Ojai City Council Special Meeting

Waiting for Leslie. We're not going to start until you

come up.

Of course you are. How not?

OK.

OK, everyone, welcome to our September 30th Council Special Council meeting. Roll call, please. Ms. Mara. Here.

Good evening. I'm so glad to be here. I didn't think I could speak tonight because it's a special meeting and I'm very short. I'm from the International City of Peace and our mayor and the All of you sent over a proclamation to the Peace Project, the Peace Event on Peace Day, September the 21st. It was great. We're sorry you couldn't come, but it was wonderful, and we just were so thrilled to have it.

Quilici showed up looking like a fabulous in his suit. He just looked great. I was so impressed by him. He was great when he read the proclamation and talked a little bit about it. So is there somebody else on my team? She's not seeing me. Okay. I was going to bring some of the team for the next meeting, but I'm here. So thank you very much, and we look forward to continuing a wonderful relationship.

Oh, it was our 10-year anniversary. Yes. And the proclamation was great, everything that it said. So many thanks from us and also Interfaith, who everyone on Interfaith Committee became members of the Interfaith International City of Peace team. So that's what we put together a great event. So many many thanks and thanks to you my dear for helping push that through. Okay. Thank you.

And just to say there is gonna be a ceremony here with the flag raising I want to say two weeks from now on a Wednesday morning. Does that ring a bell?

No.

I think it was Ray Powers was working on that.

Oh, okay.

So more to come.

More to come and I'll talk to Ray. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. What item is this for, Bridget? Is this a public comment? Casey, let me just ask you a question. Is this about one of the items or about something

that's not on the agenda? Not about the items on the agenda. OK. It's a rather unfortunate thing. I think a lot of people already know it, but because news does spread rather like like fire. But the idea of a Laura's body was found for anybody that didn't know. If anybody wants to get together and come up with things to do for the family, please contact me after the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you for that. Is there anybody online that would like to speak?

The

boss of the Internet.

Thank

you, sir.

There are no hands raised.

All right, we will move on to our first discussion item, which is Resolution Appointing a Voting Delegate and Alternate to the 2025 League of California Cities Annual Conference. Mr. Harvey.

Yes, Mayor, make this very short and sweet. There are two of you attending the League Conference in Long Beach this year. It is the Mayor Pro Tem and Council Member Whitman. In order to vote in the General Assembly at the end of the conference, you have to, by resolution, appoint at least a delegate. Since there are two of you going, it would be appropriate to not only appoint a delegate, but also an alternate. The General Assembly is at the end of the conference, so if either the Mayor Pro Tem or Council Member Whitman will not be there on Friday, they should not be appointed to that role. It is the last item of business. And that's my short and sweet report. Thank you.

Can I ask a

question?

Members going, planning to stay to the end?

I am, yes.

Yeah, I'll be there on Friday, but I think it's appropriate for the mayor pro tem, as if the mayor was going, it'd be appropriate for the mayor. I agree. I think it's mayor pro tem, I'll be an alternate. Thank

you. Any

objections to that?

I'm happy to do it. I

think we got it.

Thank you.

Thank you. Wonderful. Okay, so the next item, which is why we're primarily here, So, the workshop on the Permanent Supportive Housing Project documents. So, one point, since this is a workshop and we're working by consensus, I want to encourage my colleagues. If someone brings something up that they want to forward and you have a concern or an objection, Are you OK? No, no, no.

Just definitely let me know or let us know that you want to talk about this item because we are working by consensus. So we're sort of nodding our heads. Yes, we want this. And they're taking that down. So if you have an objection, raise it. OK, when we go to those items, so so don't let that slip by. And then for those of you who wanted to give public comments, we are suggesting that the way to go is public comments after the presentation and work it through. So you have something to comment on.

If that makes sense. So there's some right now, there's not much to comment on. So that's what we'll do going forward. So let me turn it over to you, Mr. Harvey.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm actually going to hand things over to Mr. Seibert.

Oh, great. A little handoff. And here we go. So, good evening. My name is Lucas Seibert, Community Development Director for the City of Ojai, for all of you out in TV land and out here tonight. The item before you tonight is a workshop. I'm going to go through just quickly the purpose, kind of some objectives here as well, and then I'm going to turn it over to the Dignity Moves team.

To go through a fairly lengthy and necessary and informative PowerPoint presentation that's going to have some really good detail. So, the purpose for tonight's meeting is to, through the selected drawings provided, actually it's a walkthrough of the Ojai Permanent Supportive Housing Project documents. You see those before you tonight, and there's a PowerPoint to walk through some of those kind of high-level and some details to some of those as well.

The reason for this and the purpose for this tonight is City Council, you as a body, had asked for this at the September 9th meeting when we heard both the budget as well as the timeline moving forward for this project. The selected drawings provided for review and discussion have been identified through the Dignity Moves team, and they'll be diving into those in some detail.

And then no formal decision is being made tonight. That was part of the staff report. Input will help to guide the final decision, which is what the Mayor had alluded to in terms of some of those specific details that are going to be brought up tonight and discussed. In terms of the objectives, it's a review and discussion of the project documents and details provided by Dignity Moves.

This is an opportunity for Council and the community to really kind of gain a deeper understanding of the proposed plans. That's really dating back from the May meeting where Council has made that determination. The presentation by Dignity Moves is being prepared tonight by both Dylan Johnson as well as Kathy Nolan. And then we also have Jeff Spahr here tonight, which will be introduced as well.

And really what we're looking to is incorporate City Council feedback input as well as community input as well that will be helped to kind of frame the final construction documents moving forward. So with that, I would ask for the PowerPoint presentation to be put up and then for Dylan and Jeff and Kathy as lead to present tonight. We do have a clicker as well to help.

Thank you very much for the introduction. Thank you. I'm happy to be here and put this report in. Primarily, what we'll be doing is going through the documents as they stand today. And so the heavy lifting will be by our architect and our landscape architect. But as Lucas said, we'll be here for any kind of question. With that, our architect will do the presentation.

Quick question. Would you like to go through something, have us listen and take it in, and then come back to you with questions or stop you midstream? How would you prefer?

I think it would be most productive if I go through it and we can circle back to the beginning. I think there will be numerous sort of technical issues, but having a sense of the big picture. Anyhow, great to see you again, Council and staff and the community. I just think it's wonderful how much thought is going into this project, and I appreciate the opportunity to have a live working session with you here.

So, it's important for everyone to be on the same page about where we are in the process. So, in July, we issued the design development set, and just to recap, building projects, architectural projects, typically go through three phases. There's schematic design, which is what we worked through with the Planning Commission going back into late last year, and that establishes the overall concept for the building.

And then from there, we advanced the design development when we start to flesh out some of the details and a real clear understanding of what this building's going to look like, but it's not construction ready. That we completed in July, and we sent out with the RFP Part 1 for pricing. And that, the last meeting we had was the feedback, the pricing feedback we got from the design development set.

All of that information that we gathered then has since informed what we've been doing for the last several weeks, which is preparing the construction documents that will both go in for permit, for approval. I met with Ventura County Fire this morning to go through some of these plans with them. And soon we'll be meeting with Building and Safety, and eventually use the construction document set.

to go out for bid and ultimately construction. That document set is targeted to be completed on November 7th. So you have about five to six weeks to take the drawings that you see tonight, incorporate this feedback, and produce what will be the final set of drawings in November. So that is the current project schedule that we touched on last time we met. So, it's a great time to incorporate feedback that comes up. So, starting here, this is our bird's eye view that we've been looking at all along. You can see the courtyard building there in the center.

I've always really appreciated this image insofar as how it demonstrates how this building sits in the landscape, largely nestled in an existing grove of oak trees on the west, the south, and east sides, making use of what is currently sort of the open space in the public works yard. There we go. So again, just to sort of, you know, set the groundwork for the project, I think it's helpful to revisit the goals and the project objectives that Dignity Moves and thereby the rest of the design team was provided with at the outset. And it was really sort of three high-level goals that came Frankly, directly out of City Council's stated goals, which are, one, to deliver supportive housing for the residents of the Tent Town, and that would be in the form of 30 single room occupant units, along with gathering space, a laundry room, and three offices for support and admin services.

Objective number two is to employ fire-resistant construction and help increase the fire resilience of the community. And number three, finally, is to promote climate resiliency through sustainable low-carbon design and construction. So we'll sort of touch on those at the beginning, and it's really out of those three things that all of the design decisions have been evaluated and made.

So we'll circle back to this plan later in the presentation. This is the landscape planting plan, but it's one of our more illustrative drawings showing the site plan. Just to remind everybody, you see Montgomery Street on the right, Ventura on the left, with vehicle access coming up off Montgomery. Pedestrian access, we have made the proposal that rather than send folks, particularly in wheelchairs, down to Montgomery and back up to town, we've introduced this switchbacking accessible ramp that accesses South Ventura Street, which you can see on the upper part of this drawing here, a parking area just to the north of the building, and then the building itself is a courtyard scheme, sort of a classic Spanish hacienda.

This is a design that really uses traditional building typologies to both create a comfortable residential environment and also take advantage of the shade that the deep overhangs of the courtyard provide to increase energy efficiency. Zooming in, here is a furniture plan of the building itself. So you can see this is rotated now, so north is to the left. The entrance to the whole project comes in off the left through the gates. As one enters, you could turn right and enter the administrative suite.

where we have the three offices, the mechanical room and the laundry room. You could also come into the entry hall and turn to the left to the community gathering space. It's important to note here that this isn't a kitchen, this isn't a commercial kitchen. This is a dining and gathering space, so meals will be prepared off-site and delivered for use here. So we do have warewashing facilities, dishwashers and sinks along the north wall, and food storage in what we're calling the pantry, which is on the east wall there. You can see a pair of refrigerators and freezers and shelving and so forth. Those are all behind closed doors, so that would be staff access, and the residents would be served the meals out in the gathering space, which can then spill out into the courtyard for much of the year.

I expect that most of the gathering will actually happen in this courtyard in the center that is then surrounded by the 30 SRO units. Again, that's single room occupant units, so it's really, you can imagine, almost a hotel room, a simple suite with an en suite bathroom. And there's two double units in the back corners of the building. Important to note sort of circulation through this space. Again, almost all of it will occur through those front gates on the left, but we do have egress routes out the back corners of the courtyard. Very importantly in the case of an emergency or a fire in the courtyard, there are three ways to get out of this space.

And then the courtyard itself, I'll let Kathy Nolan, our landscape architect, expand on this later, but it's really quite a pleasant, beautiful space. Outdoor picnic tables, big olive tree in the center, raised planter beds for gardening, and then a small lawn on the south side of the courtyard right there. As you've seen many times now, the building is very simple, understated, single-story construction with this sort of Spanish architectural material palette. I have samples of materials here we can go through later if you'd like, but we'll get into some of the details of how this building actually comes together.

Those first few slides were really addressing objective number one, which is to provide the sort of basic program of the residential units and the support spaces. These next few slides will get into the second two objectives, the first one being wildfire resistance. And so this project is in what CAL FIRE has designated as the Very High Fire Severity Zone, I

think

we all know. So, therefore, the building must comply with the most stringent wildland-urban interface codes. Folks refer to that as the WUE codes, if you've heard it. And some of the key features of WUE-compliant buildings include a Class A roof assembly, so sort of the highest level fire resistance at the roof. That's where a lot of wildfire risk occurs. Screened gutters to prevent leaf litter and so forth from filling the gutters and being prone to burning.

And then, intimescent screened vents at the soffits to ventilate the roof structure. Intimescent vents, intimescent products more generally, it is a material that when it comes into contact with an ember or burning, anything burning, it actually foams up. So you see this in steel buildings a lot, intimescent paints and It foams and it seals and it protects the underlying material.

So all of the vents around this building have this intimescent matrix around them. So it's really an important part of fire resistance in the new reality that we live in. Most of the homes that were lost in the Thomas Fire, for example, were lost because embers were sucked into the roof structure. So this is a great innovation that we can take advantage of.

All the windows are dual-pane and tempered, which is pretty standard in this environment now. And then the cladding of the building is ignition-resistant stucco. Essentially, the code says we need ignition-resistant materials, which basically means things that if you hold a lighter to it, it's not going to catch on fire. And then finally, Kathy's been doing quite a bit of work to ensure that we comply with the defensible space requirements. Ventura County Fire, as far as I understand, actually has more stringent requirements for defensible space than even CAL FIRE, so we'll be in quite good shape when it comes to landscape as well. And then lastly, on the left there, we do have some exposed timbers, really just the columns around the arcade.

Those will all be larger than a four by material or three and a half inches, which is, again, you know, it's ignition resistant. There are larger pieces of wood that typically char, you know, ignite as well. You'll see this image a lot as just a diagram to help visualize how this building is put together. Keep in mind, this is just a diagram. This isn't to scale, so if you want more accurate drawings of the building itself, we can look at the actual construction plans in the latter part of the presentation.

So the third goal, climate resiliency, a lot of focus has been around a low-carbon building system and a high degree of environmental sustainability when it comes to the construction itself. And I thought it would be helpful just to do a very brief sort of high-level snapshot of what The climate impacts really are in the built environment. They're tremendous. Buildings account for about 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, so there's a lot of opportunity to do this better.

And for an individual building, it's really bucketed in these two large categories, the first being embodied carbon on the left, and that is all the emissions that come from the manufacturing, The transportation and the construction itself, so things, you know, all of the carbon that went into the products that eventually become the building before it even gets to the site.

And then, the second piece is operational carbon, so that's all the energy that's required to heat and cool and light and maintain the building over time. And what's really quite interesting is for many years, the focus was on the operational carbon side of the total carbon life cycle. But in recent decades, we've made, as a society, we've made tremendous improvements in building efficiency through technology, LED lighting and heat pumps, electrification, et cetera, more insulated buildings and tighter building envelopes. That's all led to huge improvements in how efficient buildings are.

And so now, the lion's share of the carbon impact of a building is actually in the embodied side of the equation, which you can see over on the left here, this is a study published by the Rocky Mountain Institute for wood frame residential construction in North America. You know, and upwards of 70 to 90% of the total carbon impact of a building is actually happening out of the materials that you're building before you even finish construction.

So there's a lot of room for improvement there. And we'll get into some of the strategies we're using for this building in a minute. But quickly, on the operational side, again, these are fairly easy things to do that provide high levels of efficiency and low-carbon, long-term low-carbon impacts of the building. The first thing is it's 100% electric. We're not even installing a gas line to the building, nor a gas meter.

We're using high-efficiency heat pumps for the heating and air conditioning. These are ductless mini-split systems that are installed in each unit. High-efficiency heat pump hot water, that's a relatively new system for this part of the world, but it's working quite great and much more efficient than electric resistance or gas hot water. There's PV solar, so solar panels on the south-facing roofs. Important to note that that's actually outside the scope of Dignity Moves contract. What the project and the general contractor under Dignity Moves scope will be providing is a solar-ready building, so all the conduits and panels and so forth will be installed, and then the solar panels themselves will come in.

Outside of the scope of the general contract construction and therefore the budget. I think we should be careful not to digress into a discussion of budget tonight. Let's talk really about the building, but that is a fairly significant line item that's important to note. And I'll just say the last bullet here, EV charging is the same. We're providing the rough-in for the EV charging infrastructure, but not the chargers themselves.

Other energy efficiency elements we're using is the LED lighting, occupancy sensors, and then these last two bullets really just go back to sort of traditional Adobe Southwest and Spanish architecture, just working with first principles and physics around deep overhangs, thick walls, thermal mass, to just minimize the energy you need in the first place to keep these buildings comfortable.

So working with those traditional typologies just makes the rest of this brief. So now talking about the embodied carbon piece of it. If you recall, when we started the project last year, we studied a traditional straw bale construction. So you can see a straw bale there in the upper right. Straw is the leftover stalks of the grain harvest every year. This is a global issue. Wherever grain crops are grown here in California, one of the big ones is rice in the Sacramento Valley.

And disposing, the farmers need to dispose of the straw every year to make room for crops the next year. That straw grows throughout the growing season as it's growing the grain. It's pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and it's fixing it into the physical material of the grain crop. And then when they harvest the grain, these stalks are left. They're a couple of feet high.

And they represent, quite literally, the carbon dioxide that was pulled out of the atmosphere while it grew. Now, through most of the world, that straw is disposed of in one way or another. Typically, it's burned, which has a host of issues beyond just the carbon, but the air pollution as well. Here in California, that's banned, so they actually flood all the rice fields, which releases tremendous amounts of methane every winter, not to mention it uses lots of electricity. That's a rabbit hole we don't need to go down tonight, but my point is that straw represents this tremendous opportunity to reduce the environmental impact and the carbon impact of the building, both by taking that straw off the fields, turning it into building materials, sticking it in the building, and it locks it up for the life of the building, typically many decades.

And these happen to be very important decades when it comes to the climate crisis as well. So the more of that atmospheric carbon we stick in our buildings, the better in that regard. So we were first looking at straw bale. Given the constraints of this site, and as you can see, straw bales are typically pretty wide, about two feet wide. That results in a very thick wall section, which resulted in smaller units. And I think in some of the discussions we had, Planning Commission, there was really a desire to make these what are already fairly small units as big as they could possibly be and still fit on the site within the footprint. So, we did quite a bit of research and have come up with a proposal to use compressed straw panels. Unfortunately, they're only manufactured one place in the world in Australia right now.

It's a very promising product that's been in production in Australia for about 50 years. The brand name is DuraPanel. You can see it down there on the right. And they essentially take this straw, and without a glue or a resin, they compress it under heat and pressure and turn it into a 50 millimeter construction board. It's quite a remarkable product. The pressure releases the lignin that's actually in the straw naturally, that acts as a binder, so you're not adding additional petrochemical resins and so forth to it. So, at the end of the building's life cycle, these panels can just be compost.

And they also offer some pretty remarkable performance characteristics. They're semi-structural, they provide excellent acoustic resistance, there's some thermal value, not a lot, but there's some thermal insulation value, and they're extremely fire resistant. So for all of these reasons, they seem like a great product for this particular project. And they're much thinner, so we can actually achieve a fairly thin wall section and maximize the square footage in units.

So here's some examples of DuraPanel used in Australia. You can see we are proposing to use them for the interior face of the exterior building walls. The partition walls between the units, that's largely through their fire resistance and acoustic properties. They'll provide excellent partitions between the units. And then in the gathering space, our one vaulted ceiling space, we're using them as ceiling panels, much like the image on the upper left. We don't have the horizontal collar ties that are shown here, but they'll provide the finished ceiling surface.

And again, some technical details about how the panels actually come together if anybody's interested. And I think it's worth noting that in Australia, at least, these panels, this isn't a novel material. They're used for a range of product scales, small residential, civic, industrial, and institutional projects as well. I think all of the international airports in Australia have this panel as the roof structure.

So it's, you know, it's sort of a time-tested improvement product, new to this area, but certainly not there. Another major part of a building is its insulation, just in terms of the physical mass of what goes into a building. And again, with the goal of using plant-based materials, bio-based materials that are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere during the growing season and putting them into the building.

There's some great products on the market now made from hemp, particularly insulation. So we've specified two different kinds of hemp insulation. Hemp wool for the walls, both for thermal and acoustic insulation around the exterior perimeter and inside the partition walls between the units and the offices and so forth. And then in the attic structure, a loose fill, it's called fiber fill, it's basically a chopped hemp product. These all have fire retardant treatments as well, so they're It's not just temp, it's a treated product that provides excellent thermal and acoustic and fire resistant properties.

And then lastly, really coming out of our, we had originally specified a clay tile roof, which you'd see all over town. Frankly, the pricing for that came in quite high. Clay tile is a heavy product and it's an expensive product to install and to seismically restrain in the case of an earthquake. It's a huge hazard to have clay tiles falling off buildings. So you have to do a fairly complicated anchorage system.

So again, going back to the drawing board and researching products, we've come up with a product. This is an open specification, so we're naming a brand that we think fits the bill. But it is an open spec, so if other manufacturers can't provide an equivalent product, they will. The product we're looking at here is by Brava. They make a Spanish barrel tile actually out of recycled post-industrial plastics that meets all of our performance criteria. So it's class A fire rated.

It's much more lightweight than the clay tile. So it reduces the structural demands as well as the emissions related to transportation, and it comes with a 50-year warranty, so it should be a very simple, cost-effective, low-maintenance solution for the city to open this building long-term, and uses recycled plastic, and frankly, it looks quite good. I was quite pleased with its product.

So the rest of this presentation, I might do a quick pause here because the rest of this is much more technical. These are the drawings themselves. Again, they're in progress. Myself and the rest of the consultant team are actively comparing and coordinating the sheets, so I'm sure you'll find inconsistencies and mistakes here. We would expect that and have it all pulled together and tightened up by November 7th. So I'll pause quickly there if there's any questions so far, or we can jump into the sheets.

Colleagues?

Thank you for this. This is great. So when we were talking about embodied carbon, and I love the idea now that I'm really understanding better. I built a straw bale house. I also baled the straw. I do know that you can bale at different, I mean, you can set your baling specifications however you want. Also, building the house, we used a chainsaw to go through the bales.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I really appreciate the compressed straw panels. I was not aware of them. I was not aware that they were as sort of organic and unadulterated as they are. So I thank you for that. I thank you for doing the research on that. I have a

sample as well, if

you'd like. Yeah, I'd love to see it. It sounds great. You know, there is an operational cost to come from Australia, but, you know, kind of Nothing is without its thing. Yeah, I also don't want to go down the rabbit hole of the budget, and so we can talk about the things.

I think it's inevitable we'll touch on it, because all of these decisions do have cost impacts, and we're working with a fixed budget, so I would welcome some, I just, I'd hate to derail the design.

Yeah, no, no, we can, I don't think we need to talk about, you know, the budget here, and the solar panels, and the EV charging coming out of the budget, because we'll have to put that back in. But I really appreciate learning about the compressed straw panels, and as you know, the acoustics are huge, right? I mean, the idea, and just if you've ever been in a straw bale house, there is this sense of quiet and peace that comes from not having, you know, All are artificial, basic, you know, artificial materials there. It's a silence and a stillness that I think is very peaceful. So, and I think that for me, the compressed straw panels will work to provide that. So, I really thank you for bringing this forward. And I think it is a building material that we can all kind of, sort of, Well,

I will say that this will be, there are some instances, as far as I can tell, of the product being used in North America, but this will certainly be the most recent and the most high-profile, and I would encourage us to all talk about it as much as we can. Because there's a, I mean, the company that manufactures it's actually working with an architect in LA to do quite a bit of rebuilding in the Palisades with this fire-resistant So anyhow, I think we're part of a larger conversation about bringing this product to North America, and I'd love to see it. That's great.

More questions?

Yes,

go

ahead. So how does that product fit into the fire resistance category? You might assume it's bad, but you can also assume it's good, how it's treated.

Yeah, it's a great question. Largely good. Unfortunately, the fire testing standards in Australia are different than what we use in North America, so I've actually engaged with the company through our panel, connected them with North American Testing Labs to give us the by-the-book one-hour fire rating requirement that we'll need for the partition units. The acoustic rating of the partitions is, our desire, is an SDC rating of 60, which is very high.

So we're actually using a mix of drywall and the DuraPanel, so we'll get the necessary fire separation between the units actually technically from the drywall that'll be behind the DuraPanel. But they're actively working on the testing. I actually pushed the company hard last week to get me an answer before tonight so I could have a better answer for you. They've done a tremendous amount of fire testing on it, and it's quite good. Largely because it's so dense, there's no oxygen in the panel, so it chars, and the surface actually blackens, and that stops the burning of the material itself. And because it's so dense, it's an excellent radiant heat barrier. There's a video on their website, actually, of a building they built and tested for bushfire resistance in Australia.

where they essentially set the building in a wildfire environment and measured the temperature inside. And it was remarkable. It essentially was deemed to be a wildfire safe product for the Australian building codes, but of course those are different. So we're working to get the testing done so we can actually submit to Ventura County Fire and the building department.

Thank

you. And on a similar question, you mentioned the high fire hazard severity zone. And just to clarify, this project is in one of those zones. As far as I can. Very high. And look at the map. Yeah, it's the highest risk zone. And so Our county supervisor gave us some feedback about His thought process when another location was proposed, the Honor Farm, and he said that the fire department let us know they had serious concerns about circulation and access in case of emergency.

Have we had those discussions with the fire department and what kind of response have they given us?

Yeah, it's a very important and good question, so this is more about site access, so I'll go to the site plan. And timely, I actually met, I don't have the civil drawings here, which actually show all the dimension fire requirements, but I actually met with Ventura County Fire this morning, and we went through this in quite a bit of detail. So the big thing is that they have a place to turn around, that they have sufficient flow rates from the hydrants, and that we have, you know, the whole project is sprinklered and alarmed. And I just frankly told them, I said, look, let's err on the conservative side here. We actually could apply for sort of residential grade sprinkler and fire protection systems, but we're not going to. We're going to comply with the commercial grade level.

But they've very carefully looked at the turning radii of the drive, the turnaround that we're providing in the parking area, the hydrant location, the flow rates, and sprinkler systems, and he's quite happy with it. A lot of what you're suggesting we do here is over and beyond what code requires and what we are requiring as a fire department. And we need you to disclose that that is the owner's voluntary election to add these pieces to the project. And so you'll likely see some of those notes on the final constructed drawings.

For example, we're including wall-mounted fire extinguishers in every unit. More fire extinguisher cabinets than are required throughout the public spaces of the project. There's an excess of egress than would be code required, etc. So I think we're taking a, you know, with respect to the budget, keeping that in mind, we're not going completely overboard, but we're erring on the conservative side.

That's great

to hear.

And then I've got another question, but I think it's for staff, and so I'll defer that while people ask questions of the architect.

Thank you so much for all the research that you did trying to find products that would meet our ideals of working to reduce carbon emissions and also to use as natural products as we could. I'm excited about all of this, especially the dura panels. I just, I had, so my question, I want to go back to the, just the layout, and I just had a, just one question about the kitchen.

So, you know, I noted, I noted what you said about how there was no cooking or food preparation, so would, are there any, like, cook plates, or is this because of a health department regulation, or is this, what was the reasoning behind that?

Yeah, it's a great question, and we could call up some other folks from Dignity Moves here, because they're much more knowledgeable about how these projects operate than I am. But at the highest level, one, there's a desire to have a communal dining experience here, as opposed to individual kitchenettes within the units, where folks are more prone to stay in the units, cook there, and not come out and socialize with the rest of the community.

So part of it is, and that of course brings a host of issues with budget, of course, providing 30 kitchens would be very expensive. Space requirements, these units are small. And again, just the notion of this sort of courtyard communal living environment where you're gathering at least a couple of times a day outside of the individual units. So, the infrastructure, yes, if meals were to be prepared in a building of this scale, with this size and this number of residents, It would immediately trigger commercial kitchen requirements with hoods and grease traps and, frankly, seven-figure impacts to the budget and the space requirements. It would be a very different floor plan. So I think there is a practical budget driver here that actually works well with how a lot of these projects operate.