We live. Hey everybody. Welcome. It's September 9th, 2024. This is our X number of community chats. This is an opportunity for people in the community to come to City Hall to talk to me and me. And our city manager taught Kusumano about anything that's on your mind. There is no agenda, there is no time limit within reason. This is an opportunity for you to come and express your thoughts, share ideas, ask questions to learn for us to learn also. So that's the format for this. We've done a number of these. We love doing these and people are participating from home as well as in our audience here. Today we're going to start specifically by talking about Measure L. Measure L is a long term project that the city has been working on with respect to infrastructure. But instead of listening to me talk which can often be very boring, we're going to go directly to a beautiful film that we've made about Measure L, which features not only me and Todd, but members of an infrastructure task force that was formed in order to study this issue. So without further ado, we're going to cut directly to do it. Kusumana, your city manager. Today we want to talk, my name is Ergen Carmel, I'm the Mayor of Malawi, and I'm talk Kusumana, your city manager. Today we want to talk to you about the most important issue we're undertaking, not just this year, but for many years ahead. Today, your city is a really great financial and operating position. Our sales tax and our transit and our office tax are among the lowest in the county. Our parks and our field are the envy of our neighbors. Your library was voted the second best small library in America. Last year, we reduced over 400 tons of fuel off the hillside or to reduce fire risk. Pensions are often regarded as a huge financial risk for city yet we've done the math. We can weather the doubling of our pension obligations over the next 10 years and still maintain our level of investment in your community. I can go on and talk about our great initiatives with respect to affordable housing, diversity, equity, and inclusiveness, climate action plan, all of which are leading efforts within the county. While all of this is really good news and should be a source of pride for everybody in the community, we face some challenges in the years ahead that require some urgent actions. Led by our public works team, we've been assessing our infrastructure needs for the past three to five years. And what we found is that we need approximately 150 to 180 million dollars in investment over the next 10 to 15 years. This is twice the amount we have available to us today. Why is it important? Our infrastructure protects the public safety and welfare of our community. When you think about our infrastructure, think about it in three pots. The first is public safety, improvements, the second is deferred maintenance, and the third is community investment. So let's talk about them. So first with safety improvements it all starts there and this is approximately 50% of our investment needs over the next 10 to 15 years. With climate change in the extreme weather events it has a major impact on our city and three specific areas. One, the droughts and hotter periods cause major fire issues for our hillsides and field reduction and vegetation management is a number one priority for our city. The second is the atmospheric rivers, causing major flooding problems within our city, but also land slides on our hillsides. The third is sea level rise, and the importance of flood mitigation and management to protect our infrastructure not only today, but for the next 100 years. The second investment is related to Ferd Maintenance, the city owns 8 civic buildings. And within those buildings, we have years of deferred maintenance. This is approximately 20% of our need. And when you think about deferred maintenance, think about HVAC systems, mold remediation, remodeling for office space, ADA accessible access, foundation issues, roof repairs. We are in need over the next 10 to 15 years to do major investment in all eight civic buildings. The third bucket is community investment. This is approximately 30% of our investment. This is related to the 70 miles of roadway that we have in our city, expanding our sidewalks for pedestrian and bicycle use, to make sure that all of our areas within our community are accessible to everyone in our community. It's also related to quality of life, our library, our park and wreck facilities, our playgrounds, our fields. This is what separates our community from all others. And this is something that is a major priority, not only for our community, but your staff. And we're gonna work hard to make sure that we preserve that for the next 50 years. We want to develop what we heard from public works and also for a plan for what we should do next. So last July, your city council formed a 15 person citizens advisory panel. It was comprised of seven women and eight men and they spent four months studying all of these issues. This is some of what we heard. Hello I'm Jim Peron. Hello. What's me is Jerry K. Hill. We're the co-chairs of the committee. I should start by saying the committee was not a rubber stamp committee. We wanted to find out whether the city had legitimate infrastructure needs. As a result of that, we spent many hours reviewing lengthy city reports, outside consultant reports. We met with the city's finance director. We met with the director of public works. We asked him a lot of hard questions and we got great answers. The result is that the committee then spent eight meetings reviewing all the materials, reviewing the consultant reports, reviewing outside consultant reports, and we concluded that the city's infrastructure needs were legitimate. Actually, the committee unanimously agreed that the city has between $150 and $180 million in critical infrastructure needs. I'm Jerry K. Hill. I was co-chair with him. And I was extremely skeptical about this requirement for funding the infrastructure shortfall. I wasn't even aware that there was one, but after spending the time reading many, many reports and also talking with independent consultants both from the tax angle and also just how other measures have been done, we think that there is a definite need and we think that the sales tax proposition is the best way to go. Hi I'm Kendra Pollock. After looking at the investment need we then held a meeting over how to fund this. We looked at six different ways. parcel tax, bonds, TOT, business license tax, real estate transfer tax, and sales tax. It was an exhaustive review. And hi, I'm Hunter Moore and the city did a great job about lining the infrastructure needs and the committee at the end of the day looked at all six of those options and thought a bond investment was really not needed. That a parcel tax would not be appealing. The TOT and business tax didn't generate enough income and so we really only had two options. The transfer tax on the sale enough income, and so we really only had two options. The transfer tax on the sale of a property and or a general sales tax. And while there was disagreement among the members as to which of these was preferred, the research clearly showed that voters would prefer a general sales tax. And at the end of the day, that's what's most important that we generated enough funds to cover the infrastructure needs. The final thing the committee recommended was that there be guardrails on this measure to protect the tax pairs. The first guard rail is that the money only be spent for actual infrastructure needs. The second guard rail is that there be an oversight committee, independent citizens oversight committee, to review the expenditures and make sure that they are only spent on infrastructure and nothing else. And we did not want this tax to be unending. So we provided for a sunset provision, so it will terminate at 10 years. I'm Al Gromet. We also recommended that this tax go to the voters, this November, the city has an immediate investment need and we concluded that the time to act is now. I think it's critical that we take care of this deferred maintenance problem, which is very significant. We could let it go and then in 10 years we're gonna have an emergency. We won't have the and then in 10 years we're going to have an emergency. We won't have the funds to take care of the problem and the city could be a disaster. We have prided ourselves over the years in planning ahead and that's what this project is. Your City Council discussed the recommendations from the panel and from EMC at Council meetings in December and March. That's why you'll see a ballot initiative in November for a 1% sales tax increase. We believe that that will allow us, together with our existing source of funding, to make the investments that we need to over the next 10 years to improve our infrastructure in the ways that we described. Over the coming months, more information will be coming out on how we precisely plan to spend our investment strategy. For more information will be coming out on how we precisely plan to spend our investment strategy. For more information, please go to the website, listen on the screen, or contact myself, or staff, as we look forward to having this conversation with you. We will hold a community form where we can learn more and ask questions. If your neighborhood is interested, we'd be happy to come and visit and present this information to you. We want everybody to be as well informed as possible. Thank you so much for your time today, and please share this video widely. If you're not making $158,000, that's probably the best part of that video right there. So, there you go, there's Measure L, that's the Infrastructure Initiative. This is not kidding, this is a four-year-old. That would be a real big deal. There's Measure L. That's the Infrastructure Initiative. This is not kidding. This is a story or a war that we've been on in real life. Let's kill that. So this started back in 2020 when I was a freshman, let me put it that way, on the City Council, right in the middle of the pandemic when it seemed like nothing hey, by the way, you have about $50,000 or $50 million in investment that you need to make in your city in order to keep it safe. And after thinking about it for about 24 hours, we came back and we said, let's do a 360 degree view of the city. Let's look at everything that we've got that we need to take care of because the initial view was really about bridges and culverts and things like that. And we said, well, let's look at all of our city on buildings. Let's look at our parks. Let's look at all the EDI issues that we've got in our city. So that's how this started. It took, it accelerated when Todd joined the city in 2022 and then in 2023 is when we formed a 15 person task force to really study it independently come to a conclusion on this thing. And I really want to stress that this was an independent body that really assessed this whole thing. They looked through in detail all of the things that we wanted to invest in. They unanimously agreed that this was a bona fide list of investments that we need to make. And then they determined that there were two good ways of doing it. We checked that with EMC and the sales tax measures, the one that we're putting forward, because that's the one that essentially voters prefer. And that's where we are today. So we're here to answer your questions. As the video ends, it said, we are going to do a community form. Well, here we are. We're doing a community form. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that the 49ers are going to have their opening game tonight. So, hopefully, there are people watching at night. But we are available here anytime, really. There are members here that want us to come to your neighborhood and speak more than happy to do so, more than happy to take a phone call or meet in the pause at any time to talk about this. It's really important that people understand what it is that they've got on the ballot. That's really what this is about. This is just information sharing from our standpoint. So there we go. And with that, I'm going to open it up to the floor and to the people online, anybody who wants to ask a question. You can just come on up to our microphone that way people that are watching at home can hear your voice. You know, generally we state our name and where we live and a little bit of it by yourself and then ask your question and we'll have a dialogue. Joan Murray, look at Stavanyu. So there are a lot of businesses that have left Mill Valley closed down. We still have some empty storefronts. So the amount of money you're projecting for sales tax depends on a healthy bunch of merchants in town. So have you taken that into account? Yes, we have taken that into account. So we track ourselves tax revenue very closely. So you might know that the city does like all cities, it does a two-year budget. And part of that two-year budgeting process requires that we look at what our sales tax revenue is going to be. So our finance team have got their metrics, they've got their sources for looking at it, they track it year after year. We're paid very, very close attention to it, and Todd can probably talk more at length about this, but to the extent that we know month to month, quarter to quarter how sales are going in the city. So that's the first thing. Secondly, I'll say we are not complacent on our commercial environment in our city. We are working really hard to understand what barriers that exist to opening up businesses in town. So just in the last month, Todd and I and Patrick Kelly are planning director have visited a number of businesses and we've talked to them about the permitting process in the city of Mill Valley and we've tried to understand from them what issues they had getting a permit in the city of Mill Valley, what would entice other businesses to come into the city of Mill Valley and we are working very hard to figure out ways of streamlining that process. So unless there's a safety issue, a visual impact, a noise impact, a parking impact, some reason why we should be denying it, we wanna be in a position where we can issue permits for new businesses in town in 30 days. That's our goal. So we've got that process underway underway and then we're also looking at how we utilize parking in the city of Mill Valley. We have not done a proper parking analysis in the city since the 1970s and many of our standards are out of date. Our practices are out of date and so for the first time we're redoing that. That's a process that we just started last month. That's going to be ongoing now for the next, probably nine months, I believe. And that'll come to the Planning Commission first, then it'll come to the City Council. But we're trying to figure out what the barriers are to starting businesses in town, because small town character, which we always talk about in Mill Valley is being very important, that requires a vibrant downtown. And we're trying to find ways of making our downtown vibrant. It's important economically, it's important socially. So you want to talk a little bit about how we track sales. And it's a good question. We're lucky we have Eric and Trevor and our finance team. But we went back 40 years. When we started there and we worked our way forward. And so you have economic downturns, every five to seven to 10 years. We looked a lot at what happened in the 2000s. And then the housing market crashed, what happened there in COVID. We had some really good things where we could analyze that. And we're very unique in Mill Valley, where we're service oriented, grocery, food, drink, we have our one dealership, we have hotel, we're strong. We're very strong. We average and it's very unusual at a 4% interest rate increase every year in our revenues. If you go backwards and you look forward, those are the projections. We have a third party that analyzes that on a quarterly basis. And so part of what we do as a team and with the mayor and vice mayor and council, we can track in real time gross receipts. And so we can see when someone's struggling. I'll give you an example. So we had a certain restaurant that was struggling through COVID and we were doing outdoor dining. And it was time to maybe pull some of that back and start charging, but they were struggling. And you could see it in the gross receipts. It wasn't he said, she said, it was like, we need help. And so we helped them, right? It's a real time where we can see the numbers and we can help our business communities stay here when they need help. But also we can forecast, you know, moving forward of tools in the toolbox so to speak of how we can, you know, get people here. We're also focused on, as the mayor said, we're looking at property owners and where, what, in Marin County, right? We have the cascows and the targets, we have the Regionalcades in the targets. We have the regional shopping center. We have from southern Marin to northern Marin. We have an analysis of all the opportunities for us where we might be able to bring in smaller business that meets our niche into Merrin County. And so what we're trying to do is facilitate that conversation with those types of businesses, with the property owners, trying to facilitate a conversation. And if they're interested, the next step then, as the mayor said, we're trying to add all levels of our government to help that business owner get in. We have a lot of things in our code where if it's more than 1,500 square feet, they have to go through the planning process. And so there might be ways where we can update that code to be more, so we're not as restrictive. We're a little bit more open arms and how we can help streamline them within 30 days instead of the six month process, right? Time is money. And that'll be very intriguing to a lot of the businesses coming to Merun, coming to Mill Valley. But what I can tell you right now is when we did the sales tax analysis, we're comfortable with moving forward $4 million is our number. And we expect it to increase at 4% annually each year. But we on our projections are going to keep a flat four million over 10 years, right? We're hoping for $40 million over 10 years on Measure L. And that'll be part of it. And we're looking, and really when you think about that infrastructure plan, we're looking to spend $100 million over the first 10 years. We have $6 million now, that's the goodness, and we just need four more. And so that's part of that process. And again, I also just, you may have seen it in the paper, we're being compared to other cities. And we're unique. The city of no value, we're being aggressive, right? We're trying to, we don't want to defer maintenance. That'll cost our citizens more money. And so we have $6 million, as I said, towards infrastructure. And so we need four more. And that gives us 10. And when you look at our general fund, we're very unique. We actually, when you look at our revenues brought in compared to what we pay in salary benefits, right? A general fund is our revenue that come in and really a majority of the cities in Marin County, it's the services it pays for salaries and benefits people, right? And so our, when you look at us, we're 70% of our general fund is salaries and benefits. And to you, that's just a percentage, but what I'll tell you, compared to all the other cities in Marin County, we're the lowest. That's the lowest percentage. That's because of those before us making good decisions, being physically responsible, and so I'm really proud to have our name on this measure and going through the community, having them confirm that and give those recommendations. I'll just add that since this video was made, So believe it or not, we started making this video in April. So it took quite a little while to get it done. But since we made this, we've received the endorsement of a number of pretty important organizations. First of all, the Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce, which looks after all the businesses in town endorsed it. In fact, they were the first organization to endorse it. Then the Marine Realtors Association endorsed it, and that's important because of course they're looking out for the value of all the real estate in our city. And then thirdly, the coalition of sensible taxpayers, the cost, which is an organization that looks at taxes and bonds across Marin County. They made the unusual decision of actually endorsing our measure. Normally, it's either opposed or it's a neutral position, but they decided to endorse it because they felt like we had studied this issue very carefully, firstly, secondly, that it was very precise in terms of what it was trying to accomplish. It was not an open-ended tax. It's a very precise targeted list of things that were trying to accomplish. It was not an open-ended tax. It's a very precise targeted list of things that we're trying to accomplish. Thirdly, that it's sunsets automatically. In other words, if we're not successful, if the community doesn't like it, this ends automatically after 10 years. And then finally, that it's got an oversight committee. So we'll have a five-person independent group that we appoint comprised of members of the community that will sit down once a year and go through audited statements and make sure that the money was spent the way the money was supposed to be spent. And if there are priorities that that group feels is important for the next forecast period, then we welcome their input into our process. So that's what we're doing without. Are there other questions about Metro L or infrastructure? Yes, you have to come to the podium. State your name and your address. And of course there are. Yeah. I am channeling my inner John McColley with this particular question. You said it, you know, there's a budget that you have for the sales tax over the 10 years. If the sales tax is a higher amount. Well, more money go into the fund or is it at amount and we want to even it all out? Yeah, no. Do you want to figure it out? The more the merrier. So here's a few things that we're doing. We're not just relying on the sales tax. So the first one is, yes, every dollar that is brought in from that sales tax measure will go to infrastructure. So if we bring in 4 million one year and then actually we're lucky enough to bring in 5 million, then we have 9 million for infrastructure. That's the first thing. The second thing is we're just not depending on adding more taxes. We're very sensitive to that. So two other things are in play here. The second one is think about sea level rise and flood control, flood management. There are two different things, right? So we have $18 million in flood control projects. And then we also have, we haven't really spoken. We've done all this analysis in the county and the region on sea level rise, but we haven't done anything, right? And so part of our leadership team, we're like, let's develop a strategy, right? And so instead of using sales tax funds or looking at other ways, we did two things. So the last year in John McColley helped us with the help of the mayor and staff. We have secured $3.2 million from flood zone three over the next five years. That's really important because we're focusing the Sycamore area on the flats. And we're going to do six projects. One is clearing the creeks. That's about $400,000. There's a second one of taking the old Sycamore pump station and revitalizing it, putting it in installing a new one. That's about a $2.5 million dollar project, or $2 million dollar project, I'm sorry. And then you have this great pump station and you have to pump it, right? And so we have these small pipes in the region and so they're four inches. And so we're going to expand them from four to eight inches. That's $750,000. So we're going to do those major projects over the next few years with flood zone three monies. That's the first piece. But as it goes down, streamed into a Royal Creek, now we have to start thinking, what are we going to do there? And so we took the lead with the help of Stephanie Malton Peters with the county, her support, and we submitted for a grant. It's a $1.2 million. It's for adaptation. We want to do three adaptation projects that are fully engineered, where then we can go and we secure and we qualify for additional grant funds. And then potentially leveraging some of our sales tax funds with flood zone three funds to do a multi-million dollar projects. And it's a long front field as you start to think down that corridor as you go down all the way down all the way around a town into their project and then into the CalTrans project. There's multiple projects that go into that, but what we're trying to do is start to develop the roadmap for future leadership. We want to do the first and then we're going to do more. So that's another one of not relying on taxes. Let's go out and leverage our partners and let's find opportunities. So that grant, we actually find out tomorrow. The good news is staff, it's the Ocean Protection Council. It's a state OPC. Staff is recommending our $1.2 million dollar project. It's be approved. So we're excited we find out tomorrow. That's number two and that's an important one of leveraging funds. And the third one that we're doing, It's how can we be more efficient? And by being efficient, you save money, public funds, and secure and maintain and improve services long-term. The fire annexation with Southern and Fire District is one. That annexation year one, we saved $350,000 annually. Moving forward, you're going to see that trend go up for us. But we improved service delivery for the city of Mill Valley. It wasn't just to save money. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We brought our finance and admin team together. That includes admin, finance, human resources, training, right? We're taking all of our forward movement personnel, community engagement, and DEI, and we're starting to put them under one department. And over time, through attrition, you'll start to save money. But what we're doing is we're more effective across all of our departments. So those are ways that we're trying to tighten our bootstraps, do things the right way, open up funds. And as an example, those consolidations within, if it goes right over the next three to five years, we'll open up $600,000 in revenue of savings. And we'll put that back to the general fund that will then go towards infrastructure projects. So those are three ways we're looking at this and continuing to really attack it. And the other piece, again, we've talked about it before. When you look at any city government, we talked about this earlier with another group. You have to have that long-term forecast. The 10-year outlook is so critical for a city because you got to follow your revenues to expenditures and understand the decisions you make today, how they affect you tomorrow. And so this isn't one where we've gone into it and saying, hey, we need it today, but we don't know what we need five years from now. And that's what separates us from other cities and the process that we've gone through over the last two years, I think it's been pretty extensive and very positive. Could that clarification come on up? No way that somebody is at home in here or here. You know what? Well, it's simply clarifying BDSD. Is that district three? District three. Is that BDS? Yes. So flood zone three is the county of Missowat would be like alto. What are my tam valley alto? It's Marin City and us, right? Yeah. In the regional district, what's the regional body? I think we might be talking about two different groups. BCDC you're talking about? This isn't BCDC. So this is flood zone three. It was formed way back in I think the 60s or 70s in 1956. They're part of the discussion. So you absolutely need to work with BCDC to get something approved. And so, no. No. But there is currently, for the county of Marin, there are tens of millions of dollars available if you can get there first on a project that is ready to go. And so if we're able to approve, get our grant tomorrow. You will see actions over the next three months and potentially we could have an engineering project next year that we could actually bring to the community to support and move forward for funding. So I'm excited. So again, just the point of, we're not just relying on, we need more, the more we have the better because we have a lot of projects. Think about this, we have eight civic buildings We have two fire departments, so we have to take care of we have a police department in community center or a library we have city hall we have a Corporation yard we have you know the club golf hot the golf club we have We also own the depot so we have overhead things that we need to think about and again the big one that really brought us here It started with landslides. It was the big one We've done so much on fire prevention, but there's landslides There's things we need to worry about and when we evaluated them there are 35 high-risk areas right now that Earth is moving and so with the change of weather patterns and they're more extreme now, either dry or wet, it's causing serious problems. And so it caused us to say we had two decisions to make because we have six million annually, right? That's what started part of this conversation was, well, do we divert all of our funds to public safety and just protect the hillsides and don't do anything else in the city? Or do we develop a thoughtful strategy based on priorities over 10 years? And so that's what we did we did the latter. Again when you talk about a hundred million dollars the next evolution if it gets passed in November hopefully will then be the public discussions of here is the here's our recommendation and start to prioritize how we do that so that oversight committee will be really big not to see in the rears how we spent the money but they'll also be in the front and they'll be evaluating with us we'll have a group to evaluate and give recommendations to the council moving forward just the mill value way of process. I just want to like put this in maybe slight broader context. So former mayor McCauley likes to talk about city council being a relay race. One council hands off to the next council. And each successive council tries to make improvements in the city to hand onto the next generation. And I think that's really a great way to think about it. So if you think that back in the 1970s and 80s, we had some pretty good development with respect to affordable housing. In the 90s, we built our fields. We built a community center. We built onto the public library. In the naughties, we redid Miller Avenue. We started to focus on our pavement condition index and fund through the MST improvement in our roads. And then in the 2010s, we started working on things like our healthcare post-benefit costs that are significant with their vector employees. We focused on pension reform, trying to improve our ability to fund our employees in retirement. And those are, as we all know, in the state of California, very significant expenses. The thing that we're focused on now in the 2020s is this. So we're thinking ahead about what are all the potential liabilities that we've got in our city, to prepare our city for climate change and other things that are a threat to the city. And those things cost money to the city. It costs much more to replace the rafters and the plywood and the structure of your house to mitigate mold Then it does to just replace the roof tiles and that's the kind of the thing that we're trying to do Last year if you drove down Miller Avenue you saw that there's a scar Above the Montessori school that scar came because water after several atmospheric rivers came Fluttered across Ethel Avenue came down the hillside, it wrote the road, it wrote the hillside, caused damage to the property below. That's a liability, that's a legal liability that we face. We're lucky that there was no loss of life, that's of course the worst liability that you wanna take, the worst risk you wanna take, but there was a financial liability associated with that. And of course the cost to repair the road beforehand, relative to the cost of mitigating it once it's already taken place and you've got litigation, that's several times more expensive. The problem that cities around us have gotten into is that they have not been thinking about their liabilities. They've not been thinking about how to mitigate those liabilities. And that's the next frontier for the city of Mill Valley. That's the thing that we need to deal with. So we set ourselves up for success in the longer term. And that's really what this is about. And just if you think about that, so let's say we're able to deliver this $100 million program. And when you think about underfunded liabilities, you have retiree health benefits, retiree health, which is right now we have 20 million funded in an account that we have to pay out over the next 90 years. We need probably another eight to fully fund that. So if you go between now and 2034, that fund will be fully funded and we'll have solved the retiree health benefit problem, right? So that's done. Opening up a million dollars back to the general fund You'll have peaked at the cowpers Unfunded payment that we have to make each year and that you'll have invested a hundred million in infrastructure So the leadership team in 2034 will have major issues today solve for them And they'll be set up for multiple options moving forward to you continue with the MST tax Do you continue with the sales tax measure? Do you do something else? What are the issues facing you in 2034? So that's exciting for us. Sonar Legacy, hopefully if we can do it right. So it's a score. Okay, so I know from owning my own business that you do your financials every year and you know you stay on top of everything. One thing that was prohibitively expensive for me would be audited financial statements and I know the City of Mill Valley does audited financial statements every year and that helps you bring in the grant on everything. So, could you take me through the process third party that comes in because when we close our books and we have our numbers, they actually audit our financials. And so they'll go through how making sure, and we have to actually show back up. So we spent this, we have to show our two minutes. They audit our financials. It's about a three-month process where they work with our finance team and our admin team and they audit everything and then what they do is they give a third-party opinion and they confirm the numbers and then what we do is we bring those numbers and council receives it and so council's the body that oversees our staff to make it's a check and balance and so that's mandated by law so we we do that every year. And that's an important process. Yeah. Okay, well, I think we've exhausted infrastructure and measure L. So now it's up to you guys to ask questions about any topic that might be on your mind or to provide feedback on something which is on your mind. It's really your public time to have a discussion with us on any topic. It's of interest. So I'm curious if there's been any discussion about combining parks and rec. You know they were together 10 years ago or so so that the people who work like the Operation Superintendent who's now the deputy director of I can't recall his entire job title but has there been any discussion about bringing them back together? Yes it it's a great question. So as we start to go through, you know, even working with the SASM team of ways of being more efficient from the sanitary, parks, streets, being cross-trained, efficiencies, right, expertise, and building our team up, and we've been evaluating all that. And one of the things, I understand the decision making of why they did it back then. To be completely honest and transparent to you, I don't understand it today. I don't think it's working for us today and what we're starting to go back to is having one span of control, one philosophy, one team. And so I wanna move parks back. One of my recommendations is gonna be to move parks back under Mark Newman and operations. Yeah. OK. And I think, yeah. Thank you. I just want to compliment the city and the council for what I've heard tonight. And so before coming tonight, I went back and looked at the April 29th community meeting and I didn't realize that this was a community meeting. But nevertheless, I just wanted to say thank you and I'll talk to Lynn afterward because I'm following up on an issue that has concerned what we call our Bayview Neighbors Association. It's the idea and the concern we have for sound around our area. We live in a bowl here in Mill Valley. It's top graphically unique. And I looked on the agenda and I read the story in the IJ. I looked briefly at the agenda for the Park and Rec Commission and I would like to talk a little bit more about what that means. The idea of 12 amplified events and events on the plaza, I know as neighbors I can't think of anyone who doesn't think it's terrific. The plazas, the wonderful resource and so forth. But the noise of amplified music is something to approach very carefully and just looking at the discussion that took place at the Park and Rec Commission. If the news article was correct, is there were one of the members, or some of the members were talking about letting it go till 10 p.m. in the summertime. Well, what happened over the weekend was terrific here. It wrapped up at 630 or 7. But going to 10, that as well as more than 12, we don't know how many. That's where it's very helpful if we can sit down and just talk through what our experience has been with sweet water, where we work very closely with them with former members of the council like Dennis Fisco who you know really as one of the owners as well as the other owners that really engaged with us and their terrific now and thankfully they're you know holding their own even though they're now a foundation and it's not easy to keep it going. So I look forward to talking to Lynn and we'll set something up. So it's Michelle. It's Michelle Terrell. I was going to ask Michelle. I was going to ask you to coordinate with him just to see if we could get a beat with the neighborhood. Thank you. And I've always appreciated your approach since I've been here about this. You've always been very thoughtful and bringing problem solving to the table. Just again, I'll just share with everyone the background. One of the things that we're trying to do is look at all of our processes. And we're looking at streamlining and just being more thoughtful, where someone wants to do something really special in our community, whether they want to bring a business to our community, whether they want to bring a business to our community, or whether they want to do something really thoughtful. Like in the plaza as an example. I don't want to just get bogged down in process. And it hasn't made sense since I've been here for just even the 12 projects. Maybe some of them are appropriate, but for special events. I think staff pays a lot of money. We should be able to evaluate them amongst the admin team and all of our departments to move something forward. And so that's really the first piece of why it went to the Park and Rat Commission. And the other one is, I don't necessarily want to put a limit. I want to have some flexibility. I agree 10 o'clock's late. I'm looking for just one. I haven't been here more than two years, just historical perspective. And having the commission weigh in a little bit on maybe some parameters. And then what I want to do, we're not going to do anything tomorrow. Then I want to engage and I appreciate you're going to be the first neighborhood I'm going to of, okay, here's kind of how they weigh in. What should my matrix of decision making look like? Is a Saturday afternoon or is there a certain day that's different? Is there something I should be thinking about, you know, for my decision making? And when is too much? And how should we be thinking about it and just having a thoughtful process? So that's what we're looking at. We're looking at adding some vibrance and just energy to the downtown, but we also aren't looking at having amplified music every night, Monday through Sunday either. So, and again, historical context for me as a staff member is always appreciative and that's what I'm looking forward to going to. And so, yes, thank you. And we absolutely want to gauge, but that's the background. And I don't know if you want to add. Yeah. So, thank you. I mean, we definitely appreciate the engagement and the opportunity to kind of work together on this. So, I think there are two correct mever wrong, but it's actually two different issues. One is the number of events. The number of events on the plaza is limited. And as Todd says, having discretion at the staff level, which involves obviously input from the community so that we can have the appropriate number of events. That doesn't mean we've got 365 events, but it just means that we have discretion to do more than 12. Those don't necessarily have to be amplified events, by the way. So imagine, for example, Saturday morning, there's like yoga, you know, people stretching on the plaza. Well, that would be an event, right? That's an amplified event. This is people on the plaza kind of stretching and getting in shape, right? So that's the kind of thing that we're talking about, right? So it's not going to be, I don't think it disturbance for you, but it adds activity to downtown. So we are trying to make our downtown lively to keep it successful because if it's not successful, then our downtown collapses that has an economic impact on it, has a social impact on it. So it's that balance, right? And just as you describe, you work together with Dennis and Sweetwater. This is the intention to work here also. The second thing is amplified music on the plaza. That, to my understanding, is Friday and Saturday, right? We're talking about two days per week. I haven't heard it going to 10 p.m. But during summer hours, when people want to be outside, and people want to be outside, if you go down to the plaza on a Friday, it's really popular. You got young families out there and they are absolutely loving being out there. So people really want to be on the plaza and enjoy good weather and be with their friends. It's a little bit of Mill Valley's living room. I can't call everything Mill Valley's living room. And I've already called friends field the living room of Mill Valley. So I had to be careful. I had to call this the family room or the dining room or something else. But it's not kind of thing, right? So there are two different things. But Alan, we totally hear what you're saying. This is not, I'll just say, I've never thought like the loud rock and roll kind of thing is the Mill Valley spirit. It's not the culture. It's not my thing. I also live downtown by the way. So, you know, I also hear things from my place. I don't really think that's what we're going for, but you know, more, you know, the things that make Mill Valley, Mill Valley is what we're looking for, that kind of keep activity level down. And by the way, that's very consistent with what's going on in towns around us. What's called live on the avenue in San Enselmo. That's like, what's that Friday, Saturday? It's very active, it's late. Chibran has got their activity on whatever road that's called down by the R-Crite. So they've got their thing going on. Quartamaderos got their thing going on. So we're just, you know, we have to maintain some competitiveness with our neighbors around here, otherwise people will just go elsewhere. So that's the balance. You know, it's always a balance that we're looking for. So that's what we're trying to accomplish. We are absolutely not trying to make this into a raucous, noisy, unbearable place to live. Yeah. And we will, you know, we will engage with you on this thing as we always do. And we appreciate you coming to the table with us, so to speak. Yeah. Others? You've got something to say. You didn't come here just because you wanted to be here. I knew you're after your list of actions. Oh, OK, good. Welcome. Welcome. Are you new to town or? Yes. Like the summer. OK, congratulations. Where'd you move here from? Very good. Right on. My nephew lives in Portland, Oregon. Great city. Well, welcome. A little different in Portland. A little bit cooler in the summertime? Yes, here. Here it's much cooler. It's warmer in the winter time, which is the good news. It's cooler in the summertime, which I think frankly is also the good news. So time which I think frankly is also the good news. So. Yeah, good. Well, welcome here and look forward to catching up. And yeah, hope to see you soon. Come on up. Tell us about Portland. Tell us what we can learn from Portland. I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but you know. No, I mean, I was expecting more people but here trying to put you on the spot, but you know. No, I mean I was expecting more people, but here to balance it. That's official on the record. I'm Scott Murray. I live up Cascade Canyon. And see now it feels much more formal. Now I'm just like, I'm talking into the microphone. Well, I mentioned one thing. We have my wife and I have a small business. So I'm just going through the process of like getting our permit to operate in Mill Valley, which I'm excited about. So I was happy to hear you talking about streamlining. We're mostly online. We don't have a brick and mortar storefront in town yet, but we're excited. Tantrum, actually the toy shop is going to be our first retailer to carry our stuff. We do organic bedding and baby products. Anyway, so going through that process, I always appreciate anything to make things easier for small business, obviously. But that wasn't really the question in the back of my head is I've been hiking around all the trails, checking out Mill Valley, and came across the Cascade Canyon Dam, which I live downstream from, and I've been emailing with somebody at the water district. Anyway, infrastructure question, who do you think manages the decommissioned Cascade Dam so I can talk to them and be reassured that it's safe? Because it doesn't look super safe if you're just a layperson tromping around and thinking about all the water that could come down. If you live just downstream from there. Why don't we have somebody from? Or where would I go to ask? Is really the chance. Should we have somebody get in touch? Yeah, we'll get you a little bit. Let's get your contact information on. Okay, awesome. Okay wonderful thank you so much yeah yeah I don't expect a direct answer now it's just sort of like where would I turn to find out because yeah I mean you know um we have some people that let me put it this way have been in Mill Valley for a long time in the audience or something I think I will tell you more about the history of that dam and when it got decommissioned and I mean it was a swimming area. I know that and somebody got injured at one point. Oh yeah, here you go. So it was a swimming area for quite a while and it was shut down in the 70s because there was a drowning there of a young boy. And so now you'll see all kinds of signage just imagined what it would be like up there, yes. But yeah, it would say what brought to life again. But I don't think that. Yeah. Great, yeah, nothing. Hopefully it was part of our risk assessment of the city we've included in dam, which would unleash millions of gallons of water down to Old Mill Creek. Okay, well we have any general questions online. No, general questions online. Okay, well folks, I mean I don't want to keep you here when you can be going and having dinner and going home and hang out but I appreciate everybody coming out. Yeah, hey, you can go watch the game. I think you watch across the street speaking of the sweet water. And I'm not hearing a lot of hip-hoping and hollering, so I don't know if that's good news or bad news. They're doing so well. They're one's relaxed and having a beer or, you know, they're doing so badly that they've given up, but hopefully it's gone off to good start. Thanks for coming here. Do we have a date for our next community chat? To be announced, okay, we'll do something and our next guest member is still Caroline, right? So we'll do something maybe the beginning of the year, probably realistically, right? So we have busy season. Feral for Jim, part of the law, you. We're going to do a farewell for Jim anyway. So Jim, if you're watching from home, don't worry, you're going to get a farewell party, but I think we'll do something in the beginning of the year with Caroline and, you know, assuming that we're both still around. And, uh, yeah, do that. I don't like to have a new host. So, okay. Thanks everybody for joining us. Good night.