City Council — September 28, 2026

Good evening everyone. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Mr. City Attorney, are there any reports from closed session?

Thank you Madam Mayor nothing to report out of closed session.

Thank you very much, I know how much you like the attention. Roll call

Are there

any items for agenda review?

Yes Madam Mayor we have two item 3C4 the Runkle Canyon quarterly update has been postponed to a meeting in October and then consent item 1 has a supplemental report thank you

I move that all resolutions and ordinances presented tonight be read in title only. All further reading be waived. Second.

Call for the vote.

The motion passes unanimously.

Thank you Madam Clerk, if any member of the City Council may have a conflict of interest or any reason why that member must abstain from consideration of any matter on this agenda he or she should so declare at this time. Seeing none you can proceed.

a dime a day, but our real job is to take care of the entire residency, the entirety of our county And when you break it down that way, it's just a little over a penny a day that we are spending. And what we spend that money on is everything to serve our foundational principles which are these. Our mission is to engage participants in meaningful experiences and our vision is to build community and connection.

Now, that mission has evolved over the years but our purpose never has which is to preserve and protect the history of our region. I want to go back to our collections for a second As you can see, we have about 250,000 individual items and we don't just protect those. We use all of those to create publications, exhibits, programs. Our historical journal alone which has numerous articles on Simi Valley, we have over 600 original articles all researched from our collections.

And so tonight, using that collection I would like to share a glimpse of what our archives can tell all of us about the history of Simi Valley. So I'm going to start with a history lesson. Now you all know your recent history way better than anybody else, so I'm going to start way back 13,000 years ago when this place was home to the Chumash Native Americans. The word simi comes from shmi, which means thin threaded clouds. It's a Chumash word.

About 500 years ago, we were visited by Juan Cabrillo, a Portuguese sailor sailing on behalf of Spain. And he claimed this area as part of Spain. About 250 years ago, the region was colonized by Spain. 200 years ago Mexico revolted against Spain and this area swore allegiance to Mexico. And then about 175 years ago there was the Mexican-American War. We became part of the United States and ultimately became a state in 1850.

So let's start our history right in that middle part, in that Spanish colonial occupation. So right before 1800, Spain had claimed this area but had no citizens living here which left the area vulnerable to be taken over by other people like the English or the Russians most threateningly. So to protect it, Spain aggressively recruited married men with families to come and live here. Now their wives were not so happy about it, so to keep them here they awarded ranchos These huge tracts of land in order to keep and maintain families here.

And those ranchos that you see here. roughly correspond with our current day city limits. So Rancho Semi, I'm sorry it's kind of blurry in there was the sixth of over 500 ranchos that were ultimately awarded in the state of California. It's one of the top five largest ranchos. It was awarded in 1795 113,000 acres to Santiago de la Cruz Pico And here you can see it's much larger than current day Simi Valley, which is about 27,000 acres. About a fifth the size of the original rancho.

The Saticoy family sold that rancho to Don Jose de la Guerra whose name you know from Santa Barbara In, let me just I want to get this right. In 1842 for $3,000 that was three cents an acre just so you know and for 30 years after that it was almost entirely used to graze cattle. That's what most Ventura County ranches were used for And after the 1849 gold rush, cattle became hugely profitable. For example, yearly sales from Rancho Semi ranged from $50,000 to $100,000 per year which translates to two to four million dollars in today's money so it was incredibly lucrative for the ranchos but then in the 1860s everything fell apart Severe floods and droughts ended the cattle boom, and rancheros had to prove their land ownership to the new politics who were in charge of the United States.

And they could not. Every rancho in the county was sold or lost. The de la Guerra family was lucky enough to be able to sell Rancho Semi. In 1870, most of it was purchased by the Philadelphia and California Petroleum Company, this time for about 65 cents an acre. Values are going up. The sale was brokered by this guy, future U.S. Senator Thomas Bard. When there was no oil to be found, Thomas Bard and six partners formed the Semi Land & Water Company to subdivide and sell the land. This is when farmers began to come in The first buyers were farmers who raised sheep and eventually barley. Simi actually grew about a third of the county's barley in the late 1800s, and honey was also a major export.

But the Simi Land and Water Company wanted more people, smaller lots. So they developed a marketing campaign and they marketed Rancho Simi as this bucolic destination. And they built this hotel and advertised land nationwide for between $10 and $100 an acre. Those ads were very effective and they caught the eyes of a group of doctors in Chicago who bought two square miles and named it Simiopolis.

In their plan, they sold families a house kit. They sold it to them for $300. They would ship that house kit across the country. Families just had to go out there and get there, and then they would have the house kit, and they would build their house in this bucolic wonderful place. Well, here's one of those houses, and there are still a few. Three, there's at least two at the Strathern. I'm sorry, I don't remember. And in 1888, 12 families arrived to build these houses themselves.

Almost all of them left, okay? They gave it a good try. They were contractors. It was muddy. It was dirty. They had no idea what they were doing and almost everybody turned around and went back to Chicago. And they might all have left were it not for this man This is Moroni Stones, there on the left. He arrived in Simi in 1886. He was a farmer and a mechanic who turned out to be a water witch which is a dowser so there were no rivers. There weren't any creeks down where Cineapolis was. The only water they had was the rain. They had to find artesian wells and this man was a master at finding these artesian wells he was known throughout the county. He worked throughout the county And he helped those early settlers actually get there and stay.

So growth was pretty slow, even so here's a photo of Simi Valley. This is in 1968 when the population was 8000 people huge leap from 200 in 1900. But here I want to show you I hope this will work. This is a chart that shows the growth of individual cities and you'll be really remarkable to see how much larger Santa Paula in particular was than Simi Valley for so long.

Well, no. Now, well it's an amazing chart and I'm going to send it to you. And you can look and see how Simi Valley was tracked. OK so I'm going to stop my history lesson there. Everything in this talk, I want to say, was found in our Simi Valley collections. We have journals, we have photographs, we have articles, we have maps, much more. And I really want to take a moment to say we were able to relaunch our oral history program last year and we got an oral history with Pat Havens in January of this year before she sadly passed away. And she was a true community treasure and without her, the history of this city would just not be known in the same way.

Before I close, I want to thank you. You have provided support to us. You provided a grant of $25,000 back in 2023 for the 150th anniversary of the creation of the county. Since then we've installed two exhibits here. We featured a lot of Simi Valley artifacts in our exhibits. These are the partners that we work with directly in your community and in School participation in particular, you were the first high school district to adopt our new curriculum unwritten. We have interns from you, we've given away $2,000 in art scholarships and also I think I missed it, we also made direct grants to Simi Valley organizations of $5,000 back during the 150th to support the community.

I'm gonna stop but before I do that, we are able to tell this story because of everything that we gathered You know, back 150-125 years ago. We would like to continue to do that. We would love for you to share with us who else we should get oral histories from? What kinds of artifacts we should be taking care of? We take our mandate to guard our collective county history and the individual stories of the cities very, very seriously so we would love for your input on that. And lastly, I'd like to invite you to some of our exhibits.

We have Jungleland opening week from Friday and Parallel Histories up in Ventura. Thank you so much for giving me this time.

Mayor, stay up here. I think we have either comments or questions please. Mayor Pro Tem Litster.

Thank you. I just actually want to say thank you first of all for attending our State of the City which was lovely. You were right there and I'm so impressed. I understand that you're presenting all over the county but yet you have made this very specific to our city and my hat's off to you because something tells me you're doing this for every other city as well trying to be specific to their unique history

I may report him, I am actually I feel so lucky to work at the museum. I am deeply interested in why the individual cities are as different as they are because they each have their such a clear personality and culture. And so it's it's a joy for me to be able to dig into that history

Thank you for sharing that because you certainly wouldn't don't have to, but that was lovely. And if I'm not mistaken, the exhibit that was at the Spanish Heritage Festival this weekend was brought by with beautiful photographs put together from your collection, if I'm not mistaken?

Yes, it was. We're very proud.

Beautiful and the descriptions in English and Spanish is a beautiful presentation. Thank you so much. So thank you. Is that a collection that has on loan that goes throughout the county or we just got lucky?

No, we installed that in the Agriculture Museum in Santa Paula about a year ago. There are these huge photographs and it is such a compelling and popular exhibit that we really wanted to get it out to the entire county. It has residents from everywhere including from Simi Valley in that exhibit. And so we're really trying to bring that out so that everybody can see the plurality of our communities.

It was absolutely beautiful. Thank you for your time and efforts in spearheading this and making it so embrace the entire county. Much appreciated, thank you.

Madam Mayor and members of the City Council, next on the agenda is item 3C2, Ventura County Fire Department second quarter 2026 update by Ventura County Fire Department Division Chief Matt Fallett.

Welcome chief thank you.

Thank you very much. Give me a little bit of time up here just to give you a quick quarter two brief on the response levels, the data, the stats if you will as it relates to the fire department serving our community here. I also want to take a little bit of time and just give you a couple brief updates on the department as a whole and how it is going to change the way we respond and provide services to the city so on that we'll get started hopefully I can do this correctly All right, I got that.

We'll start off with just a quick recap of your community fire department. As you probably know, you have six fire stations here in the city of Simi. All them are geographically spaced to provide services throughout the entire community You have fire station 41 at the heart of it off Church Street, which has a ladder truck a large hundred foot ladder aerial truck. A fire engine with water and a rescue ambulance with two firefighters paramedics as well as the command vehicle out of there which you'll see in a second where the battalion chief works and then Fire Station 43 serves the east end of town with a singular fire engine 45 serves the west end of town with a singular fire engine. And then 46 and 47 serve the ever-growing population towards the north end, both northeast and northwest.

And then Fire Station 44 is over in the Wood Ranch area. And that has another ladder truck as well. So this is the rolling stock of our fire department that provides services here in the city. Like we talked about, the fire engine up on the left is carrying 500 gallons of water. Every single fire station in the city has one of those and then the ladder truck there 100 foot ladder with specialized equipment Rescue ambulances, which we have one here in our community.

The light fleet vehicle of the supervisor, the battalion chief and then down below We have three Blackhawk helicopters that provide wildland fire suppression as well as remote rescues Those are carrying a thousand gallons water and then our hand crew vehicles. We have four hand crews here in the county One of them is assigned to this area and that's a 20 member hand crew So this was the stats for the second quarter.

This is just a three-month profile, so this is going to be April to June of this year. There was over 3,000 calls for service in the city of Simi alone that the fire department provided Consistently over a rolling 12 month period, we handle between 119 and 13,000 calls for service in the city of Simi specifically. As you can see the vast majority of those are medical related in nature during the second quarter there was 2,519 and then you can see up at the top chart there, we handle between 2900 and 3100 calls consistently quarter to quarter here in the city of Simi and that is obviously increasing year by year for numerous reasons Which we'll touch on but during that second quarter, which like I stated before is April to June there were seven wildfires in the city.

11 structure fires so building fires and then 25 other miscellaneous type fires. As we stack up to the remainder of the county, the city of Simi consistently is second in line to Thousand Oaks regarding call volume needs for service. That's largely due to population density and increased aging population. And so as you can see those numbers tend to stay together though they are increasing year-to-year, the ones around them increase too.

This is just another chart showing the types of calls that were going on, like we talked about before. The vast majority are medical and then your lower percentiles of actual fire. Surprisingly enough here in the city largely due to thoroughfares, we do have a decent percentile of rescue component both traffic collision related as well as the beautiful hiking areas around here tend to increase our remote rescues and helicopter rescues.

Just another chart here, probably don't want to focus too much on the bubble chart because you can't really tell what that shows you outside of the fact that I can almost promise you the population increases the thicker those bubbles are. But most notably it's kind of interesting when you look at the timeframe differential up top, the top right number of incidents by hour of the day. That changes usually based on season so as you can see our highest profile in the city of Simi tends to be right around between noon and three Obviously it's going to diminish and decrease through the night hours, but depending on the weather you see massive fluctuations in that.

So that was the quick brief of the stats and analytics for our provisions to the City of Simi Valley. I want to just take a couple minutes and touch on a few updates with the Fire Department as it relates to our city, so we'll just go down the line here. For starters, and this was even touched on before, we all recognize the fact that we're in the high 90th percentile for an El Nino year.

Now, contrary to popular belief that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be an extremely wet El Nino year but it is definitely trending in that direction. Stronger than its really ever been seen on record. So with that we've been doing a lot of preparatory work. We've developed an El Nino task force Through the county, we're cooperating with VCSO, the Sheriff's Department and VC OES as well as coordinating with National Weather Service. We're doing weekly El Nino briefs and then with that we're going back to our cities that we provide services too. Obviously my responsibility lucky enough for me because I love it here is with Simi Valley OES so I've been working with Eileen as well as the public works department in depth. We got quite a few plans coming up for meetings as well as some exercises we're gonna be doing I also wanted to bring attention to everyone that we are going to be increasing our sand loading for sandbags.

So every fire station in the county is going to have sand pits, they're gonna be set up out front of the fire station I'm unsure if you're aware but not every fire station has sand pits and the vast majority of them have them behind the station gate. And as you can imagine, when rains come especially calls for service go up. And so for the public to be able to go in and service their own sand needs without the fire station filled with firefighters is next to impossible. So we're going to be setting these boxes up, if you will. And they're just going to have anywhere from a yard to three yards of sand. So anywhere from 3,000 and 9,000 pounds of sand are gonna be dropped. They'll have signs and it will be more of a self-service setup.

Additionally, just to bring attention to it, we'll be doing a sandbag demo at the Simi Valley Street Fair coming up. Eileen's been nice enough to coordinate that with me so that should be fun. I haven't filled the sandbag in a while so that can be interesting. I might lose. Moving on, I just wanted to bring to your awareness as well we're gonna be starting a new Academy in January. We'll be bringing on 37 new recruits probably about a quarter of those are going to be coming out here to the City of Simi and with that it's an academy that's made up of already firefighters from other areas both in the state and out-of-the-state as well as paramedics and a good contingent of our hand crew members will be moving into that too This is also going to be the first academy that we're going to be utilizing our new burn buildings.

And so I want to take this opportunity to show you those really quick as well as invite you down at any time to tour this facility and these buildings, get a firsthand look at live fire and the new technology that we have for that. So this is gonna be our residential fire prop. It's set up just like a two-story home that you would see, it's about I think 1750 square footage wise but front entry there on the left, you have rear stairwell in the back and this is a class A combustible fire building so we'll be burning wood, straw getting extremely high temperatures and heat. This is where you really feel and see exactly what fighting fire on the inside of a building is like This is our new Class B building.

It's gigantic, as you can tell and it's set up to be a three-story commercial structure on one side what we call a taxpayer so there's two stories of work above like a strip mall if you will an outlet mall and then on the other side it's supposed to be like a two story center hallway multi occupancy in this building. We're burning propane and so we have 100% control of it And so this allows us to basically create fire dynamics that normally are very difficult to create on our own with class A combustibles.

So with that, we can create rollover environments without a whole lot of heat too. It's not gonna get much higher than 300 or 350 degrees in this building versus like 800 to 1,000 in the other one. And then lastly I just wanted to briefly touch on a few operational initiatives that were just pushed out. This year has been a firefighter safety based year Well, every year should be a firefighter safety-based year but this year we've actually put out a couple initiatives to spearhead a safer work environment for our people. Just like all other forms of work in this country it's changing dramatically and the fire environment and the emergency environment has changed dramatically too so with that increased cancer rates have gone up dramatically with our firefighters not just in our department but departments around us so we have new decontamination procedures that we're holding our people to.

We have status added, so you might notice through PulsePoint and whatnot that incidents are remaining open a lot longer and a lot of that has to do with us decontaminating our firefighters now when they are exposed to different things. Along with that decontamination, the exposures, we all know that lithium ion batteries in EV fires are increasing rapidly. It's safe to say that a high percentile of our building fires have some type of lithium ion battery involvement With lithium-ion battery fires comes a whole new hazard of explosion, as well as the vapor itself being a bone seeker or creating massive medical issues long run. So with that we've built these SOGs which are standard operating guidelines on new methodology on how to fight these fires that's been pulled from international sources and right here back at home but it's evolving every month it seems to be changing so that is a continuous effort growth in that initiative And then our May Day, which Mayor Cavanaugh your good friend Jenna Merrill, Captain Jenna Merrill.

She spearheaded the May Day project and it has been amazing that's ultimately helping with our firefighter safety as well. If you don't know a May Day is basically when a firefighter calls for help in the emergency environment. And believe it or not up until three years ago we didn't really have a standard process for how that went and what it looked like. So over the course of about two and a half years, Captain Jenna Merrill and Captain Kyle Arledge worked with myself and the Ops Work Group team to build an entire Mayday package. And with that we've done training countywide including with the Op area so the City of Ventura, the City of Oxnard and all of our cities that we serve. So with that we're hopefully creating a slightly safer work environment for our people so we can all go home at the end of the shift.

And that pretty much concludes my presentation. So, obviously I have a slide that says questions or comments so I wanted to open it up for all of you.

They'll have questions and comments. Okay. Councilmember Judge is first.

Thank you Madam Mayor I would highly suggest all the council members take him up on that tour of the fire center down there in Camarillo, right? Yes sir. Because I went down there for your open house, I believe. Awesome. Great tour. Awesome stuff you guys are doing. It's very impressive. Also what can we tell the citizens around Simi Valley about VC Alert?

Thank you for bringing that up, Council Member Judge. VC Alert is a crucial piece or it's a crucial app that you should get for your phone as well as when you sign up for it. It's also part of VC Emergency and what that is is its early awareness or as early awareness as possible for evacuation notices throughout the county. It does serve the city of Simi Valley and we're actually working hand in hand with Simi Valley OES and VC OES To make sure that all of those evacuation areas are in line so so everyone knows the arena that we're playing in. It was utilized most recently on the Sandy Fire, and I will say that having been an incident commander on that fire.

We couldn't have safely got the amount of people out that we needed to if it wasn't for VC Alert. So, if you aren't signed up for VC Alert and or VC Emergency they'll both bring you to the same places please do so and it's very easy. It's real-time awareness and alerting for evacuations in your neighborhood. For those who don't know everyone's neighborhood is in a zone in the county and so when that zone gets hit or called by one of us to evacuate you get that real time

Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. Hopefully I didn't run on right there for you, Council Member. I said hopefully I didn't run on for you. Keep going. All right.

Thank

you. Mayor Pro Tem Litster. Thank you for your presentation. Very informative. Two questions actually. I appreciated learning about your plans for sand pits in front of the stations If someone is being threatened and such wants to go avail themselves, do they need to bring their own bags to fill it up or how does that work?

Great question Mayor Pro Tem. No they don't I will say that the downfall with having sand pits out front is there's no control of them

Right,

so we tend to when it gets really busy and the firefighters are able to assist residents with filling sandbags or at least allowing them into the back gate. We tend to control the number that we give out and we try and hold between 10 and 20 per person unless it's a major emergency and if it's a major emergency chances are the firefighters already going to be your house. So when you leave it out front those sandbags tend to find legs and 50 to 60 to 70 of them run off.

But we will try to fill them back up as quick as possible.

Now I appreciate that one other question this is a curiosity, you statistics of calls and responses by city etc. I was intrigued to notice that Simi Valley think had 22% of the county thousand Oaks had 30%, were about the same size population. What do you attribute the higher level with to? I'm just trying to understand

that. There is a there is a population difference, as you know, slightly population difference. But the other part is the aging piece of the community, the higher elderly There's also increased commercial occupancy that brings in a lot of people- not that the city doesn't. But there's more multi occupancy dwellings there- and then the size of thousand oaks from a geographical standpoint is such that- response they're they encompass a lot more just than just Newbury Park right Westlake area and that line Lake Sherwood City of Simi is purely the city of Simi for the most part. So I just

said

yeah,

well

Thank

you for your problem really appreciate it Councilmember Ayala

Thank You hi Did you I might have missed it did you mention when the sandbags would be available

I did not. I don't have that exact information right now. I'll be working with the city manager and obviously Simi Valley OES to let them know as soon as we're going to get them out Our plans and intentions from the task force side is to have all this wrapped up through the month of October, and being able to have them set up for November. A lot of that is going to be based on the weather patterns though right? We don't want to put them out too early because if that sand sits in the sun it dries up and pretty much turns into concrete. So it's really gonna be in line with the National Weather Service and I will say that our ability to move them out to all the stations can be done in a day or two with our wildland division.

All right, and you talked about VC alert. Does that interact with watch duty at all or is that two different should people have both apps? What would you say?

Yeah great question so they're completely separate apps. It does interact in the sense that watch duty monitors and utilizes VC alert for laying the same layers down for an evacuation. So if you're going to have to pick one of them, pick VC alert for your own well-being in this county and in the city of Simi Valley. Watch duty is much more intelligence and information driven on a grander scale. I think there's for just normal civilian use it's a lot But with that, it will also tell you when evacuations are put in play through VC Alert. It just won't tell you that you're part of that evacuation.

Okay and then the last question is shifting a little bit. We're going to talk about the Sandy Fire later today and I think at the Neighborhood Council meeting you mentioned who was the entity for doing the investigation? Can you just give a little information about that? Not what's happening but who oversees it

Well, the county of Ventura and the state of California have major parts of that investigation. So we're working with Cal Fire because they're part of it right? And then obviously our arson unit is still an active investigation so I can't really speak as to where we are at with that investigation and those things just yet but when that information Is salvageable and usable? I'll absolutely bring it to

the council. Yeah, I only bring it up because community members may believe that it's a local jurisdiction that is responsible for that investigation and therefore will ask Why haven't you guys shared things? And so I wanted, I know that I learned from you that it really is in partnership with the state and CAL FIRE. And so it's a much bigger process than us just being able to share the information right away.

Yeah there are state and federal regulations that drive it depending on home loss certainly life loss property loss, conservation. Things like even having the San Jose field lab within that path changes things right? So all these things kind of drive us and guide us into a much more extensive investigation. Okay thank you. Yeah no problem thank you.

Council Member Rhoads.

Thank You Madam

Mayor. You have a tough job. You have to me a scary job and a dangerous job. You recently had a firefighter injured out here on the 118. How are they doing?

Thank you for asking that. Yes, we did. We transferred him last night to Cedars-Sinai and he's doing okay in the sense that he's alive and he's maintaining stable vitals however he's got a long road ahead for surgeries Yes, for those of you who don't know we had a very unfortunate accident in the early morning hours yesterday right here on the 118 at the Tapo Canyon off ramp where one of our great fire engineers and I sincerely mean that he is an incredible firefighter and he served this city through his entire career thus far was struck by a vehicle. And we're very thankful and lucky and blessed that he's still with us but he does have a long road ahead so. I will say I certainly didn't mean to go this route but You know, Madam Mayor the entire City Council and city staff thank you so much for your comments reaching out yesterday.