Ojai City Council Regular Meeting

Ojai although there was a dip recently so in Ojai your average age hit over 50 years old twice and then it started a little decline and I just think that's for a variety of reasons. Yes sir?

First a question would you like to wait for any questions until the end which is completely fine

Uh, I'm flexible either way. Although I know you're sort of on a tight timeline if you don't mind. Okay then I would love to take questions.

Like 1970 Ojai census, the average was 35. And you were checking with this data so we've aged dramatically in 50 years. Right and

it's not just the aging but it's the decline in the birth rate. We are not attracting young people to the community and this is throughout the county but it's just this changing demographic and I'll show some more slides about this as well You can see that in Ojai, the amount of young people that you lost was not as bad compared to some other cities. You actually grew a little bit in population but you are attracting older people, in a sense.

We'll get into some of that more as we go along, but please just catch my eye and I'm happy to stop. Agricultural county, Ventura County top crop continues to be strawberries over $700 million. Avocado was number two in this report in 2024. But the interesting thing about agriculture is it's been plateauing for quite a few years at around that $2 billion mark. So, it used to be almost 5% of our economy but now it's down to about 3.3%. So, it's very difficult as you all know for farmers. It's the water, it' s the crops, it''s the labor, it ''s the pesticides.

In the community engagement your elected officials, I'd like to point out the stats for Ventura County. So through 2025 the blue is Democrats reds are Republican green are no party preference you can see the growth in the no party preference over the last 20 years most of the growth has come at the expense of Republicans and when we look at it by city You'll be probably not surprised to see that Ojai has the largest majority Democrat in the county, followed closely by Oxnard right there. So Oxnard of course having a much larger population, much larger difference. But what's interesting also is only one city has a plurality of Republicans, and that's Simi Valley. So they have slightly more in Simi Valley. Now of course that's registered, that's not turnout and that's why the parties are always trying to make sure these registered voters actually show up and vote.

I'd like to point out about the nonprofit sector. As I was driving in today, I saw the sign of Ojai and you have the little strips for each of your nonprofits so thank you for giving them recognition. In Ventura County we have over 11,000 people working in the nonprofit sector and that contributes about half a billion dollars worth of salaries. So it's an important sector although there could be a lot more philanthropy in the county that would help that grow.

So, in the economy this is hard chart to read but I like to just show it so that you know how to look at this later at your leisure there's three pages like this in the report service providing goods producing and then government the top half shows the number of jobs in each of these industries the bottom half is showing you the average wages so where we see the actual That's fine.

So where that is seeing growth like financial activities, you can see there is mine either. I believe you Weston. OK, so you could see the nice improvement in financial activities. One hundred twelve thousand dollars as an annual wage. But we've been losing jobs in that particular sector. So the imbalance in Ventura County is that we are growing some of these industries that pay the least, like travel leisure and hospitality. It's a good entry-level job and nothing against the Ojai Valley Inn it's great what they do but we need to attract these high paying jobs you hear that over and over Okay, county gross product this is similar to the nation's. You can see that back before the Great Recession that's when that peak was when we had $72 billion then the Great Recession knocked the wind out of us.

We plateaued for pretty much 10 years after that a little bit of growth into the 60s now during this period the state and the nation grew significantly So Ventura's economy did not keep up with the nation, but we've started to see a little bit of a pickup. But still the concern would be when we have another recession how will we weather it after looking at this kind of report? Taxable sales Ojai is right there in the mix you've been holding steady with the taxable sales which obviously funds much of your work You can see that Oxnard dominates and Oxnard is the only one that had significant growth. And the reason is one word, Amazon. Once they put in that Amazon warehouse and they got a lot of those sales taxes. And I know there's work trying to figure out how to equalize that but you can see the places with the auto malls like Thousand Oaks like Oxnard Even Ventura do very well.

You need a Costco. Well, I don't know if you have to buy one. I don't even know if it would go over well to have a Costco here. But some of these other cities do have it. Here's where you're outstanding. This is the chart where Ojai dominates the entire county and that is the amount of transient occupancy tax. The amount that is coming from the Ojai Valley Inn and all of your other facilities. But yes, when you look at your tax I think it's 10 or 11 percent on a $500 a room night that helps to do that so I'm sure we all share the great gratitude for the leisure and hospitality industry here in the area. Education, this touches on what I mentioned at the beginning about the declining birth rate. The green on the bottom is the grades 9 through 12, the high school, the blue on top is the TK through eighth grade.

And you can see in both of them, they sort of parallel each other how we were growing, growing and then we got into the middle of the 2000s and we peaked and then we've been on a decline ever since and it's going down. But what I'd like to share is in that upper left hand corner, it's probably too small for the audience but in 1973 our population was about 420,000 50 years later, our population doubled almost exactly from 420 to 838.

But during that time the number of students went from only 107,000 to about 122,000. We doubled in population, but our enrollment only grew about 20%. And that is the most significant demographic issue I believe facing Ventura County. So here's what it means for your Ojai Unified School District. The top line is 2021-22 and then the blue line is more recent 24-25. You can see the decline in enrollment over 10% And I'm often asked, well isn't that because everybody is homeschooling or everybody's going to the private schools? But the reality is private schools are facing the same challenges with a declining birth rate.

Correct me if I'm wrong, that private school number is countywide. Correct. Yes. Not city. Right

It is, I think only schools with like three or four more students. So a two-person school doesn't get on this chart but yes that is countywide to see that decrease so because you're looking at Ventura Unified looking at closing schools and talked about here as well it's not just a single like oh our schools are no good.

And you won't get this till your next report but the 25 26 26 27 you'll see it slightly increased.

Good for you yeah It's definitely important. Yeah, we have a per pupil spending in here you can see Ojai does not get the kind of level spending that some of the other districts do And test scores, so this is a we show the test scores for every school in the county. And the state does this measurement and there's 4 metrics that they use the number of students that meet the standard. That almost meet the standard didn't come close to meeting. or exceeded. What we report are the number of students that met or exceeded the standard, I think that's what we would all share is we want our kids to at least meet the standard and so you can see Ojai there in the green on the end uh i had to cut the chart to put it in the powerpoint it starts at 60 percent and goes down to 30 so barely one of your schools even meets 60 and this is the english the math is worse But it's nothing particular to Ojai.

Across the county, you can look at individual districts and see the ones that are high performing, the ones that have a huge spectrum, and others. We did not have one single school in the county where 100% of the students met this standard in math. Only one of them met it in English. But I do like to share this chart because it's good news if you are thinking about school, if you are thinking about college, if you have children or grandchildren The longer you stay in school, the more you will earn for every year of your life on average. So, you can see that a high school boy could maybe expect to earn $46,000 for his career but if he stays in and gets a bachelor's degree it doubles. Multiply that by the 30 plus years they'll be working. It's a huge amount of money if somebody is saying, I don't know if I can borrow that $10,000 or $20,000 for student loans.

If they're committed to education it pays off. Unfortunately girls are not the same compensation but the chart is the same for females. So some quick numbers on land use and housing. The countywide, the starts were a little higher than they've been so highest since 2017. Good news for Ojai home ownership 65%, not really a surprise. The downside of that though is that means there's less apartments, less rental homes and you can see what your median home price was.

Apartment rents are skyrocketing across the county. It's really a supply and demand issue. Ojai is sort of in the middle of the pack, a little lower than some of the other cities. One way to be affordable natural resources this is also good news about Ventura County we have great air great ocean water. Great hiking, great forest solar capacity. We have continued to add solar capacity. We now have almost the same amount in solar capacity as a small generation station like the ones at Oxnard.

public health this one is the main statistic for what we were talking about in the beginning Mr. Mayor as far as the declining birthrate you can see that in 1990 the birth rate was 19 births per thousand residents In 2023 that number was almost half, 10. And so what's happening you all know this I mean there's three main reasons it's expensive so young people say i can't have kids it's too expensive I can't afford to live here or kids say you know what we're just going to wait you know we're not we're only in our 20s we just got married we're gonna wait till we're in our 30s to have kids And so we prolong that and then finally, a lot of young families decide we can only have one child or maybe two because the cost of childcare. So all of these things are combining across the county to see this decline.

You can say well, okay. How do we solve this though? But there could be policies and I say this to every city council and Leslie's I mean, Mr. Rules heard me say this at BCOG is that Can we have our employers do more could just to pick Ojai Valley in shift hours a little bit so families could coordinate can they give Women who are nursing a little bit more time for breaks for pumping can we do things to? Build child care centers where the jobs are and Jen has a great facility right next to where they're at You don't quite have that commercial sector here But place like Ventura could we do that and I encourage the city managers to talk about this in their city manager meetings because Without more young people, we're not going to be able to attract the businesses that we want to come here because there's not going to be a labor force for them.

This is new in the report and you're welcome for all that good news I just shared. So this is new in the report as far as cancers. We break out the incidence of cancer and we break it up by breast cancer or prostate and leukemia And we looked at the 20 or so largest counties, and these numbers are age-adjusted and gender adjusted. But you can see that right there towards the top number seven or eight is Ventura County right behind Marin and Sonoma. So why do we have more incidents of cancer? It could be that we have more people coming down with cancer for environmental or genetic reasons. It could be that we have better doctors who are detecting it. I don't have an answer on that, but what's interesting is that Sonoma, Marin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara are all coastal counties.

Could there be some connection? Or is it just correlation? So no answer. This is the one with breast cancer. And now we can talk public safety, so our county sheriff's department and Sheriff Fryhoff loves this slide. You can see that Ventura County is the safest at least in this report 2024 crime stats. We are the safest of the 15 largest counties in the state and it's actually been this way for a few years. So we continue to be a very safe county, and we also break out these numbers by cities. So you can see that Ojai did have a little uptick there in violent crime but you're so small that it's like two or three assaults could really change. Yes, Ms. O'Rourke?

Yeah I was wondering is anyone tracking the ICE activity and trying to match that against potentially a baseline or in some way to pull that out

It's a great question. We don't have any data for that yet in our next report, perhaps we'd be able to make a look. I'll make a note about that. I don't know how federal arrests correlate with state arrests so I'll have to ask the Sheriff Department's team that looks at these stats as well but that's a good question just what has happened. That's the violent crime, and this is the property crime. More like you would expect of Ojai, a little decline there as we go along. So I'm at about the halfway mark. No, I'm joking. We're almost done.

This is like so interesting. This is

amazing. All right. Well, I know you have a busy agenda. But here we are with food aid. This one is surprising in all cities of the county that people are surprised just how much their neighbors are taking advantage of food that's being provided, in this case by FoodShare and you can see that that's about what 241 A thousand pounds, so almost 800-900 pounds a day is coming into Ojai to help feed your family.

And you look at some of these other cities it's all been skyrocketing and as you probably all know with the passage of the HR1 You're going to see more cuts in some of this funding and families will need to turn to more support. So another nonprofit that's doing great work, but it is surprising everywhere I go just how much is being shared. Here's the homeless counts you've been able to plateau for the city of Ojai.

Some of the other larger cities have had some declines. It's ongoing problem and I know your council looks at this very compassionately and intently. And wrapping up here with transportation, just a slide about how many people are working from home. So we chart this against other counties and you would believe that when COVID hit around 2020 we saw the numbers skyrocket relatively speaking but we saw the increase. But even after the end of the pandemic people said oh I still like this and so we have a lot of people who are continuing to work from home and so we mirror the other counties So with that, I think that's my presentation. I appreciate your time. I'm happy to answer any additional questions for the audience again this is available at www.civicalliance.org and i've got about a dozen books i'll leave them on the back if anybody wants one.

Any questions from the council? That's beautiful information. Yes, thank you so much.

This is so fascinating and it's great to see too where we can improve and where we're doing a good job. I don't recall if you said this or not. Is the data collected from a variety of sources? Is it surveys? How is the data

collected? Good question, thank you. So the data's collected generally we start at the federal level so it's called the American Community Survey which is part of the U.S. Census and we gather a lot of the data there such as gross county product other numbers Then the next level is the state. So we go to the Department of Finance, the sales tax, the transient tax. All of those come from state-level sources. We do have a couple of things that we do on our own which is we retain a contractor to do a lot of the nonprofit sector data.

Most of that comes from a group called Candid. So, we try to go out and look at the sources verifiable. We don't really allow a group, let's say I think of somebody but we just don't let the Chevron station send us the numbers that they want us to use in a sense so we are going against state data and it is all listed in the back there if anybody wants to do little more research.

Excellent thank you so much. Thank you

so much for the presentation okay my pleasure Isn't it incredible? We're going to move on to any commission reports. None received, Mayor. And then City Manager's report.

Thanks, Mayor. A couple items this evening. We do have two new city employees with us and I would like... Don't worry, I'm not gonna ask you to say anything but if I could have Addison and Rocky come forward to the podium just so the Council and the viewing public can see them. I'm just gonna read a little bit here. So here they are. On the left is Addison, on the right is Rocky. Well now they're switching it up on me. Okay, other way around. Rocky Rockwell joins the city as Transit Operations Supervisor. As an Ojai resident, Rocky brings a strong connection to the community and is excited to serve its residents while working with the iconic Ojai Trolley.

Welcome Rocky! Thank you Addison Hernandez joins the Community Development Department as an Associate Planner. Addison will serve as the primary contact during scheduled planning counter hours, assisting members of the public with questions about planning, zoning and development. So Council and community please join me in welcoming both Rocky and Addison to our team. Thank you guys!

Thank you both very much. Appreciate it. And just one more brief announcement, this Wednesday that would be tomorrow there is a town hall being presented by the Ventura County District Attorney Eric Nazarenko. It's a public safety update with a question and answer period following that This town hall is not going to be a City Council member town hall that we discussed at a prior council meeting. This is going to be hosted by yours truly with the assistance of Norma and this will be the DA just providing an update and taking questions it's from 6-7 p.m. It will be right here there are flyers in the back of the room thank you very much

Just at one point, I'd like to add that the DA is an elected position. So this is an elected official who has chosen to come speak to his constituents. So if you are a constituent and you have a question, your vote counts. So thank you.

OK, moving on to public communications. These are public comments that do not have an item on the agenda. I have three cards. Ron Salazano please. And then Carol and then Peter Laramondi.

All right, thank you so much members of council. My name is Ron Solorzano I am the regional librarian for the Ojai Valley and i just want to give a little bit of an update on how things are going uh first of all as everyone knows the Ojai library is being renovated still. I was there today took some pictures inside they've been making a lot of progress on the electrical work mostly right now but they're starting to do some work on the floors and the some of the wall areas as well A lot of holes being drilled, a lot of wires being pulled. And as far as I am aware we are on schedule so we're still looking at that spring 2027 reopening date in the meantime you know some of the my colleagues with the friends had mentioned the Miners Oaks library.

The Miner's Oaks library is doing great right now I over double the number of people coming in that they're used to. So we have a lot of our Ojai friends coming and visiting us at Miner's Oaks. We also have folks visiting us down in Oak View, those are our two closest libraries here in the valley. Both of those locations have so much going on. They have game days, Lego days, they have pause for reading with the therapy dogs.

That's going on I believe it's Wednesday at Miner's Oaks, Thursday at Oak View. Then we have the story time of course going on. We have story time Tuesday morning at the Miner's Oaks Library at 1030 and then we have a story time in the afternoon in Oak View at 3 p.m.. So there's so much going on there, I encourage you to check those libraries out if you haven't already. And then the last thing I want to make sure to plug is the Friends of the Library will be having their annual Ojai Day book sale still here in front of the Ojai Library right here in downtown. So come on by during Ojai day weekends they'll have the book sale going on Friday Saturday and Sunday and that's all I have for now and thank you all so much.

Thank you sir. Carol please, then Peter Laramindi. Yes please.

Good evening council my name is Carol Smith I had the privilege to serve as City Council and twice as mayor for our fine city. I ran for election three times. I was elected by at-large voting Each time, and the first time I ran, my second opponent was a very well-known chap in town named Lenny Klaif. And when the results of the vote was taken, I had won by four votes.

So if people tell you their votes don't count... They are wrong, but I'm very unhappy to tell you at this point thanks to Sacramento's draconian law that we must do regional voting. My vote is now worthless. All that Mr. Whitman has to do to win his seat back is vote for himself, one vote. He is running with no competition. Ms. Mang when she ran two years ago all she needed to become a councilwoman was one vote. She ran unopposed. Mr. Gilman has no competition he needs one vote Why in the world would I vote for these people? They only need one vote.

I suggest everyone who is in the same position where their council or person has no opponent not to vote. This is not democracy, it's authoritarianism. in the worst way, and I can't believe that Sacramento could make us and every other small town do this. I worked so hard. I came to the council. I said please run for council. I extolled the virtues. I said you'll get great health care etc., etc. Did people step up? No! We're just not big enough We only have, I think 3,000 registered voters.

We do not have four neighborhoods and a mayor as a separate position which by the way is ridiculous but i will talk about that another time we don't have enough people to fill those positions normally you should have a conf a contest of two or three opponents and now we have three people who basically One vote, and then guess what? They're on the council again.

I'm serious about this. I am so upset they have taken my right to vote away. I have no choice. This is a serious, serious issue. I am glad we talked about the library and all but I'm telling you everyone listening, this is... We have lost our rights to vote for candidates of a complete slate. One candidate is authoritarianism I can't say more about it.

Thank you, Mr. Peter there Mindy please and then Brian against Hello.

Hi, hi council and city staff. My name is Peter Laramindi and I live on Drown Street. I wanted to talk today about traffic. I'm sure this topic's been reiterated multiple times discussed at exhaustion but anyway, I looked up in the last traffic analysis for the 150 Ojai Avenue was done in 2016 as far as I'm aware That needs to change, something needs to happen.

With that traffic lights are erratic at best as far as timing and so I think that causes issues. I brought one of those traffic light issues up with council before and that's at Fox in Ojai Avenue. There's a discrepancy between when pedestrians are able to walk and cars turning left You have that discrepancy, there's no unison so you have multiple settings. Causes more traffic I assume and then my other little diatribe again is about traffic.

I'm sure this has been brought up before too but the four-way stop at drown is confusing at best And I think that needs to change. And my other issue with council that I hope can be addressed at some point is the different speed limits, particularly north of Ojai Avenue. You have 30 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour. I mean you have 30 miles and 30 miles an hour on Kenyatta with no sidewalks People I noticed that there's an all these new flagging for those speed limit signs People are gonna speed if they have that 30. They're gonna go. I can go 32 33 34 I think it should just be 25 period and Hopefully that can be done. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, sir. Appreciate

it All things that we could bring to our Commission Brian Akins, please. Um

Hello council, pleasure for me to be here. Oftentimes when I come before you have multiple hats on sometimes the museum which I've been a board member for 17 years. Sometimes the HPC 12 years but the thing I enjoy the most each year is putting And doing a commercial for Ojai that's coming up this Saturday from 10 to four. If you don't recognize why I have this on, then you definitely need to come to the jail that's down there.

You'll be one of many when you say I've lived here for 50 years and I've never been in the jail. We love that because we're gonna lock you up for five minutes at least for taking that long to get there. But it's just a wonderful time. The other benefit we have is that there's, in the Historic Preservation Commission, there is a committee that's been putting together historic artwork that will eventually go along the bike trail. So we'll have some samples of that there at the Ojai Jail also.

Another interesting thing is at 11 o'clock and at 2 o'clock We have Richard Sennett. Richard Sennett is the authentic Ventura County ghost hunter, always fun to have him tell stories about the jail and so we invite you to come down there and to enjoy it. And for Chief Abbott Don't worry about handcuffs. I bring my own, I have a whole selection. You know if you're lucky you might make the paper like Stephen and I did last year so just watch out for those cameras okay? So anyway again I want to thank you all and what a wonderful event and it may be less than 100 degrees on Saturday fingers crossed. Anyway thank you all we'll see you Saturday Thank you, Mr. Higgins.

That's my last comment card. Is there anybody online? Yes Mayor we have one raised hand right now for our general public comment period. Brian, Brian you have the ability to unmute and you have the floor. We have no other raised hands after that. Brian I'll give you the ability to unmute one more time and no response so I'll say last call

Is it my turn, Brian Rosen? Yes. It is.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes we can hear you.

Because I can't hear you but you can hear me and I don't know why there's no sound on my side but you're sure you can hear me right? Okay I am very very concerned about the They turned off all the electrical outlets and the homeless people can't charge their phones or anything. And it's a great hardship for people, you know in the park and in the arcade plaza nobody cares about the homeless. I mean, I guess they want to drive them out of town and they won't be able to charge up there, their phones. And also it's very difficult to drive an electric bicycle. I have an electric bicycle. It's a wonderful specialized bicycle And it doesn't go super fast like some of them I have to pedal, but I need to be able to charge it and they turned off all the electrical outlets in the city manager said they were going to do some charging stations.

But I don't know when that's ever gonna happen take a very long time and bicycles really make a difference we need to. Ojai truly has become more and more Car City USA, and we're discouraging bicycles. If somebody drives from Ventura or Santa Barbara there should be a place they can charge their bicycles up at a reasonable rate. And it's all very disturbing that they're just so much trying to discourage us riding bicycles and encourage car driving.

And also the crosswalks are difficult. Why don't you do something like in Encinitas or Santa Monica, where you have the diagonal crosswalks? Where everyone gets to cross in all directions at once and it's very difficult to be a pedestrian. You have to cross one way and then you have to wait to cross the other way. And you could do that on a couple of your intersections maybe just two.

And I just think it's so sad what's happening that more and more automobiles everywhere And also, I was thinking about all the noise every morning. The animals are terrified because all the leaf blowers go off all at once and in the lawnmowers in the city employees are busy doing the parking lot by the arcade plaza with the leaf blowers What did we do before leaf blowers? Ojai was not a filthy place. It was very nice and people, why don't we do a week without leaf blowers so we can have some empathy for how they used to do things. Things were very good and I don't think the people really want leaf blowers. They would rather go back to rakes and brooms like 1983 and before. And that little grassy lawn in Arcade Plaza it's so small then somebody could just use a push lawnmower We don't always have to use technology just because it's there.

These little lawns like in front of City Hall and the Arcade Plaza, you can just use a push lawn mower. So let's... Animals are terrified! They've been terrorized since 19... whenever leaf blowers first came on the scene and every morning everywhere you see...

Sorry that we're out of time but thank you I have everything noted. Anybody else online? That's all Mayor. Okay All right, we're moving on to the on the consent calendar. I have one public comment card on the consent calendar. Mark epic please you'd like and then if anybody else wants to comment on the consent calendar please do give us a card Mr. Miley okay come after come after mark thank you Well, because you gave me the clue. You gave me the parenthetical. Thank you for that.

You get an A. You get an eight. Mr. Mayor? Good evening City Council people and staff. Good evening. Thanks for letting me speak after years of public hearings and countless deliberations by the city council and the Parks and Recreation Commission. It is apparent that one segment of the community is simply trying to delay the adoption of Ordinance 974 By raising issues stemming from 50-year old documents, the 1971 deed conveys Upper Libbey Park to the city and the mid 1970s federal and state grants to the city for the original 1976-1977 construction of the Lower Libby Courts.

It is alleged that there may be restrictions contained in these documents that might somehow preclude the adoption of the Ordinance 974. Which merely deals with the use of the Libbey Park Public Tennis Courts for the playing of tennis. But no such restrictions exist. The 1971 D pertaining to Upper Libbey Park merely specifies that the park is to be used as a public park and place of recreation and pleasure for the people of the Ojai Valley, and that the city make appropriate portions of the park available for tennis or a tennis tournament and similar non-profit recreational events such has been conducted in the past and may reasonably be expected to continue or expand in the future.