Sebastopol City Council pledges to continue in-person and Zoom meetings with live comments

Plus find out what's happening with the AmeriCorps Trail, the search for a permanent fire chief, and more

All councilmembers were present for the Feb. 6 council meeting, including Mayor Diana Rich, Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman, Councilmember Neysa Hinton, Councilmember Sandra Maurer, and Councilmember Jill McLewis.

Proclamations and Presentations

The city council proclaimed February as Black History Month and got a visit from the Ukrainian delegation, hosted by Sebastopol World Friends (SWF), the city of Sebastopol's sister city organization.

Consent Calendar

In addition to approving the minutes of previous meetings, the city council unanimously approved the following items:

• The council gave their approval for the Sebastopol Kiwanis Club to conduct their annual fireworks show on July 3, 2024, at Analy High School and declared this action exempt under CEQA. Vice Mayor Zollman asked if they’d considered more environmentally friendly types of shows that didn’t scare dogs or cause PTSD reactions in affected veterans. A representative from Kiwanis said they had looked into drone shows, but found them to be very expensive. Nonetheless she said they were considering them for the future, but not this year.

• The council authorized the closure of Main Street during the 2024 Apple Blossom Parade, on Saturday, April 27, 2024 and okayed the use of the South High Street parking lot for the Apple Blossom Festival.

• The council authorized a change to the list of city officials that can order deposits and withdrawals from Local Agency Investment Fund (LAIF), updating the list to include Don Schwartz, the new city manager.  

• The council received of Notice of Completion for the Ives Park ADA Pathway. Councilmember Maurer asked why the pathway was built directly across the lawn in front of the stage where audience members usually sit. Mario Landeros, the city’s engineering consultant from GHD, said that the path was sited there to avoid the roots from the line of redwood trees and to make a sewer access point more accessible to city workers and their trucks. Commenters suggested that perhaps decisions such of these should not be left in the hands of out-of-town consultants and that perhaps the Ives Park Plan as a whole needed to be revisited.

• The council also approved a letter authorizing PG&E to donate City of Sebastopol work credits to Sonoma County. Due to its budget constraints, the city didn’t have the matching funds to use the PG&E work credits, and rather than let them expire unused, the council donated them to the county.

Item # 4 on the consent calendar—a recommendation to change to action minutes versus detailed minutes for city meetings—was pulled and added to the end of the regular agenda for fuller discussion.

Regular Agenda

The meaty portion of the council meeting began with the quarterly report on Horizon Shine from SAVS President Adrienne Lauby. During her report and subsequent questioning, the council was alarmed to learn that the resettlement of Horizon Shine residents was going more slowly than expected and that Lauby suspected that they would not be able to meet their March 3 move-out date. (See our article on this issue here.)

Committee Appointments

Earlier in the evening the council had interviewed candidates for the Climate Action Committee (CAC) and the Sonoma County Transportation Authority (SCTA) Bicycle and Pedestrian Citizens Advisory Committee.

There was only one new candidate for the CAC—Phillip Carter, a resident with climate background—and he was voted onto the CAC by the council on a 3 to 2 vote (The two abstentions were due to the inability of Neysa Hinton and Jill McLewis to attend the interviews due to conflicts with their work schedules.) The council also reappointed CAC members Kenna Lee and Lisa Pierce to new terms.

The council had also interviewed three candidates—Phillip Carter, Gavin Water and Silas Stafford—for one opening on the SCTA’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Citizens Advisory. Carter had expressed his willingness to step aside for this position if he was appointed to CAC, so that left two candidates. The council unanimously voted for Water, however they also expressed their enthusiasm for Stafford and invited him to apply for the Climate Action Committee.

Next, the council considered the question of three re-appointment applications for the Design Review Board. The staff report raised questions about the deportment of one of those applicants.  The inclusion of these complaints in the staff report irked Vice Mayor Zollman, who said it is the responsibility of the committee chair to police their own committee. “I don’t want to get in the middle of this,” he said, noting that the public airing of complaints against a city volunteer (though unnamed)  made him “very uncomfortable.” Neysa Hinton said she wouldn’t be comfortable with an “automatic reappointment” in this case, and after a long discussion, the council decided to re-interview all three candidates at a future city council meeting.

AmeriCorps Trail Project

The council voted unanimously to spend $55,000 in Measure M park funds to complete the Americorps Trail on city land along the Laguna. This short trail has been in the works since 2018, a fact Councilmember Hinton called “an embarrassment.” The city was awarded a grant for this project, and a portion of that grant is in danger of being yanked back if the project is not completed.  The plan is to use Measure M funds temporarily, and then in the next budget year to switch to using park development fees from the Woodmark development. Neither of these come from the city’s general fund.

Council votes to retain in-person and interactive Zoom format for city meetings

In the aftermath of a scatological and hate-filled Zoom bombing in January, the city council took up the question of whether to continue interactive Zoom council meetings with live public comment. They considered the following options:

1. Retaining in-person and Zoom virtual format meetings with live public comment (status quo);

2. Conduct in person/virtual meetings for viewing only (No virtual public comment);

3. Return to in person only meetings.

This question had been on a couple of agendas at previous meetings, pushed forward because of lack of time. The overwhelming number of public commenters at those meetings requested that the council tough it out and keep the in-person and Zoom meetings with live public comment. Commenters at tonight’s meeting said the same and so did most of the city council, with the exception of Mayor Diana Rich, who though she appreciated the accessibility, transparency and engagement that live public comment allowed, found hate speech hard to accept.

“I just want to share a slightly different perspective here,” she said. “I had a lot of people come to me appalled by what happened at our January meeting, and they felt that that experience had a serious chilling effect on their ability to engage with our processes and government. So I'd like to remind us that those experiences do have a negative effect on our public and do limit their sense of comfort and safety in reaching out and expressing their opinions. So I continue to have a real concern about that.”

In the end, after much discussion about the legal permissibility of quashing hate speech, the city council voted unanimously to maintain the in person and virtual format city council meetings and to have city staff returned with a legal opinion and guidelines regarding hate speech and other types of meeting interruptions.

Changing the style of council meeting minutes

Next the council tackled the thorny question how much is too much in terms of city council meeting minutes. For years, the city has enjoyed incredibly detailed council meeting minutes, painstakingly prepared by City Clerk and Assistant City Manager Mary Gourley, but that level of detail comes at a cost. Gourley estimated in her staff report that “For every hour of a meeting, it takes two hours to transcribe and edit.”

An alternative to her near-verbatim meeting notes are what’s called “action minutes.”

“Action minutes basically tell you the type of meeting, where the meeting is located, and who spoke at the meeting, not so much their comments, but basically who spoke, what the action was, and what the vote was,” Gourley said. “That is really what goes into your minutes. Yes, it's nice to have the background of discussions and things like that because people like to know like what those comments were. However, we do have the videos that we maintain out there. Currently we have a retention period of one year for those videos, we could increase it to three years.”

Gourley said that most of the cities that she has surveyed had switched to action minutes. City Manager Don Schwartz agreed and strongly supported the change to action minutes.

“When I took this position, you all were kind enough to ask what you could do to help me be successful, to help us all be successful. I can't think of anything with a lower cost and easier than freeing up more of Mary's time. She has been incredibly valuable to me. I have tremendous respect for her—her work ethic is above and beyond I think anything I've seen from colleagues in my career—and I don't want to lose that commitment and I don’t want to burn her out. And the more time we can free up for her to help us, the more successful we will be and I think this is the easiest way to do that. I have said at times I will make recommendations that I'm not particularly strong about, that don't matter all that much, this is not one of them. This is a ‘Please do this.’”

There was some brief back and forth about how long the video—online or  DVD—should be kept.  Councilmember Maurer suggested that videos be kept for five years, but Gourley said she thought three years were enough, noting that in her 27-plus years with the city, she has only had one request—a public records request--asking for the DVD of a meeting. The majority of the council agreed.

Neysa Hinton admitted a fondness for Gourley’s very detailed minutes, but admitted it was time to move on and free up Gourley’s time for more important things, and the council agreed, voting unanimously to switch to action minutes and keep meeting recordings for three years.

City Manager’s Report

City Manager Don Schwartz thanked the police, public works and especially the fire department for their outstanding efforts during the recent storm.

Regarding the transition plan for the departure of City Planning Director Kari Svanstrom, Schwartz said, “We're still figuring out our options. We're talking to different folks. It's very difficult to find planning managers these days. I've heard that before coming here, and I've heard that repeatedly from folks who are in the field day to day. So we're looking at options, and we'll have more to come on that.”

Regarding the search for a permanent fire chief, Schwartz said that the city was being well-served by Interim Fire Chief Todd Derum, but that new PERS rules required an open recruitment process. He expressed his appreciation for Derum continuing to serve during the recruitment process, which he said he expects to open very soon.

“I want to assure folks that they should not read anything into that decision around consolidation, yes or no…We're still evaluating options and we'll report out on that, we anticipate, this spring.”

Watch the full meeting here. The next regular city council will be on Tuesday, Feb. 20, at 6 pm at the Sebastopol Youth Annex, 425 Morris St., Sebastopol. The agenda for that meeting is available here.