Council OKs the creation of a committee to build the Sebastopol Commons

At the last city council meeting, the Sebastopol Library Staffing and Facilities Ad Hoc Committee made its pitch for a broader community commons development with the library as an anchor tenant

Councilmember Neysa Hinton, Mayor Stephen Zollman, Councilmember Phill Carter and Councilmember Sandra Maurer at last week’s council meeting. Councilmember Jill McLewis was absent. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Halfway through the last council meeting on July 15, something peculiar happened. After finishing up the previous agenda item, the mayor read the next item on the agenda and then moved almost immediately to public comment—without any significant presentation of what that agenda item contained.

“The item tonight is to receive the report from the ad hoc committee and discuss the recommended actions in the report,” he said. “The recommendations are to receive the report from the current ad hoc committee; the dissolution of the current ad hoc committee; the creation of a new committee: the Committee for the Building of the Commons for the period of July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026; approval of scope of work for committee. Committee composition and appointments to be returned to a future council meeting for consideration.”

Councilmember Phill Carter, looking confused, started to ask a question but then changed his mind and the council quickly moved on to public comment.

Public commenter Linda Robinett was also confused: “I thought I was going to get to hear some of the report, like a short summary of the report,” she said.

“I want to piggyback on the last commenter's comment here,” said Kyle Falbo. “This is a very, very rushed agenda item with very little actual presentation.”

Oliver Dick made his usual complaint about the lack of county financing for regional projects. He also noted the proliferation of “commons-es” in Sebastopol.

“I don’t quite understand why there’s this kind of almost obsession with converting the library to something else,” said Oliver Dick. “From a budget perspective, it sounds like a great recipe for Sebastopol taxpayers to be paying a lot of money for a county resource, and we’ve been here several times before over the last few years. So that’s my big concern about this document. These things just seem to run and run regardless of what’s discussed at council meetings. Here we are again, talking about the commons.”

Frequent public commenter Robert said, “I guess I pretty much agree with what everybody has said so far. I have no idea what this is about. I’ve read it a couple of times. There’s a lot of jargon in it. It’s being talked about as a library, but it’s a bunch of other stuff too, and the other stuff isn’t very well defined.”

“I remember when the mayor first started talking about this as an idea,” Robert continued, “Before he was mayor, it was the idea of the library as a hub that would bring social services to help to address our homeless problem. That didn’t get much traction, but I get the feeling that’s still part of this.”

Robert also questioned where in this crowded town, such a complex might be located.

Back at the dais, Zollman looked taken aback. “Apparently, I just assumed a lot of people have had an opportunity to review the written document since it has been on the agenda for a while. That was a huge oversight on my part,” he admitted.

In response, he gave a brief summary.

“In essence, the group has spent two years trying to figure out how to get a bigger space,” he said. “Where we landed on this is the fact that we do definitely need to think bigger and have the library perhaps be a tenant of the building, but as a whole, we need more space for the library, for our senior center, for many other entities that have come before the council, saying ‘We need more physical space.’ So this is how this evolved from just a library thing to a bigger, what is now being put forth as a Commons.”

The report puts it this way: “We envision the development of a comprehensive, unified plan for the effective and efficient use of our community’s assets and resources...The Sebastopol Commons.”

Zollman might have done well to read aloud from the report’s Attachment A—a sample elevator pitch for Sebastopol Commons—which hits most of the high points in the 17-page report.

The Sebastopol Commons project is a multi-use infrastructure project located in historic downtown Sebastopol.

Combining several community assets and service providers, this project is a catalyst for economic development in the downtown corridor.

This project includes public library services, community center space, a commercial kitchen, public restrooms, and structured parking with electric vehicle charging center, park and ride, and transit stop, and space for community gatherings and recreation.

As an equitable anchor institution of any modern city and region, the Sebastopol Regional Library is well-positioned to extend its role as a critical community connector; offering a place for community members to gather, an early learning hub, access to digital literacy, new business incubation, employee training, and the necessary tools that strengthen democracy by addressing knowledge gaps.

The Project will stress sustainability by designing to Passive House standards, reducing energy use by 80%, achieving 40% reduction in Global Warming Potential (GWP) in concrete mix, and including a 112kW solar array on the south elevation.

Zollman then corrected the notion that the library is a county department.

“What we have heard during those two years is the fact that, again, as we heard tonight, ‘Why do we care? This is a county problem. It’s a county library.’ This needs to be very clear: it is not a county library. There’s no department of the county board of libraries. It’s a county-wide system, but each city is responsible for coming up with the square footage of the library. All the county library administration does is supply the personnel for whatever size building we as a municipality come out with.”

Zollman is right about this: The Sonoma County Library is a separate public agency with a countywide system, encompassing all nine cities and the unincorporated areas. It is not governed by the county, but by the Sonoma County Library Commission.

The Sonoma County Library is also, according to Zollman, one of the wealthiest public agencies in Sonoma County—and so it behooves Sebastopol to work closely with it.

“I’m just saying that doing a better partnership with the Sonoma County Library administration itself could reap benefits for us and for our needs here locally,” he said.

The report points out that although a representative of Sonoma County Library system told the city’s library ad hoc that it doesn’t help fund the building of libraries—that’s up to cities—it did, in fact, pour $4 million into the building of the Santa Rosa Regional Library in Roseland.

The scope creep—from a committee exploring how to build a bigger library to one exploring how to build a multi-organization community commons complex—did not go unnoticed during city council comment, but it also didn’t seem to bother any of the councilmembers, all of whom indicated their support for the idea.

Maurer asked that the ad hoc limit the involvement of other organizations to those that actually need new digs.

“I think really what needs to happen is you need to narrow the scope, because the scope is including all kinds of other organizations in terms of the committee,” she said, looking at the list of possible partners. “So the Sebastopol Center for the Arts—I haven’t heard them say they need another building. Right now, they’re leasing that building from the county, and it’s a beautiful space for them. We don’t have a Parks and Recreation Department. The Gravenstein Health Action Coalition—I’m not sure why they need a building. The faith community—usually they have all their own buildings. So it just seems, in terms of the membership it’s just kind of all over the map here, and I think if you narrowed it to just those places in Sebastopol [that need new buildings]: the library, the Senior Center and the Community Center, period.”

Councilmember Carter disagreed. “I understand this as a complete rethinking about municipal assets and the ways we can support our city organizations in a more efficient manner,” he said, arguing that the committee should cast a broad net. “We don’t want to dis-include something if there are opportunities to combine resources or to manage things more effectively.”

Maurer also asked about the scope of work for the project, which the council was being asked to approve that evening. While that was not specifically laid out in the ad hoc’s report, the staff report for the item did include the following scope of work:

• Expanding its membership to include representatives from relevant community sectors and public departments.

• Developing a detailed project concept and funding plan.

• Exploring grant, foundation, and public-private funding partnerships.

• Continuing quarterly reporting to Council on its progress.

In the end, the council voted 4 to 1 (Jill McLewis was absent) to approve the following: the receipt of the report of the library ad hoc; the dissolution of the current library ad hoc; the creation of the new Committee for the Building of the Commons; the approval of the broad scope of work.

This item will return to a future council meeting regarding the composition and appointments to the new committee.

See the staff report and read the full report from the library ad hoc here.