City Attorney Larry McLaughlin is retiring and the search is on for a replacement

City Council recap for May 7: Other topics included salary schedule revisions and a strange battle over who gets to be the city's insurance rep

All members of the city council were present for the May 7 city council meeting, including Mayor Diana Rich, Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman, Councilmember Sandra Maurer, Councilmember Jill McLewis, and Councilmember Neysa Hinton.

Everyone expected this to be a short meeting. After all, how long could it take to make it through three small, relatively bureaucratic agenda items? Answer: way longer than it should have.

Proclamations

The evening began with proclamations declaring May 2024 as Drowning Prevention and National Water Safety Month, as well as Bike To Work Month. This week was proclaimed as National Police Week, National Public Works Week, and Municipal Clerk Week.

Learn to Swim coordinator Greg Jacobs and Ives Pool Director Ricardo Freitas were on hand to collect the certificate for Drowning Prevention and National Water Safety Month—and the question over whether they’d be allowed to say a few words necessitated a council powwow.

Turns out that the council’s Agenda Committee had unilaterally decided that, in order to save time at council meetings, honorees would henceforth simply come and shake hands with the councilmembers and collect their certificates, without the usual few minutes at the mic. Other councilmembers were surprised (and not happy) to hear this.

In the end, Jacobs was allowed to say a few words. From him we learned that Ives Pool is celebrating its 80th anniversary and that Rotary’s Learn to Swim program, which has taught more than 30,000 kids to swim, is in its 40th year.

Public comment for items not on the agenda

Then came public comment, which many listeners including this reporter have come to dread for reasons that will become apparent. It started off with former County Supervisor Ernie Carpenter taking Councilmember Stephen Zollman to task for liking a pro-Palestinian “River to the Sea” comment somewhere on Instagram. Carpenter declared this was an example of antisemitism and demanded that Zollman unlike the post. (No response was forthcoming from Zollman, who should win an award for his poker face.)

Skip Jirrels and Linda Robinett put in a word for Map Your Neighborhood and the Sebastopol Neighborhood Communications Unit, hoping to save it from the budget axe.

The frequent commenter known only as Admin noted the proliferation of RVs belonging to the homeless outside of the former Horizon Shine site. He asked why the city wasn’t enforcing its no overnight parking ordinance. (See our article on this issue here.)

Then came the long parade of neo-Nazis—six speakers with two minutes each to spout their racist and antisemitic vitriol. The last comment was a full-throated defense of Hitler.

Consent Calendar

In addition to the approval of minutes from previous meetings, the council unanimously approved the following:

• Approval of a contract for Sustainable Transportation Grant consultant Fehr & Peers in the amount of $260,000. The funding for this contract was provided by the Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant that the city won last year.

• Approval of Vision Zero resolution, urging a goal of zero traffic deaths.

• Receipt of notification of request to suspend recruitment for an upcoming vacancy on the Public Arts Committee;

• Approval of weed abatement notification and the setting of a public hearing date.

Councilmembers Neysa Hinton and Jill McLewis requested that another consent item—a letter of support for zero-emission new construction building standards—be taken off the consent agenda and added to the regular agenda for discussion later in the evening.

Regular Agenda

Salary Schedule Revision

The first item was a revision to the city’s publicly available pay schedule to include salary and salary ranges for approved positions, including new City Manager Don Schwartz ($245,000 a year) and the not-yet-hired Community Development position ($156,000 to $190,000 a year). This passed unanimously.

Choosing a representative to REMIF and CIRA

The next item involved the appointment of a representative for the City of Sebastopol to the board of the California Intergovernmental Risk Authority (CIRA) and Redwood Empire Municipal Insurance Fund (REMIF). City Attorney Larry McLaughlin, who is retiring on June 30, is the current representative. The new representative could be either a staff member or a councilmember.

REMIF is a self-insured joint powers authority established in 1976 to handle the insurance claims, benefit programs, and insurance needs for its 15 member cities, of which Sebastopol is one. The insurance portion of REMIF merged into the larger CIRA in 2021, though REMIF still handles benefits programs.

Being a representative to these groups involves going to two meetings a year in Sacramento.

You might not think that this would be a hotly contested position, but you would be wrong.

Two councilmembers—Neysa Hinton and Stephen Zollman—tossed their hats in the ring, both of whom wanted to be the primary representative. City Clerk/Assistant City Manager Mary Gourley has been the alternate representative for several years and offered to continue in that position. But with two council members vying for the primary position, the suggestion was made that one councilmember become the primary representative and one become the alternate.

It was tentatively suggested by Councilmember McLewis—and seconded by Mayor Rich—that Zollman, who is an attorney, be the primary representative, since he still has two years more to serve on the council and Hinton is up for re-election in November. This made Councilmember Hinton, who has served on the council for eight years and often feels she’s getting the short end of the stick, cry (or least get choked up). Rather than call for a vote (which would have seemed like a popularity contest), the council decided to draw lots. City Manager Schwartz dug a coin out of his pocket, ready for a coin toss. Councilmember Maurer, however, suggested guessing a number between 0 and 100. Whoever was closest would get to be the primary representative. Hinton won. She will be the primary voting representative, and Zollman will be the alternate.

Deciding on the process for evaluating city attorney proposals

City Attorney Larry McLaughlin will be retiring at the end of June. He has been city attorney since 1987 and had a split role as city manager/city attorney from 2013 to 2023. Now the search is on for his replacement. The city issued a request for proposals (RFP) for city attorney services, with a deadline of May 1. Four law firms submitted proposals. The point of this item was to decide on the interview procedure.

The staff report offered three options:

1. City staff would review the proposals to determine if the RFPs met the scope of work listed in the proposal and forward those that did to the council for interviews at an open city council meeting.

2. City staff would review the proposals to determine if the RFPs met the scope of work listed in the proposal, conduct first interviews, and then city council would conduct second interviews at an open city council meeting.

3. City council would review all proposals and interview all proposals at an open city council meeting.

It became clear early on that the majority of the city council wanted to steer this particular ship themselves, without the input of city staff. City Manager Schwartz said it would be common for applicants to call him to ask about the city and the job environment. Councilmember McLewis was particularly insistent that the city manager not have interactions with the candidates before the council had a chance to interview them.

“You don’t have equal employees interview each other,” she said. “It’s just a matter of process.”

This idea was echoed by both Mayor Rich, who worried about applicants currying favor with the city manager, and Councilmember Zollman, who expressed a preference for a City Attorney/City Manager relationship where clashes of opinion are frequent.

After much back and forth, a proposed motion (an elaborated version of Option 3) was cobbled together from council comments: The City Council will interview the four city attorney firms that have submitted their proposal, during either the week of May 28 or the following week. The interviews will be conducted in an open forum. The city’s HR consultant will do the reference checks and suggest interview questions to the council, along with creating a scoring criteria. The council won’t make a selection on the night of the interviews, but will vote for their preferred candidates at the next meeting. Finally, the City Manager and Assistant City Manager were directed to have minimal contact with applicants before the city council had a chance to interview them.

The council unanimously approved this motion.

Council agrees to send a letter of support for zero-emission new construction building standards

According to the staff report, “On September 7, 2023, twenty-six cities and counties sent a letter to Governor Newsom and state agencies supporting zero-emission new construction building standards statewide in the 2025 update to the State Building Energy Efficiency Standards. By supporting these efforts, Sebastopol will join these jurisdictions in encouraging the State to move towards zero-emission buildings, which refer to buildings that have no combustion-based equipment or appliances installed.”

Steve Pierce, who is a member of the city’s Climate Action Committee, spoke in favor of sending the letter to the governor.

“If we don’t go with electricity in our buildings and in our cars, there’s no way we’re going to meet our climate goals,” he said. At the same time, he assured the council that this letter was basically a suggestion which didn’t mandate anything.

Councilmember Hinton and McLewis, who had pulled this item from the consent calendar, objected to sending this letter for fear that it would result in more regulation, stifling the development of new homes.

“I don’t want to see more restrictions on building,” McLewis said. She also noted that the electric grid was unreliable.

Hinton said much the same, adding that the Sonoma County Regional Climate Protection Authority, of which she is a member, had declined to endorse the letter.

These objections were overridden by a council majority of Mayor Rich, Vice Mayor Zollman and Councilmember Maurer, who thought it was a move in the right direction toward a carbon neutral future. Rich called it “aspirational.” It won on a 3 to 2 vote, with McLewis and Hinton dissenting.

News from the city manager

City Manager Don Schwartz’s report to the city council was full of tantalizing information. He announced that the Gold Ridge Fire District Board of Directors would be considering a contract with the city of Sebastopol to provide Fire services through September. [Editor’s note: the board approved the contract.]

“This is following the decision to pursue Fire District consolidation,” he said. “If they approve that, which I anticipate and hope will happen, it means a couple of different things. One it means that they will be taking on our fire chief responsibilities. Their chief will be our chief, but their deputy chief will be acting for the most part in that role.”

Schwartz also mentioned that the city will be moving “emergency management responsibilities” from the fire department to the police department.

“To some extent that is happening informally anyway, but it’s a role that I think we have responsibilities for, and we can best meet them if we keep that in house,” Schwartz said. “Chief Nelson has also taken on more responsibility around traffic issues (as we try and reduce the expenses for our city engineer given our fiscal constraints) and also more around homelessness, so his plate continues to get a little bit bigger, and he's been very open and cheerful about taking that on.”