatively unchanged for the past 35 years, but we are facing new challenges as it has become increasingly popular. With tourists leading to an influx of cars and traffic, and dogs and shoppers. Additionally faster alternative modes of transportation like e-bikes and e-scooters are becoming more popular. In simple terms, we must address the need for more infrastructure to support the cars and the traffic and the people who want to come to our beautiful town including various types of housing for all sizes and income levels.

However, the most significant challenge we face is the lack of affordable housing, which is worsened by a small but vocal group that opposes any new development in the hope of preserving our small town character and access to nature. We are at a tipping point, and it is essential that we dress our antiquated and aging infrastructure needs now and be willing to pay for them. We must also incorporate environmental standards Into the housing element to promote the most efficient use of resources.

This includes adopting green building policies and regulations designed at the state level, including the use of renewable energy sources, energy efficient building materials. and water conservation and fire safety standards with design for more sustainable transportation options, including in any of this new development. It looks like I'm running out of time. I just want us to work together and make this happen to improve our public services and infrastructure. Thank you.

Thank you, Renee. We have one more comment in person, Kathy Lattes?

Well,

okay I admit i'm a little confused because I would actually prefer to make a comment after we hear the presentation but so I since we just walked in. I'm sorry I'm a little late and I didn't quite get the

you can do that if you

process, I would prefer

Okay, thank you one more comment online.

That's correct Mayor Becky, you have the floor now.

Thank you, Weston. Yes I'm speaking off the, this is Becky Wyndenwood again tonight and I'm speaking off the cuff because I really had a hard time grasping all of the material that I found in those hundred pages, but I do have a couple of things I'd like to Ask of the councils and the others assembled tonight, particularly. We have a government we're supposed to have a government of the people by the people and for the people.

And that means that the people's voices must be heard. And as Drew Mashburn pointed out earlier this is an awful lot of information for people to digest in a very short period of time and to line up with all the different stresses and challenges that we're having in our community now, as opposed to when this original general plan may have been created. I want to say in response to the idea that those who want to preserve Ojai Its environment, its charm, its hometown atmosphere. It's affordability and so on and so forth are not anti-housing that is a misnomer that has been too often used to divide our community.

And that is simply not the case. Most of us who want to preserve Ojai, want to preserve Ojai for the locals as opposed to always pandering to tourists and those who want to come here who end up pricing everybody else out of town. And then we lose the fabric of our community. So what I wanna ask of you all tonight is to consider The people who already live here and what they would like to see in their town. It looks as though there was some kind of a survey that was done, I noticed that there's something about three out of five respondents agreed with this or something like that.

I don't know how those respondents were chosen if all voters in the city of Ojai received a questionnaire that they could respond to and that might be something you can go into in your presentation tonight But I just want to make sure that everybody understands that those who want to preserve Ojai are not anti-housing, but we are more focused on the locals who already live here and would prefer not to expand our population because it is simply unsustainable.

We live in a small valley with limited resources and we must attend to the truth of limitation and not our hubris. Thank you.

Thank you Becky. That's it Weston?

No more via Zoom, Mayor.

All right thank you very much all right we will move on to our one discussion item general plan update joint meeting with the City Council and Planning Commission for city council determine with input from planning commission preferred alternatives to the land use element transportation element and safety element And before we introduce our consultants, I did talk to Councilmember Lange earlier this afternoon. We were reviewing the general plan so I believe Councilmember Lange you have a motion?

Yes, I actually wanted to hear what the presentation but I am in alignment with what Becky and Drew shared that. It would be helpful to workshop this, to get more community involvement. Actually Bill Miley in the public comments that he emailed mentioned that there were 160 people participating in the surveys and workshops and that represents such a small fraction and a disproportionate number of those people were older residents. And so my motion is that We, that we actually have another workshop on this and we involve community members and we get more input. So to give this more time that we don't adopt this right away.

Okay thank you. We have a motion is there a second then Council we can discuss? Yeah

I'll

second. Okay any comments from council?

If I could add one more piece to this too, if it's okay to add one more. So the other thing that I noticed is a glaring there are a couple of pieces that are missing and one is a climate, there's nothing about climate in here. And a lot of the The data was collected before really the, we like this was March 2020 was when the housing research was collected and this is before COVID. I just feel like there are some missing pieces that would be really helpful to include as well.

Thank you Councilmember Lang. All right, we have a motion and a second. Go ahead,

Susan. Could our city manager just briefly refresh us because my recollection is that we've had so many meetings. And I mean, I would consider if we need another one but I just have a long memory of multiple meetings.

Yeah, we have it was actually part of the introduction so I might end up repeating it but we were going to remind everybody because we know that there's been a lot going on over the last three years a lot more probably pressing items for people trying You know, get their kids to school and survive the last few years. And so we were going to start with sort of a refresher of how we got to this point starting with the you know it's almost become legend but the fact that we kicked off the general plan update the day that the COVID emergency was declared and we had to cancel the first meeting off the bat So going back to that point, we've had several attempts to get community input. Stakeholder meetings, council meetings, planning commission meetings.

We did a program where we tried to have and I had actually forgot about this until earlier today. We tried to have high school students from Nordoff participate in what I think was a survey that we did with them? We did a community survey with 200 community members who responded, and then to the question from the member of the public about you know how we chose people. We actually had a series of workshops that were just open meetings so people could choose to attend or not.

Exclude anybody and one of the visioning workshops had over 100 community members in March of 2021, which admittedly was quite a while ago. And then in August of 2020 or December of 2021 we had the last sort of PC City Council. Well, we had an item that came to planning commission and then came to council to discuss vision and guiding principles and had a lot of public input at those meetings And then in August of 2022, we had a community workshop.

On policy options related to land use policy transportation and safety that had 150 community members and as part of the introduction, we were going to just refresh everybody's memories that that workshop with those 150 people. And that feedback is what led to tonight's, the analysis that we did in tonight's item. So we've had a series I think it's fair and we would be the first to admit that we weren't planning for this to go on three plus years and so it's also fair to say that you know it's been a long process but we've had several meetings over the last three years.

Oh, was your intention with this motion that we take a vote at the beginning of the meeting? Because I would not be comfortable to do that. I would consider revisiting that at the end of the staff report and the presentation. I don't know how everybody else feels but I'm not prepared to vote for anything at this point.

I understood that to be her motion and that's what I supported is that we'd hear the staff report And that we'd hold discussion. But as far as voting on direction, we make a further effort we can talk about to get more public input was my thinking if the motion was intended to get more participation by the public and I'm Perfectly fine with us going forward with the meeting. Okay, up to the point of voting on actual policy direction

just

wanted to be clear.

Thank you. So, to be clear, your, your proposing voting after the presentation.

That's correct. Okay,

thank you and

after discussion.

Yes,

yes, and after public comments as well.

Okay.

Leslie.

If you could, at some point try to tally up the numbers, the hours. Because as true as this may be people come or they don't and I've heard about this numerous times so i don't know how we would change or get more people to come. We certainly could try so Like the numbers, how many workshops have we actually had? What were the topics of those workshops? How many people showed up and I would be the first to agree that the demographics probably are highly representative of one particular demographic. But I think it'd be also good to have those numbers.

I call that the interest of demographics

I would say, you know, yeah. But I'm also, you know, outreach is outreach and like I think it's wonderful that we attempted to get some Nordoff seniors in. Did they come? Yeah.

And I just was getting an update on

that. You can tally later.

We got about 10 responses from...we tried to work with a high school group and we got about ten people, ten kids who actually filled it out. And, I think roughly we're talking 450 to 500 Participants, but obviously disclaimer like could be some of the same people showing up multiple times.

Okay? Yeah and I have no objection to revisiting that motion after the presentation and if we could also think about what the next steps would be if we were to postpone and not go back to the drawing board but potentially you know, extend the outreach. What would that look like? Or are we asking staff to envision that for us as well? So thank you.

Could I make a

comment? Sure

can we just wrap this up in one

second about this okay

sure good

um i looked at the demographics of the last survey and obviously the people over 65 was greatly disproportionate uh the population that's and it's not surprising who comes out to things It seemed to me that the one way you could get a better true demographic look would be to do focus groups, where you pick people by demographics. And you had several of those that gives people information in advance so they understand what their giving an opinion on, and you can get more in-depth feedback. That would be my only suggestion as we're going on but probably doing more public workshops we're gonna get the same people coming back out again I suspect.

Thank you. Okay so just a reminder about the sequence. We will have the presentation from Raymond Associates and then on the three different sections right? We will discuss after each section correct James?

Yeah, that's what I want to make sure I understand just with trying to understand the motion. So, I think maybe why that motion was made is that the sort of the plan right now is that we'd have a presentation from our consultant Ramian Associates and then they were going to focus on the three main areas and ask for feedback and direction So I think what I, what I heard was that we start with just the presentation and not have that feedback and direction portion yet. And then at the end decide what we want to do.

Okay, that sounds reasonable so go through all three sections.

So we'll just, we'll just go through the presentation I think Ron's on the zoom so i'll say it now and then we'll repeat when, when we know he's hearing us but I think the idea would be will just will go through the presentation and then decide where we're going from there.

And there are about 80 slides, so we'll sit back and get the popcorn.

Coffee.

OK, well it's my pleasure to introduce Ron Whitmore and Raymond Associates team to prevent the general plant update. Thank you so much, Ron and team for all your hard work on this much appreciated.

And if I may just give a quick introduction before we do that. I just wanted, I think we sort of said a lot of what what I plan to say but I sort of just wanted to remind everybody about what the general plan update is and the fact that it's one of the most important things we can do because it's the guiding document for the city 25 years plus into the future, it's essentially the Council and the Planning Commission and the community participating through workshops working together to set the course for the city.

Essentially as we move into the future every decision that we make should be reinforced by the general plan or should reinforce the general plan Uh, it's a major project and ambitious project. Most cities when we had when we were getting consultants and we're doing comparisons most cities in the county spend over 1Million dollars on the general plan update. We are fortunate that we're able to get a bid for much less but it's it's A big project. It's a large scale project.

And as I said, we are now 3 years and I think a month into ours. We had planned to have it done quicker than that, but many of the impacts we mentioned earlier such as the pandemic really impacted this. I think I've said this in meetings before but one of the jokes that we've said is the first meeting we ever had I told them Ojai would never ever have a virtual meeting so don't ever bring it up And then by the next month we were told you can only have virtual meetings so.

So we had to change our strategies and we had, you know plans to come in person and those move to virtual and then you know all these different things. For that reason, we have Ron's going to give a presentation that was mentioned a moment ago as I think our estimate was 80 slides. And part of the reason we're doing that is trying to sort of make sure everybody has the same base foundation in the information how we got to this point Where we're at, what decisions have been made to this point. We've adopted our guiding principles, our vision statement, we've had the visioning workshops and we've also had community workshops on the land use element transportation element safety element policies which have gotten us to this point and Ron will go over that a little bit more but kind of He's going to get into a lot of detail, and so I will end it with just reminding everybody to try to think kind of high level big picture.

Three areas that have come up nonstop in the workshops we had where there is just so many different ideas about what could happen in these areas, what could be done in these areas, is Bryant Street and Bryant Circle, Ojai Avenue There's areas there where there could be some interesting live-work type of arrangements, and Montgomery Street and how businesses and residences can interact on Montgomery Street. And those three have come up every workshop we had they would come up. We did one where we broke into really small groups and each small group was digging into those three topics kept coming up So we will get very detailed, but I would encourage everybody just sort of think. Remember to also think big picture we're talking about over the next 25 years what do we want to see in those areas and in the city as a whole so with that I will turn it over to Ron to

James can I just

sure

Commissioner, or I'm sorry chair policy has a question.

Yes. I noticed in the staff report it, it mentions land use element which I think we're kind of passed at this point we've gone back and forth with HCD a couple times.

That's the housing element.

So that's our housing agenda. Land use circulation and safety, but also listed as environmental justice. I understand that this is a required element of the general plan now, but it is not going to be a separate element rather it's going to be infused into all of the other elements specifically the three that we're talking about tonight. And as I read this 86 page briefing, I didn't see any of that so I'm hoping that Ron can Let us understand how environmental justice is being woven into each of these three elements now, which is what I'm told it's supposed to be happening.

Yeah, and I would say that so the list you're referring to the bullet point list is the list of all items we plan to include in our update. Right? The list of items which is just the three land use element transportation element and safety element are the three that are the focus tonight.

So we're not going to discuss environmental justice at all tonight?

Not except only if it comes up in relation to one of those three pieces. So it will not be the focus of tonight. And so with that, I'll ask Ron run is just for everybody he's attending virtually he is, he will be on the screen. The screens on either side but run. Can you take it away.

Yes, good evening thank you James. Thank you Mayor sticks council members commissioners is the audio and video working okay on your end.

Yes, it's working and run in case you didn't hear coming in. So the idea or the request from Council at this point is to get through the presentation without stopping to focus on those three key issues get through the presentation and then come back and see how the council wants to handle it so

yeah I was I was listening in on a previous conversation Thank you.

He heard

what we were talking about. Is that what he said? Sort of.

More volume.

Higher volume. Are you having trouble hearing me on your end? Yeah, it's not very loud. We'll ask James to turn it up. Can you give it a shot, Ron?

Yeah sure is this any better? Yep. That's better. You're very good. All right yeah please don't hesitate to stop me if you're having any trouble with the audio or the video. Again good evening Thank you all for gathering this evening. Good evening, members of the public. My name is Ron Whitmore. I'm a principal with Ramey & Associates which is a planning firm with offices in Berkeley and Los Angeles. I am the project manager for the Ojai General Plan update. James if you could show the slides, I'd appreciate it starting with slide one and then we'll transition quickly to the next slide.

Can you put it in presentation mode, James?

James, you have to enable editing before you can do that. It's the button in the highlighting at the top.

See there. Is that what Weston is supposed to be doing right now?

I don't think so. James Hahn's running it from the back.

There you go.

Perfect. Thank you. And you can advance to the next slide, please. So while he's advancing that slide so with me tonight in addition to your excellent staff resources there and James and Lucas who we've been working with very closely on all of this all along I have with me here tonight Megan McNulty who is a senior planner with Reaming Associates Who's been focusing on a lot of the land use work for the Ojai general plan update.

And also I'm short notice, Sean daily from I terrorists who is the transportation sub consultant for the project was able to join us this evening because we heard that there were some questions about the traffic impact analysis that was done for the land use possible and use change option. Megan and I will do the bulk of the presentation since Sean wasn't planning on being here originally, but he will be available to help address any questions that come up specific to any of the transportation.

Slide please. So we have two main goals for tonight's meeting. One was to provide a brief status update Council members who may not have the full background. Most importantly we are planning on talking you through some of the key policy options that have come up. That we thought would be helpful to get councils direct guidance on before we proceeded with Transportation and safety policy options.

Now James just to clarify, we were going to share a very abbreviated version of the presentation not that full 88 slide deck is the preference of the council for us to share the entire presentation?

No, I just didn't count what the abbreviated was so continue with that we provided the full version in the packet as background but just if you can continue with that and then if specific questions come up we can

okay excellent yeah we do have that full slide deck at our disposal. In addition to that we have all of the background documentation, the reports from all the public engagement outreach, all of the technical studies and Depending on the nature of the questions, we have a lot of good resources at our fingertips that we can reference and even share on screen depending on the nature of the question.

Question? The summarized version is just taking out stuff so that's... We have it all, it's just we've got to skip pages. Okay.

Yes, it'll just... Yeah, we hit a number of the slides and so we'll be going in the same progression generally, just not presenting some of the slides that are in your full packet. Okay. And again, we'll just be the purpose tonight is to really focus on five of the options that are noted in that full packet, the three land use changes, the complete streets approach and the direction for wildfire mitigation knowing there was limited time we decided to focus on those Assuming they were the ones of greatest interest, and from which we would need the most specific guidance from City Council. We were going to stop after each section but my understanding is you'd like us just to complete the entire presentation and then stop for questions and discussion is that correct?

Yes.

But what if we change our mind after we see it Let's

let's let the presentation go, and then we'll each take turns.

Well he did ask

okay I would. I think it would be easier to stop after you section

myself

questions but I'm not sure how we got to the agreement not to. Not to stop between each section

could do a compromise. And if we're all happy to move on, but sure you have questions

after each part okay and then Ron we just let us know when each section is completed. Yeah

there's actually a slide that tells us it's time to stop and asked if there's any questions and supporting deep discussion so that'll be easy.

Okay, thank you.

So there's a few different parts to the presentation. The general plan overview is very brief, as is the quick overview of phases one and two of the project. Having heard a number of related questions tonight from both public and council commissioners, we're happy to provide any more detailed background information about any of those but I will be providing a very brief seeing primarily on the policy Next slide, please.

And you can proceed as well. So high level as has been noted already tonight the city of Ojai has a complete general plan those elements and their most recent date of update is listed to the right. However this is a focused general plan update Focusing specifically on the five elements listed on the left, land use circulation safety, environmental justice and housing.

The housing element as has been noted was adopted by the city council already and is in the final stages of HCD certification. Likewise, as noted earlier based on the environmental justice analysis done at the beginning of the planning process The plan is to integrate environmental justice goals and policies into the other elements, the land use circulation of safety elements specifically as appropriate.

Next slide please James. So as was mentioned earlier also it's a plan in general plan processes tend to be multi-phase and sometimes lengthy we're about in the middle of the process in phase three And that is the focus of tonight's presentation. And I'll give you a quick overview of those first two phases before providing more background about the policy options.

Importantly, and I were really just focusing on policy direction. There will be a full set of goals, policies and actions coming in the draft general plan which is the next phase of the project And the current. approach we're discussing with the city is that we come back to the City Council Planning Commission. After there's a, an administrative draft of that plan prepared which would cover to be everything all topics and all levels of detail before it then went through extensive public review and then back to the planning commissioning council for adoption so just just so people understand this is certainly not the last bite At the apple to get some high level direction from the city council so that we can proceed with developing the full plan, but will be coming back to you at a minimum of two more times.

Next slide please James. So again, a very quick synopsis of the first two phases of the project phase one was focused on documenting current conditions that should inform the planning process. 10 reports were produced focused on a range of environmental, demographic, housing, economic, land use, parks, transportation and environmental justice topics. Those are all available on the city's general plan webpage as are all other project documents.

Phase two is focused on crafting a clear vision instead of guiding principles for the general plan Those were based on extensive community input, including meetings with city commissions to community surveys and a community visioning workshop. Everything we've learned from the existing conditions analysis and that community input was summarized in a draft vision and guiding principles document which was then reviewed by the planning commission and adopted by the City Council in 2020.