Ojai City Council Special and Regular Meeting

Welcome back, everyone. Mr. Summers, would you give us a report out of the closed session, please?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. The council met with Mayor Gilman, Mayor Pro Tem Lang, Council Member Mang, and Council Member Whitman with Council Member Rule with an excused absence in closed session regarding one item, conference of labor negotiators regarding all unrepresented employees. The Council provided direction to staff and Council on including Kathy Holman, our Human Resources Risk Manager, as the City's negotiator regarding labor negotiations, but took no reportable action. Final compensation action, such as approving any change in compensation, cannot happen in closed session.

No action of that sort was taken, and that, if taken, will be returning to a future open session. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and with that, we will conclude the closed session, and we will now have our special presentations for Tuesday, August 12th, and Mr. Montgomery, roll call, please.

absence. Thank you,

on. So we've gotten some good feedback on that. And so far, the parents have been respectful. I will tell you, though, the best way to try to get out of a ticket is to be nice. Just be nice. Because I'm telling you, if you're not nice, you're talking yourself into a ticket. And then, last thing I'll say, you know, being a manager, I do do random audits of body camera footage, you know, because we turn on the body camera every time we do a stop. I can tell you we picked the right guy.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen video and he's just sitting there and he's just conversing with the person, the person's being nice, he's being nice, he's, you know, I mean, one contact, it was about five minutes. He sat there for five minutes just talking to her, you know, explaining, hey, why we needed you to drive safer and slow down and this, then. And by the end of it, she's thanking him, you know, and it was a positive contact. And that's what I want initially.

If I see, as long as I see behavior changing and people driving safer, then we're good. Again, I will stress though, if I don't see change in like traffic collisions or I don't see the change of behavior, we are going to ramp up enforcement and citations will be coming. So, but I'm going off everyone here. So, if everyone wants to slow down, obey the laws. We'll stay in kind of education mode. Thank you.

Any questions,

please? Yes. I have a question. So are we doing random times, like times of day, days of the week, and things like that?

Yeah, so my directive has been I need to touch weekends, so I do work every other weekend. I come in, depending on what's going on with my personal life and work week, I do alter it a little bit. So it's kind of nice because no one knows when I'm actually going to be here. So, but during the week is the majority of our traffic collisions. If you look at the data is late afternoon, Tuesday through Saturday is really the bulk of our traffic collisions. So that's the time I focus on the most. That's when I try to be out there and be active and issuing citations or talking to them.

Those are my hours, but then also the OTS grant that we're able to come in and work like DUI enforcement, worked a couple of those, I'll come in later, stay till one, two o'clock in the morning to do DUI enforcement, and that's paid for by the OTS

grant. Answer your questions can be very random, but it's good. That's a good thing. I mean, he's gonna be out there a lot. So obviously,

more questions. Mr. Harvey, correct me if I'm wrong, but the outlook that's going to go in everyone's mailbox is going to have the e-bike classifications in the document, correct?

Joint article by the Chief of Police and the City Attorney's Office, and it's going to explain the different classifications and some other useful information.

Thank you

so much.

Appreciate

it.

Great job on the cards, too. Yeah.

What we want to do now is open this up to any public comment on that presentation, if there is any. Yes.

I read in the paper that when neighbors allow other drivers to turn in front of them, that our officer takes enforcement action against them. That seems like an example of being a good neighbor that he's punishing, and I'm wondering why he does that and if he intends to stop.

I didn't fully understand what you put.

Yeah, so if somebody's going to turn in front of you like an Ojai Avenue and you stop and you let them turn. Oh, I see. Kimberly Rivers wrote in the paper that he's taking enforcement action against those individuals.

Yes, Mr. Jenkins. Okay, so you are correct. He is going to take corrective action on that. I'll tell you why. So the type of action is The vehicle could continue on Ojai Avenue. It's wide open, but the vehicle stopping to allow the neighbor in, that causes issues behind you, either rear ends or different issues coming up. So actually quite a few of our collisions are related to that.

So again, our goal is to reduce collisions, so we are going to enforce It seems kind of weird, right? You're trying to be a good neighbor, let someone in. Now, it's different if it's bumper-to-bumper traffic. People are stopped at the red light and you allow someone in. That's different. That's okay. We're saying you can't impede traffic and stop traffic to allow someone in. Even though that is kind of the OI way, I mean, I've seen that a lot, but just know a lot of our collisions are because of that, the rear-ending, so.

Thank you. Yes, Mr. Aikens.

So, Brian Aikens, just one quick question, since I know we've talked about this. Seems to be that there's been an improvement in the theft of mail in the last, since you last spoke with us. Is there any update that you can provide to the community?

So, good news, since we've hardened the mailboxes, I have not seen one crime report come in for fraud or, you know, the checks. And then it helped. I mean, even though I didn't like the high-speed pursuit that night, it helped because that guy has not come back. So I think he knows he's on our radar. We do have our specialized special enforcement unit still chasing them down and trying to get all the associates down in L.A. So it's not over for them.

It's coming. But I can tell you that the Ojai Valley has been pretty quiet as far as mail theft. So that's good. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Aikens.

Okay, we will move on to our second presentation, which is the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, Kathy Nolan, to provide a progress report on the City Hall Campus Master Plan.

Thank you. Slides should be coming right up.

Okay, good. Mayor Gilman, Council, and staff, I'm Kathy Nolan. I'm with the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, and I'm happy to be here tonight. And I'm actually here to give a progress report on the Ojai City Hall Campus Master Plan, a contract that the Ojai Valley Green Coalition has with the City of Ojai. And I'm just going to give a little background, and then I've got some slides that I'm going to go through.

And I do have a few questions, kind of midway or towards the end, where I'm hoping I can get some feedback from Council. And then, if not tonight, we have an opportunity on our website where the whole entire community can actually go and provide some comments if they so please. But if you remember, in 2022-23, the Ojai Valley Green Coalition had a community service grant at the time, and it was for the first phase of this master planning project, and that was for community engagement. So we had workshops, we had site tours and a survey, and gathered a lot of information. But the outcome from that, from the public, was there was a real desire for a nature-based passive park.

And a place for education, learning, and coming together, so a hub. Then at the end of 2024, we received the contract for this next phase, which includes the master plan, which we will have finished by May 31st of 2026. But it also included continued stakeholder engagement, so that was with staff. With also some of the projects that have been happening on the 8 acre campus, including the restoration project, the compost project. And we've talked to various other community members who have done a project here and there over the years.

In addition, we have been doing site inventory. So we're going out like what's here? So it includes everything from there's two piece poles to all the trees. We do have that tree survey that I think most of you are aware of that Jan Scow completed in 2023. But what we've done with Jan is actually we've been back here at the site numerous times. We put together what I'll call a preliminary phase one tree trimming, tree removal plan, and I'm going to be showing you that in a minute.

And once again, it's preliminary. We'll definitely be meeting with staff to look at that if there needs to be any adjustments made to it. But the beauty of having that is, too, it aligns with some funding that I'm aware of right now for fire suppression. I think the Fire State Council actually mentioned this property as one of their potential project sites. So what we're doing actually supports that.

So I think that's a good thing. I mentioned the inventory site analysis, which is kind of going into, you know, what are the sun patterns? You know, is it windy? What about parking? Is there enough? Et cetera. We're not done with all of that yet. We're probably at least halfway or more through with that. But what that has allowed us to do By getting all that information, not only from the community, but what's on site, it's revealed where we potentially can do something as far as developing the park.

And so I think what I'll do now is to go into the slides. Let's see how it works. Oh, good. So this is a sample of our site analysis. We had many more sheets, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what we're doing. And I'm just going to point out a couple things. I'll start, like, say, at the bottom left corner. There's a post-it there, and it says, Private Property Encroachment on City Property.

So in other words, one of the neighbors up there has developed part of the city property. Now, what I don't know is, does that person have an MOU, or did they? We don't know, but I'm hoping we'll find out. Further

research will follow. On note, it is not possible to get a prescriptive easement against the city, but obviously we'll do some further research on that.

Okay,

good.

And I actually submitted A list, and there may be more, but I believe there was the 15 items, and that was one of them. So these are just areas where we have questions. It's like, okay, what do we do there, right? But then on that sheet, and I don't need to read every single one, but it was in your packet, there are things about identifying the existing buildings. There's the flood control easement where the creek is, the old demonstration garden, you know, parking, et cetera.

Now, this is a tree study that we've done recently, so all the trees in light green and dark green are the trees that were identified by the arborist, Jan Scow, and then we also worked with our surveyor, just to get the trees in the correct location. We have some more detailed plans, which I'm not showing tonight, but this one actually shows the light green are all the trees that we're proposing to keep. The ones in the darker green are ones that we're proposing to either have trimmed or potentially removed. First of all, because they're hazardous, as it was indicated on Jan Scow's report.

And or they're invasive. Why do we want to get rid of some of the invasives? We're not saying all of them, but a portion or a good portion of them. Number one, we have the restoration project, and a big portion of that project was removing invasive plant species. So if we have some of the same trees on the site and we leave them, we're essentially leaving what I will call the seed inoculum to, you know, cause, you know, further maintenance and what have you.

In addition, many of them are also fire hazards. What we also looked at was, you know, if those trees do in fact come out because they are a safety or hazardous tree or invasive, to the best that we can, of course, the native species would be mitigated and potentially even the other ones mitigated because we know we want to do replanting as well. So we're not coming in and just saying, oh, we want to take the trees out. We definitely want to replant when and where we can.

So I wanted to emphasize that. And then up at the top, it says existing tree canopy study. Another thing that we've discussed is, you know, what And this is kind of going back to our site inventory. What's here, what can we keep or have remain on the property? Maybe something needs to be transplanted or maybe something needs to be reworked or maybe it needs to just be demoed because it's in such bad shape that it's a hazard or what have you.

It's not worth keeping. I don't need to go into the details on all that right now, but I can. But the point is, what we thought we could even do is, if there's interest from Council When those trees are being removed, and actually there will be some pre-planning to this, could we designate trees that could be used for what I would call rustic site furniture, like say benches? We are also proposing a lot of nature play areas for young children.

You can have logs and you can have rounds to sit on, and what have you. Of course, there's mulch, which we all love and could use, as well. I have on there a hugelkultur, and if you're not familiar with hugelkultur, it's a way that you can actually use the tree or the brush waste. You lay it in a swale like on a contour. You can add soil and what have you and use it for actually to help with stormwater or water infiltration and to build the soil. So it's a way to use something or to make out what you would call a waste material into a resource. So that's kind of what that study's about. And if, you know, there's interest from the council and the community to do that, we would like to.

I think it kind of makes sense, but I'm asking. The exciting thing was when we did all the studies, put all the information together, and then when we started looking at, well, if those trees came out, it opened up, and helped us further identify where we might want to do some, I'm going to say development, which sounds, you know, huge and big, but it's not that big, but areas where we could further do something to enhance the park.

And I will say some of our guiding criteria is to work with what's already there to the best that we can to minimize grading, you know, so to work with the existing topography to the best that we can. And then, of course, with the trees and, you know, the buildings, and we know that some of the buildings are landmarked and that they're going to stay, and how could we work that, you know, and the pickleball court, the pickleball court's there as well.

So the big orange dots basically kind of show the areas that opened up, and you can see there's kind of a pattern there of where we might do further development. Of course, we've left out the restoration area. You can see the big blue line looks like a snake. That's the creek. And then the restoration area is on both sides of that. We want to continue to work with preserving and hopefully further enhance the restoration area. And one thing I don't have on here, but I was happy to meet with a couple people today from PACS Environmental.

The big kind of open area at the bottom corner There's a native protected grass species there. It also has a fabulous, fabulous view of the mountains. It's really quite nice. And so the discussion that we had today, and I know and I've talked with Mr. Harvey about this, We want people to be able to go up there, but we also want to make sure that it's protected.

We also know that we have to work with the flood control easement, and anything we do there could involve an encroachment permit and or more, but it's just to get all that information together, and then comment on what our options are. That's something we're going to be looking at, and it looks like there may be a couple of them, and I'm excited about that.

And then, these are the questions that I have, and I'm going to jump after I mention the questions into these two slides. So, I have two schematic drawings coming up, or bubble diagrams, if you will, and the two big questions are, Where will the workshop building, we're calling it the garden house on our plans just for fun. You know, we've got the oak tree house and little house that we've been just kind of doing that, but not that it has to remain with that name.

But where would that building go? And potentially it could be the use, these are the uses that came up in our workshops, like a community kitchen. A place for indoor workshops, films, lectures, library, a lab. So where would that be and how big should it be? And if you're still interested, I know people have in sustainable methods and materials. I wanted to say that, where did I come up with the 1,200 square feet that I have on there?

I just did a takeoff on Kent Hall here in my CAD program, and it was like a little over 1,300 square feet. So I drew in about 1,200 square feet and did a little research. For how many people it would accommodate, and you can kind of get an idea based on how many people are in here and what kind of events could happen. The other one is the carriage house, which is a landmarked structure, but the big question with that is we, before we do anything further, we need to have like a structural engineer come in.

Thank you. Thank you. The other item is stormwater capture. We do have an opportunity, and I'm going to get to that slide, but I'm just going to mention it right now. We're proposing rain gardens and bioswales, that's catching it in the ground and with plants, but we could also explore storage tanks. And usually, you know, you want to look at your return on investment based on how much water you're going to get and the money you're putting into a tank. But at the same time, we may want to do it as a demonstration for the community, because we really want to encourage in our design a fire-safe landscape, which we would be emphasizing.

And then the last one I just happened to mention about the tree, reusing the tree parts for new materials. Okay, so now I'm going to try to go through this quickly. I brought a little pointer, but I found out it's not going to work, so I'm just going to have to verbally describe this, and I know it looks pretty wild. You know, all these bubbles and what's going on here.

But I'm going to start up at the upper left corner. There's the Carriage House. And then you're going to see these red bubbles, a series of red bubbles. They're areas that we've identified for kids play. That basically, in all the above, you'll see these black lines with the arrows, those are just like paths where things can connect. So there's play areas for kids, there's a red circle with, looks almost like a spider, black line going through it, those are entry nodes. So those are places where you can ingress, egress, in other words, go in, go out, and we selected those based on what's already here.

I will say if you looked on the far right, you're going to see two of those red circles with the spiders, so to speak. That's an area where we identified, if needed, that we potentially could add some parking spaces. Especially like for ADA and there may be a couple other ones. That also happens to be the location where delivery trucks can come in for maintenance and contribute to the composting area, which we have kept. There was a composting program there and I did have a nice meeting with David White. We'd like to keep that there.

The big gray areas are existing parking. I'm going to start, I'm trying to, I don't want to like jump around too much, but Up at the top right, there's a green circle. That's a lawn area that's existing, but we're looking at that as a possible event lawn. There could be a conflict with the pickleball court and sound, and we know we have restrictions on the time.

So those are things we need to figure out, but we're willing to work with that. The new We're calling it the Garden House for fun, but call it the Workshop Building or the Project Building, is an orange rectangle, and it's kind of in the bottom middle. I don't know if you can see that. So that's one location. Below that is kind of a view area, and that's where the old compost...

Thank you all for being here. Reason being that we know there are sewer lines on either side of Kent Hall and there's water lines. So once again, trying to work with what's existing. The demonstration garden and the planted areas of the big green circles, you can see the demonstration garden. And I don't want to take too much time. Well, I do want to take a lot of time, but I don't have a lot of time.

So what I'm going to do is, so this is option A, and I'm going to say this. Really, the main difference between option A and option B is where the project or the work or program building would be. Essentially, the rest of it's very, very similar. So here's another rendition, but very similar. But on this one, actually it looks a little more brown, but it's orange-brown. If you go to the kind of middle right, you'll see a rectangle, and it says Proposed Garden House.

That's the second location that we're proposing. Once again, we looked at the topography and the tree canopies, so trying to stay out of the canopies. You know, where could we do this? And those are the two locations. This is a circulation plan, just showing, you know, what's connecting, how you'd come in and out, a little bit of information about parking up on the street and existing parking lots.

This is very basic, but this is potentially where we could capture runoff water. From some of the roofs, we've identified the downspouts, also water coming off the street and the new buildings and the parking lot. I can go, well I can say next steps, but I'm, I guess maybe now I just open up for questions if you have any. Did you have a question, Matthew?

Actually, not a question. I have a point to note on the agenda, if I could, Mayor. Please. Yeah. So as as folks, I think, recognize tonight's a presentation. So the council can't provide direction. Right. Or make a decision tonight. Correct. What the council can do, of course, is ask questions, clarifying points. And then as noted, we have a comment period that I think you'll get into on the website. Yes. So anybody in the community, including the council, can go on, provide comment. Yes. And then also recognize the Council can set this through the Mayor, a future meeting for a further detailed review agendized as decision points on these options.

But no decision can be made tonight. Thank

you. Thank you.

I see you have a site cleanup day on October

4th.

You've publicized that already, or at least you've communicated

that. Yeah, and I'll just quickly mention these. So, basically, if you do want to make a comment, you go on to the OjaiValleyGreenCoalition.org and you go to the volunteer section. Basically, you're volunteering your comments. But there's a place to put your name and all the questions, and our staff has done a lovely job on doing that. And we're going to do it until the end of the month. I know it says Tuesday, 8-26, but we're going to go to August 31st. So I encourage everyone to please comment.

And then I wanted to say, as Mayor Gilman just pointed out, this is not part of our contract. It's something we That has emerged in different Green Coalition meetings and get-togethers and gatherings, and I've had people come up and mention it to me. People want to get involved with this project, and cleaning up and getting rid of invasive weeds and whatever else we can do.

One of the easiest things that we can do and needs to be done, even though I know the crew was just out there and did a beautiful job, but more things are coming up. So basically, we have the first volunteer day, Saturday, October 4th, and we're going to be that, I think you said, I think it is on our website, but we're hoping to schedule another one on the 25th. I just have to get approval from staff.

And then we're hoping to do a couple of them in November where we've reached out, or we're in the process of reaching out to a couple, some of the local schools and to the Green Valley Project. So this is a way to get teens, youth involved. And there's a, you know, a small educational portion where, you know, we'll tell them about the restoration, a little education about what we're taking out and not taking out.

But it's a way to keep the campus, first of all, fire safe, kind of weed safe, and just moving forward in a different way, so I just wanted to share that. Also, on October 25th, we're going to have an open house, and we're going to have it in the conference room. I know we're going to take the chairs out, but we're going to leave the tables in there. But what we're going to have is we're going to be moving forward with our design once we get this feedback over the next couple of weeks. And then we're going to be creating a concept drawing. So it's kind of like the next step with more information.

And it'll be open to everyone. Council and the public can actually come and make comments. And then I'm looking at doing a couple more site tours. A lot of people don't even know this is back here. And it's a jewel, you know, as it is, it's a jewel, but it'll even be more polished when we get done. So we wanted to do that. And then on, excuse me, October 28th, I'll just do, I won't do a full presentation, but I'll give you a report, an update about where we're at. And I'm open for any questions. But of course, any of you can contact me at any time as well.

Well, I don't really have a question so much as I just have a comment. I attended one of the workshops and I just think the way that you all have garnered community support and been very creative in how you How you got that support and got feedback from the community. I just love the approach that you've taken and thank you so much for all the work that you've put into this. It's exciting to see it move forward. Thank you.

I want to echo that and say I can't wait for this to start to be worked on. Yeah. Well,

we'll start pulling weeds first.

Pulling weeds is great.

Anything else?

Any other questions? Thank

you so much. Okay. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Now we'll open up to public comment on that presentation if anybody has anything they would like to say. And please tell us who you are.

I'm Karen Quimby, Ojai resident. Thanks to the Green Coalition and Kathy Nolan's leadership, and before her, Betsy Van Light's leadership, in doing a years-long community engagement process to imagine Ojai's newest park. It's amazing. Through much community input, which we just heard, and we've all probably participated in, the community wants a passive nature-based park with educational opportunities for events, like educational events, but also like weddings.

I know that they wanted to redo the wedding altar that's been in disrepair out there. Events that will generate revenue. But it's important to recognize that the loud racket sport of pickleball will significantly impact all of these activities, from the contemplative viewpoints to trying to do an event on the front lawn. And the pickleball is played seven days a week, seven hours a day. There is a break from noon to two every day, so you could technically do events in that time.

But for the rest of the time, you know, till 7 p.m., there will be loud racquet sports play. So the council has not been successful in mitigating the noise from the courts. The players ignore the recommended use of quieter paddles for the most part. So I urge you to seriously consider What will work, what type of sound walls will work, not only for the neighbors, of course, but for eventual park goers?

Otherwise, your ideal of a passive, contemplative, nature-based park cannot be realized. I hope you'll consider the significant limitation that Pickleball poses to the design of the park before you build it and that to allocate the funds that will be needed to probably build an enclosed Thank you for your time.

I just have a quick note that, as I recall, when there was an open survey on the website for the Green Coalition, there were quite a number of people who supported the pickleball use and even asked for an expansion of the pickleball use. So it wasn't that it was 100% of the people who wanted it to be a passive, quiet place. There was quite a participation In the surveys that indicated that people were also very happy playing pickleball there. I just want that to be noted for the record.