Transcript of the Sebastopol City Council Candidate Forum

City council candidates in their own words

The League of Women Voters Sebastopol City Council Candidate Forum on Wednesday night started off with moderator, Pamela Stevens, laying down the ground rules. The three candidates—incumbent Neysa Hinton, and newcomers Phill Carter and Stanton Key Nethery—were given one minute for opening statements. After that, the Stevens asked the three candidates a series of questions—most penned by members of the audience. Candidates had 90 seconds to answer each question. The debate was an hour and half long.

You can watch a recording of the candidate forum here.

Opening Statements

KEY NETHERY: I’ve lived here in Sebastopol for about 13 years, and I’ve been in the library advisory board capacity for several years. Several people said I should run for city council. I finally got convinced, and basically my two things that I'm most concerned about are I want to make sure that that the city doesn’t run out of money, and I want to make sure that the city doesn’t run out of water. That’s pretty much it. My background is as an entrepreneur and CEO, that kind of stuff, but I’m retired at the moment.

NEYSA HINTON: My name is Neysa Hinton, and I’m a fourth generation Sonoma County resident, who’s currently serving my eighth year on your Sebastopol City Council. I’ve served as mayor twice and vice mayor twice. I returned to Sebastopol after college to raise my children, who both attended Sebastopol public schools from kindergarten through high school graduation. I’m running for my third term to continue to provide leadership and institutional knowledge of our city council as we move through these challenging times that we’re finding ourselves faced with. By now, many people know me—where I stand and why—but for those that do not, the most important goals I want to focus on, to just name a few, are our serious budget shortfalls and growing our tax base long term. I’ve been a working mother my entire life. I bring business skills and knowledge to our small city in my role as a member of the city council, and I ask for your support for re-election.

PHILL CARVER: My name is Phill Carter, and I’ve been a part of the Climate Action Committee now for two years, slowly getting more and more involved with the city’s business and finding more and more about what can be improved. As I started out in the transportation area and trying to figure out our needs to improve downtown, make it a more bikeable city, I discovered other issues that are interrelated. As the environment and economics are intertwined, I hope to be able to improve both at the same time. I don’t think environmentalism and business improvement are mutually exclusive. I have two kids, and I’m a board member of the Wesco Soccer Club. I’m also interested in making sure that this town is financially viable for the next 50 years. Also our water. I have many, many years of business experience to sympathize with our downtown owners. And I’m from a small town, so I seriously respect the small town vibe.

What do you see as the most critical issue facing Sebastopol?

NEYSA HINTON: The number one issue is our financial situation. We were the first ones of a lot of small cities in Sonoma County that became aware that we had a structural deficit, that we had a lot of one-time money that was dropping into our budget, and it wasn’t sustainable. We are rolling out with a half-cent sales tax measure on this November ballot, trying to come up with a temporary 12-year bridge until we can get the city back stabilized. I believe that’s our number one issue, and it also impacts our other expenses, which are water and sewer rates that we’ve had to increase, and possible reorganization of our fire department with neighboring Gold Ridge.

PHILL CARTER: I agree that economics is probably the key to most things, and how we approach it is, if we imagine a more beautiful town, and I feel like getting a tax revenue up is just as important as cutting costs. However, over the past 10 years, our budget has gone from just over $6 million to $16 million in the past 10 years, and I’m exploring how exactly that happened. I want to develop new ways of bringing in business through making our downtown more beautiful, having a better Ives Park, and having more festivals and things like that, to bring in short-term income, as well as looking at the hotels at issue. But interrelated is transportation, and I’m seriously going to look at how these two highways that bisect our town disrupt our traffic flows. That also has something to do with housing, and in that is infill housing, and so we can approach affordable housing, our economics, for our downtown area and our livability, all with a simple approach of creating a more vibrant city.

KEY NETHERY: Definitely the finances, you know, the fact that we’re running at a deficit—that has a huge impact on anything and everything that we do going forward. So that, to me, is the number one issue: like, why did we get here? How do we get out? What do we do if the sales tax doesn’t pass? What services is the city paying for that we might not need to or we can delay and what services should we be providing? So there’s just all these questions that all focus around finances. So finance is the biggie, for me at least.

What are your thoughts on the proposal to build the Gravenstein Commons supportive housing development on the former AmeriGas site on Highway 116? (Editor’s note: Located on the former site of the HorizonShine RV Village, this development by St. Vincent De Paul will provide supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals.)

PHILL CARTER: “Because this has been a very contentious issue, and people in the previous councils have already struggled with this decision for quite a while, I do support the fact that it will go forward with monies from the state and grants like that. This area is developing rapidly, and I love that. We have the Canopy development coming in. Lucky Market isn’t doing as well as it could be. And with this development, along with Canopy, which I agree with mixed developments, should support each other and kind of give eyes to the development. I definitely feel like we do need affordable housing, and this is a good way to have the charitable group work it out. And I appreciate that. I regret the struggles that we’ve had to go through to get here. I understand lawsuits and other troubles that we’ve had to solve the RV crisis, and I definitely feel like affordable housing will be additive in that in that particular area. So I support it.

KEY NETHERY: “Yep, it’s pretty simple. We need housing, and I support it. It’s been going forward for a while, and it makes sense for it to continue going forward. We definitely need housing. There’s just not that many locations where housing can be built. And we especially need low-cost housing or housing that’s affordable, let’s put it that way, for people that can’t go out and buy a huge house in Sebastopol. So I’m for it.”

NEYSA HINTON: “This is a simple one for me because I made the vote on it. So I made multiple votes sitting on city council, and in the final vote, when we brought it back for reconsideration, I continued to support this project. St. Vincent de Paul got a $6.5 million State Project Grant, and we would have been walking away from that money for low-income housing in our community, permanent supportive housing. It’s 22 units, and I have stated publicly that St. Vincent de Paul had bought that property for about $900,000, and that’s where we put the SAVS temporary shelter, with always the intent to develop that project. I do believe we will have a local preference, and so we’re hoping to get some of the RV dwellers into that housing. And I’m not up to speed on all the details of that, but I do know that I’ve heard that. Hopefully, at the end of the day, it will help solve our housing crisis that we have here in our city.”

Ensuring community voices are heard and decisions are made transparently is essential for trust in local government. How would you improve public engagement and transparency in the city’s decision-making process?

KEY NETHERY: Well, okay, so I’m on the Library Advisory Board, and as such, I’m under the Brown Act, and the Brown Act has all sorts of regulations about the kind of tools that people use today to communicate as a group—and they’re prohibited. So, you know, we can’t have a Slack channel. We can’t have like, some sort of group discussion on Facebook or on X or any of those things. And so it’s really difficult for the community to sort of come together and come with some sort of joint discussion, long-term discussion. And so unfortunately, right now, it looks like the only way to deal with this is the current process we have — where the community gets time in the meetings to make two-minute conversations about things they want to relay or they can email stuff in. So I’m not really sure what we can do under the existing Brown Act regulations. I’m definitely interested in looking into alternatives to what we’re currently facing though.

NEYSA HINTON: Well, I think Sebastopol does an exceptional job in this area. First of all, I think we’re the last city—and that includes when you take into consideration the Board of Supervisors—that allows live Zoom comments in a gallery format for a city council meeting. We have had a few meetings that we’ve been Zoom bombed with a lot of negativity, but the council has addressed this twice and consistently has voted to have live Zoom participants. And that is by far the most open government I think we can do, taking into consideration what the previous speaker talked about, which is our Brown Act rules. We can only team up with one other person on a five-member council to discuss anything in advance until we get into the public format. In addition to making public comment on his live Zoom basis, our public has the ability to submit a longer comment to us all, and our city clerk, Mary, forwards those as soon as the comment comes in. It’s not like she waits—as soon as that comment comes to city hall, within less than 24 hours, they are forwarded to the council members. Also myself, personally, my personal cell is out in the public. People can call me at any time, and I either will answer or call them back. So I do believe in open government, and I believe that Sebastopol is really practicing that, and we do what we say we’re going to do.

PHILL CARTER: Sometimes I feel dissatisfied with the way data and information is progressing through the city’s decision process. So I am curious about how we can use technology to make the available data and options available beforehand and so that the citizens are prepared as well as we are in live council member meetings. Although a lot of things are available online, I think we can do more to make these easily accessible and readily available. I do agree that decisions have to be made within committees, and these are difficult to hash out during live events. I, of course, 100% want community input. I feel like we can do more with town hall events, and I definitely think we can do more with our web presence.

What is your plan to help support small local businesses?

NEYSA HINTON: So I have been involved with our local Chamber of Commerce, and am very supportive of the merger between the Downtown Association and the Chamber of Commerce that the business community would like to see happen. I think that will help us organize our efforts, instead of having one group work, sometimes doing the work twice, or not in a coordinated effort. We also, from the city’s perspective, have expanded our planning director role to have an economic development piece to that. We increased the budget for that position to find a person that can do more economic development to help us grow that area of our town and focus on it. And that person has yet to be hired, but I understand the final decision to hire that person will be made by the city manager, and that is in progress, is what I understand about that. Other than that, it’s just a matter of continuing to shop local for all of us. A few people know that before COVID, I had bought a local business with a partner on Main Street. We do also have a rule in place that doesn’t allow chain stores in the downtown, and so I’m fully supportive of that as well. I don’t believe that multiple corporation or chains should be in our downtown core.

PHILL CARTER: As a business owner and an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it is, and costs, especially fixed costs, are super difficult to handle. Especially when the economy may go up and down, you’re still responsible for the same costs. Some of these fixed costs are electricity and water and rent, and it feels like we can do a lot more to help our existing businesses with those. I don’t know exactly the mechanism for reducing their water bills or their electric bills, but there is a way. And then also, I want to attract more businesses through encouraging marketing. What Neysa said, I had completely agree with, as far as merging the Chamber with the city’s voice, so there’s unified marketing. We can do so much with just a little amount of money to market the town a whole lot more and get a unified voice, a unified character and a unified brand, and to coordinate a series of festivals and concerts and other events that have a tendency to bring in both people that will contribute to a hotel tax revenue, sales tax revenue and short-term hiring. So we can do more immediately by just increasing our marketing revenue and our pizzazz with collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce and with the Barlow. Long term, we will have to worry about how we incentivize other types of businesses, because, as a business owner, why would I want to be here? We have to increase the why.

KEY NETHERY: Basically, there’s a couple of things. You know, Sebastopol and all cities pretty much have been hit by the age of Amazon. And the real question is, what are viable businesses in the age of Amazon? I mean, I would have thought it was, like, a shoe store, but Zappos has killed that off. One of the things that the city manager mentioned is that there’s somebody in Santa Rosa that he’s working with that has a list of businesses that are probably viable for a small city in the age of Amazon, and so it’d be interesting to know what those are. It’s great that there’s an economic development person that’s going to be coming on board, because they should be searching out businesses that can survive and would do well in Sebastopol. And my guess is that the more businesses we have here that we can bring in, the more people come, the more everything sort of feeds on itself. So, you know, to me, a lot of it is the economic development person is going to have a big role to play in making Sebastopol grow and have more businesses.

How will you support rank and file staff?

PHILL CARTER: I’m not really sure how to answer that, other than to say, we have a lot of great people working for Sebastopol, and we want to keep them happy. And currently, their pay scale must adjust with any future pay scales that we have out there. But otherwise they should feel part of the community, and if they feel disassociated, maybe they have an impact, maybe they have a way to communicate that to the council in a different way. Otherwise, we will get reports from the department heads and make sure that they’re taken care of, whatever they need. It is not like we can do a lot more than just empower them to do their jobs the best way that they can.

KEY NETHERY: One of the things that was brought up during the last meeting was tying a couple of the jobs together as a particular category pay scale, something along those lines, to where, when a new hire came in and they were hired at a market rate that the other person that has a similar category of job, their rate would go up to that market rate. So you wouldn’t end up with people that have been around for a long time not getting paid market rates. That seemed like a very smart idea. So, you know, the other thing that I’ve heard from folks was that if we’re going to have people and we’re going to task them with jobs, city council should probably let them do their jobs as opposed to micromanaging. I haven’t noticed this, but that was a comment that I got from somebody, and, definitely if you’re doing your job, it’s no fun to have somebody second guess everything that you’re doing. So allowing people to do their jobs seems like a viable way of keeping people happy.

NEYSA HINTON: Yeah, basically it starts at the top. The city manager reports to the city council, but rank and file and department heads report to the city manager, I agree with the previous comment about it’s not our job to micromanage people who are tasked with doing a job. I’m not in charge of them. We’re here to set policy as city council members, not get involved in the day-to-day jobs of we have about 50 employees on staff with the city. The other thing is to just be open. Again, I just want to state I think that we’re all as city council members, it’s the expectation that we need to be responsive when we are seeked out both by the public or by members that work for our city. But of course, with that, we can’t just operate in a silo. We have to make sure that their supervisor is aware of any issues going on. I personally have been invited to meetings with members of our staff, and when they invite me to a meeting, I show up. So I think it’s just always being listening to both the staff that works for the city and also our public. That is our job, and then to be well informed.

How will you work with council members and city staff to address the city’s projected budget deficit?

KEY NETHERY: Well, the first thing to do would be to figure out, like, what does the city do? Should it be doing all these things? What does it cost? And, you know, where the money’s flowing. And you know it’s just sort of like a deep dive into micromanaging the budget, basically finding out what’s going on. And the odds are that the person to talk to would be the city manager and see what their thoughts are on where we’re overspending, where we can cut, where we need to spend more. You know, there’s just, like, a whole bunch of expertise out there that needs to be consulted to figure out, like, what are we doing and how can we change? And, you know, how can we continue going forward? So lots of lots of questions, lots of listening.

NEYSA HINTON: So currently, the system is that the city manager brings forth the budget to the council. We have a process that we have a subcommittee of two council members that work on the details and what we always call ‘the deep dive’ into the budget. I’ve served on that for five years out of my eight. I have not served on it in the last two years. And so we count on that city subcommittee to ask a lot of the questions, although any council member at any time can ask questions about the budget and learn more. I do believe we have been working really diligently and, unfortunately, had to make some really tough and deep cuts, specifically to our nonprofit community, which really pains me having, like, lived here a very long time. But we did take a $1.6 million budget deficit of two budgets ago to a $600,000 approximate general fund deficit this time. So a lot of things have been cut. I believe we have been doing that in the current council as much as we can, but we haven’t been able to cut as fast as our spending is rolling the other way, and that is why we’re going out for a sales tax measure to try to create this bridge until we can get things on the right track.

PHILL CARTER: I think the council this year has been faced with a really tough problem, and they’ve tackled it as a team and politely, and I hope to do the same. This is a team effort. We’re all hoping for a better Sebastopol. We can find a way to work together to figure out what ways we can make the cuts, or what ways we can make things grow fast enough in order to make the budget right. Sometimes we have to do our own homework, very deep dives, into budgets past to figure out where we think things have gone sideways, or where we think things could be improved and where more efficiencies are. In that way, I will do a little bit of my own homework, but then in the Brown Act kind of super supersedes some [unclear audio] before or enforces it to become in front of the group. If I’m not part of the budget committee, then I will definitely try to use public comment to address some of the things that I feel like they are needed. But otherwise, I will definitely work with city staff and trust their opinions on a lot of the ways that they can do to cut hours and staff. It’s very tough, and I don’t envy that position. However, we have to make important calls, and if we have disagreements, it’s still just a matter of finding a way to impart our vision. You know, if my vision is to create a more vibrant town to grow our way out of this, then we can make it. You know, I can shift that focus through my thoughts and my words in some ways, not just simply gut.

What are your thoughts on the council’s decision to reduce the city’s funding to the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center?

NEYSON HINTON: I think the budget subcommittee wanted to reduce it even more than we reduced it, and I was an advocate for keeping some budget there. You can’t take a nonprofit that’s already struggling and take them from a high level of support that we’ve given them for many years and reduce it to zero and expect them to be able to keep operating. They have said to the city that they are trying to find sustainable funding sources. I know they’ve also lost their executive director recently within the last year, and they are a vital part of our community, as all of our little nonprofits are. The city does not have a Parks and Recreation Department as many bigger cities do that support these sorts of things, like our senior center, like our pool, like our Sebastopol Community Center. So we rely on nonprofits in the city, as we have for a long time, to help us provide these kinds of extra services that enhance all of our lives. I’m not for pulling the rug out from anybody. A couple years ago, we saved the Senior Center, and this year, the Senior Center was doing okay, so they kind of gave us a waiver of not asking us for cash, although we help maintain their building through our Public Works department. So again, we can’t pull the rug out of anybody, and I was never for that.

PHILL CARTER: Yeah, just quickly, the cultural center is super important for attracting tourists and attracting people to the city. You know, if there’s a big event, people will come and spend money in other ways. So it is valuable, but how valuable is it? And I do also agree with the short-term cuts and to see if we can’t help them find other forms of funding. That said, I do think that we can spend some extra time and money to help them figure out how to get more self-supported.

KEY NETHERY: Yeah, it’s one of those things to where, you know, it’s a great place, you know, it does good stuff. We would love for it to have all the money that it needs, and that’s just not possible right now. So I agree with Neysa that, you know, going to a zero budget is a horrible idea. I do think that having to reduce a little bit or maybe a lot, I don’t know what the percentage is, but having to reduce their budget so that they can figure out how to adapt is probably the best choice that the city council could have made. And you know, ultimately, if we can increase income and reduce expenses, that this is something that we could reinvest in going forward in the future. But I think that the city council probably made the right choice in lowering their budget.

At a recent meeting, the city council members received a report on the possibility of creating an enhanced infrastructure financing district (EIFD). What are your thoughts on this?

I just did like a small calculation of trying to figure out the process of analysis to see if different projects would actually pay off. So what I understand is this district would have bonds that we don’t have to approve through the city, but are basically loans, which is basically an investment in a certain area. So if we were to take out some wells, you know, there that need remediation and hope that there would be new development there would that pay off the bonds that we would attract? What I need more information on is, like everybody else, like, what projects would pass the cost-benefit analysis and like, you know, beyond the pool, but what really help immediately get new development into the town and swear it pays off the bond and I just need more information to see if the economic development would extend beyond the city limits, if we could capture county money that is also helpful to pay back these bonds, and this is just something I don’t know that I’ll have. I’ll have to wait on future town meetings to understand.

KEY NETHERY: So a lot of the EIFD has been driven by the library basically bursting at its seams and needing a new building. What an EIFD does is it says, here’s the existing tax basis for an area and any increase in income, not increase in tax rate, but like, for example, if you were to improve some building that, you know, your basis goes up, so the tax amount that you get increases. Some percentage of that would go to the EIFD. And it’s a 45-year kind of thing to where you have a very little money at the beginning, and it just sort of adds over time to where you can fund infrastructure-type projects. So, for example, the library is used all throughout, you know, west county, and it’s paid for right now pretty much by Sebastopol, and an EIFD would allow us to have businesses and whatnot outside of Sebastopol city limits who are using the library to help fund the improvements to the library. So it’s complicated, but it’s a good thing.

HINTON: First of all, just give a little background, we received a $60,000 grant from our supervisor in the 5th district to do a study, and that study is in progress, so we have not learned what the results of that study are yet, and so this is a tough one to know the complete answer to. I know that there would be a committee formed that would include all the members where is in the tax base. So that would include probably some Sebastopol members and some county members on the committee to decide where, what would get improved within the district. And my understanding is we just wouldn’t grab the whole of Sebastopol. We would grab more the development areas, not single-family housing, and that’s where then it makes sense to have the development that we would invest in go. So basically, it’s a long-term possible solution. I’m really interested because I understand that we get an extra 2% from the county that we would not get any other way. Downtown Santa Rosa and the Valley of Sonoma is moving forward on these EIFD districts. I think the jury’s still out. I’m not necessarily a fan of necessarily of the library or any single project. We have talked about a lot of things, including affordable housing, and so helping subsidize housing within these districts to help build up.

What are your thoughts on proposals to merge city departments and commissions?

KEY NETHERY: The only one that I know of right now that’s happening is the fire department. And I haven’t seen the economics on any of this stuff, so I don’t really know. I don’t have a good answer. The real question would be, you know, we’re a town of 8,000 people, and the people we’ve got are doing, in general, the folks that I’ve interacted with are doing a great job. So I don’t know whether merging groups of people is going to be useful or not useful. It’s just—the details—I don’t have them yet.

NEYSA HINTON: Yeah, we are still examining in a possible it’s called reorganization with the Gold Ridge Fire Department, and we are in the process of going through the LAFCO proposal stage and seeing if that makes sense for the city, but the city voted 100% in support to go through this LAFCO process. So that’s the big department merger that we would talk about. I know that it’s been discussed about moving different departments that now are scattered throughout the entire city—Planning and Public Works, is in one building. You got building and fire in another, you got the police department, you got City Hall, which is really too small for how the city has grown. But again, those kinds of decisions are really up to the city manager. He knows where the department heads are. He should be the one to lead something like that. And we rely on him as our top executive to make decisions like that, in my opinion, and then we can always weigh in, but I still think he should take the lead.

PHILL CARTER: I definitely want to efficiencies in some of these planning departments and commissions, but I don’t want to handicap them, and I want to make sure that they’re able to do their job and protect the parts of the town that they’re meant to protect. But I definitely want to make things go faster and have a more efficient process and make sure the right hand is talking to the left hand. So in some ways, maybe some collaboration is helpful, and some contraction and departments could reduce administration costs, which are something that may hinder our budget. That said some of the committees are important because they don’t restrict development, but they do provide insight, and those are critical, but we can make our departments more efficient. As far as Gold Hill (sic) goes, I know that reducing admin is important, and I’m a fan of that, but I would be reticent to decrease too many departments and contract them to the point where they’re ineffective. Just to sum up: moderation. But yes, find efficiency. And leave it to the town manager. Can I throw that in there too?

What are your thoughts on the possibility of the city contracting for its public safety services to the sheriff’s office?

NEYSA HINTON: So I don’t have an opinion on that. I do know that both Windsor and the town of Sonoma contract with the Sheriff’s Department. My sister is a retired police officer, and she used to specialize and teach at the Santa Rosa JC Academy in local community policing. She actually started her career here at the Sebastopol as a dispatcher. Many people don’t know that, but as we grew up here, so I’m a big community local policing fan, and I do believe that that is super important to our community. I like to see the police officers, when they’re able, walking the downtown streets and talking to our merchants. So that’s where my personal preference would lie. But of course, if somebody wanted to suggest that, I would have to look at all the facts and then hear from the community, and kind of all options are always open, I think, especially when we have this fiscal crisis. So I would be open as well to hearing, I guess, if it would save us money. Bottom line.

PHILL CARTER: I’ve been going to town halls and a lot of council meetings for the past year or two and have slowly gotten to know our police force, and I really respect that we can know them on a first name basis, and there’s just a few of them, and they can tell us very detailed ways to how to keep safe. And I appreciate that. I’m not sure if we would get the same thing through a sheriff, and I’m also not sure it would save us money, even though 32 or 50 something percent of our budget is going to the police office. So I would be leaning against it initially, you know, unless there was a strong desire from the police department and the citizens—which I’m a listener—like, if that’s what everybody would want, then certainly I will do my best to look into it and make it work. But initially, I’ll lean against it.

KEY NETHERY: Yeah, I’ve not looked into the financials or the workload, or what it is that the police department here does versus how the sheriff’s department handles like Windsor and Sonoma and so, you know, it would need analysis. I’d have to look into it, but I’m open to the idea that perhaps a town of 8,000 people is better managed by Sheriff’s Department. I prefer to know all of our local police officers as they’re doing their job. But that might be something that we can no longer afford, I don’t know. So it just requires data.

What are your thoughts on the proposed Hotel Sebastopol and Barlow Hotel projects?

PHILL CARTER: I think it’s important for the city. I’m for hotels, and because that is some development that will impact the city’s look, I appreciate how much work that they’re going to put in to make them fit within the city. But having come from other cities that were marginally bigger than this, have hotels that are, you know, iconic within the city and helpful for a lot of different kinds of community events, I think they’re very helpful. You know, I’m not the business person, so I can’t decide their business model or their approach, but I would certainly like to use them as part of the collaboration with marketing the city to get it to be more of a stop-in town than a pass-through town. So if you have these hotels, then it’s a midpoint. They could go to the beach, they could go up to Guerneville or wine or something like that. It would be, actually become a place where people can be. Although I’m stylistically leaning a little bit more Petaluma than Healdsburg, I do come from a small town, and I appreciate Sebastopol’s own city look, and I will trust that our planning department will honor that. And as far as traffic goes, we have two of the biggest highways here. We have 140,000 trips going up a day from Cotati to Guerneville. We have 61,000 trips, at least, coming from Santa Rosa to Bodega. If we can capture some of that with a hotel, —maybe even capture some San Rosa traffic—it would be great.

KEY NETHERY: Yeah, I think both hotels would be wonderful. Number one, we are right on the edge of the Russian River resort area, and this is a great place to visit if you want to go and explore all the wineries and the roads and, you know, biking, and there’s just, like, a whole lot of stuff that you can do with Sebastopol as a base. Similarly, we’ve got the Barlow, we’ve got the downtown, we’ve got lots of really good restaurants. If we have a large number of more people here staying in hotels, then those businesses are going to do a lot better. So I’m all for the two hotels. I think that that would be a wonderful addition to the town.

NEYSA HINTON: Hotel Sebastopol has been in the works since I was elected the first time in 2016, and I’ve been supportive of the hotel. They’ve designed a beautiful project that is multi-level. The top level matches our movie theater, and the lower level matches Screamin’ Mimi’s. And they’re going to have hostel rooms and bike lockers. And I think it really goes well with the bike lanes that go through our town that don’t get as much use as they really should. People can come stay, they can spend their money and support our local town, and then they can go home. The project in the Barlow has been discussed on and off the table for a while. Ideally, I wish those buildings, if we had had forethought, were built with housing on the top level, but that was a previous city council, and they weren’t built to sustain and have housing. So with the new Barlow Hotel, it is using an existing footprint that already exists, and that building needs to be rebuilt anyway. So at this stage, considering our financial situation, I believe that two hotels make sense. Let me just state that we did lose a downtown hotel in the Gravenstein Station to a HomeKey project, which was not our choice. That was a county program. We didn’t have any say in it, but we welcome those residents that are going to live there.

The city council is responsible for the water and sewer operations in the city of Sebastopol. Finances, water quality and infrastructure needs have not been easily available to rate payers. What would you do to better inform water rate payers concerning the finances and the state of our water and sewer infrastructure?

KEY NETHERY: I totally agree that there’s this black box that’s water and sewer, and you know, like, what’s going on? There is a monthly thing, a statement that goes up with the bills, that discusses issues that are related to water and sewer. The problem with those is that if you live in a multi-unit house or multi-unit place, you don’t ever see the bill. So you never see these communications. It seems to me that it would be useful to have somebody start exploring writing up, you know, a monthly article, and then finding a way to get that monthly article to a lot of the people that are utilizing water that don’t pay bills for water. So, you know, just more communication, somebody to explore and answer questions and write it up and get the information out there. Because, I agree, I’m concerned.

NEYSA HINTON: The city council wasn't that informed to be honest, in my opinion, and we were kind of taken unawares. I think, generally speaking, we had kicked the can down the road, because we don't like to spend money on consultants to have a full rate study done, and when we got it done at a cost of $90,000, we had the consultant tell us that we had not been raising rates at the level that we should have been for sustainability of our water and sewer program. I believe the city thought they were doing the right thing. We were bringing it up every couple years, but at the end of the day, when we paid an outside consultant—and that account we cannot make money in—all of a sudden, we were taken aback. We had to do some steep increases. That was a tough vote. My house is the biggest asset I own, and I need reliable sewer and water to keep my property value up and to just live here. I mean, I’ve lived here in this house 31 years. So unfortunately, we went through the process. We tried to be as transparent as possible. We reported out the information as soon as we received it, reliable information. And we will continue to try to do that in full transparency to the rate payers the best we can.

PHILL CARTER: I would love to see a plan going forward be positive and proactive. But I would also like, in retrospect, to see it line itemed. So that this function of the city, which is separated from our government on the budget—it’s a business-related tab on that budget that it pays for itself—it’s self-explanatory why we need to increase rates. You know, here is how much we worked on repairs; here's how many hours are put on it. That's not visible to me, but I think should be; if it is, I haven’t been able to see it. I would love to be able to see it as its own standing accounting platform. And that said, I would also like to see a plan for it, because one thing that I know is we're going to have water issues going forward for the next 50 years. There are cities in California that are suffering from lowering wells and depreciation of assets, and I want to make sure that whatever we put this new revenue to isn't just a bandaid event, but it is proactively building something that will last us for the next 30 years.

The last Homeless Point in Time Count documents 118 homeless individuals in Sebastopol. What would you do to reduce the number of homeless people so that Sebastopol has one per every 1,000 residents, similar to Windsor. In addition, what are the plans for having RVs removed from city streets and finding housing for the people in them?

NEYSA HINTON: Well, first, the plan to remove RVs—we are currently on hold in an agreement with a lawsuit that the city is dealing with that has not been settled yet. So we have not been able to enforce our 72-hour rule and move RVs along unless they’re a health and safety hazard. And our police department spends a lot of time working on this issue, and we do have a homeless coordinator that is part of our city contract with West County Community Services that works on this issue also. She works to try to get the homeless community in Sebastopol services so that they can get what they need and hopefully work towards a more sustainable goal. I saw the stats from the counts recently and was shocked at the level that they say is in Sebastopol. I also have heard that those can be unreliable statistics, and it depends on when the Point Counts are happening, and then what sweeps have been done, and then people flood out to different zones. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that's where they’re going to remain for the next three, six months or a year. A lot of people are mobile, and they move around. And so I think that the Point in Time Count is not the most reliable.

PHILL CARTER: All the numbers of homeless are difficult. Seeing this number so high is new to me, but I don’t find it terribly out of line. But I do want to make sure that the homeless don’t affect the small businesses, but in the most compassionate way. And how can we do this? How can we organize county services and don’t absorb so many problems from the exterior economy for a small city that doesn’t have enough room to absorb that impact. When the homeless also come with other problems such as drug use or panhandling in front of businesses, where businesses suffer, it creates a downward spiral that we don’t need. And I mean beyond ‘We don’t need it,” it’s not okay. We want to make sure that that homeless in whatever various state they are, whether they want help, could be helped or unhelpable, that they receive the care that they have. And there are a lot of different organizations—where we don’t have to recreate the wheel—we can use services that are out there and make sure that we use our the services that we have to protect the businesses assets that we have. Knowing that we’re in the lawsuit trouble and then we’re not able to do certain things, we can use our resources from San Francisco and other big cities that are also dealing with this problem.

KEY NETHERY: Well, I definitely do not have, like, the silver bullet to solve this problem. I think that it’s going to be an interesting deep dive to sort of find out, like what we’ve been doing, why we’re stymied in certain areas, what we can do, what other cities have done. I mean I know that in other states, they tend to basically just put the homeless into housing and they start there, and then they work with them to get the services that they need. But the first thing they have is a safe place to sleep and store their stuff. And I’m not sure that we have the resources to do that. We don’t have a place for it. I don’t know how we would go about doing something like that. I don’t know if we could do something like that that was even small, you know, like a, like a 10-by-10-foot safe space for someone who’s homeless. So I don’t really have a silver bullet answer. It’s something that I’m interested in, and something that you know, I’d like to see if we can find a solution for, but I don’t have the answer.

How will you collaborate with our 5th district supervisor to bring funds to Sebastopol, which serves as a west county service center. Besides funds, how else will you collaborate with the county?

PHILL CARTER: One of the reasons why I want to be on the city council is because it has an effect beyond Sebastopol. Or we could lobby for Sebastopol inside the county. There are seats in Sonoma Clean Power and other organizations where we can make our voice known as how the rates are distributed to us or what’s available, and how we can work together hand in hand. As a part of the Climate Action Committee, we’re actually working with all the various resources, such as card [inaudible] and active transportation, to bring what they have into Sebastopol so that we can work more collaboratively. Some of the transportation studies involved us working with—sorry, I lost my train of through—but with transportation especially we can work with the county. In working with Linda Hopkins, specifically, I feel like I can learn what’s going on and find ways to collaborate, but also use her as a sounding board to figure out what we might be able to do. Because, as far as from what I understand, if we have an issue and we found it out, then possibly she might keep her ears open and find out unique or creative ways where we can work with the county to get funds in and resources, especially for with the homeless situation.

KEY NETHERY: So the Library Advisory Board, you know, watching what the library does, the library is actually more than just books. It provides a lot of social services to the greater area. There’s days where you can come in and, you know, you can get help filling out forms. You can have people there who can assist you with doing that, people that can help you file to get your birth certificate, whatever, you know, get an email address. Whatever the homeless community needs, the library helps with that. And one of the things that the EFID does is it allows us to draw upon the greater county who uses the services that are available at the library—it allows us to draw upon the greater county to fund these services. And so it’s about the only mechanism I know of where the county can help the city to provide services to the people in the county. So the EFID is targeted towards that particular problem.

NEYSA HINTON: I think it’s really important, as a council member in Sebastopol to be really involved in the regional effort. I have a strong relationship with Linda Hopkins that I’ve built over the last eight years in office, and we sit on some regional boards together, including SCTA for transportation and RCPA for Regional Climate Protection. I’m on the subcommittee for climate protection with the county, and also we belong to the Groundwater Sustainability Agency. And we belong to a water association, also that helps us get our permitting at with some expertise that we don’t have a small city in a regional group. So these regional groups and these relationships are really important. You have to cultivate them. And then when there’s an opportunity, as Supervisor Hopkins did to give us the $60,000 grant to explore the EIFD, then all of a sudden, with that strong relationship, we have those opportunities. Because she’s like, ‘Okay, if Santa Rosa doing it with their supervisor, and Sonoma Valley is doing it, I want to do it with my group.’ Let me also point out that we got $1.5 million in flood relief dollars from the state of California at the time in 2019 from a relationship with Mark Levine’s office. So these kinds of relationships are important, and I think as an elected official, the active electives work on this.

What ideas do you have to fix the traffic problem in the city, as well as the downtown parking issues?

KEY NETHERY: So I recently learned about “stroads,” which is a street that’s a road, and basically the concept is a street is something that you stroll on and that you have a large number of people along the edges and the cars are not zooming through it. A road is something where you have cars getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible with as minimal amount of interruptions. So like the freeway is a road, and the Barlow is a great example of a street. A “stroad” is kind of like South Main, where we’ve got stores that we want people to visit, but we also have cars zooming through the town as fast as possible to get from one side of town to the other side of town. And the concept was, if you’re going to do anything to change traffic, you want to get rid of stroads, and you want to make something either a road or a street. But Bodega is a good example of pretty much a road. There’s very few businesses along that, and it works quite well as getting cars through. The 116 corridor could use some work.

NEYSA HINTON: So there is a group—I’m not a part of the group—but I do know that they’ve received a Caltrans grant to reimagine our downtown. I’m excited to hear about what the results of that work is. As council members, we can’t always be involved in everything or sit in everything, but I think that that is something that we are pursuing, and we’ll find out what the recommendations are that come from that. You spoke about parking, also. I don’t think parking is an issue in Sebastopol. In fact, I was just speaking with somebody the other day, we have free parking. It’s not like Santa Rosa, where you’re putting money in the meters or your credit card. So I think we encourage people to shop here, and we give them free parking. Currently, there is a small issue that I’ve been made aware of with employees maybe taking up some of those parking places because we don’t have a strong enforcement policy currently through our police department. So generally, I find that I can park in Sebastopol. I was in downtown today at a variety of locations, and I had no problem parking and walking no more than a block to where I was going. So I don’t see parking as an issue currently, and hopefully, like I said, I’m excited to hear about the reimagine what our downtown could look like. We can’t get rid of the two state highways, unfortunately, so we need to come up with other creative solutions.

PHILL CARTER: This is one of the reasons why I’m here tonight. I started out in the Climate Action Committee, on the Transportation Committee, trying to think about how to make it more bikeable. And then, as I did deeper and deeper dives, I discovered how critical these highways were, and how our downtown is built straight up on this highway. Then I discovered, through a lot of relationships, that in 1985 or so, in the early 80s, that there was a decision to go from two lanes, bi-directional, to one lane. And that was a significant political crisis. But it’s all flow through and traffic jams. We’re going to have two more developments that are going up the road, and we need to reimagine the town. I’m actively involved with it. And as Key nicely said, there’s a Strong Towns movement where they define a certain type of road that’s designed for speed. What we have is this intersection where we open it up in two different places for full speed travel, where we need to keep it slower. Can we do that with traffic circles? What can we do? Can we widen the sidewalks? How can we get traffic to slow down so that our downtown stores don’t suffer, but we can maintain the level of flow that we need so it doesn’t disrupt traffic. It’s a terrible problem. I don’t know of any other place that has quite this problem, but we are going to look at it, and we’re going to imagine it through three different studies that are happening concurrently, and we’re going to build trails on the outside of town that hopefully will allow people to go to Analy from the south side of town.

Affordable housing is a priority to residents. What is your position on the city’s policies on short term rentals such as Airbnb and VRBO.

NEYSA HINTON: Well, we’re not allowing any additional ones, and we’re collecting the TOT taxes from the ones that exist. I think that decision was made a long time ago. You can have a hosted Airbnb, meaning you live in the house or on the property in your own home. We also block any ADUs which get permit deductions. They cannot be short term rentals. So I’m familiar with the situation, but I think our city, frankly, handled this a long time ago with the ordinances that we currently have in place.

PHIL CARTER: The first part of the statement was really about infill housing and the need for affordable housing, and this goes along with transportation and how we deal with some of our trips. We have the opportunity to build infill housing, which can be more affordable and would provide walkability to downtown shops and things like that. This will make the whole vibe a whole lot better. And if we have two new hotels, this will reduce the pressure on having some houses become Airbnbs. Although if people do want to create revenue from their homes or ADUs, which I totally understand, it can be disruptive on the community. And as I understand, there’s a limit on how much you can do for your own home, but if you’re in and out of your own home, I think there’s a process to be able to use it more than three month stretches—not entirely positive. But what I would really prefer to concentrate on, because long term rentals are more needed in the affordable style, that we focus on infill housing and creating these areas that are vacant or not fully utilized, turn them from commercial into infill housing.

KEE NETHERY: Yeah, I think, as Neysa was saying, that this is kind of sort of a solved problem in terms of Airbnbs: the hosted Airbnb totally legit. If you want to have, you know, a stranger come into your house and rent a room and you want to host them, cool, go for it. I think the idea of having an entire house rented out, it’s not working for us, and so that’s sort of been eliminated as a possibility. I totally agree with infill—you know, like the ADUs and junior ADUs, that is a great way to increase the amount of housing in the existing space, because we don’t have extra lots. The one thing I would like to see is some ability for the city to help turn some commercial spaces into small housing. So, for example, you know, Berkeley allows 150-square-foot house or unit, and there’s quite a few places that have an upstairs that if you put a 250-square-foot place, it would be a good way for people to be able to live in this community and work in this community. So I think there’s a lot that the city can do to help.

Closing Statements

PHILL CARTER: I’m running for council because I want to reimagine the downtown, to make it vibrant, to make it beautiful, to think about growing the downtown through festivals and a clean downtown, using resources that we have to market it a little bit better, become a little bit more business friendly, but not ruin the vibe of a small town. That said, I want to work on transportation and infill and affordable housing, without reducing the safety of our area, making sure that our businesses are not only able to receive walkable traffic, but also not having a problem with the unhoused. And then I also need to do a lot of work and struggle with our long-term RV parking. I know that that’s a terrible issue, and will take quite a bit of work. More or less, I hope to add a positive vibe with team spirit, so that the council can get things done and move us forward as fast as possible, so that we can get out of the budget issues, making sure that we keep our eye on the ball and complete transparency.

KEY NETHERY: Yeah, so the my two main issues are budget—we can’t spend more than we bring in—and water. I want to make sure that we have enough water to last us. My wife and I moved here, and we intend to live here the rest of our lives. We’d like for the place to be viable for that. We have rental property, and so I’ve got a lot of expertise and experience in housing, and I’m definitely interested in seeing what kind of possibilities there are. So, yeah, I’m interested in jumping in and seeing what I can do to make this place get back on track.

NEYSA HINTON: So for the last eight years on the Sebastopol City Council, I’ve demonstrated a commitment to Sebastopol values and utilize my knowledge of the issues that we’re facing, applied my experience to finding solutions for tough challenges. I support and practice open government, inclusion of all budget solutions and infrastructure investments, and provide steady leadership while keeping community goals in the forefront. But honestly now, a lot of people know me, and where I stand and why. You’ve seen my decisions, and while I listen to others and the whole community, I do not hesitate to express the position I feel is best for our community. It’s been an honor, frankly, and a privilege to serve for the last eight years on our Sebastopol City Council. And with your support, I hope to continue to serve you in a third term, so that we can continue to build a thriving Sebastopol and solve our many challenges.