CORRECTION: Vice Mayor McLewis blasts public reaction to council's choice of a new garbage hauler

Recap of the Jan. 21 Sebastopol City Council meeting: bike trails, fire funding, and a controversial garbage decision revisited

CORRECTION: Our post this morning suggested that the Sebastopol City Council voted a second time on Tuesday to give the contract to SCRR. They did not. They awarded the contract at the previous council meeting. At Tuesday’s meeting, they were voting on certain terms of the SCRR contract, namely on which rate option to choose and the franchise fee. The article below has been corrected in several places to reflect this. We apologize for the confusion.

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Despite more pleas from the public at the Jan. 21 city council meeting, the Sebastopol City Council reiterated its support of the new garbage contract with SCRR. The council chose a new SCRR rate schedule and approved a franchise fee. Councilmember Sandra Maurer and Vice Mayor Jill McLewis, members of the council’s Solid Waste Ad Hoc, gave long—and in McLewis’s case, furious—explanations of their decision to endorse SCRR.

The council also made quick work of four other items, approving a funding agreement with the county for Measure H (the fire tax), the Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan, an MOU with the city union SEIU, and the annual report from Police Chief Ron Nelson on the use of surveillance technology.

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All council members were present for the Jan. 21 Sebastopol City Council meeting, including Mayor Stephen Zollman, Vice Mayor Jill McLewis, Councilmember Phill Carter, Councilmember Neysa Hinton, and Councilmember Sandra Maurer.

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Public comment for items not on the agenda

Farmworker advocate Maria Membrila, who was featured in our most recent article on Woodmark, told the council about the 48 Woodmark apartments which were supposed to go to farmworkers but had been leased to others.

“I don’t know if you have any power or if there’s anything you can do, but I wanted to let the public know and for you to become aware that this is a situation that’s happening,” Membrila said.

Noting that this project has two phases—Phase 1, with 48 units, and the still-to-be-built Phase 2, with 36 units—Membrila asked that the next 36 units be reserved for farmworkers and that 10 units from the 48-unit batch be leased to farmworker families as they become vacant.

“I’m happy to volunteer and support that,” she said, “We do need to hold them accountable.”

There were a few other public comments as well. Kyle Falbo echoed this concern about the goings-on at Woodmark and wondered if the city had been complicit somehow. Sunny Galbraith spoke to support the proposed changes in the farmers market permit—earlier operating hours, use of the West America parking lot—and also chastised the council for not engaging the city’s Climate Action or Zero Waste committees in the choice of a solid waste hauler. Myriah Volk of the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce reported that their small business gathering in mid-January had been very successful, but warned the council that most of the city’s businesses don’t feel appreciated or supported by the city government—and that the council’s recent decision to change garbage haulers had just exacerbated this feeling.

Consent Calendar

The consent calendar was twice as long as usual because Michael Hilber, a Santa Rosa resident, accused the council of violating the Brown Act because the address of the council meeting had inadvertently been left off the agenda for the last meeting. This made for an extraordinarily long list of consent calendar items, which you can find in a sidebar at the end of this article.

Phill Carter requested that the final consent calendar item—the approval of a new rate schedule and franchise fee for the contract with Sonoma County Resource Recovery (SCRR) —be moved to the regular agenda for further discussion.

Regular Agenda

Mayor Zollman asked for a show of hands to gauge the number of people who’d showed up to comment on the solid waste vote, and seeing most of the hands in the room go up, he moved that item to the top of the agenda.

Additions to the Solid Waste Contract with SCRR

Altogether, 23 people rose to speak about the council’s decision to award the city’s solid waste contract to SCRR instead of Recology. All but two of those—an SCRR employee and former city council candidate Oliver Dick—begged the council to change their mind or at least delay further decisions until they could answer questions from residents and local businesses.

When it came time for the council to comment on the issue, Vice Mayor McLewis, a member of the city council’s Solid Waste Ad Hoc, leaped into a 12-minute excoriation of Recology and some members of the public who supported Recology and opposed the decision of the council. Her voice vibrated with anger as she rebuked Recology, Ky Boyd of the Rialto, and some members of the general public for their behavior, which she compared to the uncivil, vitriolic sort that one usually sees only in national politics. She used the word “ashamed” four times—as in “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

She claimed that Recology had refused to budge during negotiations and that it was now, having lost the contract, spreading misinformation and “stirring up trouble.” She also said that she was tired of local residents being asked to subsidize local businesses’ solid waste bills. She refuted the claim that this had been a rushed decision by reading a long list of city council meeting dates on the topic, stretching back to April 2023.

But more than the facts of the case, she said it was the tenor of the debate that was really bothering her. She said the political backlash from the council’s decision had made some in her family question their decision to move to Sebastopol.

“You should see the texts I’ve been receiving,” she said. “I’ve received threats. I’ve been called names. I’ve been excluded from the business community here. They’ve talked about me left and right. I am just so frustrated by this community and how nasty it is.”

In closing, she said, “I am not going to take any more vitriol from people calling me names, questioning my integrity, and telling me I’m taking kickbacks because I get nothing from this except, right now, a big old headache.”

Councilmember Maurer gave a more measured response. She echoed McLewis’s comment that this decision had been in the works in public for a long time. She pointed out that the Solid Waste Ad Hoc committee consisted of six people—herself, Vice Mayor McLewis, Assistant City Manager Mary Gourley, City Engineer Toni Bertolero, and the director and the assistant director of Public Works—and that after long consideration, they were in 100% agreement that SCRR was the better choice.

“I felt really good about our decision, and to have all of this firestorm come out, it was really quite a shock,” she said.

Maurer said she was dismayed by the suggestion “that somehow we had failed the public. I just know that I put my best effort into it. I am an environmentalist, and I do conserve, and I do believe that that is super important. I understand that this way of charging is going to put pressure on some businesses to find different systems to create less waste. I think all of us need to be looking at creating less waste overall.”

“One other thing I wanted to say [to the business community] is SCRR has reached out to some businesses, and if you don’t talk to them, then you’re not going to find out whether or not you can work together. But I’m going to encourage you to talk to them and come up with some new systems.”

As happened at the last council meeting, Councilmembers Phill Carter and Neysa Hinton asked to delay the decision to get people’s questions answered and let the public accustom themselves to the idea of a new garbage hauler. And like the last meeting, Mayor Zollman’s decision to back SCRR tipped the scales.

The vote to switch to SCRR happened at the last council meeting. The vote this week was about which SCRR rate structure to adopt: Option 1 or Option 2.

• Option 1: One-time adjustment effective July 1, 2025, with new rates at an increase of 15.8% compared to current rates, followed by annual indexed rate adjustments in future years.

• Option 2: Three-year stepped-in adjustments, starting July 1, 2025, with new rates at an increase of 5% compared to current rates, followed by 9.8% increases on July 1, 2026, and July 1, 2027. Adjustment effective July 1, 2028, would be per the annual indexed rate adjustment plus 2%, with annual adjustments thereafter being only per the annual indexed rate adjustment.

Two weeks ago, the council was leaning toward Option 2. On Tuesday, both Maurer and McLewis suggested that instead of Option 2, the council should vote for Option 1, which would mean a 15.8% increase in garbage rates for most residential customers this year starting in July. (This is as opposed to the initially offered 57% increase for residential customers suggested by SCRR’s competitor Recology.)

Maurer compared Option 1 to “pulling off the bandaid.”

Hear Vice Mayor McLewis’s and Councilmember Maurer’s remarks here (apologies for the audio quality):

In the end, the city council voted 4 to 1 to approve SCRR’s Option 1. Councilmember Hinton voted no. Though Phill Carter previously voted against giving the contract to SCRR, this time he voted for the Option 1 motion.

“It became clear that a delay in the decision would not be possible,” Carter wrote in a comment to The Times. “If a delay were possible, it would not change the effect of the majority decision. I voted to approve Option 1…I did not change my mind so much as decide to move forward in a positive way to make this a win-win as much as possible.”

A franchise fee to be paid to the city of Sebastopol by SCRR was also a part of this same motion. That fee is equal to 10% of the gross revenues for collection services provided in Sebastopol. (And no, this isn’t a kickback. It is standard in most municipal garbage contracts.)

Other regular agenda items

The council whisked through two other agenda items—approving the Measure H fire funding contract with the county of Sonoma and the signing of a union contract with SIEU. They also accepted and approved Police Chief Ron Nelson’s annual report on surveillance technologies (which consists of cameras on city buildings).

In addition, after five public hearings—two of them before the city council—the city council approved the Sebastopol Active Transportation Plan. The consultant explained that thanks to public comments and council suggestions, they had added the Gravenstein Trail and the Apple Blossom Trail to the ranked list of priority projects, giving them Priority 1 status. In public comment, most of the speakers applauded this decision, and Councilmember Sandra Maurer gave a special shout-out to Lynn Deedler—the creator of these trail concepts—for his perseverance in keeping these trails on the city’s radar all these years.

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SIDEBAR: Committee Appointments

The council meeting began an hour earlier than usual so that council members could interview candidates for several city committees. The council appointed the following new and returning members:

• Gavin Waters was appointed to the Public Arts Committee.

• Paul Fritz and Jennifer Koelemeijer were appointed to the Planning Commission.

• Lynn Deedler, Marshall Balfe, and Christian D. Macke were appointed to the Design Review Board.

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SIDEBAR: Consent Calendar Items

The consent calendar consists of items that are routine in nature or don’t require additional discussion, often because they’ve been discussed extensively at a previous council meeting.

This list includes items previously approved at the Dec. 17 and Jan. 7 city council meetings.

• The city council approved the repeal of a city ordinance requiring candidates to file their financial disclosure statements through the city election portal. As of January 1, 2025, candidates will be required to file through the California Fair Political Practices Commission’s portal.

• The city council received the city’s Code of Conduct policies and provided a signed document to the City Clerk.

• Per state law, the city council approved a current list of local appointments for the Planning Commission, Design Review, Public Arts and Climate Action Committee.

• The city council approved the city’s AB 1600 Report for 2023-24, which requires the city to report annually on development fees collected and their use.

• The city council approved agreements with the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) for implementation of a ¼ cent sales tax, as approved at the Nov. 5, election, and an agreement with Sonoma County regarding Measure U and Measure I. In exchange for the City waiving collection of a portion of the ½ cent sales tax authorized by Measure U, Sonoma County will pay the City an amount equal to what the City would receive if it collected the full amount. (See our article on this topic here.)

• The council approved the Final Map and Subdivision Improvements Agreement for the Canopy Subdivision located at 1009-1011 Gravenstein Highway North, behind the O’Reilly complex.

• The council agreed to continue providing staff support for the Climate Action Committee, limited to 10 hours per month

• The council approved a new Sebastopol Fire Department Stipend Policy, with the goal of providing 24-hour coverage at the fire station.

• The council approved a new Fire Captain job description and salary range.

• The council approved an amendment to the scope of work for the City Gate contract for fire department reorganization, which will cost an additional $25,000.

• The council approved an update to the Staffing Assessment Study. This $10,000 update is already included in the city budget.

• The council approved a budget amendment for an additional $1,500 for a council member to attend the League of CA Cities /CAL Cities New Mayors and Council Members Academy, January 22-24, 2025.

• The council designated a voting delegate and alternate to vote in the mayor's absence for the 2025 Sonoma County Mayors and Councilmembers City Selection Committee Meetings and Sonoma County Mayors and Councilmembers Board and General Membership Association Meetings.

• The council approved the city’s sponsorship of the Sebastopol Walks 2025 program. This costs nothing and has no fiscal impact.