Ojai City Council Special Meeting

We're ready, Weston?

Yes, Mayor, we are ready.

Okay, everyone, welcome to the Tuesday, November 16th Council meeting. Roll call, please.

Thanks, Mayor.

Mayor Gilman. 18th. Did I say 16? 18th. Thank you. Thank you. Good. Great. Keep me

on. Mayor Gilman. Here. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Lang.

Here.

Council Member Mang.

Here.

We have Council Member Rule participating remotely. She's not logged on yet, and Council Member Whitman is on his way.

If they want to get bulk material, they can have two uses of the coupon code and up to 15 yards of compost per use. So that is a full, basically, bobtail truck for us. They don't have to take that much. They can take a lesser amount if they so desire, but we want to give them the opportunity to maximize the use. We found that when we expanded the volumes available to residents, they took advantage of it in previous programs, so we wanted to make sure that we're not shortchanging those who want to take advantage of the access to the material.

So again, this is for a resident's a single physical location, so one coupon use per address. The coupon program details and compost bags can be picked up at Aquaflow at 1940 East Ojai Avenue. And again, bulk compost and mulch can be picked up at 201 Kinetic Drive in Oxnard. Any deliveries that go into the city is a flat rate of $270. I know it's a little bit painful, but it is difficult to get up into Ojai with trucks and so on. So that's really a reduced rate to guarantee, but it is The city would just cover the cost of the materials.

So how does a resident order? Well, first of all, they're going to find the information at your city website. I'm not going to repeat that. You can see it. Then they'll follow the instructions and place their order on our website, which is shop.agrumen.com. And they will be required to register themselves in there so that we can identify each individual who uses the coupon code. So that's tallied at the end of the month, and you will see that and exactly which resident purchased, how much they purchased, and where the material went to. We will confirm the address of every resident that places an order. And so we have set up an automated system because it became very complicated with lots of systems going on simultaneously. We couldn't manually do it for each city, so we've now set up a GPS coordinate system where it will tag every address that comes in and check it to see which compost program it qualified for.

So that's something we've done to improve our systems to make it a lot easier for the residents to kind of know quickly whether they qualify for one or another of coupon codes. We've got lots of them in the in the county going right now so for that reason it's important that we always make sure that the resident knows where they live because sometimes residents think they're in a city but they're in the county or vice versa just because their address says one thing they they think one thing without knowing that they're not in the place they think they are. So, we sometimes have to manage that. There are lots of other programs in the county, so we can often point them to an existing program if it's still running. Let's see, that pretty much covers everything on my presentation.

So, I want to open this up to questions. If anybody has anything about Agriment, about the program, about anything specific, please open it up. Thank you. I was thinking

this could go in the Ojai Outlook, possibly, right? Some link there to let folks know about it.

We could shoehorn that in, yes,

absolutely. Yeah,

go, please. I toured the Harrison facilities and saw them taking the plastic bags with organic waste out. Is this connected to that operation?

In a sense, I don't know if you're familiar, we recently opened the Mountain View Food Waste Processing Facility in Oxnard, and that's the only one that exists in the county. And so we're basically taking, we're going to be taking all the food waste from the Harrisons, and we're still arranging private contracts with different haulers and private food production entities that are going to bring their food waste to us.

But yes, we do work with the Harrisons very closely. We provide a lot of their organics management, so they will do some diversion at their location, and then they will send the food waste. We'll either go to Simi Valley, which is then sent up into Kern County, but now with the option of Oxnard, we'll be able to redirect a lot of that food waste to our facility.

Excellent. Thank you so much. This is very exciting. Organic waste is such a huge contributor to methane gas and to the warming climate, so this is great to see that we are going to be the first city in the county that is receiving the benefits of this win-win operation.

Thank you very much. Any questions? No, that's wonderful.

Thank you. Well, thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to seeing a successful program moving forward. Absolutely.

All right. Appreciate it. Wonderful. All right. City Manager's Report, please.

Yes, Mayor, a couple things this evening. First, I'd like to call Ms. Leah Palmer up to the podium to start things off, if I could. Give her a moment to come on up. So, Leah is our new accounting manager. She joined us, I think, last week? Yeah. Okay, great. Let me just read to you a little bit about Leah. So, she brings with her 10 years of accounting experience. She began her career in the private sector, where she learned the cornerstone accounting functions of accounts payable, accounts receivable, and treasury management. And from there, she moved into public accounting, where she has had the opportunity to work on payroll, budgeting, grant management, audits, and the annual comprehensive financial report.

Leah holds a Bachelor of Science in Business with an emphasis in Business Management from Cal State Northridge. Leah is dedicated to ensuring the accuracy and integrity of financial records, adhering to government-specific regulations and compliance and accountability in the use of taxpayer funds. All exciting stuff. Thank you, Leah. We're super excited to have you join us. Anything you want to say while you're up there?

Just thank you for having me. I'm really excited to join the team and get to work with everybody.

Thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Leah. Welcome. Thanks. Next, I think I want to kick it to the clerk to talk about our board vacancies and our appointment

process.

Mr.

Montgomery? I'd just like to start by saying, from the city clerk's office seat here, we had a minor error. That's why the community and council are missing Two council members right now, and we just had one mistake on our time on our printed binders, and it shows the importance of printed binders, and also how one small mistake can have a big impact relating to our community. So we understand that, and we will always improve going forward. So, city commissions. We have a lot of commission vacancies. There are three in total, which is a big deal. Planning Commission, Historic Preservation Commission, and Arts Commission.

We have conducted outreach through advertising the Ojai Valley News, social media outreach, and our city commission vacancies webpage. So, all the clerk's offices webpages are up to date, and you can always, any interested community member can always go to our city website. So, a little rundown. Planning Commission received no new applications in this process, but I would have to say, for the record, Mr. Steingold did apply again. He would call me out on that, jokingly.

So, there are four applications on file there. Historic Preservation has one new application on file. For total and Arts Commission has two new applications on file and two new and only two on file So thank you to council members and mayor for the footwork there. I'm getting some you know dedicated volunteers to serve on commissions last report there was council action for a regional board to for the area housing and Authority, AHA, we re-noticed that in the newspaper and there were no new applications on that and we intend to bring Mr. Steve Mason up for reappointment since there are no more applications and we intend to get that on our December 9th agenda.

Thank you. Wonderful.

Thank you, Mr. Montgomery. Thanks. Two more brief things. Just with the recent rain event, I just want to extend my thanks to the Public Works Department, the Sheriff's Department, and the Ventura County Fire Department, who were all very busy over the weekend. I know I live on the east end, and at my house, last time I checked, it was something like almost eight inches over the last several days.

So, thank you for all the work from our crews and teams. And then lastly, for those interested in anything related to the Ojai Permanent Supportive Housing Project, the bid package was posted on our website on November 7th, 2025. So, that's on our landing page. And that's all I have this evening. Thank you.

Thank you. Wonderful. Now, what's not on the agenda, but what should be, would be Commissioner Reports, and we have Commissioner Wright for the Arts Commission to give us a presentation. Thank you.

Good evening. Mayor Gilman, Mayor Pro Tem Lang, City Council Member Mang, Mang and Lang. I know, right? City staff, the community here, thank you for this opportunity to update you on the Arts Commission. For our meeting, which is on this Thursday, the Arts Commission is scheduled to receive the Ad Hoc Committee's recommendations for grant awards. The Arts Commission will review and vote on each applicant's proposal and finalize the award amounts.

And this will be the completion of the 2026 grant cycle. From there, we will send our recommendations to you, the City Council, ASAP, for your approval. And of course, we're hoping they'll appear on a very soon agenda. We'll see. We had 28 grant applications, which was nearly double from last year. And that includes individuals and organizations across many artistic disciplines, including dance, film, theater, fine art, music.

I'm sure this is because of the increased budget from $30,000 to $100,000. So, once again, thank you so much, as somebody would say, for the raise. And you're all invited, and you're all invited to attend the meeting on Thursday. You can see firsthand our hard work and careful consideration of each of the grant proposals. With the grants behind us, we will move on to updating our five-year plan, something that's required of arts commissions.

Under the leadership of Chair West, we will focus on the following key issues. Collaborating with Ojai Chamber of Commerce on a study for creative and economy impact. Continuing our assessment and maintenance of our public art collection. Assessing the methodology and calculation the city uses to calculate the percent for the arts. Expanding our education and mentorship programs for creative professionals and aspiring artists.

And cultivating and bringing on new commissioners. Sounds like we have a couple applicants, so that'll be moving along. So thank you for your time this evening, and I hope to see at least some of you this Thursday, 6 p.m., 6 p.m., at the Chamber, the City Chambers.

Any questions? Good work. Loving it. Loving it. Thanks. I have no public comment cards. Mr. Montgomery? Yes? One

moment, let's ensure.

I have some for items.

Let's just tell, we have one Zoom participant, and I'm speaking to a Zoom participant. We are entering our general public comment period. Just give you an opportunity to raise your hand in our hybrid model.

Mayor, it looks like we can move on. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks. Okay, we'll move on to the consent calendar. Does anybody want to pull any items from the consent calendar?

I'd like to pull item number 7. I have a question about it.

Okay.

I have a question with 5 and 7.

Okay, 5 and 7.

But I'll

move to approve the rest of them.

Okay. So I have a motion to approve 2, 3, 4, and 6. I will second that.

What are we doing?

He

wanted to do the discussion

item, so

if

we get through this, then

we'll get to that. Just to confirm, he indicated he had nothing on the consent that he was interested in, so thank you for asking.

Motion passes.

So let's look at number five, and then I guess here's the time that I would ask for any comments on consent item five. Seeing none, okay. Did you have on?

Yeah, I just had it. It's basic. I was just curious as to why we went so far away. Where is it up north that we didn't go locally to Ventura County to different fleet organizations? You know that. And then my other thing I just wanted to it's not a big deal, but if you notice on the back page, the contract has an expiration date of eleven eight twenty five. The source, well, So I just want to make sure, like if we go ahead with this, that it doesn't come back and then there's a change and then there's more money and all of that, that it's, it's throughout, there's a couple of them with that date where it's expired.

And we'll verify that too. It may be that that expired and then the next one just picks up where that one expired. We put the staff report together before, before that date, so that's probably what has happened here. And we go with SourceWell, so it's, they do the bidding, Other agencies, County of Ventura, sometimes City of Oxnard, City of Ventura, all the other agencies around. And so we're able to piggyback on that. And it depends on where they get the best pricing for the vehicles. It happens to be in Northern California. The last time we bought an EV truck was from Sacramento, Ford Sacramento. So it just kind of depends who's got the vehicles and the pricing that they give these agencies.

Fair enough.

Anything else? And

then I might ask Ms. Chode if she would just come up for the next item.

This is your first time up here like this, right? Welcome. You want to start?

Yes, so this, and this is for the security for the tent town. And the contract amount is, I mean, it's a significant amount. And my question is, is it better to go with a contract, to contract this out, or would it save us money? Would it, is there, would it be more cost effective to bring these services in-house and to hire our own security team?

Can I ask, my related question, the note I wrote is, are we happy with the service as it is, just as part of the conversation?

Sure, so let me start with that. Yes, I would say that we are happy with the service, and it is a little bit of a unique security detail. It's not like other assignments. It's one that requires some understanding of the specific needs of the population. And their vulnerability, and that is something that we've really enjoyed with Secure All. In particular, they have folks in their leadership team that have actually experienced homelessness themselves, and so that's been very helpful in dealing with some of the unique challenges that we encounter, not only with our participants, but those that try to prey on them, because that really is the main reason why Secure All is there, is just to protect them, not so much Protecting the community from the participants, because that's not what we experience.

It is multiple officers with the ability to fill in folks when somebody becomes sick or whatever. We could staff up with our own team. That is something we could look at if council wants us to. I don't have a number for what that would be, but I would say that we are happy with the service that we do receive, and it's been good for the city so far.

So I will add that there is an added benefit here to having a contractor because they have their own insurance in addition to our insurance. So any liability, right, there's an opportunity depending on whatever occurs that it could run through something other than the city's insurance.

The last thing I'll add is that at this point they've also formed close relationships with the leadership of the camp, Ventura County Behavioral Health, Ventura County Sheriff's Department, so they're pretty established in our community. Chief, would you weigh in on that?

Thanks. So occasionally I do check in with the officers and I do get a little bit of feedback from the deputies. They feel very comfortable with Secure All. The security officers Really understand the city and kind of what we want and our expectations. And really where I'm impressed is they've really kept the rift raft down at night and they have a good pulse on it. Believe it or not, they don't call us too often for stuff. They handle stuff on their own. It's only extreme issues that they call us for. So I'm actually impressed with the job they're doing.

Because the dollar amount is high, of course, we see that and it gives us some pretty serious pause. We also understand the service they're offering.

But that's another thing with the accounting to me doesn't add up. First of all, my first question is, I'm just curious with so many people, you know, working in finance, that why a contract expired so many months ago without somebody catching that? That's a big thing with security to not have a contract, in my opinion.

Well, actually, this is related to an item we've spoken about with the Council before, and that is the accounts payable module. We're deploying an automated module as part of our enterprise system, and Ms. Cho can jump in here. That's important because it won't allow contracts to be paid, or invoices to be paid, rather, unless the contract is current. So it impacted a multiple number of contracts, and I think you've seen that so far. We've been trying to slowly catch up, but we're close to getting close to implement that. And Ms. Cho, do you want to talk about the rough timing and what we're doing right now to test that module? Ms.

Cho Yeah. So with the implementation of the purchase order software would help support We have the financial and budgetary controls in place. So with new contracts that arise, we'll enter that into our PO system. And some of the details that would be included is like the contract terms, the amount, all to exceed. So as we get invoices in, it will kind of automatically have a running total balance of like what's spent and what's remaining. So that will, I guess, We provide additional, I guess, added layer into our budgetary controls in that aspect.

Our department, in conjunction with Springbrook, provided trainings to the departments to use the PO software. I believe just today we were able to get access to the live version, so that we'll be able to kind of test out the workflow to ensure that there's no I guess kinks in the system and that we also are working on a procurement policy to go in alignment with our purchase order module.

So with that, I would think that beginning in the new calendar year, we could see that in place.

Perfect. And then as far as some of the financing or the fees and everything, so it says $542,400 services through June 30th of 26. I have, because I've asked in the past for accounting for Tent Town Cabin Village, and so I've created my own spreadsheet and going through the warrants From the city, I have $341,785 that has been paid through the warrants through November 2nd.

Just for the security?

Yes. So that leaves, that's a difference of $200,615. You know, divided, so that's four months, or eight months. And then if we divided that, it's like $25,000 a month. But we reduced the hours in June to $10,900 roughly, so I feel there's like an overage, like a $100,000 overage. The math doesn't math for me, so I.

So we're going to, it sounds like what, tell me if I'm getting you right. If you were to sit down with Ms. Cho and see how, what's not, what's not correct here on the accounting part to see where it's different.

Well, it would be helpful because I'm just going, if you're going by warrants, I have, you know, I have them through the whole year going through that to have that, so why is there, you know, and I'm not putting any blame, please trust that, and I don't mean to come across as that person because I know you're coming into a lot, so I'm totally willing to work, but I would like to see it add up better or explain, you know, because that's quite a bit of money to not have.

Yeah, if you want, I could kind of just give a brief explanation of the numbers that are listed on the report. So the total contract price for the $542,400 is from the inception of the services that are provided from Secure All Security. So the amendment number two is a request for $294,900. And this contract, or I'm sorry, this amendment covers two fiscal years. So that's why the comparison is a little bit, I guess, skewed. So of the $294,900, approximately $100,000 of that was spent from March of 2025 to June of 2025.

I have kind of a breakdown of those invoices that I can share with you that totals that $100,000. But additionally, on the second row, that 43,600, those are for invoices paid through October of 2025, but covers July to September services. So just because of the timing of when we receive the invoices and when we pay it out, there is a little bit of lag time. So what you see, the 43,600 are for services paid through October from July to September.

So with that, that 294 So, the budgetary impact for this second amendment for the current fiscal year would be approximately $195,000, which is the $294,000 minus the $100,000. And to date, we spent $50,000, and that covers September to the first half of November.

So tell me if I'm wrong, those numbers actually sounded very close to what you said the discrepancy might be. Did I get that right?

It appears to me, but I'm just, yeah. I don't know. To me, when numbers don't add up, you know what I mean? So do you show in your thing from January to November how much you have showing that we've spent for security? I

have approximate numbers by fiscal year. So in 24-25, so that would cover June of 2024 to July of 2025, I have approximately $350,000. And for this current fiscal year, starting from July to current, what we have paid is approximately $50,000. And so with the remaining budget, when preparing for the amendment, it was approximated about a little less than $15,000 per month. And that's a little bit of a cushion because I, for example, with holidays, there's like a time and a half charge. So just to account for a little cushion in that estimation.

But for example, in the past month, it was a little under $13,600.

Okay. Well, what I'm also hoping is that with Ms. Cho here and the systems we're talking about, that everything would be matching much more clearly in the things that you bring up. Are you feeling confident in what you just heard or not confident?

No, I hear what she said. Absolutely, I hear you.

Okay. But we're happy to arrange if you want to sit down with Ms. Cho to go through the numbers, of course. Yeah.

Perfect, yeah, I

think. Okay.

If I may add on the question for number five, the information that you're looking for is the last page in the last paragraph. The contract is in effect until 2026. Thank you.

So it was just a typo?

No, it's SourceWale does their contracts super weird. And so this makes it look like if you don't First of all, they use European numbers in the dates, which is hard to clock. But they usually have a one-page extension, which next time we can put at the front to make it more accessible.

Ms. Palmer? Yes, I was going to say that as well. A lot of times they have sort of a one-year extension, and it happened to be on the very last page, so it extends to November 8th of 26, for clarification.

Wonderful.

And then if we could also acknowledge public comment for the entire consent calendar, too.

Okay. Yes, let's do that. Sorry if I misspoke. I thought I did that, but maybe I did not.

I have no raised hands on Zoom, Mayor. Okay. On consent, Mr. Stengel?

Okay. Thank you. All right, so then I guess I will move to approve consent item number seven.

I'll second it.

Okay.

And five

mayor?

Yes, please. Five we did already. Did we do five? We did not. Oh, five and seven

together. Sorry. Thank you.

Motion fails.

Okay.

Hello.

Are you not wanting to approve seven? Oh, sorry, did I misunderstand?

So when could we meet to go over numbers? Where'd she go?

Okay. She's here, yeah. I can send you an email and we can put

together the availability. Okay, perfect then. Does Leslie need? Hello? I

didn't know that she was here. Were you here for the conversation on the consent item that we're talking about, five and seven?

I was not.

Okay. I

just joined

when I heard the vote.

So let me just make sure, so are you- Okay, so we'll

go ahead then and go and then I'll meet with her and we can go over the numbers.

You're saying you don't want to approve seven or you do want to approve and you will meet? Sorry, I'm just asking for clarification.

We can go ahead and approve and meet of that.

Okay, approve.

So then a yes on five and seven. Okay. Mark that vote as yes for Councilmember. Thank you. Motion does pass.

All right. So we're at a slight impasse here, which is we are at the discussion item number eight, and Mr. Whitman was asking to be a part of that, and he should be here any second. He should

be, yes.

So let's take a ten minute break.

Perfect.

Check, check, one, two. Welcome back. Thanks for the break. So we will start with a roll call again. Mr. Montgomery?

Yes.

remotely for Ms. Rule?

Yes, Council Member Rule, can we just have you disclose whether there are any individuals 18 years or older present in the room with you and if there are, the nature of your relationship.