Ojai City Council Regular Meeting

First off, can we have a report out of the closed session Mr. Summers?

Yes, thank you Mayor. So the Council met in closed session and considered two items. First a performance evaluation for the City Manager on that the Council provided direction to staff and Council took no reportable action. And then the second on the performance evaluation for the City Attorney there the Council also began the discussion but we'll be continuing it to the April 22nd meeting provided directional staff and council took no reportable action. Thank you.

Thank you with that we will end the closed session and begin the open session Yeah, so artificial but here we are. If that's all it takes let's start again with a roll call please Mr. Montgomery. Yes

staff report, I have 19 applications to choose from. Yeah. And of those there was a discussion before this body that we really kind of stay in-house, meaning only those individuals that are residents within the city or within the sphere of influence or sphere of influence That narrows it down to 14. I need more, I'm more of a pool than that. More of a pool to choose from than that because right now I'm very limited in terms of who I can select. Between the two groups?

Correct. And within the one group, Economic Diversification, it's three different groups One of the groups really only has one person there.

I just, so I am in support of that. And I just also wanted to note that you're also, in addition to being in the city, you're also looking for individuals with experience in the subject matters that are listed for climate and, you know, for economic diversification. Climate science and policy. Both yes. Public health. Okay. So just double checking that.

Absolutely.

Great, thank you.

Okay so we'll pull consent item E. Any other changes? No Mayor. Okay any move to approve the agenda as amended?

I'll move to approve the agenda. Thank you,

second any objections? Okay great all right wow what are we gonna do here no just kidding so we have an approval of the agenda so then first we have a presentation from our police chief on 2024 year-end crime statistics for the city of Ojai Welcome back.

Good evening, Mayor, Honorable Council and city members. So this presentation was already in the works before we made our transition so we figured it just might be a little easier if I go ahead and present this to you. So tonight I'm presenting to you the City of Ojai Crime Statistics for 2024. Next slide please. Just a quick mention before we start these. So usually when we stand up here and give you crime statistics, we usually have a comparison from the year prior. Unfortunately in early 2024, we transitioned our crime reporting and how we report our crimes to DOJ We used to use Uniform Crime Reporting, now we use National Incident-Based Reporting. So it's quite different and unfortunately because of the reporting we do not compare apples to apples so for 2024 we don't have a comparison from 2023 for you.

Starting in 2025 when we make those crime statistics presentation for you in 2025, we will again have that comparison for you. So for 2024, these are our basic crime statistics. Very high level what you're looking at is our calls for service in the city only which were just over 3,500 calls for service Our response time, 6.64 minutes. That is strictly our priority one which we would consider our urgent calls, so emergency-related calls that we're usually responding with lights and sirens to. Our arrests, 261, which includes both felony and misdemeanor arrests and our traffic accidents, noninjury 46 and injury 32.

Next slide please. So now we break our crime statistics down into three categories. We categorize them into crimes against persons, crimes against property and crimes against society. Here is you will see the numbers in crimes against persons for the city. You will see we had one homicide that was strictly in regards to a traffic fatality. We had 73 reports of crimes against person's total Sex offenses, we had two. Aggravated assaults, 17. Simple assaults, 51 and intimidation and kidnapping, two incidents. The majority of our aggravated and simple assaults which that includes both felony and misdemeanor assaults the offender was known to the victim so I just really want the public to know these are relationships that are already known these aren't just a random people usually coming up and assaulting someone that the relationship has already been established there The intimidation and kidnapping incidents were in relation to domestic violence.

So again, not some random kidnapping incident going on here in Ojai. And the increase in assaults is consistent with prior increases that we've seen starting coming out of COVID. So they've steadily increased coming out of 2021. Next slide please. Crimes against property. In 2024, there were 149 total reports of crimes against property and that consisted of two incidents of robbery, five of burglary, 51 of larceny, three of motor vehicle theft, two of arson, 46 of vandalism and 36 of fraud and forgery.

Arrests were made in both of the robbery cases, and again when we talk about robbery cases this isn't like bank robberies that we're talking about here. Really it's just a person-to-person theft but because there is a use of fear involved in that, it's classified as a robbery. Our burglary cases consisted of two residential burglaries and three commercial burglaries, which is a reduction compared to the previous year. Burglaries pretty much stay the same in how we report them so we knew that we had less incidences of burglary than we did the prior year.

Larceny includes petty theft, grand theft and shoplifting. The number of occurrences is consistent compared to previous years when we just look at the incidents of what the thefts were entailing. Check fraud and forgery has been a frequent trend here in the city of Ojai, along with phone scams and identity theft. And again, the offender in this case is almost always unknown because typically they're using internet or phone scams to lure victims into sending money via mail by other means which leads us to very limited resources in terms of investigating them.

Next slide, please. Crimes against society. In 2024 there were 55 total reports of crimes against society which included narcotics violations, weapons violations and animal cruelty. Due to the nature of how we report crimes against society typically an arrest is always made in these cases. So out of 55 total cases there were 54 arrests in these incidents. Next slide, please.

In this slide you will see basically it's just a comparison of all three categories the crimes against persons property and society and as you can see property crimes make up pretty much more than 50% of our crime here in Ojai which for us is preferable to see crimes against property versus crimes against persons next slide please This slide will tell you how the percentage and how many cases were cleared by arrest in crimes against persons. We have a 78% clearance rate, which means we're making arrests in 78% of these cases, which out of 73, 57 were cleared.

Crimes against property at 26% clearance rate. And the reason that is so low is crimes against property includes forgery, fraud, identity theft. And again, the suspects in those cases could be in another state, they could be in another country when they're sending emails and phone scams. So those are very difficult to investigate. Crimes against society, again, the nature of how they're reported, very high clearance rate of 98%. Next slide please.

Our traffic citations for... that says 2023, my mistake. This is 2024. Our highest traffic citations were given by means of, as a result of using the phone while driving. No, that's not a surprise to us. We've over the year we're looking at the cause of a lot of accidents and that's what a main cause of accident was, was driving distracted. And then you'll see the following numbers in terms of what the other citations were given for.

Next slide please. That's a short brief overview, quick overview of our crime statistics. And for the public these statistics can be found on our website at VenturaSheriff.org and can be viewed on our forward-facing dashboard that's available. But for 2025, and I'm sure Captain Jenkins can probably expand on this a little bit more. But as the Council you know that you approved our traffic motor and we are diligently working towards that and giving updates to the City Manager about how we're moving along and progressing in that so we're hoping to get that moving for 2025. We're hoping to bring back our foot patrols and our bike patrols Something unfortunately we couldn't do last year because of staffing and overtime, but hopefully we'll be able to do that again in the coming year.

So with that I will open it up to any questions that you may have of myself or Captain Jenkins.

Is your new title Commander?

Yes.

So Commander, I heard you say that the matrix are different. I understand that but just your general feeling year compared to year on year would you say Ojai continues to be a safe place no real trend change?

Absolutely. Yes, I can speak to that because I do live here and so it is pretty important to me but yes generally speaking our crime statistics even though we're not comparing the same thing from 2023 to 2024 the city of Ojai still looks pretty good in terms of our crime statistics and I would say yes it is a very safe place to live.

I think I read something that said that Ojai was the safest city in Ventura County

Oh, I won't go that far to say that.

Well, I don't know if that's

true. I don't know. I know there are other cities in the county that would love to claim that as well. But yes, we're doing pretty good here in Ojai. Thank you.

Any questions? And I failed to welcome Chief Jenkins here to our table. Welcome! We love having you here.

Yeah, I guess I do have a question. How is larceny distinguished from those other theft-type of crimes?

So, larceny really includes—is inclusive of grand theft, petty theft. It's just a kind of overall category that you can throw all the different thefts into. We distinguish when we're looking at really getting down and breaking into felony versus misdemeanor. That's where we're going to look at petty theft Grand theft, motor vehicle theft. But generally speaking when you're just kind of giving a general idea larceny includes all those different types of thefts.

Any other questions? Yes please.

Of the different types of crimes, do we have a sense of how many crimes were perpetrated by residents of Ojai versus people who are visiting from out-of-town?

It's a great question but we do not keep statistics like that. If that's something that you would like to do, we would really have to delve into and look on a case-by-case basis to extract that information.

That's very interesting. Anything else? Thank you very much, Commander Newman. Appreciate you being here for everything you're doing. Okay great we will open it up to public communications. Currently I have one public speaker card and that is Larry Steingold. Hello Mr. Steingold

Good evening. Thank you, thank you actually for the honor of being on the or being asked to be on the advisory group. Hopefully you will not use science education and degrees as a bar to get people on the climate. It's raining outside I know about weather right but I'm not on that. A shout out to Public Works and Park & Rec. Public Work, the road work is amazing and roads are getting done. I think that's wonderful.

And Park & Rec, the brochure and the activities and everything is... Please go read it. Please look at it. It's a wonderful thing and they're doing a great job. On the budget which since it's no longer on the agenda I would love you to look at lowering the minimum $200,000. We're not New York, we're not L.A., we're not Ventura. We have $16 million to spend. I know it may be a burden on staff occasionally to respond but a paragraph on each item going through-I mean you don't have to be-you have to have knowledge of budgets. You could have three people on it which I think you should have more than two.

Where are the stockholders? You're the board of directors, they're the company. They're doing a great job, you're doing a great job but somewhere along the line five $50,000 checks going sideways. I come from the state of Rhode Island so it's like things are like that. So please lower the threshold and consider having more than two people from the public because there's a lot of educated knowledgeable budget people Thank you very much.

I'm not sure. I'll

respond once you're finished.

Okay, I hear they are doing more testing to see how deep and what have you. That's a good thing. Be thankful we don't have VOCs otherwise the project would be doing for years. It'd be going somewhere else. Removing dirt is just the number. Thank you very much and have a nice evening.

Thank You Mr. Stengel Did you want to respond, Mr. Harvey?

Yes Mayor, so in response to Mr. Stangl's question I believe he was asking about phase two testing for the Cabin Village project and he is correct consistent with council direction and discussion at the last meeting. Rincon Consulting has embarked upon additional testing we expect to know more in next couple weeks and pursuant to council direction We will come back with the results of that when we bring the proposed development management agreement with Dignity Moves. Those will both come to you together and you can review them together, and we'll obviously keep the public in that as well. Thanks.

Thank you Mr. Harvey. Can I

ask a quick question? Do you have a timeline for when that will be coming back?

Yes, good question. I think it's, we have placed on the working agenda for the first meeting in May.

And the Contract for Dignity Moves will be coming back for that.

Both together, yes. Thank you so much, appreciate it. And just on that topic in the event let's say RINCON Consulting needs more time then we will move it to the second meeting in May and if that happens I will certainly let Council and the public know.

OK, and you will keep those two items together regardless of any delay for one. Absolutely. OK, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Harvey. Anything online? Mr. Montgomery?

Yes, mayor. Let's take this time to speak to our zoom participants. We are on public communications with which is our general public comment period. I have no raised hands now, but I do want to make sure we utilize our hybrid format here. Last call to raise a hand before we move on to consent calendar And we'll move on.

Thank you very much, and we did talk about our agenda but now we're on the consent calendar. We pulled item E so that will not be there and do we want to talk about any of the other items or pull them out separately? Yes, Mr. Whitman. Yeah

I'd like to pull C and F for discussion purposes. Okay

all right anything else?

I had those on my list too.

Wonderful Yes.

Is it time to talk about C or do we vote on the rest of

it? Should we vote on the rest and then OK, so what do I have an approval for items B, A, B, D and and that's it. ABD.

I'll move to approve.

Thank you.

A second.

All those in favor are. Do we need a call? No. All is in favor. Yes. OK, great. All right. Let's talk about C.

So My question has to do with the type of trolley that we're looking at

purchasing.

Is it the same fuel of the one that we're operating right now? And how are we going to fuel, where are we going to fuel and how are we gonna fuel these new trolleys?

Mr. Alameda is here prepared to answer that question. Wonderful

Thank you for the question. The two trolleys that we're looking to purchase under this purchase agreement are both identical in model build look and fueling as the ones that we currently operate, so currently we operate three propane trolleys and the fueling source is over at Public Works Yard. So everything will operate as it does now just will have more capacity and more reliable truck.

So, at the south end of Signal is where the fueling takes place?

Correct. We have an agreement in place with a propane provider that comes and fills our tank there.

And the background being, the previous council had approved an electric trolley I believe and the delay in that is impacting the service we can provide. Do you understand that correctly?

Correct. Just to step back a little bit, the city used to operate two routes, an A and B route. And with our existing trolley fleet, we had one go out of service and the city purchased another propane one, 1,000 oaks about a year-and-a-half ago to stabilize. We're only operating one route now and we're barely able to do that because the two of the trolleys are well over their usable life and aren't very reliable So bringing these two on will stabilize the service and potentially bring back that second route. We did want to go all-electric, that was the intent. Council approved the purchase of an electric trolley. The manufacturer was bought by a larger company and they're looking at retooling their manufacturing process so the one we purchased is still going through the queue.

That's been delayed by about 12-14 months, but it's a total unknown if we can buy additional electric ones at this time. And if we were, it would be past the ones that we have online now still being in operation.

So

just following up on what you just said, I want to make sure I understand it. We're still in line for a single electric trolley when that trolley arrives and is in service we would potentially Thank you very much.

And

I guess this is for a future agenda item, potentially. But we looked into it and thought about how to transition into an all-electric fleet. That's something we have to discuss as an agendized item.

Yeah, I think my question too was so we don't have any sense of because they're revising their manufacturing. We don't have any sense of when new electric models would be available or is it possible that there just wouldn't be anymore like that they would discontinue trolleys or the electrification of trolleys and that we would potentially be looking at other options if we want to electrify

So, the one that we ordered that is I mentioned still going through was expected to come this July. Now it's looking like will be coming February of 26th. At this time they still plan to manufacture electric trolleys but they want to basically retool how they're put together. They're looking at redoing the chassis and how they're built So they're basically re-engineering the design from what existed to something new, and that timeline's unknown.

Thank

you. I just wanted to offer that I received four constituent comments of people who used to use the beeline and they're eager to use the line again so I'm eager to restart that service. So I know my voice has already been registered there but I think it's a real treasure that we have and I'd love to see it be its fullest sense.

There is enough money in the FTA fund to purchase the electric bus?

Well, actually there's some good news on that front. So, as you know we brought on a new Transit Supervisor, Anthony Bally, who's introduced the Council and is with us tonight. But he's been very successful in unwinding a lot of the funding that is available to us that we weren't necessarily obtaining in the past. There was a lot of funding at both state and county level that we weren't maximizing. So yes it is true that we have the FTA Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

So we're in a good spot for both capital operations and doing way more robust maintenance.

And then just one other question, so I see here on the invoice that they are you know of course we know they're used their 2020s no warranties or anything like that does somebody from the city go to check it out? You know like your mechanic or whatever person to make sure it's a solid purchase

Yeah, they are going to be shipping them here and our mechanic will both check them but before they go online they have to go through. It's a pretty robust DOT inspection so we basically do for lack of a better term a pre-DOT inspection to make sure it's going to pass but these are done on a regular basis even on the ones that we own So before it's put into service, it'll pass all the checks. And if it were to not be serviceable for some reason It would be returned.

Okay, and then with a 2020 do they go like so many you know like a car? It's a certain mileage, and then it's like okay. Do you know the mileage?

Yeah, so both of these we do know the mileage one is about 30,000 and one is about 40,000 keep in mind that we have a trolley right now operating as And that's way past its usable life. But the mechanic that we brought on has really worked wonders to keep the fleet going forward.

Yeah, so if we were to assume that we had one trolley for each route and we're buying two and we get an electric one then have three which would give us an opportunity to potentially either add a new route or do something with a trolley perhaps trolleying people from where they park their cars way over there into downtown or something like that. Is that correct? We would have potentially another vehicle Andrew

Backing out the one that's probably going to go offline soon. These two used ones, the electric ones. Anthony, our new transit supervisor does have some ideas about some supplemental routes we could do to

serve the public better. That would be really nice. My car has 280,000 miles on it. I wanted 300,000.

Ms. Rule, I'm definitely seeing this as a future agenda item meaning we would want to look at the routes and Take advantage of this great Ojai service and

amplify it.

Purchase two trolleys.

I'll make a motion to purchase the

two trolleys. All second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Great, let's move on to D amendment to the Professional Services Agreement. I don't know how do you pronounce this name is it Tripepi?

Yes, I'm sorry. Forgive me, I was on the wrong one. We're on D

not F.

No, I think we're on F. Sorry, D got approved. Sorry, we're on F, my fault, my fault. That's okay, they're both Tripepi Smith items so it's understandable.

Understood, yep, sorry, we're on

So I'm the one who pulled F, but although I guess Councilmember Lang was also interested in pulling that one. I looked at the branding that's been produced and I'm not a fan That's maybe just personal taste, but I'm perfectly happy with continuing with the city's official brand. I would not rule out seeing a different branding and being interested in that branding, but the ones that we've developed that were in front of us I'm not crazy about the font, I'm not crazy about the colors and I'm not crazy about the graphic. So that kind of covers the whole thing right? Fair enough.

Council decision and we would be happy if council wanted to direct us to Throw this back and maybe ask for some additional options You could also I could bring back a future item with inform a subcommittee on this topic. I mean it or we could just abandon it whatever Council directs is perfectly fine. We spent, we did spend some money it wasn't a huge amount of money was $14,400 you know and perhaps not all that would be sunk costs that were lost because maybe they're you know if you read I'm sure you did you know the the background there they're trying to pull colors from the existing approved Seal and I think that might be appropriate if there was gonna be a different logo But it's it's all fine. And then if council wants us to go through that we're happy to do that You guys give us the direction and we'll do that

Did you have some feedback?

Well, first of all I wanted to say that I really like the idea of having a consistent look and feel for all of our PowerPoints, for everything that's coming out of the city. This has been something I know I've talked to you about and it's been really important to me to move forward on this so I want to thank you for taking the initiative on this. I also wanted to look at, you know, I've heard from some constituents who were reluctant to move forward in this specific direction.

And so I would like to take some time with it, get some more feedback and see if this is the direction that we want to go. I personally like the colors. I think they're friendly, I think they're bright and I think they pull out colors from the logo or from the seal. And I like one of the round primary icon So if so, if it's possible for us to perhaps talk about other options. Of course

we could bring this back as a future agenda item and I might just include this as a starting point and then we can build from there and this would probably come back sometime in May if that's acceptable to Council. Yes

yes

Yeah, and I guess my suggestion would be that if Councilmember Lang wants to potentially team with one other council member and participate in a little guidance on... I'm way under qualified to be that person.

The mayor is a graphic designer.

Before we get down there, let me ask the city attorney. I think I'm feeling I probably would need to bring that back and put that as an agenda item if they're gonna be forming a subcommittee but I don't want some guidance here.

I don't feel the need to be on a subcommittee but it could just be early feedback. I think it could be an

informal working group so it's continue the item to return with further input from the mayor and Mayor Pro Tem as a working group Thank you very much for

moving forward with that.

I'm sorry, I was confused when we were polling things. But item D, I wanted to talk about that.

What did you have a question about?

Well because I see it's not a huge amount $5500 a month but I did a little looking into it and the amount there is very limited community input talking like comments shares this and that and I just had a thought Like, could it be to partner with either like Ventura College or Channel Islands with a student who this is their thing? Social media, fresh new. Engage them. You know what I mean? You can give them far less and they would be so grateful, so happy and maybe somebody to start getting younger people involved because that seems to be what we all want and we don't know how to go about. So I thought could this be a start to do something like that?

So procedurally, are we on? Do we want to talk? Yeah

let's

do it.

I'd like to entertain that that we could

bring up talking about D.

I'm okay with that.

It was approved but council meeting is still going so Council could discuss it further. Okay,

so we're on D. A couple things. Of course we can do whatever Council wants us to do obviously So this particular amendment just gets us through the end of the fiscal year. You know, we transitioned Ms. Revere over into a recreation manager role and there was a need for somebody to fill this. I was going to bring back to the Council in the new fiscal year a comprehensive contract with Rebecca Smith for the newsletter and for social media management.

We could involve an intern in that effort, what we see is we have up to five posts a week, we ask for really quick turnaround, we asked for quick revisions, we contact them at night or sometimes on the weekends You could have a person doing that, but they have infrastructure such that they have somebody on call. They also have a supervising manager. So it's a team that you get and it's a bit more robust than just relying on one particular individual.

Like the intern concept which you're speaking of, these are younger people. I think the oldest person on the team outside of the supervisors and the directors is 25. So I feel like we're getting a lot of folks that this is their... Well, we're tapping into the youth and I have kids too and I know that we all go to our kids when we want to know about anything digital or social media.

But, you know we can work on that. And we can address that too. I've learned and maybe you all know this, I wasn't aware of this but you can boost your posts and I've been learning on how that Mayor Pro Tem, this is your world. Right right so We can certainly do that, that can be part of what we request however I am also mindful from my own experience I very rarely like or comment on a post from an agency or an organization. I tend to mostly focus on individuals, but that's my personal preference.

But I mean, I think that's something though. That's good constructive criticism I could definitely bring back to them.

I would offer this working on let's say at schools and things like that where there are feelings like let's get volunteers to do things and the difficulty that I have found is they have to be pressed. You have to be able to call a phone person and say get here now the phones not working then the volunteers don't work well for that. This isn't that but I'm looking at the team right now on their website I do see it is nice to be able to press somebody on a weekend and say, go for it.

And I also agree though that if we say our PR strategy, we should come up with targets and say what's our strategy? What are we trying to do? If it's getting more likes and more shares, that's the strategy. That Ben can, that Mr. Harvey can implement. So that's part of the strategy. Who are you trying to reach? So maybe that hasn't been articulated well

enough. And this would also, sorry to jump in, but this also might be a good opportunity for a subcommittee at City Council to give me that type of direction that you guys would like. You know, this is what we want to see and how we want to see it. And that's great.

I'll just add one more thing and that is on another board that I serve on, I am the Marketing and Outreach Director And trying to get volunteers to post, and I have great volunteers but trying to get them to post things in a timely manner or like meet deadlines is really hard. And these are all ages from the 20s up to the 50s you know so so I think when you're paying someone it really they haven't a vested interest in doing what we want them to do.