What happened at the March 5 Sebastopol City Council Meeting?

Council receives financial audit and hears the results of an electrification survey

All members of the city council were present for the March 5 council meeting, including Mayor Diana Rich, Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman, Councilmember Sandra Maurer, Councilmember Jill McLewis, and Councilmember Neysa Hinton.

Sound and video recording problems continued to plague the city council’s public meetings. The meeting started 20 minutes late, while techs raced to troubleshoot the problem. Alas, in the resulting video recording, the sound quality of people speaking from the podium was so low at the beginning of the meeting as to be indecipherable.

Proclamations

The council meeting began with three proclamations. The council declared March 17-23 as National Surveyors Week. They also declared March to be American Red Cross Month and Women’s History Month.

Public comment for items not on the agenda

Several people spoke during public comment asking the council to support a ceasefire resolution for Gaza. Katie from Sebastopol Senior Center announced a fundraiser for the Day Trip program on Saturday, March 23. Myriah Volk of the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce asked the city council to waive park and police fees for the Apple Blossom Festival, a request that was echoed by former Chamber director Liinda Collins and Peacetown’s Jim Corbett.

Consent Calendar

In addition to approving the minutes of previous meetings, the city council unanimously approved the letter of support for the City of Santa Rosa Community Project Funding Request for the Llano Trunk Sewer Line Project. It also approved the adoption of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) thresholds and policies, which aligns city policy to match updated CEQA guidelines (under SB743), which identify Vehicle Miles Travelled as the most appropriate metric for evaluating a development project’s transportation impact.

Regular Agenda

Financial Audit

The council received the city’s annual financial audit for 2022-2023. City Manager Don Schwartz described this report as “written by and for accountants.” (You can find the audit here.)

The audit is a technical document that looks at how the city’s financial statements are prepared, and if they were done so in accord with sound accounting principles. According to the staff report, “The audit found that the City's financial statements are free of material misstatements and comply with the generally accepted accounting principles and standards.”

Some on the council managed to extract some good news from the audit. In an email to constituents, Councilmember Sandra Maurer described her takeaways from this report this way: “A few takeaways are that in comparison to other small cities, the city is doing a good job managing pension liability. Our tax base is relatively stable, and the predicted end of fiscal year 23/24 reserve is 32.9%, which is slightly higher than what was predicted in November. It's future spending where we will need to be very careful moving forward.”

There were no answers in this audit as to the question of how the city got in the dire financial position it finds itself in ($2.4 million in the red) or how it can right the ship.

Those questions might be answered—or at least fleshed out—in a report on the budget that Schwartz plans to deliver at the next council meeting on March 19.

The climate action committee releases the results of their electrification study

The Climate Action Committee (CAC) did a survey last spring on electrification—that is, the move away from natural gas to all electric power for local residences. CAC co-chair Kenna Lee presented the results, which were summarized in the staff report:

• Awareness that new technologies exist is fairly high but the details about them are not well understood.  

• Cost is the primary barrier to implementing electrification.

• Reliability of the electrical grid, especially during power shut offs, is a concern. Dependable electricity supply needs to be assured.

• Contractors and installer acceptance are the key to selling the change.

• Consumers confuse the cost of electric appliances of the past with the new

• Financial options to help consumers are not easily accessed.

• Many responses suggest that citizens believe that the City of Sebastopol is the initiator of retiring the gas Infrastructure. (Editor’s Note: According to Lee, the pressure is coming from PG&E and the state, which would like to end the use of natural gas by 2050.)

One odd note: Sebastopol leads the county in natural gas consumption.

See the full survey here.

Councilmember McLewis noted that electrification would be a tough sell given all the recent power outages. Councilmember Neysa Hinton, noting that Sebastopol is considered a leader in this area, suggested teaming up with the folks at Sebastopol Hardware to offer classes for contractors in electrification technologies. Maurer, echoing McLewis’s concern, asked how to bridge the gap between electrification and the unreliability of the grid. Lee said that grids were going to change and brought up the possibility of locally based micro-grids.

In public comments, CAC members Lisa and Steve Pierce both spoke. Steve called Climate change “an existential threat that we all face. Everyone has to step up” and he noted that Sebastopol leads the county in solar panels and electric cars. Lisa thanked the council for their support and said that the electrification survey had been a good opportunity for the Climate Action Committee to interact with the public.

Former city council candidate Oliver Dick objected to the whole discussion and suggested that, like the ceasefire resolution, it was outside the scope of a local city council and therefore a waste of time. “I don’t really enjoy being told all this stuff,” he said. “It’s just very, very annoying.”

Watch the full meeting here. The next regular city council will be on Tuesday, March 19, at 6 pm at the Sebastopol Youth Annex, 425 Morris St., Sebastopol.