Taking a close look at the staffing needs of the city

Recap of the Sebastopol City Council meeting of Feb. 18

At the Feb. 18 city council meeting, the council heard presentations on the Citywide Classification and Compensation Study and the Citywide Staffing Study 2025. In addition, the council considered the city’s EIFD consultant’s request for an additional $15,000 to continue their work for the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District. Here’s the recap of the meeting:

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All council members were present for the Feb. 18 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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Consent Calendar

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.

The council approved a change in personnel rules that would allow new city employees to claim vacation time once they’ve been working for the city for three months instead of six months. They also approved the parcel map for the Habitat for Humanity building at 333 North Main St., as well as a Hwy. 116 Pedestrian Crossing Enhancement Maintenance Agreement.

Councilmember Sandra Maurer pulled an item about the proposed 2025-26 Budget Calendar for discussion later in the evening.

Presentations

Citywide Classification and Compensation Study

In the 2024-25 Adopted Budget, the City Council allocated funding for a citywide classification and compensation study and hired Bryce Consulting to review and update the classification and compensation structure for all city positions. This included 47 positions across six city departments.

According to Bryce representative Shelley Anderson, they updated all the city job descriptions based on employee descriptions of their work and compared Sebastopol’s compensation with the mean compensation packages of 10 other cities, including Cloverdale, Corte Madera, Cotati, Healdsburg, Mill Valley, Rohnert Park, Sausalito, St. Helena, Sonoma and Sonoma County.

On average, the city of Sebastopol is 6.91% below market for base salary and 2.81% below the market for total compensation.

Councilmember Neysa Hinton asked if the numbers would be different if the consultant removed the wealthier Marin cities.

“If you take those away, it’s going to look worse,” Anderson said.

Hinton then asked Anderson to re-figure the comparisons without including Rohnert Park, a much larger city, which Anderson agreed to do at no extra charge.

Here’s the report on all city positions’ monthly pay:

There was a long discussion on whether the city should adopt a compensation philosophy or policy. (As an example, the city’s HR consultant Deborah Muchmore said that one Northern California city has a policy of always being 10% below the market average for all city jobs across the board.) The council ultimately decided not to decide about this that evening but to address it at their upcoming (but not yet scheduled) Goals and Priority meeting.

You can read the Classification and Compensation Study here.

The Citywide Staffing Study

The City Council also heard the results of the new Citywide Staffing Study 2025 from Deborah Muchmore of Muchmore Than Consulting. This is an update to a previous staffing study from 2022, which cost $15,000 and sat on the shelf and was never implemented. The 2022 report recommended the addition of 16 full-time staff positions, which obviously didn’t happen. (Muchmore said that only one full-time staff member was added between 2022 and 2025.) The 2025 staff study, which cost $10,000, recommends the addition of seven staff members—three now, four later.

Muchmore examined each city department and interviewed staff. Her recommendations fell into three categories: critical, important, and beneficial. (The latter translates as “nice to have if you’ve got the money.”) For the most part, we will address the critical needs in this article. You can see her full recommendation in the staff report.

• City Administration: The report recommends the addition of one full-time analyst or technician to provide analysis and support for public meetings.

• Administrative Services: The report recommends adding one full-time Accounting Technician II.

• Community Development: The report recommends filling the full-time Permit Tech position, which is currently open. It also recommends folding the Building Department into Community Development.

• Public Works/Engineering: The report recommends reclassifying and retitling some positions.

• Police Department: The report recommends unfreezing the ninth police officer position. (It also suggests adding three more positions at a later date—a full-time officer, a full-time sergeant and a full-time admin.)

During questioning, it was revealed that adding these positions—not including the three additional police officers—would add $580,000 to next year’s budget.

City manager Don Schwartz noted, “I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford any new positions in the coming year.”

Regular Agenda

EIFD Contract: The City Council unanimously approved an amendment to the Kosmont & Associates contract for consulting services for the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District (EIFD). This involved adding $15,000 to the contract to extend its time and expand its project scope, including doing a full fiscal analysis on the EIFD initiative. The County will pick up $7,500 of that $15,000.

2025-26 Budget Calendar: Councilmember Sandra Maurer pulled this item from the consent calendar, in part to protest the cancellation of the city council’s Priorities and Goal Setting meeting. This meeting was tentatively listed on the budget calendar, which Maurer had hoped would be reason enough to open this discussion. City Attorney Alex Mog disabused her of this notion. He argued that this wasn’t the time to discuss the cancellation and re-scheduling of the Priorities and Goal Setting meeting—that would need to be agendized and noticed for another meeting. Maurer said she was frustrated that the Priorities and Goal Setting meeting, which she has been asking for from the beginning of her term and had been scheduled for February, was canceled by the Agenda Review committee without consulting with the rest of the council. Once that issue was put to bed, the council unanimously approved the budget calendar for 2025-26.

City Manager Report

In his city manager’s report—in response to a question by Oliver Dick during public comment—Schwartz gave a rundown on what the new Community Development Director Emi Theriault has been doing. The community development position combines the duties of planning director and economic development. Schwartz’s report is worth quoting at length.

I wanted to speak in particular about what we’re doing in economic development and the Community Development Director. She is spending a tremendous amount of time on economic development. The number one project by far right now is the Barlow application for a hotel. They are very eager to move quickly. So we are negotiating a development agreement or anticipating getting that to the planning commission in March and hopefully to the city council in April for your consideration. And I don’t think there's any higher economic development priority or anything we could be spending our time on that’s going to generate the benefits that another hotel or two in town would do.

Additionally, while it’s not going as quickly as any of us would like, we are proceeding on the consolidation of the Planning Commission and the Design Review Board, and you’ll have an item for your discussion and consideration in a couple of months or within the next two months for sure. And then when we get your direction, we’ll work on executing the mechanics of that.

She’s also been involved in a backup role on the EIFD when John Jay was out for some time. She stepped in to help us get the agenda item forward tonight, and then some combination of she and I have been in touch with the Chamber of Commerce, the Economic Development Board and Sonoma County Tourism lately, not as much as we would like, but we are trying to establish some relationships there—but it may not be highly visible. We have not been meeting with the businesses as much as we would like, but that's in part due to the Barlow work.

The other piece of this that’s really important is the housing element. There are some state mandates, and if we don't demonstrate good progress in meeting those state mandates, we could lose control of housing decisions. Those are major efforts. They've been delayed because we haven't had a full-time planning director for the better part of the last year. So that’s also very high on her priority list.

You can watch a video of the Feb. 18 Sebastopol City Council meeting here. The next Sebastopol City Council meeting is March 4 at the Sebastopol Youth Annex, 425 Morris St., Sebastopol.